Steve Jackson Games Forums - Generation Ships

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Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson (Post 1386248)

If long-term scaleable life support and moderate scale fabrication can allow human exploration and exploitation of the solar system and still be TL8, those can be done.

TL8 rocket science does not allow for large scale exploration of the solar system and space constuction.

The ISS and the Shuttle were/are run very much on an open-cycle basis. That the recent Dragon capsule was brought back from the ISS with useful items is quite possibly a first. The Russian Progress supply capsules were simply loaded with the station's garbage after the new supplies were removed and allowed to burn up on re-entry.

This included clothing. Clothing is not washed on the ISS. Instead it si worn for two weeks and then sent off the station to be burned.

On the Shuttle, liquid wastes were ejected as the fuel cells produced all needed water (as long as the fuel holds out). Solid wastes were simply stored and broght back. This caused the techs to make rude (but accurate) jokes about what the vehicle smelled like.

Closed cycle life support systems and in space resource harvesting, fabrication and construction are simply so far beyond what is possible at mid-TL8 that genships have to be at least TL9. I think a hard science propulsion system might well be beyond TL9.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin (Post 1386542)

Closed cycle life support systems and in space resource harvesting, fabrication and construction are simply so far beyond what is possible at mid-TL8 that genships have to be at least TL9.

We might be able to do it without the fully closed cycle: there might be places yet to be found where there are sufficient consumables to do stuff on very large scales, if we can sustain the open-cycle exploration long enough to find them and exploit them. Then pre-load the path of the gen ship with slightly slower bundles of consumables to be used as they go. The craptastic resource cycle of the ISS is a candidate for retarded TL development area, esp given it was a Reagan era holdover, so it need not say anything more meaningful about mature TL8 capacity than SDI projections did.

Re: Generation Ships

Part of the reason ISS is so open cycle is budget. The mass of the equipment to partially close the cycle is probably a years worth of supply launches. If you actually had hard multiyear budgets it would be worth it. With year by year funding it gets hard to justify.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson (Post 1386671)

The craptastic resource cycle of the ISS is a candidate for retarded TL development area, esp given it was a Reagan era holdover,

ISS technology might be retarded because it uses so much Soviet stuff but the ISS-desgin is all Clinton-era. There isn''t any "real TL8 SOTA" that is off the shelf ready anyway. Anything that much better than what we have now is decades away.

Look at the proposed TL-crossover dates on UT p.8. The latest (on the Retarded TL path) is 2050. The earliesr is 2020 which is indeed the same as the 40 years between 1940 and 1980 of TL7. Choose an intermediate date if you prefer one.

You're going to have to decide on an absolute Dark Age of technological stagnation of 1-2 centuries length before anyone would try and build a genship at TL8. They'd probably give up the idea because it was too hard and they were too poor.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin (Post 1386822)

You're going to have to decide on an absolute Dark Age of technological stagnation of 1-2 centuries length before anyone would try and build a genship at TL8. They'd probably give up the idea because it was too hard and they were too poor.

That doesn't rule out the whole of TL8 genship scenarios, like the arrival of one here crewed by some hardier species for whom TL8 is sufficient to sustain them. I expect we'd see them coming by the blue-shifted solar spectrum from their decel mirror or by the bursts of their Orion drive.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson (Post 1386908)

We come in peace. Pay no attention to bright as a sun nuclear bombs going off "straight at ya'".

Also funny first contact as humans realize that they don't have more advanced technology to share. Oh, the lols that would be shared.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyndaran (Post 1386925)

Oh yeah, I do that all the time. The The ancient astronauts reveal, "No, that face on Mars thing really is just a hill, but it makes a good scary helmet design, eh?"

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson (Post 1386908)

I know you'll ignore anything i say to cast doubt on this idea you've adopted but try looking in Spaceships.

Solar sails and mag sails are TL9 there. No hard science TL8 drive in Spaceships provides more than 3 mps per fuel tank.

If you build your accel phase as a lower stage you'll have 14 spaces. One of those goes to drive, one to rear armor and no more than 12 can go to fuel. that's 36 mps at max.

Travelling to (or from) Alpha Centauri at 36 mps will that approx 22,700 years.

After having a first stage for accel you'd need a second stage for decel while putting you "generation" shiip as your third stage. This multiplies the size of your ship by 10.

It's not a "generation" ship anyway. You could call it a _Civilization_ ship maybe. It only needs to remain in operation for 3 to 4 times the collective length of civilization on Earth.

So while TL8 life support is nowhere close to being adequate handwaving that away still leaves you with inadequate propulsion. Handwave that away and you'll still be left with the inadeqauacy of TL8 means of constructing it.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh (Post 1385008)

- AI Bob, you're going with the MeatBagGenShip #256.
- Why? I don't want to go on a millennia-long flight with meatbags!
- Well, someone has to sacrifice itself by doing it, so that the rest of us AIs can live without them on our conveniently uninhabitable-for-meatbags planet.

Well if they all want to hang out on uninhabitable-for-meatbags planets then it mostly doesn't make sense. Although those meatbag planets might be annoying and damage the property values of good AI planets.

Quote:

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh (Post 1385011)

Do you consider GURPS TL9 modifications as robocop-level? (I assume yes, since stuff like artificial hearts is advertised within the films' commercial breaks.) I'm not sure where the middle ground would be though. Any lower than robocop, and you get TL8 (modern). And I'm not sure there are all that many settings that are TL8-derived, but don't have mid-range prosthetics. BSG, perhaps, though they're not quite TL8-derived.

I believe the middle ground he wants is where modifications are neither inferior to the original like peg legs nor superior like robocop-level but rather has both strengths and weaknesses compared to the original.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385196)

No, envy and jealousy are two different things, though they overlap in places. Envy does not necessarily implly that you want to take away something someone else has, or prevent them from having it. One can be envious of status, wealth, etc, and set out to match or better them, without necessarily seeking to take them away from someone else.

Jealousy is different. If one envies the new sports car of someone else, one can get a sports car of the same model or fancier. Jealousy means you want to have that particular sports car. You want it to be yours instead of his.

Obviously that can overlap with envy, but it's not the same thing.

They are different but your example would generally be put under envy too. Jealousy is generally considered to be based on the fear of loss while envy is unhappiness by comparison.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385204)

Within limits, yes. But no, human are not all that malleable, the history of the last century is nasty proof of that. Past a certain point, they break rather than bend. Unless you genetically alter the population, human nature will limit the power of the rulers to change things.

Nor is science as powerful as all that. The changes that can be made are limited to a range of possibilities determined by the material the changes are being applied to. Some very nasty possibilities do exist, but the range is still relatively limited as long as you're dealing with human beings.

Up to a point, yes.

AI could not be relied upon for that. If it's genuinely conscious, AI will have its own agenda. If it's not, it'll be outsmarted or gamed by humans who figure out the limits of the code and work around it.

Well yes obviously limits exist and since "human nature" is defined as that which is unchangeable it will provide the limits. That still leaves people being quite malleable. Care to explain what specifically was unusual about the last century with respect to human malleability?

As for AI, it's quite possible it's "own agenda" is taking care of the generation ship.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385213)

Nope. At best they are servants, at worst they are dangerous competition, they are not children.

The children metaphor doesn't work for a species, because, unlike individuals, a species has an open-ended lifespan. There's no inherent reason why Homo sapiens can't endure indefinitely.

There is no inherent reason why an individual can't endure indefinitely either but that doesn't mean they can't have reasonable friendly children instead of servants or dangerous competition. Oh they will probably be competition but not unusually dangerous competition.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385213)

Humanity, as a species, doesn't age and doesn't grow older (except in the trivial chronological sense). Thus comparisons to children and parents are invalid. Machines are tools, designing them to be self-willed is madness, assuming we can do that. A self-willed tool ceases to be useful and may become dangerous.

Sufficiently broad values of "machines" to include AI also includes humans which have no inherent necessity of being tools. You don't make fully self-willed intelligences to be tools, you make them to be companions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385216)

That doesn't make it valid. Anthropomorphizing pets is a mixed bag, sometimes it matches reality, sometimes it's wishful thinking. But a pet is not a child, even if the human in question likes to pretend otherwise. A car is not a child, a mountain is not a child...and usually, none of these things represents a potential serious threat to one's own well-being and the future of one's actual descendents.

Humans might very well become attached to a given AI. Maybe, for all we know, the reverse could happen too. It still doesn't make them our children.

What does validity and wishful thinking have to do with anything? Definitions of children beyond strict blood relations have to do with attachment. If the AI is believed to be a child... then it is.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385243)

As was actually noted once in a GURPS worldbook, humans have genuinely domesticated only a handful of mammal species out of the huge numbers that exist. It's taken us tens of thousands of years to do it, and there's still a wide range of difference in degree in the success.

Humans have domesticated the majority of animals they felt useful to domesticate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 (Post 1385271)

But we don't know if it can be created in any medium other than carbon and water, either. That's just the point, we have no evidence at all, either way. From a scientific POV, one is just as probable as the other, since the subject matter is a black box.

It's not as probable as the other at all! It would take serious evidence to suggest that there is something magical and until now unsuspected about carbon and water that is necessary for intelligence. Science doesn't need to assume things are equally probable without hard evidence. We didn't know that the LHC wouldn't kill us all before we switched it on but science could tell us it was less probable then the alternative.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyndaran (Post 1385513)

I'm leery of anyone throwing around uncertainty principles or really anything to do with quantum mechanics when talking about anything not directly related to quantum physics.
Intelligence is a macroscopic tool toward achieving goals by self-aware entities. I see no need for quantum anything in that.
It smacks too much of squeezing biochauvenistic religion in the back door.

But this all too close to the THS threads and off topic.

For this thread all that matters is what, if any, type(s) of A.I.s are available for the ship.

Even if there is some quantum basis for intelligence there isn't anything to suggest it can't be duplicated by other means.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astromancer (Post 1386303)

A vast problem for a TL8 starship would be human bones. Without either a genetic engineering trick to prevent calcium loss, or artificial gravity (either superscience or spining part of the ship) everybody on broad gets brittle bone disease. And that's only a start because we don't know what DECADES of microgravity will do to humans. Moreover, we only have Sci Fi and speculation on human gestation and delvelopement in microgravity.

And? That's why you spin part of the ship. Yes if you don't spin it there are problems but that's like complaining about people starving when you don't produce any food.

Re: Generation Ships

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin (Post 1387156)

Solar sails and mag sails are TL9 there. No hard science TL8 drive in Spaceships provides more than 3 mps per fuel tank.

... I can't believe I didn't realize that sooner. Yeah, I think this kills a full TL8 genship. So no other choice than TL 8/9 then?