In terms of social development, I wonder how frequently the common knowledge of typical things about the Imperium gets lost. A small colony sets up (perhaps without informing the imperial government, or outside the domain of the Imperium) via contracted transport
of the colonists to a world and after a few curious free trader visits there are no more. The colony is more or less on its own. Children born to that colony will probably be taught that there is a huge empire out there among the stars that they came from,
but none of them are likely to ever visit it and they won't be able to relate that first hand experience to their own children. Teaching might shift to more practical matters ("make sure to get the harvest in before aphelion") and most of the concept of the
Imperium gets lost completely. There's not really that connection to stabilize social development and I imagine that the colony will rapidly (a couple of generations in) develop its own culture and view of the universe.
Well, the Long Night was just that kind of experience for the Second Imperium. By now (and by now I mean ~1116 in the CT timeline, no rebellion no Virus Third Imperium Thingie.)
Hit send by mistake
By now, many of the really odd and stark cultural differences would have been smoothed off a bit, but I expect the Third Imperium is a much more varied place, culturally than the Second and way more than the First
As I recall from canon, one of the features of the Second imperium is the flowering of non-Vilani culture after centuries of repression; which centuries of repression could have seriously altered just what those cultures *used* to be. It would
be like thousands of variants on the SCA, not actual feudal societies, but what was remembered/half-remembered/fictionalized of the originals.
All overlaid by TL-12 technology and mass media.
THEN that all slowly grinds down over the Long Night, what came out of those thousands of isolated cultural petri dishes must have been eye-opening for the first scouts of the Third Imperium to venture to these lost worlds. (And we’ll pretend
that T4 and the horrifically sociopathic reconquest of the Zhunastu School of Contact didn’t happen…and it JUST struck me how much like the Spanish conquest of the Americas that bit of canon was…Move in with large technological advantage, get the natives to
slaughter each other for the tech, then knock down the winners so you can strip mine the wealth of the new world. what remains becomes a dependent customer of yours. )
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs