Deep Roots

[onyxhawke]

Originally published at Agent Incite. You can comment here or there.

This should be the start of a series on one of my favorite ideas in science fiction, and the major factors that go into it. In my extremely humble opinion we don’t see this explored enough in writing, and not much talked about in television and film. There are a ton of fun things that can done with it, and more ways to influence it than can probably be charted. I speak of course of extra planetary colonization.

In tv shows like Stargate Atlantis we see one of the more common ideas; the scientific outpost. A small group that is put together to learn stuff, but not really to be sustainable out of its transported and locally available resources across multiple generations. Stargate Atlantics is qell executed, and not shocking in it’s utter focus on the two things it needs to accomplish, learning stuff and keeping the people reasonably safe. We don’t see cooks, in fact we seen tons of packaged food. We don’t see teachers because they don’t have any children. This is a perfect example of the function of the group following the purpose.

But there are a lot of factors that go into a colony, and even deciding how to set it up. For a colony going elsewhere you have to decide on:

1. Colony size
2. Materials going with them
3. Why is this colony being formed
4. Distance & time to destination
5. Social structure
6. Culling and acceptance criteria of the colonists
7. Non survival cargo
8. Biological Diversity of crops and livestock
9. Leadership
10. Colony ship design
11. Environment of the destination

There are nearly innumerable interactions between these and I’ll be doing a series of posts on them when time and brainwaves can be focused. The next post will be published tomorrow here.