The required bandwidth and latency needed
just is not there, and it is just not possible
for the two cultures to truly stay in sync --
to be, become, and remain indefinitely, one culture.
There will eventually be cultural divergences,
and discrepancies, which will increase over time,
due to the kinds of inherent non-linearity of process
inherent in all human cultures and processes.
Seems like a motte and bailey argument. Either the claim is there would be some differences, which seems true but irrelevant, or that would necessarily be huge discrepancies, which seems false. For a long time the UK and Australia had a communication latency of months, but I don’t see any evidence that the Aussies had any desire to attack the mother country, even if they could. Mars is close enough that people could go back and forth, both temporarily for work and permanently as immigrants, including weapons inspectors if required.
The claim is there would be some differences, in the short term (dozens of years), and that these would necessarily _become_ huge discrepancies, over the long term (hundreds or thousands of years). This amplification of difference is inevitable due to multiple nonlinear effects operating in all types of life ecosystems, cultures, etc. A few thousand years is a trivial timescale when it comes to planetary evolution dynamics and life cycles, which is generally measured in billions of years.
Yeah I really don’t see why these huge discrepancies, large enough to force a war, are inevitable when they are close enough we could watch the same evening news, tweet on the same twitter, and even visit each other’s planets for to get our PhDs before returning home. The British and Roman Empires managed to stick together for a pretty long time despite much worse communication gaps, and their collapses wasn’t related to increasing cultural divergences among colonists.
Of course, absent technology, the rate of cultural evolution, and thus of divergence, for the British and Roman Empires is very much slower than it would be for modern technology-enabled planets. The rate of change (and thus of divergence) of both of these historical examples was very slow, comparatively, to our our ‘evening news watching’ society. Hence, historically they did go “a long time” without either ever developing anything even close to the necessary tech capability to completely kill the other one. Ie; it is not just “the total elapsed time” as it is the “net aggregate functional difference over the accumulative rate of change” that matters.
Also, I notice that our modern ‘broadcast news watching society’ has become, also because of technology (and increasingly) more and more politically polarized and socially balkanized. Surely it can be suggested that this is at least some sort of evidence of technology being associated with cultural change, and with the rate of cultural change, and thus hence also of the overall eventual degree of divergence—ie; and this in addition to prior cultural changes being the reason for new technologies being/becoming developed, and hence of eventually even more increased divergence, etc (for example, because of the historical emergence of rationalism, the “western enlightenment”, etc, over the last few hundred years). To go from there and to notice that 1; strong overall societal polarization and local balkanization combined with 2; rapidly advancing and increasingly divergent technological capabilities, along with 3; no common necessary basis of mutuality of survival (ie, MAD and the reality of global nuclear winter) eventually leads to 4; very high first strike game-theoretic potentials and thus, with high levels of at least some type of tech power, significant culture destroying consequences somewhere.
Seems like a motte and bailey argument. Either the claim is there would be some differences, which seems true but irrelevant, or that would necessarily be huge discrepancies, which seems false. For a long time the UK and Australia had a communication latency of months, but I don’t see any evidence that the Aussies had any desire to attack the mother country, even if they could. Mars is close enough that people could go back and forth, both temporarily for work and permanently as immigrants, including weapons inspectors if required.
The claim is there would be some differences, in the short term (dozens of years), and that these would necessarily _become_ huge discrepancies, over the long term (hundreds or thousands of years). This amplification of difference is inevitable due to multiple nonlinear effects operating in all types of life ecosystems, cultures, etc. A few thousand years is a trivial timescale when it comes to planetary evolution dynamics and life cycles, which is generally measured in billions of years.
Yeah I really don’t see why these huge discrepancies, large enough to force a war, are inevitable when they are close enough we could watch the same evening news, tweet on the same twitter, and even visit each other’s planets for to get our PhDs before returning home. The British and Roman Empires managed to stick together for a pretty long time despite much worse communication gaps, and their collapses wasn’t related to increasing cultural divergences among colonists.
Of course, absent technology, the rate of cultural evolution, and thus of divergence, for the British and Roman Empires is very much slower than it would be for modern technology-enabled planets. The rate of change (and thus of divergence) of both of these historical examples was very slow, comparatively, to our our ‘evening news watching’ society. Hence, historically they did go “a long time” without either ever developing anything even close to the necessary tech capability to completely kill the other one. Ie; it is not just “the total elapsed time” as it is the “net aggregate functional difference over the accumulative rate of change” that matters.
Also, I notice that our modern ‘broadcast news watching society’ has become, also because of technology (and increasingly) more and more politically polarized and socially balkanized. Surely it can be suggested that this is at least some sort of evidence of technology being associated with cultural change, and with the rate of cultural change, and thus hence also of the overall eventual degree of divergence—ie; and this in addition to prior cultural changes being the reason for new technologies being/becoming developed, and hence of eventually even more increased divergence, etc (for example, because of the historical emergence of rationalism, the “western enlightenment”, etc, over the last few hundred years). To go from there and to notice that 1; strong overall societal polarization and local balkanization combined with 2; rapidly advancing and increasingly divergent technological capabilities, along with 3; no common necessary basis of mutuality of survival (ie, MAD and the reality of global nuclear winter) eventually leads to 4; very high first strike game-theoretic potentials and thus, with high levels of at least some type of tech power, significant culture destroying consequences somewhere.