I’m wondering if the concept of a Galactic Republic/Federation/Empire commonly depicted in Space Sci-fi even makes sense.
I’ve heard it said before that the limitation on empire size is about 2 weeks. That is to say, if it takes longer than 2 weeks to get a message from the capital to the frontier it causes instability. So, it’s more about time than absolute physical size.
Assuming no FTL and centered at Earth (or the sun) that puts the max distance roughly a little past the low estimate for where the Oort cloud begins.
(Wolfram Alpha says 14 light days is 2424 AU and the cloud has inner edge estimates from 2000 to 5000 AU
Seems like size clearly correlates with citizen happiness in contemporary world. Small European countries as much faster and have much happier citizens than large empires like russia, USA, China.
Instructions Unclear. I declare my own sovereign nation with a population of 1 and just 1 square meter of land (cardboard box under the bridge). 🫠
That’s what really drives me - if all fails you can always become a Cynic and live in a cardboard box country 🙂↕️
I do not enjoy how fast he moves here
As with Rome, the limitation is often communication and transportation.
You’d have a hard time even keeping Mars part of unified empire with Earth given our current technology level. We simply can’t move things back and forth easily enough until we figure out fusion reactors (or some other power source) to a much higher level than we currently have.
Any sort of empire spanning more than a single solar system would require faster than light travel and communications.
Supposing Stargate technology exists, you could conceivably control an entire galaxy, but that is proposing the existence of technology incompatible with our best understanding of the universe. Realistically the solar system will probably be the limit of my empire.
I feel like a major limitation to a Stargate empire would be Stargate throughout.
A large enough military would need to be supplied at each Stargate to secure access. At a certain point, it is going to be difficult for the home world to supply all garrisons, even if some garrisons some self-sufficiency. Worse, if a garrison is self sufficient, how do you maintain loyalty to the home world.
Sci-fi is delightfully circumspect on how an intergalactic empire would work. Maybe Herbert’s Dune universe is clearest and he just took us back to the middle ages with sandworms and drugs, fiefdoms and nobility.
I think whatever area shares the same government is a country. It doesn’t have to be contiguous or on the same body floating through space. It could be the size of the Vatican or half the universe.
I suspect the definition of the word will change once (if) we make it to the stars. We have gone from nomadic life to loosely defined borders to kingdoms to empires to multinational and intranational federations of sort. These terms may no longer be fit for purpose when we colonize Mars etc. And maybe that’s why you struggle to comprehend how it would all work behind the scenes. We don’t know for sure, sci-fi authors don’t know (or don’t want to be too specific and limit themselves in what stories they could tell in the future).
42 is the max.
The maximum size of a hemisphere is half of a planet…
I imagine interstellar coalition governments probably function a lot more like the EU than a single country. Individual planets/solar systems would probably function under a somewhat independent governorship that is still subject to the overall laws of the federation/republic.
It’s sort of like asking “how big can a city get?” before states and nation-states existed, when in reality at some point a higher tier governance inevitably takes over. An interstellar or galactic scale government is necessarily going to be massively stratified with many levels of hierarchy in between. I think this is why many sci-fi governments at this scale are also described as bloated, unintelligible bureaucracies.
Historically speaking, about 6.6m square miles.
