I’m guessing the odds are the same as a sdflkhjkcjbbkjhn being bnadsfjughlkjm
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.
A Few notes on The Culture
Iain M Banks
In the 1924 Soviet film Aelita: Queen of Mars humans travel to Mars and teach the enslaved locals about communism, fomenting a glorious revolution against the ruling class.
And it was the Soviets who ended up making it to space first, so who knows?
just wait till they learn about the drm, hypervisors, and trusted system cpus which run everything. 
great, make your own fab: except that production itself is co-opted.
running to space won’t magically get us egalitarian societies; there are always competing forces. there’s simply no way around the fact we have to work on ourselves, and then stay vigilant.
I think it’s more realistically saying that without figuring that out, space colonies would not be possible anyway. Launching a Boeing 747 worth of people to Mars and trusting the organizational challenges will just work out is the sort of plan only an idiot would come up with.
Hmm, so less “settling space turns us into an egalitarian society” than “creating an egalitarian society is a prerequisite for settling space.” I don’t know if I buy it, but I like it.
Of course there are still a bunch of galaxy-spanning wars in the Culture series so even in Banks’ utopian view it’s clear that there are still a lot of issues to work out.
Bookmark for later.
In death we’re all alike.
(Petroff et al 2015)
(5) Teenagers from Spaaaaace doing their equivalent of ringing the doorbell and running away.
always these buzzing teasers with their silly antennas on their head;
“They’re the same people that worked with a US company and the US army to explore a piece of material that they claim was a UAP and really is a piece of missile casing from the 1950s. They’re the same people that have been influencing some of these whistleblowers who have come forward to say: ‘Hey, I don’t have any first-hand evidence, but all these people are telling me this‘…"That is a self-licking ice cream cone, exactly…’”
