Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

FTL has been serving a smaller and smaller role here with each passing revision. I've considered ways to eliminate it entirely before, but never took them, primarily because I wanted easy access between the two peoples and didn't want to break the timeline of a'millian ancient history.

What I missed before was a bleedingly obvious move: what is a colony of humans ended up in the A'millian's solar system? This accomplishes both goals. But, does it change too much? (One thing is it takes away some wet water navy potential :( )

One of the nice things about hardening is it has actually made story elements make more sense as the science gets better. Very little serious stuff has changed so far, but all the explanations fall into place with hard science. Will the same happen here?

Let's find out.


First, we need some basic backstory. We need to understand why there is a colony coming, how far they came, where they are going, etc.

The most obvious change necessitated here will be Earth is quite a bit more into the future than it is in the current ASE timeline; probably several hundred years or more into the future to give them interstellar capability. Quite possibly a lot further into the future yet.

The problem with far future is so much changes that it might not be recognizable. I think we should look for a reason for it all to happen as soon as plausible. Of course, too soon gets silly.


Meh, this isn't terribly important actually. We can come back to it for fun later; what matters now is some people left and end up here. Even their own motivations don't matter much, since it is their descendants who actually arrive. The trip will be long enough that we can just say "well things change" and leave it at that. The big question from here is why did they pick this specific star? I might have to rethink some facts about the star and its system. A simple solution is to say it is the nearest system that looks like home.

Anywho, how does the trip work? This is important, since it determines how they will arrive. Will robots arrive first to set things up? Do they go for the inner or outer system?

It seems to me that after you pick a candidate through telescopes that the next thing to do would be to send ahead some probes to map it out. However, if all solar systems have piles of material (seems like a safe assumption to me), this is something they could do themselves on the fly.

What about preparation? I see two possible modes for the transport. One is that the people are inanimate for the transfer (uploads, embryos, cryosleep, whatever, not important) and bring very little with them, and need preparation at the destination before they can wake up, and the other is that they were awake the whole time, living in their habitats on stored stuff for the trip.


Option A means they might send something ahead, and it will take them a while to get set up, but they arrive in the same state as they left (so their original motivations are relevant). Option B means they are ready to go as soon as they arrive, and are possibly generations apart from the people who left.


I like B because a) it is a fresh start of sorts, b) it can bring a running ecosystem along, c) opens possibilities for side stories about the people during the trip.

I dislike it because that's a lot of energy it has to store; unintended consequences ahoy! Also, things might change too much over those years.

One of the nice things about option A is it gives a moment of weakness for the colonists, so I can keep the debate as to if they should be wiped out while we still have the chance.


I like that, so let's run it.



So here's the basic idea. Colonists and an piece of Earth, frozen or whatever, launch toward a new star, wanting to get far away from their old home. (Something that saddens me here is they could get far away without launching toward a new star. I hate feeding into the misconception that solar systems are small. But meh, not that big of a deal.)

They are detected as they are coming in, giving the A'millians that window to decide to try and exterminate them before they get set up. We keep that.

They head into orbit around a gas giant - plenty of local resources and decent solar power too. The machines and part of the crew come to life (some part of the crew would always be up for maintenance, so we're adding to that) to start creating a local habitat cluster big enough to create the slice of Earth away from home.

First conact can optionally be made at this point.

Now, once the habs themselves are built, more people are woken up and plants are planted. Once things start to get up to size, more people or embryos or whatever are unfrozen.

Meanwhile, they work on more habs to wake up the rest of the ship.

The whole process would take at least decades. By the time it was through, the interstellar convoy would have grown into a young colony of millions, if not more.


Here's some beauty of it:

a) We can ignore some tech advances that might have happened on Earth. The colonists would have lost a lot of time, and they also wouldn't take everything with them. It would be fucktarded for this to have too huge of an impact, but it takes care of some disparity.

b) Manufacturing is definitely going to be behind. Most the infrastructure will be stuff they took with them, which is related to kickstarting the colony. The rest has to be built later, and they are just getting started. The knowledge is available in the crew and computer memory banks, but the rest isn't there yet.

c) They can bring a wide diversity of stuff that is rolled out slowly; new stuff arrives from Earth as time goes on.... sort of... without stuff actually needing to arrive from Earth.

d) Coming from (b), we can have fairly high population growth for quite some time without being contrived. This lets it quickly grow and fragment, giving diversity for the fun. I can see it breeching one billion (all in space!) in the span of the timeline - actually more than it is currently.



So it works and looks like it will be all good things.


That gives us our setup. Now need to get through the actual events, and I'll get into it next post. Time to get back to work.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

I remember when I took the plunge and decided to do away with FTL in my own uni. Do it! It'll make your universe more realistic and probably also more original (because it forces you to deal with problems that most SF solves with magic).

Nice to see I apparently helped inspire this a bit. :D
Destructionator wrote:What I missed before was a bleedingly obvious move: what is a colony of humans ended up in the A'millian's solar system? This accomplishes both goals. But, does it change too much? (One thing is it takes away some wet water navy potential :( )
You could have them colonize a nearby companion star with its own water planet ... or something.
The most obvious change necessitated here will be Earth is quite a bit more into the future than it is in the current ASE timeline; probably several hundred years or more into the future to give them interstellar capability. Quite possibly a lot further into the future yet.

The problem with far future is so much changes that it might not be recognizable. I think we should look for a reason for it all to happen as soon as plausible. Of course, too soon gets silly.
I think a nuclear salt water rocket is possible with more or less present tech and with a mass ratio of 15/1 (what Atomic Rocket suggests is probably the maximum practical without staging) I calculate it would get up to .04 c. Of course you'd need a magsail brake to slow down, which might require somewhat more advanced tech. That's pretty slow but it might be feasible to reach a nearby star with it; I calculate about 100 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Crew would be another problem, of course. With near future tech it would have to be a generation ship.

More seriously, the easy way to do this is to have the colonists be a group that simply isn't into uploading into robots or whatever. Assuming everybody else is willing to leave them alone an STL-only universe should allow pretty profound isolation to be found easily if it's desired.
The big question from here is why did they pick this specific star? I might have to rethink some facts about the star and its system. A simple solution is to say it is the nearest system that looks like home.
Although if this is an isolationist group I think they might want to pick something more like the hundredth nearest star that looks like home. If I desired isolation I really wouldn't want to move to a place that would logically be at the top of almost everyone's "places to go" list too. I'd want something that had a decent buffer of distance and other equally (or more) interesting destinations between me and home. The geometry of space is relatively friendly to this: a sphere with 2X the radius has 8X the volume, so, for instance, there will be 8X as many stars within 200 light years as within 100 light years.
I dislike it because that's a lot of energy it has to store; unintended consequences ahoy!
The easiest way to avoid this would be to have the ship be very slow. The next easiest would be to have it propelled by laser lightsail or some other arrangement that relies on heavy infrastructure, with a magsail for a brake.
So here's the basic idea. Colonists and an piece of Earth, frozen or whatever, launch toward a new star, wanting to get far away from their old home. (Something that saddens me here is they could get far away without launching toward a new star. I hate feeding into the misconception that solar systems are small. But meh, not that big of a deal.)
If you just want isolation the solar system has plenty of places to go, but having your own solar system would give you a lot of room to expand and carry out all sorts of large projects with less interference. Depending on what sort of agenda your group had for the far future that could be a significant consideration.
They are detected as they are coming in, giving the A'millians that window to decide to try and exterminate them before they get set up. We keep that.

They head into orbit around a gas giant - plenty of local resources and decent solar power too. The machines and part of the crew come to life (some part of the crew would always be up for maintenance, so we're adding to that) to start creating a local habitat cluster big enough to create the slice of Earth away from home.

First conact can optionally be made at this point.

Now, once the habs themselves are built, more people are woken up and plants are planted. Once things start to get up to size, more people or embryos or whatever are unfrozen.

Meanwhile, they work on more habs to wake up the rest of the ship.
That sounds very cool and interesting. It reminds me a little of the "let's conquer an alien planet" thread on Spacebattles.com, which I think would itself make a pretty cool basis for a SF story.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Somes J wrote:You could have them colonize a nearby companion star with its own water planet ... or something.
One of the goals is to keep the travel time fairly small; the early missions take just months. (Why? So when the one ship has its accident, running out of supplies in the short term is a realistic problem. I could revise this, but would prefer not to.)
I think a nuclear salt water rocket is possible with more or less present tech
I read somewhere that the NSWR wouldn't actually work at all. I don't remember the source nor the argument, but I think it had something to do with the nuclear material tending to condense and react in the tank when under thrust; it's a bomb waiting to happen. I'm not sure about that though.
That's pretty slow but it might be feasible to reach a nearby star with it; I calculate about 100 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Crew would be another problem, of course. With near future tech it would have to be a generation ship.
A fairly long travel time and distance is a bonus - it means less probability of a) telescopes detecting each other early on and b) pesky terrans coming in and ruining the balance of power.

My preferred mode for interstellar travel would be a laser sail. This requires a bit investment from the homeworld, but that's ok. This avoids the rocket equation entirely, and can get you very fast. To stop, a sacrificial laser or something similar is used on the other end.
More seriously, the easy way to do this is to have the colonists be a group that simply isn't into uploading into robots or whatever. Assuming everybody else is willing to leave them alone an STL-only universe should allow pretty profound isolation to be found easily if it's desired.
Aye, that works well.
Although if this is an isolationist group I think they might want to pick something more like the hundredth nearest star that looks like home. If I desired isolation I really wouldn't want to move to a place that would logically be at the top of almost everyone's "places to go" list too.
Perhaps, but stars like home might not be interesting to an AI packed civilization at all; their priorities are different. Still, going some ways out is probably a good call.
The easiest way to avoid this would be to have the ship be very slow. The next easiest would be to have it propelled by laser lightsail or some other arrangement that relies on heavy infrastructure, with a magsail for a brake.
Reading my mind.
Depending on what sort of agenda your group had for the far future that could be a significant consideration.
Yah. It would also put them nicely out of range of interplanetary x-ray lasers if they left town.
That sounds very cool and interesting. It reminds me a little of the "let's conquer an alien planet" thread on Spacebattles.com, which I think would itself make a pretty cool basis for a SF story.
Hmm. Holy crap, that thread is huge! I don't think I'll be able to read it all.

Glancing through the first couple pages, I sure hope sb posters aren't decision makers on this human colony. They've gotta peacefully coexist for quite some time to let the story take place.

From that thread:
Hmm, for real Lulz, we find out that the planet isn't inhabited by aliens, but by Earth people who left Sol after we did and had a faster ship.
I was considering this too. A'millians and humans are very similar. Before, I just handwaved this. "Maybe there is a god designing us? Meh, who cares." Using the slowboat opens up another possibility: they are actually the survivors of a failed colony sent much earlier that have gone down their own evolutionary path. I won't commit to this, but having the possibility open is much nicer than handwaving it as an act of God.

Another example of my axiom: the harder the tech, the more things that just start to make sense!

The big downside is that this would require it all to take place in far future on Earth, which makes it more of a stretch that there would be recognizable people and institutions among the colonists. How long could you expect an ultra conservative sect to hold out? The tech would almost necessarily be beyond what I want to present too, but the manufacturing infrastructure could help with that. Maybe throw in an accident of some sort that damaged the computer tapes storing the fun stuff too. Problem there is it isn't believable that such an accident takes out the backups too.

(See, I figure any interstellar expedition would be a bunch of redundant copies all going at once, or very close to each other (in space terms). By copies I mean sister ships and the sort, each capable of in theroy accomplishing the mission independently. This way, if one fails, it has another friendly group right there to help them out, and save the expensive mission from certain failure. I'd find it stupid to go hundreds or thousands of years away from home without a backup plan.)


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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Destructionator wrote:One of the goals is to keep the travel time fairly small; the early missions take just months. (Why? So when the one ship has its accident, running out of supplies in the short term is a realistic problem. I could revise this, but would prefer not to.)
Hmm, as I remember you can get planets around a double star up to 1/5 of the distance between the two stars, and you probably need a Jupiter equivalent to protect from comets, say it orbits at 5 AU ... you could seperate the stars by around 30 AU. That's around the orbit of Neptune in our solar system. If you want, say, 4 months of travel time you end up with 434 km/s, that's probably feasible with a number of drive systems.
I read somewhere that the NSWR wouldn't actually work at all. I don't remember the source nor the argument, but I think it had something to do with the nuclear material tending to condense and react in the tank when under thrust; it's a bomb waiting to happen. I'm not sure about that though.
Hmm, since I had been considering NSWR as a cheap and dirty propulsion system for primitive starships in my own uni...
My preferred mode for interstellar travel would be a laser sail. This requires a bit investment from the homeworld, but that's ok. This avoids the rocket equation entirely, and can get you very fast.
Beamed power is what I go with in my own uni too. It just seems much better than any of the alternatives. Although I'm partial to a sailbeam with a magsail for braking at the destination system. It seems easier from an engineering perspective: you don't need to worry about focusing a laser on the lightsail over distances of thousands of AU.
Perhaps, but stars like home might not be interesting to an AI packed civilization at all; their priorities are different. Still, going some ways out is probably a good call.
True.
The big downside is that this would require it all to take place in far future on Earth, which makes it more of a stretch that there would be recognizable people and institutions among the colonists. How long could you expect an ultra conservative sect to hold out? The tech would almost necessarily be beyond what I want to present too, but the manufacturing infrastructure could help with that. Maybe throw in an accident of some sort that damaged the computer tapes storing the fun stuff too. Problem there is it isn't believable that such an accident takes out the backups too.
I can think of two possibilities offhand.

1) The A'millian star system is very far away, hundreds or thousands of light years from Earth. The first expedition sent travelled at a low fraction of c. Later, a second expedition was sent at a much higher fraction of c. The second expedition beat the first one by many thousands of years. The second expedition colonists became the A'millians, the first expedition ones became the humans.

2) The ancestors of the A'millians were taken from prehistoric Earth by aliens in prehistory.

The first explanation seems better to me. It's more parsimonious and just seems less hokey. Plus there's something really awesome in the idea of the entire history of the A'millian civilization takes place while the first expedition was slumbering in cryosleep as they drifted slowly between the stars. It really drives home just how huge space can be.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Somes J wrote: Hmm, as I remember you can get planets around a double star up to 1/5 of the distance between the two stars, and you probably need a Jupiter equivalent to protect from comets, say it orbits at 5 AU ... you could seperate the stars by around 30 AU.
Hmm. A double star would be quite interesting (I pondered it briefly yesterday, but discounted it because I want the A'millian sky to look much like an Earth sky... it might work anyway though. I'll have to consider some simulations), and may help in the transfer.

Going from inner star to outer star may be able to do some gravity assist.... no no no better yet. An elliptical orbit. This could be useful for one star too... travel between the two civilizations comes for free every few years (the old timeline assumed a launch window to the FTL jump point only once very three years) because there is a station orbitting right between the two.

Image

At aphelion, it is meeting the colonist's cluster. At perihelion, it comes in fairly close to the planet. If you time your transfer, you can get onto the visiting station quickly and with little effort*. This station will sometimes need to burn to pick up more speed (it loses some to the people it picks up), but this is simple enough.

* Now, here's the problem: the orbital velocities don't match. At perihelion, the station will be going significantly faster than the planet. (Danger: what if some malicious dude wanted to impact the planet? Uh oh.) Any people wanting to board it will have to burn to match speeds with it, which is the same burn to just do a Hohmann transfer out to the colony anyway.

Here's how to avoid that, and it is insane. You park your ship right in front of the approaching station. It comes up behind you, and will eventually collide. If you hit, you'll match speeds, but it won't be pretty; it needs to be dragged out.

At first I thought of magnets to do this, but their force drops off too quickly; won't be much of a time window to fit in the acceleration. But, what about kinetic impactors?

Your transfer shuttle has an Orion style pusher plate on it. You park in front of the station, and it throws out giant rubber balls (or something :P), which bounce off your pusher plate and ideally go back to the station.

Each one transfers a bit of momentum from the station to your shuttle, slowing it down just a tiny bit and speeding you up in gradual pulses.


Repeat enough times, and you can be gently brought into the (magnetic?) docking bay of the station, with enough speed to make it to the outer system.


Once there, you are going much slower than the colony, and need to match speed, but this is a fairly small delta-v, and the same bouncy ball trick might help again.

I've gotta run the numbers, but it all seems plausible at first glance. Biggest problem is the danger of "accidents" in the orbital calculation.

Oh dear, this might make the First War an actual fighting war rather than a fairly tame deportation like in the current timeline. (The ASE were the only ones with the FTL drive in the current timeline, so they controlled who and what came to visit them and when. Naturally, no giant armies or weapons would be transferred, even if they had the logistical capability for it in the first place. This leads directly to the weapon that was ultimately used against them: a biological agent with a long incubation period injected into a unknowing tourist. It is the only thing they could slip past Customs. When tourists or visiting scientists misbehaved, they were just deported at the next launch window. One time, the army had to round them all up though, as some resisted the timetable, which granted it the name of war, despite it being nothing like what we'd consider war in the real world.)

I'd like to keep the power in their hands, but anywho, this kind of change is what this thread exists to discuss!
That's around the orbit of Neptune in our solar system. If you want, say, 4 months of travel time you end up with 434 km/s, that's probably feasible with a number of drive systems.
That's a very large number though; imagine using those drive systems on missile boats. I want to avoid large delta-v's while keeping the travel short - I think the elliptical orbit is a ticket there.
Although I'm partial to a sailbeam with a magsail for braking at the destination system. It seems easier from an engineering perspective: you don't need to worry about focusing a laser on the lightsail over distances of thousands of AU.
Looks good.
1) The A'millian star system is very far away, hundreds or thousands of light years from Earth. The first expedition sent travelled at a low fraction of c. Later, a second expedition was sent at a much higher fraction of c. The second expedition beat the first one by many thousands of years. The second expedition colonists became the A'millians, the first expedition ones became the humans.
Hah! This would hilariously harken back to old revisions of the 'verse, where they were far far away (the newest revision is ~14 light years).

If the first one left at 1% and went 100 light years, we're talking 10,000 years of travel. Long, long time to be on your own.

Say the second one zipped right along at 50%; small enough to discount relativity still, but significantly faster. About 200 years to get there. They could leave centuries after the fact and still blow right by them.

There's over 3000 years of recorded A'millian history by the time the colony arrives. That works! Leaves ~6000 years of prehistory. Big question would be: why did colony #2 fail? How did it fail so completely as to leave little to no trace of it being there, aside from a planet that appears to have been terraformed? (No artifacts in orbit or on the ground - none discovered yet anyway. It could probably be tied into the amillians not having fully mapped out their own world yet.)
The first explanation seems better to me. It's more parsimonious and just seems less hokey.
Yes, done less too.
Plus there's something really awesome in the idea of the entire history of the A'millian civilization takes place while the first expedition was slumbering in cryosleep as they drifted slowly between the stars. It really drives home just how huge space can be.
Aye, that's a pretty cool idea. Just need to make that long ass trip work without magic (that's a long time to go without solar power nor beamed laser, even if they are just sipping the juice). Perhaps the system is fully automated; not even a maintenance crew is awake. A nuclear reactor runs ever so slowly to maintain the robots and life support systems; fission, fusion, heck, even stored antimatter if cutting down on fuel mass is relevant (seems unlikely, but maybe).

But haha, stored antimatter gosa BOOM bye bye backup. Oh dear. Convenient storywise, but a bit insane in universe. But over 10,000 years combined operation and only one accident is actually a decent track record. I could probably run with that.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:Hmm. A double star would be quite interesting (I pondered it briefly yesterday, but discounted it because I want the A'millian sky to look much like an Earth sky...
I calculate a sunlike star 30 AU from Earth would shine with around 1/1000th the light of the sun (1366 watts/m^2 at 1 AU vs 1.334 watts/m^2 at 32 AU). By comparison the sun is about 449,000 times brighter than the full moon (according to this Wikipedia page), so at 30 AU a sunlike star would be around 449 times the brightness of the full moon. What that would actually look like I'm not sure. Of course, that's a sunlike star. Let's say instead the companion star is a red dwarf like Lalande 21185, which according to its Solstation page is around 1/166th as bright as our sun. It would be less than 3 times the brightness of the full moon. If the companion star is like Proxima Centauri, 19,000 times fainter than our sun, it would only be around 1/50th the brightness of the full moon.
Your transfer shuttle has an Orion style pusher plate on it. You park in front of the station, and it throws out giant rubber balls (or something :P), which bounce off your pusher plate and ideally go back to the station.

Each one transfers a bit of momentum from the station to your shuttle, slowing it down just a tiny bit and speeding you up in gradual pulses.
I once heard an idea of matching speeds with an asteroid by shooting a grappler at the end of a long string into it and using the string to transfer your ship's momentum to the asteroid. Maybe you could use something like that.

The main difficulty I see with your idea is keeping the balls from exploding when they hit the pusher plate at multiple km/s. Although even if you couldn't do that there would be an advantage to the set-up. Since the ship doesn't have to carry its own propellant or fuel the mass ratio death spiral problem is eliminated. You have to slow down or speed up only the ship itself, rather than the ship + fuel + propellant. The balls themselves could be launched out of mass drivers at one end, so you'd only have to expend fuel to slow them down at the station.

The big wrinkle I see is that I don't see why the space station is necessary. Why not just install these systems at the colony and at the planet? That seems much more straightforward.
That's a very large number though; imagine using those drive systems on missile boats. I want to avoid large delta-v's while keeping the travel short - I think the elliptical orbit is a ticket there.
Well, if you want to avoid large delta Vs I think the best thing would be either:

1) Accept travel times of years rather than months.
2) Make the companion star a brown dwarf. This basically makes it equivalent to a very large gas giant, which should let you move it quite a bit closer.
3) Do away with the idea of having the human colony around a companion star. Make it around a gas giant or something instead.
There's over 3000 years of recorded A'millian history by the time the colony arrives. That works! Leaves ~6000 years of prehistory. Big question would be: why did colony #2 fail? How did it fail so completely as to leave little to no trace of it being there, aside from a planet that appears to have been terraformed? (No artifacts in orbit or on the ground - none discovered yet anyway. It could probably be tied into the amillians not having fully mapped out their own world yet.)
Maybe the climate warmed dramatically and catastrophically at some point. That could explain both the initial colony's failure and the lack of artifacts. The initial settlements were all established on lowlands. Something caused the climate to warm dramatically and the glaciers to melt and raise the sea levels catastrophically. The survivors were forced to flee onto what had been unsettled highlands. The seas rose too quickly to give them time to transplant the infrastructure of their entire civilization to the previously completely unsettled highlands, so technological civilization collapsed. No artifacts have been found because they're mostly all buried in sea bottom mud on the continental shelves.

There's evidence that the Younger Dryas cold snap in Earth history may have altered the climate dramatically in a matter of a few years (link), so there's some precedent for this kind of catastrophe on our own planet (although that was catastrophic cooling instead of catastrophic warming). Perhaps the sudden warming was caused by a huge volcanic eruption that belched up an enormous amount of greenhouse gasses. Or maybe there was some sort of temporary brightening of the sun. It wouldn't even have to be all that dramatic if the climate was on the virge of a shift from cooler to warmer mode already, and once the causitive event was over the new hotter climate stayed stable because all the feedback loops had shifted.
Aye, that's a pretty cool idea. Just need to make that long ass trip work without magic (that's a long time to go without solar power nor beamed laser, even if they are just sipping the juice). Perhaps the system is fully automated; not even a maintenance crew is awake. A nuclear reactor runs ever so slowly to maintain the robots and life support systems; fission, fusion, heck, even stored antimatter if cutting down on fuel mass is relevant (seems unlikely, but maybe).
I calculate 10.5 kg of deuterium to sustain a consumption level of 10 kilowatts for 10,000 years with deuterium fusion. Energy storage shouldn't be a big problem with fusion power. The big issue is keeping the ship from falling apart in all that time. Although interstellar space should be a great environment for preserving anything that isn't harmed by cold or vacuum. I've read an estimate that the astronauts' footprints on the moon might last as long as 10 million years if they're not disturbed, and they're just impressions in dirt. I wouldn't be surprised if simply turning everything off and trusting in the vacuum and cold (and some radiation and micrometeorite shielding) to preserve everything turned out to be a viable strategy.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:What that would actually look like I'm not sure.
There's a second potential problem: global climate change. A 1/1000x increase isn't a lot, but I'm not qualified to say what effects it would have on the weather.
If the companion star is like Proxima Centauri, 19,000 times fainter than our sun, it would only be around 1/50th the brightness of the full moon.
That's more like it. The question here is why would the colonists park around the small star instead of the big one? The goal for going next to a star is presumably solar power, so going to the brighter one seems like the better choice.

What about a dwarf star with rings? Eh, they'd probably just melt.

That's why going for a gas giant in the outer system, something like Jupiter, is probably what I'd go for if I were them. Close enough to capture solar power without huge expense (for the habitats, not really the ships; not dense enough for mobility), but far enough out that iceballs are plentiful.
I once heard an idea of matching speeds with an asteroid by shooting a grappler at the end of a long string into it and using the string to transfer your ship's momentum to the asteroid. Maybe you could use something like that.
I could see it working for an asteroid you are near to already, but you'd be pulled awfully quickly for a trip to the outer system.

The delta-v needed at Earth to get out to Jupiter is about 19 km/s. (Then about 5 km/s more to circularize the orbit at Jupiter, for a total of about 24 km/s). 19 km/s is just an awful lot to get from any direct connection.


And it is an awful lot for the bouncy balls to survive too, I suppose. It being destroyed wastes some of that momentum though. What if it could be thrown gradually and caught gradually?

Instead of giant rubber balls, what if it were magnetized balls? The pusher plate is also a magnet, repelling it. The balls would have a small mass, so the force needn't be huge for each one.

Gah, magnets repelling would just want to flip themselves over and attract. Probably won't work.


I guess the best would probably be a sacrificial stream; let it blast apart and just call it the cost of space travel.
Since the ship doesn't have to carry its own propellant or fuel the mass ratio death spiral problem is eliminated. You have to slow down or speed up only the ship itself, rather than the ship + fuel + propellant.
Right, and using a station in elliptical orbit improves upon that, by only needing to speed up/down the passengers rather than the ship. I'll discuss below.
The big wrinkle I see is that I don't see why the space station is necessary. Why not just install these systems at the colony and at the planet? That seems much more straightforward.
The beauty of the station is two things:

a) It lets meetings take place en route; gives everyone something to do during the fairly long trip.

b) It stores that transfer energy for the spacecraft so you can reuse it. All you pay for is the stuff you are actually transferring, rather than a bunch of propellant and spacecraft too. Let the sun's gravity hold on to your spacecraft.

If you aren't paying for the mass of the spacecraft for the whole trip, every trip, you can go with luxury on it, so it could be a small habitat rather than a traditional interplanetary shuttle.


The net energy change of any round trip is zero: the state before is the same as the state after; everything is back where it started. I want to exploit this fact to keep costs as low as possible. The delta-v spent catching the shuttle can be given right back to the station when it brings people home - then, they need to shed that 19km/s, and can do it by flying out a mass driver (or something) on the station's rear. Conservation of momentum says the station gets back what it lost capturing the station!

All you pay for in the round trip is inefficiency. The fuel for the rockets on the shuttle, used to position it for the station to capture and to get back home when done and the bouncy balls destroyed in the process.

Basically, the net cost is only for a shuttle to and from high Earth orbit but you get the benefit of riding a habitat out to Jupiter.



Mention hard sci-fi interplanetary travel and most people think about being cramped in tiny little cans for years. Here, you are in that little can for mere days, then spend the bulk of the trip in a slice of home!


Well, if you want to avoid large delta Vs I think the best thing would be either:

1) Accept travel times of years rather than months.
2) Make the companion star a brown dwarf. This basically makes it equivalent to a very large gas giant, which should let you move it quite a bit closer.
3) Do away with the idea of having the human colony around a companion star. Make it around a gas giant or something instead.
Any one of these is ok. I'm really leaning toward the gas giant though for the ice reason from above.
Maybe the climate warmed dramatically and catastrophically at some point. That could explain both the initial colony's failure and the lack of artifacts.
Interestingly, this is already part of the canon! From my old evolution article on OZ (two years old now):
So the surviving tribes were the ones who crossed the river and went south.

Over a series of pretty nasty winters, the river separating east and west that was once crossable widened from erosion and the effects of freezing over. Soon, it was no longer crossable by primitive man. The proto-westerners and the proto-easterners were now geographically isolated. (This is in the ballpark of BW 1,000,000)

Also over this time, water levels rose enough to make returning to the mainland impossible without ships. Speaking of the mainland, their ancient precursors back on the mainland are getting mercilessly outcompeted at every turn, and are approaching extinction.
(There's two species of A'millian on their home island - both very very closely related, but slightly different in a few details and chemically incapable of natural interbreeding. The geographic isolation of a small group due to the large flooded river led to them going down their own path. This speciation occurred fairly rapidly; the climate changed quickly and the isolated group was too small to dilute mutations. They live solely on this island. Then, there is [url=http://www.omniverseone.com/forum/viewt ... 477#p6477a third species[/url] around the equator, but they aren't very intelligent and don't share a recent common ancestor, so not interesting in space terms. But I figure a planet is a big place, so I can have some fun with other local life too. I invented these guys for the TSW uni, and transplanted them here because I could.)

I did a lot of weather maps for that thread too. Here's one showing ocean currents and prevailing winds:
Image

In the east, there is lots of snow (or rain in summer) on the coast, and if is just cold further inland, all thanks to the mean winds. The west is relatively mild, thanks primarily to warm ocean currents.

Anyway, I digress.
The initial settlements were all established on lowlands. Something caused the climate to warm dramatically and the glaciers to melt and raise the sea levels catastrophically. The survivors were forced to flee onto what had been unsettled highlands. The seas rose too quickly to give them time to transplant the infrastructure of their entire civilization to the previously completely unsettled highlands, so technological civilization collapsed.
That sounds pretty good. It also grinds my axe where I like to say planets are dangerous - the planet struck out at random and hit them fast and hard. That kind of thing wouldn't happen in a space habitat.
Perhaps the sudden warming was caused by a huge volcanic eruption that belched up an enormous amount of greenhouse gasses.
Another option is asteroid impact too, but I like a supervolcano. It fits in with my love of a planet's own wrath; no outside influence required.

The effect could be a series of big changes. The eruption might not be of lava, but more of just stored carbon. This catalyzes sudden global warming, melting some glaciers over the course of just a few decades. This, in addition to raising water levels, lead into a situation like the linked science article: it screws up ocean currents, and the climate suddenly cools down.

The sudden flooding leads the colonists to move up, leaving some of their stuff behind. Then, the sudden cooling leads to mass starvation. The old one-two punch wipes them mostly out.
I calculate 10.5 kg of deuterium to sustain a consumption level of 10 kilowatts for 10,000 years with deuterium fusion. Energy storage shouldn't be a big problem with fusion power.
BTW, I made an energy calculator a whlie back: http://arsdnet.net/ase/energy.html

I use it primarily to get a more intuitive feeling of what a megaton is whenever someone mentions it (hence the ice and steam numbers), but I have some nuclear numbers there too. My fusion number is about 1/4 what your's is though; we're within an order of magnitude, so good enough, but mine is likely wrong. Do you have a source for your number? I'll double check and revise my page.



Anywho, the question is how much power is actually needed? 10 kW seems awfully small for maintaining what is likely millions of tons of people, animals, plants, etc. to wake up, but keeping them cold wouldn't cost anything and it isn't accelerating so maybe. But, maybe it is free.

Still, you can multiply that by several thousand and still have an acceptable mass of fuel, so sounds good in any case.

Oh, speaking of acceleration, the energy for slowing down likely needs to be stored. Some BOTE numbers place fusion fuel for the sailbeam laser at about 2% of the payload if you include this. That's still not so bad. Antimatter of course is many many many times less mass, but the danger outweighs the benefits. Fusion it is.

The big issue is keeping the ship from falling apart in all that time.
And if you run the fusion generator, this amplifies: the reactor walls will eventually need to be replaced thanks to neutrons fucking with them if nothing else (remember, even aneutronic primary reactions still generate some from secondary processes; no reactor is perfect, and multiplied by 10,000 years ensures failures will happen).
Although interstellar space should be a great environment for preserving anything that isn't harmed by cold or vacuum. I've read an estimate that the astronauts' footprints on the moon might last as long as 10 million years if they're not disturbed, and they're just impressions in dirt.
The only problem is frozen people might need some kind of maintenance anyway. I'm not well versed on cryogenics, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't stop time for the subject; surely there's more to it than just putting them on ice and forgetting about it.

What concerns me is things like random cosmic rays going through the shielding and zapping some DNA. Not bad for short term, but over a very long trip, this surely adds up, even when frozen. (Wikipedia confirms that real scientists (lol wikipedia confirms haha!) are concerned about this too,
Wikipedia wrote: However, estimates based on the accumulation of radiation-induced DNA damage during cryogenic storage have suggested a maximum storage period of 1000 years.
The people might wake up with cancer or something. My first gut is to wake them up every so often and regenerate the tissue (somehow), but I suppose if you can do it early, perhaps you can do it after the fact too.

Also, these conservative people, while not full transhumans, may still be post-human in some areas; perhaps one of these enhancements includes a self correcting mechanism that kicks in after they wake up to repair damaged DNA. Finally, the losses to the expedition that they couldn't fix might be unavoidable, but perhaps acceptable in the grand scheme of things.


There's something else here: if it is far future, perhaps such trips have been made before; they have some reliable data as to the limits of their technology. For people to risk it en masse, they'd probably want some data saying it can be done, even if they themselves are pushing the limits. (Being the first 100 light year mission is one thing if there have been successful 80 ly missions before. But if it came only after 5 ly missions, it's a little crazy.) This puts Earth even more into the future. Or maybe, these people really REALLY wanted to get way the hell away and not be bothered, so they picked something where only a madman would follow them. I think I like that.
I wouldn't be surprised if simply turning everything off and trusting in the vacuum and cold (and some radiation and micrometeorite shielding) to preserve everything turned out to be a viable strategy.
I think so too. Let's run with it.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:There's a second potential problem: global climate change. A 1/1000x increase isn't a lot, but I'm not qualified to say what effects it would have on the weather.
Climate is so complex I don't think it's really worth the effort to worry about tiny details like that. I'd just assume that any effects you don't want are canceled out by something else you haven't mentioned.
That's more like it. The question here is why would the colonists park around the small star instead of the big one?
Well, if they see signs of civilization (radio transmissions, industrial pollutants in the spectral lines of a life zone planet, drive flares of spacecraft) from the big star on the way in they might want to be cautious.
What about a dwarf star with rings? Eh, they'd probably just melt.
Depends on what they're made out of. I imagine rocky rings could probably survive.
That's why going for a gas giant in the outer system, something like Jupiter, is probably what I'd go for if I were them. Close enough to capture solar power without huge expense (for the habitats, not really the ships; not dense enough for mobility), but far enough out that iceballs are plentiful.
A gas giant sounds good.
I guess the best would probably be a sacrificial stream; let it blast apart and just call it the cost of space travel.
One possibility I can think of is to use ionized gas, and catch it with a magsail. I imagine it'd probably disperse pretty quickly though, unless it was a particle beam. Or maybe you could use a sailbeam, have the ship turn it into ionized gas with a laser, and then catch the gas, recondensce it, and make another sail out of it.
Any one of these is ok. I'm really leaning toward the gas giant though for the ice reason from above.
Gas giant definitely sounds good.
That sounds pretty good. It also grinds my axe where I like to say planets are dangerous - the planet struck out at random and hit them fast and hard. That kind of thing wouldn't happen in a space habitat.
I'm glad you like it.
The effect could be a series of big changes. The eruption might not be of lava, but more of just stored carbon. This catalyzes sudden global warming, melting some glaciers over the course of just a few decades. This, in addition to raising water levels, lead into a situation like the linked science article: it screws up ocean currents, and the climate suddenly cools down.

The sudden flooding leads the colonists to move up, leaving some of their stuff behind. Then, the sudden cooling leads to mass starvation. The old one-two punch wipes them mostly out.
You wouldn't even need to invoke shifting currents to have an effect like that. A big volcanic eruption should also pump lots of dust and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, cooling the climate. Instead of warming followed by cold snap you might have a cold snap caused by all the dust and SO2, followed by the warming after it dissipates. Although I suppose having the cold snap come after the warming would be more devestating, because most of the technological systems that could let them deal with the cold snap would already be gone. I suppose you could have all three happen. First a prolonged post-eruption winter, then as the dust precipitates out the CO2 warms the climate dramatically, melting the glaciers and drowning the settled lands, then a shift in ocean currents causes another cold snap.

I wonder whether the second cold snap climate would be temporary or permanent. I could see a scenario where you'd end up with a cooler climate and higher sea levels. All it takes is a large low-lying polar continent. After the glaciers melt it all disappears under the water, and this both means that land glaciers can't form there anymore and that heat is better distributed to the polar region, so even when the climate cools back down the seas don't retreat. Of course, that opens up the question of how the land glacier there formed in the first place. Maybe a really severe ice age that caused enough ice to form on one of the other continents to lower the sea level enough to expose it. Also, big glaciers depress the land, don't they? The planet may be in for another ice age in the future when the polar continent springs back enough to start exposing large sections of it.

My fusion number is about 1/4 what your's is though; we're within an order of magnitude, so good enough, but mine is likely wrong. Do you have a source for your number? I'll double check and revise my page.
I forget exactly where it was but it was in a conversation with the user who goes by the handle Bigfish on SB.com. Hmm, checking the members list he no longer seems to be there...
Oh, speaking of acceleration, the energy for slowing down likely needs to be stored.
I'm pretty sure if you use a magsail you don't have to. The magsail works by transferring the ship's momentum into the interstellar medium. On the other hand a magsail is better at high speeds than at low ones. The one estimate I've seen has a ship that's 1/2 composed of magsail needing 30 years to decellerate from .1 c.
The people might wake up with cancer or something. My first gut is to wake them up every so often and regenerate the tissue (somehow), but I suppose if you can do it early, perhaps you can do it after the fact too.
I'd say having to wake them up for a little while every 1000 years, or even every few decades, shouldn't be too much of a strain. Especially if you could keep them sedated or hooked up to virtual environments while you're doing it. You don't need to have to worry about making the ship habitable, just the cryotubes.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:One possibility I can think of is to use ionized gas, and catch it with a magsail. I imagine it'd probably disperse pretty quickly though, unless it was a particle beam. Or maybe you could use a sailbeam, have the ship turn it into ionized gas with a laser, and then catch the gas, recondensce it, and make another sail out of it.
Might work.

Another complication with meeting a station hit me this morning though: the travel time is going to be big, and the delta-v won't be right.

Why? I screwed it up. I assumed the station would be in a Hohmann orbit between the two destinations. Problem is a Hohmann orbit doesn't have the same orbital period as either destination; they only line up for a meeting on that specific orbit every century or so. (I'm taking the period of the hohmann orbit and working out where it reaches both Earth and Jupiter at near whole numbers of years for each planet; integer Earth years at one half of the orbit, and integer Jupiter years at the other half of the orbit.)

Gah. We might have better luck of the station orbit had the same semi-major axis as the outer orbit, and was so elliptical as to be tangential with the inner orbit:

Image

My Paint ellipses are suck, but you get the idea. Start with Jupiter's orbit and smush it down until it touches Earth's orbit.


We know from Kepler that the semi-major axis is what matters for the orbital period. Same axis as Jupiter means same period as Jupiter - almost 12 years. The four quadrents of this orbit alternate: Earth, Jupiter, Earth, Jupiter. Thus, one way travel time is about 3 years; close to the Hohmann transfer.

When do launch windows open up? Half way through each orbit. But they aren't integer multiples of each other, so it won't be every orbit of the station. (But, it will reliably meet up with Jupiter twice an orbit, so we take out that complication.)

Every 5.93 years, the station intercept's Earth's orbit (or comes close to it). But, Earth is only there to meet it about every 80 years.

What's interesting is the times where it can do a pick up and drop off in one cycle. I just had a program brute force some math.
0 : 0.000000
13 : 77.089996
14 : 83.019997
28 : 166.039993
42 : 249.059998
56 : 332.079987
57 : 338.009979
70 : 415.099976
71 : 421.029999
85 : 504.049988
99 : 587.070007
The left number is how many half-jovian years go by (possible Jupiter intercept windows) and the right is how many full Earth years go by. Notice 13 and 14, then again 56,57, and again 70,71. You could met the station, go for a 6 year ride, and end up back home.


While this is interesting, the windows are still to far between.

It really isn't workable for Jupiter :-(


I really like the idea though. Just Jupiter's orbital period is too big. What if it was used to get half way there? Say, to a colony in the asteroid belt. This could be rigged artificially to have an integer multiple as a period, and the trip would be quite a bit shorter.. a bit in from Ceres would give you an orbital period of exactly 4 years. Use the same trick, and every two years, you'd meet right up with that station, take a one year ride and then play. Cool, again close to the travel time of a Hohmann transfer.

The nearest I could put a gas giant to the sun is about the snow line; ~2.7 AU (assuming sun like star), though that's a stretch too. Jupiter is where it is likely because that's the earliest and nearest it could form (this excludes the possibility of capturing a hot jupiter or something like that). But anyway, the orbital period there is about 4 1/2 years.

Not a beautiful integer (that's not likely to happen if it isn't artificial), but the windows might happen more often.

Running the math shows it to be almost exactly every twenty years. We could increase the eccentricity more, and open up a few more windows (like actually in my pain picture)...

Meh, still not worth it.


So the cool transfer station only works for often recurring travel if at least one of the end points is an artificial construct, in an orbit of intelligent design. Alas.
Although I suppose having the cold snap come after the warming would be more devestating, because most of the technological systems that could let them deal with the cold snap would already be gone.
Exactly.
I suppose you could have all three happen. First a prolonged post-eruption winter, then as the dust precipitates out the CO2 warms the climate dramatically, melting the glaciers and drowning the settled lands, then a shift in ocean currents causes another cold snap.
Pwned! Sounds like it'd take out our (post?)human colony, and it'd do a number on the rest of the life around too; the terraforming lets it still be Earth like, but the evolutionary pressures from this brutality makes it alien enough to leave the question open.
I wonder whether the second cold snap climate would be temporary or permanent.
If it is permanent, our poor blokes are in for some pain. We want all this radicalness to mostly settle out within at most, a couple thousand years, so things are basically back to normal in time for civilization to take off. This is a lot of geological activity in a relatively short time, but it all sounds plausible, and it has to be rather brutal to take out a high tech civilization.
I could see a scenario where you'd end up with a cooler climate and higher sea levels.
I like where you're going. The cooler climate could be just a few degrees on average too, making a lot of difference globally, but still being decent livable in some areas. A geological explanation competing with the biological and now colonial explanation as to why A'millians are only found in a small fraction of the planet's land area.

The climate can also remain decent at the equator, if not tropical. This lets the space launcher still go up down there, and the active forestlife to remain.
Also, big glaciers depress the land, don't they?
It is logical that they would, though I don't know for sure.
The planet may be in for another ice age in the future when the polar continent springs back enough to start exposing large sections of it.
If so, what shit luck! But this kind of thing happens. I can work with it.
On the other hand a magsail is better at high speeds than at low ones. The one estimate I've seen has a ship that's 1/2 composed of magsail needing 30 years to decellerate from .1 c.
Right. The ISM is almost nothing, especially at these speeds (bright side is that's one less thing to worry about breaking the ship as you travel). It seems that you'd get a better mass ratio from the nuclear option.

I had another quick thought last night too. How do you time the waking up? The most reliable option might be a nuclear isotope on a kind of kill switch. A given mass will degrade in a known time, without needing outside influence, so it'd be a pretty idiot proof timer. Get the right amount for your trip and boom. The hard part would be getting the thing it triggers to be as stupid simple; perhaps a heat switch. When the radioactivity gets low enough, it cools off and completes the wakeup circuit. Simple, free energy wise, and an accurate, reliable timer; beats anything else I could think of. Next best thing would be a sensor detecting arrival in the destination solar system, but this strikes me as easier said than done. Maybe a magnetic sensor picking up the heliopause? But that's a but too late to begin the slowing down and mapping process.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:Pwned! Sounds like it'd take out our (post?)human colony, and it'd do a number on the rest of the life around too; the terraforming lets it still be Earth like, but the evolutionary pressures from this brutality makes it alien enough to leave the question open.
10,000 years probably isn't enough time for evolution to change most species that much though. They might be altered significantly but they'd probably still be easily recognizable derivatives of terrestrial species. Then again, if we go with punctuated equilibrium model of evolution you might be a surprising amount of change in short time periods.
This is a lot of geological activity in a relatively short time, but it all sounds plausible, and it has to be rather brutal to take out a high tech civilization.
Another possibility would be to have the climate shift be an unanticipated effect of the terraforming. The new climate they established wasn't as stable as they thought it was.
I like where you're going. The cooler climate could be just a few degrees on average too, making a lot of difference globally, but still being decent livable in some areas. A geological explanation competing with the biological and now colonial explanation as to why A'millians are only found in a small fraction of the planet's land area.

The climate can also remain decent at the equator, if not tropical. This lets the space launcher still go up down there, and the active forestlife to remain.
Even during the last glacial maximum there were still large tropical forests in South America and South Asia, though they were smaller than they are today. That was a time when the Earth's land area was mostly grassland and desert.
It is logical that they would, though I don't know for sure.
Doing some Googling, yes isostatic depression is a real phenomenon. 10,000 years ago Lake Champlain was open to the ocean because the land was still springing back from being pushed down by the ice age glaciers, allowing the ocean to penetrate to the Champlain Valley.
Right. The ISM is almost nothing, especially at these speeds (bright side is that's one less thing to worry about breaking the ship as you travel). It seems that you'd get a better mass ratio from the nuclear option.
I think something close to the best possible hydrogen fusion drive would give you a mass ratio of around 2.7 for .1 c (30,000 km/s). For .1 c a magsail taking up half the dry mass of the ship is still favorable. In fact I have serious doubts about the feasibility of actually building a fusion rocket that good. The estimate is based on assuming all the energy generated in the reaction goes into accelerating the fuel with ~75% efficiency.
I had another quick thought last night too. How do you time the waking up? The most reliable option might be a nuclear isotope on a kind of kill switch. A given mass will degrade in a known time, without needing outside influence, so it'd be a pretty idiot proof timer. Get the right amount for your trip and boom. The hard part would be getting the thing it triggers to be as stupid simple; perhaps a heat switch. When the radioactivity gets low enough, it cools off and completes the wakeup circuit. Simple, free energy wise, and an accurate, reliable timer; beats anything else I could think of. Next best thing would be a sensor detecting arrival in the destination solar system, but this strikes me as easier said than done. Maybe a magnetic sensor picking up the heliopause? But that's a but too late to begin the slowing down and mapping process.
That reminds me of a discussion I had on the feasibility of Von Neumann probes on SDN. One of the issues that came up was how one would go about waking one up if it was solar powered and so completely shut off during interstellar journeys. I remember one idea I came up with was to have a flask of some substance with a low melting point, and as the probe entered the system and the flask would be warmed by sunlight and the substance would start to evaporate, which would drive a small turbine generator, which would kickstart the electrical system. That only really works for very slow probes though.

I'm trying to remember whether we covered what radioisotopes would have a long enough life to be useful for something like this. Anyway, the discussion is found in here, and is somewhat related to what we're talking about now, so you might find it rather useful.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Let's get back to my plot overview for this post. I'm going to do a simple list of big elements in the main canon stor, and then ask if they can still be done technically with the change. Going over character motivations and setups, etc., will come later.

Starting off, everything prior to first contact (well, detection) can remain the same. Astronomers might see the incoming starships, or they might not. They are pretty far out and not emitting all that much. The deceleration period would take several years, and would more likely be detected, but can also be close enough to first contact as to not significantly affect the events before.


We start off with sending robot probes to check out the new discovery. This still works. A difference is the probes will more likely be discovered early on, and will have less info to fetch, but it can be done.

Then the debate about whether to shoot first or talk. Still valid - there's a chance to disrupt the colony as it is thawing.

First contact - a multi year mission to spend time with the newbies and learn about them. Works.

Scientific exchange - problem here is what can a young civilization offer to a far future interstellar race? Not really that much, but perhaps some raw data. They could also exchange science for culture; the dialog can certainly still happen and be exciting for people involved on both sides. Works.

Request for a research colony on the planet. Definitely can happen. A difference though is the humans can provide their own transport. Perhaps their industry is too busy working on local stuff though, so they are still limited in this.

The researchers misbehave (unauthorized medical experiments, if you know what I mean) leading to their expulsion. Can happen - perhaps more likely with their own transport, since they could smuggle naughty stuff in and out more easily.

One of the small escort ships for the transport has a problem, leading to the disaster in space adventure. This is iffy - we have to come back to it. The details certainly must be different, since the setup directly depends on the FTL drive, but we should be able to salvage it (and we must).

The expulsion leads to icy relations for a while. Still works, though now they can see each other through telescopes. That's ok though, and might work to an advantage.


The focus shifts to humanity for a little while. The expulsion and subsequent fallout encourages rifts among them; the groups among them split further apart as a result of this. Combined with other factors all coming together at once, World War III breaks out. This can still happen, though the factions wouldn't be as separate now, so it is less believable on its own.

On Earth, nations have their preexisting differences which provided the powder keg. You'd imagine that if people are leaving for a far away star together, it would be folks who generally get along already. They spent everything together to go on this long mission, and now a fairly minor quibble with some aliens has them willing to kill each other? I don't buy it.

But, it is workable anyway. Just because they got along before they left doesn't mean they still have to get along now. The decades of hardship in setting up the new colony combined with time just changing people means a lot of resentment can stir up. Moreover, just because they were willing to leave together doesn't mean they necessarily love each other. Maybe they just hate each other less than they hate the rest of their neighbors, and figured they are stronger together than apart. And it didn't quite work out that way.

(Having two groups would be nice too, since in the old timeline, there are francophones and anglophones together in the Star Empire and the future branches tend to congregate along language lines. We can keep that here.)

So not as simple as before, but still plenty of potential to work with.



Now, the aftermath of WW3 has to change to some degree. In the OTL [old time line], it brought up several problems that were solved with SCIENCE, and ultimately led to the creation of the titular Star Empire.

The big picture is Earth was hurting bad - climate change, lack of resources, destroyed infrastructure, all at once - and they ended up sending a message to an A'millian spy probe (still arriving like clockwork, despite the icy relations) asking for help. The debate happens again - think Star Trek VI's meeting scene after Praxis (oh man, good film!) - but they decide to take up the challenge to help humanity recover. I call this period the Restoration.

This is one of my favorite parts of the story - problem after problem solved with the power of space science - but probably needs huge changes to work here. It might be the breaking point of the possibility.

Anyway, let's discuss individual items:

1) Kessler syndrome in Earth orbit means getting to space is a no-go. No more satellites means global communication breaks down, and future wars change. This was the first problem that had to be solved in the Restoration, amplified by the logistics of getting out there. Seeing how they are not in Earth orbit in the NTL [new time line], this must change, but some of the spirit can surely be salvaged.

2) The biggest challenge in helping out is the logistics. Starfleet could carry hundreds of folks over at once, but keeping them supplied is hard, and carrying big heavy equipment is near impossible. Previously, they'd depend on the locals to take care of that stuff, but if the locals had it all now, they wouldn't need help.

It has to be solved with some part local alliance, some part automated machinery going ahead to set up a base, and some part people just plain cutting back.

Much of this remains, but not all of it. With my beautiful station idea not being entirely workable, it keeps the mass problems at least. A big difference is more people can stay behind on A'millia and still help out in fast time. (The FTL launch windows before meant the home team could help, but had several years lag, during which time people died, so putting dudes on site, including a mission commander, was a necessity. Not as much here, but still somewhat. If nothing else, having people actually there would be a morale boost, so it is warranted to some extent.)

3) Also, hundreds of folks really isn't that much. They have to make the most of multiplying their effort. In the OTL, manpower had to come from the locals. A lot of the ground work was fairly simple after the scientists got their samples. They work out what to do, engineer the crops, etc. Then, local manpower is used to plant them and ultimately put a stop to the food crisis (the most politically unstabilizing thing as well as the biggest humanitarian disaster).

These local laborers were often recruited from anarchist territories, with promises of protection and a better life in the long term in exchange for hard work now. That protection would come in the form of local cops (reinforced by A'millian knights (often in the local form of remote operated robots) and French soldiers. France was the industrialized country that came out of this in the best shape; they were still self-sufficient and would likely make a full recovery without intervention given enough time. Knowing this, they were a bit reluctant to accept an outside power as an equal, but nevertheless accepted, providing huge amounts of support to the effort, figuring a recovered world sooner rather than later is in their best interests as well as the morally right thing.) and lasers from orbiting starships to take out trouble spots.

People accepted, figuring the promises sounded good, and besides, guaranteed little rations now under the protection of these foreigners beats getting murdered for what you gather by the locals or starving to death.

As the situation improved, these people and their families became royal subjects, and the farms they worked became A'millian territories. The King's men were good to them; far better than anyone else in recent memory, and this brought legitimate loyalty that lasted for hundreds of years.

With a sizable portion of humans proud to be A'millian subjects, the fears of amillia being crushed under human wrath could finally fade away. We were actually strong too now; no more bluffing required. This is the a big real reason the government agreed to help in the restoration, and it proved to be a complete success. Everybody wins. (This also opens the doors to many more foreign adventures story wise, and kicks off the first space habitats, leading to the fun of space fighters and such. And having a presence on a planet with potential enemies leads to the fun of air forces and navies too.)


In the NTL, how much of this would remain? The limitations on manpower sticks there due to the logistics, but why do they need locals? Why would the locals join them? How would they help? It all needs to be mutually beneficial - this is primarily a story of science, not of conquest.

Sheer manpower helping solve a food shortage in a space colony seems weird. Why would they accept outside direction for that anyway?


The disaster needs work. What could ruin a space habitat cluster so much that they ask for outside help beyond stuff like supply shipments, but still has people living through it? Greenhouse gases don't work to ruin agriculture; this is all easily controlled. Nukes would fuck up the climate, but wouldn't likely leave survivors.

I'm getting off my numbered points. Let's get back to that and see if any answers come up.

4) I said above that a big problem is food shortage. Climate change, as an effect of the war and other human activities building up, drastically cut agricultural yields throughout much of the world. Destroyed infrastructure means the parts well off can't do much to help everyone else.

The people from space can take immediate steps to help the situation. From growing stuff in orbit and dropping it down from using giant mirrors to block or redirect sunlight to help farms on the ground.

They also do research to help out - taking air and soil samples and engineering crops that can flourish there.

In the NTL, an acceptable solution to these problems is just to migrate to a newly built habitat; there's not much outsiders can really do (they are already in space, so having helpers in orbit is nothing special). The bigger problem is I don't see this happening at all.


Of course, if the colonists terraformed a large moon or something, it could come back to this. But what kind of idiot goes through that kind of trouble when you have all that beautiful stuff in space to work with? (Answer: the kind of idiot whose colony fails during a sudden ice age :P) Bah, it'd probably work, but I really dislike it.

Terraforming does give an easy out for all this - the war fucked up a fragile process, and outside help is needed to put it back on track. But, again, I really don't find it believable that people would choose to live on a planet when they are already in beautiful spacecraft, especially not a planet that needs this much damn work to be livable in the first place.

Conclusion: A solution exists, but I want better options. I'll have to come back to this.

--------

After the Restoration comes the rise into a golden age for mankind. Infrastructure is rebuilt over a long period, and people's grandchildren start to live the space nerd's wet dream. Multiple nations get big space programs and habitat plans in the works (hoping to never need to ask outsiders for help again) and high Earth orbit becomes a diverse playground of awesomeness.

At this point, the setting is pretty well good to go. When I talk about the ase 'verse setting in general, I usually mean this period - you have the busy Earth orbit, the flourishing Earth itself, population growth positive and leveling off to negative [!] as high tech standards of living go global.

It is utopia, and it is all thanks to the power of science, coming from the hard work of humans cooperating with aliens as equals.

With the cost of the restoration off the budget, other fun projects can resume. Starfleet continues its mission to explore strange, new worlds (OTL had ftl missions doing manned flybys of other star systems. NTL can have manned scientific missions to Mercury, Mars, and Saturn! Might change one of the character's college degrees, but still workable - especially if heading toward Mercury. Oh man, that pwns). Transhumanists continue their mission to push the ceiling of mankind's abilities higher and higher (NTL wouldn't necessarily have this as being new inventions, but they can dabble in it once more).

And politics resume.

Anyway though, the setting at this point is pretty much the same in OTL and NTL. A'millia itself is somewhat isolated, but still in easy enough reach. The human territories bring them into the action locally whenever desired though. Most the action takes place in the space habitats.

Everything remains workable with very few differences.

What are these differences? Well, the second war involved moving a space fortress into position. The reason it was moved was actually to move the ftl jump point, but the cover story is perfectly workable on its own - the asteroid gives materials, and the fortress gives security. Works.

Pretty much all the same for this period.


Next block of stuff that may need discussion is third war and its aftermath. In the OTL, a group decides to leave everyone else and live in the outer system (no change required, the outer system is a big place). A series of events (which I've written down somewhere, but don't recall right now, so I'll be vague) leads to a war of independence between them and their local supporters and their former masters, and their supporters.

A potential difference is the master nation in the OTL didn't have much interplanetary capability, which really weakened their response to the succession. The NTL can actually keep that; most action will be around the human colony clusters at that gas giant anyway. They asked their old allies, the A'millian starfleet, to head out there and take care of it. (This makes more sense in the NTL, since they have to be interplanetary now anyway to make it out to the outer system!) Inner planets would have more launch windows outward than outer planets too, so that helps the NTL once again.


Now, here's where the bigger differences come in. Remember those unauthorized medical experiments from way back when? That was gathering data for the development of a biological weapon that takes down A'millians, but not humans (it exploits a requirement for some kind of enzyme or whatever; making them descendants of humanity needn't break this, as the requirement can still evolve in the new world).

The data got shelved and forgotten for a long time, but it was never destroyed. It is covertly redeveloped, and now deployed.


In the OTL, this was done by injecting tourists. Thanks to the space fortress being in position, the trip from the territories to the planet is about a week. They could secretly infect someone, and that someone could make it through the grand tour before the bug dies off (it can't survive for long in humans, so it needs to get to the target fairly quickly, and has a two week incubation period in A'millians - by the time they know something is wrong, it is too late to stop the spread).

This is the only way to strike them directly; you have to catch a ride on one of their starships, and they aren't going to green light you bringing an army of nukes or whatever.


What changes in the NTL? Well, getting from the outer system to the planet in a mere week is a stretch. *but* is it impossible? By this point, the infrastructure would be set up. Perhaps laser beam stations can be created to impart huge delta-v to transiting ships.

We're talking 10,000 km/s delta-v, but a 1g burn/flip/burn could get to Earth from Jupiter in just 12 days. That's a lot, but it is similar tech to the starships we know exist here, so it is actually workable, but may need tweaking. (edit: this is actually a huge huge huge delta-v. Just because starships can do it doesn't mean it can be an everyday thing... so it really needs work. I like stationary infrastructure, but this is overdoing it. Below I run with it, but some work is still required. must come back to it)

The other part of this is why not use other methods of exterminating someone? Sharing a solar system means just throwing rocks might work. Or, using an interplanetary ravening death beam of doom (long range x-ray lasers; similar tech to the starships again!)

Surprise, that's why. Dropping a rock is an open act of genocide that isn't going to connect for several years. In that time, you just lost every friend you had, and everyone else has a chance to redirect it. Throwing rocks might work on primitive planet dwellers, but not so much on mature space civilizations.

What about the ravening death beam? It might just not work; x-rays don't pass through a planetary atmosphere that well. It'd heat things up and wouldn't be pretty, but it isn't a surefire death. Moreover, as soon as you open up with it, your life is over. Even if it works, you're finished.

Of course, a conventional invasion is possible too, but you'd have to get through Starfleet and the territorial space militias first. Not going to happen.


So the biological weapon is still a good choice. It can connect, spread, and gives you plausible denability if you do it right. No one is sure about the source; it might even be natural.

It still works.


Now comes the aftermath of the extermination. There's some stuff here that will likely change. The main characters were off world at the time (in the rebel habitat, for personal reasons), and get back shortly after the disaster strikes.

They are unaware of what happened, and have to figure it out and work out a solution on the fly.

In the OTL, they were unaware because they were going through backdoor FTL jump points, getting from Saturn back home (the weirdness of magic drives is sometimes going through two star systems is faster than the direct route). Radio messages of the news just couldn't reach them.

I might be able to keep that. An omnidirectional broadcast wouldn't be very strong at interplanetary distances. It'd probably be broadcast only to people in local orbit, and sent to other population centers via a directed beam. Perhaps directional radio, or maybe comms laser.

However it works though, if you aren't close to a repeater station (say, if you were a private ship en route between the two population centers), you might be out of reach for a while. So that's still workable.


What about the trip? Getting back from Saturn right in time to see the action can be tweaked with launch times. Possible. But, another little element is one of the characters goes, leaving her young child behind (with the kid's father). The OTL expectation was "brb 1 month", but the NTL would require it to be a bit longer. It is hard to believe that a (somewhat) new mother would leave her baby for very long.

Not necessarily - perhaps they could use one of those high speed laser stations to speed right along, but why would the breakaway rebel colony even have one?

One possibility is the meeting doesn't take place in the breakaway colony. It could just as well be moved to the main population centers. So that's workable.

Now, the main laser station brings back the radio blackout problem. This is a fairly well traveled path; wouldn't it have a comms repeater for people on it? Maybe not; perhaps it isn't demanded enough to warrant the expense. Though, this would be a special circumstance - wouldn't you point some radio that way and say "btw, the planet you are heading toward has declared a major global emergency"?

It doesn't make sense. If they take the main station, they have to know about what is going on. This isn't a big change; they find out what they'd learn from the radio quickly enough anyway. So I guess I can work with it.


Next potential change is asking for help from the human territories. In the OTL, this was a difficult thing; the logistics problem is multiplied by the crews being deadly sick. They'd have to send a ship asking for help, and ships to pick up the people and supplies that can help. (Btw, they also recalled their deep space missions, which were mostly in the solar system anyway. Only change is the timing of their return; they'd come from Neptune instead of Jupiter for example, since there's no need to send a ship to explore Jupiter now that there is a colony there. Minor change.)

In the NTL, they just radio for it and let the helpers arrive in their own spacecraft. This means outside assistance can show up easily and in fairly short order; it takes away the "we're the only ship in the quadrent!" aspect.


I could get this back by making the receiving station for the high speed infrastructure stop working, but why would it work for the main guys and suddenly fail afterward? One possibility is making it fail before they arrive, and they need to jury rig some way to slow down. This might be an impossible feat to pull off though!

Also, why would it fail? Easy option is sabotage, and then the people are too busy fighting off the weapon infection to worry about fixing. It makes sense for the genociders to break it, to ensure help can't arrive quickly enough to counter their weapon. But sabotage is an overt act, so there goes their plausible deniability, and they need an agent with the means and opportunity to pull it off. This isn't impossible, but certainly easier said than done.

An easier method might to be to time it all such that the attack takes place when it is down for scheduled maintenance.... this only requires some human intelligence about the timing - which you could get from a publically available "the system will be down for scheduled maintenance" notice!

(What kind of scheduled maintenance would it require? I don't really know, but it seems plausible that it does need some!)

That is deviously brilliant. The maintenance guy starts to work on it (from his teleoperator station on the low orbit space station, right next to the tourist reception area....), then falls ill. Quarantine is ordered, so it never gets put back together.

It might still partially work, letting our heroes use it to slow down, but they break it permanently in the process.

Why would they launch the main guys toward it if they know it is scheduled to be down? Drat. One option is they know the news already and insist to be launched anyway. Not ideal, but workable. Maybe there's an enemy agent who launched them to their doom? Not likely - such a launch would surely have to be approved by several people, and they all can't be enemy agents.

Maybe they were playing with fire - launch when the system is down, knowing it is scheduled to be back up with plenty of time to spare before the people arrive, so there shouldn't be a danger. (The time to spare gives the needed safety margin for normal circumstances at least.) This is a big dangerous, but I could live with it - who would have thought a system meant to go down for days at most would actually end up being down for closer to three weeks?

I think I can work with that.

Also, why would the guys take a "short" trip right next to a scheduled downtime? Perhaps it was scheduled to be repaired before they were meaning to go back, and other shit changed the plans. Fits right into the above, and that works for me.


So we keep the isolated folks, but drop the initial mystery in exchange for some physics drama.


The very last thing is right near the end. It is all surely workable, but I'll discuss it, and come back to the stuff I bolded above, at a later time. I've been typing this post most the day as it is!
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:10,000 years probably isn't enough time for evolution to change most species that much though. They might be altered significantly but they'd probably still be easily recognizable derivatives of terrestrial species. Then again, if we go with punctuated equilibrium model of evolution you might be a surprising amount of change in short time periods.
This is true, and it's ok too, since most the life is remarkably Earth like, and the rest can be derivatives from them... now, I do think punctuated equilibrium has good stuff, and do apply it here - the sudden climate changes kill off some recognizable stuff, leaving only the more esoteric (relevant) variations behind.
Another possibility would be to have the climate shift be an unanticipated effect of the terraforming. The new climate they established wasn't as stable as they thought it was.
Yes, that could work, though it goes against the little knock of planets are brutal on their own. I might be using failed terraforming later on too - my giant post above discusses it in part. I'm undecided so far.

10,000 years ago Lake Champlain was open to the ocean because the land was still springing back from being pushed down by the ice age glaciers, allowing the ocean to penetrate to the Champlain Valley.
How cool!

I'm such a nerd; these geology facts are so much more interesting to me than the characters or plot (or wars) that most people want from their reading!
I think something close to the best possible hydrogen fusion drive would give you a mass ratio of around 2.7 for .1 c (30,000 km/s). For .1 c a magsail taking up half the dry mass of the ship is still favorable. In fact I have serious doubts about the feasibility of actually building a fusion rocket that good. The estimate is based on assuming all the energy generated in the reaction goes into accelerating the fuel with ~75% efficiency.
Oh hell, you're right. My analysis was too simplistic.
That only really works for very slow probes though.
Aye, too little headtime to get down from .1c.
I'm trying to remember whether we covered what radioisotopes would have a long enough life to be useful for something like this. Anyway, the discussion is found in here, and is somewhat related to what we're talking about now, so you might find it rather useful.
I remember the thread. I think I skimmed it the first time though.

Skimming it again now. There's a lot of good stuff in there - warming the equipment is something good to do, but not really impossible if you can trigger it somehow. (worst case, burn some kerosene). Nothing specifically about the radioactive trigger. But one isotope that comes to mind with a half life in the right ballpark is Carbon-14.

How to bring this to a working system though is beyond me. I'm ok with just waving my hands; I'm pretty sure the problem can be solved, which puts it ahead of FTL anyway.

Wyrm did say one thing early on though that got my attention:
Wyrm wrote:For a first place to settle —when energy is at a premium— a planet is the way to go. While an asteroid belt will contain the most usable material overall, it's not all in one place, and grouped into easily-accessible and sizable deposits as it is on a planet.
I don't buy this for our situation here; asteroid mining seems the way to go. The costs shouldn't be all that bad, especially with moons of a gas giant. But, perhaps using a larger moon to get started is still ok to get kickstarted, and it can help me in my Restoration dilemma. I can push the crash ahead on the time table for a while - they use it as a starting point and intend to go into space eventually, but shit happens. Maybe. Blargh. I still don't like it.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Your ideas sound good to me so far. Yeah, integrating your old ideas about the recovery with a space colony set-up could be sort of difficult. Unless ... hmm, maybe there was some sort of war convention that you don't simply blow up each other's colonies. That strikes me as reasonable, just like we didn't nuke Baghdad and Kabul even though we easily could have. Then you might end up with a situation where the colonies are intact but all the infrastructure is destroyed, and you end up with O'Neill or Bernal type colonies going to seed, with impoverished inhabitants living on the inside. If the colony is basically a box of astrocrete filled with air with a sunroof I could see them being naturally self-sustaining, so as long as they're not simply blown up you could get a situation where technological civilization collapses but some people survive. Of course if they're at a gas giant insufficient sunlight may be a problem. How long could a collecting mirror system go without maintenance before it started to fail?

This gives me a mental image of a scenario similar to this, but where the technological civilization has completely collapsed and no help came for thousands of years; the survivors have formed Midaeval-type societies within the colonies, and don't even realize the nature of the worlds they inhabit. I wonder how long such a situation could be sustainable. Hmm, I might just incorporate something like this into my own uni. It'd be cool to imagine explorers finding some abandoned but still living alien O'Neill-type colony around some random red dwarf.
Destructionator wrote:How cool!

I'm such a nerd; these geology facts are so much more interesting to me than the characters or plot (or wars) that most people want from their reading!
Have you ever checked out this site? You might find it interesting.
How to bring this to a working system though is beyond me. I'm ok with just waving my hands; I'm pretty sure the problem can be solved, which puts it ahead of FTL anyway.
I remember one of the ideas I came up with was a wind-up mechanical timer. I'm kind of skeptical of how practical a mechanical timer that takes hundreds or thousands of years to wind down would be, but I personally find the idea sort of cool in a Refuge In Audacity way.

A radioisotope timer that triggers a mechanical trigger seems most plausible to me. Just doing some quick Googling, Wikipedia says U-233 has a half-life of 159,000 years, so there are definitely radioisotopes with suitably long half-lives.
I don't buy this for our situation here; asteroid mining seems the way to go. The costs shouldn't be all that bad, especially with moons of a gas giant. But, perhaps using a larger moon to get started is still ok to get kickstarted, and it can help me in my Restoration dilemma. I can push the crash ahead on the time table for a while - they use it as a starting point and intend to go into space eventually, but shit happens. Maybe. Blargh. I still don't like it.
I strongly suspect the whole "planets have lots of resources in one place" thing is overrated. You probably should be able to find very rich asteroids (much richer than planetary crusts to a great extent, since most of the juicy heavy elements haven't settled into the difficult to access core), and even middling asteroids (a few km) have billions of tons of material. Besides, are all the rich mineral deposits on a planet actually in one place? I'm no geologist but I have the impression that areas that are rich in one type of mineral aren't necessarily rich in others. So I imagine you'd have to end up moving around substantially on a planet's surface to get to all the resources you'd need, unless you have can economically seive trace elements out of the local environment and/or build most of what you need out of really common elements like carbon, in which case asteroids or even dirty snowballs should be able to meet your needs just fine unless you're planning construction on a really grand scale. This isn't mentioning the inherent disadvantages of having to deal with a deep gravity well and possibly an atmosphere that a planet has, which are nontrivial inconveniences.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:Unless ... hmm, maybe there was some sort of war convention that you don't simply blow up each other's colonies.
The biggest problem story wise with blowing them up is if you destroy them, there's nothing left to recover.

In universe, habitats are hard to crack anyway (a nuke would do the job of course). Though, their destruction would be a pretty spectacular sight.

An O'Neill cylinder is held together by cables under tension. There's a safety margin built into the design, but still, if you compromised enough of the cables, it would literally spin itself apart. So a nuke inside pushes the air outward with extreme force. This instantly shatters the windows, allowing the superheated plasma to escape through it - there's the first thing for TV, and this might save the superstructure. But the heat also weakens the cables, causing them to weaken, stretch and break.

With each one breaking, the tension on the others has to increase to compensate... and they are weakened too, so they break. Now, even the full strength ones break.

Out from the explosion, you'd see the hot plasma blast out, then a cascade of breaking cables with pieces flying off on tangent lines. There might be a point where enough of it breaks off that the remaining cables actually survive (perhaps with people inside in shelters being ok too), but you'll have one broken can at that point.

Fully destroyed or not, that'd be one visually impressive CGI show in a movie!
That strikes me as reasonable, just like we didn't nuke Baghdad and Kabul even though we easily could have.
You might also be interdependent on the other habitats. Destroying them might send debris at you, or you might be literally tethered to them too.

Of course, limited war has its game theory advantages too; if you go all out on them now, everyone else will go all out on you later. Being limited now lets you enjoy those limitations yourself when on the receiving end.
Then you might end up with a situation where the colonies are intact but all the infrastructure is destroyed, and you end up with O'Neill or Bernal type colonies going to seed, with impoverished inhabitants living on the inside. If the colony is basically a box of astrocrete filled with air with a sunroof I could see them being naturally self-sustaining, so as long as they're not simply blown up you could get a situation where technological civilization collapses but some people survive.
Aye. The wars could have bombing of factories and such inside the hab too; it need not be all external. (Mobile Suit Gundam ran with this too. The Zeon fighter isn't an airplane; it is built to sit in the axis of a cylinder and take down its targets, flying on inertia and aerodynamics, but no gravity.)
Of course if they're at a gas giant insufficient sunlight may be a problem.
Even in the outer system, the mirrors would work; you'd just make them bigger. O'Neill calculated that if a habitat was 50% mirror by mass, it could collect sunlight beyond the orbit of Pluto sufficient to operate!
How long could a collecting mirror system go without maintenance before it started to fail?
Probably quite some time. The mirrors themselves are dirt simple (aluminum foil) with no special stresses; they'd need to be replaced eventually as the solar wind and micrometeors take down the reflectiveness (is that a word?), but this would take a long time.

The big problem would be the system that keeps them aligned with the sun and rotates day and night. Being aligned with the sun can probably be kept with rotation of the whole hab as it orbits, especially if in solar orbit; it'd take some precision angular momentum, but it doesn't need an active system in theory to rotate the habitat at the exact rate such that it always points at the sun.

Wikipedia agrees:
Wikipedia wrote: The habitat and its mirrors must be aimed at the sun. O'Neill and his students carefully worked out a method of continuously turning the colony 360 degrees per orbit without using rockets that discard reaction mass. [20] First, the pair of habitats can be rolled by operating the cylinders as momentum wheels. If one habitat's rotation is slightly retarded, the two cylinders will rotate about each other. Once the plane formed by the two axes of rotation is perpendicular (in the roll axis) to the orbit, then the pair of cylinders can be yawed to aim at the sun by exerting a force between the two sunward bearings: away from each other will cause both cylinders to gyroscopically precess, and the system will yaw in one direction, towards each other will cause yaw in the other direction. The counter-rotating habitats have no net gyroscopic effect, and so this slight precession can continue for the habitat's orbit, keeping it aimed at the sun.
Awesome. Seeing how it is all inertia, this could continue on practically forever.

What about the day/night cycle?

To quote Wiki again:
Large mirrors are hinged at the back of each stripe of window. The unhinged edge of the windows points toward the Sun. The purpose of the mirrors is to reflect sunlight into the cylinders through the windows. Night is simulated by opening the mirrors, letting the window view empty space; this also permits heat to radiate to space. During the day, the reflected Sun appears to move as the mirrors move, creating a natural progression of Sun angles. Although not visible to the naked eye, the Sun's image might be observed to rotate due to the cylinder's rotation. The light reflected from the mirrors is polarized, which might confuse bees.[16]
This is the part most likely to fail. It involves moving parts with more than just inertia. It might also put stress on the foil, and break it, but it shouldn't be a problem; the gears could just be made so it is physically impossible to break the mirrors..

Mobile Suit Gundam, again having done the research(!), had a colony with failed mirrors too. They were locked in the day position, and as a result, the habitat overheated and dried out - thus, dying out. The people in the show just abandoned it.

But I could see this system failing in various ways. Imagine if it is literal mechanical gears. Proper maintenance might involve replacing parts as they wear out or break.

What happens if they don't? Well, suppose a gear has a broken tooth. The piece might jam it right up, locking the mirrors in a particular state - perpetual day, night, twilight, whatever.

If it doesn't jam, such a problem might change the day length ever so subtlely. Perhaps this would lead to one perpetual season; the days are shortened, so it tends toward longer winter. Or longer, so it tends toward summer.

I say tends toward because the system might be fairly complex, and change day length through another mechanism. So you had 10 hour days in winter, moving gradually to 15 hour days in summer. But this broken system makes 9 hour days in winter moving to 14 hour days in summer. There's a whole pile of possibilities.

Note too that an O'neill habitat has three independent mirrors. One might fail while the others keep working. Would be weird, but surely surviveable.
I wonder how long such a situation could be sustainable. Hmm,
The long term problem isn't any individual failure, but a whole bunch of little ones adding up over time. Mirror 1 might break, and its ok. Then a window pane breaks, and its ok (air leaks aren't a huge problem for a long time, during which time it might solve itself; something blows in to block it). A cable stresses and breaks, but the safety margin accounts for it. In a properly maintained hab, the DPW repair crews just take care of it and nobody even cares.

The ecosystem would be scary, but if big enough, they have a way to correct themselves, so probably ok.

It isn't until a whole pile of things break at once that it becomes catastrophic. The locals might even learn to jury rig some of the broken stuff without fully understanding it. That would be a sight.

Oh the horror would be if the last straw was the outside visitors coming in! But yeah, I can see it working. A broken mirror system leading to one third of it being stuck in perpetual twilight would be pretty gnarley too.
I might just incorporate something like this into my own uni. It'd be cool to imagine explorers finding some abandoned but still living alien O'Neill-type colony around some random red dwarf.
Yes, indeed. And it puts a sock in the mouths of those people who say "lol they must fail".
Have you ever checked out this site? You might find it interesting.
Sweet, thanks.
I remember one of the ideas I came up with was a wind-up mechanical timer. I'm kind of skeptical of how practical a mechanical timer that takes hundreds or thousands of years to wind down would be, but I personally find the idea sort of cool in a Refuge In Audacity way.
Oh, it'd be hard to make it work, especially with accuracy after so long. Being slightly wrong could be a full failure for the mission.
A radioisotope timer that triggers a mechanical trigger seems most plausible to me. Just doing some quick Googling, Wikipedia says U-233 has a half-life of 159,000 years, so there are definitely radioisotopes with suitably long half-lives.
Aye.
I strongly suspect the whole "planets have lots of resources in one place" thing is overrated.
The thing I find most absurd is when people argue you don't have the bring the resources to you when on a planet. That's why there's no bulk transport of ore amirite?

The big thing is planets (well, Earth anyway, not all do) do have big veins of ore, which is nice, but it is fairly uniform; one thing in one place. You still have to travel to get the stuff together, and instead of shooting it through a device, you have to pull it out of gravity and into your device.

And the energy objection shows planetary thinking too. Even if it does take more energy to do the job in space, it doesn't matter - there's more energy available in space! The sun just sends gobs of it at you 24/7.


I'm only even considering it because I want to set up a system to fail, but do so in a justifiable manner.
So I imagine you'd have to end up moving around substantially on a planet's surface to get to all the resources you'd need, unless you have can economically seive trace elements out of the local environment and/or build most of what you need out of really common elements like carbon, in which case asteroids or even dirty snowballs should be able to meet your needs just fine unless you're planning construction on a really grand scale. This isn't mentioning the inherent disadvantages of having to deal with a deep gravity well and possibly an atmosphere that a planet has, which are nontrivial inconveniences.
Exactly.

You ever notice too when people talk about landing on a planet, it is always the Moon or Mars? Why is that? Because they are the closest ones to open space! Nobody considers a colony on Venus, or Jupiter, or Saturn, or Neptune, or Uranus, because they'll kill you dead just for trying. Mars and the Moon at least don't actively try to crush you.

rant over
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:Aye. The wars could have bombing of factories and such inside the hab too; it need not be all external. (Mobile Suit Gundam ran with this too. The Zeon fighter isn't an airplane; it is built to sit in the axis of a cylinder and take down its targets, flying on inertia and aerodynamics, but no gravity.)
Zero gee aircraft would probably have an interesting design. I now have a vague idea for a habitat that had the gravity fail and has been abandoned for millions of years, and life has adapted to freefall. You'd get things that are sort of like air-fish (built for the air, but built more like marine animals than birds). I remember I once found a site on the internet where somebody did some art projecting what such life would be like. You had a torpedo shaped animal with fin-like wings.
Yes, indeed. And it puts a sock in the mouths of those people who say "lol they must fail".
Yeah, I'm kind of envisioning a very minimalistic habitat, basically an astrocrete box with a sun roof, that manages to survive millions of years after being abandoned.

I realized that it would solve a lot of problems if I assume the species that built it was native to a tidally locked red dwarf planet, so they were used to and enjoyed perpetual sunlight. You could get away with having no mirrors then; just point the habitat toward the star pole-on. You should get perpetual illumination with the sun low in the sky, just like the near-terminator zone of their homeworld.

One thing I wonder about that is exactly what the sky would look like. Would you get perpetual sunset? I'd think for sunset you'd need the sun to actually be eclipsed by the horizon, which wouldn't happen. So I'm sort of envisioning a sun hanging just above the horizon line, maybe with perpetual twilight in areas where tall buildings or hills block it. Sound about right?
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Somes J wrote:I now have a vague idea for a habitat that had the gravity fail and has been abandoned for millions of years, and life has adapted to freefall.
How would the gravity fail? Remember it is just angular inertia keeping it going.

One possibility is for a gradual failure. A habitat would be two counter-rotating cylinders, so the net angular momentum of the whole thing is zero. The two sides needn't be connected by more than just some cables, but it is reasonable to think they might have more to allow easy foot travel between the two. edit: Well, they might be dozens of miles apart, but it is zero-g, so you can kinda just fly across. Perhaps originally it was a train tube like thing. /edit

Say there's a wee bit of friction on that connection; negligible in the short term, so you don't worry about damage to the connection, but over the course of thousands of years without maintenance, it slows both cylinders down (equally of course, due to conservation) until they finally stop.

The beings inside would probably never even notice it, since the change is so gradual.

I suppose tiny friction is to be expected on just cables too. Without some energy input, stopping might just be inevitable.
I realized that it would solve a lot of problems if I assume the species that built it was native to a tidally locked red dwarf planet, so they were used to and enjoyed perpetual sunlight. You could get away with having no mirrors then; just point the habitat toward the star pole-on. You should get perpetual illumination with the sun low in the sky, just like the near-terminator zone of their homeworld.
You have to be careful about heat. On a planet, you probably have an atomsphere, which takes the hot air from the sun side and carries it to the night side, where it can be radiated away into space. The convection would bring your thermal equilibrium down to a livable level.

A habitat wouldn't have this; it'd have to radiate based just on its surface area. A cylinder might be able to make it work though, since it has more surface area pointing toward space than it does toward the star.

You could also perhaps move it away from the star somewhat, so sunlight in = heat radiated out without any active system required.
One thing I wonder about that is exactly what the sky would look like. Would you get perpetual sunset?
I laid in my bed thinking about this last night, and came to a disappointing conclusion. I think the sky would be blue all the time, just with a different intensity.

The sky is blue because the short wavelengths scatter more easily than the long ones. The blue light gets scattered throughout the atmosphere and the yellows and reds go straight through.

At sunset, the sunlight has to pass through a lot more air, so the longer wavelengths get scattered too; blue and yellow in the sky, with the reds only passing right though.

At twilight, scattering still makes a difference. The sunlight doesn't directly reach us anymore, but it hits atmosphere past the horizon which reflects and scatters some our way anyway.


All this only happens because the earth has an atomsphere and is a sphere. A space habitat has an atomsphere, but only a couple miles of it (in Island III; you can go bigger or smaller) from any angle.

As the mirrors rotate, the sun disc will move, but it isn't actually passing the light through any more atomsphere. It is still pretty much a straight shot into the colony. It seems to me like the scattering should be pretty uniform; probably just the blues at any given time.

One possibility to keep it is to have something near the windows with a higher density. I really like the idea of filling the window areas with water (and have ran with this in the setting; I discuss submarine colony invaders in a thread somewhere; I think in the TSW forum). Water is mostly transparent*, so the sun still shines through.

EDIT: * But if stuff started growing in there, it wouldn't be... perhaps it won't matter or can just be cleaned. Also, even if you don't fill the windows with water, I remember someone saying some would pool in there and frost anyway, so maybe a similar effect without fear of growth.

Btw, on water scattering, have you ever shot a laser pointer at a clear dish of water? It purtty. /EDIT.

It also gives the habitat a big reserve in case something goes wrong, and provides a stabilizing sink - the water holds heat, evening things out during the day, it can hold CO2 to help keep the atmosphere regulated without an active system. Water is a useful buffer for a lot of things.

There's also the potential beauty of taking a boat onto those lakes at night. It'd be literally sailing on the stars - look down and see them through that window, and look up and see them through the others.

Physically, it adds to the weight the windows must hold, but it's ok; they have steel frames doing most the work anyway. I'm confident real engineers can work out the specifics.

Also, you can have something floating in the water such that if a pane breaks, the water flow through it carries this blocker into place. Failsafe until crews can arrive to fix it properly.

Anyway, it is cool and the justifications make enough sense.


But, related to this, the benefit is water bends light a lot more quickly than air. I don't remember all the physics behind it, but would passing through a steeper angle of water serve to scatter the sun's light similar to a steeper angle of air?

Biggest problem to me seems to be that if it scattered throughout the water, you'd have an orange section of the sky; directly where the water is, but not so much everywhere else, since the air is still the same. I doubt it would give the same result as we get here.

Kinda disappointing. No aurora either, speaking of the sky. But not a huge deal, and possibly solvable with fancier windows or something. Maybe the water plan would be good enough? I don't know.
I'd think for sunset you'd need the sun to actually be eclipsed by the horizon, which wouldn't happen. So I'm sort of envisioning a sun hanging just above the horizon line, maybe with perpetual twilight in areas where tall buildings or hills block it. Sound about right?
Yeah, it does. You could get more dimness as more of the sun's disc is blocked below the horizon, but I generally agree here.

There is one possibility that I'm seeing only now as I draw a picture. Forgive my bad Paint again.

Image

Would our guys see separate suns through each window? They aren't supposed to. What must happen in the side windows angle their mirrors such that the sun's disc doesn't actually come in through them unless it is that right time of day. Otherwise, they angle toward something else.


But I don't see how that would work. Without the spherical atmosphere, the light in the sky wouldn't be uniform either without the other mirrors doing their part, so it would be weird if they angled away.

Perhaps it puts the disc right below the horizon, taking advantage of the fact that the people are basically in depressions to still get light in, but not the sun's shape.

If I drew the picture to scale, I think it would be showing that now. (Someone sailing on the other window might actually see two suns though. And a third one below them. The angle can't really solve it at all times, just in the common ones.)


Blargh, I don't think it works for twilight anyway. Hills can do the job though for local areas.


These changes are minor - less orange and scattered light; a lot of people might not even notice, but it seems like it has to be somewhat different. (And please, correct me if you find a flaw in my reasoning or a source that says otherwise. I should check my copy of The High Frontier.)

The most Earth like habitats for the sky might be the closed, completely artificial ones. They can just have a big screen and fake lights create the sky scenery. They'd be living in a giant planetarium. But this requires too much maintenance to work for a regressed civilization. It might work in smaller habs, which have artificial plumbing for rain too though.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Man, it was November 2006 when I started my kick on habitats (the receipt to my High Frontier copy is still in the pages). Been a long time.

Chapter 5 has him saying habitats are large as 80 miles long and 16 miles wide could be built with just iron and aluminum, 1970's tech. The air pressure inside would be like that of Denver. He says such would be wasteful of materials and thus uneconomical at first, but could be done as space civilization becomes richer.

That's incredible. I thought Island III was reaching peaks of iron, but I seem to have remembered it incorrectly - Island III was just the point of diminishing returns for the early economy.

This changes the cascade failure I talked about above. There'd be a lot of excess strength i those cables; they are even harder to break entirely. It also gives more leeway to stack the habitat with underground facilities, if you are into that kind of thing.

Page 39 has Dr O'Neill saying (bolding mine) "A dweller in one of the valley areas will look up and see a blue sky, obtained probably by art rather than nature -- it will be rather easy to control the reflectance of the mirrors and the tinting of the windows area ("solars") to give a blue tint to the solars."

This mechanism still sticks to my hypothesis though, that there won't really be orange sky dawns/dusks.

He says the angle of the sun in the sky could be set by the cable length on the mirrors, and could be altered, but probably won't be. So less chance for failure there, though my gears mechanism I do think would also work; I don't see any physical blocker to it.


Hah, page 43: "Perhaps by the time such a community is built families will also be able to communicate with a central library though the same microwave link." Nice wireless internet there.

He also discusses having homes exposed to space through their floor, for big space windows or solar power reflected up for heating (the latter seems far more useful). Such seems unlikely to me.

Chapter 6, he says the two cylinders in the pair would be 50 miles apart, so yea, a long ass walk. He proposes a bus attached to the hull of the cylinder to be used for commuting - the tangential velocity when it lets go gives it a lot of speed, crossing the gap in 8 minutes, and then the other cylinder rotates in the opposite direction, so it appears stopped relative to the bus! This requires precision timing, so it wouldn't work for a tech failed colony.

And of course magnetic trains going between pairs.


Mang, good book. I've gotta read it all again.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Magister Militum »

:shock: 80 miles?! Wow, I was really off when I though things like Island III where the biggest you could get with things such as iron.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

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Me too, actually. On the size, it doesn't seem to me that length should be a breaker too... the forces on the hull are from the rotation, which changes with diameter, but not with length. You might be able to keep the same diameter (16 miles is the upper end with steel holding a breathable atmosphere, according to O'Neill's book), and scale up the length even more. Pressure on the end caps is the only potential problem I can think of; that's the only force that would be trying to pull it apart in the length direction.

It'd probably take a real engineer to math it up and see how it works though. Perhaps O'Neill's students did that, and that's where the 1/4 ratio came from. I don't know.

-------

Anyway, I'm returning to this thread because I did a tangential hijack over on SDN and was blabbing about something I find super cool.

Here's the thread:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=143623

I basically hijacked it, starting here: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8#p3357378


The first post might sound familiar, as it is based on a discussion Somes J and I had earlier in this thread, about the habitat failure modes. My next post there gets into the fun stuff: having someone explore a failed cluster. Having it be a failed interstellar colony (man, that's 3 of those in this thread!) is cool because it could then plausibly be abandoned for thousands of years; if it was in the home system, why didn't their neighbors rescue them?


My latest post there talks about where the failure is, and how you'd get there.


One possibility is slowboating the explorers in on their own starship. Straightforward and simple, but would be hard to fit into this 'verse's timeline.


Another is using mind upload tech to send your characters there without sending a physical body. This is pretty outstanding story wise: they are physically isolated from everything, so they have to make due with what they have, round trip communication still takes years so they are pretty well talk separated too from base.... but, this equipment lets villains follow them in discretely. A few weeks after the good guys leave, some bad guys leave too. Good guys don't know until they meet up for the first time on location.


While I like the story potential, it doesn't fit into my technophobism in this 'verse. Bringing me to option three: The failed cluster is in the same solar system as everyone else.


This thread is all about colonists slowboating in. There's two groups: the first, who are very slow and become the spacer humans, and the second, moving much faster and eventually become the planetary a'millians.

But, what happened to the second group's starship? I think this is where our potential is.


What they would have had to do was go ahead and terraform the planet. Meanwhile, they have to wait on starships. The ideal situation is to send some robots ahead, so by the time you get there, it's ready to go, but let's say that can't do the whole job; eventually, the life forms must be brought in, and they ride with you (one cryoship group carries all the embryos and such).


Since the planet isn't 100% ready yet, you live in orbiting habitats while overseeing the final stages. You wake up most, if not all, of your expedition on orbit so you can all drop down at once and get to work. Hence, the habitat cluster is actually fairly sizable.


Now, the planet is ready for the people. But, some of them say "why the fuck would I slave away on that planet when I could instead live well up here?" (That's my biggest beef with interstellar planet colonization. Why would you abandon your beautiful space habs for an undeveloped world?)

So, the majority go down, but a minority doesn't want to and stay in space. The planet bound guys aren't happy about this - these other people came all this way, willing to help work to make this happen... just to change their mind after showing up? Fuck those assholes.


This bitter feeling means they aren't really willing to come to each other's assistance when shit starts to break. On the planet, The Environment Strikes Back plays out with the brutality described earlier in this thread, and in space, such small numbers remained that their technological civilization couldn't be maintained over infinite generations. Both portions of the colony end of failing independently, but neither completely. Both regress technologically.


On the planet, their high tech artifacts are lost to nature. In space, the habs each go their own way, failing at random and being forgotten in solar orbit.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

That could definitely be an interesting scenario. When the planetary culture develops a space program they find all these habitats drifting around in the solar system, maybe some of them dead while others are still going and support primitive cultures isolated for thousands of years*.

You wouldn't even necessarily need a schism among the colonists, there might have been two different groups among them that were planning on splitting and going seperate ways all along. Unfortunately they both ran into unanticipated problems.

Hmm, we've already gone over what sort of problems might happen with the planetary colonists, the question is what does in the habitats? Hmm, maybe you could combine this with some ideas from earlier discussion and there was some sort of war. They restrained themselves enough that the habitats themselves weren't damaged, but society got wrecked. Or maybe they were still dependent on the planetside people for some vital technology or resource (no idea what), and when the planetary civilization collapsed they couldn't sustain technological civilization on their own.

* Aside: it occurs to me that you could easily have something like this in our own solar system with alien colonists. I mean, could our telescopes tell the difference between a derelict habitat and a random asteroid in the asteroid belt? If the aliens had taken humans off Earth for some reason you might actually get something like old pulp depictions of an inhabited solar system with people living on Mars and Venus and Titan and whatnot, only with habitats. That might be an interesting setting.
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:That could definitely be an interesting scenario. When the planetary culture develops a space program they find all these habitats drifting around in the solar system, maybe some of them dead while others are still going and support primitive cultures isolated for thousands of years.
Yes, and the beauty is this could be discovered far later; they might be discovered by mistaken for asteroids, or just not discovered at all for a long time. I can roll it out at any convenient time in the timeline.
You wouldn't even necessarily need a schism among the colonists, there might have been two different groups among them that were planning on splitting and going seperate ways all along. Unfortunately they both ran into unanticipated problems.
The problem with that is you'd expect them to bring enough supplies for both to go smoothly; the odds of both failing would be pretty low. With a schism, it is more believable to have both fail together, since they were never meant to work when split up and independent.
Hmm, we've already gone over what sort of problems might happen with the planetary colonists, the question is what does in the habitats? Hmm, maybe you could combine this with some ideas from earlier discussion and there was some sort of war. They restrained themselves enough that the habitats themselves weren't damaged, but society got wrecked.
War might work, but I'm already using that in the "present" times, so redoing it is a bit trite; I like to mix things up. What I'm thinking is just an unintended consequence of poor planning. When they decided to stay in the ships, they didn't think it through for the long term. There weren't enough teachers up there to keep the next generation in the tech.

Two problems with that would be these people might be immortal; they could carry on without a next generation for a long time. The other would be a single AI could serve as teachers. This could perhaps be neutralized by not having enough material for the hands on part of training... all the textbook knowledge is there, but production isn't good enough to learn it well, meaning they waste material in actual use due to mistakes, leading to a long term downward trend...

But, ugh, resupplying shouldn't be a problem.

Realistically, it'll probably be a combination of little factors all hitting at the same time and/or accumulating over the years. The planet side folks took the chip fabs with them, so when the computers start to break down, you can't fix them. The old timers are picked off by accidents, poor nutrition, etc. one by one, and that's skill lost.

Starting with a small pool (because the majority went through with the original plan to live on this new planet), the effects add up quickly. By the time they decide to beg for help from the others, it is too late - the ice age has hit them.
Or maybe they were still dependent on the planetside people for some vital technology or resource (no idea what), and when the planetary civilization collapsed they couldn't sustain technological civilization on their own.
A problem with this is they'd need to have mature launch tech on the planet to send stuff up; this wouldn't be a high priority for them since there's just too much other infrastructure to worry about first.

* Aside: it occurs to me that you could easily have something like this in our own solar system with alien colonists. I mean, could our telescopes tell the difference between a derelict habitat and a random asteroid in the asteroid belt? If the aliens had taken humans off Earth for some reason you might actually get something like old pulp depictions of an inhabited solar system with people living on Mars and Venus and Titan and whatnot, only with habitats. That might be an interesting setting.
Aye, they should look pretty similar, especially if they are more inner to the system than we are. Then, you wouldn't see the big mirrors; it'd just look like an extraordinarily large rock. If the habitats are smaller, they might not look interesting at all. Until you realize they are in a fairly regular cluster on a stable orbit... then it'd be probe time.

I love this kind of answer to the Fermi paradox too: they are here, we just haven't seen them yet! I admit this isn't original - I took the idea from one of Mike Combs' short stories: http://writings.mike-combs.com/eyeshine.htm
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Imagine hitting the gold mine when the explorers take a look... a still operational computer disk. There's the exposition that answers all the open questions as to their origin in one place. The data might be readable too without extraordinary effort, since colony #1, still existing here would have close enough tech and language to colony #2.

The A'millians learn about their past, and the humans learn about a wee bit of their homeworld's future.


This would be my love setting for a video game. It's like Phantasy Star III but even more fantastic. All these fantasy elements in this weird world that lead to sci-fi amazingness. Wow, I love it.
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

side note, I like all of Mike Combs' stories: http://writings.mike-combs.com/shortstories.htm

Every one of them is awesome. I re-read three tonight, but just want to say one thing: http://writings.mike-combs.com/riteques.htm

This story is all about what I love: ask the right question. It involves a piece of fictional science, but uses it in a different way than what you'd expect...
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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Somes J
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:The problem with that is you'd expect them to bring enough supplies for both to go smoothly; the odds of both failing would be pretty low. With a schism, it is more believable to have both fail together, since they were never meant to work when split up and independent.
True.
War might work, but I'm already using that in the "present" times, so redoing it is a bit trite; I like to mix things up. What I'm thinking is just an unintended consequence of poor planning. When they decided to stay in the ships, they didn't think it through for the long term. There weren't enough teachers up there to keep the next generation in the tech.

Two problems with that would be these people might be immortal; they could carry on without a next generation for a long time. The other would be a single AI could serve as teachers.
Sounds reasonably plausible. Ways of getting around those problems: the big problem would be if they didn't have enough technology to maintain their technology. Best way to explain that happening might be if there was some sort of accident/disaster that killed a lot of their people (maybe some kind of deliberate sabotage if you want to avoid portraying habitats as unsafe), including crucial technical people. Have this happen after or roughly simultaneous with the disaster on the planet, so they can't help. AI could be explained by the initial group being relatively technophobic, so they didn't bring any serious AIs with them, and maybe their AI people were lost in the disaster.
I love this kind of answer to the Fermi paradox too: they are here, we just haven't seen them yet! I admit this isn't original - I took the idea from one of Mike Combs' short stories: http://writings.mike-combs.com/eyeshine.htm
It kind of reminds me of this idea for an Avatar fanfic I've played with. I've seen it pointed out a couple of times that Pandora looks like the kind of place an advanced postSingularity civilization might set up for their luddites. Imagine a sequel where humans invade the place, and then somebody spots a bunch of super high-tech warships coming in from Alpha Centauri's Kuiper Belt. It turns out the Na'Vi are basically an advanced postSingularity's equivalent of the Amish, and the rest of the civilization lives in the Kuiper Belt, so humans never saw them (said advanced civilization left their old homeworld with its inconvenient gravity well to their luddites). Now, to extend the analogy, it's sort of as if some 1900s-tech guys started dicking around with the Amish, thinking they were the only people on the planet, and then gets a real nasty shock when a US National Guard unit shows up...
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Re: Possibility: killing FTL via slowboat colonists

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:Sounds reasonably plausible. Ways of getting around those problems: the big problem would be if they didn't have enough technology to maintain their technology. Best way to explain that happening might be if there was some sort of accident/disaster that killed a lot of their people (maybe some kind of deliberate sabotage if you want to avoid portraying habitats as unsafe), including crucial technical people. Have this happen after or roughly simultaneous with the disaster on the planet, so they can't help. AI could be explained by the initial group being relatively technophobic, so they didn't bring any serious AIs with them, and maybe their AI people were lost in the disaster.
That sounds pretty good.
It kind of reminds me of this idea for an Avatar fanfic I've played with. I've seen it pointed out a couple of times that Pandora looks like the kind of place an advanced postSingularity civilization might set up for their luddites. Imagine a sequel where humans invade the place, and then somebody spots a bunch of super high-tech warships coming in from Alpha Centauri's Kuiper Belt. It turns out the Na'Vi are basically an advanced postSingularity's equivalent of the Amish, and the rest of the civilization lives in the Kuiper Belt, so humans never saw them (said advanced civilization left their old homeworld with its inconvenient gravity well to their luddites). Now, to extend the analogy, it's sort of as if some 1900s-tech guys started dicking around with the Amish, thinking they were the only people on the planet, and then gets a real nasty shock when a US National Guard unit shows up...
HAHA! I haven't seen the film myself, but I've seen plenty of threads saying they should nuke the piss out of them... imagine their surprise when the warships come out of the woodwork. Hilarious.
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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