11-15-2017, 12:23 PM | #21 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
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Such as the aliens have already been here but are gone now because they found nothing of interest to them as just one example. Then there's possibilities such as the number of alien species capable of interstellar travel being small enough that the probability of none of them being interested in colonization is not that unlikely. There are many, many others.
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11-15-2017, 01:10 PM | #22 | ||||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
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11-15-2017, 01:30 PM | #23 | |||
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Location: Ventura CA
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
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11-15-2017, 01:44 PM | #24 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
Existence is risky for biological organisms. Even the best precautions will occasionally fail. I doubt you'd get more than a few absurdly luck and/or paranoid individuals to survive more than a thousand or so years regardless of reasonable technological projections.
Though enough of those will probably skew society to something even our most safety conscious helicopter parents could only gawk at. We are at the cusp of gaining the ability to radically alter our very nature, something as different from us as stone age people are to pond scum. I don't think just thinking, "wow, one million years from now is like one million years ago but in reverse." works as an analogy.
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11-15-2017, 01:55 PM | #25 | |
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
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11-15-2017, 02:05 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
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I suspect we Westerners tend to over-extrapolate from the case of Rome. Rome's problem was heavy dependence on grain from Egypt, leaving it vulnerable to catastrophic collapse. That sort of collapse is actually fairly rare AFAICT. |
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11-15-2017, 02:16 PM | #27 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
Re: colonization speeds, can we really expect the fastest possible ships to get used for this purpose? If antimatter propulsion is possible but prohibitively expensive, it matters whether the ship's designers suck up the cost, or decide to go with a fusion design even if the fusion ship is 1/10th the specific impulse. There's also likely to be some limit on how many stages anyone would build an interstellar rocket with.
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11-15-2017, 02:25 PM | #28 |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
Nowhere near a million years, that's for sure!!!
Last edited by NineDaysDead; 11-15-2017 at 02:28 PM. |
11-15-2017, 02:32 PM | #29 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
Except... antimatter vs. fusion might not matter if laser-powered lightsails are the preferred mode of interplanetary transportation. Does anyone know of good sources for the laser-powered lightsail concept? I've heard it's complicated, and that's about all I know.
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11-15-2017, 02:37 PM | #30 | |
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] Conservative hard SF... but not implausibly conservative
In this case, I think "a set of cultural institutions that are distinct and haven't suffered a major collapse or technological discontinuity" fits the requirement.
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You are proposing a civilization that is able to maintain the technological and economic infrastructure necessary for a Type II civilization with a Class B stellar engine for nearly five times as long as anatomically modern humans even existed. What is "proven to exist" are a few rare institutions that have continuously operated for about 1500 years. Claims can be made for slightly older, but can't be substantiated, and many (the Japanese Imperial Throne, the lineage of Elizabeth Windsor) are clearly political fiction. Last edited by sir_pudding; 11-16-2017 at 11:52 AM. |
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