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Which belief systems fit each phase of space colonization?
Going back to Asia for the first time in over a decade suggested to me that different civilizations are fit for different tasks. Space settlement may need a sequence of worldviews, rather than one universal worldview.
Ray Doraisamy
May 08, 2026
Space colonization will not be driven by a single worldview. Different psychologies reward different actions. The shape of attention that results in the mindset to leave Earth is not the same one that survives first contact with certain doom, builds durable settlements, or grows a settlement into a civilization.
As an example, we considered:
Ancient Greek for decision to leave.
Ancient Norse for breakout and extreme danger.
Roman for first foothold and infrastructure building.
Mormon for growth & multiplication.
This matched the first four phases in:
Decision to leave Earth
Breakout
Foothold
Growth
Expansion
Stabilization
Persistence across millenia
For Expansion, many people are the remnants of a single, drastically expanding culture. The culture that led to all four worldviews we’ve matched.
This is not the expansion of a balloon, but a branching explosion, the kind you might see from shrubby weeds.
In The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, David Anthony writes, “[Proto-Indo-Europeans] turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange.”
I remember seeing shrines with Hanuman, and reading comics based on Journey to the West, starring a Monkey King, Sun Wukong. Two very different cultures, featuring a personage that was very similar. Okay, Journey to the West is a 16th century novel based on stories about a Chinese Buddhist monk traveling to India to collect sutras. Greek and Roman myths had a similar parallel, one that was easiest to see.
Did that mean they were all connected? According to my parents (at the time), all gods that weren’t the Abrahamic god were demons, or fallen angels. There was something else, though.
Through an interest in Tolkien (and so languages), I picked up on the Indo-European connection.
It seemed like it was all connected!
Except, most of the oldest stories we have access to are not Indo-European.
Sumerian, the culture that brought us finance as we know it. Egyptian. Akkadian, which brought us the Epic of Gilgamesh we know. Hurrian, which is what melds with one set of Indo-Europeans to give us the Hittites.
Instead of just the horse, Indo-Europeans were foremost a people of steppe and wagon. Mobile. And whatever syncretizations we are the result of today, they engaged in a lot of it. Wherever they conquered a local, settled people, they branched off into a new limb.
The World Tree, a commonality of the Tree of Indo-European expansion
In the modern era, we contrasted the European drive to explore with the Chinese penchant for insulation. Yet it may be the minority of lineages that branched out. The Austronesians were another great example of branching expansion & exploration.
How do you feed a vast number of people on the move without Amazon.com?
You bring lunch with four legs, for the Indo-Europeans.
1. SERVED with oblations, first-born, mountain-render, Aṅgiras' son, Bṛhaspati, the Holy, With twice-firm path, dwelling in light, our Father, roars loudly, as a bull, to Earth and Heaven.
2 Bṛhaspati, who made for such a people wide room and verge when Gods were invocated, Slaying his enemies, breaks down their castles, quelling his foes and conquering those who hate him.
3 Bṛhaspati in war hath won rich treasures, hath won, this God, the great stalls filled with cattle. Striving to win waters and light, resistless, Bṛhaspati with lightning smites the foeman.
So that’s a mindset for expansion. The constant sacrifice for expansion, as with the horse sacrifices and hecatombs (sacrifice of 100 oxen). A worldview intent on moving outward, and having many descendants.
When our settles have expanded, with all these localizations, all these different worldviews, that is when we might draw from the Hindu tradition.
Hinduism, a relatively recent religion that is nevertheless backwards compatible, has a habit of claiming every other god as its own.
You can see the solidification of castes balanced with a vast acknowledgement of gods as a stabilization. Slowing change down.
Which brings us to Persistence across millenia.
For that, we could use a worldview that prizes memory, the word, and argument as much as any Brahmin might, but taken even further.
A people dedicated to remembering a deal.
Take care lest you forget the ETERNAL your God and fail to keep the commandments, rules, and laws that I enjoin upon you today.
thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the LORD your God, and observe to do all the words of this law.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates.
Coordinating through millenia requires something to be frozen.
For the Jews, it is their rules.
Whatever set of worldviews our descendants use, it will be set.
One size never fits all.
Our examples were:
Ancient Greek for decision to leave.
Ancient Norse for breakout and extreme danger.
Roman for first foothold and infrastructure building.
Mormon for growth & multiplication.
Proto-Indo-European for expansion.
Hinduism for stabilization.
Judaism for persistence.
I’m sure you could come up with other candidates for each phase, but no single one (yet) will fit all.