12-09-2024, 11:56 AM
I think the only other person I've seen talking about this (or something similar to it) is Isaac Arthur, who referred to it as "Crawl-onizing."
But I think he was still talking about a group of vessels launched with the goal and purpose of reaching another star. I'm talking more about a culture of people who plot their courses without necessarily having the goal of another star in mind; they're just balancing the interests of staying near enough the markets they serve, staying near enough the other habs that supply things they need, and plotting courses to intercept and harvest materials useful to their own industries.
Some of them are hab builders and sell new habs to other groups when population demands it. Some of them mine metals and some fab chips and some harvest volatiles, and each of these specialties establishes constraints on what they need to stay near and how near they need to stay.
They don't want to crowd too close together in cases that create competition for the same resources - if they specialize in the same kind of industry that means they compete for both resources and markets. But they need each other, because you can't have the same massive ship effectively intercepting all the different kinds of resources that they use - instead, let the specialists each concentrate on interceptions that, once made, benefit hundreds of their neighbors, by moving individual habitats of much lower mass than the supposed 'generalist' alternative that tries to get everything.
So you get a 'flock' - a more-or-less leaderless group, all navigating independently, that wants to maintain preferred distances from each other while traversing a volume containing useful materials.
And this is what they do, year in and year out. If the flock gets big enough that all the specialists are duplicated, it may split into several flocks, just by happenstance, gradually with dozens or hundreds of independent decisions about navigation made over a century or more. If they happen to overrun a volume containing a star, then the resource density in-system will sustain a slow buildup of population (and number of habitats) as they approach it.
But I don't see their goal as colonization as such; they're just going where the available resources are, one year after another, forever. They wouldn't think of themselves as colonizing, or "Crawl-onizing." They'd think of what they do as just living where they are.
But I think he was still talking about a group of vessels launched with the goal and purpose of reaching another star. I'm talking more about a culture of people who plot their courses without necessarily having the goal of another star in mind; they're just balancing the interests of staying near enough the markets they serve, staying near enough the other habs that supply things they need, and plotting courses to intercept and harvest materials useful to their own industries.
Some of them are hab builders and sell new habs to other groups when population demands it. Some of them mine metals and some fab chips and some harvest volatiles, and each of these specialties establishes constraints on what they need to stay near and how near they need to stay.
They don't want to crowd too close together in cases that create competition for the same resources - if they specialize in the same kind of industry that means they compete for both resources and markets. But they need each other, because you can't have the same massive ship effectively intercepting all the different kinds of resources that they use - instead, let the specialists each concentrate on interceptions that, once made, benefit hundreds of their neighbors, by moving individual habitats of much lower mass than the supposed 'generalist' alternative that tries to get everything.
So you get a 'flock' - a more-or-less leaderless group, all navigating independently, that wants to maintain preferred distances from each other while traversing a volume containing useful materials.
And this is what they do, year in and year out. If the flock gets big enough that all the specialists are duplicated, it may split into several flocks, just by happenstance, gradually with dozens or hundreds of independent decisions about navigation made over a century or more. If they happen to overrun a volume containing a star, then the resource density in-system will sustain a slow buildup of population (and number of habitats) as they approach it.
But I don't see their goal as colonization as such; they're just going where the available resources are, one year after another, forever. They wouldn't think of themselves as colonizing, or "Crawl-onizing." They'd think of what they do as just living where they are.