Kristopher

Re: Star Wars licence news...

I haven't intersected with hardcore SW geeks in several years, but I thought the reception of the Clone Wars cartoon was generally positive. Certainly the gaming geek crowds I frequent online generally like it. The "movie" was dumb, but mainly in that it was three TV episodes strung together, and not even particularly good ones for the series.

 

Mind you, I'm sure there's the usual segment of nerd-ragers who hated the CW movie with every fiber of their midichlorians and therefore refuse to accept anything remotely associated with it.

I'll watch the CW cartoon if it's on, though I prefer the non-Anakin episodes... I can't really regard the man who, in a few years, will betray all his friends, who will take part in the murder of billions at Alderaan, as a hero.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

That's several orders of magnitude greater than the world population we've been discussing.

Some of the numbers we've been throwing around were in the 1 - 5 trillion range, based on either the land surface area or Earth or the given land area of Trantor, and the population density of some notable cities.

Re: Star Wars licence news...

I liiked the basic of the d6 system, but the attributes, and the particular grouping of skills under the attributes, needed work, and beginning characters were... a little anemic compared to the setting and the stories.

Re: Announcing Kazei 5, Second Edition

Christmas in February?

Re: Good bye Constellation Program

Freight Rail rocks. Especially with the Hybrid systems. Getting rid of the liberal pet project Light Rail and car speed rail though would free up money to get us something better then an Apollo Rehash, and to be fair to the Constellation Program, Quite a lot of it, is reusable in various fashions, and best of all, it was a slight step forward program with multiple uses, that was Off the Shelf, hence, cheaper in the long run. Folks can bemoan the rehash but Apollo Worked and if it isn't broke, don't fix it. Besides, if you aren't going to even attempt things that would work BETTER, you have to either Do Nothing, or build on what has worked before.

 

Our guy chose do nothing, but what the Hey, I'm getting a Train I can use to go to a podunk puddle jumper airport, for 14 times what it would cost me to drive there, and I'm sure the Chinese will be willing to share the moon when we finally decide to do something right? I mean, those guys are the nicest "Can't We All get along?" humanitarians on the face of the planet.

 

At least until they get a hold of a copy of the Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

If you really want to discuss politics this badly, and cram political side comments into every post on every subject, there's always the NGD board.

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

Ah. Kind of like' date=' the creation of the Universe and Life, not to mention intelligent life then? [/quote']

 

No, not like those things. We don't know how likely or unlikely those things are -- our data set is still too small.

 

We do know what it would take for a fission detonation large enough to kick off the mass of the moon to occur, and it is vanishingly unlikely. We've been over many of the hurdles on this thread.

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

I think there's a lot of things that happen in nature all by themselves' date=' that we can't even come close to simulating much less actually make happen, so therefore to keep using the terminology of Can't, Never, Unlikely, and Impossible as the main rebuttal, doesn't make much sense to me.[/quote']

 

Let me put it another way, then. There's an obstacle course of unlikely events all that all have to come together to make this scenario happen, to the point that it's so unlikely as to be functionally impossible.

 

Have you ever heard of a Rube Goldberg machine?

Re: Good bye Constellation Program

Cargo rail is financially solvent and successful.

What does this have to do with the Constellation Program?

I'm sad to see the future moon mission push scrapped, but not sad to see the rehash of Apollo, based on disposable capsules, dumped like the sack of crap it is.

Re: Astronomers to find new Earth, Real Soon Now

(Disclaimer: this is NOT directed at anyone here.)

I just find it funny that people who scoff at the idea of FTL or anti-gravity technology as "science fantasy" will turn around and speak of things like "computronium" and "nanites" as if they're a given, and then you ask them how to make "computronium", or how theyr'e going to overcome the basic physical (energy, waste heat, etc) hurdles of making nanites as depicted in their futurist visions, they say "I don't know but I'm sure it will be figured out soon", often followed by a far-off smling gaze and some blather about The Singularity!!!!

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

It seems to me that if you combine both theories (fissionable material on the surface exploding and Extra-terrestrial body slamming into the earth) it makes a great deal more sense.

 

Imagine an extraterrestrial body (asteroid most likely) partially made of fissionable material, slamming into the earth at a location containing a large concentration of said material. Would that bring the material together fast enough to incite the proper reaction?

In such a highly unlikely scenario, you might get an explosive reaction out of that, if all the variables were just right -- variables that are hard to get right when you're trying to make it happen.

Problem 1: you get a reaction at masses far less than the mass needed to "blow the moon off".

Problem 2: if you have a collistion anyway, the explosion is superfluous.

Re: Astronomers to find new Earth, Real Soon Now

I'll upload myself into a computer and send a probe consisting of a chunk of computronium the size of a soda can' date=' and a batch of general-purpose nanites which, when I arrive, will build the equipment to build the equipment to re-instantiate me as a physical being.[/quote']

 

Well, if we're off in pure handwavium territory, we might as well make the ship FTL and skip all that.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

View Coruscant as the equivalent of Washington D.C. . Now the District of Columbia has 572' date='059 people and is the capital of a polity with 307,212,123 people or about one person in the capital for every 537 in the polity total. Assume 72 earth-sized worlds ideally suited to agriculture. With good tech maybe they produce enough food for 60 billion people. That's 4.320 trillion people, assume they have 320 billion people on the 72 worlds (because it's easy) and you have 4 trillion people on Coruscant. Earth would have that population if it had about 4 times the population density of NYC, which given the supertech skyscrapers maybe Coruscant has. This implies 2148 trillion in the Republic. Count Dooku talked of tens of thousands of star systems, not worlds mind you but systems, changing sides. And he said it like it was an advantage, not game over. So if we assume 100,000 start systems it's the right order of magnitude and it gives us about 21 billion people per system. Higher than earth but not crazy high if you assume better tech. So yeah, the capital of a galatic empire might well have 70+ worlds whose main economic activity is feeding it. [/quote']

 

Logstics is the issue.

 

(Well, there's waste heat from 4 trillion people, and...)

Re: Pulpy Art

Arise, thread...

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

Not really. All an explosion IS' date=' is a reaction. Just faster and a little more energetic.[/quote']

 

Um... a little?

 

While the fundamental physics of the fission chain reaction in a nuclear weapon is similar to the physics of a controlled nuclear reactor, the two types of device must be engineered quite differently (see nuclear reactor physics). It is impossible to convert a nuclear reactor to cause a true nuclear explosion[citation needed], or for a nuclear reactor to explode the way a nuclear explosive does, (though partial fuel meltdowns and steam explosions have occurred).

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

At the only known location' date=' three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, sixteen sites have been discovered at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place approximately 2 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW of power output during that time[/i']....etc etc etc ......and that's just a basic Google grab. So one can obviously get, a fission reaction out of a natural phenomena, so a detonation, should be possible as well. Stuff blows up all the time without our help.

Long, long step from "reaction" to "detonation" when it comes to fission.

Re: Astronomers to find new Earth, Real Soon Now

Only if Orion comes with a free set of life-extending or suspended-animation technolgies as part of the sales package.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Physiology

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

The basic problem is that there's probably no way to get a fission detonation out of natural phenomena.

Re: Astronomers to find new Earth, Real Soon Now

Orion wouldn't make a trip to another "earth" any more feasible.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Not true. It tells us something else. It tells us that the 50s version of the galaxy' date=' one which swarmed with advanced tool using civilisations travelling from star to star is not what we'll find. Either tool using life is low probability, or interstellar travel is impractical, or of course both. Because if at least one of those things was not true, there would be no us to ask the question.[/quote']

 

There's an unspoken assumption in there, still. It's no more reasonable to assume that we'd have been wiped out if there were others already out there, than it is to assume that any civilization that had achieved interstellar travel would have "overcome war and violence".

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

I have to disagree. It tells you something valuable: that the easiest-imagined scenario doesn't work. Therefore something else is going on. You don't know what yet' date=' but something else important is going on. Consideration of what that other thing(s) could be can be exceedingly productive, because you can turn your efforts to studying the alternatives can lead you to discover things you didn't know. This is a [u']classic[/u] pattern of scientific inquiry, and one of the most productive. This next is not intended as an insult, but as a scientist I will say that to do the simple blanket dismissal you seem to be doing is to commit an Epic Fail for scientific inquiry. You're missing a grand opportunity, to examine the assumptions within your initial inquiry, tease out the consequences of each one (not only to the question immediately at hand, but what else may follow as a consequence in other questions), see if you can identify where your initial assumptions are going wrong.

 

For technological reasons it has been difficult to make progress over the last 60 years or so, but significant progress has been made. As of about 20 years ago we became able to state definitely that there aren't large fusion rocket propelled starships moving around nearby the in the galaxy: such things could be detected and recognized. So one possible alternative (that they are out there and we couldn't tell) has been, to a limited degree, eliminated. Going back to the topic in the OP, the statistics on exoplanets also bear on that: of the 450 approx systems we know, there are very few systems that look like ours. Sure, there's selection effects that operate in that sample, but there are programs in progress as we debate now that will give us much stronger information in five years. If it turns out that earthlike planets in long-term stable star systems are much rarer than we think, well, that's one possible resolution. If Kepler finds such systems in the numbers people expect, then we must look elsewhere for the resolution of the paradox. Maybe the Brownlee-Ward "Rare Earth" ideas are right, that Galactic environment matters as much as just the star system, and everything closer to the galactic center than 3 kpc (or 5 kpc or 8 kpc) gets sterilized by supernovae blasts before it gets the ~2 Gyr it needs to evolve from first cell to technologists, and those parts further than 12 kpc (or 10 kpc or 8 kpc) don't have enough heavy-element content to spawn adequate numbers of planets to get one that is adequate for life to get started. That leads off toward its own lines of inquiry about evolutionary biology and the abiotic origins of life. In short, the profit is not merely in the paradox itself; it's pursuing where the paradox might be resolved that the gains are, and chasing down those questions that brings out other knowledge (which will bear on this and other questions in ways you cannot now predict).

 

Only when considered on the shallowest level does the Paradox get you as little as you are asserting.

 

Sorry if I'm sounding like a zealot here, but, well, I am a zealot about this. This is a microcosm of why science is an infinite frontier and why things you don't understand are the key to learning more. The very fact you don't understand something means you have an opportunity to learn something new, and you don't know what when you start pursuing it, but it will pay off -- unless you drop it. And that, I suspect, is why Nyrath has got frustrated with you.

And I wouldn't argue with any of that.

1) I may very well be hung up on the name, because to me, it's not a paradox. Conflicting assumptions do not a paradox make -- it just means that you're missing something, or outright wrong.

2) The assumptions behind the "paradox" are so often stated with much unjustified conviction -- especially the one about the colonial spread of alien species. You can compile a list of hundreds of reasons that any particular species might "fail" to do so, and at least one person in the discussion will say, in effect, "Doesn't matter, it would still happen." It's almost as if the colonial spread is taken on faith, or as an axiom.

3) My reaction to a setup such as the Fermi "Paradox" is one of "OK, let's look into it, and see what we can find out, but until we know more, let's not jump to any conclusions or get too damn wound up about it." I hate it when people jump to conclusions, and it only takes one right guess in ten for them to think that it's justified, because most people seem to remember success more easily and strongly than failure.

Re: Your Top Ten Science Fiction Writers, and then some.

On the topic at hand, I find that, just as I tend to like songs rather than bands, I tend to like stories rather than writers.

That said, I like a lot of Niven, and a lot of Bujold.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

A several-month quarantine period in stellar orbit' date=' cooling it down to ~10 kelvin, as well as blasting it with hard X-rays or gamma rays at the end, oughta take care of a lot of stuff. Won't help against prions, but nothing multicellular will survive that. And you can do it "on the pallet" in free drift in the outer system, so you don't tie down ships holding the stuff rather than moving cargo. Yes, it makes the pipeline longer, but as a safety measure it should be acceptable.[/quote']

 

At the point of needing such measures, it might be better for a world to grow its own...

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

You just don't get it' date=' do you?[/quote']

 

No, evidently, I don't get what you're trying to say.

 

It's not like I've said anything that could be considered remotely insulting to you, or about you. I'm not out to tick you off, either.

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

Right but in terms of centrifugal stuff' date=' doesn't the Heavy material move outwards faster and easier eventually? Like swinging a Lead ball at the end of a rope, as opposed to a feather?[/quote']

 

If a molten ball is spinning fast enough to do that, the heavy stuff might very well go flying off! There's no string holding it in, just gravity, and if it's spinning fast enough for the heavier material to overcome gravity, why would it stop at the surface of the molten planet?