Earlier quoted context omitted.
All empires collapse eventually.
Past performance isn't a guarantee of future results. With modern technology, the next empire will never collapse.
The heat death will guarantee the collapse of all and any empire.
How transportation technologies shaped empires
131–140 of 313 posts
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#132That's not true, as evidenced by many, many empires, past and present (Spanish, British, Roman, American) that spanned more than a month of travel.
What they're trying to say is that the span of control is limited by the ability to project power/information to the extremities of the empire. That makes sense, but the way they measure the limits is wrong.
The way the empires get around this problem is by putting people who have drunk the kool-aid in positions of power. While this can lead to abuse (ie: the Spanish), it can also lead to surprising amounts of consistency (all of the above).
Empires that fail are empires that require centralized decision making...and that's due to the communication limits posited and the generally poor quality of the staff in those types of organizations.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#133I feel like there's some cherry picking going on. I mean, issues with germanic tribes and inland conquests did play a role but... what about upper egypt, paetrea, britannia, etc. The edge of the empire was the edge of the empire... with frontier problems. Why did germania fail, but not those other ones. I mean size is an issue. Travel & messaging are issues. Empires are very much defined by these things, etc. I just…
Barbarism is certainly a factor in the Roman expansion into Germania, but if you look at how the Romans were able to colonize Gaul completely. I think originally they thought they could follow the same playbook into both Germania and Britain. Britain was never full pacified and required a large occupation force to keep the province under control. After the defeat of Varus during the reign of Augustus, I think Roman leadership looked at the area using a cost/benefit analysis and decided it wasn't worth the amount of money that would be needed to fully pacifiy the region. The Romans should have pulled out of Britain after Claudius, the invasion was a vanity project and had no real value as a province.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
But for future interplanetary colonization, the rule would become one light month. Not very far. But imagine any form of communication taking years to bounce back and forth. That could not be centrally governed. It might not just be travel time, but it probably does correlate.
Have you read much Le Guin by any chance? This is a theme I've seen in her work.
Could you mention some books?
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#135Somebody calculate a light month.
In essence, one star system. Planet orbits are generally much less than a light month, and distance between closest stars is generally much larger than a light month.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#136A lot of counter-cases are conflating specific conquests with the the overall empire. There will be exceptions (in both directions of closer & further) but I think what the author is trying to do is set the radius of the empire, relative to a one or a few epicenters. I don't think the exact value is that important vs. the logistical impacts of distance and their influence on all aspects of controlling a geopolitical…
If you take Russian Empire/USSR for example, most of the territories which have been lost are much closer to Moscow (Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Belarus, Georgia etc.) than the territories still under Moscow control (Siberia), so at least in the Russia's case, it's not about transportation at all.
Siberia is kind of its own exception, though. I’d say they managed to keep Siberia - for reasons solely to do with Siberia - despite how bad they were at keeping the empire together, relatively speaking.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
They lost it to home rule only after it took less than a month to travel there with steam ships, right?
The point was they couldn't hold the Canadian colony. Britain didn't give home-rule to Canada because of their good-will. American belligerence towards European presence in the New World, and their rise as a major military and economic power, made holding Canada practically impossible by the mid 1800s (for example, it was untannable for Britain to maintain a large military presence in Canada anymore). Britain fully e…
But the article literally argues that the British loss of the American colonies in 1776 is an example of how an empire can’t retain territory at a month’s remove.
To which the existence of British colonies in Canada after 1776 is kind of a direct rejoinder, right? The eventual loss of those colonies is irrelevant to the point that you can’t explain the American revolution as being an inevitable consequence of remoteness.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why, I’d wager that, with modern Victorian transportation, a man could travel all the way around the world in less than eighty days. Meet me on the steps of the Reform club! Phileas Fogg’s example Suggests that at the height of the ‘sun never sets’ era, nowhere should have been more than 40 days away from London. And with a significant chunk of that time stuck transiting the pacific, brings the majority of the world…
No, it suggests that there was an optimal path around the world in 80 days. The geography of many regions would have made them more remote than the optimal path.
The geography of those many remote regions (e.g. the interior of Africa or Australia or parts of Asia) meant that they were not really governed by the empires - it's just that they were linked to the wider world through various port cities, and those were generally governed by some empire and within a month of its capital, so the value of their trade was captured tehre.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I expect the "law" is not as simple as "1 month travel time" Aka the article is complete bullshit.
No, I didn't say that. It holds up for most of history, except for a fairly small window of ~50 years where communication was faster than travel (after that travel was fast enough that almost anywhere was less than 1 month away).
I agree. Imagine a future where we find a way to send messages at/near the speed of light intergalactically but can still only travel at some fraction of it.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#140So… the moon, or even Venus?
Not sure Venus is within 1 month travel time.
Granted this is with Apollo era technology... but we're still talking Saturn V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby
> The proposed mission would have used a Saturn V to send three astronauts on a flight past Venus, which would have lasted approximately one year.
> ...
> Phase C would be the actual manned flyby, using a Block IV CSM and an updated version of the Venus flyby S-IVB which would carry a large radio antenna for communication with Earth.
> ...
> The Phase C mission was planned for a launch in late October or early November 1973, when the velocity requirements to reach Venus and the duration of the resulting mission would be at their lowest. After a brief stay in Earth parking orbit to check out the spacecraft, the crew would have headed for Venus. ... After a successful S-IVB burn, the spacecraft would have passed approximately 3000 miles from the surface of Venus about four months later.
Of note https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php is fun to play with. - Custom list (Venus), one way rendezvous, minimize duration, all trajectories.
The shortest one is an 80 day one "burn straight there" approach.
I'm not sure that NASA has that updated for more recent years (its a search - not a compute) - still gives you an idea of what is doable and the inner solar system opportunities are fairly consistent (compared to the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program which is once every 175 years). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... and if that sounds like fun, then High Frontier board game might be up your alley ( current edition https://iongamedesign.com/products/high-frontier-4-all https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/281655/high-frontier-4-a... ).