Why are planetary federations and space empires the norm in scifi anyway?
The way I see it decentralization and a return to a sort of pseudo-feudalism is way more realistic. There'd be hundreds of independent states not a united human front.
There's no way a centralized government on earth would know about the daily problems of a martian or a titanian, it's just too far away.
Federalization IS decentralized governance you moron. A federation is just the republican version of feudalism. You have the federal authority (ie the "King") ruling over a bunch of smaller states who have the autonomy to handle their own issues (ie the lesser nobles).
that sounds more like a confederation to me ngl
like, extant federal bodies today like the US, Russia, and Germany have very centralized government systems.
If delegation is all you need to be decentralized then even China would be seen the same way since each 省 has a 省长
>extant federal bodies today like the US[...] have very centralized government systems
Ah yes. The United States of America. In which each State (which is another word for country) has their own constitution, tax system, legal system, governing and law making bodies, etc. Very centralized.
But each state also gives up a fair number of powers, such as the ability to make independent treaties, and they cannot make laws that contravene federal laws, I.e., since the US Constitution guarantees right to an attorney, a state can’t make a law that says that you must represent yourself in court.
A confederation is looser than that; the European Union is a better example of a confederation than the United States, which is definitely a federation. Though the US is still a looser governmental structure than some nations like, say. France, where ALL power stems from the central government and individual region (“departments” in France’s case) have no independence whatsoever. This is called a unitary state.
Here’s a good way to tell the difference between a unitary state and a federation: if the US President has a disagreement with a US State governor, and the law is not clearly on one side or another, the two must negotiate and work together to overcome the disagreement, or else go to court and let judges mediate, and it’s not automatically clear that the President will come out on top; it’s not hard to look through US history and find times that governors did, as recently as within the past few presidential terms.
If the Chinese President and the governor of a Chinese province have a disagreement, the Chinese President wins, period, because he can simply replace the governor with another governor who will agree with him.
I wasn't arguing that the US isn't a federation, I was calling into question using the term "very centralized", which is ambiguous and we could argue endless on what that means, and listing it along side entities such as Russia and Germany. I'd contend the US is about as close to those two as it is the Commonwealth or EU. The US system is... very strange honestly with few things that can be directly compared to it. And how much power the states give up is sort of zig-zagged by the fact that the federal laws are made by assemblies of delegates from the states.
A confederation would probably be a closer equivalent to a feudal state in organization, though the line between confederation and federation is more of a sliding scale.
Both are nations consisting of sub-states, but in theory the difference is that in a confederation the states have almost full autonomy and the central government is a very bare-bones affair that basically exists only to keep the nation together and handle matters that affect more than one state, while in a federation the states still have large amount of autonomy in local affairs but delegate some power to the central government which effectively acts as a higher tier of government. For example, in the US the states can do things like set tax rates and make some laws, but they can't break federal-level laws or go against the constitution. For example they can legalize weed but they can't legalize murder or take away citizenship from some segment of the population.
>Why are [these things] the norm?
>The way I see it [something else] is more realistic
Nobody cares about what is realistic. Being the norm has literally nothing to do with it. Develop a theory of mind.
Anon, what is it that you think federations are, exactly? They're decentralized. Their constituent administrative units are largely self-governing and hold guarantees of that self-governance. That's the whole point!
But to answer your question, it's because it's way easier to have a handful of massive monolithic superpowers rather than build out the complex international relations of many hundreds of independent nations and what makes them distinctive. It helps streamline the worldbuilding so other shit can be focused on.
We are not allowed to think outside of norms? Else we end up with a Mayflower again forming a country outside the reach of the current rulers.
>There's no way a centralized government on earth would know about the daily problems of a martian or a titanian, it's just too far away.
Well with light speed communication and modern information networks they'd know a hell of a lot more than what the emperors of Rome ever knew about their frontier provinces.
I mean, I might be overblowing the timelag since it'll only take a few minutes for lightspeed communication yeah; but it's also just the immediacy and the contrast.
I doubt a bureaucrat earthside would ever really understand a martian or belter perspective on life even with direct correspondence; you just won't be able to perceive the same inherent danger and spartan experience from a videoscreen
>I doubt a bureaucrat earthside would ever really understand a martian or belter perspective on life even with direct correspondence
I mean how much do you think the average modern bureaucrat understands the life of a farmer or oilrig technician? If you've got system ships that can consistently move at 1g acceleration it doesn't take *that* much time to move around most of the system. So maybe bureaucrats have to relatively frequently fly around. Or maybe they just have "office buildings" located throughout the system and hire locals. And it's quite probably that if you do bother to have an in person assembly it's not like you couldn't ship the representatives to live there for the duration of their term.
Probably not even half the hassle a lot of appointees had to deal with in the colonial era, getting put on a ship for a months long journey to be an ambassador or governor for a significant chunk of their life.
>I mean how much do you think the average modern bureaucrat understands the life of a farmer or oilrig technician?
NTA
Not to be too current politics here, but that is a an actual problem already. Bureaucratic isolation from the rest of society is causing problems on Earth right fricking now, in countries you can get to the other side of in an hour. One size fits all solutions handed down from a system increasingly divorced from the people those solutions are implemented by and for.
I'll stop the rant now. I just don't see a centralized power holding on to direct governorship of that many colonies for a long time. At least not after they're largely self sufficient. Obviously in the founding period before that the colonies will have no choice.
>At least not after they're largely self sufficient
Depends what model of colonies you want to draw inspiration from - in the days of empire, making sure your colonies *weren't* self-sufficient was an option, at least for a while.
In some places this was extreme, Caribbean islands where cash crops were so valuable, that food was imported rather than grown local, and economic theory was against wider trade, but even today with free trade and without legislative restrictions (most Empires for a while kept it a rule that imports ALL had to come from the Mother country, or at least big ticket stuff where there was a monopoly company or cartel back in the home country (side note - makes for lots of cool smuggling in your game or story)), even with it being legal to make stuff anywhere, you still get the vast majority of certain products coming from specific place, not made everywhere - see for example the vast majority of silicon chips being made in Taiwan, because fab shops ain't cheap.
Fair point.
It would be the better part of a century POST terraforming for mars to have a high tech industry, assuming it even has all of the materials. Plastics might be an Earth monopoly until Jovian colonies start harvesting on Titan. So Earthgov holding colonies ransom over trade monopolies is definitely reasonable.
Definitely not an amicable relationship though. At least not for the average person.
There's a reason why in the 1700s smuggling was a very respectable profession... in the colonies.
Smugglers weren't scummy types, they were "savvy businessmen", breaking the unjust hold of the metropole strangling free trade
There's also extra dimensions if it's not "earthgov", acting as one, but if you see stuff like national colonies - the US having Territories on the Moon, Mars and titan, Chinese Special Administrative regions on the Moon and orbital habitats, Interplanetary France and British Crown dependencies etc.
Because otherwise it doesn't fricking matter, whether you're talking about a story or a game. You can't cover a thousand different cultures. You can't cover a hundred in any way that's meaningful beyond Planet of the Funny Hats.
So you'd have maybe a dozen worlds with something vaguely meaningful written about them, and then just empty space. Or a list of names that might as well be empty space.
OP, you basically described the setting of Traveller, 3rd Imperium, which delved into a pseudo feudal decentralized state due to limits of FTL. The fastest FTL travel is 20 light years a week, it creates very interesting problems.
Do check the setting out
most sci-fi treat each planet as nothing more than a single city or village. most sci-fi could take place on a single planet and it wouldn't really change anything in terms of scale