Re: Generation Ships
 

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
 

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
 

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
 

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
 

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
 

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
 

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
 

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.

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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
 

... 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?

Re: Generation Ships
 

The real potential of solar sails (and probably magsails too) requires boosting with external projectors from the launch system. Simple calculations are probably not possible.

But with the self-contianed hard science drives from Spaceships your maximum mps per tank at various TLs is:

TL9, 20mps for the Advanced Fusion Pulse Drive

TL10 120 mps for The Antimatter Plasma Rocket

TL11 3400 mps for the Antimatter Pion if you can produice and store the required quantities of antimatter which is not a given without superscience.

So if you use my staged proplusion scheme with the above drives the trip time to Alpha Centauri is still c.3400 years at TL9 and a probably manageable 570 tears at TL10. If you can go to the TL11 antimatter drive it's down to 20 years or so.

The TL11 drive would be good as Alpha Centauri isn't really a _good_ candiate for a habitable or terraformable planet. It might be just barely possible if Alpha Centauri A and B are far enough apart (Gurps seems to assume 10 AU is the magic distance) not to interfere with each other's planet-forming. They might be. It's a surprisingly hard subject to research.

So TL9 propulsion alone doesn't seem to make enough difference really and I'm not seeing why we're trying to assume only TL8 in anything else.

Perhaps someone else can tell you if the numbers for a solar sail vehicle would be a lot better.

If you don't want god-like AIs running everything at TL10 then don't go with the optimistic numbers for them in UT. In the late 60s Arthur Clarke did his best to make human-level AI (HAL) look reasonable for 2001 (note that he also assumed much more capable space tech than was actually present in our 2001).

In 2012 does AI really look closer to us that it did to the moviegoers who went to see 2001? Not really. If anything it looks farther away becaue we have a better idea of the problems. Currently we need to mount a custom mainframe froma major research university in an SUV to equal the independant terrain navigation capabilities of a lizard.

So while there's no great reason to think Human-equalling (much less exceeding) AI is impossible there's no reason to think it's around the corner either. AI is plausibly a yes or no item in hard SF for a truly forseeable future.

Hard cryo freeze that stops aging is even more dubious tech. It actually might be impossible. The TL9 Hibernation Capsules that slows aging to 10% looks more likely.

So you do not have to have low tech to make genships the choice over AI or sleeper ships. Genships are so difficult to produce that even at High TLs their exisitence is not without difficulty in plausibility.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Even 10% aging for deep hibernation is rather dubious. Most animals that deeply hibernate do not live any longer than relatives in areas in which they don't have to hibernate.
It's probably an issue of yes, you reduce the rate at which free radicals etc. damage you, but you also reduce the rate at which your cells can repair themselves resulting in not much change with regards to aging.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Fred, I never dismiss anything you have to say. That is not to say I agree with your word or treat GURPS SPACESHIPS' word as gospel.

Yeah, I was on that page last week.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That was a joke.

Well, I'm pretty sure robocop-level has its flaws. Murphy is a headache in terms of maintenance, and I'm sure that even synthetic hearts from the ads have this flaw (to a lesser extent). I'd really want to talk this over with Flyndaran, though. I'm aiming for a similar somewhat-advanced replacements in my own setting.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It occurs to me that a TL10 ship trying to rescue the passengers and crew of a failing TL8 generation starship might make a decent short campaign.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Dismiss my opinions with airy handwaiving is exactly what you appear to do.

If it's not what you actually intend to convey you have a nigh-catastrophic communiucation skills problem.

If you don't want to use Spaceships numbers (or those from any other Gurps publication) I'm not sure what you're doing discussing it on a Gurps forum.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yeah, it could be, in theory, just as in theory a dictatorial human could have taking care of his/her subjects as agenda. But 'could be' isn't good enough, the only reason to prefer an AI to a human in a position of power is if there's some way to ensure that.

On the contrary, immortality and reproduction are conflicting states. Children would be dangerous and indeed eventually deadly competition to a race of immortals, since the previous generation isn't going away, each new generation divides finite resources and possibilities ever more thinly. A race of immortals is going to have to restrict reproduction to levels that match their death rate (for whatever cause) from cold Malthusian necessity.

Not to the species as a whole.

Uh...no. We haven't. Those we have domesticated are, for the most part, only partial successes. Dogs come closest to full success, and there are quirks in the canids that make them easier to domesticate than most species.

Nobody said anything about magic or the supernatural. Just because a process or phenomenon is mechanistic doesn't necessarily mean it can be duplicated any way you want to do it. U-235 works as fission fuel. Iron-56does not. Carbon serves as a workable chemical basis for biology, as far as we can see even the other elements of Column 14 do not. Maybe they could, under some conditions (there have been unconvincing speculations about silicon), but nobody knows.

That said, nobody knows if life is purely mechanistic or not.

But it can not tell us whether it's more probable or not that conciousness is confined to biology or not, because it has no data.

There was extensive data and workable theory applying to the physics of the LLC. There's none applying to the processes of consciousness, we can't even usefully define what consciousness is, other than in loose-contextual ways.

When there's no data, science must be silent.

And equally nothing to suggest that it can. No data, no science. Absent data, science can not speak.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I have been reevaluating how Gurps does cyborgs, especially the full brain in a box type. Though realistically that would require an odd setting assumption to make plausible.
Robocop personifies the sadness of low empathy but still having emotions. Coupled with what I call OPH: overly stoic.

Re: Generation Ships
 

the same thing that people who say "I don't want to use the Gurps magic system, because in this world the system works differently. How can I make the system work?"

The thing that makes Gurps different is the G for Generic. We have different vision of the future (surprise!) and are trying to figure out which numbers fit.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The OP requested an airy, handwavy sort of thread. It's not personal, I had people blowing off my perfectly good precepts for the last two weeks.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Well, ÆS is pretty odd, but has its reasons to trying the tech out (the box versions, that is). Partial replacements I see as something more 'down-to-earth'.

So . . . what do you say about re/starting the discussion of early cyborgs and cyborg organs outside this thread?

Re: Generation Ships
 

So it was in that spirit that you repeatedly asked other people to cite sources supporting their beliefs?

Re: Generation Ships
 

I think it would be military in nature with alot of scientific training.

I don't believe any kind of "democratic" system would work but a safety valve might be the promise of some kind of freedom for one's descendants at PlanetFall.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Respectfully, can you explain why you beleive this?

If we're contemplating a 200 year voyage and look back over the last 200 years of our history it is only democracies that have endured that long.

There are specialized exceptions like Monaco and Vatican City of course, Vatican City really doesn't look like a good model for a generation ship. :)

Monaco depends on income from outside its' borders and there isn't going to be an "outside".

Contrariwise, over the last 200 years military dictatorships are exactly the type of government most likely to end in a violent crash.

Soldiers only live wth their failies during peacetime and peacetime militaries are notoriously subject to mission drift.

The genship might look like a University community. Those seem very self-contained and separated from outside reality. If it's a co-ed university it even avoids the Vatican City problem.

The university model could also be sort of democratic with a Board of Trustees elected from the community and a President who answers to the Board. Not actually very diffeerent from many small to mid-szed munciplanities.

The football would suck though. :)

Re: Generation Ships
 

If we're talking about a generation ship's administration the conditions are completely different then they are on earth. A ship cannot afford to have people staging revolts nor would they unless they're psychotically suicidal.
How stringent the rule of a military-style gov't would be is completely dependent on the conditions on-board the ship. Where decisions may need to be made in a timely manner for sake of the ship's survival. As someone who worked in the University/College environment for almost a decade and a half. The university model would not work unless the people were taken care of by some kind of automated systems that hardly ever needed attention. It all boils down to what is most efficient and most conducive to the survival of the people on the ship. Democracies whatever their form are for societies who's survival doesn't require tight structures and timely decisions. Such as may be the case on a generation ship.

Re: Generation Ships
 

<shrug> If you can't afford revolts you can't afford overly authoritarian governments that inspire revolts. A military without enemies is also rather oxymoronic.

I am also puxxled by this view that a genship will be in a state of perpetual emergency teetering on the brink of disaster if swift choices are not made.

Interstellar space is _empty_. it is empty in ways that bring new breadth and meaning to the word "emptiness". The problems of a genship are matters of long term sustainability and not short term crisis.

You may have to be stern in telling would be parents that they can't all ahve enough children at the same time to form a decent pee-wee footballl league but you also have to e consisstant in saying that year after year. Near-stasis is probably desirable.

Planning for a government that will be capable of ordering 10% of the population into the recycling system is better spent avoiding that cirses whatever it would be. This mythical crisis would probably end with the overpopulation problem being solved by the overthrow the dictatorship that ordered it.

Re: Generation Ships
 

As for Government onboard the vessel, it depends on who is undertaking this trek anyways. Corporate sponsored? Goverment Sponsored? Rich Elite? And what conditions spurred the creation of the Generation Ship... Refugees? Explorers? Staking land claims? Crazy flight of fancy?

Answer that, and you'll have a good idea about the government/adminastation onboard.

Personally, I can't imagine this before Late TL9, Truthfully without some unusal circumstances, I can't imagine a Generation Ship at all rather than an AI piolted Seed Ship.

Maybe we should focus on what events would need to take place to make a Generation Ship a plausible outcome, then work from there.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yo Fred

It seems you're making alot of assumptions, as we all are , about the nature of life aboard said Gen Ship. My question to would be is why do you believe a military-style (namely regimented and subject to orders) would automatically be subject to revolts?

And Trachmyr pointed out it also depends on who and why said gen ship is being sent out.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Sounds cool.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Anything might be "subject" to "revolts". The question is when are they more likely?

The key issue there is change of government. If turnover of Parliament/Congress/Presidency is not a normal and regular thing the it is only by revolt that the governemnt can be changed.

Related to this is the Succession Crisis. If a government is not prepared to chnge leadership regualry but instead changes only upon the death of the old leader this leads to a great reduction of long term stability.

These factors make relatively good democracies very unlikely to suffer revolts. Why start a Civil War when you could win the next election? People reach the threshold to vote the current rascals out a good bit before they reach the one about bloody revolution.

"Regimented and subject to orders" could describe a lot of people's regular jobs...... while they are on the job. The need to regiment people's private lives and make them subject to orders in normally priovate matters is the rub.

In that area it is only in the matter of reproduction that I see any need to "regiment" and a lot of potential discontent could be avoided by striving intently to build "fairness" into the system.

So I see little need for military-style regimentation in general life aboard a genship and I see military-style autocracy as actively counterproductive.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The generation ship has a different set of variables than the last 200 years on Earth. For a start the generation ship only has one government unless things have already started to go horribly wrong. Also, the ship can't afford to have economic growth.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That last thing is actually rather major. Every successful society in human history has done it by taking advantage of other less powerful ones.

Re: Generation Ships
 

No, that was before I caught on.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Not as you understand economic growth. However, if those living on the generation ship become more efficient in their use of reasources or discover or develop new and better ways to do things, that could function like convention ecconomic growth in a non-conventional setting.

Propose the development of a form of VR which had a rich profound sensuous quality. Luxuries enjoyed in the VR setting could be both profound and richly satisfying. People might except a more spartan daily life in reality for a much more luxurous life in VR than even kings and emperors could have experienced. Reasources saved by the more spartan living conditions, could be used elsewhere as the comunity/ship sees fit.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Not always the case. Some societies have been able to exploit stronger societies with great success. But, while in transit, the comunity that lives in a starship wouldn't be able to exploit others, no others would be near enough to exploit, so the point is moot.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I meant as in the generation ship society will be unlike anything that has ever existed on earth... A small successful society not relying on the backs of others.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The way I tend to see tech levels, TL8 is stuff that exists today, at least in prototype form. Anything that is in the process of being developed, but couldn't plausibly be manufactured commercially (assuming demand, which is not always there*) within the next couple of years is probably TL9.

We're not that far from being a TL9 society. Considering that TL8 started in the 80s, one might say that a paradigm shift worthy of being called a TL change in GURPS either has occured or is still in the process of occuring. If TL8 is computers in all homes, TL9 could be computers in every pocket. Alternatively, if we want TL8 to be constant access to information and the Internet, TL9 is when the Internet stops being just a resource to be accessed by special means and becomes ubiqitious to the point of not only one, but multiple tools or toys routinely carried by most people being more or less constantly connected.

In any event, that means that any form of spaceship drive that could drive a spaceship out of our solar system without astronomical waste is probably TL9.

*There is lots of stuff that is solidly TL6-8 technology but just isn't manufactured except as hypothetical special orders, either because the real world lacks the kind of threats or challenges that would make it useful or because cheaper or more effective technologies exist to fulfil the demand. A good example is a full plate and mail harness of some combination steel/titanium/ceramic armour, with kevlar/aramid/other composite backing. Such armour would give good performance against monster claws, fangs, beaks and suchlike, as well as against swords, spears, arrows, guns and other threats. It's possible to make it at TL8, but in a normal world, as opposed to a Monster Hunting one, ceramic and composite body armours that cover vital areas from gunfire and shrapnel are both cheaper and usually more effective.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Just as a technical note there's a differnce between "out of the solar system" and "to another star in pracical time". If TL8 Orion drives could be built to match expectations (and there hasn't been the slightest work on this beyond paper studies) then a ship could be propelled to beyond solarr escape velocity.

Thisd is more like building a long-term space habitat and then sending it just _away_ rather than going anywhere in particular.I don't think you can build the long term habitat at any TL8 that isn't an unrecognizable alternate.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Spaceships says that the Oort cloud is 10,000 A.U.s out. That would still take many years for an Orion Drive to pass.
The solar system is BIG.

Re: Generation Ships
 

My point, though, was that given how far away from production Orion drives are in our reality, they appear to be TL9 technology. The paper studies and theoretical possibilities of one TL will often become the technology in common use at the next, which is what governs the assignment of TLs in GURPS. There is nothing in the rules that says that some TL9 gadgets may not exist right now in the real world, in the form of prototypes available only to those with very specific Social Advantages, amounting to Perks like Early Adopter or some specialised form of the High TL Advantage.

We're close to TL9, no matter what measure we use. It's to be expected that we know how to build some TL9 gadgets, if we could just work out some of the kinks.

Re: Generation Ships
 

All true but Orion drives are TL7 concepts from the early 60s. If they had been pursued vigorously in some alternate timeline, perhaps one where the natural human Template includes Regen (Radiation Only) then they might have been ready in the TL8 period.

Spaceships includes a lot of things that are for deep alternates even if they aren't ^. The Nuclear Saltwater Rocket might be even more dangerous than the Orion drive.