Easily overlooked in the suggestion of interstellar settlement is the question of maintaining communication between Sol’s civilization and its distant extrasolar progeny. This is likely to be a proposition as grand in scale and sophistication as the development of starships because the challenge of maintaining communication at a civilization-scale bandwidth across interstellar distances is very great. And how we accomplish this will have great ramifications on the cultural evolution of these distant branches of civilization. Will we be able to maintain a cultural coherence across such distances or will these settlements become very isolated islands whose cultures radically diverge to the point where they are truly alien to the rest of us in time?