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Old 01-29-2018, 10:59 AM   #21
CardinalBiggles
 
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Also, you seem to assume that only ecconomic motives and imperatives are valid. Cultures and subcultures have made choices from different motives.
Any culture still needs the economic wherewithall to purchase the means of travel. The Pilgrim Fathers still needed to buy their ship. They didn't have to invent the means to cross the Atlantic as someone with an economic incentive had already done so.

You seem to assume that a culture or subculture can simply decide to boldly go and they boldly will. If a culture wants to go to the stars, they need a vehicle to go in. Who is paying for it?

The reason that a culture wants to go to the stars may well be entirely ideological, but getting there costs money. Unless the said culture can develop interstellar travel entirely through their own resources, they need outside help. The outside help is going to want to be paid as R&D is usually very expensive.

In 1869 many things were unknown that are known in the early 21st century, but you seem to be asking for responders to define physical principles unknown in the early 22nd century to enable star travel without using handwavium. If I could do so I would be working towards a Nobel prize or negotiating with DARPA, not writing on a game forum.

As you do not know my motivations, your last comment comes perilously close to an ad hominem.
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Old 01-29-2018, 11:28 AM   #22
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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Within the physics and engineering of 1869, interplanetary travel, even as far as the Moon, was of course superscience and handwavium.
Not sure it was, you know. Very little of the engineering had been invented, but the idea of liquefying gasses was developing, and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism had been published. Those make liquid-fuel rocketry and radio communication into imaginable future technologies. The computers used for Apollo would seem like magic, admittedly, but not much else.

In the same way, we can envision the fusion pulse drives of THS as somewhat plausible in terms of physics, although we can't build them. But we lack a physically plausible explanation for fast interstellar travel.
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Old 01-29-2018, 12:54 PM   #23
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

Rocketry is basically applied Newtonian physics. 1869 is over a century past his death.
Traveling to the moon was silly "impossible" pre-Newton though.
But saying that some particular form of now-superscience is realistic just, because people of the past didn't know something we now do is a rather bizarre stance to take.

No one's going to arrest a GM that adds one or more superscience techs to their THS game.
But there is a fundamental difference between technologies that don't exist but obey known laws of physics and those that don't obey them.
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Old 01-29-2018, 03:31 PM   #24
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

Try this idea. Since there's an almost religious commitment to the idea that only AIs can startravel, and in THS AIs can use exowombs and forced growth chambers to create bioroids, with fertility and any desired genotype in their gametes, why not have fanatics ( your choice of what they're fanatical about) send AIs out with the goal and equipment to recreate humanity around another star system in the ideological image of the fanatics in question. As this eliminates the need for humans to survive and interstellar journey, and as DNA can be built from scratch, that is to say viable DNA can be made from inorganic molecules in the THS setting, no lifeform need survive the journey either, only the passion to act and relatively small resources are needed.

As total memetic purity could be achieved in these new cultures, the societies formed could be very extreme.
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Old 01-29-2018, 10:00 PM   #25
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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Not sure it was, you know. Very little of the engineering had been invented, but the idea of liquefying gasses was developing, and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism had been published.
But none of it had been put to any practical use yet, and the details of doing so were staggeringly hard. There were so many 'obvious' reasons why this or that theoretical possibility could never be done in practice that in 1869, we're talking superscience.

Yeah, liquefying gases was coming about, which means all that's left for manned rocketry is materials science enough to contain cold temperatures on a grand scale while being strong enough to stand up to multi-G accelerations and staggeringly high combustion temperatures in a sufficiently controlled way that the whole thing doesn't blow up in a fireball that kills the crew and everybody around. Realistically, everyone knows how hard it is to even make a small rocket fly in a controlled direction at a low altitude, so dreams of going to the Moon are utterly unrealistic.

Yeah, some theoretical electromagnetic work had been done, but the notion of using that to communicate across hundreds of thousands of miles of vacuum is the stuff of empty fantasy, not reality. Nobody even knows how to make a receiver or transmitter for such things that wil work across a room, much less anything useful even on Earth.

And of course the sheer scale of reactant necessary to make the journey, or even to achieve escape velocity, makes the entire project self-evidently absurd and economically inconceivable.

I know I sound snarky, but this is something it's hard for moderns to get out minds around. The Saturn V was more superscientific, from the POV of 1869, than O'Neil Habitats or Daedadus probes are to us. We can't readily get into the mindset of the middle 1800s, the changes have been so enormous compared to the rate of change we're used to.

From 1850 to 1950, the world changed more rapidly than it had had changed in all the history of the human race up until then, or then it has since. Internal combustion engines of the sort we use today in 2017 are superscience in their material strength, temperature tolerance, precision of engineering, reliability, controllability, they are easily as far out to someone in 1869 as relativistic drives are to us.

The freaking land-line telephone was at the edge of realistic projection in 1869. It was theoretically possible to the science of the time, but its practicality remained highly doubtful.

Air travel? Theoretically possible in 1869 physics, but of course it's unrealistic. The amount of power you'd have to pack into a small volume simply isn't practical or plausible, and what possible economic rationale could justify such fantastic expense?

Things change. Sometimes very slowly, sometimes very fast. The slow change since 1950 makes it hard for us to get out minds around how much superscience emerged in the century before it.

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Those make liquid-fuel rocketry and radio communication into imaginable future technologies. The computers used for Apollo would seem like magic, admittedly, but not much else.

In the same way, we can envision the fusion pulse drives of THS as somewhat plausible in terms of physics, although we can't build them. But we lack a physically plausible explanation for fast interstellar travel.
ALL of it would seem like magic in 1869. Just about every aspect of the Apollo Project would seem utterly fantastic, even the stuff that was comprehensible in terms of physical theory in 1869 would seem utterly fantastical in application. It would be to them what a working, practical Bussard drive would be to us.

The cars and planes that were used in supporting Apollo would be to the people of 1869 as the fusion pulse drives of THS are to us. The Saturn V would be an exercise in practical magic on multiple levels.
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Old 01-30-2018, 02:10 AM   #26
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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Try this idea. Since there's an almost religious commitment to the idea that only AIs can startravel, and in THS AIs can use exowombs and forced growth chambers to create bioroids, with fertility and any desired genotype in their gametes, why not have fanatics ( your choice of what they're fanatical about) send AIs out with the goal and equipment to recreate humanity around another star system in the ideological image of the fanatics in question. As this eliminates the need for humans to survive and interstellar journey, and as DNA can be built from scratch, that is to say viable DNA can be made from inorganic molecules in the THS setting, no lifeform need survive the journey either, only the passion to act and relatively small resources are needed.
This will certainly be cheaper than nanostasis, but with nanostasis you can take with you biosapients who are able to pay for their tickets. :) I suspect "live out your life in the perfect society" will get more takers than "help build the perfect society, but you'll never see it" (which is really the generation-ship recruitment problem again).
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Old 01-30-2018, 03:39 AM   #27
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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But none of it had been put to any practical use yet, and the details of doing so were staggeringly hard. There were so many 'obvious' reasons why this or that theoretical possibility could never be done in practice that in 1869, we're talking superscience.
That's not what superscience means. Superscience doesn't mean 'implausible to make in practice'. It means 'requires the fundamental laws of nature in the setting to contradict fundamental laws of nature as we currently know them'. Once we get into 'this is all theoretical science, but we have no idea how to engineer it in practice', it stops being superscience.

Nuclear power would be considered superscience in the days when conservation of mass was considered an unbreakable fundamental law of nature. Rocket travel by itself is perfectly within the Newtonian paradigm (even though now we know relativistic calculations are relevant for it).
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Old 01-30-2018, 04:11 AM   #28
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

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This will certainly be cheaper than nanostasis, but with nanostasis you can take with you biosapients who are able to pay for their tickets. :) I suspect "live out your life in the perfect society" will get more takers than "help build the perfect society, but you'll never see it" (which is really the generation-ship recruitment problem again).
A thousand pounds per human vs. under an ounce is a massive difference. Without considering all the biologicals necessary to wake up and keep people alive long enough for setting up a colony.
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Old 01-30-2018, 10:03 PM   #29
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That's not what superscience means. Superscience doesn't mean 'implausible to make in practice'. It means 'requires the fundamental laws of nature in the setting to contradict fundamental laws of nature as we currently know them'. Once we get into 'this is all theoretical science, but we have no idea how to engineer it in practice', it stops being superscience.

Nuclear power would be considered superscience in the days when conservation of mass was considered an unbreakable fundamental law of nature. Rocket travel by itself is perfectly within the Newtonian paradigm (even though now we know relativistic calculations are relevant for it).
Yeah, but we're not just talking about the technical definitions. The word 'superscience' also gets used in a more general way to describe things are that are theoretically possible but thought to be impossible in practice, whether that's technically right or not.

Yeah, rocketry is completely within the physics of 1869. But the necessary improvements in so many fields to make even simple sounding rockets would have looked seriously daunting at the time, much less Saturn 5s, which would have looked like utterly unrealistic daydreaming.

Relativistic starships able to get across the Universe in one lifetime, ship time, are possible in theory, too, but would routinely be described as fantasy or superscience.
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Old 01-30-2018, 10:46 PM   #30
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Default Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?

Please tell me who on these forums, let alone this thread, has used superscience to mean merely hard but technically possible, because I can't remember one.
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