#could make an educated guess. based on their intense history and feelings about colonialism and imperialism

[transsexual-dandelions]

Talking with me has to be wild. *insert most revolutionary and complex history and connections* *any variation and amount of swears* yk? Ya feel? Do you see it?

[starsailorstories]

So! Given, uh, everything, any chance you could talk about how various Astraea cultures deal with sicknesses and quarantine? Especially since some (especially Bell Town) are extremely or entirely genetically identical, and so more at risk?

Also, how would the cast members react to self isolation and social distancing?

FIRST OFF, sorry this took 10 years to answer, I was super busy and there’s kind of A Lot Of Spec Bio to discuss here

Also, this question made me feel very Seen lol…why yes i DO use worldbuilding as a coping mechanism for the stress of watching the wet tissue paper my country calls a social safety net dissolve

Most sickness that astraeas deal with day to day isn’t actually contagious*, but more a result of individual reaction to the environment (in terms of public health response, think seasonal allergies, although physiologically speaking it’s nothing like that). Communicable, infectious disease tends to be a less frequent problem but purely for that reason is more feared, especially as the most common source for novel diseases is interplanetary shipping (like, astraeas on one planet who have immunity to something unknowingly ship contaminated goods to another planet where people don’t). All that is nowhere near as devastating as it could be in a human context–for one thing astraeas’ bodies are hella dry compared to ours, so if a microbe isn’t airborne it’s almost a non-issue (on the other hand, infection is almost a guarantee if you have an open wound)–but most planets, stations and orbiters have a list of OTHER planets, stations and orbiters categorized by how long it’s been since first contact and how long shipments need to be in quarantine based on that, and that kind of thing runs the same gamut from “rigorously evidence-based” to “completely political and petty” that it does on earth.

Speaking of which, the issue of genetic similarity as a disease risk is as politicized as you’d expect in a society where people said “oh, with our genetic technology we can just design the working class to be however we want.” The Hyperians, being, you know, A Rigidly Hierarchal Interstellar Empire In A Space Opera as they are, tend to present the genetic homogeneity as sort of a good thing, what makes Us Us and Them Them, and the royal family themselves subscribe to the very historically royal (and also very eugenicist) idea that genetic “purity”–which for astraeas mostly just means having children in a very chemically controlled environment–helps keep em’ royal or something. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t it just makes hemophilia, and the more conservative Basileans minimize the environmental variance that keeps them from wiping each other out like some kind of aggressively graceful banana monocrop, the easier it is for epidemics to escalate in general because whole colonies become vectors together.

You won’t read about it in your galactic history book til after the revolution, but the dangers of genetic homogeneity were actually observed by lux units, who noticed that “variant” and “off-order” clones were a bit more likely to survive outbreaks of disease. Supervisors in clone factories have tried HARD to excise the superstition that variant units who remain un-decommissioned into adulthood are good luck to have on your cabin crew or manufacturing-plant shift, but it’s never completely gone away, and once Bell Town goes topside their medics and scientists immediately get to work testing, peer reviewing and proving the mechanics of diversity as a factor of public health because it’s a helpful argument for legitimizing their seizure of the means of their own reproduction and fighting the prejudice against “defective” lux that don’t fit the mold.

To really get into your question, Bell Town at least has the advantage of being small and having a busybody mom friend for a de facto head medic, so I don’t think they’ve ever had a quarantine situation get much bigger than four or five people just because Bolt is very up on how everyone’s doing and very very persuasive–the medics know that that’s just a matter of luck though, and I’m sure a factor in the push to go topside is the potential for tragedy involved in having a settlement of mostly/nearly genetically identical people in somewhat adverse and scarce conditions. That’s not to say there’s no plan–the shortages in Bell Town tend to be of immediately consumable raw materials, like air and fuel and very basic multi-use medicines, whereas raw materials for manufacturing specialized equipment are a lot easier to get because organized factories in DT’s network can have them smuggled out. And a majority of the town’s population, at least by vol. 2, are former manufacturing-plant labor with working radio receivers in their heads, so it’s fairly feasible to expect even a small portion of them, with an emergency push, to manufacture A Lot of vaccines, or intensive care equipment, or whatever was needed practically overnight with the direct guidance of the medics to ensure as much safety in the process as possible (they do just that with medical and defense supplies in vol. 2 for various spoilery things).

Up top, the aula’s responses to any and all large-scale social crises tend to be erratic but sweeping. There are some advantages–in terms of expertise, there are certainly things that well-paid doctors with fully equipped research hospitals can accomplish that a dedicated crack team of self-educated medics can’t, including proactive study of new strains of disease. There’s also feudal insanity–technically individual hospitals/institutions aren’t supposed to issue info without the aula’s permission, though legally local nobles can give it on the Hyperians’ behalf if they’re willing to risk Drama. The internal weirdness of the court both logistical and interpersonal (which I need to make a post about) can sometimes mean, in any emergency, that different parts of the empire receive conflicting information, or an edict followed after a day’s delay in the satellite network by a retraction. Public trust (among citizens of relative status at least) that the Hyperians know what they’re doing tends to decline exponentially as you move out from the inner Rings for this exact reason.

Derafior City on Caesura B dealt with a wave of multiple epidemics a couple hundred turns before the official rise of the empire that still affect how the city is laid out–leaders at the time issued quarantine orders in cooperation with individual colony matriarchs, and as those orders became enforced in physical “zones” neighborhood identities, reputations, and rivalries became increasingly defined (Crater culture being what it is, quarantine boundaries were often pretty literal battle lines as the situation became desperate). A lot of historians trace the factionalism of the Crater to this era, although outside imperialism was also a major instigator of both factional conflicts and disease exposure. Keep in mind too that while outsiders like to portray Derafior as violently fractured and there’s a grain of truth to that, there are just as many deep loyalties between neighborhood/colony factions as there are rivalries and as we see in vol. 3, Caesurans are certainly not allergic to closing ranks when shit really hits the fan. 

I don’t have specific canon examples from other ante-dome cultures but another thing of possible interest that I’d like to talk about is that in places touched by Basilean culture, a lot of what we consider “social distancing” is just normal because cleanliness is highly ritualized and valued. Although platonic adult friendships tend to be very cuddly by American and British standards, at the same time, hand touches between strangers outside specific social rituals are seen as quite inappropriate, so things are more thoroughly designed to prevent them–for example, most trading of goods is done purely on paper at the point of sale and nothing actually passes from hand to hand, you go get it out of the crate or pick it out of the field yourself (which is also a practicality of the relative non-ubiquity of flexible currency–and actually, one of the complaints about the use of currency among more traditional astraeas is that it spreads germs). Basically everyone who can afford it wears gloves in public, which are changed and washed every time a person re-enters her home (disposable gloves are mostly limited to medical and laboratory settings, although it’s not unheard of to use them in a pinch if you don’t have a place to launder gloves at home. Side note, if you’re translating directly Altamaian actually refers to manual labor that makes it impractical to wear gloves as “barehanded” labor and the summary conceptualization of such as unhygienic represents a MAJOR vein of classism among Basilean citizens). The reason for the glove thing is that for a species with an exoskeleton regular hand washing can be kind of involved (You know how sometimes it takes a lot of scrubbing to get the dirt out from under your fingernails? Now imagine you have fingernails all over your hands). 

Oh and to answer your second question: out of the main cast the one you’d think would suffer most with self-isolation is Bolt, but being a healthcare worker she’d still see people. Rugsy would complain the loudest but also paradoxically be secretly kind of relieved to not have to worry about People for a while. DT experiences virtually no change from her normal lifestyle lmao

*There’s two kinds of disease that can affect astraeas–what they call “miasmic”, and infectious. Miasmic disease (which as you might guess I named after the precursor to modern germ theory–it’s kind of true in this instance!) is basically when an individual’s body and light chemistry can’t maintain its normal balance in certain atmosphere conditions. A big reason for the kickoff of the artificial atmosphere industry after the settling of Altamai is that the cloud cover tends to trap a lot of carbon dioxide, and for i.e. Basillans and Sitherians (who have come to be based on G-type stars, like the sun, and K-type stars, slightly smaller and cooler than the sun) there’s just not enough hydrogen atoms in there to run their bodies optimally. This mostly affects very young children, the elderly, and those whose cores were formed in suboptimal conditions (comparable to a human who has a chronic health condition because of a birth defect) and if it can’t be remedied by a move to more hydrogen/helium rich air, it’s treated by sucking the pure hydrogen out of a water electrolysis device through a hose on the daily, which side note, is also a reliable hangover remedy for them.