191–200 of 330 posts
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The people who had to migrate had a front row seat (and supporting role) to the greatest show in the known universe: life on earth. Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
> Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it. I'm sure it was a lot of fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense.
Link to Canva presentation for the winning entry https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
Cool concept, but some things are just strange: Power provided by toroidal nuclear fusion reactors in the outer shell of the living module, but why do you need such reactors if your primary propulsion is provided by Helium 3 - Deuterium Direct Fusion Drive? If you have direct fusion technology, you don't need toroidal reactors. Rotating inner shells mechanically for 400 years is terrible design, it's much easier just…
These are supposed to be generational ships. Now imagine you need to take the primary drive down for maintenance? What does the moving colony have for power?
I'd want tri-redundant systems at a least, for everything.
When can we start?
Feed them like Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
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It would be cruel to their children.
Would it be any more cruel than having children as a serf on a farm, where your family has worked for countless generations, knowing that they're likely to have the same fate?
The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
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> doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations. > life will get boring and pointless fast Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy an…
The people who had to migrate had a front row seat (and supporting role) to the greatest show in the known universe: life on earth. Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
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This got me thinking. There are fairly hard takes on most fictional technology but I don't know that I've ever come across one for artificial gravity. At least no examples immediately come to mind. I guess that's just too far out in the fictional physics system weeds for even the more dedicated of authors.
Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions (albeit the weakest one), perhaps trying to create it artificially is a bit beyond even hypothetical physics. Sounds like the latest suggestion for it is from 2016: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mathematician-has-proposed-a-... > Now, Füzfa has shown, mathematically speaking, that by stacking large superconducting electromagnets we would be able to produce a very w…
-require vast amounts of power
-be so heavy that most of the 1g would come from the mass of the electromagnets!
-destroy anything for quite some distance (including themselves)
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There were 8: Noah, his wife, their three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth), and their three wives. If so, there must have been a whole of inbreeding in later generations. Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.
You mean God sent word to the Sumerians and Akkadians !
I'll admit it: I've clicked because of the books....
Follows a classic sci-fi series arc, IMO. Brilliant, enthralling and at times terrifying first book, followed by several tomes of 'meh'. See also Night's Dawn.
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Reading through this in detail just cements that we are never leaving this solar system unless we discover some new physics to get around our speed limitations.
Adding to the issue that it is relative pointless (IMO) to send meat popsicles all that way when a robot can make the journey about a million times easier and just send us some postcards. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but it's kinda boring out there. We'd certainly not want to make the trek until the robots had scoured the galaxy looking for a fun place to visit. And by that time we'll all be living in some post-Sing…
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Reading through this in detail just cements that we are never leaving this solar system unless we discover some new physics to get around our speed limitations.
We had the technology to do it in 44 years 60 years ago: An atomic (fission) Orion can achieve perhaps 9–11% of the speed of light. [...] At 0.1 c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1 g or 9.8 m/s2). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls..…
The problem with using thermonuclear explosions to produce that level of thrust are more "but can we actually do it safely" than "but can we do it in a way that generates more that it takes to produce", but that's a not inconsiderable problem even without all the international agreements about where we shouldn't be exploding nuclear bombs...