how about wormholes for communication? one might envision a scenario where one could open a wormhole to anywhere in the universe, which would allow for instantaneous communication. however, because of some physical principle, these wormholes wouldn't be stable, therefore prohibiting travel through it. or, they may only allow certain types of EM radiation to pass through, or life just couldn't survive the stresses of passing through, or whatever. it might suffice for transfer of information.
the beauty would be, much like suggested modes of time travel, that you would need a "gateway" at either end of the transmission, which would have to be built by people who got there the "slow" way (

here's another one for brown dwarf detection: gravitational waves.

predicted by quantum gravity, there are efforts underway to measure them even now. or at least, to build the necessary apparatus. anyway, i would think a brown dwarf careening through the galaxy might cause some gravitational waves, which should be detectable without delay. this is in addition to the gravitational lensing mentioned before.

on the physics/realtiy side of it, FTL travel is physically possible. both variations of "warp" and models for creating an artificial wormhole involve negative energy - not to be confused wtih dark energy - to function. unfortunately the little information we can derive about negative energy is that particles carrying it would have imaginary mass.

but on the writer's side of it, i don't see any reason to try and invent a method of instant communications (an ansible, as they're often dubbed in science fiction). especially if i wanted to stick to known science, the numbers are there for FTL travel and communication by some methods that haven't been completely discounted in theory, but i'd have no idea how to even start describing the engineered technology. i also kinda like the idea of star systems being connected only by very asynchronous communication. i could add an interesting level to the way politics and information trade unfold.

it is science fiction, right? there is always some give and take involved, and if the story is to play in the far future, who can say what technologies humankind will possess? on the other hand, i personally prefer estimates that are not too conservative, lest we get AI that is operated by cassette tapes or somesuch. a great example for this are star wars operation panels. all blinking lights and switches.




one possible explanation here is the enormous amounts of energy needed for such communication. or negative energy. imagine a scenario where you have to save years or decades to obtain the amounts of energy required for a single transmission. especially, if you have a hub, like earth, which would have to communicate fairly frequently just to talk to every colony out there every once in a while.

but hey, just an idea. there are plenty of other options.

Well, you're right, FTL is possible with negative energy, we might have any number of technologies in the far future, etc. But I was under the impression that you were trying to be more conservative with the technological settings, a "hard" sci-fi. Otherwise, just do what you want, make what you need.

i do.

for two reasons. one is the writing. "the petri dish effect" we've been discussing so far is a perfect excuse to do in fiction what social scientists wish they could do in a lab: vary environmental conditions -and genes- and see what happens. that'll all go to s*** if anyone figures out how to go FTL.

number two is more scientific. i think FTL will turn out to be impossible - either for theoretical reasons or because of the challenges presented in terms of engineering and cost. there's still a whole lot we don't know, and our most cutting-edge theories of physics today are only barely supported by experimental evidence - many are partially unverifiable with current technology. there are only minor loopholes in the central theories of quantum physics and general relativity that make FTL mathematically possible. but just because you can arrive at a conclusion using numbers doesn't mean it's right. rememeber: math was invented to describe phenomena, it just so happens that sometimes we can also use it to predict stuff. think of it linguistically. the grammar of math is always precise: just because a statement is grammatically correct doesn't mean it describes something sensical.

FTL seems possible only by a minor loophole, and the mathematical phenomenon cannot be described using other physical models. one day, perhaps soon, we'll probably piece together a working GUT (grand unification theory) and a Theory of Everything. at that point i think we'd be better positioned to say what might be possible. personally, i think the big truth, so to speak, will be something no one's ever been able to even remotely conceive before.

Hey there! Sorry for disappearing - Been very busy with stuff.

On the Solar Catastrophe front:

I read a rather funny/weird/interesting book called "Apocolypse 2012". While it was a weird book and I'm not sure how much of it to take seriously, It did talk about a very interesting, semi-scientifucally possible solar doomsday event:

Pardon my lack of physics/astronomy/spelling ability

Essentially, The solar system is devoid of ISM (interstellar medium). We talked about this earlier in the thread. Well, The solar system, as we know, isn't stationary. It moves though this ISM like a boat through water. We, some astronomers have noted that the solar system is moving into an area of the galaxy that is "more dense" (like going from a boat in water to a boat in ice). Now its the Sun that displaces this ISM as we move, and as the solar system moves into denser space, more stress is placed on the Sun. Some scientists hypothesize that the current spike in solar activity (like some of the largest solar Flares on record) is linked to our movement. Historically, these flares have taken out satellites, power grids, and some people have noticed that Very very large flared were detected around the time Katrina was gaining strength, and before the earthquake that caused the great Tsunami.

Now while its not the most dramatic doomsday, but if Earth started having more and more vicsious events (storms, earthquakes, etc). It would be very hard to recover from that. Attrition would outpace our developement and ability to repair the damage. Again, other planets could also be affected by flares. Habitability across our solar system would decrease over time....

Just throwing that out there.

Ps dytopic - I enjoyed the Character study. It was very deep.

no apologies needed, it's not like you're on a clock or anything



thanks! i really enjoy sudden fiction because it gets me out of my comfort zone. if it hasn't become obivous, i can be quite verbose. the wonderful challenge with sudden fiction is in word economy. i can practically fart 500 words, but cramming lots of ideas, meaning and clarity (or creative ambiguity!) into those 500 words is the real challenge, and one i really enjoy.



2012? did it make reference to Nostradamus or the Aztec calendar?



hmm i'm certainly no physicist (though... i started college with preferred enrollment in the aerospace engineering program, so i'm no halfwit either  ), but that 'stress' would be pressure... the first place that'd be affected would be the heliopuase, the bubble in the ISM that's formed where our sun's hot, but thin, gas emissions 'balance out' against the higher pressure of the ISM. the first question is whether that would translate into higher pressure on the sun itself. i don't know for sure, but my newtonian intuition says yes. after the heliopuase, the next peak in pressure i think would be somewhere in/near the sun where the outward pressure from the fusion fights agains the inward pressure of both gravity and (in its own very small way) the pressure of its own expelled gasses. i know that battle quite well myself.

this is about where my speculatation would turn to BSing. part of the problem is that we don't fully understand our own sun's behavior; the magnetic forces created by our sun are powerful and complex.

incidentally, did you see the episode of Stargate: Atlantis "Echos"?

at any rate, i'm sure there's no shortage of potential disasters that could befall us. i think in a work of fiction, the real horror comes from the way it's put to the page.

We had better learn to live and explore space if mankind is going to survive.

here is one possibility.

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13167

  

here is a question for the engineers out there.


could the photocells by applied like paint and still work.

Actually it made a lot of references to the aztec calandar and even set the doomsday date at Dec 20, 2012, matching the calendar. One of the big themes of the book (and the one I took the least seriously) was that the natural events described seem to culminate around 2012. For example, the solar maximum, where the sun will we outputting the most energy and flares will occur in 2012. The minimun was around 2005. The book also talked about other events, such as the increasing activity of The Yellowstone Volcano, The weakening ozone layer, flipping of the magnetic poles, etc.

Like I said weird book, not all of it I could take seriously, but It does have some interesting doomsday scenario's that would make good fiction. I did enjoy how it stuck to "nature." There wasn't much about nuclear proliferation us blowing eachother up or anything.

I think from the physics angle, the way the book described it was that The displacement of the ISM would affect the gravitational and magnetic feild of the sun. Since solar flares are outbursts of radiation, disruption of the magnetic feild would generate larger flares (sorta like releiving "pressure").

Again I don't know Jack about physics, so this dude could be blowing steam, but its still kinda intersting and cool sounding, lol

i assume you mean the kind solar cells that power pocket calculators and the like, for the purpose of creating electricity?

wikipedia just taught me that they're technically called photovoltaic cells - who knew?!

i'm reading up out of curiosity. i don't know if a 'paint' would work per se, but it wouldn't need to be a paint. second generation solar cell technology is very flexible, capable of being applied even to cloths. i suppose whether this would be as good as a paint depends on the use you had in mind - were you thinking to cover an entire ship/station in this 'paint'?

i'd say that's a pretty good idea. besides generating some power, it'd also provide some shielding to radiation. from what i've read, our current photovoltaic technology, at least the kinds used to generate power, mainly absorb intrared and visible light spectra, but it's easier to make use of higher-energy wavelengths of light than lower.

i'm getting the hint that cells can be chemically calibrated to absorb different spectra. multi-layer solar cells have at their 'bottom' a layer designed to absorb infrared, since heat can be generated at higher levels.

from what i've read it seems like there are a few emerging photovoltaic technologies that could create something like a paint. organic and polymer types can be flexible, but aren't very effecient now. there are also dyes that can work like a solar cell, but they degrage over time under UV and IR light, and i'm guessing they haven't been developed for heavy exposure to gamma and x-rays.

still, i think these technologies are still less effecient only because they're so much more recent than the silicon-based technologies.



hi 3dmike, and welcome to the discussion.

that was an interesting article - did you read the subsequent debate? it's too bad the author only provided the concepts section as a powerpoint presentation - especially when one can easily save it as a web-compatible presentation.

the author claims he can achive constant 1g of force. that's not a big accomplishment, to be honest. applied to something the size of a spcecraft, it'd be about as much force as having the crew blow on sails. all the guy's numbers are whack, seriously. i think he's calculating travel times based on something with nearly zero mass, which is ludicrous.

perhaps some engine like that will be used some day. i can't imagine it being used to propel very much, though.

the thing about any propulsion device that makes use of any sort of ISM - from the molecular to the subatomic - their "fuel" isn't something they combust, but whatever generates the electricity to power the propulsion drive. if you're going to have a drive operating for decades at a time, you're probably going to need a power plant of some kind. generally, small objects can achive very high specific impulse (fuel effeciency), but only at the cost of low max thrust.

i do think living humans won't be going to other stars until we can achive relativistic speeds, and that's one point of that article i agree with. well that, and "NLS" (near light speed) is a pretty useful generic acronym.

i think we'll probably be receiving telemetry from early interstellar probes before we start colonizing. but the chances we'll find an earth-like planet nearby with an early probe seem small to me. i think it's more likely that we'll be going to stars "blindly". we'll have a lot more information in the coming centuries - assuming we manage to avoid devastating catasrophes and what not - we'll know a lot more about the nearby star systems. if you look at how much we already know given the instruments we have at hand, and rate technology changes and grows, etc., i think we'll see scientists start to identify things like atmospheric composition and water occurance on planets with a similar temperature to ours - in our lifetimes. but those will be special cases - the planets, and the ability to identify them from here (well, "here" being in and close to our own solar system, not necessarily the earth).

i think those will be number 1 targets, obviously. but by that point, we'll also have a lot of experience living in space and exploiting resources in asteroids and inhospitable planets and satellites - who knows, possibly stars themselves. the real kicker is that all our information will be dated by however many light years away the thing we're looking at happens to be.

anyway, i think there could be a point when we started sending out colonies to stars blindly. the ship gets there, checks the place out - even if it's a dump, it could set up a temporary resource-gathering facility of one sort or another based on the star's radiation, if nothing else. once ready, the ship gets up and goes on - unless of course, the place is worth colonizing.

---

however we get to places we colonize, those are the points of my interest. i'm surprised no one's really speculated on something they could see happening under these or those conditions - given the dramatic possibile environments we might encounter, our abilities to manipulate genes, our cultural history and diversity, and the almost total physical isolation new colonies will have. so i'm throwing it out there explicity - what sort of divergence to you all think could be possible? or interesting environmental conditions, or given a unique makeup of the crew (culture, language, religion, all of that stuff - all the crews might not necessarily be altrustic internationalists). even if you don't have a "full picture", ideas and pieces are always interesting.

Well, this isn't exactly what you asked for, but I had this idea for a basic premise to wrap a plot around, just throwing it out there. You mentioned that we would probably receive information about other planets from probes and such before we colonized. What if we found a "paradise" planet (Planet class 30, of course ), and we sent a colony ship(s) with millions of people to this planet. Being far away, it would take say 10-20 years to get there, plus the data we received in the first place would be 5-10 years old, so there's essentially a 30 year gap between our finding the planet and reaching it. We get there...and it has been destroyed. The planet surface is irradiated or covered with volcanic activity, due to some catastrophe that occurred within that 30 year gap. The planet hasn't totally lost its life-support capabilities, there is evidence of surviving vegetation and the equipment they have might be able to filter contaminated water, but it will be hellish down there. The people can't go back, the ships were designed with little room for error, and they have no supplies left. They must land, so now a million people are forced to live in this ash ball of a planet. What would happen?...

yes or car

this is why i would have sent a crew to the planet

1 they can start setting things up.

2 if things did go south as per above. if the colony ship hasn't reached the point of no return then they can turn around. if the colony ship has reached the point of no return then they can prepare for it.

I think, that while divergence will certianly occur, it'll keep the same pattern of development that we've seen here in Human history.

Assuming that our initial colony is relatively small, and resources are very limited (just enough to survive), we'd have a rather simple egalitarian culture, atleast in terms of materialism. There will still some for of gov't, but probably more military/paramilitary rather than democracy ("We don't have the time to debate X, we need to work to survive!"). Some democractic principles will probably exsist. Perhaps the colony will be lead by a commitee that will vote on issues, but the commitee isn't elected by the people; perhaps intitally appointed by the entity that set up (funded) the colonial expedition from earth. For familiarity, I think a lot of original Earth culture will remain intact. The people will use it to remind them selves where tehy are from and why they left as a form of motivation.
As the colony grows and prospers (profiting in the sense that there are surplus resources - survival of individuals is pretty much garunteed), I would expect to see the emergence of different classes and simple internal economies along with the emergence of materialism. New culture, language, etc would form as the different classes in the colony differentiate and establish their own identity. Earth won't be forgotten, but culturally, its not as significant.
As the colony continues to grow, with the emergence of classes, dissent will occur. It's posible that there may be internal social-political conflict within the colony over government types and the distrobution of wealth. Many things from separation, to reform to revolution could occur. By this time, sub-cultures and class would have definite identities and would have little to do with Earth except in a historical sense. Some language and arbitrary traditions (like holidays) may still remain, but their significance may be lost.

I think ultimately, the divergence of culture will be based on proximitey (and therefore contact) with Earth. A far away colony that is essentially required to be self sufficient with little contact with Earth will diverge much more than a closer colony where there is significant and continual interaction with Earth.
I think, at least in terms of history, you could look at the British American Colonies and outer Roman colonies to see how distance would cause cultural divergence. Also interestingly enough, what would happen to the colony if the "Motherland" were to suffer catastrophe (I'm thinking like the collapse of the roman empire - Would the future Earth cultures even know of thier lost colony, or be able to communicate with it)? What will happen when they (Earth and colony) "re-discover" each other?

Edit - holy crap I can't spell today - apologies!
Edit-Edit - Come to think of It, I think Asimov's Foundation Trilogy kinda looks at the divergence over time a bit in the first 2 books. The colony tries to maintian its Imperial culture at first and as its losses contact with the Empire, it begins to form its own culture and structure.

ha i hadn't even thought about practical and realistic applications like putting it on cars or homes (or just about everywhere today) - very nice point.



i did think about that. my idea to get around it would be ships that don't need to land; that can function as autonomous space stations as long as they orbit a star (and perhaps even in empty space). but i think it's a good premise to describe a colony's early and unexpected struggles - especially if the colony ship were created in earth's first days of sending them to other stars.



hmm see i think quite the opposite. well, i guess it depends on what level you look at. i don't think human diaspora will abandon universals like art, music, spiritual exploration, or love for animal companions.

i imagine our 'colony rush' spanning centuries or even millenia, resulting in thousands of human-settled star systems.

i think catastrophe could befall some, and they'd sink into a technological barbarism of sorts. others, equipped with enough technology, could prosper into new centers of human activites. i still like the idea that private groups might eventaully be able to found their own colonies. i don't know what sorts of society would foster such colonies, but i could see them creating the potential for a great deal of cultural drift. i could easily imagine socialisms founded on varying religious ideals and interpretations - though their fates would certainly vary.

i could see meritocracies with a military hierarchy being commonplace in many missions founded under especially scientific auspices.

and if we're sending colonies out over the span of thousands (or millions) of years, our home starting material will change a great deal. no doubt there could be periods where Sol lost interest in her colonies and founding new ones. 'our current trajectory' is still very open for interpretation; bear in mind how exceedingly short-lived the modern/industrial era has been on the scales of all human history and pre-history. after studying society for 5 years, the one thing i'm absolutely sure of is that it's impossible to predict social change at our current level of understanding. capitalism is interesting in that it's both incredibly unstable and incredibly addictive (or malignant, or inert). capitalism is like entropy, or drunken boxing. it's powerful because it's unstable, and it's unstable because it needs to continue spreading into new lands to continue surviving. i don't just mean territory. capitalism fueled the european age of colonial expansion and the industrial revolution - new markets. and when all the lands had been marketized, and industrial production because as profitable as it could, the great depression happened. and then capitalism colonized the mind and heart, and consumerism was born.

one question i keep returning to in my philosophical life is whether that market can be exhausted, whether culture might 'evolve' - by force of its members being pushed to the brink of insanity - to the point that people are completely immune to advertising, fed up with buying crap that wears out in ever shorter amounts of time, sick of seeing waste everywhere.

Arthur C. Clark was pretty optimistic about the future of society, often noting that real democracy was finally achieved when universal education was truly and fully implemented. i'm pretty young (25), and this may be a product of my particular bias, but it seems to me the younger generations are becomming increasingly galvanized between an increasingly shallow and materialistic majority and a growing minority of younger people who desire deep understanding, gnosis, across all levels of understanding.

i think it's an interesting age to live in, but not entirely in a positive sense. it's interesting because it's precarious. perhaps it's because i've grown up in southern california, where consumerism is pretty much force fed to the kids, i feel like there could be a saturation point on the horizon. but to be honest, i think if we're talking about human beings living for a million years in this solar system, statistically speaking, damn near anything's possible. in the same way the vast distances provide a petri dish for humans across star systems, i think vast spans of time can do the same thing for the earth.

---

edit: anyone ever read The City and the Stars by Clark? i think i have an idea slowly boiling in my mind about a way to frame this much potential content... i don't want to spoil it yet though, so i'm gonna think about it a bit more.

I certianly agree. I think human culutural fundamentals will remain, just the way they are expressed will diverge.



The European colonial expansion (in the Americas, pre-Industrial revolution) was fueled by Materialism ( I beleive that is the term). It was opposite of capitalism, in that the quest wasn't to control new markets but new resources. The power of a nation was based on how many resources it controlled and how self-sufficient (economically speaking) it effectively was. It wasn't until The industrial revolution and "The Wealth of Nations" was written that the concept of a nation's power being being judged by market control was really taken up in earnest (The economic power of a nation is judged by whether or not its people can afford what they need when they need it).

I really like the your idea of a long term colony being sent out and established to somewhere and Earth eventually losing intrest/contact with the colony. I see a lot of interesting potential stories about the two cultures "re-discovering" eachother.

On a side note - what exactly would we bring to make a new colony? What is needed, what is extra? In this thread, we've talked about Fussion/nuclear power, Solar, Terraforming, genetics, Food, plants, livestock, and scientific exploration.
Would a new colony on a hostile planet have time to build a genetics lab? What benifit would it provide a colony that's barely getting by? Would they just keep it in storage till they have thier survival secured and then build it? Would conditions get so bad that it would be chopped up for scrap? What if the only genetists died before the lab was built?

If everyting's going on one ship, This ship is gonna be huge:

Food
Agricultural equipment (everything from planting to proessing to cooking)
Industrial equipment (I'm talking everything from foundries to textiles - need to make building materials somehow)
Construction equiment
Medical equipment
Chemical equipment (Need to make medicines and other chemicals from "scratch")
Scientific equipment (duh)
Communications.
Education (Can't build it now, but gotta remember how to build it later!)
Not to mention the requisite raw materials neede to just to get these projects off the ground! (steel, lumber, polymers, chemicals, etc)

We're not just talking like space labs with a few dudes. I mean for a "self sufficient" colony of I'm guessing several thsousand people, these facilities are gonna be huge, like one the scale of those large refineries in Tx and steel mills in Pa. Not to mention very large areas dedicated to agriculture (cotton, grains, livestock). This would be even harder if the prospective world was not earthlike - say every thing had to be in domes or underground or something...

one dozzer, one crane.





books

on the other hand your right that the colony ship will have to be self sufficient.


what i see is three ships.

ship 1 aircraft to get you to ship 2

ship 2 to get you to mars.

ship 3 a lander to get on the ground would have to land on butt. incorporated in this ship should be a dozer and means to make cement for a landing strip for ship 1

I think you underestimate the amount of work that goes into modern construction. Welders, front end loaders, requistie chemicals, machine shops, molds, presses, not to mention the needed logistical equipment for transporting the materials. In addition, you'll have to prefab more complex parts on Earth until fabrication facilites capable of building their own are built. That's a lot of metal and parts to be sending in a colony ship. Not to mention, logistically, that the initial pahses of the conlony will have no choice but to be built in a certian order and manor (its called dericking in the construction business).



I think that would be inadequate also. I mean, would you let a Doctor operate on your heart who has only read about being a Doctor? Apprenticship styled systems could work in a colony and would probably be the only option in a colony that is so far away it can be considered "cut off". But staight encyclopedias would also be inadequate. They are meant for general education. You are gonna need a lot of books. Electronic documentation would be the best - most info - least physical space. But it would still be huge.

I do agree that the transition from space to planet would certianly have to be in phases. Like you said, one to clear out a landing area, and then ships that would essentially drop the supplies. Perhaps dropping them to the planet like in pods, ala the apollo capsules or something similar.

i think you overestimate what you would need to get started. you probable wouldn't need the crane. all or most buildings would be one story. not 37 stories.





i don't believe that i mentioned medicine as being able to be kept in a book. but current doctors can teach other people to be doctors.





books harddrives except for weight what is the difference

as for power plants and agriculture. the people on the colony ship will have to take care of the power plants and farms on the ship so again they can teach others to do it also.

I think that colony ships would be very specialized according to what was on the destination world. A given colony ship can only carry so many resources, the colonists would soon have to use their surrounding resources. At this point we might be able to receive more detailed information on a given world from more advanced space probes, and then ships we send there would be built and equipped specifically for whatever resources we detected.

Power could be generated by exploiting natural sources such as water, wind, or geothermal power. Solar power is always an option, and it could be particularly useful if the local sun were brighter than ours is. There is also the option of biofuels; we could use processes that we have to create oil or ethanol with vegetation, whether this means setting up a distillation apparatus, or maybe for something slightly more sci fi (though we can do this now too) bring along just a small amount of bacteria (and the proper people to handle the culture), which could digest and convert the vegetation to something usable.

I would think that the initial colony wouldn't require that much construction. Depending on the weather conditions, I would imagine it would be more like camping than anything; we would use simple tent-like structures to contain a small atmosphere if we needed it. We could also use natural formations, such as caves, if they were present; all that would be required would be to put a door on the entrance. Construction of a factory and the above mentioned power plants would have to happen soon, however, and the installation of a communications array is also on the queue. Another option to the colonists is to deconstruct the colony ship itself for the necessary parts to construct the necessary colony modules.

Hopefully the world being colonized has some amount of vegetation that is edible, but if it didn't, I think the best route is some sort of biomatter converter; it could operate with bacteria or with whatever else we invent, it would essentially "digest" the biomatter, both from planetary sources or from our own waste if necessary, filtering any toxins and reorganizing it into a an edible state. Think like in the Matrix, where they eat that mush that's "... a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs." Eating mush and pellets wouldn't help very much for morale though, better bring some Ultra Spices (you researched those, right?).

There probably wouldn't be any "school" in the colony's early stages. Basic education would be taught by parents, aka home schooled. More advanced education would probably be restricted to construction-specific topics, allowing for an apprenticeship-like program that denyasis mentioned. Later, once communications were established, data could be broadcasted from Earth, and by the time it reached the colony the appropriate computers could have been constructed and the data could be downloaded.


I think the term you're looking for is "Mercantilism"

Hi!

Not much. The 250GB HD weights ~0.5 kg and has a capacity of 250 billions of characters. A 250 pages book weights 0.5 kg and has about 0.5 millions of characters. So a HD can store as much as 0.5 millions of books. 250 tons of books vs. one HD of 0.5 kg really doesn't make such a big difference.

BR, Iztok