2mo ago

Questions about political borders... IN SPAAAAACE! (and some other stuff)

How would political borders work in space? I'm currently treating interplanetary space as ocean and planets as landmasses. A polity has complete sovereignty over their planet and its gravity well. For large planets, the space occupied by the planet's orbit is also considered an exclusive economic zone. foreign entities may travel freely through this zone, but may not exploit resources found there or set up permanent orbital colonies there.

I suppose I'd have to look at what a polity is capable of defending militarily, since practically you can only keep what you're capable of defending from rivals. A planet's surface and gravity well are easily defensible, but I'm not sure about the entire orbit. Planets move around relative to each other.

The yinrih are also quite fond of building massive spaceborn archologies that are nations unto themselves, though they are much smaller than planets and don't have a significant gravity well.

There are two polities that require special consideration, The Spacer Confederacy and Partisan Territory. Both are collections of these spaceborn archologies occupying resource-rich asteroid belts[^1].

The Spacer Confederacy is a loose collection of independent city-states that somehow hate each other just little enough to form a federal council and police force to protect the common interests of the inner belt. Partisan Territory occupies the Outer Belt and has a totalitarian system of government.

Here's story that explains a bit of how the Spacer Confederacy works. I'm not sure how viable such a system is, but if it doesn't work, I'm hoping it "doesn't work" in a way that allows for more interesting worldbuilding rather than just being stupid.

[^1]: Yes I know the IRL asteroid belt has a tiny amount of total mass, but this is my world, dang it!

6 comments

You should take a look at A city on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC fame) as they discuss this quite a bit. The long and short of it is that nations are currently not allowed to own anything in space, only make use of it (being bound by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967). But it quickly becomes clear there are a lot of ways to skirt that, especially if you don’t mind having a hot war on Earth.
I think you need to keep mind how borders are enforced. Each political entity wants all the resources under their control, but since all political entities want the same limited resources, they have to fight for them. Depending on the scarcity of resources and the efficiency of each economy, each entity will reserve a different amount of resources to their military, which will then determine how far out their territory can reach.
A good model for territory (assuming all space is equally valuable and equally as hard to defend) are weighted voronoi graphs. Essentially, the power of a military decreases as you move further from the capital, and the borders are drawn where two opposing militaries have equal power. (i.e. a stable equilibrium point) If one of the militaries manage to push past this equilibrium point, the opposing military will become stronger due to being closer to the capital, and will push the border back to where it was.
Now, reality is significantly more complex than this simple model, especially due to the sparsity of resources in space, so a resource-point based model is going to more accurate than a resource-area based model.
In a resource point model, there are two big aspects you need to consider: surface curvature and caravan routes. If you imagine territory as a 3d object rather than a 2d one, then the surface of that object becomes the borders of the territory. If you imagine a sphere around a planet, that planet can be attacked from six different sides. If instead the planet was located in a sphere centered on the sun, the planet could only be attacked from one side. The difference between these two scenarios is how much the surface of the territory curves.
When you take into account caravan routes, the optimal shape for a territory reaching out to a resource is a shallow cone with the base centered around the capital.
TLDR; the best borders for a political entity is a spiky ball.
- That was very helpful thank you.
The Expanse has some examples, especially to your point that you can only keep what you can defend. Centers of power are planets, moons, large asteroids, large standalone stations, and fleets. Means of attack and control can include guerilla warfare to sabotage life support, pirates/privateers attacking trade, redirecting asteroids, bioweapons...
Lagrange points may provide ideal "regions of economic authority" for planet-based civilizations - both because they are natural sites for orbital industry and because military forces can be pre-positioned there. The rest of the orbit is mostly meaningless space; there's nothing special about Earth's orbit away from the lagrange points, compared to an arbitrary empty spot between Earth and Mars.
What polities might want to enforce, however, is control over the best trajectories between their worlds. There might be rules against placing large objects within those trajectories, or otherwise obstructing and disrupting them. This would be especially true if there was regular traffic along those trajectories.
I hope humans never leave planet earth so we dont try to make silly claims of ownership over space.
Besides, its meaningless to try when I've already claimed the entire universe.

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