Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

«‹›3 »

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

humanity is one of the first sapient life forms. Basically all conclusions that stem from that are depressing.

What's depressing about it? I guess it kind of feels like a responsibility to be the Precursors, but hey, someone has to go first.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2020 09:58

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 15:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Zesty posted:

Thinking Humanity is the precursor race is the geocentrism of the 21st century.

Is this a widely held attitude and I missed it? Most of the answers seem to be "obviously intelligent life totally destroys itself," or "obviously intelligent life is avoiding us," or "some other projected dire sentiment about human nature."

Though even if humans are first, that doesn't mean it'll go anywhere. Might be an oddity for some hardy beetles of the future to find. We should be sure to get some good footage of galaxies for 'em.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 09:26

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

aphid_licker posted:

Has research been done somehow on how boxed in we are in terms of evolutionary options that work? Like on earth if you're evolving life you're probably ending up doing photosynthesis at some point, and then you're gonna try to grow towards the sun at some point, and whoops now you have trees. I guess the chlorophyll-like could have different colors, but you're gonna have a trunk and a canopy (or be a grass, or shrub etc.). This question was inspired by learning that crabs apparently evolved five separate times: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/15/animals-have-evolved-into-a-crab-like-shape-at-least-5-separate-times.html

So if we look at a planet with earth-like characteristics, are we gonna find basically trees and deer and wolves and crabs, just with Klingon forehead ridges and maybe they're using a different chirality in some of their molecules?

Well first we have to find non-Earth life.

I suspect you would get the same kind of broad divisions we have - primary producers, things that eat those, and things that eat those that eat the primary producers, etc. I imagine there would also be parasites of various kinds. The details are hard to imagine, although I would imagine an organism in a similar niche would probably have mechanical or functional similarities to its earth equivalents.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2020 05:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Captain Monkey posted:

No need to be a dick, it was a legitimate question. A society that stops in the Bronze Age or even late Medieval Age isn't going to explore the cosmos.

The Bronze Age is an arbitrary date. The way I would look at it is: It would be very hard for an alien civilization without access to fire/smelting to make much use of metal. Most of our advanced technology relies on metal and there are applications, such as instruments and electronics, where it is relatively hard to think of alternatives.

This does not mean they are not possible, but it would be a lot easier to imagine how beetles or bears could build radio telescopes vs. octopi or whales.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2020 04:57

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

On a technical basis any xenolife would not be animals or plants! Or at least that's what GURPS Blue Planet told me. This doesn't mean it wouldn't be broadly similar so much as "it would be from a completely different origin of life."

# ¿ Nov 1, 2020 13:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

eXXon posted:

I'm not exactly understanding the purpose of launching from water. Okay, you don't have to build scaffolding or a launch pad. Is that really a substantial savings? I guess you can tow it out into whatever spot in the ocean is the most efficient launch point?

Being able to launch from a more-or-less ideal place would be a consequential savings on fuel, and that's a huge chunk of the cost. Other advantages I cannot speak much about, but I know the reason why the US launches from Cape Canaveral is mostly this concern; it is the southernmost place in the continental US which does not have inhabited areas more or less straight east. Puerto Rico or some kind of Harlingen TX spacedrome would be even better, but then you have to ship everything to Puerto Rico - or worse, Harlingen.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2022 20:06

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

There's a lot of stuff which seems understood in broad principle but hasn't yet been built yet, but isn't like, "this wouldn't ever possibly work at all, even a little bit." I think in order to have rotational psuedo-gravity I remember hearing you, essentially, need to have the items rotating about 4 times per minute in a circle about sixty meters in diameter. Which sounds enormous, but you could have two pods connected by a long tube (much like my johnson) rotating around some kind of central axis. I think you could also get less (but non-trivial) gravity with a smaller radius, that figure's for Earth gravity.

Nobody's built it yet but it's not like a hyper-drive. Nor is it an O'Neill cylinder of course, but it seems like it would be the obvious broad concept for some kind of low-impulse Mars/Earth vessel or a larger international space station.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2022 00:31

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

What is your over/under on humanity�s chances for the next couple centuries?

1) odds of human civilization making it out intact by 2200

2) odds of the human species surviving past 2200

To make the bet would be fruitless, if you don't win how will you cash out?

1. is nearly certain although there could be severe degradation and change. However, organized human societies with division of labor, and likely at least large chunks of what we would recognize as modern technology? Nearly certain.

2. is similar, because the two are kind of one and the same. The big thing here is that the global range of humanity means that even if the only place in the world that was not struck by a murderous Ideology Bomb was the South Island of New Zealand, that is still millions of people.

The main hedge here is some poo poo like a gamma-ray burst or something, I would say. Beyond that it is a question of how many people, and in what level of technological comfort... a far more open question.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2022 20:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Whatever happens, I will blame my Posting Enemies.

DrSunshine posted:

Computer, ENHANCE! Enhance I say!!

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-cool-rock-formation-on-mars-looks-just-like-an-alien-doorway

Spooky Discovery on Mars Looks Just Like an Alien Doorway

That is weirdly regular, what the hell could have caused that? Other than the entrance to the alien command base, obviously, that part goes without saying.

# ¿ May 13, 2022 08:15

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

My God.

I do see the ring!

# ¿ Jul 11, 2022 23:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I'm favor of Space Migration and allowing the Earth to heal, but I'm soft on colony drops.

Any new stuff from the Webb lately?

# ¿ Jul 18, 2022 19:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

HookedOnChthonics posted:

I mean, just threatening to cut off ground support & withhold the next food shipment would be enough of a sword of Damocles to prevent any insurrection, no? Or is this scenario set after the replicators are invented?

It's possible there may be ways to obtain food other than replicators. They mention something about trucks when I go to Trader Joe's and I hear about the government passing or paying a "farm bill," so I think there's some kind of methodology there.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 02:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Trader Just Orange Enough, the Melnorme who went to Cali for a retreat and never wanted to leave.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 02:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Telsa Cola posted:

I know its much more complex than this but I'm imagine highly paid engineers and scientists in a gradeschool room just doing arts and crafts to try to get this stuff to work.

You, a brilliant researcher in the fields of futurology and human psychology: It is impossible/inevitable that people will colonize/die in space. Such a thing is inconcievable/inevitable. It will definitely happen/never happen.

Me, a child: hee hee, maybe we can braid the funny carbon tubes, like Cindy's hair!

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 22:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Doom Rooster posted:

Give Nana some graphene yarn and she�ll get to work.

Who foresaw �we�ll knit our way to space� as the answer to launch costs?

Having seen monkeys braiding each other's fur in the zoo, I think we can class this one under "man destroys, monkey creates"

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 22:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The supply chain thing is interesting to me. Didn't Hitler get hundreds of V2s built under rather constrained supply chain situations (to say the least), and weren't the first American rockets to get things in orbit essentially derived from the V2?

Some kind of low-resource rocket to put utility satellites in orbit would also have the benefit of all the rockets we've already launched, and we could have computer technology decay 50 years and still have better computers than they did for Apollo.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 08:35

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Bug Squash posted:

There's something incredibly sad about the news of Russia's withdrawal from the ISS. There was so much potential in Russia and their space expertise, and instead it's reverting to a backwater tyranny. They are swearing they intend to build their own space station, but seeing as they can't currently manage seatbelts, power steering or abs on the Lada I doubt it will amount to anything beyond a metal casket in orbit.

"Ah, but what about America's crimes?" they will say scornfully to the planet, and that will replace all that they are missing.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2022 21:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I thought Kessler syndrome would mostly interfere with LEO stuff anyway, not medium or high orbit applications. More "substantially increased risk of collisions per satellite/year" than "death erosion filth belt"

# ¿ Jul 28, 2022 02:26

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

You folks might enjoy Niven's A World of Ptavvs given recent topics, although it comes with the usual caveats of "Larry Niven, a horny sci fi author working in the 60s and 70s mostly, wrote it." I don't recall any major grotesqueries in it that aren't part of the actual story, though.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2022 05:19

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ashpanash posted:

Sure. My point is, if we look out and everything is indistinguishable from natural processes, the immediate conclusion shouldn�t be that there�s almost certainly artificial stuff there but it�s too well hidden. It seems to me that it�s better to lean into the idea that what we�re seeing is indicative of what�s actually there, instead of assuming that our instruments are just never good enough to see that which we�d prefer to see.

If there was an artificial signal which was widespread and well distributed, how would we know it was artificial?

# ¿ Jul 31, 2022 13:19

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Tighclops posted:

loving hubris

It's just common sense that it's impossible for complex life to evolve on steady-state stars, because without the impetus of a stellar cycle to cause an estivation cycle, any intelligent life form will end up constantly eating beyond the carrying capacity of its local ecology well before any permanent artifacts can be developed. There are limits on what you can do with forestry management and every time someone's tried to do monospecific food plants they've failed miserably; it's unrealistic to expect botanical hydroponics to feed entire planets one boutique plant at a time. And before the development of freeze-drying, there's no way to store food energy other than body fat.

This also means that radio-frequency energy is never going to be anything other than a toy or a tool for local networking, because the necessary antenna structures are enormous and would be destroyed by the solar cycle storms on the planetary surfaces. It's gotta be fiber-optics and lasers for spacecraft; nothing else can work. Just impossible.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2022 19:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

eXXon posted:

Are you replying to anything in particular from that two-word joke post or is there some context I'm missing?

I don't know what you mean by steady-state stars. Main sequence? All stars are variable to some degree. The 11-year solar cycle has, as far as I know, a modest impact on life on Earth, so the reference to eating beyond carrying capacity seems out of place.

The last paragraph, meanwhile, seems to just be complete nonsense. If I'm replying to a chatbot, then ha ha owned I guess.

I was definitely making a joke. My idea was hypothetical aliens who are majorly different from Earth life looking at themselves and features of themselves, and thinking "Well, obviously, this poo poo is just how it's going to be. These rules are obviously general rules."

In specific, these hypothetical aliens had an estivation cycle due to a stellar cycle which changed their planet's received radiation from their star; were not able to create agriculture in the same way as we have on Earth, possibly due to differences in what plants are available; and had not worked much with radio, as large-scale antennas had problems due to bad weather. So their entire worldview were shaped by these factors.

We probably have similar factors influencing our worldview and the trick is figuring out what they are.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 02:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

khwarezm posted:

Well, you could argue that Multicellular life has become a lot more complex in that billion years, like the Cambrian era saw a quantum leap in complexity and animal life did not even exist on land at that point.

I think that you could make an argument that within the Quaternary, there's probably a greater abundance of intelligent species than at any other point in Earth's past. It may not be unheard of that if humans went completely extinct there could be something to fill the void in a relatively short timespan.

Leaving aside apes or monkeys reinventing the wheel, I'd put my eye on parrots, corvids, and bears; elephants would have a fair shot too.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 05:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

eXXon posted:

Okay, well, the general point is fine, but you're kind of conflating local conditions on a planet/in a star system with basic physical laws that are identical throughout the universe (as far as we know). There are plenty of reasons why life-as-we-know-it might have a harder time developing around low-mass stars, including the fact that they're more active and variable (on average) than solar-mass stars, but there are still efforts to detect Earthlike planets around them (partly because they're easier to detect than around more massive/larger stars). On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where an advanced civilization develops spaceflight but can't find any use for radios, whether for communication or astronomy or whatever, just because most of the universe is transparent to huge chunks of the radio spectrum and the 21cm hydrogen line is basically impossible to avoid discovering.

Anyway, JWST + 30 metre class telescopes are going to discover a lot about exoplanet atmospheres and answer many questions about how rare habitable Earthlike planets are. They certainly seem to be quite common extrapolating from very incomplete transit surveys (as in, many billions), whereas none of the factors that make Earth potentially unique seem like one-in-a-million factors. Maaaybe the relatively massive moon, since we know next to nothing about exomoons, but it does seem anthropocentric to consider a massive/nearby moon a requirement for the development of (sentient) life anyway.

It seems one other advantage an earthlike planet around a smaller star might have - although this advantage has not yet fully come into play due to the age of the universe - is that that star would last a lot longer. I remember reading an article speculating that Earth isn't necessarily a perfectly wonderful planet but is actually potentially marginal as far as water-bearing worlds go. We will certainly be able to make more informed speculation before too much longer, although there is always the possibility of a poor sample. Which just means we need more telescopes, obviously...

It is also possible (though not statistically likely) that humans are in fact the first intelligent life to arise in this neck of the woods, perhaps this galaxy. Theoretically perhaps even the entire universe, I suppose, although THAT seems a little unlikely, but on the other hand, someone has to be first, don't they?

e: As for radio, I see your point, but technological progress is also not a straight line. There can also be enormous potential which is left aside by other concerns (nuclear power) or which simply isn't thought of (deep geothermal power, which seems to literally just be "why don't we drill to deeper rocks?").

Nessus fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Aug 4, 2022

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 08:17

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ashpanash posted:

Let's say you successfully drill far enough to reach the mantle. Let's be really generous and say that's 40km. What then? How do you extract energy from the mantle?

You don't go to the mantle, you go like 10km down to where the rock is very hot but not liquid - the hotter the better but it's pretty hot down there just about everywhere. From there it's the same basic idea as more shallow geothermal: you pump water (or something) down one hole, it comes out hotter on the other hole.

Most of the analysis of the concept I've seen are essentially "Oh yeah, that'd work" with the details being engineering solutions, generally of the kind where you can presume a solution is possible and it's a question of how economic it will be to develop and deploy. (As opposed to nuclear fusion, still being developed, and nuclear fission, provably workable.)

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 16:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ashpanash posted:

So you pump water down, then what? It flashes to steam, then has to travel back up 10km to turn a turbine? It doesn't cool and condense on that trip up? How does the water go from the pipe down to the pipe up? Are you throwing a compressor down there where it's that hot? How are you powering that?

There's a reason that geothermal plants are viable when there's volcanic activity near the surface.

There's a bunch of diagrams and outlining here:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical

While this is not exactly the most scholarly of sources, a lot of this is coming from Department of Energy studies and pilot projects. It would not necessarily be a mega-project; there is apparently a lot of technology overlap with fracking, although the pressures are far lower and you are not using anything toxic, nor are you extracting fossil fuels.

addendum: I believe you pump the water down at the surface, and extract the heated water at a separate well. You could just run it through radiator loops after you drive the turbine and send it back to the pump site.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 18:34

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ashpanash posted:

Thanks for the link, that's interesting stuff. Definitely the kind of ideas I would have dismissed as just being untenable. I guess that's why I migrated to theory rather than engineering.

As you note, there's a lot of really significant engineering challenges there, but some might be workable eventually. The upsides are seemingly huge if they can manage it.

Yeah granted a lot of this involved quotes from companies, but it sounded like there have been functional pilot projects and most of the problems were "we have to figure out exactly HOW and at a reasonable cost" problems, not "is this even possible without exotic sci-fi materials and entire new hypothetical branches of physics" problems.

It's a tangent but to loop it back to the original point: an alien species might, either due to natural opportunities or random chance, focus their energy infrastructure on this -- and end up with a lot less ecological disruption for an industrial civilization than we would expect.

unwantedplatypus posted:

There may be resource constraints for a hypothetical more advanced civilization that we are unaware of. We see that the universe is incredibly abundant in energy, and we know that our own civilization is limited by the amount of energy it can access. But perhaps energy isn't the limiting resource once you get to a certain milestone of development, its something else. Much in the same way that a pre-industrial civilization is primarily limited by the amount of food it can produce. If that's the case, there may be other civilizations present, but we simply haven't detected them because it turns out building a dyson sphere or similar megastructure is functionally impossible or not worth it.

I've heard people say that nitrogen may be a factor here and I'm kind of curious how the hell Earth got all this nitrogen if apparently it's kind of rare. This doesn't come up a lot.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 19:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

khwarezm posted:

Is nitrogen even particularly important for a machine civilization?

It might be important for the people who built the machine civilization to get started.

Though some may hold it unnecessary:

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 19:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Uglycat posted:

Wouldn't we expect carbon, nitrogen and oxygen in roughly equal proportions, on account of the c-n-o cycle in the mother star?

That's definitely not what Earth's atmosphere contains, it's like 78% N, 21% O2, remainder trace gasses. Carbon dioxide and methane, which you may have heard about in other contexts, are measured in parts per million (CO2) and per billion (methane).

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 20:15

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I remember reading something about how at some point, not too cosmically long in the future, almost all galaxies other than perhaps the local group will become impossible to sense due to cosmic expansion? Is that true or am I misremembering something that's about like '100 billion years' not '1 billion years' from now?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2022 01:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

khwarezm posted:

The Serina one is my favourite, I remember following that project a bit some years ago so it was cool to see how its developed in a surprisingly poignant direction, albeit also more fantastical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDtpEiMyGT4

Wow, that was an amazing read, are there many others like it?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2022 19:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I would also like to hear more about the ideas of this Zubrin and why exactly he is a fool.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2022 23:52

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The only thing that comes to mind is that if you're leaving a number of fuel manufacturing machines on Mars, you could eventually use them for something else after a few missions. Bring along some big balloons to fill with oxygen or something.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2022 00:17

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Left hand cosmos means Satan is lord.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2022 16:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Would energy have condensed into matter at some point? I have no idea about all this buck wild poo poo.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2022 22:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Asimov was best when he was writing Idea Stories like The Final Question.

Niven is to this day confused we�re not zeroing condemned criminals for bountiful organs, but some of that may be rejection syndrome being less amenable to a treatment than he thought.

Did the Strugatskys do anything that bizarre ?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 21:46

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

I really, really am sorry, but I must point and laugh at your username. A eugenicist for the ages.

Indeed, bordering on parody. At least the kzin stuff had plausible sociological explanation without invoking genetics.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 22:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

Teela has some strong words for you.

And breeding a "docile Kzin" seems about as sensible as breeding a docile German.

Repeatedly killing huge chunks of a polity COULD eventually lead to a change in culture and political strategy. They are aliens, after all.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 22:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

This is how UKK felt about Germans, too!

Sorry

Who the heck is UKK

Anyway most SF authors are weirdos. I think Doc Smith was pretty normal though.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 22:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 15:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Is that decay cycle with iron/helium producing enormous burps of bullshit in the guts of a star, where all that advanced material which gets emitted in supernovas comes from? I gather anything in the Sun won't be coming out any time soon, barring something like an interaction with a high speed object or collision with another star, though.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 15:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

«‹›3 »