I've got to say that I don't like it.
It basically stretches the setting too thin. Now instead of small towns on a frontier, it turns into single-man cabins scattered across antartica, with chance of aliens/zombies/zombie-aliens/oh-god-why-is-everything-on-fire. We don't even have a lot of fiction outside the solar system, and like you said, there's only what? 10 million people Up?
It SHOULD eventually happen, but it's just too far, too fast, not enough people to keep the feel.
Think about it, for a reasonable travel distance of say, 15 lightyears from any one of the 23 named gates, you're looking at 20-30 stars on average. Someone will stop by, look, go home, and they're basically effectively meaningless for the plot. We've already got so much territory to cover in our own backyard that even in the projected fluff the first extrasolar settlements practically next door to us don't really pass 50k permenant residents until 2020/2025. This will basically... add nothing to the setting, and the implications could twist it in unwelcome ways. Shouldn't we have, I dunno, a mass exodus from Earth actually driving extrasolar settlements before we go jumping to 'we can now jump 2000 lightyears away from earth'?
It basically stretches the setting too thin. Now instead of small towns on a frontier, it turns into single-man cabins scattered across antartica, with chance of aliens/zombies/zombie-aliens/oh-god-why-is-everything-on-fire. We don't even have a lot of fiction outside the solar system, and like you said, there's only what? 10 million people Up?
It SHOULD eventually happen, but it's just too far, too fast, not enough people to keep the feel.
Think about it, for a reasonable travel distance of say, 15 lightyears from any one of the 23 named gates, you're looking at 20-30 stars on average. Someone will stop by, look, go home, and they're basically effectively meaningless for the plot. We've already got so much territory to cover in our own backyard that even in the projected fluff the first extrasolar settlements practically next door to us don't really pass 50k permenant residents until 2020/2025. This will basically... add nothing to the setting, and the implications could twist it in unwelcome ways. Shouldn't we have, I dunno, a mass exodus from Earth actually driving extrasolar settlements before we go jumping to 'we can now jump 2000 lightyears away from earth'?