#interstellar civilization

A: Become leader of a small, newly terraformed swamp planet colonization team of an interstellar (human, with FTL, lets say around 1000 star systems) civilization in the far future (where aliens have not been encountered), you will be in charge of a small team of 12 other people and millions of robots to prepare the planet for inhabitation (and will be fairly compensated based on your work, the civilization in question is whatever you personally consider closest to a utopia) you will have to live on the planet afterwards, you have 5 years before the first batch of 10,000 colonists arrive. B: Become a low ranking noble in an interstellar feudal human civilization in the far future (with FTL, lets say 10,000 star systems) (where aliens have not been encountered) in charge of a single recently colonised gas giant (where a layer of atmosphere has been made breathable, and people live on floating cities extracting gas from lower layers) you are obligated to live on your planet, manage its government, military and finances independantley, pay taxes to your liege, and produce heirs. Your planet has a population of 500 million.

I asked the AI to generate an image inspired by my words, and to my surprise, it included a winged lion — the symbolic representation of my Guardian Spirit. The strange thing is, I never mentioned anything about it. When I asked the AI why it appeared, I received this response...

An interstellar civilization wouldn't really be giant empire so much as it would be billions of separate civilizations communicating with one another via laser link.

I would imagine any one stellar civilization would advance, digress, advance, and so on over time. They would worship the trickle of information that comes through the narrow laser links from the nearby star systems with civilizations more advanced than them and be basked in the praise of the less advanced civilizations that they send their own technological and cultural information to. Every few millennia, one of the thousands of links connecting any one star system to its neighbors may go black and every surrounding civilization would ping for reply from their lost brother. The pings may be answered centuries later by a new civilization that has grown out of the ruins of the last; the former civilization having been destroyed by war, disease, economic collapse, or stellar event.

Trade may occur, but not as it occurs on Earth or as it would between planets of the same star system. A trade agreement may be struck if a star system lacks a substance that a neighboring star system has in abundance and vice versa. Or, instead of being satisfied with narrow laser links for information, civilizations may send physical copies of huge amounts of data through the void of space. Such ships could contain every bit of data the vending civilization had ever produced, from scientific papers and technical schematics to archaeological findings and pop-music. Each shipment would take centuries or more to reach its destination.