The Galactic Encyclopedia and Relativity
The advanced Galactic Encyclopedia still has to obey the dictates of relativity, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light or radio waves. So while we reside about 25,000 light years from the central galactic transportation terminal, Trantor, our update will still be 25,000 years behind the times at Trantor.
Even the closest stars to us, the binary Proxima Alpha Sentori A and B are 4.3 light years away. They have only recently learned that Trump won the 2016 election, if they picked up our signals. Learning that he was opposed to even earth aliens and was replacing government scientists with lobbyists undoubtedly discouraged them from contacting us until they found out if he was reelected. So they still have four years to wait to hear about this, and we have four more years to hear from them if they decide to contact us, which amounts to an 8 year wait from now. That’s how it works.
Having attended a UC Irvine Law webinar on Misinformation and Voting today, I started wondering if the Galactic Times or Wikipedia might also be subject to misinformation, disinformation, or, a term I first heard yesterday, malinformation. Maybe the Empire remains dominant by controlling the information world, as it does the transportation world.
A common misunderstanding is that since a 1-g relativistic traveler can reach Earth from Trantor in 20 of their years, we could get news only 20 years old. The 20 years is the traveler’s aging on the trip, but it still takes them 25,000 years in our years.
That is also the principal reason that return trips don’t make any sense. To and from Trantor to Earth, the Earth you return to will be 50,000 years in the future. With our current inability to significantly reduce global warming, it is doubtful that it would even be habitable, except for a few people living in air conditioned domes, and polluting the planet even further. That brings us to the Dune world.
There is certainly no way that you could have a Galactic democracy with that delay in voting. You couldn’t even have local group governments between nearby stars. Even on Earth with one of the supposed leading Democracies, the United States, only one of the two parties believes in Democracy any more. The best we can hope for is that the Galactic Government is an hereditary Monarchy like the ancient Pharoahs, or a Clonocracy as in Foundation, to discourage occasional coups and insurrections and the wars that they bring. The Clonocracy (not rejected by spell check!) could easily fail since we believe evolution will lead to smarter and better adapted progress of all 100 billion planet dominating species in our Galaxy.
Yes, Galactic Scientific Rationality is quite different from Warp Speed Science Fiction.
