i hope you guys don't take this remark offensively, but: do you think that real understanding comes easy?

it takes a lot of words to make complicated points, and esepcially to explain details. if you leave out the details, you can make mistakes and misinterpretations. while you guys might just want to get to the point, as milltertime said, i'm interested both in writing novels and in learning about things i don't know much about (especially in here, genetics).

and danielost, what millertime said is completely true. sometimes i have other motives, but in this thread i'm not interested in being "right," i'm interested in understanding - and not just the topics we're discussing in here, either.

so i guess all i have to say is this: the only request i have about how to participate in this discussion is to be respectful. if you'd prefer to make short posts, that's fine. i'm sorry if you feel like some posts are too long for you, but out of respect for the people who enjoy longer posts, please avoid givign the appearance of being condescending about it.

PS edit: i myself am very much an intellectual, and i'm prone to being very, very wordy. i try to keep my posts as short as i can without losing clarity, but that doesn't mean they end up short, only shorter.



sure the novel has to do with reality. it was really written, wasn't it? so people in a fictitious future could very likely remember it and talk about it. personally, i like it when characters in stories reference other stories, and i think i could manage it. though, i should probably re-read Hitchhiker's Guide - it's been almost 10 years!

what is the most important phrase in the hitchhikers guide

42, no?

and i believe it's So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - title of the forth book.

wrong


it is DON'T PANIC

i'd wanted to come back to this. i indeed posed this challenge to my own imagination. Ender's Game proposes an intersting model for sub-light interstellar war, but it still relied on instantaneous communication and remote piloting.

this might be a longer post, just to warn   i actually want to start with some of the circumstances that could lead to interstellar war.

as we've discussed before, the atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than that of the Earth. about 4 billion years ago, Mars lost its magnetosphere because its core cooled. the Earth's magnetic field is generated because its iron core is constantly churning, as Mars's did a long time ago. this will happen to the Earth one day too; it's believed that our core remains hot because of the energy created by a very large impact that also formed the moon.

that, i think wouldn't be enough in itself to abandon Sol. if we do indeed terraform Mars, i think one thing we'll need to do is learn to create an artificial magnetosphere. i imagine this could be achieved with a satellite network, but i don't know enough of the physics to be sure. if it is possible, then the same thing could be done to the Earth way down the line.

but that leads to another interesting point. i think it most likely that the Sol system would, at any given point, have access to the most advanced technologies. as the center of the Terran diaspora, it'd have the lowest average time to receive transmission from other human settlements, and its history wouldn't be perforated by hundreds or thousands of years of travel through interstellar space, and hundreds or thousands of years of development in a new star system.

still, i don't think war between stars will likely occur unless the potential gains would likely outweigh the costs and potential losses.

there are always freak accidents. at this point in history, we're afraid of a large comet hitting the Earth. but by the time we've got colonies, i think we'd be able to handle something like that, personally. do you?

but i'm going to up the ante. what would happen if a large rogue planet crashed into the sun? or something like that. i need an event that would leave the entire solar system nearly uninhabitable. a rogue planet in itself wouldn't do much to the sun. a small rocky planet would have about as much effect as a drop of acid on the pacific ocean's ph level. a large gas planet would add fuel to the fire. but it'd have to be several dozen jovian masses to make a noticeable effect, at least that's what i'm speculating. but remember, space is big. and unless it were actually aimed, i think it's very unlikely anything would crash right into the sun, or even be moving on the same solar axis. but a planet that massive getting caught in the sun's gravity field would seriously screw up the orbits of damn near everything in the solar system, even if it only passed through once.

keep in mind, this is our solar system i'm envisioning, the origin of humanity. i could imagine us having half a trillion people in the solar system eventually. definately not all on Earth. and on Earth, i think most of the population would be concentrated in massive megastructures in more desolate places.

imagine a golden age of humanity, so to speak. we face a crisis long before we go into space, caused by our own destruction of the environment in many ways, but we manage to come through the crucible, repair the environment as best we can, and give the surface and oceans back to Earth's other life forms. we move as much as we can into the rest of the solar system, and those who do stay on Earth have managed to reduce their 'environmental footprint' to nearly nothing. but it's this event that leads us to see ourselves moving out of the Sol system and colonizing new star systems - for curiosity and security of survival, for adventure and relief of the constant urge to reproduce. that, after all, is the golden rule of all living things, isn't it? don't get me wrong, i myself am a green-liberal type and believe we need to curb our population growth... for now. but i'm a living breathing life form, and i want progeny!

i'm not trying to get into real politics of the present day by any means as an end in itself. i'm just trying to extrapolate from the present, and explaining how i see it to make my extrapolations clearer. i think eventually when technology and culture get to the point - for whatever reasons - that we can preserve the Earth's natural beauty, live elsewhere and believe we've got good lives, and perhaps even learn a thing or two and have some wild adventures - we'll absolutely do it. it'll probably take a whole helluva lot of bickering amongst ourselves, but there it is.

and here comes a rogue planet, alomst on the verge of being a brown dwarf, careeing into our home after millenea of prosperity, hundreds of colonies, and what we'd believed to be a point in history when our morals were finally clear and sympathetic to all and universally true, and our characters pure. we'd be able to detect something that big with our future technology a while before it hit us, it'd catch objects in the Ort cloud and Kupier belt, scattering comets and asteroids all throughout the system in wildly unpredictable trajectories. all of our space-bound infrastructure would be in supreme peril, all the populated planets and natural satellites might potentially have their orbits thrown off, might even be ejected from the system entirely, or crash into the sun, the rogue or one of the gas giants. we couldn't survive that... but we could flee... go somwhere rich. we are the progenitors of all humans, will we live as refugees, or will we retain our noble status? ethical dilemmas as we've never faced, but possibly even millions of years to prepare for what we decide...

* * *

by the way, have any of you heard about the gaping hole in the universe?

edit: actually, this article's better.

here is a question.


we decide to send a science expedition to alpha. fifty year travail time. how big of a crew do you send. remember too small and they'll kill each other. too big not enough resources. also remember they will probable have to come back as well. ie a generation ship

an AI can tell you if a planet might be habitable. but it can't tell you if you can live there.

and an AI can't handle the unknown and remember the closer it is to alpha the more independent it will have to be. round trip communications will increase to 9 years.



as long as we are not completely wiped out we can recover from anything.

AI doesn't need to communicate in real time, and sure, sufficiently advanced AI can do all those things and plenty more, not to mention lots of stuff living humans can't do.



nope. not in my story anyway.

i simply don't agree. if you want to provide more details as to why you think that, you might convince me, and if you'd like me to clarify any of the points i made earlier i'd be happy to; but otherwise it's simply a difference of opinion.

fair enough, and i think two clarifications may be in order on my part.

i didn't mean to suggest that Sol would become a 'ghost town' entirely. i'm sure some people would remain, if for no other reason than to maintain the system as part of an intersteller communications network (sort of like the poney express).

there's also a point i made earlier that didn't really consider in your post. with the kind of technology available at that point, i believe the inhabitants of the system would be able to detect the gas mega-giant hundreds, if not thousands of years before it had a major effect on the system. that's more than enough time to build up a truly massive invasion force, esepcially if you don't need to worry about preserving the planets after you leave. i'm sure lots of people wouldn't believe in it, but at the same time, desperation is powerful fuel for a war. the rationalizations for it are huge - if you've been getting reports about these genetic freaks taking hold in some pristine system, and you've got the natural diversity of your home planet to worry about, plus billions or trillions of people to think about, war doesn't seem that unlikely a prospect. that was my point: to imagine the kind of events that'd facilitate an interstellar war, not that we'd abandon the home system entirely.

if we can see things that are barely big enough to be spherical way past neptune, we'll be able to see something just under a brown dwarf. at the high end, they can be 90 jupiter masses, which would make detecting them fairly easy - we'd see gravitational lensing effects grow exponentially as it came closer. and since i'm envisionthing this at a point when we'd developed interstellar communication, we'd start noticing its effects on EM signals early. and you said it yourself, objects that size emit radiation, though not by means of fusion. visible light isn't the only method we have to "see" things. we can infer the presence of dim objects when they pass in front of bright objects or relatively nearby, affecting their trajectories; we can detect photons across the entire EM spectrum, and we can also use gravitational lensing effects to detect both very large dark objects very far away, and the effects on gravity on objects nearby.

considering the intensity with which we already watch the skies, considering the fact that signal receivers are essentially like highly specialized sensors (especially when something behaves anomalously), and considering that we'll probably continue building observatories of more and more stregth, and have colony ships traveling all over for centuries before, it's a matter of time before some turns up funny and further investigations reveal the existence of a doomsday planet, should one exist.

though, your objections do bring to mind the issue that even if such a thing were discovered centuries ahead of time, people well might not believe it's actually a threat.

well yeah, i think i had all that in mind when i was describing a 'war.' what i have in mind bears more resemblance to a massive number of very well armed refugees, more than a war in the traditional sense. they don't hope to bring anything back to their home system; they're hopeing to take a new home system. i mean, if people in the Sol system had been colonizing nearby systems for a very long time, such that human settlements spread over the space of hundreds of light years, the refugees would be hard-pressed to find worthwhile systems that weren't already habitated. and as we discussed before, given enough time people in different systems might chose to mutate their bodies in different ways, develop seemingly alien ethics and culture - those seem like violitile ingredients, you know?

and it wouldn't be communication in the way we have it now, by no means at all. but i think it'd be a lot more than just news from earth. news, yes, but also new discoveries, further information about destination stars, scematics for new technology, letters from home (family members and decendants of family members). the colony ships and colonies would also be sending back near constant streams of information as well. art, history, new technology, all sorts of scientific discovery and data. i'd bear far more resemblance to the days of sailing ships and (gasp) snail mail, but on a scale we've never experienced. i'm sure some groups would 'drop out' of the interstellar ham radio club, but still i see no reason why communications wouldn't remain open, if not very delayed, among at least some of the colonies.

as for a gamma ray burst, it's an interesting idea, but even if the Earth lost its entire ozone layer, i don't see that as presenting much more of a challenge than terraforming another planet. it'd be disasterous, but it wouldn't cripple civilization throughout the whole system, would it?

your point is entirely valid. for the sake of plot, i wanted to imagine an event that'd distrupt the entire system after a fairly advanced level of development had been reached - Mars and possibly even Venus both terraformed, dozens or hundreds of mostly self-sufficient habitation stations in orbit and on the surfaces of other objects, and underground.