You don’t need evolution to make your aliens, cultural separation would immediately begin and do it for you.
To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world.
Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture.
Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not.
It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home.
Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth.
To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare.
So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones.
Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.
To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world.
Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture.
Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not.
It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home.
Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth.
To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare.
So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones.
Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.