[Star Trek like] number of planets and sapients

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by maximara

What "an infectious plague of suns going supernova"? Memory Alpha doesn't mention this. Cite the episode and series this is expressly stated.

That was the reason why Spock destroyed Romulus's sun with the red matter.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That assumes all species including humans breed like rabbits. Modern prosperous nations barely have population growth. I don't see why futuristic societies would be so different just, because they're colonizing new planets.

Of course over thousands or tens of thousands of years, even minuscule growth would be "problematic" for the genre.

But my "realism issue" with Star Trek type universes is how nearly every major player, even those newly discovered, are at almost the exact same tech level.
It's a fun trope perfect for gaming, but some players may consider it a tripping point for sci fi hardness.

That's certainly reasonable, but it falls foul of the problem with all discussion of aliens, in that we have no data at all.

For ex, if technological advancement is 'normally' an exponentiating curve, as Heinlein posited, the chances of two sapient races meeting on comparable levels is essentially zero. That would reflect the rate of advancement that the West has seen over the last 3 or 4 centuries. If you imagine first contacts between cultures at 1750 level, 1850, 1950, and 2120 levels, you see substantial differences over short periods.

But if 'normal' advancement is far slower, the equation changes. If the 'norm' is bursts of fast advancement amid plateaus, that produces potentially a totally different picture. This sort of picture is consistent with larger scale human history.

We don't have any data, so it's ultimately all speculation.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

These are numbers that would fit best with a Star Trek like space opera, large enough to be interesting and small enough not to be overwhelming. As for population growth, the past fifty years of our history has shown that, on average, human fertility drops as average wealth increases, to the point where every developed nation has negative population growth without immigration, so a warp capable society not expanding beyond a defensive perimeter would be quite possible. Women have better things to do than to just have babies and/or families require two incomes to maintain economic stability.

It is highly unlikely that a warp capable humanity would have high population growth after the influx of wealth from the Sol System. High levels of social support (universal health care, subsidized day care, direct payments to parents, etc.) may be enough to turn negative population growth into low population growth, but the majority of women will stop at two children. Since the minorities that embrace high population growth are the ones that would most likely leave to start up colonies and get eating by unfriendly creatures, their contribution would likely be negated.

Over time, Darwin will take care of that.

Even on shorter scales, population growth is more tightly linked to cultural/religious factors than is commonly realized. There's no reason to assume that a warp-capable society would have either low or high female fertility rates, either is equally plausible at any given historical time.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That was the reason why Spock destroyed Romulus's sun with the red matter.

No. Star Trek 2009 simply has Spock Prime say "One hundred twenty-nine years from now, a star will explode, and threaten to destroy the galaxy."

Spock never explains how this supernova will threaten to destroy the galaxy

In fact, as Memory Alpha points out Spock is talking total nonsense:

"Having a supernova threaten the entire galaxy, as was claimed to be the case by Spock in Star Trek, is a physical impossibility under normal circumstances: the law of special relativity limits the shock wave's expansion rate to below the speed of light, meaning it would be a minimum of several years before it affected even nearby stars. The expansion of the blast wave would also result in it weakening and dissipating over time.

Even if Spock consumed the star in time to prevent it from destroying Romulus, doing so would still leave the planet without a source of heat and light, resulting in it becoming uninhabitable anyway, albeit physically intact."

"Within the Milky Way Galaxy, supernovae generally occurred approximately once per century." - Supernova (Memory Alpha) This is actually slower then our universe where a supernovae occurs about every 50 years.

Nothing about "an infectious plague of suns going supernova" in Star Trek (2009). In fact, per the above the exact opposite is presented ie there are fewer supernovas in the Star Trek universe then our own.

Again, excluding books and comics (their canonicity, even when novelizations of episodes or movies, is questionable) where is this particular idea coming from?

[Phantasm]

As I recall, Romulus's sun was relatively unaffected; an amoral scientist took advantage of the supernova and shunted a lot of it through subspace to destroy the twin planets of Romulus and Remus a lot faster than the actual shockwave should have happened.

If things had occurred as normal, Spock would have had a hundred years or so to devise some way to prevent the supernova's shockwave from destroying the planets.


(Mind, my source for this is Star Trek Online, which while not "canon" tries to follow the TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY-ENT canon as best it can. Discovery is messing things up.)

[isf]

Originally Posted by maximara

The flaw in this as pointed out in several of Isaac Arthur videos is to use a lot of resources to get out of your own gravity well only go down another (ie set up a colony on a planet) is dumb.

Being Star Trek like, the transporter makes betting to orbit very cheap. I haven't used spaceships to build a port facility to ballpark a figure, but I'm figuring something like $10/lb initally.

Originally Posted by maximara

Isaac Arthur also points out that if these Earth-like planets have life you have a potential War of the Worlds/Andromeda Strain situation on your hands. The odds the biosphere and the stuff in it will be compatible with your biology is effectively nil.

Possibly, that is pretty speculative. ST has progenitor/Preservers that have seeded terran life across the galaxy.

Originally Posted by maximara

EC comics had a story where a multigenerational ship found out that for biological and physiological reasons they couldn't live on any planet and so lived among the star. Basically every planet with life could be the equivalent of Eden from Star Trek's "The Way to Eden".

I don't expect to see generational ships as a rule in this setting.

Originally Posted by maximara

A far more realistic situation is your civilization sets up space stations and starts mining the asteroid belts within that system. Once those are gone they would move on to the rocky planets using the gas giants for simpler elements. So planets become not something you settle on but something you mine.

Yes, but ST like TL^ changes this for the most part. I do want to have a plausible non-TL^ base to then change as needed tough.

[isf]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Mining planets when you are already in space makes about as much sense as building spaceships out of wood. Terraforming planets as biological reserves makes more sense, as any species should have a plan B, C, D, etc., a place where their members can survive should civilization collapse. While terraformed planets may eventually destabilize, they will likely last for tens of millions of years, meaning that humanity may stumble across thousands of examples of destabilized terraformed Precursor colonies.

I don't think that is necessarily the case for mining; planets have processes that concentrate minerals and I haven't heard of any gems in asteroids, but I do expect a lot of space based industry. Destabilized terraformed Precursor planets (whether colonies or not) sound like something fun to encounter

[isf]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Hard science? We're talking pseudo-Star Trek here. Hard science doesn't have a seat at the table.

Actually, I do want hard science to have a seat at the table, the table just has seats for TL^, genre, and game-ability as well. I explicitly want a plausible hardish science base to add in the other seats [being alone in the universe and there being no means of ftl travel are pretty hard but incompatible with genre and setting].

[isf]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

That's certainly reasonable, but it falls foul of the problem with all discussion of aliens, in that we have no data at all.

For ex, if technological advancement is 'normally' an exponentiating curve, as Heinlein posited, the chances of two sapient races meeting on comparable levels is essentially zero. That would reflect the rate of advancement that the West has seen over the last 3 or 4 centuries. If you imagine first contacts between cultures at 1750 level, 1850, 1950, and 2120 levels, you see substantial differences over short periods.

I think that teal world technologies are mostly s-curves and not exponential.

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

But if 'normal' advancement is far slower, the equation changes. If the 'norm' is bursts of fast advancement amid plateaus, that produces potentially a totally different picture. This sort of picture is consistent with larger scale human history.

We don't have any data, so it's ultimately all speculation.

Yes, I think this makes for a better story for this kind of setting.

[isf]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Over time, Darwin will take care of that.

Even on shorter scales, population growth is more tightly linked to cultural/religious factors than is commonly realized. There's no reason to assume that a warp-capable society would have either low or high female fertility rates, either is equally plausible at any given historical time.

Even if core developed planets have stable populations, colonies will tend to have higher growth rates. If you wanted to live in a stable society,, you would be lees likely to go to live on a colony.