Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)
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I think not since as I mentioned before it seems like it would kind of ruin the appeal of many who would love the idea of living on an alien world and exploring new places if they just ended up living inside a giant tower that could easily be found on Earth. I'd also point out that arcologies aren't really necessary for new colonies due to all the space available.
Arcologies for most colonies don't really make sense in my opinion. They only make sense for places that are either uninhabitable or already heavily populated worlds.
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just put out a spacecraigslist ad
An industrial/space port arcology might work. Rather then living space its meant to contain a fair chunk of the planet's heavy industry and ship traffic to limit environmental impact.
They can also double as the heart of planetary defense grids on border worlds.
[X] No
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We are already investing in tons of security for our colonies. On top of that pirating is soon going to become far, far less of an issue once we topple the Hegemony who have been supplying a lot of the ones attacking SA space along with the large number of worlds supporting the rest.
What about some combination of "paying other people to build ships" and "employ pre-existing transportation companies to help us out"? It's not like we're going to be the only people benefitting from a more developed colonial setting and offering good deals on access to some of our tech to Salarian U-Haul if they help us move lots of people out to the colonies are an option. What sort of numbers would you consider significant for transporting people? What sort of goals should we set ourselves?
I think you may have missed my point. We can totally move the people (10,000 transports is very much within our future budgets and a billion people per year is more then enough) and we can even build them houses to live in. The problem is everything else. You can't just drop ten million people on a colony of 100k (or even 10 million for that matter) and not expect it to completely collapse the local economy. Things would eventually sort themselves out as people build new shops to service the new population, factories to service the shops, primary industry to service the factories, ect. But all that stuff takes time and it would be a massive issue while people were sorting things out.
Hence my comments on how if we want to avoid collapsing the colonial economies we probably shouldn't be aiming for more then single digit millions of migrants per year.
Well if we look at the largest canon colony worlds:
- Joab (21.6 million): A planet explicitly lacking appropriate levels of oxygen and nitrogen for breathing. I think it is safe to say most those millions are living in Arcologies.
- Elysium (8.3 million): An "alpine paradise" described as a major hub for travel and commerce. Given the planet's clear retirement theme (including the name) I suspect this is probably a highly rural planet that probably doesn't make use of Arcologies.
- Trident (6.8 million): The planet is 95% water with land taking the form of small archipelagos which are viewed as highly valuable real estate and constantly fought over. I suspect a weird blend of Arcologies for all the workers (and criminals) and island mansions for the wealthy elite.
- Bekenstein (5.4 million): The planet explictly went for industry over rural development and we actually have a panoramic showing massive towering buildings that are very likely Arcologies. I think it is safe to say Arcologies are in play here.
- Terra Nova (4.4 million): Nothing really points in either way here.
- Eden Prime (3.7 million): Despite being one of the few planets explicitly called an "idyllic agrarian world" it is also one of the few planets to explicitly house its population in Arcologies: "The population is housed space-efficient arcologies that tower over thousands of kilometers of green fields and orchards."
- Benning (2.3 million): We know it is an agriworld with "automated agricultural systems" but nothing to indicate how the people live. Given the example of Eden Prime I'd tend to assume Arcologies but there isn't anything to back that up.
- Arvuna (0.9 million): 90% water and hit with heavy enough radiation that the human colonies are explicitly shielded. They don't necessary have to be using Arcologies but given the limited land space and need to shield everything against radiation it seems probable they are.
- Horizon (0.7 million): The planet is filled with "dissidents, marginal people, and fringe-dwellers from across Alliance space". That doesn't seem like a collection of people who would be happy living together in Arcologies.
- Sanctum (0.3 million): A cold and generally freezing world where the air can suddenly turn deadly with little warning that is only inhabited due to the valuable resources mined there. These is a prime location for Arcologies so I'd be shocked if they don't use them.
I guess my question is why do we bother with trying to engineer colonization a certain way? If the demand for these sorts of projects is there, or if we can benefit by nabbing a bunch of newly colonized resource deposits thats one thing, but I really don't see the point of deliberately guiding human colonization in this manner. Why not let colonization proceed organically and then provide whatever goods and services these colonies desire?
We should keep in mind that Terra Firma has legitimate concerns (apart from the we hate aliens stuff, but that is a minority of them either way). The Alliance went all in for fast colonial expansion to the detriment of everything else. The massive pirate issues we face are just a result of expanding too fast for the fleet to keep up with it. Furthermore earth suffers from underinvestment on a incredible large scale, we know that poverty and crime are big issues on Earth, the Shepard earthborn background makes that clear. The costs to properly defend farflung colonies are massive , not to mention that it sparked a war with the Batarians, the costs of that war alone are immense. It is not unreasonable to say, that for a fraction of the above mentioned expenses you could have solved poverty and homelessness on earth. If you take one look at a map, you see that the Alliance territory claims are in no relation to their population or economy and that is without their claims on the Attican Traverse, no wonder everybody else thinks that humans are unreasonable and greedy. Naturally these agressive territorrial claims have cost the Alliance a large amount of goodwill with the council, goodwill that could have been used to achieve other aims, like economic consessions, that are far more important to the vast majority of humans that live on earth. Earth faced systemic discrimination when it comes to the allocation of funds and their interests seem to have no bearing on the Alliance foreign policy, despite being the vast majority of population. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that poverty and unfair treatment lead to extremism. Earth has a popualation of 11 billion, to even reduce that through emigration to colonies by one billion over a reasonable timeframe is unfeasible. It would be far easier to just solve the issues facing Earth, a program of arcology building is one part of it, naturally we should finally do something to create jobs on earth. We gifted entire defense systems to multiple colonies, before we opened even a single factory or lab on earth, no wonder that those that lobby for the interests of earth are not our biggest fans in the Alliance. If we fix the issues facing Earth, we also will conquer extremism and cut off vital support from organisations like Cerberus. Not to mention that Terra Firma are actually right when it comes to colonisation, following the Salarian model with fewer but very well developed colonies is the better idea. Creating higly populated centers of industry/culture/finance/science is actually far more efficent than the massive sprawl of colonies, favoured by the Alliance. A credit invested on earth is far more efficent than a credit invested on Midnoir, that is the cluster effect that leads to innovation (we see that with large cities OTL).
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That is the cluster effect, what we are doing is basically building research labs etc. on greenfield land in colonies. People for example come to Midnoir to work at PI but there is not a lot else. It might be ok for factories but not so much with research. Were our main labs located on earth we could tap into a whole ecosystem of universities and skilled labour. For that reason we only did one collaboration with a university and that was limited to supplying them with a ARC reactor, a whole world of collaborative reseach would open up to us on earth. Futhermore in a heavily urban environment like earth, PI itself would not only tap into an existing ecosytem, PI would also create it's own ecosystem. Around our research divsion a whole network of startups would develop, founded by people that got their start at PI. And if their ideas work out, we can buy them up and integrate them into our company (and get one or more research heros). Even the bigger colonies like Elysium have less population than OTL Greater London, not to mention are spread out over a vastly bigger area. The density just isn't there for a proper research cluster in the colonies.
When it comes to tradtional infrastructure it is even more clearcut, on a low density colony like midnoir transport necessarily means individually owned cars/shuttles. In the magacities of earth you can invest into public transit, naturally the latter is far more efficent than the former. Or if you would like to invest in education for gifted students, to scout for the PI research heros of tomorrow, you wouldn't find enough exceptionally gifted students on Mindnoir to fill a class on a specific subject, on earth that wouldn't be a problem. The same is true for defense, a shield of the same size protects a lot more people on Earth than on Bekenstein etc.
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HanEmpire
Delicious
The Golden Child, of course.
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I've made a Fallout knockoff of this quest with authors permission.
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Engineering quest (Fallout 4)
In the vein of Revy quest, guide a genius through the the Fallout version of London
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Ok but like, why do we care what they think? And if we really want to spite them, why not just fund the campaigns of non-xenophobic politicians in their districts?
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Gonna stop you right there. No offense but that is an extremely unrealistic and naive outcome that just won't happen. The reality is that extremism in that case just won't disappear along with racism and xenophobia. Even in real life in modern times racism and xenophobia are still serious problems in a lot of places. Which is not helped in that numerous politicians around the globe use racism and xenophobia as their platform for political gains with things like blaming people's problems on foreigners and certain races even if that is most definitely is not case.
The issue with overly focusing on Earth is that it just encourages all the racist and xenophobic people to stay racist and xenophobic by being far more isolationist. These people aren't going away and are in fact motivated by racism and xenophobia. One major reasoning that people like Terra Firma want to be more isolationist is to avoid as much influence by the other alien races as possible. The best way to lessen racism is exposure to other people outside your group.
Another major factor that people that I believe has been brought up is that realistically a lot of Earth's polities, a reminder that the Earth does not operate under a one world government, are not going to be cool with one person or corporation having that much influence. No matter how much Revy is liked by the SA a lot of people including the SA would be extremely uncomfortable with someone having too much influence on the world. People already point out how bad mega corporations can be if they have too much influence and having a single person or corporation have too much influence sets a pretty bad example down the line.
Let's be real, a lot of countries and nations would likely not be remotely thrilled at a foreigner having so much influence over their country/nation. Especially when that person both was born on a colony and grew up away from their planet entirely. And this is before taking into account other corporations feeling threatened at PI gaining too much influence politically over entire governments. The xenophobia thing is also likely to come into effect here with Revy not only being technically foreign from Earth but also being more open towards alien relations between humanity as a whole.
Not to say we probably can't do somethings with Earth, just that it seems like it would be far less than people are imagining. Hence why encouraging immigration to the colonies is popular. Taking the poorer people off of the hands of earth nations is far less likely to step on peoples toes.
Eh, not sure if it's as big a deal as you think. Imagine if we have what, 20 colonies and we are able to move around 10 million people to them each over a year? That's around 200 million people a year being moved alone. Might be possible to set things up so that the economy of a new discovered colony or even existing ones are able to handle the transition. Maybe even having an VI/AI specced to help out with that.