Aliens, Space Elevators, and Politics

Where Michael is giving his detailed thoughts.

The first two Exchanging Notes posts have been Scoot throwing his ideas while I respond to them in the comments section. This time, I want to repay the favor. After all, I do need to put in my own ideas for this project. For now, I would like to focus on three things: aliens, space elevators, and politics. In that order.

Aliens

If you see the About page of Bima Sakti, you know that I intend to have alien life and inhabitable planets in this setting:

While the Americans, the Eurasians, and all the other powers squabble down on Earth, Indonesia explores the depths of space – encountering alien life and settling planets.

The thing is that I don’t really know what kind of alien life I want for Bima Sakti. I want to give a shout-out to

J.R. Logan

with his comment here:

This raises the question: how will aliens be shown in the Bima Sakti Universe? How advanced would these aliens be compared to humanity? Would they be human aliens, or alien aliens?

Human (or at least humanoid) aliens will definitely drive home the comparison with the Age of Exploration. I can see some of these Indonesians intermixing with the natives (assuming biological compatibility because why not).

I’ll get to alien politics in a later part of this post. For now, I want to focus on biology…

One of my pet theories in sci-fi stories like Star Trek is that human aliens from outer space are actually fellow descendants of Adam. How else could they interbreed with the Earthlings? Of course, I don’t really want to go full-schizo with the origins of these aliens and whatnot (though Halo got away with having a prehistoric human space empire, so…)

Personally, my answer would be to have both. Have human aliens and alien aliens. That would really open up the possibilities. One particular aspect of the universe I want to explore is how there would be aliens coming and settling in Jakarta. Perhaps some of these alien species are aquatic, so they made their home under the waters of Jakarta Bay (it should be cleaned up in 200 years, I hope).

I mentioned Jakarta because that’s my primary candidate for the space elevator. This brings me to my next topic.

Space Elevators

Space Elevators are expensive. I was playing with the idea of multiple space elevators, but that would just be overkill. And besides, having only one space elevator on the entire Earth would really help with the whole “Indonesian gatekeeping of outer space” thing.

Thus, the question would be this: where do we put them? The obvious candidate is Jakarta and one that I think we should go with for both in-universe and out-of-universe reasons.

I brought up Indonesia’s plan for a new capital called Nusantara in a previous comment. Personally, I see things heading south for Jakarta after the capital’s move. Why? Because in a sense, this is basically the national government running away from the city’s problems.

Thus, the city began to fall into disrepair even as more and more people are still coming in for work. Upon this background, the international community began to work together. Indonesia was chosen to be the place for Earth’s space elevator. The government in Nusantara chose Jakarta as the spot in a way to revitalize the former capital.

Out of universe, I’m just much more familiar with Jakarta (I mean, Marvel got away with 99.5% of all the important events in their universe happening in New York…). Also, I found the idea of Jakarta being even more of a hodgepodge of ethnic groups than it already is (and was historically) even more fun.

Unfortunately for the “international community”, a strongman figure rose up. He overthrew the government which he saw as slaves to the “globalists”. In its place, he set up a government dedicated to restoring “Indonesian values” – Pancasila. Then, he took over the space elevator, setting the stage for Indonesian dominance in space.

This brings me to the next topic.

Politics

This is where the fun begins.

In a previous comment, I brought up the idea of Indonesia using ASEAN into a NATO-esque organization filled with countries who are aligned with Indonesia but not an actual part the country.

Of course, this ASEAN has a twist – Australia is a part of it. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. This is already a thing in soccer. In terms of population, Australia is a small country. For cultural/historical reasons, Australia aligned itself with the West, first the British and now with the Americans.  Now, imagine the winds of political power shifting once more. Seeing Indonesia’s rise to power, Australia broke ranks with the West, aligning itself with Indonesia.

But beyond Southeast Asia (and Australia), I’m still hammering out the geopolitics of Earth. When I put in the Eurasians in the about page, I was thinking of an entity that formed out of Russia and China, uniting the Eurasian landmass. Of course, Scoot rightly pointed out that their current alliance is more out of fear of a common enemy (the US) instead of an actual cultural unity.

So things will have to change, both in universe and out of universe if we want to make it work. For the moment, I’ll put that on the shelf.

But I also want to get into another dimension of politics in Bima Sakti: space politics.

I’m still figuring out how interstellar politics are going to be like. Will there be an alien UN, or will the alien power(s) be more isolationist, a sort of space Imperial China? Regardless, I can see the humans being troublemakers of sorts, conquering worlds, settling planets, and carving out territories for Bima Sakti.

Going back to JR’s comment here, I think it would be cool if the alien word for human is ‘Indonesian’ or something along those lines. It would be similar to how ‘Franks’ (and its variants like Feringgi in Malay) were used in the East to refer to Europeans thanks to the Crusades.

I don’t want to make this post too long, so I’ll move on for now.

Given the vastness of space, even with FTL travel (also have to figure how that one would work), a centralized state would be unfeasible. That’s why I think Bima Sakti should be a decentralized entity that paid fealty (for lack of a better word) to the central government in Nusantara (assuming the capital hadn’t been moved back to Jakarta in the two centuries since).

I’m actually imagining an Indonesian ethnic group or two carving up their kingdoms in the stars. These empires are independent in all but name, paying their bare minimum tax to the central government but otherwise ignoring them when it’s convenient.

I actually have more to say on that, but this post is long enough. I’ll save them for a future post/comment.

For now, I present these ideas to

Scoot

for his consideration.

-Michael P. Marpaung