To have moved that much closer in 30 years it would have had to have been traveling ~2.5 of light speed. Very unlikely. Its possible your old source was based on a faulty measurement however. That also seems unlikey as AC is one of the few stars we can measure by direct parallax so it's distance has been known for a long time very accurately.

I suppose one day it may be technically possible to "claim" (by claim I mean say 'this is our matter and anyone using it will have to pay') as far out as the Oort cloud which can extend up to half a light year in some places. Thats still only 1/9th of the way to the nearest star. Realistically Solar systems will have to be independant of each other and a centralised govt will be impossible (lightspeed com lag.)
Space is just too mind bogglingly huge.
To put it in km a light year is 9.461×10^12 km.
Thats 9,461,000,000,000 km. The earth has a diameter of only 12,000 km. You simply can't apply concepts such as territory to interstellar space.

I don't seem to be able to impress the sheer vastness of this enterprise...

Even driving around at the speed of light is going to take weeks to get around our solar systems immediate surrounding...... now we have to add in 3 dimensionality too.... the mind boggles at the number of bases you would need to create a network like you suggested..... billions of bases?

As any form of communication is going to achieve a maximum of 300,000 km per second, a message from the next star system, even using relays to strengthen the quality of the signal, is still going to take years to reach us. Rapid response forces will take on a whole new meaning!!

Ultimately, when (if) we finally get to the point where we can travel at light speed+... I doubt that we'd ever try to patrol anything further than the asteroid belt - even that would be an extremely costly and challenging network.

If you were to put a string of ships one light day (26 billion km) apart between here and alpha centauri you would still need over fifteen thousand of them.
Also Radio signals travel at lightspeed the same as all light, they are not instant and take time to travel to their destination. Ships moving around in interstellar space will have to be doing so at upward of 90% of lightspeed if they expect to reach their destinations owithin their crews lifetimes.

Heh and so will Mutually assured destruction. Station a few Bussard ramjets in your outer solar system and if anyone attacks you you send them back a them at 99%+ of cee. Having the thought of a ship which gains the relatavistic mass of a small moon crashing into your planet will sure put a damper on interstellar war. =P



I dunno, there really isn't much out there to patrol. It wouldn't be necessary to have ships anywhere except maybe trade routes between the major planets and the asteroid belt (which would be impossible to patrol)

I agree - I mean as an absolute maximum, there would be patrols out that far.... and even then they would be following preset 'trade' lanes rather than attempting to secure the entire area.

I think the sheer scope of space is just very difficult to visualise and it's easy to make false assumptions based upon our planetary experiences.

My thoughts:

Culture border means that the Civ at least have the ability to spread their culture to all the area within it which means there must be either space ships or space stations existed in the area to do this job. That being said, there shouldn't be any technical problem with communication and transportation within its own culture border. So when an alien Civ ship enters the culture border it will be detected for sure and what would you do now? You have to ask them why they come here and decide if they are welcomed or not.

I think at least there should be an option in the diplomatic screen that you could sign the open border treaty or not. Of course after the translation tech developed  

actually, communication is forseeably less and less of a problem. we are currently doing some quantum experimenting stuff that i dont know much about, but it basically says that any two given particles can be "linked" by a process called entanglement. This link would allow them to interact with eachother, and more importantly the stability of this link is not dependant upon distance, so theoretically they could interact across an infinite distance. now individually, we could not use this for transmitting information, due to some weird improbability stuff, but there is evidence that complex networks may be able to carry recognizable infromation. obviously, this would enable communication across any distance. now we just have to work on ships being able to travel at the required speeds.

Even if theoretically we manage to produce a device that can communicate over the billions of kilometres instantaneously.... we still need to go back to the problem of detection.

How can you keep an eye on all that space? We're talking astronomical figures of km3, it's simply not rational to assume we would have the materials to patrol anything beyond even a fraction of a solar system, or the paths between systems. Even if notifying bases of intrustion weren't a problem, detecting them in the first place most certainly would be. It would be like trying to find a dropped contact lense in the Atlantic.


Even more critical really, is why would anyone bother trying to patrol such distances? Why go to such extreme expense (with the material and energy required to create such a network, we'd be better off building a dyson sphere and be done with it).... so what if an alien enters your space 1 trillion light years away? You'd have zones close to planets and they would be the claimed areas, they would be enforced militarily and the vastness of space between would be, aside from the tradelanes and stations, a no man's land.

as for speed of light we have already broken that with communications

ie we have sent a radio signal through a solid object which is supposed to have traveled faster than light and it has been done at least twice

That's because the speed of light in an object is artificially slowed down to begin with. This is totally different than trying to go faster than light in a vacuum.



Actually, we've sent a few satellites through the "asteroid belt" without problems. Unlike asteroid belts in science fiction, real asteroid belts have a lot of space between asteroids.

Anyways, I agree that most "borders" probably won't be beyond trade routes in the solar system and within the atmosphere of a planet. The only way to construct borders larger than that would probably be to construct a Dyson sphere.

borders can easily exist in space... for the same reason they do in land

Because you SAY so... because one government says to another... see this line, if you cross it there will be trouble... the space isnt valuable of course, but having a bunch of it between your planet and border means that you can prepare for invasion better, the moment they cross even if by complete surprise you have as long as it takes them to travel to prepare. The border isnt enforced per-se by patrols, it can be enforced by the threat of war/sanctions.

I suggest that influence and borders be different lines, and that you can purposely break borders to a small extent, say half a sector or so, this wont auto-declare war (going further in would it therefore shows that a minor incident isnt an apocalypse) but it would lessen relations.

To correlate some of these real world considerations to the game..... your influence border in the game is basically the extent into space where your people frequent more than any other alien race. Your actual zone of control is anywhere your ships can effectively reach in a single turn. That ZOC is approximate to what we would do in reality. Anywhere within an appropriate operational range would be "ours" anything beyond a suitable ZOC would be no man's land. Naturally potential enemy staging range would be taken into account, but if ships can move faster than light, we aren't going to be able to stop them anyway - it would be far better to invest more in guarding the target than stopping the threat reach that target.

I'm still failing to see why some people think we would need to control vast tracts of empty space - it would serve absolutely no purpose and cost excessive amounts.

I wasn't saying it would be impossible to patrol because of how many asteroids there were (although that is a factor) I know how dense asteroid belts are.
The reason it would be impossible to patrol is because it stretches right around the sun and distinguishing ships from asteroids (especially ships that don't want to be found) would be no mean trick.

I think it's more realistic to reduce the planet culture border to the max sensor level, player can develope the sensor tech to gain better sensor as well as the culture border. And this should apply to the space station and space mines too.