Discussion on diverse Sci-Fi Tropes

[L. Marcus]

I'd like to kick off this thread by raising the topic of colonization of extrasolar planets. Let's assume that Humanity has discovered a relatively cheap and relatively fast FTL (say, at one light-year per day) and has scouted out some life-bearing worlds within reach. Why colonize? With that level of tech, I'd say it's more efficient to go all macro-life -- establish space stations in other star systems, rather than the hassle of trying to survive on a planet with -- in all likelihood -- a biology vastly different from ours.

 

This all assumes a campaign on the high side of the Mohs Scale Of Sci-Fi Hardness, of course. And who knows -- with advances in science, terraforming a barren rock (Mars, probably) or a hothouse hell (Venus, definitely) might be more favorable.

 

Another thing: I'd imagine that humans who have grown up and lived their whole life in a O'Neill cylinder could be predisposed towards agoraphobia. Imagine such a spacer being plonked down in the middle of the Great Plains. I'd give fifty-fifty odds that he or she would lay face down on the ground, grab at the grass and be very reticent to let go.

[Lord Liaden]

Well, planets can give us ready access not only to living space, but raw materials with which to build, and the basis for food production, all in one convenient location. Plus, human beings have evolved to live on planets; we don't really understand yet all the physical and psychological consequences of lifetimes spent in an artificial environment.

 

(I haven't slept enough yet to string more thoughts together coherently. Let me get back to you.)

[L. Marcus]

"Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!"

[massey]

I'd say you colonize planets because there's tons of resources right there.  Building space stations for your habitats eliminates the need to go anywhere else.  There's plenty of room in this solar system without going to another.  There's enough iron ore and other minerals in this system that you're unlikely to run out of stuff to build your stations with.

 

You go to other planets because there's a ready-made ecosystem that you can take advantage of.  I'd imagine if you had relatively cheap, fast FTL, you'd have people scatter all over the dam place.  Humans would go to thousands of worlds.  You might only have a small settlement on each one, but you'd have a lot of them.  Why sit around and take orders from someone, when you can go somewhere else and be in charge?

[NuSoardGraphite]

Considering there are likely millions of earth-like terrestrial worlds in the galaxy, in a space opera setting, saying 10% are compatible with human habitation without any form of terraforming is fairly reasonable. This gives you hundreds of thousands of alien worlds your characters can explore unencumbered. In a harder sci fi campaign it would probably be well below 1 percent, but thats still a few thousand worlds.

 

In my own campaign, which is pretty soft on the science scale, there are probably close to 100 worlds that are compatible with human biology, dozens more that require only filters or hreathers to survive and still hundreds more that require EVAC suits to interact with. Terraforming is slow (takes at least a century) so colonies are concentrated on human compatible worlds with the less compatible worlds being limited to scientiffic research or resource mining.

 

Another option is genetically engineering a generation of humans to be able to survive on normally more hostile worlds. In my campaign seveeral human variants have been created wwith this in mind. There are heavy worlders, spacers (designed to thrive in micro and zero g) ocean worlders (designed to breathe water and survive high pressures) cold worlders (designed to be comfortable at sub zero temperatures for long periods) Gliders (humans designed to live in the floating cities of habitable gas giants. They have membranes which facilitate gliding and limited flight and can also withstand pressure of upper atmosphere of gas giants) and humans designed to breathe different atmospheres such as methane.

[NuSoardGraphite]

I'd say you colonize planets because there's tons of resources right there.  Building space stations for your habitats eliminates the need to go anywhere else.  There's plenty of room in this solar system without going to another.  There's enough iron ore and other minerals in this system that you're unlikely to run out of stuff to build your stations with.

 

You go to other planets because there's a ready-made ecosystem that you can take advantage of.  I'd imagine if you had relatively cheap, fast FTL, you'd have people scatter all over the dam place.  Humans would go to thousands of worlds.  You might only have a small settlement on each one, but you'd have a lot of them.  Why sit around and take orders from someone, when you can go somewhere else and be in charge?

Thats the direction I took with my Star Hero campaign. Humand went in all directions and set up hundreds of colonies. Over the last couple of hundred years, the human government has finally contacted and absorbed most of them (75% ish) but by this time, cultures have diverged considerably so there is a whole lot of diversity just among humans, let alone the aliens they have encountered.

[L. Marcus]

Well, planets can give us ready access not only to living space, but raw materials with which to build, and the basis for food production, all in one convenient location. Plus, human beings have evolved to live on planets; we don't really understand yet all the physical and psychological consequences of lifetimes spent in an artificial environment.

 

(I haven't slept enough yet to string more thoughts together coherently. Let me get back to you.)

 

Mining at the bottom of a gravity well takes more energy than belting, and the resources in question are easier to get at in asteroids and comets. But OTOH, if the culture doing the mining has gravitic technology, or a beanstalk in place ...

 

There is a proposed type of O'Neill habitat that is made by semi-melting a nickle-iron asteroid -- there's a name for them, I wish I remembered what it was. There are a few in Transhuman Space. Anyway, I do doubt that growing up in such an environment would have any appreciable effect on Human physiology; and as for psychology -- well, what one grows up with is what's normal, right?

 

I'd say you colonize planets because there's tons of resources right there.  Building space stations for your habitats eliminates the need to go anywhere else.  There's plenty of room in this solar system without going to another.  There's enough iron ore and other minerals in this system that you're unlikely to run out of stuff to build your stations with.

 

You go to other planets because there's a ready-made ecosystem that you can take advantage of.  I'd imagine if you had relatively cheap, fast FTL, you'd have people scatter all over the dam place.  Humans would go to thousands of worlds.  You might only have a small settlement on each one, but you'd have a lot of them.  Why sit around and take orders from someone, when you can go somewhere else and be in charge?

 

That's another side of colonizing I wanted to talk about -- how ethical is it? Is it ethical to disturb another ecosystem to enrich yourself -- because it will be disturbed, almost no matter what precautions one takes. I've been thinking of it like a very thorough Prime Directive. In 2300 AD, colonists on less bio-compatible worlds import soil from Earth, sterilize some native strip of dirt, mix in the import, plant Earth crops, and subsist on that.

 

Where should one draw the line for interference? Is it okay to colonize and terraform planets that only has bacteria-analogues? Eucaryotes? Multicellular life in the sea, but none on land?

 

Such things ponder I, the geek.

 

Considering there are likely millions of earth-like terrestrial worlds in the galaxy, in a space opera setting, saying 10% are compatible with human habitation without any form of terraforming is fairly reasonable. This gives you hundreds of thousands of alien worlds your characters can explore unencumbered. In a harder sci fi campaign it would probably be well below 1 percent, but thats still a few thousand worlds.

 

In my own campaign, which is pretty soft on the science scale, there are probably close to 100 worlds that are compatible with human biology, dozens more that require only filters or hreathers to survive and still hundreds more that require EVAC suits to interact with. Terraforming is slow (takes at least a century) so colonies are concentrated on human compatible worlds with the less compatible worlds being limited to scientiffic research or resource mining.

 

Another option is genetically engineering a generation of humans to be able to survive on normally more hostile worlds. In my campaign seveeral human variants have been created wwith this in mind. There are heavy worlders, spacers (designed to thrive in micro and zero g) ocean worlders (designed to breathe water and survive high pressures) cold worlders (designed to be comfortable at sub zero temperatures for long periods) Gliders (humans designed to live in the floating cities of habitable gas giants. They have membranes which facilitate gliding and limited flight and can also withstand pressure of upper atmosphere of gas giants) and humans designed to breathe different atmospheres such as methane.

 

Oh, in Space Opera one needs to have planets, that's true. And modern sci-fi games really have to deal with genetic engineering in one way or another, either through Human variants or perhaps Uplift.

[csyphrett]

Something that Drake uses is the interstellar organization with a lot of colony worlds that collapses and the civilizations have to rebuild.

CES 

[massey]

I think ethical questions are for the philosophers.  If there's something valuable out there, people are going to go and take it.  Prime Directive, bah!

[massey]

Mining at the bottom of a gravity well takes more energy than belting, and the resources in question are easier to get at in asteroids and comets. But OTOH, if the culture doing the mining has gravitic technology, or a beanstalk in place ...

 

There is a proposed type of O'Neill habitat that is made by semi-melting a nickle-iron asteroid -- there's a name for them, I wish I remembered what it was. There are a few in Transhuman Space. Anyway, I do doubt that growing up in such an environment would have any appreciable effect on Human physiology; and as for psychology -- well, what one grows up with is what's normal, right?

 

 

Whether it takes more energy or not, well that depends where you're going with the stuff you mine.  On a typical Star Trek M-class planet, you don't have to worry about working in a vacuum, operating in micro-gravity, etc.  You can mine minerals just like we always have.  I think the ability to walk around without a space suit (and thus, scratch your nose) would be appealing to colonists.  On a planet you've also got access to water.  You can be wasteful on a planet, because you're not maintaining a sealed ecosystem.

[DShomshak]

A lot depends on how fast the FTL is and how common easily-habitable planets are. In the Star Hero setting that includes my Planetary Romance world of Sard, there are three modes of FTL. Planoform ships can be very large to carry lots of people and cargo, but aren't very fast (less than 1 LY/day). Linoform ships can travel much faster, but have severe mass limits: You can explore using them, but not send lots of people or cargo. And the punctiform drive is instantaneous and has no mass limit, but only a few super-advanced alien races know how to build it. (And they do it by making the drive external, as Star Gates that send a ship from one fixed gate to another.) The result is that human colonization extends only about 25 LY from Earth... and if anyone took off in linoform ships with a cargo of frozen embryos and uterine replicators, they are effectively gone from the rest of humanity forever.

 

To compensate, I make Earthlike, ready-to-colonize planets fairly common... but not so common that people don't also colonize suboptimal worlds in order to have a place of their own. People who just want mineral resources set up in asteroid belts and on small moons.

 

The Earthlike planets within range receive the lion's share of colonization, though, because they are the easiest to settle. People who really want to stay away from unbelievers and gentiles usually go the belter/O'Neill colony route -- possibly building a bubble asteroid if they can afford it (I think that's what Marcus alluded to).

 

Aliens face the same issues, and only a few species are near enough that there can be meaningful trade or conflict. Anyway, there are no unique material resources worth going a long way to obtain (peacefully or otherwise). Like, if you wanted melange you'd send a linoform ship to Dune to obtain sandworm tissue samples, and clone your own. (Bad example, I know, since Dune is part of a setting with very different FTL made possible by melange.) Or you don't mine dilithium, you goddamn make it from whatever elements go into it (lithium, I presume).

 

Dean Shomshak

[assault]

That's another side of colonizing I wanted to talk about -- how ethical is it? Is it ethical to disturb another ecosystem to enrich yourself -- because it will be disturbed, almost no matter what precautions one takes. I've been thinking of it like a very thorough Prime Directive. In 2300 AD, colonists on less bio-compatible worlds import soil from Earth, sterilize some native strip of dirt, mix in the import, plant Earth crops, and subsist on that.

 

Where should one draw the line for interference? Is it okay to colonize and terraform planets that only has bacteria-analogues? Eucaryotes? Multicellular life in the sea, but none on land?

 

Such things ponder I, the geek.

 

Not to mention the technical aspects of this. After all, biology is primarily microbiology. Living in an alien ecosystem means living amongst its equivalents of bacteria, algae, yeasts etc.

 

It's easy to shoot alien tigers. Not so easy to eradicate an entire ecosystem. And it's not easy to predict the interactions between such an ecosystem and the species that humans would need to introduce if they want to be able to live outside sealed bubbles/cans.

[sinanju]

I'd like to kick off this thread by raising the topic of colonization of extrasolar planets. Let's assume that Humanity has discovered a relatively cheap and relatively fast FTL (say, at one light-year per day) and has scouted out some life-bearing worlds within reach. Why colonize? With that level of tech, I'd say it's more efficient to go all macro-life -- establish space stations in other star systems, rather than the hassle of trying to survive on a planet with -- in all likelihood -- a biology vastly different from ours.

 

This all assumes a campaign on the high side of the Mohs Scale Of Sci-Fi Hardness, of course. And who knows -- with advances in science, terraforming a barren rock (Mars, probably) or a hothouse hell (Venus, definitely) might be more favorable.

 

Another thing: I'd imagine that humans who have grown up and lived their whole life in a O'Neill cylinder could be predisposed towards agoraphobia. Imagine such a spacer being plonked down in the middle of the Great Plains. I'd give fifty-fifty odds that he or she would lay face down on the ground, grab at the grass and be very reticent to let go.

 

I tend to agree. I think we're far more likely to colonize SPACE than other planets. The dangers of space--vacuum, extremes of cold and heat, radiation, etc--are pretty well known. We haven't figured out answers for all of them, especially in the long term, but once we do...the answers will work everywhere. Lack of gravity is another killer problem in the long run (it might prove impossible to adapt to long-term weightlessness, we really don't know yet) but serious colonization will include habitats large enough to use spin for gravity so it needn't be a dealbreaker.

 

Planets, I suspect, will be much harder nut to crack. Every planet (and different parts of the same planet) will throw an endless variety of problems at would-be colonists. Different atmospheric compositions, temperatures, humidity levels, and weather effects. Different gravity. If there's any life at all, it's probably going to be a real problem whether it's microscopic or big enough to eat you. And the alien biology is probably going to interact with terran biology in unexpected ways whenever you least expect it. Unless there's some pressing reason to climb down into a big gravity well, why bother? You can have shirtsleeve environments and nice plants and flowers and animals and lakes, and forests and streams and waterfalls on artificial habitats when they're big enough (and the more practice we get, the bigger we'll be able to make them). Robots can mine the planets for raw materials, and ship it back up out of the gravity well to our safe, comfortable habitats.

[Cancer]

I tend to think that full-out terraforming is a much more difficult and lengthy process than generally acknowledged, and the ideal initial bases for a new-arrived starship will be airless rocky moons, as big as you can find, modulo other issues. Nothing airless will have a full 1 gee of gravity, but up to a quarter or maybe even a half gee could be. Building an atmosphere where one wasn't means moving a lot of comet mass, and frankly, there isn't that much mass in comets to begin with.

 

Remember: the total mass in the Solar System asteroid belt is tiny: less than 5% of the mass of Earth's Moon. There just isn't that much mass in small bodies.

 

I am leery of icy moons. Ice, even at temperatures in the 20 to 100 K range, has a lot of long-term stability issues, and structures built on one will tend to sink into the ground and keep sinking until it hits something denser than it ... quite likely a long way in.

[Clonus]

I'd like to kick off this thread by raising the topic of colonization of extrasolar planets. Let's assume that Humanity has discovered a relatively cheap and relatively fast FTL (say, at one light-year per day) and has scouted out some life-bearing worlds within reach. Why colonize? With that level of tech, I'd say it's more efficient to go all macro-life -- establish space stations in other star systems, rather than the hassle of trying to survive on a planet with -- in all likelihood -- a biology vastly different from ours.

 

 

Importing the necessities of life across space is not so easy.  Just shipping enough air and soil through space to start up an O'Neill colony requires a massive shipping enterprise.  Then there's the fundamental conceptual problem involved in adopting the O'Neill lifestyle...which is why the heck are you doing that?   Think about why people build cities.  There are two basic reasons why people build a town.  Either it's beside or the middle of a exploitable resource or it's on a transportation route, ideally where multiple transportation routes come together.  Empty space is not an exploitable resource.  Nor it is inherently a transportation route.  You might plop a space station in a system that is otherwise worthless, but happens to be conveniently placed for ships that want to resupply and repair on the way from a place that is worth something to another place that is worth something.  You almost certainly would plop at least one space station in orbit around a planet that is worth something for some reason.  It would provide a place for ships to dock when they aren't capable of landing, and large ships almost certainly wouldn't be capable of landing.   You might put one or two in an asteroid belt as a control center for asteroid prospecting and mining...but asteroid prospecting and mining requires a market for the goods.  And that requires a place that actually supports a large population.  Planets support a large population.  Nothing else really does.  Artificial environments are going to be economically self-limiting

 

Mind you the kind of planet that would be worth colonizing are kind of restricted.  Basically you want a planet at a certain stage of development, one where there's a lot of single celled life in the ocean cranking out oxygen, but they haven't extensively moved onto the land yet.  That way we can move Earth life in where people actually live.  

[Zeropoint]

 

Just shipping enough air and soil through space to start up an O'Neill colony requires a massive shipping enterprise.

 

Well, that would by why you MAKE air and soil on-site from local materials. Air is just nitrogen and oxygen. Soil is just mineral grains with water, bacteria, and dead plant bits mixed in. Sure, you'd have to ship some starter cultures of plants and soil bacteria, but you could get the rest from astronomical bodies, and that would be the vast majority of the mass and volume.