>>11106978>>11106978>As OP, I don't care to force the discussion into a space opera direction.As soon as you start talking about star empires you're already dipping a toe.
Once you can reliably exploit orbital resources, and figure out how to live indefinitely in space, you've got a virtually bottomless well of resources scattered all over in system. There wouldn't be any reason to squabble over it.
You can't even say that these space colonies are going to be established by governments anymore as the private industry moves more into its own, and you have guys like bezos and musk both talking about an end game of living in space.
Once you've got established colonies in space they're not beholden to earth for anything, if you're an asteroid colony, and earth starts trying to swing their dick around, and sends an invasion fleet towards you, you just have to threaten with a few asteroids being dropped on their heads to make them re-evaluate their strategy.
Earth would just be a market to sell excess resources too, assuming they had anything of value to trade in exchange.
The reason you have governments are to enforce your borders, and to manage resources. If you're in space its nothing but lebensraum. Individual colonies would just operate like independent city states.
The longer they stay isolated, the more they'll each drift from baseline humans.
