Galactic Empires

One of the most prevalent themes in science fiction is the galactic empire. Star Wars and Star Trek (and all their spin-offs) take place in a galactic empire; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is about the decline and fall of a galactic empire. My novel Pawns of Tomorrow is about a galactic empire based on a chess game. To ensure a certain amount realism to the story, I did research about our own Milky Way galaxy. What I found out was that a galaxy is a hell of a big place.

To illustrate: The NASA space probe Voyager 2, traveling at approximately 93,000 mph, took twelve years to travel to Neptune. If this same space vehicle were to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it would take it over 370 years to reach it. Okay, but that's reality. Let's assume that we have a starship capable of faster than light travel (impossible according to scientists). How much faster? Let's say it can reach Proxima Centauri (4.22 lightyears away) in four days. Pretty fast huh. That's one lightyear a day or fifteen lightdays per hour. Okay, now let's say we want to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The galaxy has an estimated diameter of 100,000 lightyears. The trip would take 100,000 days or almost 3,000 years.

In galactic terms, 100 lightyears or even a 1000 lightyears is in the neighborhood. As a result, even with FLT (faster than light) speeds, our empire could not be very large. Even then, travel from one star to another would take a lot of time, a hundred days (over three months) to go to a stellar system a hundred lightyears away, a thousand days (over three years) to go to a system a thousand lightyears away.

Another problem is that electronic communication between systems would be impractical. A message sent to a planet 100 lightyears away would arrive in the next century, a 1000 lightyears away, in the next millennium. So our galactic civilization would need to resort to communiqués sent by starship. It would be like the days around Columbus' time with sailing ships.

Another thing about the galaxy is the sheer number of star systems. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Let's say that only a thousandth of them contain habitable planets. That means that the rulers of the galactic empire would have to administer 400 million planets each of which contained over a billion humanoids. What an administrative nightmare.

In my novel, my galactic empire spans part of the Orion spiral arm of the galaxy. An alien empire of approximately equal technological ability, based in the Perseus arm, declares war on the Orion's. But such a war becomes a tactical and strategic game of complexities. For example, most star systems don't even know that the empire is at war, some within the empire's borders don't even realize that there is an empire. It makes for some interesting situations.