Unofficial ME Dev Diary II: Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the Stars
This is an unofficial dev diary. I used to work at BioWare as a writer on Mass Effect 1 and 2. In August of 2009 I moved on to new position at another company. Therefore, I don't speak for BioWare, nor for any of my former colleagues , nor for Electronic Arts. The following is my opinion only.
In
Mass Effect, Earth is still divided into self-interested nations, and our solar system has been developed by a multitude of national and corporate interests. However, a single entity – the Systems Alliance – has political and military authority over all human colonies, outposts, and stations beyond the solar system. We felt it was important that humanity present a single, united face to the galaxy, one that has left terrestrial regionalism behind.
Part of my job on ME1 was to explain how this came about, as part of the Codex and as reference for the novel
Revelation. Knowing the goal, how did I build towards that?
My problem with the Roddenberrian image of united humanity is that I think real humans tend to be greedy, selfish creatures that don't easily share political power, possessions, money, or living space. That's how we were made to be - evolution is usually unkind to the altruistic in times of scarcity. Only exceptional individuals can rise above their own biological impulses to place the needs of the many above the needs of the few or one.
I freely admit my glass is always half empty.
Based on this logic, I find the concept of "world government" ludicrous. Put any two people together, they'll find something to argue about. There are too many opposing and entrenched positions on Earth about who did what, who owns what, and who should get what. Every day, people are killed over grievances thousands of years old. I can’t conceive of that changing unless the nature of mankind changes. Should our species one day evolve into such saints, I doubt you and I would still recognize them as human.
My feeling is that in the future, changes of technology and economy will allow increasing numbers of ethnic and ideological
microstates and
micronations. People will build peace for themselves by establishing enclaves with like-minded fellows, and keeping The Other out.
Certainly we see this trend in the modern age. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia shattered virtually overnight. Quebec and Scotland have independence movements. Tens of thousands flood the streets in protest of “globalization” – the forcible integration of national economies into a world free market. In the US, the last decade has seen increasing divide between Red State and Blue State. We don't talk with our neighbors, we talk to people who think like us on the forums of the Huffington Post or Free Republic. Groups on both left and right speak openly of seceding from the United States, a discussion which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.
I look at the post-WWII Earth and see that the center cannot hold against factionalism and regionalism.
ME1 lead writer Drew Karphyshyn thought I was jaded and cynical. He looks at the same time period and points to the expansion of NATO and the establishment of the European Union. He sees the Kyoto Treaty, the Euro, the Channel Tunnel, and UN peacekeeping operations. He sees trends of centralization and cooperation.
The disagreement between us is why we never pinned down the exact number of nations on Earth in
Mass Effect. There are currently 195 sovereign nations on the Earth. I feel that by 2183, that number should increase by about 50. Drew feels it should
drop by the same amount.
To preempt an argument over what is – for the purposes of the player's experience – a meaningless number, we made a gentleman’s agreement to simply leave it unspecified. Of course, since we made that agreement, Drew has moved to BioWare Austin to work on
Star Wars: The Old Republic three days a week and play golf four days a week (he's also been known to write
New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels), and I left BioWare altogether. It's possible the new writing team for ME3 will come to a new agreement.
Given all this, I felt the most likely way for a pan-human government to come about was by starting again from scratch. A new structure must be established, completely divorced from the issues of Old Earth.
The problem with this idea was the time scale of
Mass Effect. Humans have possessed interstellar flight less than 35 years at the beginning of ME1. Colonies in virgin wilderness are reliant on the mother country for manufactured equipment and population growth for many years. England's first permanent settlement in North America, Jamestown, was founded on May 14, 1607. It was 169 years before that colony developed sufficiently to break away on July 4, 1776 - and that was accomplished in a human-friendly biosphere and environment. The idea that Earth nations would simply allow their various dependent colonies to break away and form their own government is fairly preposterous.
Space travel is expensive. A single space shuttle mission has an average cost of $1.5 billion.
Mars Direct, the “faster, cheaper, better” manned Mars mission, expected to put four people on the Red Planet for around $50 billion. The operating costs for a permanent lunar base with rotating crews of four are estimated in hundreds of billions
per year.
Placing a permanent human colony on another world involves moving thousands of people. Even assuming ideal Earth-like conditions – what we called a “shirtsleeves” environment – setting up a civilization on a virgin world requires millions of tons of supplies to boot-strap to something approaching self-sufficiency. The requirements are even higher for worlds that are not quite ideal - where it's difficult to grow food locally, for example, or where water needs to be filtered for material or biological contaminants, where minerals vital for Earth life (manganese, chrominum, etc.) are in short supply, or where trace atmospheric pollutants require rebreather masks and special filters for HVAC systems.
The sheer cost of moving bodies across light years explains the apparent discrepancy between the populations of Earth and its colonies. Earth is heavily overpopulated, but entire human colony worlds rarely equal the population of modern Los Angeles (Terra Nova, the most populous Alliance world, has only 4.4 million inhabitants). The concept of space colonization to relieve terrestrial population pressures is like the old idea of getting rid of garbage by shooting it all into the sun; it sounds like a great solution until you run the numbers.
How can anyone be expected to afford space colonization? Our answer was that no one nation, faction, or corporation could – but Earth
as a whole did. In order to take humanity to the stars, nations had to pool their resources.
My personal feeling is that most nations wouldn't pool their resources unless all the participants see benefits proportionate to their investment measured against their own economic strength. Again, the logic lies in my belief that humans are self-interested creatures who only kick in if they expect to see a profit for themselves. A system in which everyone gains based on their contributions as measured against each other would be perceived as unfair for those on the bottom, and they wouldn't participate. The G8 can afford to throw in more money. If, say, Hungary (
Gross Domestic Product $196.7 billion) kicks in 20% of their economy, or $39.34 billion, they’ll get four times what the United States (
GDP $14.44 trillion) would for kicking in 5% of their economy, or $722 billion. (I will emphasize that this was never vetted by anyone else at BioWare, and remains purely my own theory.)
Everyone works together, everyone profits based on effort versus capability. This plants the seeds for the Systems Alliance, the organization through which the participants coordinate their efforts.
The early SA was an intergovernmental organization, not a government in and of itself. It administrated colonization efforts and set space development policy. It had its own merchant fleet to keep colonists and supplies flowing outward. As more people moved into space, it gained its own small navy to protect those colonies and merchant ships from calamity. Many of those warships were obsolescent “hand-me-downs” from national militaries.
The structure was there, but I felt it would take a dramatic event to believably allow the SA to become a true government. Fortunately, we already had something suitable in the IP's backstory.
It was the Alliance's hand-me-down fleet that liberated Shanxi from the turians while the colonial nations back on Earth bickered about who should have the prestige of leading a relief effort, and what the fleet's objectives should be. This showed those who lived and worked in space that the nation-states of Earth were too busy with their old arguments to organize a relief effort on their behalf. This display – not of
force, but of
cohesion – gave the Alliance the political clout to push for and gain independence from the nations that had spawned it.
By this point, Earth's economy was booming thanks to the influx of colonial resources. My logic was that no politician would want to trade a boom economy for a war and recession. Again, this was predicated on my cynical belief that humans are self-interested above all else. Earth wanted to keep the political power, resources, money, and living space of the colonies. However, they were loathe to temporarily sacrifice the standard of living they enjoyed to keep them.
Humans, at least those in
Third Wave nations, tend to be impatient and short-sighted about such things. We tend think of the next economic quarter or the next paycheck.
The Sol system was left to the powers of Earth. Everything beyond was the Alliance.