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VitalSigns posted:
 hence, The Killing Star is where it's at, no need to digest what you can just bomb instead  :page1synpa:
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Dec 7, 2018 21:47
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
about tasty human snacks, neatly packaged in space tin cans
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This was worth reading all of, in the OP now. 
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Dec 7, 2018 21:51
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Lightning Knight posted:This was worth reading all of, in the OP now. it’s a pretty good post
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Dec 7, 2018 21:54
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BardoTheConsumer posted:God drat "yeah we should stop exploring this area of science" is the dumbest loving take I could possibly imagine. What kind of sad, wonderless life do you lead when you consider that meager amount of money to be wasted? An advanced case of engineer's disease. Studying the weird stuff is important because we don't know the application yet, and may not for a century, and thus hits the "this does nothing for ME" that some people use for evaluating worthiness.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:13
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Revelation 2-13 posted:Is our moon really the only moon we know of which is 1:1 tidal locked with it's mother planet? Also, 400 times smaller and 400 times closer, so it's a perfect overlap! I'm convinced. Obviously put there by progenitor races to create tidal forces with all that entails for the evolution of life. I'm off to make youtube videos and spread the word! Also the collision that created our moon is likely why we have the geomagnetic field that we do and thus a decent atmosphere, unlike Mars.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:54
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VitalSigns posted:Space predators being the resolution to the Fermi paradox seems unlikely to me because why would an alien species that doesn't share common descent like all life we've heretofore observed on Earth be able to naturally digest anything it finds here, let alone everything. I don't find space predators to be a compelling idea, but just to play devil's advocate- If glucose polymers are a universal life component, a space predator could possibly develop a way to express just the digestion machinery for starch or cellulose or chitin etc. depending on what they find at a given star. Also, a lot of the "don't eat that, it'll make you sick" things are tailor-evolved defense mechanisms. They might be completely ineffective against an alien physiology.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:08
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Epitope posted:I don't find space predators to be a compelling idea, but just to play devil's advocate- It's not the kind of thing you evolve as a spacefaring society, first because you're no longer talking about the extended timescales it takes evolution to happen, but also because you're dealing with abrupt changes. If a group of humans (or reindeer)shipwreck on an island that can't support human life, they don't evolve new faculties to live there, they just die because the conditions were too inhospitable. For natural selection to give you, say, the ability to live on an alien food source, some individuals need to be able to survive so that small differences in fitness eventually crowd out the others and eventually lead to a new species. They could genetically engineer themselves to do it maybe but if they have that ability why not just genetically engineer their perfect food source at home. Runs into the same problem as "why come to earth for our gold and iridium" except worse because they already have a biosphere with animals they evolved to eat made up of the most common stuff in the universe so why come here. Epitope posted:Also, a lot of the "don't eat that, it'll make you sick" things are tailor-evolved defense mechanisms. They might be completely ineffective against an alien physiology. If the aliens have a different totally alien kind of channel they might be immune to say pufferfish poison, but on the other hand any one of the millions of substances in our bodies could just happen to be the right shape to bind to some receptor in their bodies and cause unpredictable or dangerous effects. Or they just may be unable to break down a chemical in earth life that we don't even notice. For example we happen to be good at breaking down theobromine so we can eat chocolate all day but dogs don't break it down very well so too much builds up to toxic levels and sickens or kills them. Or humans die of ethanol poisoning all the time, but horse livers manufacture so much alcohol dehydrogenase that not only is it impossible for them to drink enough alcohol to kill them it may not be possible for them to even get drunk because their liver breaks it down so fast it can't accumulate in the bloodstream. Bodies are actually fairly delicate things that must maintain homeostasis, if you just start shoving random alien things into your mouth that you didn't evolve to eat, it's way more likely that it won't be broken down or excreted properly or will interfere with metabolic processes that didn't evolve to deal with its presence, and it will hurt you than it is you'll luck out and be fine. If you click that lick from my last post about the enzyme deficiency some people have that makes meat poison them, it's not that the proteins themselves kill the people. What happens is they can't break down some amino acids, and their body has to excrete them instead, but our renal system wasn't really designed to flush away huge amounts of amino acids (because normally those are digested and absorbed) so unless they go on a protein restricted diet, their kidneys get damaged from overwork and eventually they die of kidney failure. So imagine that, but you just ate an alien full of weirdo proteins that you can't digest and your body isn't adapted to deal with them properly. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 01:18
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I'm imagining a xenomorph that has a rumen type organ, and the microbial community therein can express diverse metabolic pathways. Regulation of metabolism based on what's available is common, see the lac operon. The toxin part would probably depend a lot on how different the alien physiology is. Still, if enough of them land, they can presumably learn "don't eat that one" before too many of them partake in that meal
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Dec 8, 2018 01:49
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I'm imagining the aliens from Alien except they're like docile space cows. 
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Dec 8, 2018 01:54
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Sure if you assume that all potentially spacefaring life has all the same types of carbohydrates, such that single-celled organisms evolved with any/all of the metabolic pathways on their planet that they would need here okay, but why come to Earth to get our cellulose. But let's assume for whatever reason they can't/won't stay home and eat their own plants: I'd say the bigger problem is proteins. There are only so many ways you can hook up carbohydrates so okay, but proteins can be all sorts of fantastical shapes and even animals on earth don't all agree on which amino acids to use. Some plant defenses are just amino acids that are poisonous to animals, you might show up at a planet and oops everything is poison. Or we might lack an essential amino acid that you need so you eat all you want and die of protein deficiency anyway. You could assume that like their ruminant organ with diverse metabolic abilities, they also have encountered every possible amino acid on their world and can turn on enzymes to break them down or convert them into other amino acids, or like plants they can synthesize all the amino acids they need from more basic compounds, but then why do they need to go anywhere to eat? Same thing with micronutrients, do they use all the same vitamins too or will they get alien-scurvy? Or do they make all their own, in which case again what is pressuring them to hunt? And what if one of our micronutrients is poison, a dog liver will kill a human from vitamin A overdose, what if they get here and it turns out vitamin A which doesn't exist on their world is lethal to them at any dose, now what do they eat.
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Dec 8, 2018 02:25
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I agree with you too much to keep arguing. The thing I think is more likely (because I think we should do it  ) is directed panspermia. Let's start biological warfare with E.T. If a payload of alien microbes landed on earth, would they have a chance? Home field advantage has gotta be pretty big.
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Dec 8, 2018 02:34
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Why kind of idiot primate is afraid that a spacefaring civilization will eat them? Lol Why not just remove all the oxygen from our atmosphere for fuel on their way to wherever. Wouldn't even need to land. Being eaten sounds boring as gently caress
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Dec 8, 2018 04:29
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If there was a space predator somehow, some magic pack of wolves that could magically fly planet to planet, It seems like it would have to evolve to be a space predator and have the whole way it consumes food and digests food be evolved around concepts of being unsure if what it eats is poison and being unable to ever get matching proteins and having to tear everything down to whatever the most basic level of biology is common enough among random aliens it eats. Like no space wolf would have a digestive tract that just let puffer fish poison into it's body untested, it'd have to have some perfectly sealed stomach that food stays in for 48 space hours with all it's tissue types so it could puke it all back up instead of letting it in it's real bloodstream if anything weird happened. Or whatever.
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Dec 8, 2018 05:09
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DrSunshine posted:I'm imagining the aliens from Alien except they're like docile space cows. I'm imagining that but they eat like Brundlefly
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Dec 8, 2018 05:12
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God damned nerds, getting all technical about aliens. *Dunks the top of your head in a supermassive black hole*
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Dec 8, 2018 06:20
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VitalSigns posted:This is the dumbest thing I've seen in D&D in over a decade of lurking/posting, and I've read every single jrodefeld post. You must not proofread your own posts before clicking 'Submit Reply'.
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Dec 8, 2018 13:00
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silence_kit posted:You must not proofread your own posts before clicking 'Submit Reply'. Yeah, he would probably find something even dumber in some of your other posts he quoted.
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Dec 8, 2018 13:06
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Colonizing other planets in the solar system is silly, why would you want to go back into a gravity well once you're out? If future humanity is cool, they'll just strip mine all the dumb dead rocks and build networks of O'Neill cylinders at the various useful orbits. Alternatively, the only other advanced civilization in the Milky Way just jostled a bit of the universe into a lower energy state with their fancy new particle accelerator and we're all utterly hosed in X years.
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Dec 8, 2018 13:19
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Potential BFF posted:Colonizing other planets in the solar system is silly, why would you want to go back into a gravity well once you're out? Why do people live anywhere that people live? Why hasn’t everyone just moved into the bands south and north of the equator with the best climate the second we got mobile enough to do so? It’s just how humans are.
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Dec 8, 2018 13:37
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I mean, pretty much everything is in one big gravity well or another. Even if you're not fighting to get off a planet, you're paying fuel and/or time costs to fight orbital sync issues.
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Dec 9, 2018 05:10
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Haystack posted:I mean, pretty much everything is in one big gravity well or another. Even if you're not fighting to get off a planet, you're paying fuel and/or time costs to fight orbital sync issues. All the aliens live in the great void and hate gravity, that’s why they aren’t around here.
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Dec 9, 2018 05:30
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If a planet or moon has something interesting on it, go hog wild with a colony but Mars is just poison dirt and frozen crap that can be found elsewhere. Maybe it can serve as a temporary fuel production station for the automated construction bots building the O'neill cylinders and strip mining the asteroid belt. Sure building a giant space station is hard, but so is colonizing Mars and the cylinders get bonuses of proper gravity, attached zero-g manufacturing, and the Republic of Zeon.
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Dec 9, 2018 16:07
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Terraforming is a trap choice -- that's why you get the Voidborne ascension perk that gives big bonuses to Habitats so you can max out your population in every colonized system, plus it's the first step to  Megastructures.
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Dec 9, 2018 18:18
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Just to take this issue with this, silicon-based life would mostly be varieties of rock anemones. Carbon-based life was able to eat the Earth and evolve and poo poo because Carbon is super-flexible, chemically-speaking, and can do all sorts of fun tricks that silicon just can't. I take issue with your issue. There's no guarantees silicon-based life would be rock anemones or stuck at the bottom of oceans. Well, no more guarantee than it'd be anything because we haven't met it yet. Now I get to talk about what I think about silicon chemistry!  Carbon is super-flexible, you are correct, but silicon is the second most flexible atom next to it (and is literally next to it on the Periodic Table meaning their properties are similar). Silicon is flexible enough to make macromolecules just like carbon, which is possibly the most important thing for it plausibly being a cornerstone of life and why we talk about silicon-based life. Macromolecules are, as the name suggested, large molecules; at their low end a macromolecule contains hundreds of atoms while at the high end it contains thousands of atoms. Small molecules, like the nucleic acids in our bodies (dozens of atoms each), come together due to their chemistry to form macromolecules such as DNA (thousands of atoms). The proteins in our bodies and any polymer we use in our lives are composed of macromolecules. Making macromolecules requires a flexible atom able to form lots of bonds (lots in this context being four) as a base. Both carbon and silicon can form four bonds with four different atoms; they're both about equally good at that. One important feature of these flexible atoms is how they form long chains. Carbon has no problem forming long chains of itself; if you have a long chain of carbon with only hydrogens in every other available bonding position, you have a hydrocarbon; modifying them can make things important to our biochemistry like fatty acids. The silicon equivalent is a silane, which is hilariously flammable like hydrocarbons, but not nearly as stable. So while silanes, which are highly reactive in general, may be important to the biochemical reactions of a silicon-based life form, it's probably not going to around as a stable molecule. What silicon can do that carbon can't is form silicones. A silicone, as in the polymer we see in our every day lives, is a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms. Silicones are highly stable and flexible with the theoretical ability to modify each silicon in the chain with up to two other atoms. Carbon doesn't form an exact equivalent of silicone--alternating carbon with oxygen in a chain makes an ether functional group which has its own complex chemistry. You can put ether functional groups in a chain but they tend to form a loop instead of a straight chain, which oddly enough is important to how Febreze and other odor eliminating products work. Another thing you would need for life is a set of functional groups that have a variety of chemical properties they can imbue macromolecules with. For our carbon-based life, most atoms used in our functional groups are near carbon in the Periodic Table: nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. Other atoms used in our biochemistry are on the left side of the Periodic Table (hydrogen, sodium, magnesium, etc.) or near the center (iron, zinc, manganese, etc). While we don't know exactly what other atoms silicon-based life would use in its functional groups, it's easy enough to speculate it would share a lot of the atoms with us based on what we know about basic chemistry, the chemistry of silicon, and our own biochemistry. We know, for instance, that in our own biochemistry the elements carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur have a complex interlocked chemistry. Silicon does not interact with nitrogen directly, but has chemistry with carbon and sulfur. So functional groups for silicon-based life would have access to nitrogen as a key micronutrient much like we need iodine--or they may not use nitrogen at all. With carbon, we know silicon can form some functional groups and that they have a complex chemistry with each other because of the study of organosilicons. With sulfur, we know silicon can polymerize with it in a way that carbon can not, which would be an important difference in how silicon-based life works. Silicon does not interact with phosphorus much at all under Earth-like conditions, so if we found silicon-based life using phosphorous we'd probably learn something new about that chemistry. Lastly, one thing silicon is hands-down worse at than carbon is the ability to form double and triple bonds. Carbon is very good at both of those things which means they're a big part of the functional groups in our own biochemistry. So silicon is flexible enough to plausibly build large macromolecules with, and we know from basic research into the chemistry of silicon that it can form functional groups with carbon, oxygen, and sulfur at the least. Once you have functional groups you need a set of molecular building blocks using those functional groups that fit together in a flexible way to build a macromolecule. As that macromolecule gets bigger it will start demonstrating unique properties due how its functional groups interact with each other and with functional groups in other small and macromolecules. In carbon-based life this would be where you building blocks like nucleic acids that are assembled to make a self-replicating macromolecule like DNA and RNA which is able to facilitate the synthesis of other macromolecules like proteins and other structures that make up the cells organisms are composed of. So from this perspective there's nothing clearly standing in the way of silicon-based life being just as complex as carbon-based life. Silicon has its own bag of tricks to offer but we only poorly understand them because we haven't studied silicon and its ability to form macromolecules (this is something basic research would do, FYI) nearly as much as we've studied carbon and most importantly our own biochemistry. Most of our research into organosilicons is due to polymer research--so how to make different and better plastics (this is something applied research does, FYI). The bigger hurdles to us imagining silicon-based life, from our perspective as carbon-based life, is what their basic building blocks and fundamental chemical reactions for them would be--which we have to completely guess at. For example, their biochemistry would definitely have several reduction-oxidation reactions somewhere in it (which doesn't have to involve oxygen in spite of the name of the reaction); for us one of those is carbon (solid) and oxygen (gas) forming carbon dioxide (gas). The equivalent for a silicon-based life form would be silicon (solid) and oxygen (gas) forming silicon dioxide (solid). So how they use that reaction would have to be completely different than how our form of life uses the equivalent. And of course because silicon reacts well with carbon it may just be that they use the same carbon and oxygen redox reaction as us. When we think about silicon-based life we need to remember it doesn't have to exist at the same conditions as we do. What if they were on a planet halfway between Earth and Venus in conditions? I say this because one idea is that silicon-based life could exist at much hotter temperatures than carbon-based life. Going to a much higher temperature and pressure would mean changes to chemistry that would both make some reactions we benefit from unfavorable and unusual and vice verse. One other big question that also relates to the reactions that make this life possible is what solvent that silicon-based life would use as at a higher temperature water isn't going to work. Sulfuric acid is one suggestion because it boils at 300 C; so if silicon life using that would exist somewhere just below that temperature. Using sulfuric acid as a solvent would also make the chemistry happening completely different than how our life works and might have the benefit of making silicone-based macromolecules much more stable. An example in the difference of conditions is silicon nitride, an inert industrial chemical under Earth-like conditions. On a hot planet covered in sulfuric acid, silicon nitride would not exist as a compound--it would be dissolved so nitrogen would not risk being locked up in an inert compound and would go elsewhere in their environment and be available for biochemical reactions. Living at a higher temperature than us hardly would stop a silicon-based life from space-faring anymore than we do from the perspective of life support--it's trivial to make a hotter box than what we do for traveling the delightfully insulating depths of space where you have more trouble getting rid of heat than generating it. Of course, what kind of technology is possible on the planet they might live on is another question. The important thing is that if silicon-based life could form from abiogensis, there's nothing fundamental that we know of standing in its way of being as complex as us. Citations: A lot of chemistry textbooks I've read because I'm a chemist. I like this one which is about supramolecular chemistry, the study of molecules--especially macromolecules--interacting with one another.
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Dec 10, 2018 05:49
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LtStorm posted:An amazing post This is a really excellent, interesting and informative post!! Thanks so much for making this, LtStorm. Everything until now I had read about Silicon biochemistry seemed to indicate it was not likely to be possible because of something involving silicon compounds being more fragile or less flexible than Carbon ones (If I recall correctly?), but coming from an actual chemist, that really is informative and opens up the possibilities for speculation much more widely.
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Dec 10, 2018 07:09
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Re: Silicon based life I'm not a chemist, but my understanding is that silicon is only able to form complex bonds at extremely low temperatures, like around 100 Kelvin. The popular idea is lava monsters because of our association of silicon with rock, but in reality any silicon based life would be out in the iceballs of the oort or plutoids, living very slowly.
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Dec 10, 2018 10:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If there was a space predator somehow, some magic pack of wolves that could magically fly planet to planet, It seems like it would have to evolve to be a space predator and have the whole way it consumes food and digests food be evolved around concepts of being unsure if what it eats is poison and being unable to ever get matching proteins and having to tear everything down to whatever the most basic level of biology is common enough among random aliens it eats. If we're assuming a creature that has no essential amino acids or vitamins because it synthesizes it all from raw material like plants, why do they need to go anywhere to eat anyone. They can eat absolutely anything at all as long as it's got sugars and whatever elements their biology needs, they could farm their own planet with whatever they want or eat vats of algae (probably a creature that didn't need variety in food because it didn't need to obtain a full suite of micronutrients wouldn't get tired of eating the same thing every day). And an airlock stomach seems unlikely to evolve, it's horribly inefficient compared to a species just adapting their bodies to the poisons in their environment by not eating the poisonous thing or coming up with a way to tolerate, break it down, or eliminate it. Natural selection doesn't care if individuals die, as far as nature is concerned if half the population dies every year from a new poison until the species adapts that's way better than spending a bunch of energy making sure no one can possibly eat something and get sick. What we actually see is something like ours, if you mess up and eat something bad that's bad in a really common way our tongue detects it and we spit it out or our stomach detects it and we throw up, but it's not worth it to seal up all our food and test it with various tissues just in case we eat pufferfish poison because that is a rare problem and it's more efficient for a few individuals to just die. Something like that would have to be engineered to be an alien space predator. And it wouldn't solve the problem anyway, if one of our amino acids or vitamins is poison to them then they'd get here and not be able to eat anything. In other words, in both cases we're just assuming a species that culturally just wants to go to other worlds and hunt and eat aliens for sport or to religion or some reason, but at that point you might just as well solve the Fermi paradox by assuming they sling relativistic missiles at any other species they detect rather than going all the way there in a spaceship for hundreds or thousands of years just to eat everyone and then  ...what then, set up a listening station and go into coldsleep for 100,000 years until they pick up another radio transmission?Well I'm glad someone out there didn't drop out of chemistry as soon as it got hard, unlike me (great post!) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 17:12
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I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting space wolves or "real" space predators that go into gravity wells to eat prey because space reasons. What I wanted to point out is that if basic biology across the galaxy is anything like ours, virtually all interaction *between* complex species is in a predator/prey or parasitic context, relatively little is genuinely symbiotic (although there's naturally a truckload of second and third level interactions where plants attract aphid predators to eat the aphids and so forth) and most of that has been true for upwards of a billion years. Humans have overcome a bunch of that but not enough to instinctively flinch when we see a snake, feel bad about eating 95% of the stuff we eat, or stop making movies about space predators that go into gravity wells to hunt for sport. I don't really see a reason why a space overlord would handle that better than we do. Silicon based life and other kinds of life that are not remotely interested in competing for the same resources as us are possibly our best bet to overcome that evolutionary problem on both sides.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:02
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Haystack posted:Aliens don't have interstellar civilizations for exactly the same reason humans never will: it costs way, way, waaaay too much energy, and is way too slow. A physicist on another forum I frequent broke it down like this: As others have said - this last assumption about future energy capabilities is where this line of reasoning breaks down. If we're going to to be going to another solar system, it won't be for a long time. And by that time we're going to have some pretty serious energy capabilities on our hands (not to mention that we'd probably be pretty capable of modifying our bodies or straight up going full robotic). Taking a crack at some very back of the envelope calculations with numbers scraped from google: We're generating something like 10^13 watts energy. We're nowhere near maximally utilizing all the Earth based energy available to us. The bulk of this is probably solar energy. We're probably not going to go completely hogwild covering the Earth and oceans in future tech solar panels since that would cause an ecological catastrophe due to us stealing the light from every ecosystem, but we can probably expand it massively. This is the road to the "Type 1 Civilization" on the Kardashev scale. The estimates on how much energy this could give us are probably pretty ropey, but I'm going to estimate it's around 1000 times greater than our current situation. I reckon that would actually be enough to consider making the journey at that point, although it would be pretty risky even with pretty imaginative propulsion methods. But humans aren't going to stop there. Because there's a lot, lot more energy available from the sun. Gradually we're going to build more and more platforms to harness more of the sunlight that's currently just being wasted to the rest of the universe. This would involve the building of a Dyson swarm - basically the realistic version of a Dyson sphere built up of trillions of satellites. We hopefully would build this in such a way as to not block out light to the Earth. Maybe we'd have to deconstruct a couple of planets to build this. The energy harnessed from even partial Dyson swarms is going to be immense, and gets us pretty much up to the level of a Type 2 civilization. Something around 10 trillion times what we have available to us at the moment. Even if the massive compromises and losses involved with a real world implementation would eat into that giving us just a fraction of a percent of that, we've still got an incredible amount of power now available to us. If we take the scenario shifting the ISS at 0.6c in the table, that goes from 23.73 times our energy budget, to 0.000000000002373 times our energy budget. The engineering involved is still going to be extremely difficult, but humans are clever and we're absolutely going to give it a go sooner or later.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:23
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VitalSigns posted:If we're assuming a creature that has no essential amino acids or vitamins because it synthesizes it all from raw material like plants, why do they need to go anywhere to eat anyone. They can eat absolutely anything at all as long as it's got sugars and whatever elements their biology needs, they could farm their own planet with whatever they want or eat vats of algae (probably a creature that didn't need variety in food because it didn't need to obtain a full suite of micronutrients wouldn't get tired of eating the same thing every day). I can't really imagine how or why there would ever be space wolves, but if there was, they'd have to have evolved to be space wolves. like one that could digest fat would be way more likely to find food on random planets than one that could digest only protein. Since fat is fat and there is only a couple ways to do the chemicals, so more things are going to evolve the same specifics than trying to break down proteins that could be any which way.
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Dec 10, 2018 20:24
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Bug Squash posted:Maybe we'd have to deconstruct a couple of planets to build this. Actually, I think some astronomer calculated that you could surround the sun in a swarm of satellites just with the mass of Mercury alone. Ah, here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTfuI-9jIo https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/08/23/how_to_build_a_dyson_swarm.html That'd be doable ... assuming we could invent a self-replicating robot factory. There's still a few engineering problems to be solved on that front, but there's nothing physically preventing us from doing it. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 20:30
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On a slightly different topic, I ran across an interesting article that gives an indepth description of using particles beams as space weapons: http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/12/particle-beams-in-space.html Thought this would be a good place for it.
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Dec 10, 2018 21:13
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I can't really imagine how or why there would ever be space wolves, but if there was, they'd have to have evolved to be space wolves. like one that could digest fat would be way more likely to find food on random planets than one that could digest only protein. Since fat is fat and there is only a couple ways to do the chemicals, so more things are going to evolve the same specifics than trying to break down proteins that could be any which way. Ok but the point was how plausible various explanations for the Fermi paradox are, so if we start with "well assuming a completely implausible thing that could never exist existed, then there's no problem" well ok but my point is that it's implausible in the first place. There's no way for something to evolve to be a space wolf because the environment they evolved in on any planet would be entirely unlike what they'd need to be space predators. At that point you may as well say "ok but if you assume protective angels who live in the center of the galaxy and like the quiet existed in the first place, they would obviously have the great angelic power to teleport anywhere and sterilize any civilization that made noise on the radio so there's no need to worry about how much energy it would take" like okay fine that resolves the paradox too. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 21:20
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DrSunshine posted:That'd be doable ... assuming we could invent a self-replicating robot factory. There's still a few engineering problems to be solved on that front, but there's nothing physically preventing us from doing it. I mean, we have a working proof of concept - us.
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Dec 10, 2018 21:32
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Is space predators even a thing that anyone has ever seriously proposed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox? I've never even heard it mentioned before, just that intelligent species may see it as an unavoidable necessity to kill everyone they come across. It's a proposed solution because you don't have to imagine any kind of crazy space biology to make it work, you just have to subscribe to a few pretty reasonable assumptions: 1) If you can strap rocket engines to things relatively cheaply then you can make civilization ending weapons very easily and point them basically anywhere you want 2) It's hard to defend against or even spot those weapons 3) The only way to be completely sure that you don't have to worry about the second point is to kill everyone else first And then there's the little addendum that if we can think of this, then other civilizations probably can too and that's all the more reason to kill them before it occurs to them to kill us first.
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Dec 10, 2018 21:35
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Paradoxish posted:Is space predators even a thing that anyone has ever seriously proposed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox? I've never even heard it mentioned before, just that intelligent species may see it as an unavoidable necessity to kill everyone they come across. It's a proposed solution because you don't have to imagine any kind of crazy space biology to make it work, you just have to subscribe to a few pretty reasonable assumptions: My problem with this is that by this logic Russia or the US should have nuked the other immediately upon discovering the technology to do so. It doesnt make sense to fire a KKV at every random civilization you see just because they could theoretically do the same to you, and for proof of that look no further than the idea that our particular species (mostly) finds that idea repugnant.
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Dec 10, 2018 21:39
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my dad posted:I mean, we have a working proof of concept - us. Brb pitching my "Disrupt space by getting orphaned 3rd world children to build a dyson sphere by hand" idea to Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
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Dec 10, 2018 21:40
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BardoTheConsumer posted:My problem with this is that by this logic Russia or the US should have nuked the other immediately upon discovering the technology to do so. It doesnt make sense to fire a KKV at every random civilization you see just because they could theoretically do the same to you, and for proof of that look no further than the idea that our particular species (mostly) finds that idea repugnant. You do realize that is literally what the policy makers at the time lamented, both when the soviets got nukes and much later when the north koreans got their nuclear icbms? "Yeah, in hindsight, we should've struck while we had the chance, that was real dumb of us." Current nuclear arms r&d is focused on being able to do this, which is why we had to sign (soon to be defunct) treaties to curtail it because one side or the other was getting to far along in their "bomb you without worrying about getting bombed back" tech, right? just because we've been dancing in this endgame for decades now doesn't mean we ever stopped working towards finally checkmating the other guy
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Dec 10, 2018 21:44
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BardoTheConsumer posted:My problem with this is that by this logic Russia or the US should have nuked the other immediately upon discovering the technology to do so. It doesnt make sense to fire a KKV at every random civilization you see just because they could theoretically do the same to you, and for proof of that look no further than the idea that our particular species (mostly) finds that idea repugnant. I don't 100% buy into the idea either, but I don't think the Cold War is actually a good counter argument for a couple of reasons. First of all, we never really had the capability to end civilization. Human civilization would probably have survived a full on nuclear confrontation between the US and USSR, and in any case there was never seriously a possibility to wipe the other side out without retaliation so the calculus was different. We really don't know that we wouldn't have chosen to wipe each other out in a real confrontation because we both never had that confrontation and very quickly lost the ability to strike without consequence. The more important point is that we could talk to the Soviet Union in a reasonable way. That's a much different situation from noticing some unusual radio signals that you suddenly realize are indisputable proof of life light years away. Sending one message to and receiving an answer from a distant civilization could potentially be a centuries long project. What if they've already launched something? What if they haven't, but they will before we can talk to them? The idea isn't that everyone is bloodthirsty monsters, it's that civilizations may become incredibly risk averse once they realize that someone can potentially see them and there's no way to communicate with that someone. Also, maybe the civilizations that can't stand stomach the idea of wanton genocide still come to this same conclusion and choose to go completely dark as a solution. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 21:48
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Paradoxish posted:1) If you can strap rocket engines to things relatively cheaply then you can make civilization ending weapons very easily and point them basically anywhere you want Even taking the "better strike first" assumption at face value (which we shouldn't), ultimately: 1) is false. Sending something across interstellar distances is insanely expensive, and doing so accurately is even harder. 2) I have no idea about. Like, it'd be pretty hard to tell the difference between a random rock, a spaceship, and a KKV, but something sufficiently large coming at you at 0.6c would probably stand out quite a bit. 3) is false, because it is extremely hard to confirm that you actually completely destroyed your targets considering the timespans and distances involved. DrSunshine posted:Brb pitching my "Disrupt space by getting orphaned 3rd world children to build a dyson sphere by hand" idea to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. You were probably beaten to the punch long ago. 
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Dec 10, 2018 21:52
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