In science fiction, space colonization tends to be modeled on a (perhaps romanticized) wild-west era USA. Yet even today's technology is likely to make it very different.
(I've been reading Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, which takes place in part on such a planet.)
In particular, both GPS and some form of the mobile phone and network access are likely to be universally available (probably combined into a single device) to all colonists. The major cost of GPS is launching the satellites from the surface, but in a planetary colonization, the colony ship is in orbit already. Launching a satellite from one orbit to another is a much easier proposition. The existence of satellite and probably aerial photographs of the area is a given. Similarly for communication — either again using satellites, or using ground-based cellular and/or mesh networks that the colonists put down as they go or which are distributed prior to actual settlement.
Where Heinlein's Lazarus Long searched for water by shading his eyes and looking around, and studied photomaps but didn't quite know where he was on them, a more modern pioneer will have "Google New Beginnings" (or whatever the planet might be called). Registering photomaps accurately is not trivial, but neither is it that difficult; at worst you'll have a rough registration to begin with and refine it as you go.
Similarly, a modern pioneer will be in contact with the rest of the planetary internet, such as it might be. When one person in a party goes ahead to scout and the other remains behind to tend the wagons and livestock, they'll be in contact via phone and text message (including distance and bearing, of course).
The social consequences of the difference are likely to be profound.
Which is not to say it'll all be easy; real difficulties of pioneering will remain. They just won't be the ones described in the old sci-fi books — a few will be eliminated, the rest transformed by the technology to varying degrees, but difficulties and challenges will remain.
⇦ Cabin crew, disarm doors and cross-check | ⇨ Investment seminar program scam? |
28 July 2009, 9:35 UTCcomment by Paul Harrison
Also, chances are any planet kill you five ways before breakfast if you let it. Rugged individualism is especially good way for everyone to die. *People* scouting? Wagons? Livestock? Lolwut?
... wonders if Russians are pre-adapted to space.
