I think I may have thought of a huge problem with how I describe some
of the dystopian worlds in my universe.  Initially I had this idea of
worlds that are wholly owned (either openly or subvertly) by
corporations and the world and its inhabitants are exploited to work
these huge factories and/or mining operations.

On these high population industrialized worlds a very definite caste
system is commonly employed with really poor people (think company
store) living in densly populated housing on one end of the scale with
the company executives on the other end of the economic scale.

I began to question this a bit.

1) would this system work or would it collapse under its own weight.

2) would a system like this "wear out" a world using up resources until
they were played out.

3) In a case where there are robots/androids used would manufaturing
jobs even exist? If not what use would a high population be?

Again I'm using you folks as a sounding board. I'm being a bit anal
about my writing trying to minimize "handwavium" in the stories.  I
want all the story elements to make sense.

The high pop/industrialized worlds are a catalyst for characters in the
story to leave.  In one part of human space there exists a star
spanning government that is organized as a representative republic such
that the worlds can do just about anything they want to do as long as
it fits within the rules formed by the founding articles of federation.

One of the paths for young people is to go into federal service (not
just military, essentially any of the service related character types
in Traveller) and they by charter are not supposed to be stopped by
their planetary government from doing so.  (In fact I've started one
story around that.)

Knowing this group is populated with sharp minds what do you folks
think?

--

Peter L. Berghold                                 <xxxxxx@berghold.net>
Professonally: (retired) IT Professional (DevOps, Puppet, Perl...)
Advocations: Dog Training, Beer Brewing, BBQ, Cooking