This is one of the most challenging settings of my story, because I cannot just extrapolate from today, but let’s see what I can do with it:
The Alien world is a large rocky planet orbiting the red dwarf star Lalande 21185. It is a bit larger than the Earth, but much denser, with a lot of iron, which means that gravity at it’s surface is roughly twice that of Earth. It is on a very close orbit, so the gravitational forces from the star submit the planet to very strong tidal forces, keeping the planet highly geologically active. The planet has a strong magnetic field that emanates from it’s central iron core dynamo, much like Earth’s.
The Aliens have dug an extensive network of tunnels and underground chambers where they cultivate the organisms that they use as food. A large part of the life of the Aliens is spent colonizing new worlds similar to this one: rocky worlds orbiting red dwarves, which entails a lot of space travel, hopping from one system to the other. They construct their ships on the surface of the planets, in cavities that are gradually dug out for materials. Once the ships are finished, they are sitting on top of rock spires in the middle of craters.
The human colonists arrive on the planet in the Alien ship, and the Aliens construct a replica of the Moon base where the humans come from. They thus have all the services and resources that they had on the moon in a base occupied by 10 000 people. The Alien replicas are functionally the same as the originals, so maintenance and repair of systems can be carried out by the humans.
The Aliens area highly decentralized yet organized society, and things are done as needed. When resources grow thin, they move deeper, or expand their network, abandoning the unproductive tunnels behind them. It takes millions of years to strip mine a planet, but as a planet’s resources are exhausted, additional ships are built, and the Aliens move on to another red dwarf. They have been going through the same pattern for the last few billion years, and are very efficient at it.
The human colony on Lalande has grown a lot in the almost three centuries that it has been occupying the planet. The Aliens have been keeping a close watch on the growth of the colony, and when the colony becomes too crowded, the Aliens construct another copy of the moon base for the human colony to expand in. The Lalande Colony now occupies 18 distinct copies of the original moon base. Human society on Lalande is a highly eclectic group of people, governed through an elected council. The tradition that developed was that each new copy of the base would get an elected council and a mayor, and that the mayor or each copy would sit on a high council which would take the general decisions.
Since the original moon base had a university, a sports center, cinemas, shopping district, etc, there are now 18 copies of all of these things. The colonists have kept the original design and destination of most installations, which makes for lively sports leagues, and healthy competition between universities. Some services were not available at the original moon base, many manufactured products for instance were imported from Earth or from the larger Moon Cities. The inhabitants have developed methods to obtain clothes, cultivate food, etc. The lack of some luxuries make for a rather spartan lifestyle compared to life on the Moon, but all basic necessities are available to all.
More on the Human/Alien interactions another day.
