> "evil empire/East India Trading Company but in Spaaaaace"
I think it would be much more sinister.
The FTL controllers would be seen as gods by species who have yet to leave their homeworld. Every civilization within their sphere of influence would be either have to be their allies, thralls, unable to move around in the galaxy unless they get piggyback rides by the FTL barons, or engulfed and extinguished by them.
Imagine if we in the real world found out that there was no way to explore the universe we've been observing for centuries, unless we allied with some alien species that does not, can not, have our best interests on their minds.
Interstellar travel would require resources, and resources would require interstellar travel..
To go against the FTL species you would need to control at least as many planets as they do, and to control that many planets you would need FTL travel..
Decoding it to ROT18 makes some amusing changes to the numbers.
I think I have kinda grown out of such existential dread, once I started having a sort of intuition that the Universe is too inconceivably large to be uniformly altered, let alone "damaged", by any single event or entity (which also makes me cringe at sci-fi which throws the word "universe" around so lightly.)
More importantly, I started thinking of the "backdrop" of Reality itself to not be Nothingness, but Everythingness.
That is, the blackness we see out there, must not be the default state. I imagine a flood of "white" behind the void, and the reality we perceive is just a heavily-filtered slice of it.
What led me to this way of looking at things was a comment on HN or Reddit, that talked about how, in certain axioms of mathematics, you can have a null/empty set but it's impossible to have a set which contains everything including itself. Whereas in another group of rules, it's impossible to have an empty set because everything else is arrived at by "subtracting" from the "infinite" set!
Maybe someone here knows better of what I'm referring to.
Why thank you. It's common elsewhere in places that don't have rich comment markup supporting spoiler tags; it dawned on me recently that I didn't see it used much on HN for some reason.
And don't think for a minute that the first human company that gets that tech wouldn't do the exact same thing.
Wilbur and Orville Wright did precisely that for flight until the US govt dismissed the patents due to WWI. The patents, and their insane lawsuits, were poisoning the whole US on flight. Europe grew by leaps and bounds, and had all sorts of aircraft.
I think it would be much more sinister.
The FTL controllers would be seen as gods by species who have yet to leave their homeworld. Every civilization within their sphere of influence would be either have to be their allies, thralls, unable to move around in the galaxy unless they get piggyback rides by the FTL barons, or engulfed and extinguished by them.
Imagine if we in the real world found out that there was no way to explore the universe we've been observing for centuries, unless we allied with some alien species that does not, can not, have our best interests on their minds.
Interstellar travel would require resources, and resources would require interstellar travel..
To go against the FTL species you would need to control at least as many planets as they do, and to control that many planets you would need FTL travel..
Sounds like a monumentally hopeless reality.