Nyrath

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

You just don't get it, do you?

OK, I've had enough.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

No' date=' there just seems to be a pattern emerging from your posts.[/quote']

What' date=' that I think a lot of speculation is pointless because we don't have sufficient information, and that a lot of "that is impossible" talk puts the cart before the horse?[/quote']

Pattern:

1. New topic appears in Hero Forum's Star Hero section, discussing application of something scientific to a Star Hero campaign
   
2. Some discussion occurs
   
3. Kristopher appears, stating that he has read all about the scientific principle in question, it does not make sense to him, so therefore thousands of scientists must be wrong.
   
4. Others patiently try to explain the scientific principle to Kristopher
   
5. Kristopher states that the explanation is just a re-hash of what he read before, therefore the others are wrong as well.
   
6. A few pages of this ensues
   
7. and the original point of the thread, applying the scientific principle to a campaign, has been utterly derailed
   

 

I would have added you to my Ignore list a long time ago, but you cannot do that to moderators.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Ad hominem? I guess that tells us what we need to know about the defensibility of the "Paradox".

Heh. You really think I'm the one true defender of the Fermi Pardox? Or that one can do an Ad hominem by using quotations? No, there just seems to be a pattern emerging from your posts.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Yep. Space Roaches.

Yes, a friend of mine had a nasty idea. As it turns out, there are many species of insect that are resistant to vacuum. He recalls several that survived exposure to the vacuum chamber inside an electron microscope. So it probably would not be out of the question to genetically engineer an insect that had a self-contained breathing system which could activate upon exposure to vacuum.

Then there is the Bombardier beetle. it's jet can be adapted into acting as a space propulsion system.

Now, combine that with organic diamond tipped jaws, prolific reproduction, and an instinct to seek out spacecraft's radar dishes, sensors, and other vulnerable items, and you have a real ugly biological weapon.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Reading the Wiki article, this is where I said "Wait, no."

 

{ Wiki article omitted }

 

Sorry, but this is subjectivist nonsense.

Yeah, I get what you're saying, I've gotten that all along.

 

What I've been saying is, how the hell?

 

The light appearing to do something different, I can accept. The light actually, physically doing all three and more? No, that's just goofy.

Yes, I've read all sorts of detailed discussions and explorations of the Fermi "Paradox".

 

It doesn't tell us anything.

I repeat, you are nothing if not consistent.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Yes, I've read all sorts of detailed discussions and explorations of the Fermi "Paradox".

 

It doesn't tell us anything.

 

All we know is that we haven't seen signs of anyone else yet. That's it. All that tells us, is exactly that, and only that. Nothing more.

You are nothing if not consistent.

Re: Physics of space battles - gizmodo article

I hate to tell you this but you've been scooped.

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/77323-An-interesting-article-on-the-Physics-of-Space-Combat (December 18th, 2009)

Re: Mass Effect Campaign Setting

Ken Burnside of Ad Astra games and I got a cameo in Mass Effect 2. He's "serviceman Burnside", and I'm "serviceman Chung."

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

That it is not, however, does not mean anything definitive, except that it is not.

 

It doesn't mean with any certainty that we are alone, or the first, or that interstellar colonization is impossible, or...

Yes. In the same way that an oncologist might tell you that chemotherapy for your cancer gives you a 75% survival rate. It doesn't mean with any certainty that you will survive. But that's the way to bet. We are talking about probabilities here.

The basic framework of the Fermi Paradox is

The apparent size and age of the universe suggests that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist.

 

However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

The main theoretical explanations are:

5.1 No other civilizations currently exist

5.2 They do exist, but we see no evidence

You can read details about each of the options in the link.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

.... And some may simply be not all that motivated, or even the opposite.

 

We humans are a curious bunch by nature, that is a big part of why we do this sort of thing.

 

Another sentient race may not necessarily think that way. A race that consistently "plays it safe" may have a very long and slow period of development, and may even decide that interstellar travel or alien contact is just too risky. So they stay at home and hide a lot. If any aliens are paranoid by nature, they might build Berzerkers to wipe out everybody else -or, again, they might just hide a lot.

 

Or, whatever may pass for politics and/or religion in other races could be a factor as well. We have various flavours of isolationist / exclusionist groups, after all.

Well, unfortunately there is something else to consider. The scenarios you outline only explain the lack of observable aliens if every single one of them acts as you say. It only takes one 'bad apple' to ruin the argument.

In the history of our galaxy, there might have been ten thousand alien civilizations confined to their home planets. But if there was a single one that was expansionist, they could have colonized the entire galaxy in as little as 50 million years, sub-light. Much less time if they had FTL.

Given the age of the Galaxy, this means it could have been entirely colonized 240 times. So where are they? Earth should currently be an alien colony.

Re: Extraterrestrial Organisms Already Here ?

Well, there are two scenarios here.

If we are sneakily trying to eavesdrop all other alien civilizations in our neighborhood, we will of course fail to find all the aliens who now use Quantum-Z Diffract Meson waves for communication.

But any alien civilization that was intentionally trying to broadcast messages to primitive people like us would use crude radio waves. And they would use "anti-cryptography", that is, make coded radio messages that were designed to be easy to decode.

Re: Moon May Have Formed in Natural Nuclear Explosion

What happened to the "Theia impact" theory?

From the article:

The standard theory of the origin of the Moon is called the giant impact hypothesis. It supposes that early in the Solar System's history, a massive object smashed into the Earth, cleaving it into two unequal parts. The smaller of these condensed into the Moon.

 

The best simulations of this process suggest that about 80 percent of Moon ought to have come from the impactor and 20 percent from the Earth.

 

That's hard to reconcile with the measured make up of Moon rock, which is almost identical to Earth rock in terms of isotopic content.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24721/

The moon formed after the explosion of a runaway nuclear georeactor in the Earth's mantle, according to a new theory of lunar formation.

 

But there's another theory called the fission hypothesis that could account for the similar isotopic content. This idea is that the Earth and Moon both formed from a rapidly spinning blob of molten rock. This blob was spinning so rapidly that the force of gravity only just overcame the centrifugal forces at work.

 

In this system, any slight kick would have ejected a small blob of molten rock into orbit. This blob eventually formed the Moon.

 

The fission hypothesis has been studied for 150 years but ultimately rejected because nobody has been able to work out where the energy could have come from to kick a lunar-sized blob into orbit.

 

Now Rob de Meijer at University of the Western Cape and Wim van Westrenen at VU University in Amsterdam say they know where that kick might have come from.

 

Their idea is that centrifugal forces would have concentrated heavier elements such as uranium and thorium near the Earth's surface on the equatorial plane. High concentrations of these radioactive elements can lead to nuclear chain reactions which can become supercritical if the concentrations are high enough.

The mind boggles...

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

I thought of that' date=' after I posted it. I wonder how that would work out long-term.[/quote']

 

Like Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

 

"Bring in that floating fat man"

Re: Fiction resources for Solar HERO.

And just a little reminder that out of print books can be found at http://www.bookfinder.com and sometimes at Amazon.com

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

What does it matter?

Re: Extraterrestrial Organisms Already Here ?

Well, it might be a blessing in disguise. Here on Earth be managed to become difficult to detect before we were noticed by Emperor Ming, a Bezerker, or something else awful.

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

And maybe, in the future, we will have designed and built all those SPS and licked the transmission problem, and.....

As I say, no-one has said that there will be no use for Orion. Only that, right now, there isn't one.

Well, by that reasoning there is no use for any of NASA's rocket boosters because currently there are no space probes scheduled to be launched. Nor is there any use for your automobile because you currently have no errands to run.

There are lots of space projects whose development efforts are on hold for the foreseeable future because there exists no heavy lift capacity. Once the capacity appears, development will re-start.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

I was bouncing around Wiki for rough numbers' date=' here's the page I started out on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density. I had no idea how big Trantor was supposed to be, or how much land area to base the figures on, so I fudged with the numbers for Earth.[/quote']

Well, you might have taken a glance at the Wikipedia entry for "Trantor"

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

I find it interesting that no East European writers have made anyone else's lists.

Ever hear about the Ugly American and the Not-Invented-Here syndrome? I get the impression that the bulk of the poster here are from the States.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

"It does go beyond what we can comprehend"' date=' which is the second time someone has made that sort of comment in this thread.[/quote']

 

So?

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

OK, so 45 billion is do-able.

 

But... is a worldwide city only 45 billion people?

 

Earth's land area is 58 million square miles. We'll use the the population density of Singapore to be conservative (~18200 per square mile). That's 1,055,600,000,000 people. One trillion. Right?

 

So you've be looking at the no-margin just-in-time delivery of offworld food arriving on almost 4700 "tankers" per day, right?

 

 

Now take one of the very dense real-life cities as an example for density, and you'd have more like three trillion people, and about 14000 "tankers".

Your figures are slightly low, Trantor has a land area of 194,000,000 square kilometers, about 130% of Earth's land area.

Trantor as per the novel has a population density of 232 people per square kilometer. New York City has 842, Tokyo has 5,847, and the nation of Singapore is up there with 6,852 (not 7,027 as you stated, "18200 per square mile" ).

Assuming a 2 day transit time:

Trantor: 207 ships daily, 828 total

Trantor with New York City density: 751 daily, 3,006 total

with Tokyo density: 5,218 daily, 20,871 total

with Singapore density: 6,116 daily, 24,459 total.

(for comparison purposes, the number of daily commercial air liner flight in the US is about 37,000)

Now you delegate. For each daily ship, have one landing pad evenly spaced over the available land area. Each pad will have the infrastructure to unload the ship, and deliver the food to the distribution network.

Land surface area per ship (square kilometers)

Std Trantor: 937,031

New York Trantor: 258,184

Tokyo Trantor: 37,180

Singapore Trantor: 31,727

The surface area of Connecticut is about 14,356 square kilometers, so even at Singapore Trantor population densities each landing pad will be in a area more than twice the size of Connecticut.

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

The trouble with top ten lists and the ensuing debates is that they inevitably come down to "Well if he's so great' date=' how do you explain the fact that [i']I[/i] don't like him, Mr. Smarty-pants?"

which invites the response "Well, obviously because you are an uncultured low-brow", a flamewar erupts, and the moderator locks down the thread.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Each tanker would provide for an area of ~4200 sq mi' date=' an area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut. But in that same area there will be 217 million people, which means they can probably find a few people capable of unloading and delivering the food from the tanker. It does go beyond what we can comprehend, and I imagine the bigger issue is dealing with waste and providing clean water for such a population.[/quote']

Why do people keep trying to bring this back to a matter of comprehension?

 

It's just numbers. If the numbers don't work, the system is impossible. If they do, it's not.

 

* blink * blink *

Where is the "matter of comprehension?

Blacksword is trying to see if the numbers will work.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Well' date=' that's easier with disintegrations.[/quote']

 

True, but I imagine those twenty agricultural worlds would eventually like to have some of their fertilizer back.