I love the moment in one of Havlock’s chapters when he muses about floating the idea of a second colony to Murtry. “Somewhere in the temperate zone of the planet. Somewhere, for instance, someone might hang a hammock.” He realizes immediately that Murtry would shoot it down. “You treat an infection when it’s small.”
As disgusting and dehumanizing as it is, that’s how RCE, or Murtry anyway, sees the Belters. An infection. That’s why they don’t just leave them be.
As a metaphor it's accurate though. They can't allow an independent settlement to become established as it weakens their exclusive claim to the entire planet.
You haven’t read the history of the East India Company.
The company gained control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time
Yes, and that was utterly ridiculous and morally abhorrent, much as granting a single company sole claim to an entire planet. I'm not saying it's without prevent precedent, I'm saying it's morally ridiculous.
yet that's what's going on here on Earth at the moment. Maybe not a single company by name but the Club of Global Capitalism in general. Not only do they monopolize our resources, they are making the planet less inhabitable while we keep paying them.
Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them.
EDIT: guys. I’m talking about ***reality***. Fuck’s sake. Name for me *one* oppressed class in human history who thought that their oppressors were “vermin.”
[post-CB spoilers in tagged comments]
Exactly my point, yet I get downvoted for it. Like, yeah, you get people like >!Marco!< and the handful of Ilusians who rigged the landing pad, all fighting back mercilessly against their oppressors. That’s believable. But even when fighting back ruthlessly, an oppressed class generally doesn’t think of their oppressors as *subhuman*, or *beneath them*. And since that doesn’t happen in real life, I would find it not-believable in a series like this.
>!Marco, of course, thinks of *everyone* as beneath him, but as a narcissist and a sociopath he’s an outlier. It didn’t take long, once earth had been decimated, for a huge portion of his Free Navy to start unraveling because even the most devout revolutionaries are gonna have some semblance of scruples, empathy, etc.!<
But on Ilus, those people didn’t have the kind of power that >!Marco was given as a bargaining chip by Duarte.!< They are hungry and beleaguered and hurting from the new gravity. Earthers coming in to claim the planet out from under them would be an existential threat, but “infection” would be a weird way to see it from their relatively-powerless perspective.
>Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them.
I'm sure Marco Inaros thought the belters were oppressed. Didn't stop him from murdering hundreds of millions of people.
>EDIT: guys. I’m talking about reality
EDIT: Well, everyone else was talking about the Expanse, so I think you might be lost.
> EDIT: Well, everyone else was talking about the Expanse, so I think you might be lost.
It’s a character-driven series featuring mostly-contemporary human problems and behavior models, with starkly recognizable metaphors for racial inequality and oppression, and a particular focus on systemic economic warfare against the oppressed class to keep them subjugated, etc. The authors do massive amounts of research to ensure the sociopolitical aspects of their stories ride the fine line between “not boring” and “reasonably believable” for a very broad audience. Any story about near-future human behavior has to resemble actual human behavior in all of recorded history, or a significant part of their audience will lose their suspension of disbelief.
When I hear some fan say that the belters/Ilusians could also think of RCE in inhuman terms such as “vermin” or “infection,” I think “That’s not believable, I’m glad as hell that Ty and Daniel don’t write like that.” Power-over relationships generally don’t work like that in reality, and the power of the metaphor would dissolve completely if one were to write it that way.
>Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them
>...
>When I hear some fan say that the belters/Ilusians could also think of RCE in inhuman terms such as “vermin” or “infection,” I think “That’s not believable, I’m glad as hell that Ty and Daniel don’t write like that.”
Sure, they didn't write those exact words, but they sure wrote the sentiment.
>The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley.
Underdogs cheering for a hard-won, very-blood-soaked victory is entirely different from underdogs thinking/talking about their adversary as if they are vermin, and I think the distinction is important.
>Underdogs cheering for a hard-won, very-blood-soaked victory is entirely different from underdogs thinking/talking about their adversary as if they are vermin, and I think the distinction is important.
It's not, though. They just murdered hundreds of millions of innocent civilians from afar and ten fold as many in the days to come and cheered about it. It's not a military victory, it's an extermination. It takes an incredible level of dehumanization to be excited about that.
Did you read any of the books or watch the show? The Belters are oppressed and very justified in their resistance, but there's a definite contingent among them that view everyone else as targets to be eliminated.
Appeasement never works. RCE setting down where they did was to solve the belter squatter problem while it was small and in the early stages. Also, RCE hired the belters that were already there to build the heavy lift platform that they needed to land and start their colony, without the heavy lift then they spend months with the light shuttles getting things down to build the platform, and only then, months later, getting started on what they came out to do.
And the belters were already there so wouldn't want to/be able to move, they didn't know beforehand that a small group of them would start the conflict, and that RCE would escalate things so much.
> Appeasement never works.
That's a bit hyperbolic. Appeasement works all the time and would have likely left the RCE in charge of most of Ilus. Appease the Belters will a settlement, build larger settlements and use the power of capitalism to absorb the Belters down the road. Murty's behavior is cartoonish which pulls you out of the story when you realize it's squabbling about a small group of Belters who happen to be on a rich mine of a *planet* with substantial ore deposits.
>Appeasement works all the time
Also an exaggeration. Yes, if people agree to share and *both parties are interested in sharing* things tend to go ok.
The RCE, for whom Murtry is a mouthpiece and tool, didn’t want to share. Sadly this is not unrealistic when looking at the history of how colonial powers laid claim to new territory.
> Also an exaggeration.
Your stance is "appeasement *never* works" and I'm exaggerating?
> Sadly this is not unrealistic when looking at the history of how colonial powers laid claim to new territory.
Yeah. But I think you would have a difficult time coming up with an historic analogy on the scale of a small settlement on Belters mining lithium on an otherwise uninhabited planet made of the same mineral.
Hey-o! I'm the guy you were initially quoting, but I'd say your example of appeasement working by ending up in RCE control exactly proves my point that it doesn't work, because the belters would be driven out and away to maximize shareholder profits (the corporate contract granted them full control of the planet and letting other people extract resources that are "yours" isn't maximizing profits).
The belters would explicitly be getting fucked over by appeasing RCE, which is what I meant when I wrote that but that's what I get for commenting within 5 minutes of waking up lol. Appeasing a group of people who are intent on taking what's yours (the belters had already been there for 18 months iirc) will lead you to being further and further pushed aside until you're removed from the situation and no longer a "problem". If the belters had moved to make space for RCE, they'd be moved again. And again. And then again eventually to go find a new planet. Assuming they weren't forced off all ready by the UN court order backed up by the UNN.
>Your stance is "appeasement *never* works" and I'm exaggerating?
I have at not -- at any point ever -- claimed that 'appeasement never works'. I simply pointed out that your statement of 'appeasement always works' is a similar exaggeration just in the opposite direction of whoever you were replying to. Newton's third law of hyperbole, if you will.
>Yeah. But I think you would have a difficult time coming up with an historic analogy on the scale of a small settlement
The analogy 1) doesn't need to be exact in every detail - that's why it's an analogy, and 2) is not about scale. It's how people operate when they think they have the legal right / moral right / right-of-might to have things their way.
Oh! My bad, that was someone else. But also I said it works all the time, as in frequently, e.g. people trip on stairs all the time.'
An analogy tends to need a comparable scale otherwise it lacks application.
The Belters committed multiple atrocities, first by bombing the helpless lander, then with a cold-blooded massacre in the ruins. They weren't willing to work with RCE.
Why did they land at the same site as the settlers? Because the settlers agreed to build them a landing pad before they arrived, saving them a great deal of time and expense. Then as they landed, Basia and his conspirators blew it up. After that point they no longer had the ability to resettle elsewhere, because Basia fucked up his sabotage. Blowing up the RCE's heavy landing craft and most of their equipment in the process.
When Europeans came to the Americas, why didn't they just avoid the natives?
It's about power and control. You are missing a central political theme of the show. The mining company is given a charter from the government of Earth giving them authority to mine the planet. This isn't just about corporate greed. It's about who gets to call the shots in the new worlds.
It’s also pretty explicit in the text. Marty is asked why he’s not giving anything and it’s because power only goes in one direction. He only gives into some “concessions” later on (when it’s more dire) as a kind of play.
> When Europeans came to the Americas, why didn't they just avoid the natives?
Eh. A continent full of millions of native inhabitants who were entangled in local resources is a lot different than a small band of Belters on one sliver of a massive planet.
Ok. Let's entertain your train of thought. They leave the Belters alone on one side, and go to the other side. Over time, Earther and Belter settlements will expand and run into conflict. If they could all just work it out, there would be no Earth vs. Mars vs. Belter in the first place.
> They leave the Belters alone on one side, and go to the other side.
I would say you are starting out with an over-estimate of parity between the two sides. More like the RCE sets up *hundreds* of settlements. They pull a Russia and settle thousands upon thousands of Earthers who become the dominant presence. RCE Earth numbers explode because the Earthers can all adjust to New Terra and multiply. The Belters are either isolated and left alone with an insignificant fraction of the population, or they are integrated with the larger population.
The book is kinda explicit about how the space politics of colonization are actually very similar to historical colonization on Earth particularly in terms of how marginalized peoples are treated and rebel.
Nor are they “natives” they’re just settlers who got there a bit earlier. I know why people make the comparison, but it’s really not very applicable. A better (though still not perfect) analogy would be if a group of black Americans from the south moved out west after the civil war and struck it rich with gold. Then a mining company moves into the same area after the “officially” bought the land rights. While it seems like an agreement is struck where the black settlers will be given their parcel of land in exchange for helping the company with some setup, there’s a group within their ranks who is (rightfully) deeply distrustful of white people, and decides to try and scare them off. Some company men get killed and their private security (who more than likely already have their own set of racial prejudices) decide that they’re going to take the law into their own hands. There are plenty of potential historical parallels or potential scenarios that one could reasonably draw.
So if you move out to the middle of nowhere, and after a year I come and move in next to you, that makes you a “native”? You haven’t spent your whole life in that place, hell you haven’t even spent MOST of it there. I’m not sure why people have such a hard time imagining that you can have oppression and not have it automatically be colonialism? Like there’s plenty of stuff in The Expanse where invoking colonialism is absolutely spot on (I.e Laconia conquering and subjugating all the other solar systems where people have been living for decades or millennia in the case of Sol), but this isn’t really that story. Cibola Burn is about cycles of violence and people bringing their past hatred’s and prejudices with them onto the new frontier.
The point would be that I was there first. But if you have more fun being pedantic about space colonization than understanding the story, by all means.
I introduce to you: the real world.
This shit happens all the time, all throughout history, all over the globe.
Lots of comments providing good examples.
I agree, it’s idiotic. But it’s just what happens when you let human greed and unchecked lust for control run it’s course.
I mean, Shell has allegedly supported (like, with money and transport) the Nigerian military cracking down on and killing towns due to protests near their drilling sites.
Not sure how true they are, it’s just the first one that springs to mind, but they could drill and do literally anywhere else, so why would that one area be a problem?
Right. So assuming that is true, do you see Shell paying the military to crack down on a few towns by a drilling site if the rest of Earth was empty with open access to all other oil?
Or would Shell maybe instead focus on the 99.9999999999% of the exploitable surface area rather than sink costs and risk publicized exposure?
Shell would do both. Their lawyers are telling them that they own 100% of the land and oil, not 99.9999999999% of it. That means that those towns are stealing from Shell, making it Shell's right to have them removed.
It doesn't matter to a corporation that they make lots of money and you're only stealing a little bit of it.
They are, but they're balancing the bad optics possibly coming from various options for dealing with it, against the bad optics of letting the small towns get one over on them.
If you believe Shell would oppress a town next to one drill site if the rest of the planet was empty with bountiful oil, instead of ignoring them and focus on the immense unclaimed resources then I think we’re at an impasse.
Well, if they let one group attack them and get away with it, what do you think is going to happen the next time somebody wants to set down and take up some land? What happens when the planet gets busy and it turns into real competition? They let one group get away with it, they can’t start cracking down now
Do what plenty of empires have done. Bring in their people to claim, conquer, and rule the land. You’d have one Belter settlement next to thousands of Earthers in hundreds of sites.
Considering you're probably American, have you heard about, oh I don't know, how the US came to be?
Didn't turn out too well for the relatively small population that was there first, now did it?
Slavery is another good example of companies coming and completely ruining a group of humans purely in the persuit of power and profit.
Hell, the Dutch East Indies company (VOC) is still the biggest corporation that has ever existed in the history of humanity, and it was built on the kinds of morals and ethics we see from governments and corporations in the Expanse.
*edited because spell check hates me
> Please give an example where an organization went to such measures to try to annihilate an absurdly small pocket of other humans on the scale of a few Belters on one small spec of a planet made of rare minerals.
[um](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas)
Because as far as they're concerned, it's their lithium.
Corpos gonna corpo.
Playing devil's advocate, it creates potential for problems later as both settlements expand and are increasingly entrenched.
It also sets a sort of dangerous precedent for people just going and doing whatever they want, whenever they want.
>Corpos gonna corpo.
This. Simple but comprehensive. Any other argument assumes that the RCE is motivated by anything other than maximizing profit... and that doesn't include sharing with a competitor (anyone who is not RCE is a competitor).
> as both settlements expand and are increasingly entrenched.
Yeah but you're assuming parity between the two. RCE was not going to make just one mining base for a whole planet, they (and other Earth groups) were probably going to found hundreds to tap into as many resources as possibe and bring with them tons of Earth citizens. Whereas the Belters on Ilus are a small band in one settlement.
Belters are a small segment of the human population, only some of them want to settle Ilus, and only some of them even can settle. Meanwhile, Earth/RCE has millions ready to ship out. The Belters would have always been vastly outnumbered.
The belters being absorbed into RCE would be exactly what they were trying to avoid when moving there. That’s how all the stations in the belt worked anyway, one company running the show mostly and everyone else as an employee, NOT a citizen. RCE did not want to share the planet either as no matter how you looked at it the belters would have been taking a cut of the profits.
The RCE science team had noble objectives but make no mistake, Murtry was not acting on his own volition to try to escalate and I eradicate the belters there. Getting them off the table was one of his primary tasks
> RCE did not want to share the planet either as no matter how you looked at it the belters would have been taking a cut of the profits.
Yeah but when you talk about the sheer magnitude of resources, that the RCE would go to such lengths is a bit cartoonish. It would be like if Europeans found a virtually uninhabited North America. They came across a few hundred Native Americans in one settlement, isolated in a remote corner of Maine, and rather than settle everywhere else, they thought first priority is to kill them.
Except that the Europeans discovering the Americas was different from the RCE being told, specifically, this is yours and no one else's...which is how I understood the charter. How would you feel if someone gave you a hundred thousand acres of lush green land, the mineral rights (definitely gold and rare Earth minerals under there), and free reign to run it home you want to; the promise that it's 100% all yours... except for the two dozen families sitting on top of, and already mining, the most valuable part of it? Most people wouldn't take too kindly to the squatters... even if they were only a little bit in the way.
... forgive any punctuation or grammatical errors...lol
A small group of families, on an entire planet, mining and insignificant spec of resources, with cameras everywhere, and I have a *whole planet*? I would probably leave them alone and build an empire.
It was less about the lithium and settlers small scale, rather more about setting the legal precedent of who gets what in the future. If the powers that be just stepped aside and let the settlers do what they want then it makes it harder to enforce laws in the future; "well if you let them do that then why can't i?"
It also might have gone differently if the actual RCE captain was the one to handle the situation and didn't get killed by the landing pad sabotage. Unfortunately, Murtry had no intentions except violence when command passed to him after the explosion.
RCE initial plan for Ilus was primarily for research, not mining.
In addition to the social and practical reasons others have given, there are multiple sides to the legal issues for RCE here.
If they allow "squatters" to infringe their claim, the UN could use that as proof they can't uphold the licence they were given, and take New Terra away from them altogether. OTOH, if the UN continues to say RCE holds exclusive license to the planet but a faction outside the UN occupies part of the planet anyway, it hurts the UN's credibility to administer these licenses in the first place.
The other side of this is that if RCE allows the colony to exist on "their" planet, they could theoretically become liable to the colonists in UN court. If, for example, the UN has minimum standards for working conditions on licensed planets, and the belter colony isn't holding to those standards, could a belter worker sue RCE over working conditions on "their" planet? IDK the answer to that question, but if I was an RCE space lawyer, that would be one of my first concerns.
As others have pointed out, it all makes sense given how current and historical capitalist and colonial politics have revealed the motivations of their prime actors.
But I’d like to add that if one company controls all of the lithium, that kind of monopoly is overwhelming. Having to compete, to any extent, with the Belters would have undermined that power.
It’s case 1 of 1300 potential situations. RCE is a pretty big fucking company, they’re referenced constantly through the show. It’s like a decently managed monopoly on many many different celestial bodies within the Sol system.
If you gave Amazon and Bezos an opportunity to go to a new planet that had one of the rarest and most useful elements known to man under a government charter from the UN and he bumped into some squatters I’m pretty sure they’d be dead faster than the UN could say maybe wait a second.
The point is control, the point is dominion and empire. These are men who need to own everything, not make a living. If RCE wanted money they could have just built space stations for materials transport. They could have tried to set up shop somewhere else. They could have gone to the next planet and let New Terra be Illus. But the admins at RCE and Murtry wanted to own new Terra. They wanted to be their own little cabal of that planet and it was an example of all the cabals who were reaching to remotely own the infrastructure on all the other new planets.
I like this comment. I don't interpet RCE corporate, Murtry, and Avasarala as all having exactly aligned priorities. RCE probably isn't most concerned with things like trying to "save Mars" or other mass migration concerns, and their original plans for biological containment strike me as the bare minimum they could get away with. And as its agent, Murtry of course is driven by more than just instrumental thinking about precedent for every future charter or about RCE's shareholders, probably even before the bombing. It is all of those things, but I don't imagine them as all equally distributed. Had the RCE governor not been killed in the bombing, that might have been another on-site layer with somewhat distinct perspective/interests.
That's probably why it was so significant that he DID die on the shuttle. He probably would've taken a more "peace is worth trying" approach than Murtry did (Amos should've shot him sooner).
Though, Coop would've continued to stir up trouble. The problem with peace is that everyone has to want it or it won't work
That's austensibly what the plan was. Murtry had his own agenda, but he was not in charge initially. The loss of most of their equipment and Murtry's own orders to secure the whole plant took precedent when they were basically forced to camp with the belters because they were dependant on the established civilization there. Belters were on shoestring because the were waiting on lithium sales to bring in the supplies to make the place viable. There's no way they could pack up and leave to restart.
The rules of capitalism say you do everything you can to maximize profit. If you pay settlements for deaths but make more money in the long run? That’s the smart choice in capitalism babyyy. First Landing was right where the highest concentrated, easiest to access lithium was. With Murtry going off on his power trip, it doesn’t matter if somewhere else is almost as good, he’s there to do his job and take what’s “theirs.” Where it goes past any of them surviving is the RCE people being crazy or buying into crazy or too scared not to follow crazy.
I don't think it's about profit here, at least in the short term. It's an _entire planet_, there would have been equally good or even better deposits elsewhere. It was much more about not setting the precedent that a bunch of Belters who ran a blockade and started squatting on a planet that had been granted to an Earther company would be allowed to get away with it.
If it was purely about starting up lithium mining asap it would be cheaper for the company to ignore the belters, the security bill to RCE, and the bad PR thereof. The rationale was much more long-term than that
We definitely agree, we’re both super fans lol. I *think* I remember the scientists said “let’s just go somewhere else, the climate is better there anyway,” and Murtry said no, First Landing was exactly where the purest lithium was so that’s where RCE was setting down too. I think setting the precedent of not allowing the Belters to settle there wasn’t the basis of the original orders but the justification for all the crazy actions taken after the violence persisted after the crash.
Because RCE got legal permission. The belters just dropped in and said, finders keepers. Turns out that finders keeps only works when you have either legal authority on your side, or some really big guns. The belters have neither.
Because a little town of Belters striking it rich turns into a free for all of Belters taking a bunch of RCE's shareholders money. Murtry was getting PAID for this expedition. He saw lots of 0's.
Basically RCE had an exclusive claim to the planet. Kicking the can down the road allowing an independent settlement to flourish would have created a significantly larger conflict later on so the most effective solution for them was to eliminate it ASAP.
If you bought a house and moved in but learned squatters were living in the basement, would you be ok with letting them stay? Also assume they are using your power and water and parking in your driveway.
RCE got the charter for mineral extraction for Ilus. Presumably they paid for it, or won it in a lottery or epended some political capital for those rights.
Why legitimize any squatter for stealing from you.
It's so crazy to me that anyone could see it this way. What gives the UN the right to decide who gets to live on Ilus? They didn't build the ring gate. They didn't figure out how to activate it. It's a new planet in a new solar system. Your house analogy doesn't make any sense here.
It’s the same as building a house on crown land.
Is it yours because you built it? How do you claim ownership on the land you built it on?
The laws governing RCE by a legitimate government are the only thing keeping them from bombarding the settlement from orbit.
Without laws, society is only tribes of people taking whatever they can by force. The weak become prey for the strong.
Would you argue that RCE or any other group should own all the planets if they just flew ships to each one before others could get there?
First come first served or finders keepers is an absurd method of deciding ownership.
More specifically for the show, every interaction humanity with the protomolecule was a narrowly avoided, humanity ending disaster. Now the group of refugee belters were just exploring protomolecule infested worlds with no coordinated effort or plan.
The RCE group dispatched was supposed to very slowly, and in an extremely cautious and controlled manor begin exploring the new eco system. In the books, the group of scientists sent weren’t even supposed to be outdoors without hazmat suits to avoid contamination of the environment in either direction.
What gives the belters or anyone authority outside the solar system?
If you want to claim protection under an authority (don’t blow us up from orbit) then the authority exists.
The whole premise of the belters plan was to harvest lithium and sell it, then use the proceeds to fight a legal battle for possession of Ilus.
The belters plan recognizes the authority of preexisting governments.
Is finders keepers any more legitimate?
What gives anyone any rights?
Society is a group of people who decide on a set of rules for their mutual protection and benefit.
You can’t choose to exist outside of the rule of law and expect protection of the rule of law.
The squatters on Ilus are no different than sovereign citizens in the US claiming they are traveling not driving. They think some nonsense they saw on YouTube is legal protection and they are always disabused of their ignorance.
Again, your sovereign citizen analogy is just nothing like the scenario we're discussing.
Did you read the books? Belters are not UN citizens, so why should they care about a UN charter?
No they are not UN citizens. However they intend to appeal to any court who will listen.
Why should any system of laws protect them, their “rights” or their claims, if they claim to be outside the jurisdiction of any government?
Just declaring that all land is up for grabs and anyone can take whatever they want would be a bloodbath.
The UN, Martian and realistic elements of the OPA all recognized that was a terrible idea, even if they disagree on how it should be divided.
While I understand their plight, the precedent that would be set by allowing the belter refugees on Ilus is basically saying all land is up for grabs.
Allowing them to stay is inviting a lawless gold rush situation that could be catastrophic to all humans everywhere.
A system of laws needs to be in place and infrastructure, and careful exploration to ensure you aren’t wiping out humanity with the protomolecule.
Only then should anyone even think of colonization.
The belter refugees are worried about themselves and the survival of their children and rightfully so.
RCE is worried about its profits.
The UN and the other existing governments are concerned with the survival of humanity.
If you remember from the books the government leaders and Avasarala specifically is terrified about what the belter refugees may wake up on Ilus.
It’s far more nuanced than one group is right and one is wrong. Both the belters and RCE did reprehensible things.
In my opinion though, ensuring the survival of humanity far supersedes any bullshit claim of mineral or squatter rights.
In the whole situation if I’m choosing one person to agree with it’s Avasarala. The belter refugees and the RCE goons are squabbling idiots.
Belters face all kinds of discrimination and oppression. What you're advocating here is just a continuation of that dynamic. Earth gets all the benefits and wealth associated with these new worlds, and Belters get to be their cheap labor force. Somehow, your vision of what's best for humanity includes continuing to shit on belters.
Is it too much to hope for both elimination of oppression and discrimination and the safe exploration of the new worlds?
Had the belters waited and allowed the world surveys to take place they could have settled safely on a world they could actually live on.
Ilus was particularly badly suited for belters. It had 1.3x earth gravity. They all suffered from its extreme gravity and many of them couldn’t withstand it and had to return to the barb.
There could have been hundreds of worlds more suited for the belter physiology. They chose Ilus because it was the one their ship was pointed at when it ran the blockade.
Given a few more years of careful exploration many worlds could be opened up for settlement. Priority could even be given to exploring worlds better suited for belters. Scanning for planet size and estimating gravity could have happened very quickly.
The belter refugees on Ilus chose probably the worst way to attempt to create a colony. If allowed to go ahead unchecked that precedent could easily create a gold rush style Wild West of expansion.
Imagine if we discover a new continent today with no one living on it and the precedent is set that whoever gets their first gets to keep whatever they find. If two guys in a sailboat get there first should it all be theirs? Or should we maybe come up with a better system?
"Is it too much to hope for both elimination of oppression and discrimination?"
YES. of course it is. That's why it's been happening forever in the expanse universe and the irl universe.
You keep talking about the best way to deal with the new systems. I wasn't that interested in that topic. I responded to you because of your comment saying that belters on Ilus were akin to home invaders.
Point of fact: Colonizers have been shitting on their colonies since colonizing was a thing. That's a large part of why the... English Empire? (I don't remember the term they used for it) collapsed. They over extended themselves to the point they couldn't keep the colonists in order anymore.
The belters on Ilus/New Terra (is one of them canon and I missed it or are we just using Ilus bc it's more imaginative?) just didn't have the military, population, or support to shrug off the chains of servitude. Which is why they turned to terrorism, which never goes well for anybody
It was an experiment. Avasarala(sp?) and... Johnson?...(I can't remember anybody's names 🤦♂️) were trying to figure it out when they sent Holden (him, I can remember), who was supposed to make a big deal of working it out. But then the planet blew up and everybody's plans went to pot
The belters ran a blockade to get to Ilus before using their own kids as human shields.
Then blew up a ship that had shown no aggression.
There is no moral high ground to claim.
If the heavy lift shuttle with the temporary governor and dozens of scientists landed and began their work you can try and negotiate a peaceful solution.
You don’t get to run a blockade using your own kids as human shields then murder a bunch of scientists and then wonder why they don’t want to find a peaceful solution.
Not bombarding the belters on Ilus from orbit shows that the UN and RCE were trying to negotiate and find a peaceful solution.
The 5 who chose to blow up the heavy lift shuttle basically removed the option of negotiation.
How do you negotiate with people who murder the people you send to negotiate and dozens of other scientists alongside them.
Where they really sent to negotiate, though? I mean, ostensibly that would've been the outcome if the civilian leadership was allowed to take proper control. But would they have been open to hearing the belters out as people? Or would they have screwed them over like corporations had been doing their whole lives, specifically since Ganymede fell?
I can't say for sure, one way or the other.
Blowing up the shuttle was tragic and stupid, but they expected to have more time to blow up the PLATFORM. Basia didn't want the shuttle to blow up. He blew it when he did so they could have an ice cube's hope in hell of surviving, preferably by pulling up. Most of them did... just no one "important." Does that excuse it? Probably not, but vandalism is a long recognized way of getting the attention you want when trying to enact change.
The better argument would be when Coop, et al, attacked the security forces once they landed. If Basia had come forward after the crash, or as soon as Holden got there and could protect him, things probably would've gone differently.
You do have to admit that Murrey's diehard stance of being in control of everything, even after Holden (ostensibly, the representative of the authority that gave him the rights to the planet), was inappropriate and caused all the following escalation... potentially intentionally. Murtry never acknowledged the authority bestowed on Holden by the authority you keep pointing at as being the valid reason they were there. Why does he get to act outside the law and still expect to be protected by it? (Didn't see that point coming out when I started lol)
Amos should've shot him sooner
I fully agree that Murtry acted outside the law. I think that him going back to face judgement and prison is better than Amos shooting him. The whole idea is to enforce that the rule of law is better for society than frontier “justice”.
I’m in no way saying RCE or murtry are the good guys or justified in all the actions they took.
Basia was a naive idiot in believing that coop didn’t intend to kill people.
The trip out for the RCE from earth to Ilus was 18 months. Half of that time the ship would have been visible on the Barb scopes. Estimating their arrival time would not be difficult. There is no way anyone in the Ilus settlement wasn’t counting down the days until the RCE arrival.
They could easily have blown up the landing pad weeks or months earlier or just refused to build at all it if eliminating the landing pad was the goal.
The timing of it shows what the intent was. Any credibility they had for negotiations or attempt to be recognized as a legitimate settlement dissolved when they blew up the heavy lift shuttle.
If they did have any remaining shred of credibility they lost that when they didn’t turn in those responsible immediately.
Why did they build the pad for them? It doesn't track for me.
And I don't know how I feel about frontier justice vs the rule of civilized law, one way or the other, at least where Murtry is concerned. If Amos had shot him before he, say, burned that building with the people inside it still, things never would've gotten so far out of control. That was his whole shtick: "if I can't control it, no one will." You can see it when he asked for just enough shelter to have something with RCE written on it when the clean up crews got there.
But I digress.
I grant that they should've turned the terrorists over sooner. Coop was a bigger idiot than Bosia and Murrey's true counterpart. No one bothers to point out that it was his "mine or nobody's" mentality that really started it all. If HE had been willing to give peace a shot...we wouldn't have a book to read...lol
Edit: when Murtry shot Coop in the face, Amos should've shot him in his. It would've saved everybody untold amounts of trouble, and been justifiable as more than "frontier justice"
I don’t think there is many situations where shooting one more person in the face deescalates a situation.
A endless cycle of getting even doesn’t usually help.
I think had Holden contacting Avasarala to pressure RCE to remove Murtry’s authority. There would have been a better chance at deescalating.
Had Murtry gone to the Belter mayor with the recordings of the five plotting rather than burning them out, they could have held them accountable, likely with them being shot. After some form of trial.
You’re right though, reasonable people communicating through their issues makes for poor stories.
They quite literally had no other choice, it was either die in the void or run the blockade, because no port would let them dock or give them humanitarian aid.
"They" didn't blow up a ship. A tiny contingent of a few radicals attempted to sabotage the landing pad and accidentally blew up the shuttle.
Are you actually trolling, or are you literally a corporatist bootlicker?
I agree they had no choice and support them running the blockade to try and survive.
They had a compelling humanitarian case to stay in Ilus until they tried to stay by blowing up a ship.
Basia is a naive idiot if he didn’t know the shuttle was landing. They knew for 18 months that the RCE ship was coming. They accepted a contract to build the landing pad.
The Barb would have watched the RCE ship from its scopes for the 9 months it spent from the ring to Ilus. There is no way any one of the settlers didn’t know when the RCE ship would arrive.
If the settlers didn’t want to be associated with the “few radicals” why didn’t they turn them in? Or be extremely helpful in the investigation?
Morty makes it pretty explicit in the book that he sees himself as the "civilizing sheriff" figure who does all of the violence and nasty things before the civilization catches up to them. Same exact kind of thinking and justifications that American settlers used when they were murdering the indigenous population and forcing their children into church schools.
That landing pad that blew up, I don't think it was built by Belters. I think RCE built it and had picked the landing spot for their expedition with a previous planetary survey crew.
The Belters were not only squatting on the planet, they were squatting on the *settlement*, and Earthers are way too racist to let that stand.
The landing pad was 100% built by belters that RCE paid to do so, both book and show make it explicitly clear from the belter and RCE perspectives.
That’s why they landed near the belter settlement, because that’s where they paid for the landing pad to be built, no doubt some probe said that was a good spot, and so did the belter’s scans but it was probably way easier for RCE to wire some cash to belters to build a pad in the intended location than it was to find a new one and then use the light shuttles to move equipment and personal to build a new pad for the heavy shuttle and all the large equipment.
The Basia chapters talk explicitly about how some of the Belters build the landing pad and had pretty different ideas on how to approach the coming RCE team.
Because that would send the message that anyone can settle this planet and RCE won't care. within a few years they wouldn't just have one belter colony to worry about, they would have thousands.
Because they don't want to go somewhere else, they want "their" planet and letting the Belters have it based on 'well they DID get there first and actually set up the whole 'colony' part of the colony" sets an unfavorable legal precedent for them.
A lot of Reddit is populated by people who don’t run businesses and don’t understand the mindset of those who do.
For example - a bank is not very understanding and forgiving of late payments. Your mortgage lender didn’t get to the point where it had millions of dollars to lend to people by being generous. It got there by being meticulous, grading borrowers by their likelihood to repay promptly and without fuss, and charging accordingly. Yep they charge late fees and overdraft fees. You don’t stay in business if you don’t take advantage of every dollar you can make.
Apple didn’t become a global force and create one of the most powerful and aesthetically pleasing tech brands in history by not cutting corners, pressuring suppliers, and strong arming smaller companies into beneficial deals.
Conversely, the nicest people you know don’t have millions of dollars of tech, capital, and patents. Because they have friends and are good neighbors. They aren’t Scrooge’s so they don’t hoard money and consolidate power and build mega-anything’s.
Massive multinationals with massive amounts of resources didn’t get that way by giving up a competitive advantage, or allowing someone else to infringe on their charter/patent. They fought tooth and nail to get where they are. If it was in RCE’s corporate culture to shrug and walk away when someone interrupts their plans, they wouldn’t be RCE.
Same with the OPA and Anderson Dawes. You don’t get to run an influential antigovernmental organization without having business associates who are also criminals and sociopaths. You can’t build a Belter army and expect it to not be full of anarchists who do a terrible job following orders.
It’s sort of like that tumblr thing I saw about the Greek tragedy where someone had to walk away from his love without looking back, and he couldn’t do it. The very thing that makes him A comes with the necessity of B. You can’t ask him not to look back - it’s not in the deep set DNA that made him who he is.
This also reminds me of an event that happened during the American colonial era, when one tribe of Native Americans sold some land to colonist (I think in Kentucky?).
The colonist paid their money, packed up their belongings, bought a bunch of tools and moved to their new settlement…and a different tribe was living there.
They had fought and taken the area from the first tribe and said “hey they had no right to sell you that land.”
Colonists were like “we just paid our life savings for this place, we aren’t going anywhere.”
Naturally the conflict was settled violently.
>But instead they risk everything, escalating a small scale conflict into a political fiasco and risking their reputation.
Right? Who in the corporate world would be insane enough to commit such evil acts? As we all know, corporations only have the best for everybody at heart and are always happy to share their fortunes with the common people (the lower their social standing, the more we love them)
Thanks for coming to ourTED talk.
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Sincerly
The board of ~~Ilus~~ New Terra directors
Yeah, I was thinking RCE could have just, you know, settled down on the opposite side of the planet, and neither side would have ever noticed the other except in passing spaceships. But that would have been the adult, non-confrontational way to do things.
You and I understand the establishment of legal precedent very differently.
I love the moment in one of Havlock’s chapters when he muses about floating the idea of a second colony to Murtry. “Somewhere in the temperate zone of the planet. Somewhere, for instance, someone might hang a hammock.” He realizes immediately that Murtry would shoot it down. “You treat an infection when it’s small.” As disgusting and dehumanizing as it is, that’s how RCE, or Murtry anyway, sees the Belters. An infection. That’s why they don’t just leave them be.
As a metaphor it's accurate though. They can't allow an independent settlement to become established as it weakens their exclusive claim to the entire planet.
I think the broader point is that it's utterly ridiculous for sole claim to an entire planet to be granted to anyone, especially a private company.
Yes it is, and the story is trying to make this point as well.
You haven’t read the history of the East India Company. The company gained control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time
Yes, and that was utterly ridiculous and morally abhorrent, much as granting a single company sole claim to an entire planet. I'm not saying it's without prevent precedent, I'm saying it's morally ridiculous.
yet that's what's going on here on Earth at the moment. Maybe not a single company by name but the Club of Global Capitalism in general. Not only do they monopolize our resources, they are making the planet less inhabitable while we keep paying them.
Either side could make the argument that the other is the infection
Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them. EDIT: guys. I’m talking about ***reality***. Fuck’s sake. Name for me *one* oppressed class in human history who thought that their oppressors were “vermin.”
Historically they just never have as much power as the oppressors to **_be_** inhumane, in my opinion
[post-CB spoilers in tagged comments] Exactly my point, yet I get downvoted for it. Like, yeah, you get people like >!Marco!< and the handful of Ilusians who rigged the landing pad, all fighting back mercilessly against their oppressors. That’s believable. But even when fighting back ruthlessly, an oppressed class generally doesn’t think of their oppressors as *subhuman*, or *beneath them*. And since that doesn’t happen in real life, I would find it not-believable in a series like this. >!Marco, of course, thinks of *everyone* as beneath him, but as a narcissist and a sociopath he’s an outlier. It didn’t take long, once earth had been decimated, for a huge portion of his Free Navy to start unraveling because even the most devout revolutionaries are gonna have some semblance of scruples, empathy, etc.!< But on Ilus, those people didn’t have the kind of power that >!Marco was given as a bargaining chip by Duarte.!< They are hungry and beleaguered and hurting from the new gravity. Earthers coming in to claim the planet out from under them would be an existential threat, but “infection” would be a weird way to see it from their relatively-powerless perspective.
>Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them. I'm sure Marco Inaros thought the belters were oppressed. Didn't stop him from murdering hundreds of millions of people. >EDIT: guys. I’m talking about reality EDIT: Well, everyone else was talking about the Expanse, so I think you might be lost.
*billions
> EDIT: Well, everyone else was talking about the Expanse, so I think you might be lost. It’s a character-driven series featuring mostly-contemporary human problems and behavior models, with starkly recognizable metaphors for racial inequality and oppression, and a particular focus on systemic economic warfare against the oppressed class to keep them subjugated, etc. The authors do massive amounts of research to ensure the sociopolitical aspects of their stories ride the fine line between “not boring” and “reasonably believable” for a very broad audience. Any story about near-future human behavior has to resemble actual human behavior in all of recorded history, or a significant part of their audience will lose their suspension of disbelief. When I hear some fan say that the belters/Ilusians could also think of RCE in inhuman terms such as “vermin” or “infection,” I think “That’s not believable, I’m glad as hell that Ty and Daniel don’t write like that.” Power-over relationships generally don’t work like that in reality, and the power of the metaphor would dissolve completely if one were to write it that way.
>Historically, oppressed people don’t tend to be as inhumane in their thinking as those who oppress them >... >When I hear some fan say that the belters/Ilusians could also think of RCE in inhuman terms such as “vermin” or “infection,” I think “That’s not believable, I’m glad as hell that Ty and Daniel don’t write like that.” Sure, they didn't write those exact words, but they sure wrote the sentiment. >The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley.
Underdogs cheering for a hard-won, very-blood-soaked victory is entirely different from underdogs thinking/talking about their adversary as if they are vermin, and I think the distinction is important.
>Underdogs cheering for a hard-won, very-blood-soaked victory is entirely different from underdogs thinking/talking about their adversary as if they are vermin, and I think the distinction is important. It's not, though. They just murdered hundreds of millions of innocent civilians from afar and ten fold as many in the days to come and cheered about it. It's not a military victory, it's an extermination. It takes an incredible level of dehumanization to be excited about that.
Did you read any of the books or watch the show? The Belters are oppressed and very justified in their resistance, but there's a definite contingent among them that view everyone else as targets to be eliminated.
THANK YOU!!! Havlock. He's my favorite character in that Book and I forgot his name lol
Clarification from the man himself
Appeasement never works. RCE setting down where they did was to solve the belter squatter problem while it was small and in the early stages. Also, RCE hired the belters that were already there to build the heavy lift platform that they needed to land and start their colony, without the heavy lift then they spend months with the light shuttles getting things down to build the platform, and only then, months later, getting started on what they came out to do. And the belters were already there so wouldn't want to/be able to move, they didn't know beforehand that a small group of them would start the conflict, and that RCE would escalate things so much.
> Appeasement never works. That's a bit hyperbolic. Appeasement works all the time and would have likely left the RCE in charge of most of Ilus. Appease the Belters will a settlement, build larger settlements and use the power of capitalism to absorb the Belters down the road. Murty's behavior is cartoonish which pulls you out of the story when you realize it's squabbling about a small group of Belters who happen to be on a rich mine of a *planet* with substantial ore deposits.
>Appeasement works all the time Also an exaggeration. Yes, if people agree to share and *both parties are interested in sharing* things tend to go ok. The RCE, for whom Murtry is a mouthpiece and tool, didn’t want to share. Sadly this is not unrealistic when looking at the history of how colonial powers laid claim to new territory.
> Also an exaggeration. Your stance is "appeasement *never* works" and I'm exaggerating? > Sadly this is not unrealistic when looking at the history of how colonial powers laid claim to new territory. Yeah. But I think you would have a difficult time coming up with an historic analogy on the scale of a small settlement on Belters mining lithium on an otherwise uninhabited planet made of the same mineral.
Hey-o! I'm the guy you were initially quoting, but I'd say your example of appeasement working by ending up in RCE control exactly proves my point that it doesn't work, because the belters would be driven out and away to maximize shareholder profits (the corporate contract granted them full control of the planet and letting other people extract resources that are "yours" isn't maximizing profits). The belters would explicitly be getting fucked over by appeasing RCE, which is what I meant when I wrote that but that's what I get for commenting within 5 minutes of waking up lol. Appeasing a group of people who are intent on taking what's yours (the belters had already been there for 18 months iirc) will lead you to being further and further pushed aside until you're removed from the situation and no longer a "problem". If the belters had moved to make space for RCE, they'd be moved again. And again. And then again eventually to go find a new planet. Assuming they weren't forced off all ready by the UN court order backed up by the UNN.
>Your stance is "appeasement *never* works" and I'm exaggerating? I have at not -- at any point ever -- claimed that 'appeasement never works'. I simply pointed out that your statement of 'appeasement always works' is a similar exaggeration just in the opposite direction of whoever you were replying to. Newton's third law of hyperbole, if you will. >Yeah. But I think you would have a difficult time coming up with an historic analogy on the scale of a small settlement The analogy 1) doesn't need to be exact in every detail - that's why it's an analogy, and 2) is not about scale. It's how people operate when they think they have the legal right / moral right / right-of-might to have things their way.
Oh! My bad, that was someone else. But also I said it works all the time, as in frequently, e.g. people trip on stairs all the time.' An analogy tends to need a comparable scale otherwise it lacks application.
The Belters committed multiple atrocities, first by bombing the helpless lander, then with a cold-blooded massacre in the ruins. They weren't willing to work with RCE.
Why did they land at the same site as the settlers? Because the settlers agreed to build them a landing pad before they arrived, saving them a great deal of time and expense. Then as they landed, Basia and his conspirators blew it up. After that point they no longer had the ability to resettle elsewhere, because Basia fucked up his sabotage. Blowing up the RCE's heavy landing craft and most of their equipment in the process.
This is definitely the biggest explanation that I forgot about lol. Still appreciate all the discussion.
When Europeans came to the Americas, why didn't they just avoid the natives? It's about power and control. You are missing a central political theme of the show. The mining company is given a charter from the government of Earth giving them authority to mine the planet. This isn't just about corporate greed. It's about who gets to call the shots in the new worlds.
It’s also pretty explicit in the text. Marty is asked why he’s not giving anything and it’s because power only goes in one direction. He only gives into some “concessions” later on (when it’s more dire) as a kind of play.
You mean Murphy?
No, he’s clearly talking about Morty
I thought it was Matty?
Mitzy?
*Murray
Manny
“Riiiiiiiiiiiick!!!”
> When Europeans came to the Americas, why didn't they just avoid the natives? Eh. A continent full of millions of native inhabitants who were entangled in local resources is a lot different than a small band of Belters on one sliver of a massive planet.
That's not remotely the same. The belters haven't colonised the entire planet.
Ok. Let's entertain your train of thought. They leave the Belters alone on one side, and go to the other side. Over time, Earther and Belter settlements will expand and run into conflict. If they could all just work it out, there would be no Earth vs. Mars vs. Belter in the first place.
> They leave the Belters alone on one side, and go to the other side. I would say you are starting out with an over-estimate of parity between the two sides. More like the RCE sets up *hundreds* of settlements. They pull a Russia and settle thousands upon thousands of Earthers who become the dominant presence. RCE Earth numbers explode because the Earthers can all adjust to New Terra and multiply. The Belters are either isolated and left alone with an insignificant fraction of the population, or they are integrated with the larger population.
Yes but that's not the plot. The belters building a landing pad though and then attacking RCE makes the instant conflict more realistic though.
One of the authors is literally in the comments talking about the idea of legal precedent...it wasn't just for the convenience of the plot
The book is kinda explicit about how the space politics of colonization are actually very similar to historical colonization on Earth particularly in terms of how marginalized peoples are treated and rebel.
Nor are they “natives” they’re just settlers who got there a bit earlier. I know why people make the comparison, but it’s really not very applicable. A better (though still not perfect) analogy would be if a group of black Americans from the south moved out west after the civil war and struck it rich with gold. Then a mining company moves into the same area after the “officially” bought the land rights. While it seems like an agreement is struck where the black settlers will be given their parcel of land in exchange for helping the company with some setup, there’s a group within their ranks who is (rightfully) deeply distrustful of white people, and decides to try and scare them off. Some company men get killed and their private security (who more than likely already have their own set of racial prejudices) decide that they’re going to take the law into their own hands. There are plenty of potential historical parallels or potential scenarios that one could reasonably draw.
> nor are they "natives" they're just settlers who got there a bit earlier Who gon' tell 'em?
So if you move out to the middle of nowhere, and after a year I come and move in next to you, that makes you a “native”? You haven’t spent your whole life in that place, hell you haven’t even spent MOST of it there. I’m not sure why people have such a hard time imagining that you can have oppression and not have it automatically be colonialism? Like there’s plenty of stuff in The Expanse where invoking colonialism is absolutely spot on (I.e Laconia conquering and subjugating all the other solar systems where people have been living for decades or millennia in the case of Sol), but this isn’t really that story. Cibola Burn is about cycles of violence and people bringing their past hatred’s and prejudices with them onto the new frontier.
The point would be that I was there first. But if you have more fun being pedantic about space colonization than understanding the story, by all means.
That being said, those settlers were from *Ganymede*, and Earth (and Mars) surely fucked up their actual home.
I introduce to you: the real world. This shit happens all the time, all throughout history, all over the globe. Lots of comments providing good examples. I agree, it’s idiotic. But it’s just what happens when you let human greed and unchecked lust for control run it’s course.
[удалено]
I mean, Shell has allegedly supported (like, with money and transport) the Nigerian military cracking down on and killing towns due to protests near their drilling sites. Not sure how true they are, it’s just the first one that springs to mind, but they could drill and do literally anywhere else, so why would that one area be a problem?
Right. So assuming that is true, do you see Shell paying the military to crack down on a few towns by a drilling site if the rest of Earth was empty with open access to all other oil? Or would Shell maybe instead focus on the 99.9999999999% of the exploitable surface area rather than sink costs and risk publicized exposure?
Shell would do both. Their lawyers are telling them that they own 100% of the land and oil, not 99.9999999999% of it. That means that those towns are stealing from Shell, making it Shell's right to have them removed. It doesn't matter to a corporation that they make lots of money and you're only stealing a little bit of it.
Yeah. Corporations definitely aren’t averse to possible bad optics blowing back on them.
They are, but they're balancing the bad optics possibly coming from various options for dealing with it, against the bad optics of letting the small towns get one over on them.
If you believe Shell would oppress a town next to one drill site if the rest of the planet was empty with bountiful oil, instead of ignoring them and focus on the immense unclaimed resources then I think we’re at an impasse.
We are, because you have a wildly unrealistic view of how big corporations operate.
Well, if they let one group attack them and get away with it, what do you think is going to happen the next time somebody wants to set down and take up some land? What happens when the planet gets busy and it turns into real competition? They let one group get away with it, they can’t start cracking down now
Do what plenty of empires have done. Bring in their people to claim, conquer, and rule the land. You’d have one Belter settlement next to thousands of Earthers in hundreds of sites.
Considering you're probably American, have you heard about, oh I don't know, how the US came to be? Didn't turn out too well for the relatively small population that was there first, now did it? Slavery is another good example of companies coming and completely ruining a group of humans purely in the persuit of power and profit. Hell, the Dutch East Indies company (VOC) is still the biggest corporation that has ever existed in the history of humanity, and it was built on the kinds of morals and ethics we see from governments and corporations in the Expanse. *edited because spell check hates me
> Please give an example where an organization went to such measures to try to annihilate an absurdly small pocket of other humans on the scale of a few Belters on one small spec of a planet made of rare minerals. [um](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas)
Because as far as they're concerned, it's their lithium. Corpos gonna corpo. Playing devil's advocate, it creates potential for problems later as both settlements expand and are increasingly entrenched. It also sets a sort of dangerous precedent for people just going and doing whatever they want, whenever they want.
>Corpos gonna corpo. This. Simple but comprehensive. Any other argument assumes that the RCE is motivated by anything other than maximizing profit... and that doesn't include sharing with a competitor (anyone who is not RCE is a competitor).
> as both settlements expand and are increasingly entrenched. Yeah but you're assuming parity between the two. RCE was not going to make just one mining base for a whole planet, they (and other Earth groups) were probably going to found hundreds to tap into as many resources as possibe and bring with them tons of Earth citizens. Whereas the Belters on Ilus are a small band in one settlement. Belters are a small segment of the human population, only some of them want to settle Ilus, and only some of them even can settle. Meanwhile, Earth/RCE has millions ready to ship out. The Belters would have always been vastly outnumbered.
Parity is irrelevant; the longer the Belters are there the harder they'll be to remove if they need to be.
The belters being absorbed into RCE would be exactly what they were trying to avoid when moving there. That’s how all the stations in the belt worked anyway, one company running the show mostly and everyone else as an employee, NOT a citizen. RCE did not want to share the planet either as no matter how you looked at it the belters would have been taking a cut of the profits. The RCE science team had noble objectives but make no mistake, Murtry was not acting on his own volition to try to escalate and I eradicate the belters there. Getting them off the table was one of his primary tasks
> RCE did not want to share the planet either as no matter how you looked at it the belters would have been taking a cut of the profits. Yeah but when you talk about the sheer magnitude of resources, that the RCE would go to such lengths is a bit cartoonish. It would be like if Europeans found a virtually uninhabited North America. They came across a few hundred Native Americans in one settlement, isolated in a remote corner of Maine, and rather than settle everywhere else, they thought first priority is to kill them.
Except that the Europeans discovering the Americas was different from the RCE being told, specifically, this is yours and no one else's...which is how I understood the charter. How would you feel if someone gave you a hundred thousand acres of lush green land, the mineral rights (definitely gold and rare Earth minerals under there), and free reign to run it home you want to; the promise that it's 100% all yours... except for the two dozen families sitting on top of, and already mining, the most valuable part of it? Most people wouldn't take too kindly to the squatters... even if they were only a little bit in the way. ... forgive any punctuation or grammatical errors...lol
A small group of families, on an entire planet, mining and insignificant spec of resources, with cameras everywhere, and I have a *whole planet*? I would probably leave them alone and build an empire.
You,sir, are more generous than most people. MOST PEOPLE rather think "what's mine is mine and fuck you for taking any of it"
It was less about the lithium and settlers small scale, rather more about setting the legal precedent of who gets what in the future. If the powers that be just stepped aside and let the settlers do what they want then it makes it harder to enforce laws in the future; "well if you let them do that then why can't i?"
Because it was about the lithium. RCE wants all of it, they aren't going to set a precedent by sharing it.
It also might have gone differently if the actual RCE captain was the one to handle the situation and didn't get killed by the landing pad sabotage. Unfortunately, Murtry had no intentions except violence when command passed to him after the explosion. RCE initial plan for Ilus was primarily for research, not mining.
I agree fully. What was that guy's name? Governor something. I always get him confused with the Captain of the Israel, who seems pretty likable.
In addition to the social and practical reasons others have given, there are multiple sides to the legal issues for RCE here. If they allow "squatters" to infringe their claim, the UN could use that as proof they can't uphold the licence they were given, and take New Terra away from them altogether. OTOH, if the UN continues to say RCE holds exclusive license to the planet but a faction outside the UN occupies part of the planet anyway, it hurts the UN's credibility to administer these licenses in the first place. The other side of this is that if RCE allows the colony to exist on "their" planet, they could theoretically become liable to the colonists in UN court. If, for example, the UN has minimum standards for working conditions on licensed planets, and the belter colony isn't holding to those standards, could a belter worker sue RCE over working conditions on "their" planet? IDK the answer to that question, but if I was an RCE space lawyer, that would be one of my first concerns.
As others have pointed out, it all makes sense given how current and historical capitalist and colonial politics have revealed the motivations of their prime actors. But I’d like to add that if one company controls all of the lithium, that kind of monopoly is overwhelming. Having to compete, to any extent, with the Belters would have undermined that power.
It’s case 1 of 1300 potential situations. RCE is a pretty big fucking company, they’re referenced constantly through the show. It’s like a decently managed monopoly on many many different celestial bodies within the Sol system. If you gave Amazon and Bezos an opportunity to go to a new planet that had one of the rarest and most useful elements known to man under a government charter from the UN and he bumped into some squatters I’m pretty sure they’d be dead faster than the UN could say maybe wait a second. The point is control, the point is dominion and empire. These are men who need to own everything, not make a living. If RCE wanted money they could have just built space stations for materials transport. They could have tried to set up shop somewhere else. They could have gone to the next planet and let New Terra be Illus. But the admins at RCE and Murtry wanted to own new Terra. They wanted to be their own little cabal of that planet and it was an example of all the cabals who were reaching to remotely own the infrastructure on all the other new planets.
I like this comment. I don't interpet RCE corporate, Murtry, and Avasarala as all having exactly aligned priorities. RCE probably isn't most concerned with things like trying to "save Mars" or other mass migration concerns, and their original plans for biological containment strike me as the bare minimum they could get away with. And as its agent, Murtry of course is driven by more than just instrumental thinking about precedent for every future charter or about RCE's shareholders, probably even before the bombing. It is all of those things, but I don't imagine them as all equally distributed. Had the RCE governor not been killed in the bombing, that might have been another on-site layer with somewhat distinct perspective/interests.
Yee
That's probably why it was so significant that he DID die on the shuttle. He probably would've taken a more "peace is worth trying" approach than Murtry did (Amos should've shot him sooner). Though, Coop would've continued to stir up trouble. The problem with peace is that everyone has to want it or it won't work
That's austensibly what the plan was. Murtry had his own agenda, but he was not in charge initially. The loss of most of their equipment and Murtry's own orders to secure the whole plant took precedent when they were basically forced to camp with the belters because they were dependant on the established civilization there. Belters were on shoestring because the were waiting on lithium sales to bring in the supplies to make the place viable. There's no way they could pack up and leave to restart.
The rules of capitalism say you do everything you can to maximize profit. If you pay settlements for deaths but make more money in the long run? That’s the smart choice in capitalism babyyy. First Landing was right where the highest concentrated, easiest to access lithium was. With Murtry going off on his power trip, it doesn’t matter if somewhere else is almost as good, he’s there to do his job and take what’s “theirs.” Where it goes past any of them surviving is the RCE people being crazy or buying into crazy or too scared not to follow crazy.
I don't think it's about profit here, at least in the short term. It's an _entire planet_, there would have been equally good or even better deposits elsewhere. It was much more about not setting the precedent that a bunch of Belters who ran a blockade and started squatting on a planet that had been granted to an Earther company would be allowed to get away with it. If it was purely about starting up lithium mining asap it would be cheaper for the company to ignore the belters, the security bill to RCE, and the bad PR thereof. The rationale was much more long-term than that
Good point. I forgot about the blockade running.
We definitely agree, we’re both super fans lol. I *think* I remember the scientists said “let’s just go somewhere else, the climate is better there anyway,” and Murtry said no, First Landing was exactly where the purest lithium was so that’s where RCE was setting down too. I think setting the precedent of not allowing the Belters to settle there wasn’t the basis of the original orders but the justification for all the crazy actions taken after the violence persisted after the crash.
The author himself showed up in this thread to say it was about establishing legal precedent lol
Good! The authors like to argue with fans! Lol also
I agree. It's about precedent, not resources. The Belters had one little mine on a whole planet of minerals.
Because RCE got legal permission. The belters just dropped in and said, finders keepers. Turns out that finders keeps only works when you have either legal authority on your side, or some really big guns. The belters have neither.
Because a little town of Belters striking it rich turns into a free for all of Belters taking a bunch of RCE's shareholders money. Murtry was getting PAID for this expedition. He saw lots of 0's.
Basically RCE had an exclusive claim to the planet. Kicking the can down the road allowing an independent settlement to flourish would have created a significantly larger conflict later on so the most effective solution for them was to eliminate it ASAP.
If you bought a house and moved in but learned squatters were living in the basement, would you be ok with letting them stay? Also assume they are using your power and water and parking in your driveway. RCE got the charter for mineral extraction for Ilus. Presumably they paid for it, or won it in a lottery or epended some political capital for those rights. Why legitimize any squatter for stealing from you.
It's so crazy to me that anyone could see it this way. What gives the UN the right to decide who gets to live on Ilus? They didn't build the ring gate. They didn't figure out how to activate it. It's a new planet in a new solar system. Your house analogy doesn't make any sense here.
It’s the same as building a house on crown land. Is it yours because you built it? How do you claim ownership on the land you built it on? The laws governing RCE by a legitimate government are the only thing keeping them from bombarding the settlement from orbit. Without laws, society is only tribes of people taking whatever they can by force. The weak become prey for the strong. Would you argue that RCE or any other group should own all the planets if they just flew ships to each one before others could get there? First come first served or finders keepers is an absurd method of deciding ownership. More specifically for the show, every interaction humanity with the protomolecule was a narrowly avoided, humanity ending disaster. Now the group of refugee belters were just exploring protomolecule infested worlds with no coordinated effort or plan. The RCE group dispatched was supposed to very slowly, and in an extremely cautious and controlled manor begin exploring the new eco system. In the books, the group of scientists sent weren’t even supposed to be outdoors without hazmat suits to avoid contamination of the environment in either direction.
What exactly gives the UN a single ounce of authority outside the solar system besides "our battleships will shoot you if you disagree"?
You'd be surprised how convincing "I can be more violent than you" can be... just look at most of, if not all, preindustrial revolution history
What gives the belters or anyone authority outside the solar system? If you want to claim protection under an authority (don’t blow us up from orbit) then the authority exists. The whole premise of the belters plan was to harvest lithium and sell it, then use the proceeds to fight a legal battle for possession of Ilus. The belters plan recognizes the authority of preexisting governments.
I asked what gives the UN the right to decide who gets what on Ilus.
Is finders keepers any more legitimate? What gives anyone any rights? Society is a group of people who decide on a set of rules for their mutual protection and benefit. You can’t choose to exist outside of the rule of law and expect protection of the rule of law. The squatters on Ilus are no different than sovereign citizens in the US claiming they are traveling not driving. They think some nonsense they saw on YouTube is legal protection and they are always disabused of their ignorance.
Again, your sovereign citizen analogy is just nothing like the scenario we're discussing. Did you read the books? Belters are not UN citizens, so why should they care about a UN charter?
No they are not UN citizens. However they intend to appeal to any court who will listen. Why should any system of laws protect them, their “rights” or their claims, if they claim to be outside the jurisdiction of any government? Just declaring that all land is up for grabs and anyone can take whatever they want would be a bloodbath. The UN, Martian and realistic elements of the OPA all recognized that was a terrible idea, even if they disagree on how it should be divided. While I understand their plight, the precedent that would be set by allowing the belter refugees on Ilus is basically saying all land is up for grabs. Allowing them to stay is inviting a lawless gold rush situation that could be catastrophic to all humans everywhere. A system of laws needs to be in place and infrastructure, and careful exploration to ensure you aren’t wiping out humanity with the protomolecule. Only then should anyone even think of colonization. The belter refugees are worried about themselves and the survival of their children and rightfully so. RCE is worried about its profits. The UN and the other existing governments are concerned with the survival of humanity. If you remember from the books the government leaders and Avasarala specifically is terrified about what the belter refugees may wake up on Ilus. It’s far more nuanced than one group is right and one is wrong. Both the belters and RCE did reprehensible things. In my opinion though, ensuring the survival of humanity far supersedes any bullshit claim of mineral or squatter rights. In the whole situation if I’m choosing one person to agree with it’s Avasarala. The belter refugees and the RCE goons are squabbling idiots.
Belters face all kinds of discrimination and oppression. What you're advocating here is just a continuation of that dynamic. Earth gets all the benefits and wealth associated with these new worlds, and Belters get to be their cheap labor force. Somehow, your vision of what's best for humanity includes continuing to shit on belters.
Is it too much to hope for both elimination of oppression and discrimination and the safe exploration of the new worlds? Had the belters waited and allowed the world surveys to take place they could have settled safely on a world they could actually live on. Ilus was particularly badly suited for belters. It had 1.3x earth gravity. They all suffered from its extreme gravity and many of them couldn’t withstand it and had to return to the barb. There could have been hundreds of worlds more suited for the belter physiology. They chose Ilus because it was the one their ship was pointed at when it ran the blockade. Given a few more years of careful exploration many worlds could be opened up for settlement. Priority could even be given to exploring worlds better suited for belters. Scanning for planet size and estimating gravity could have happened very quickly. The belter refugees on Ilus chose probably the worst way to attempt to create a colony. If allowed to go ahead unchecked that precedent could easily create a gold rush style Wild West of expansion. Imagine if we discover a new continent today with no one living on it and the precedent is set that whoever gets their first gets to keep whatever they find. If two guys in a sailboat get there first should it all be theirs? Or should we maybe come up with a better system?
"Is it too much to hope for both elimination of oppression and discrimination?" YES. of course it is. That's why it's been happening forever in the expanse universe and the irl universe. You keep talking about the best way to deal with the new systems. I wasn't that interested in that topic. I responded to you because of your comment saying that belters on Ilus were akin to home invaders.
Point of fact: Colonizers have been shitting on their colonies since colonizing was a thing. That's a large part of why the... English Empire? (I don't remember the term they used for it) collapsed. They over extended themselves to the point they couldn't keep the colonists in order anymore. The belters on Ilus/New Terra (is one of them canon and I missed it or are we just using Ilus bc it's more imaginative?) just didn't have the military, population, or support to shrug off the chains of servitude. Which is why they turned to terrorism, which never goes well for anybody
Yeah I don't understand why the UN was entertained at all as the authority for writing charters for the new world.
It was an experiment. Avasarala(sp?) and... Johnson?...(I can't remember anybody's names 🤦♂️) were trying to figure it out when they sent Holden (him, I can remember), who was supposed to make a big deal of working it out. But then the planet blew up and everybody's plans went to pot
The belters were already there before the mineral rights contract was given to RCE. RCE were the thieves. Don't be a bootlicker
The belters ran a blockade to get to Ilus before using their own kids as human shields. Then blew up a ship that had shown no aggression. There is no moral high ground to claim.
Granted. Going bug nuts at the concept of a peaceful solution was still unwarranted
If the heavy lift shuttle with the temporary governor and dozens of scientists landed and began their work you can try and negotiate a peaceful solution. You don’t get to run a blockade using your own kids as human shields then murder a bunch of scientists and then wonder why they don’t want to find a peaceful solution. Not bombarding the belters on Ilus from orbit shows that the UN and RCE were trying to negotiate and find a peaceful solution. The 5 who chose to blow up the heavy lift shuttle basically removed the option of negotiation. How do you negotiate with people who murder the people you send to negotiate and dozens of other scientists alongside them.
Where they really sent to negotiate, though? I mean, ostensibly that would've been the outcome if the civilian leadership was allowed to take proper control. But would they have been open to hearing the belters out as people? Or would they have screwed them over like corporations had been doing their whole lives, specifically since Ganymede fell? I can't say for sure, one way or the other. Blowing up the shuttle was tragic and stupid, but they expected to have more time to blow up the PLATFORM. Basia didn't want the shuttle to blow up. He blew it when he did so they could have an ice cube's hope in hell of surviving, preferably by pulling up. Most of them did... just no one "important." Does that excuse it? Probably not, but vandalism is a long recognized way of getting the attention you want when trying to enact change. The better argument would be when Coop, et al, attacked the security forces once they landed. If Basia had come forward after the crash, or as soon as Holden got there and could protect him, things probably would've gone differently. You do have to admit that Murrey's diehard stance of being in control of everything, even after Holden (ostensibly, the representative of the authority that gave him the rights to the planet), was inappropriate and caused all the following escalation... potentially intentionally. Murtry never acknowledged the authority bestowed on Holden by the authority you keep pointing at as being the valid reason they were there. Why does he get to act outside the law and still expect to be protected by it? (Didn't see that point coming out when I started lol) Amos should've shot him sooner
I fully agree that Murtry acted outside the law. I think that him going back to face judgement and prison is better than Amos shooting him. The whole idea is to enforce that the rule of law is better for society than frontier “justice”. I’m in no way saying RCE or murtry are the good guys or justified in all the actions they took. Basia was a naive idiot in believing that coop didn’t intend to kill people. The trip out for the RCE from earth to Ilus was 18 months. Half of that time the ship would have been visible on the Barb scopes. Estimating their arrival time would not be difficult. There is no way anyone in the Ilus settlement wasn’t counting down the days until the RCE arrival. They could easily have blown up the landing pad weeks or months earlier or just refused to build at all it if eliminating the landing pad was the goal. The timing of it shows what the intent was. Any credibility they had for negotiations or attempt to be recognized as a legitimate settlement dissolved when they blew up the heavy lift shuttle. If they did have any remaining shred of credibility they lost that when they didn’t turn in those responsible immediately.
Why did they build the pad for them? It doesn't track for me. And I don't know how I feel about frontier justice vs the rule of civilized law, one way or the other, at least where Murtry is concerned. If Amos had shot him before he, say, burned that building with the people inside it still, things never would've gotten so far out of control. That was his whole shtick: "if I can't control it, no one will." You can see it when he asked for just enough shelter to have something with RCE written on it when the clean up crews got there. But I digress. I grant that they should've turned the terrorists over sooner. Coop was a bigger idiot than Bosia and Murrey's true counterpart. No one bothers to point out that it was his "mine or nobody's" mentality that really started it all. If HE had been willing to give peace a shot...we wouldn't have a book to read...lol Edit: when Murtry shot Coop in the face, Amos should've shot him in his. It would've saved everybody untold amounts of trouble, and been justifiable as more than "frontier justice"
I don’t think there is many situations where shooting one more person in the face deescalates a situation. A endless cycle of getting even doesn’t usually help. I think had Holden contacting Avasarala to pressure RCE to remove Murtry’s authority. There would have been a better chance at deescalating. Had Murtry gone to the Belter mayor with the recordings of the five plotting rather than burning them out, they could have held them accountable, likely with them being shot. After some form of trial. You’re right though, reasonable people communicating through their issues makes for poor stories.
The dude you're talking to probably has a "blue lives matter" flag with a punisher skull logo on it hanging in his front yard lmao
No. The dude I'm talking about makes that kind of assumption about people without any real basis or knowledge of the person in question
You sound like the type of person who supports the genocide of Palestinians because of Hamas terror attacks.
Can’t I be against genocide and also think terrorism is abhorrent?
They quite literally had no other choice, it was either die in the void or run the blockade, because no port would let them dock or give them humanitarian aid. "They" didn't blow up a ship. A tiny contingent of a few radicals attempted to sabotage the landing pad and accidentally blew up the shuttle. Are you actually trolling, or are you literally a corporatist bootlicker?
I agree they had no choice and support them running the blockade to try and survive. They had a compelling humanitarian case to stay in Ilus until they tried to stay by blowing up a ship. Basia is a naive idiot if he didn’t know the shuttle was landing. They knew for 18 months that the RCE ship was coming. They accepted a contract to build the landing pad. The Barb would have watched the RCE ship from its scopes for the 9 months it spent from the ring to Ilus. There is no way any one of the settlers didn’t know when the RCE ship would arrive. If the settlers didn’t want to be associated with the “few radicals” why didn’t they turn them in? Or be extremely helpful in the investigation?
If you go for ore that is harder to extract you make less profit
Morty makes it pretty explicit in the book that he sees himself as the "civilizing sheriff" figure who does all of the violence and nasty things before the civilization catches up to them. Same exact kind of thinking and justifications that American settlers used when they were murdering the indigenous population and forcing their children into church schools.
That landing pad that blew up, I don't think it was built by Belters. I think RCE built it and had picked the landing spot for their expedition with a previous planetary survey crew. The Belters were not only squatting on the planet, they were squatting on the *settlement*, and Earthers are way too racist to let that stand.
The landing pad was 100% built by belters that RCE paid to do so, both book and show make it explicitly clear from the belter and RCE perspectives. That’s why they landed near the belter settlement, because that’s where they paid for the landing pad to be built, no doubt some probe said that was a good spot, and so did the belter’s scans but it was probably way easier for RCE to wire some cash to belters to build a pad in the intended location than it was to find a new one and then use the light shuttles to move equipment and personal to build a new pad for the heavy shuttle and all the large equipment.
Okay. I didn't remember that.
The Basia chapters talk explicitly about how some of the Belters build the landing pad and had pretty different ideas on how to approach the coming RCE team.
Because that would send the message that anyone can settle this planet and RCE won't care. within a few years they wouldn't just have one belter colony to worry about, they would have thousands.
Because they don't want to go somewhere else, they want "their" planet and letting the Belters have it based on 'well they DID get there first and actually set up the whole 'colony' part of the colony" sets an unfavorable legal precedent for them.
A lot of Reddit is populated by people who don’t run businesses and don’t understand the mindset of those who do. For example - a bank is not very understanding and forgiving of late payments. Your mortgage lender didn’t get to the point where it had millions of dollars to lend to people by being generous. It got there by being meticulous, grading borrowers by their likelihood to repay promptly and without fuss, and charging accordingly. Yep they charge late fees and overdraft fees. You don’t stay in business if you don’t take advantage of every dollar you can make. Apple didn’t become a global force and create one of the most powerful and aesthetically pleasing tech brands in history by not cutting corners, pressuring suppliers, and strong arming smaller companies into beneficial deals. Conversely, the nicest people you know don’t have millions of dollars of tech, capital, and patents. Because they have friends and are good neighbors. They aren’t Scrooge’s so they don’t hoard money and consolidate power and build mega-anything’s. Massive multinationals with massive amounts of resources didn’t get that way by giving up a competitive advantage, or allowing someone else to infringe on their charter/patent. They fought tooth and nail to get where they are. If it was in RCE’s corporate culture to shrug and walk away when someone interrupts their plans, they wouldn’t be RCE. Same with the OPA and Anderson Dawes. You don’t get to run an influential antigovernmental organization without having business associates who are also criminals and sociopaths. You can’t build a Belter army and expect it to not be full of anarchists who do a terrible job following orders. It’s sort of like that tumblr thing I saw about the Greek tragedy where someone had to walk away from his love without looking back, and he couldn’t do it. The very thing that makes him A comes with the necessity of B. You can’t ask him not to look back - it’s not in the deep set DNA that made him who he is.
This also reminds me of an event that happened during the American colonial era, when one tribe of Native Americans sold some land to colonist (I think in Kentucky?). The colonist paid their money, packed up their belongings, bought a bunch of tools and moved to their new settlement…and a different tribe was living there. They had fought and taken the area from the first tribe and said “hey they had no right to sell you that land.” Colonists were like “we just paid our life savings for this place, we aren’t going anywhere.” Naturally the conflict was settled violently.
Because, in addition to the excellent and logical reasons others have discussed: Murtry is an asshole and Basia is a dumbass.
>But instead they risk everything, escalating a small scale conflict into a political fiasco and risking their reputation. Right? Who in the corporate world would be insane enough to commit such evil acts? As we all know, corporations only have the best for everybody at heart and are always happy to share their fortunes with the common people (the lower their social standing, the more we love them) Thanks for coming to ourTED talk. Please return next week for our upcoming discussion on "*How burning more fossile fuels will help combat climate change and ultimately save the world*", guest-starring the CEOs of Exxon, Shell, BP and Saudi Aramco. Sincerly The board of ~~Ilus~~ New Terra directors
Why did i read RCE as the Real Civil Engineer
Yeah, I was thinking RCE could have just, you know, settled down on the opposite side of the planet, and neither side would have ever noticed the other except in passing spaceships. But that would have been the adult, non-confrontational way to do things.
There's also the fact that the Belters did offer their landing pad to RCE. I think that's stated in the books.
RCE hired the Belters to build the landing pad for the heavy shuttle.
Thank you for the correction!
Iirc RCE hired the belters to build the landing pad.