Five Plot-Friendly Ways to Isolate Planets and Space Colonies

Need a pristine petri dish for your science fiction sociological
experiment? Here are five ways to achieve that.

https://www.tor.com/2023/03/27/five-plot-friendly-ways-to-isolate-planets-and-space-colonies/
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On Monday, March 27, 2023 at 9:09:44 AM UTC-5, James Nicoll wrote:
> Five Plot-Friendly Ways to Isolate Planets and Space Colonies
>
> Need a pristine petri dish for your science fiction sociological
> experiment? Here are five ways to achieve that.
>
> https://www.tor.com/2023/03/27/five-plot-friendly-ways-to-isolate-planets-and-space-colonies/
> --
> My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
> My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
> My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
> My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

In the _Antares_ stories, an interesting implication of their FTL travel method is shown by a comment in one of the books. It hardly effects the events of the plot, but at one point it's mentioned that something like 95%(!) of all stars simply don't have the 'foldpoints' that enable FTL travel to other star systems. Such systems are accessible only by STL travel, and so in practice are never visited.

The Altans temporarily lose their foldpoint because of the Antares supernova, but it eventually reappears after the blast wave from the explosion passes their star system.

But imagine what's implied by that 95% for a sapient race in such a star system! They might very well master the mathematics of FTL, when they reached the necessary tech level. They might be able to calculate which stars are linked by FTL connections...but if their own is not, they're still out of luck! Trapped in their home system, except for STL travel.

Further, the 95% figure means that as a matter of odds, _most_ sapient races could expect to find themselves in that boat.

(The actual odds are not quite that bad, because the FTL foldpoints tend to cluster around more massive stars. Which means that a disproportionate number of the class K, G, and F stars would tend to have them compared to the class M red dwarfs that are by far the most common stars. We _think_ that the KGF stars are more likely to be home to sapient species than the M stars, so that might help the odds somewhat...but it still looks like a better than even chance most races won't have access to FTL travel even so.)