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[Scoops Novel]

There's an average of 1.6  planets per star in the milky way. 160 billion planets. 7 billion humans. 23 planets per human, should we ever get FTL.

https://open.spotify.com/track/3lzWEINzUgmqInX6OGrumv?si=d76e6b71d6a44809

Let's assume this holds true. More realistically, no planets at a higher tech then ours. So the meme of human protagonists becomes manifest and we more or less do what we like.

1. This assumes we get cheap, personal ftl.

2.   It would need to be basically strictly personal; only a single humans organic matter could be transferred, or the earth is instantly mega-fucked from everything weird we can bring back from the galaxy.

3. It would get boring. Since we've basically established that humans would become planeswalkers, minus the magic, we would have planeswalker problems, namely having seen it all before, and having little cause to get invested most of the time, especially whenm there's always a potentially more interesting planet around the corner. You would end up with hub planets which are reliably interesting, but it's at risk of the whole thing getting generic.

4. This also assumes we don't get AI or anything else which basically repaints the picture.

Anything else?

[MaxTheFox]

Your scenario is kinda scuffed because any possible "loopholes" in physics to allow FTL wouldn't be limited to transporting a single human. In general if you could only transport humans then there wouldn't really be an empire due to no possibility of resource exploitation.

I will disregard that because otherwise it's boring. I don't think the Earth would get fucked in that case anyhow.

What would be wrong, chiefly, is possible anti-alien prejudice. I don't want a repeat of the Age Of Imperialism... unless it's on planets that don't have sapient aliens on them. In that case, I would support space colonization and imperialism wholeheartedly. Nothing's wrong with it if there's nobody to oppress.

[Scoops Novel]

Literally a 160 billion planets worth of stuff to bring back to Earth, and you don't think it would get fucked? Why did they even make the movie Aliens?  (Not anti-alien prejudice, uh... cultural legacy)

[Rolan7]

There are old hard-sci-fi stories about settings where humans can be transferred at FTL.
Not bodies, though.  Merely the information, and it copied not deleted.

Imagine talking to your self who has been transferred to a mining rig around Procyon, using FTL comms.
"Hey buuuuddy!  Capitalism allows anyone to succeed, and you're basically me, so please work for my benefit?"

[Starver]

On seeing the title, I had an immediate answer for this thread... Slightly ruined by the introduction of FTL, so can't go that direction.

So, to restart the thought-process from scratch...
1) Initially, a massive dispersal of humanity. Under your granting of cheap/personal FTL, any time anyone decides they don't like their current situation, a semi-random scattering to "somewhere that might be better".
2) I am, of course, presuming that (sufficient) environmental support and sustenance and other protection is available, whether you beam yourself to Mars, Jovian moon, Kepler-452b, Barnard's Star b, anything positively mercuric, 51 Pegasi b('s best moon?), whatever might be orbitting around the Luhman 16 system or (because you have the FTL as a safety-belt) something close to Cygnus X-1. Because that'd probably discourage any use of the facility, for most people. Never mind that the rancors/sarlaccs/brain fungii/Goa'uld symbiotes/Predators(and/or)Aliens/ætherial vampires/whatever can't be ever brought back to Earth).
3) Or any actual rare Planet Paradise (unironically named) discovered by the bold-and-lucky would soak up the nearly-as-adventurous, before eventually it gets to those looking for a second home... It'd be quite a social nexus. Depending on how the effort goes to make/keep it comfortably inhabitable, you'll perhaps maintain this future. Any massive ruining of the environment by the early-adopters, or any wildcard opponents of their vision, would dilute this effect... and not increase the attractiveness of alternate destinations, except relatively.
4) With nothing stopping ease of returning, it won't actually balkanise the (slightly expanded) human-race, beyond whatever factionalism naturally arises as common enemies can now be found vying for whole planets rather than long-established geographic rivalries. Maybe the sensible people will find enough non-War World locations to stay out of it. Perhaps we'll even get places set aside for such 'sport', for the good of everyone else, but that needs some form of authority established/expanded over the whole process (the 'air traffic controllers' over the whole FTL thing?) and that's a whole 'nother variable in this equation so...

Sorry, let's cut the attempt to put a myriad of interlinking thoughts into comprehensive and expansive exposition.

a) In the short term, wonderous awe as to what the boffins allow us to do.
b) Then very little, at least on the relative galactic level. Things on Earth may go a bit haywire, but then things down here do that anyway.
c) ...skip the rather misty intermediary...
d) If humanity lasts long enough to actually evenly spread throughout the galaxy - without in all that time dying out (by its own hand, by A Series Of Unfortunate Accidents, by the severe lack of human contact because not enough people go 23 planets over and find a suitable partner to provide a new generation willing to at least maintain the population), it'll be different. So different. But I'm not sure the odds are in our favour getting there.

Unless there's functional-immortality alongside that FTL (thus adding another layer of complication to the mix), it'll not be something that'll affect us. So I'm just gonna say there's unicorns and rainbows and lemon meringue pie for everyone, and you'll never be able to prove me wrong.

[Eric Blank]

Our craft, personal as they may be, would inevitably deliver rats, cockroaches and other pests to other habitable planets with ecosystems and they would get W.R.E.K.T.

[Trapezohedron]

Single-person 'slingshot' teleporters can be used by the next man, I suppose, and could send groups of people one by one to other planets.

But then again, having 'infinite' resources means that there would be little demand for 'trade', which would mean Earth as we know it would collapse.

Earth would then try to capitalize on cheap FTL tech for transport, and limit its usage significantly to prevent other people from leaving the planet and ergo Earth losing power.

Earth, if it cannot figure out how to source resources from other planets, slightly alters their stance because it also means that there is no way to bring earth-like technology over to the other planets, unless it was as compact as an adult human's organic bodymass. They will massively limit the number of items to send over, perhaps even outlaw it.

Humans on the other side would have to figure out technology again, without the ability to craft raw materials. This would set a disparity where planets will generally be of a lower tech than the earth.

Secretly, Earth still tries to develop FTL-Slingshot drives for transport ships, so they can subjugate the 'alien' worlds and exploit their resources.

[MaxTheFox]

Literally a 160 billion planets worth of stuff to bring back to Earth, and you don't think it would get fucked? Why did they even make the movie Aliens?  (Not anti-alien prejudice, uh... cultural legacy)

You assume:
1) That there will be no government control over what is brought back, which is unrealistic.
2) That the FTL method is fast enough to reach all 160 billion planets within a reasonable time, which is suspect. At lightspeed, it would take 200000 years to cross the galaxy, while at 100c it would take 2000 whole years.

[None]

Would be a lot easier simply to set up on a sufficiently hospitable planet instead of hauling anything back to earth, no?

It seems dumb to insist that humanity will get bored of the universe simply because we could reach it all. Fuck, you can't get bored of Earth in a human lifetime and we're stuck here. Your one-man limitation on crafts is dumb out of undue concern for the earth, when surely there's other habitable planets out there. 160 billion planets won't be super interesting on its face given that most will be barren rocks or gas giants as is, but then you'll have novel cultures sprouting up around whatever mining colony, frontier establishment, earthlike planet, etc etc etc.

Our massive canvas of eight billion people across planet earth would become a tiny blip in the kaleidoscopic sprawl that would be the golden prime of interstellar humanity, and this is speaking purely from how we'd do in the Milky Way Galaxy, with untold numbers of extra galaxies out there. Like, go grab an old freeware version of Space Engine and just fly around for a bit. Digital recreations like this one fail to capture the novel features, faults, mountains, structures, flora, and fauna of a real living, breathing galaxy, which is where you'd get the feeling of staleness from, but that's incomplete simulation for you.

Otherwise, problems with humanity's galactic empire.... It might be really easy to get lost? Or hide from people?

[Scoops Novel]

our one-man limitation on crafts is dumb out of undue concern for the earth, when surely there's other habitable planets out there.

The only functional planet in a ftl society is either one that can completely block travel to the system or is hidden; and realistically if you let anyone through your planet now has a shelf-life, so hidden.

It seems that an ftl society only works with ifs and buts. Multiversal travel is also a shit-show; is there any other way to get wide-open exploration of new worlds?

[MaxTheFox]

You're making a lot of assumptions but aren't making much of an effort to justify them.

[Trapezohedron]

The only functional planet in a ftl society is either one that can completely block travel to the system or is hidden; and realistically if you let anyone through your planet now has a shelf-life, so hidden.

Why is this a rule?

FTL would even make the planet more contiguous with the 'world' at large; think islands or even countries. A fully-functional FTL with no arbitrary limits eliminates a lot of problems with transport, with people just teleporting items in and out of existence where they literally need it.

Even if we limit it (FTL costs a LOT of power), then massive shipments are still justifiable and worth the effort, because planets will always have materials they can use to construct things. Each planet having their own limits to existence (since Earth exists in a Goldilocks' Zone) would mean that different planets will be requiring different resources, bringing demand up for those who can synthesize or harvest those items.

The only thing that would be wrong with Humanity's empire would be its own greed.

[Scoops Novel]

Why is this a rule?

FTL would even make the planet more contiguous with the 'world' at large; think islands or even countries. A fully-functional FTL with no arbitrary limits eliminates a lot of problems with transport, with people just teleporting items in and out of existence where they literally need it.

Even if we limit it (FTL costs a LOT of power), then massive shipments are still justifiable and worth the effort, because planets will always have materials they can use to construct things. Each planet having their own limits to existence (since Earth exists in a Goldilocks' Zone) would mean that different planets will be requiring different resources, bringing demand up for those who can synthesize or harvest those items.

The only thing that would be wrong with Humanity's empire would be its own greed.

So long as the galaxy is full of potential hazards which humanity can accidentally or deliberately carry, FTL is a non-starter. It just takes one weird cross-planetary virus or insidious predator, amongst who knows what in a literal galaxy of stuff. Nukes from dead civilizations. Bumping into sleeping alien empires who steal the technology. Unless you can carefully manage what can warp where, you're boned. And if you do manage it, no way do humans have the know-how to catch every secret danger that could hitch a ride.

[MaxTheFox]

There were, IIRC, serious bureaucratic problems with bringing back completely sterile, inert Moon rocks. What makes you think potential biohazards or alien technology wouldn't be scrutinized even more?

Alien viruses would most likely be harmless to humans due to very different biological structures anyways.

Again, you seem to be assuming total anarchy. That is indeed what would happen if everyone could go FTL at will with personal-sized devices, but realistically you'd need spaceships which could be more tightly controlled.

[Starver]

Unless the galactic cross-section of life is weirdly small, I doubt that "an alien virus" would be a threat.

Our own viruses work with DNA (or RNA) codes that co-evolved with the living things they infect. There's no reason to believe an alien version of a virus is suited to infect a human being (let alone be worse than a random 'new' Earth virus). The chances it holds 'replicate me!' code compatible with our own cells is small, not least because it probably won't have the same codon-expectations, or even A(T/U)CG forming the codons, or even the same type of bases at all, or even on the same type of backbone, or even based upon the same carbon-chain chemistry, or even based upon carbon! (To be honest, it is thought that carbon is the only practical basis for life[1], but every stage further back towards the terran ideal adds progressively more chance of divergence.)

Predators, maybe. They could kill, even if they found us organically unpallettable (which they probably would) and then you'd just be relying upon instinct (or threat response), comparative scale, comparative numbers of predator to prey (us), whether the alienness of our appearence pushes them towards caution or into "attacking attack"/"defending attack" behaviour... The first blob-eating-blob that tries to absorb a human through attaching to the sole of a space-traveller's boot is not going to have much luck (unless it's an extreme-pH 'attack' and the boot isn't proof to that). Perhaps more problematic could be inadvertently-transported herds of sauropod-equivalent grazers that don't even eat 'meat' but are evolved to root around house-sized rocks for nutrients and now rampage around damaging house-sized houses desperately looking for something edible.

Long-dead civilisations are interesting. Probably nothing deliberately left behind, as time would have disabled/prematurely activated any actual ingenious unattended traps. But possibly their main ultra-long-term-radiological-waste repository is marked with alien symbology that means "no, seriously, don't excavate anything that is here" but looks to human eyes more like "Congratulations you are the 1,000,000th visitor to this site! Dig here to claim your unique prize!"

'Sleeping' alien empires have much same issue. Obviously good enough to be hibernating/semipermanently in torpor (perhaps arranging a caretaker role for one or more individuals, by turns, to keep the rest of their stasis-pods 'stasis'ing) and capable of understanding our encapsulated-FTL system, but never worked it out for themselves before we stumbled upon them and triggered their wake-up call.


And, in all these, the reverse of the threat is true. If alien biology can infect us, we probably have something to infect alien biology. We may discover a planet with interesting bubblegum-flavoured land-jellyfish and end up doing what we did to the dodo or very nearly did with all the giant tortoises (and very actually did with some of them!) - or, if not us, our mice, rats, cats, etc that we accidentally dispersed there. Oh, hello Long Dead Civilisation... Did you leave a magnificent record of your great but ultimately futile works..? ...oh, I'm not sure, we inadvertently destroyed the key (lock-type, and/or Rosetta Stone) you thought you'd left for those who came after and maybe never even realised it. Or perhaps we discovered a strange energy source, brought in engineers to remove it for study, and now the Sleeping Chamber Catacombs are filled with the smell of (whatever your version is of) rotting flesh as your intended long-period sleep instead becomes terminally eternal.


(A lot of human-vs-alien fiction likes to treat us as the midway-point on social scales: neither as utopian nor as distipian as other represented societies; having far more dullard ones and others nigh-on intellectually superior; there's a more extreme warrior-race and another who rule as ultra-pacifist gods; or various mixtures from various ends of various mutually-exclusive scales. The humans, arriving on the scene, are the JOATs, in a way that no existing galactic race seems to have become. Together with some quality that seems to have burnt out the most amongst the Ancient Incumbents to the galactic plane, like tenacity or adaptability, we end up having compassion and self-centred determination. We can learn to build upon found technology but then also be imaginatively destructive with it. Our verdency can be great but also can be consciously restrained, meaning we always have people to explore/raid/hold-the-line/etc without plunging into mindless assimilation or becoming an entirely spent force. … But there's nothing to say that, in reality, we are as seemingly one-dimensional as Klingons, Vorlons, Predators, nomadic-space-'Gods'... A race of Kal Els or Darkseids or Thanosii or Galactuses or even Tribbles, from the comparative viewpoint of all other races who would rather we just keep to ourselves. Maybe our microbes are the only ones that don't live in perfectly symbiotic harmony with the other branches in our own tree-of-life. Or maybe symbiosis is that One Neet Trick that only our own planet has developed in its various gut-biomes, coral reefs, lichen blooms and we actually have the closest thing to the concept of Gaia. But in leiu of more than one planetary datapoint, our own, our very imagination remains utterly biased - and we have no idea which way or how much!)


I don't think it's true to say I Have An Opinion on this. I have many possible Opinions, and still think it's likely that I'm missing the True Opinion, and at the very least am holding multiple mutually-exclusive ones open so long as I'm not proven that they are Wrong.


(PPE: Oh look. Partially, yet succinctly, ninjaed. Max hadn't posted that before I started this. All credit to her for using fewer words to say that bit better.)

[1] In any environment that isn't too far from our comfort zones. Extreme pressures/temperatures might support a direct silicaceous version of organic chemistry (with many other elemental tweaks, almost certainly, very unlikely to be an *ahem* Carbon Copy in all other regards). And who knows what 'life' can develop in stellar plasmas based upon small-scale(?) magnetic and electrical field interaction and coherent self-reinforcement. But none of this type of ecosystem would readily provide anything we'd think of as a 'space flu', or would be amongst the least concerns for the human who ventured to expose themselves thus.