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Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

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Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#71

Post by db48x »

GTP wrote: post #37
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what we're currently capable of. What we're capable of != what we're doing / not doing because of political will. We are technically capable of reaching significant fractions of c with tech from the 1960s. We'll never do that because there's no will to do it, but the tech is there. Same for self replicating stuff. We could build self-contained factories that build stuff from raw minerals, but we'll likely not do it…

This would mean bootstrapping current advanced manufacturing technologies to a new planet. You would need so many different tools to do that that I seriously doubt we are currently capable of making it compact enough to be sent into deep space with current technologies. We're currently sending at most small capsules into deep space, my gut tells me that for self-contained factories we would need to send something in…

Yea, the paper discusses a probe with a mass between 50g and 500kg using a diamondoid data storage medium that holds ~6,250 exabytes per gram. Plenty of room for any blueprints you want to include, up to and including a planet full of humans. If not actually today’s tech, it is but a few years into the future. I’m sure my next computer will have a few hundred grams of that diamondoid storage.

Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#72

Post by db48x »

fnord77 wrote: post #24
satisfice wrote: post #12

Can we have a science paper that explains why we can colonize Andromeda but we can’t build high speed rail?

There's no NIMBYs in Andromeda

Well, that we know of. None that can object to our sending the probes, at any rate.

Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#73

Post by db48x »

zackmorris wrote: post #27

In his 1999 book "Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization", Robert Zubrin mentioned checking the math for Bussard ramjets with Dana Andrews in their 1988 join paper "Magnetic Sails and Interstellar Travel" and found that they aren't capable of reaching more than a few percent of the speed of light before drag overcomes propulsion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54728.Entering_Space https://www.resear…

> …and I also really don't want to do my taxes.

What a coincidence! April 15th really is the worst day of the year, isn’t it?

Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#74

Post by GTP »

db48x wrote: post #71
GTP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would mean bootstrapping current advanced manufacturing technologies to a new planet. You would need so many different tools to do that that I seriously doubt we are currently capable of making it compact enough to be sent into deep space with current technologies. We're currently sending at most small capsules into deep space, my gut tells me that for self-contained factories we would need to send something in…

Yea, the paper discusses a probe with a mass between 50g and 500kg using a diamondoid data storage medium that holds ~6,250 exabytes per gram. Plenty of room for any blueprints you want to include, up to and including a planet full of humans. If not actually today’s tech, it is but a few years into the future. I’m sure my next computer will have a few hundred grams of that diamondoid storage.

Blueprints are the last of my concerns. What I think will be hard to do is to implement a full supply chain into a single space-travelling factory, including sourcing and refining of raw materials. But, regarding the blueprints, it now occurs to me that our "recipes" are made to work on our planet. Another one may lack some "ingredients" or have atmospheric conditions that could mess with the chemical reactions we use here. So we would need an advanced AI able to adapt production to the environment it finds.

Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#75

Post by db48x »

GTP wrote: post #74
db48x wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, the paper discusses a probe with a mass between 50g and 500kg using a diamondoid data storage medium that holds ~6,250 exabytes per gram. Plenty of room for any blueprints you want to include, up to and including a planet full of humans. If not actually today’s tech, it is but a few years into the future. I’m sure my next computer will have a few hundred grams of that diamondoid storage.

Blueprints are the last of my concerns. What I think will be hard to do is to implement a full supply chain into a single space-travelling factory, including sourcing and refining of raw materials. But, regarding the blueprints, it now occurs to me that our "recipes" are made to work on our planet. Another one may lack some "ingredients" or have atmospheric conditions that could mess with the chemical reactions we us…

Sourcing and refining materials are just blueprints. Adaptations for other environments are just different blueprints.

But honestly most of the work would be done in vacuum. Skip the planets, build the daughter probes out of asteroids. Most systems should have plenty of easily accessible material even if they don’t have a prominent asteroid belt, even if the probe has to scavenge the system’s oort cloud.

Re: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

#76

Post by satisfice »

psychoslave wrote: post #17
satisfice wrote: post #12

Can we have a science paper that explains why we can colonize Andromeda but we can’t build high speed rail?

Because we don't refer to the same entities in each case?

You silly men. You think green fields and blue sky thinking will make space colonization less expensive and more obtainable than a new airline terminal.

Of course the proof is in the utter lack of progress toward obtaining the stars, despite the stars in your credulous eyes.

There is antidote to what ails you: try thinking about this for five minutes straight.

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