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Old 02-06-2017, 11:24 AM   #11
whswhs
 
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
Ok, so you want to somewhere between double and quadruple your population over the course of 200 years, meanwhile moving all this excess population to new worlds?
We have an idea of the human doubling time. It was incredibly long up until the beginning of urbanization. At that point it went to around a thousand years, and stayed there, roughly, up until 1750, when it went to 50 years. With a fifty-year doubling time you could multiply initial population by 16 in 200 years, and that's without continuing immigration.
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Old 02-06-2017, 11:25 AM   #12
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

The speed of development comes down to few main factors:
-cost of transportation
-how habitation friendly the target worlds are
-how desperate humanity/major parts of humanity are to get out there.

A mature TL 9^ society with the capability to resource mine in the space and to use robots should be able to build astonishingly large space structures while still using extremely small parts of a planetary wealth.

So if the actual FTL drives are just normal technology and do not require some special rare material like the mass effect element zero. Then building the ships would not really cost that much.

So if there is a need/wish and plenty of directly habitable worlds then moving millions of people should be possible over a timescale of only decades.
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Old 02-06-2017, 11:43 AM   #13
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

[QUOTE=vicky_molokh;2074982]
Things that worry me:[list]
Quote:
[*]The rate of building up colonies. Making multiple self-sustaining colonies (not outposts) with a population ranging from at least a few millions to a billion seems like something that's hard to pull off in 200ish years. It means either focusing more on non-operatic technologies such as creation of rapid-breeding transhumans, or moving lots of people around.
Well you can't reasonably grow a colony to billions in 200 years ago. And even in space opera, you don't. Star Trek started founding human interstellar colonies abooout...now, and none of them have a population of billions except by virtue of having already been inhabited when humans arrived. Even the really nice planets clock in at no more than under ten million. Which is actually enough. You have a single decent sized city surrounded by some small towns. Science fiction frequently treats planets as single biomes which is of course wrong, but it can look like that when the planet is mostly still uninhabited and you're only visiting the occupied part of it.



Quote:
[*]Assuming the colonies will be founded by rather modest populations compared to that of the homeworld, just how fast can they grow, assuming that a new planet both has a biochemically compatible ecosystem (this isn't hard-sci!) and reasonable resource value?
Assume a perfectly habitable planet (Habitability 6) that does not have any notable resources (RVM 0), that was colonized 200 years. The minimum population (barring catastrophe) using standard assumptions of growth would be 400,000. But the typical population value would 3 million. That fits into the default model of a single modern port city surrounded by a few small somewhat frontiery towns. Give it RVM +1 and roll a 14 and you get as high as 15 million. Having a culture that emphasizes population growth could increase that somewhat maybe as much as three times.

Going further than that, and you can always use the Darkover cheat...which is to say that malfunctions of the early buggy hyperdrives could send colony ships back in time, creating lost colonies that likely regressed in technology at least for a time but have populations that hit the carrying capacity limits of whatever their tech level was by the time they were discovered by the Imperium.

Last edited by David Johnston2; 02-06-2017 at 01:53 PM.
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Old 02-06-2017, 11:59 AM   #14
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

That's actually something close to my own setting.

First of all, looking at the numbers: You don't really need reactionless drives for cheap orbital transport. An SM+8 water-based Fusion Torch craft can put 750t into orbit for about 70t of water, for a cost of less than $2 per ton into orbit. Using SS2:40's $50/t should pay for handling, shipping, etc.
FTL cost will obviously depend on your FTL method. Let's assume the average distance between "interesting" systems is 10 days. We can use SS2:40's $100/t per day as a proxy. Total cost to travel between two interesting worlds is therefore $1050/t, call it $1000. With colonies being further away, $2000.

As another approach, we can look at the Genesis Colonial Transporter (SS5:19). A TL10^ design, it transports 4,000 colonists plus everything they need to a new home. At $1.8B, it's fairly expensive, and would probably be used in a "shuttle" service between a colony and a parent colony. Doing so, we can call it thirty days per round trip (total of 20 days travel due to FTL-2, plus five to unload and load). Call it ten trips per year.
Replacing the hydrogen-torch with a water-torch reduces fuel cost to $30,000 per trip. Let's assume that reduces passengers to 3000. Additional cost is for the crew (60 people, at $600,000 per trip for comfortable jobs), and to pay off the spacecraft itself ($3.6M per trip over fifty years). Call it a comfortable $5M per trip, including moving stuff into and out of orbit. That's only $16,000 per person, and includes space for industrial equipment and livestock.


Now, who can afford that? At TL10, monthly pay for an average job is $5,600. At status 1, you gain a profit of over $4,000 per month; $3000 if you have to support one dependant. It appears clear that, by saving for two or three years, most people would be able to buy a trip to a colony world.

And how many would there be? Well, look into genetic engineering. A human being with Longevity engineered will live to more than 200 years. You might well assume that UT medical technology and longer lives will lead to more children per parent - I find ericthered's 2% growth rate to look more and more plausible.

And why would they leave Earth? Well, aside from the usual - population pressure, resources, wars, devastation, climate change - those would be 200 billion people. You have to put them somewhere. But can you transport 200 billion people to other planets?
Let's say your 4 billion people, gross-world product of $22.4T, invest 0.5% into colony spacecraft. That's $112B in the first year, buying 60 Genesis transports. Those are able to transport 1.8 million people per year, and that only increases with each further year. Assuming 2% of the transports have to be replaced every year, the peak population is reached 64 years in, when about 5000 Genesis transport 150 million people per year. If the colonies continue to pay to transport Earth's population, it's actually going to be empty by the year 110.
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Old 02-06-2017, 12:01 PM   #15
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
Woops, my mistake. Edited: 10-50 millions of people in orbit/on other planets part- or full-time. But half of Terra's population is just a number in a setting I'm currently running, which I imagined as one of the possible starting points for such a development.
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Originally Posted by weby View Post
-how desperate humanity/major parts of humanity are to get out there.

A mature TL 9^ society with the capability to resource mine in the space and to use robots should be able to build astonishingly large space structures while still using extremely small parts of a planetary wealth.
.
And there's the rub: A mature TL 9^ civilization with a planetary population of 4 billion appears to have no pressing need to go colonising the galaxy. What's their motivation, is basically the first question that needs to be addressed, that will affect all the others.
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Old 02-06-2017, 12:10 PM   #16
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

What I did in mine followed the following steps:

1) First extrasolar colony took 20 years to reach at fast STL speeds.
2) First contact with another species that already had lightspeed drives.
3) War breaks out between the species, fought mainly at STL and lightspeed for 150 years.
4) FTL drives developed not long after the war ends.
5) Sleeper ships sent out to many stars at fast STL, lightspeed, and slow FTL speeds. Some ships still unaccounted for.
6) Extrasolar colonies founded on nearby systems not long after.
7) Cloning used in a lot of areas to quickly populate some planets, generally used as a workforce on farms, in mines, and in construction.
8) Colonization of a 20 ly radius assisted by well-mapped routes. The frontier extends out to 50 ly beyond that, not so well mapped and often in very small populations.

Mind, my setting takes about 500 years to go from TL8 to TL11^; the setting itself is just entering TL11^ ca. 2500 CE.

No world other than Earth and some alien homeworlds has over a billion people; even the leaders of my "self-determination league" measure their populations in the millions.
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Old 02-06-2017, 03:13 PM   #17
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

Humans won't have left Earth in Star Trek until 2063 at the earliest, because that's when Warp Drive was invented. Those ships would only do Warp 1 at best.
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Old 02-06-2017, 03:29 PM   #18
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
[*]The rate of building up colonies. Making multiple self-sustaining colonies (not outposts) with a population ranging from at least a few millions to a billion seems like something that's hard to pull off in 200ish years. It means either focusing more on non-operatic technologies such as creation of rapid-breeding transhumans, or moving lots of people around.
Well, the thing is 200 years is a lot of time and a lot of people can move in that time. Look at the population of North America, for instance.

If going to a colony world in your space opera is as easy as crossing the Atlantic or Pacific in the 19th century, you don't really have that much of a problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
[*]Moving lots of people offworld implies having a large colonizing fleet. Yet somehow I doubt that a planetary population will spend more than about 0.5% of its Monthly Average Wealth Income on such a fleet and the colonization itself. Maybe 5% if there's some big long-term existential threat (because societies like being in denial). I suspect that this would be extremely little.
If movement of people to the colonies has to be done at public expense, you likely have a problem.

If it's done by people buying their own passage from a plentiful general transportation fleet, not as much.
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Old 02-06-2017, 03:44 PM   #19
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

In a sense, this is a justification for "single-biome planets" in a lot of space operas; There's only a few thousand or million people on a planet, and they live in the best place they can find. It doesn't work for Star Wars where people have lived on every planet you can breath on for millennia, but for a lot of other settings...
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Old 02-06-2017, 04:46 PM   #20
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: From TL9^ interplanetary to TL10^ interstellar space opera in 200 years or less?

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Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain View Post
Humans won't have left Earth in Star Trek until 2063 at the earliest, because that's when Warp Drive was invented. Those ships would only do Warp 1 at best.
That's a retcon to move the date safely into the future. At the time, Star Trek's future history had us launching interstellar colonization ventures in the 1990s.
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