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Future Musing: What if we can not reach the Stars?


Christopher

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I was thinking about Orion last night...Footfall used it as Man's last ditch way to fight the Aliens and retake the High ground...the reasons Not to use it are many, and reasonable...for people who live in a Biosphere. But it could be the "go to" tech for mad AI's (!) the drive system is pretty dang close to a "ultimate weapon" and it lets you move around. "Win-win".

 

So lets consider a "Beserker" that builds a Solar halo around a star for Anti-matter, and uses a micro gram or so to trigger tiny to small Fusion reactions. If it decides to run from you, how do you navigate, or target through a chain of mico to mega kiloton blasts?

 

For offense it can use nuke pumped X-ray lasers, and um...nukes :) small 10 ton sized blasts could power small craft, and kinetic kill packages real nice. It can mine Hydrogen from gas giants for moar Bombz! At least you should be able to detect it comming from a long way off...

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I was thinking about Orion last night...Footfall used it as Man's last ditch way to fight the Aliens and retake the High ground...the reasons Not to use it are many, and reasonable...for people who live in a Biosphere. But it could be the "go to" tech for mad AI's (!) the drive system is pretty dang close to a "ultimate weapon" and it lets you move around. "Win-win".

 

So lets consider a "Beserker" that builds a Solar halo around a star for Anti-matter, and uses a micro gram or so to trigger tiny to small Fusion reactions. If it decides to run from you, how do you navigate, or target through a chain of mico to mega kiloton blasts?

 

For offense it can use nuke pumped X-ray lasers, and um...nukes :) small 10 ton sized blasts could power small craft, and kinetic kill packages real nice. It can mine Hydrogen from gas giants for moar Bombz! At least you should be able to detect it comming from a long way off...

Targetting is rather easy: Do not shoot from behind. Catch up with it and fire broadsides.

 

While Gas Giants can be somewhat interesting as fuel source, it really wants to go for Stars. Much more fuel in those and Stellar canibalism is somewhat known.

Also the gain from stellar wind should not be underestimated. In effect it is a Star Sized, Star Massed and Star Magnetic Field sized Ramscoop during travel.

 

I am not quite sure what you mean with a "Halo" here. You mean a Niven ring?

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More or less...I use "halo" for any chain of satelites around something :) If the chain links, then it's a ring as well.

 

The problem with catching up is the lack of a living crew, so it can take Dozens of Gees, while I can't see a living crew living past say 20.

 

Plus I suspect that all that emp, and radiation would make tracking "challenging".

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From my point of view that is only a distraction.

Born of people incapable to accept thier own shortcommings and looking for Distrations and Scapegoats.

A common mistake while growing up, but not a unsourmountable one.

 

I managed to overcome that pattern of reality-denial and distraction despite having something that qualifies as mental illness. If I did it, everyone can do it.

I really need to write my theory over on the non-gamign discussion.

You are not a population. Your assertion that "everyone can do it" while possibly true is largely irrelevant. They don't, so we're stuck where we are.

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It's possible that, as Moore's Law starts to break down, that our pace of technological advancement may slow as well, and we may hit a relative plateau for a few decades or even a few centuries. I'd expect that innovations would become more cultural, economic and sociological in nature. We might work fewer hours and change the way we live our lives. If lifespans become extended, then we may have first and second and third retirements, where we take time off to do stuff of interest to us, then return to doing work we like to do.

 

My own thoughts on that are that we've basically become "distracted" by computers.  We've made rather pathetic improvements in space travel since the moon landing.  We've only got so many research dollars to go around.  For the past 30+ years, the money has been in computers.  There was a lot of low-hanging fruit around, and we made easy advances that resulted in big improvements.  This resulted in big financial gains, and lots of other companies jumped in and invested similarly.

 

Computers will probably hit a point where development slows to a crawl.  It happened with airplanes, it happened with cars, it happened with nukes.  We developed to the point where there was no apparent "next step", or the next step was really hard and really expensive.  And then we move on to something else.

 

As computer development starts to cool down, we'll switch to something else.  It might be robotics.  It might be genetics.  It might be fusion.  It might be space travel.  The problem space travel has, is that there's nothing valuable anywhere near us.  That first step to another world is prohibitively expensive.  We can go into space, but there's really nothing to do once we get there.  So we kind of stalled out.  We need some kind of breakthrough before space travel looks interesting again.

 

I think we're fairly close to a generic labor bot.  In the next 20 years, they'll have a robot that can walk around, drive a car, pick up trash, vacuum the carpet, take your order at McDonald's, etc.  When that happens, you'll have a big change in society as you create a permanent class of people who are unemployed because there's a robot that can do it cheaper.  That'll be a source of major social upheaval.  

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Well, G. Harry Stine wrote a series of books back in, I think, the 1980s on all the useful and profitable things that can be done in cislunar space. (I recall The Space Enterprise and Future Power.) The problem he and other would-be promoters encountered when they tried to sell existing businesses and investors on their proposals is that while everyone thought space industry could be tremendously profitable, the start-up costs were high enough that everyone wanted someone else to do it first and prove it worked Everyone wanted to be second in.

 

As a cynic about human nature, though, I think the real impediment to space industrialization and colonization is that there's nobody out there in the Solar System to rob and enslave.

 

Dean Shomshak

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Well, G. Harry Stine wrote a series of books back in, I think, the 1980s on all the useful and profitable things that can be done in cislunar space. (I recall The Space Enterprise and Future Power.) The problem he and other would-be promoters encountered when they tried to sell existing businesses and investors on their proposals is that while everyone thought space industry could be tremendously profitable, the start-up costs were high enough that everyone wanted someone else to do it first and prove it worked Everyone wanted to be second in.

 

As a cynic about human nature, though, I think the real impediment to space industrialization and colonization is that there's nobody out there in the Solar System to rob and enslave.

 

Dean Shomshak

Being the "first in" is kind of the job of a government. Considering actually privately funded initiatives, it is doing that quite well.

 

Also I have to rejet that notion about "nobody to rob". There is nobody who even lays claim to it, so it is a free for all!

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