Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [125]
If there were small worlds at a distance from the star, at a sufficiently great distance to have icy materials as well as metals and rock—an asteroid belt would be ideal—then it might be time to build a new space settlement from scratch, abandoning the old free-world, which, despite all repairs, might by then be rather battered. (It would also be an opportunity to introduce new designs and technological advances from the hull in.)
There might well be an overwhelming temptation to linger a while, to build settlement after settlement in the new asteroid belt.
The advantages to this are obvious. During all the long years the free-world has wandered through space, it will have had to maintain a rigid population control. Now there will be a chance to expand population with wild abandon.
Again, through all the long years, the free-world, while much larger than what we would ordinarily think of as a space vessel, would be small enough to make it necessary to enforce a certain uniformity of culture and way of life. The building of numerous space settlements over a period of centuries in an asteroid belt would allow the establishment of widely different cultures.
And, of course, the new space settlements would eventually go to seed and move outward as a new generation of free-worlds.
We might almost imagine civilizations as existing in two alternating forms: a motile, population-controlled form as free-worlds drifting through space; and a sessile, population-expanding form as space settlements about a star.
Each free-world as it drifts through space eventually loses all contact with its home base, with space settlements, with other free-worlds. It becomes a lonely, self-contained culture that develops a literature of its own, as well as art forms, philosophy, science, and customs, with some Earth culture as a distant base, of course . Every other free-world does the same and no one of them is likely to duplicate the culture of another at all closely. And with each settlement in a new Solar system and eventual breakout, a new explosion of difference would result.
Such cultural variations could produce an infinite richness to humanity as a whole, a richness that could only be faintly hinted at if humanity were confined to the Solar system forever.
Different free-world cultures might have a chance to interact when the paths of two of them intersected.
Each would be detected by the other from a long distance, we might imagine, and the approach would be a time of great excitement on each. The meeting would surely involve a ritual of incomparable importance; there would be no flashby with a hail-and-farewell.* Each, after all, would have compiled its own records, which it could now make available to the other. There would be descriptions by each of sectors of space never visited by the other. New scientific theories and novel interpretations of old ones would be expounded. Differing philosophies and ways of life would be discussed. Literature, works of art, material artifacts, and technological devices would be exchanged.
There would also be the opportunity for a cross-flow of genes. Any exchange of population (either temporary or permanent) might be the major accomplishment of any such meeting. Such an exchange might improve the biological vigor of both populations.
To be sure, in the course of the long separation, enough mutation might have taken place to make the two populations mutually infertile. They might have evolved into separate species, but even so, intellectual cross-fertilization may be possible (provided always that the inevitable language difficulty is overcome, for even if two free-worlds had begun with the same language, these would have developed separately into widely different dialects).
In this way, humanity would become