# Aliens..



## 3blake7 (Jun 29, 2015)

There could be aliens on Earth. If a species a million years older than us, discovered immortality and embraced exponential population growth, they would have traveled to every star system in the galaxy by now. They may have us completely surrounded, at every neighboring star system.They could have terraformed hundreds of billions of worlds. They could have watched as planets with life, less developed, matured, achieved sentient and eventually global consciousness. They could be manipulating us through immortal agents implanted on the planet. We could be a reality TV show for scientists of an alien race.
They could be on Earth, possibly found or there may be detectable evidence, in the form of sunshades around planets too close to their stars.

*Just something I thought of while working on my SciFi universe.. lol


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## KLJo (Jun 29, 2015)

Who says that _we_ aren't the aliens? Cosmic seeding.


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## Boofy (Jun 29, 2015)

KLJo said:


> Who says that _we_ aren't the aliens? Cosmic seeding.


Or maybe WE'RE the alien species and we're running a simulation of the entire of the universe in a quest for immortality in order to spread out across the universe, terraform planets and create planetary sun shields and such?

The meta hurts my brain.


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## InstituteMan (Jun 29, 2015)

I love me some aliens. It's my favorite pulpy theme of story. 

The distances involved and the basic physics make it sadly unlikely that any intelligent life has visited us (microbes, perhaps, but nothing big or smart), but the story is still rich with possibilities.


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## Pluralized (Jun 29, 2015)

Psilocybin. It's what's for dinner.


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## joshybo (Jun 29, 2015)

InstituteMan said:


> The distances involved and the basic physics make it sadly unlikely that any intelligent life has visited us (microbes, perhaps, but nothing big or smart), but the story is still rich with possibilities.



You're such a buzzkill, what with your "science" and all.  Maybe aliens are just, like, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay smarter and you don't know!  Clearly, you're just a bigoted speciesist.


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## 3blake7 (Jun 30, 2015)

With our current population growth of 19 per 1000 and immortality, our population would be 500 quadrillion by the year 3000. All we have to do, is build a giant spacescraper, send trillions into space, setup autonomous industries that mine the asteroid belt and build spacestations, then when the population of the Solar system reached critical mass, there is an explosion of relativistic pioneers. They would reach a nearby star system like hundreds of years later but they will start terraforming with the autonomous self-replicating industry and building more space stations. Our population growth would be exponential. If we did this for a million years we might be in every star in the galaxy. I think it's not that big of a stretch to assume there is other sentient life in our galaxy and that they could have evolved millions of years before us, possibly even a billion. 

They are among us.


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## KLJo (Jun 30, 2015)

There are a fair number of holes in that.

1. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. 1,000,000 years travel, even at currently inconceivable %s of the speed of light, wouldn't scratch the surface.

2. It is highly unlikely that there are many, if any, intelligent species that are going to co-exist in the limited, and relatively narrow time scope of humanity because ...#3

3. Intelligent life needs time to develop, and space is a bitch. I believe that life exists elsewhere. I'm certain that even intelligent life exists elsewhere. But asking for two advanced planets that have hit the jackpot the way earth did AND are in fair travel distance from one another is a tall order.
We don't even really have a limitless future, the sun will render the earth uninhabitable in approx. 5 billion years as it becomes a red giant. And we're really quite lucky to have had the opportunity to thrive due to a myriad factors like the gas giants running some pretty sick D from bombardment, all the way to things like the dinosaurs being decimated. (Aside: I geek out wondering if, in the absence of that mass extinction, intelligence would have developed any way, but in dinosaurs. PHILOSORAPTOR!)

Check out the modified Drake equation, it will blow your mind.
N = N*F_Q FHZ_ F_O F_L F_S
N = the number of planets with detectable signs of life
N* = the number of stars observed
FQ = the fraction of stars that are quiet
FHZ = the fraction of stars with rocky planets in the habitable zone
FO = the fraction of those planets that can be observed
FL = the fraction that have life
FS = the fraction on which life produces a detectable signature gas

Note: that this is simply the chance that we might be able to observe a planet that has a gas in its atmosphere that may indicate the presence of life as we know it. This is nowhere near intelligent life with the capacity to travel and assimilate. 

It is outrageously improbable.


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## Riis Marshall (Jun 30, 2015)

Hello 3

Isn't that, more or less, what Douglas Adams said in his inappropriately described five-volume trilogy, _The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy_ a while back?

All the best with your musings.

Warmest regards
Riis


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## walker (Jun 30, 2015)

KLJo said:


> There are a fair number of holes in that.
> 
> 1. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. 1,000,000 years travel, even at currently inconceivable %s of the speed of light, wouldn't scratch the surface.
> 
> ...



I agree with the distance thing. It's hard to move around in the universe, for big things at least.

I'm not so sure it's true that intelligent life existing close to us is outrageously improbable though. 

Any equation or calculation based on what we can observe of the universe is bound to be flawed, because we can't observe much. We don't even know what the heck is going on in our own solar system! Every planet or moon that we have approached has turned out to be radically different than we supposed beforehand, and that is about to happen again with Pluto, in a month or so I think. Nobody was talking about oceans on Europa until we actually flew out there, and even now, having approached Europa extremely close in terms of outer space, we know almost nothing about her. How can we possibly know much about other solar systems, many light years away?

Also, if you look at how life started on earth, our having been seeded from outer space is likely. Not intentionally seeded, but unintentionally seeded, as in panspermia. We were a hot mess of lava, gases, etc. at first, but once we cooled down, life started right away, as soon as it could. There are two choices. Life started here, or some bacteria or archaea flew in on a rock. The second seems more probable to me, given the short length of time that it took for life to start. Getting from no life to a bacteria seems to me a huge step, an impossibly huge step, compared to getting from a bacteria to, say, an elephant. How did it happen so quickly here on Earth? We know that viruses and bacteria can survive in outer space, from our own missions to the moon. Put two and two together, and it might be that life is incredibly common in the universe. In the same way that a new island that pokes its head above the waves is immediately populated with life, planets may be immediately seeded with life, in the form of bacteria, etc. as soon as they are formed. Either life takes, or it doesn't, but given a chance everywhere, there may be a very large number of planets with life on them.

Finally, it seems that intelligent life can evolve fairly quickly. The Cambrian explosion came out of nowhere, and doesn't seem to have depended on the amount of time that passed before it. The kinds of things that evolved before the Cambrian explosion did not evolve a whole lot leading up to the Cambrian, so the Cambrian could have happened sooner. Also, human intelligence evolved very quickly, astonishingly quickly, and there aren't good explanations for why. We seem to be much more intelligent than is necessary, if that makes sense. A hawk that feeds on birds, for example, would be a much more efficient predator if it could fly at 500 mph, but the hawk is good enough as is; there are no evolutionary pressures that drive it to fly that fast. Our intelligence is like flying at 500 mph. It doesn't make sense considering the pressures that evolution has put on us to this point in time. So, some things happen by chance in evolution, and fairly quickly. Why not elsewhere?

None of this even addresses the question of whether or not life has to be carbon-based. All of these studies assume carbon-based life that depends on water, but why? Carbon and water do have some unique properties, but it would certainly be possible to store information as DNA does with other molecules, and perform some of the other functions of life. You can store information, for example, in silicon chips.


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## Terry D (Jun 30, 2015)

The only assumptions we can make are based on the samples we can study. In the case of intelligent life that's a sample size of one, us -- not enough to make any statistically sound projections. Most parts of our galaxy are not hospitable to life as we understand it (I'm not going to discuss 'other types of life' because that's all speculation). The closely packed stars that make up the bulk of our galaxy's core would create strange planetary orbits (as we have seen with many of the planets detected in the past few years), and intense radiation fields. Life as we know it needs stability to flourish (but not too stable or there becomes no cause, or need for the mutations which drive evolution), and the galaxy as a whole is not a very stable place.

It is also easy to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing aliens. There may, indeed, be many lifeforms out there which demonstrate what we would recognize as intelligence, but why would they need to have the same curiosity and technological drive as we do? They may not care about exploration. We can't know what motivates them. If they exist, and if they are motivated like we are, God help us.

My last point is one I've thought about a lot. Since we only have our single sample of 'intelligent' life to go by, and if we really look at what that intelligence has wrought on this planet; how do we know that our sort of intelligence is a survivable evolutionary trait? Only one species out of the millions which have walked and crawled on Earth has developed the trait of intelligence, and that species has, in a very short time, brought with it: war, pollution, unchecked population growth, and resource consumption total disproportionate to its population size. Technological man is not --when measured in terms of time -- a proven successful species. The intelligence we are so proud of may be a self-correcting evolutionary aberration.


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## walker (Jun 30, 2015)

Terry D said:


> The only assumptions we can make are based on the samples we can study. In the case of intelligent life that's a sample size of one, us -- not enough to make any statistically sound projections. Most parts of our galaxy are not hospitable to life as we understand it (I'm not going to discuss 'other types of life' because that's all speculation). The closely packed stars that make up the bulk of our galaxy's core would create strange planetary orbits (as we have seen with many of the planets detected in the past few years), and intense radiation fields. Life as we know it needs stability to flourish (but not too stable or there becomes no cause, or need for the mutations which drive evolution), and the galaxy as a whole is not a very stable place.
> 
> It is also easy to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing aliens. There may, indeed, be many lifeforms out there which demonstrate what we would recognize as intelligence, but why would they need to have the same curiosity and technological drive as we do? They may not care about exploration. We can't know what motivates them. If they exist, and if they are motivated like we are, God help us.
> 
> My last point is one I've thought about a lot. Since we only have our single sample of 'intelligent' life to go by, and if we really look at what that intelligence has wrought on this planet; how do we know that our sort of intelligence is a survivable evolutionary trait? Only one species out of the millions which have walked and crawled on Earth has developed the trait of intelligence, and that species has, in a very short time, brought with it: war, pollution, unchecked population growth, and resource consumption total disproportionate to its population size. Technological man is not --when measured in terms of time -- a proven successful species. The intelligence we are so proud of may be a self-correcting evolutionary aberration.



My cat disagrees that there is only one example of intelligent life on earth.

And regarding the "success" of humans: Earth belongs to single-celled organisms like bacteria and archaea. Always has, and likely always will. As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, any reasonable measure of success awards the prize to bacteria. Numbers? More bacteria in your own body than there are human beings in all Earth. Adaptability? Bacteria and Archaea live everywhere from pools of icewater inside the Antarctic ice sheet, to deep-sea hydrothermal vents with temperatures of several hundred degrees C. Not to mention they can survive in outer space, without a spaceship. Biomass? Bacteria and Archaea fill not only the oceans (densities of 1,000,000 per cm3 of water in some cases), but also the soil, so if we could put all of the bacteria and ARchaea on Earth on a scale and weigh them, they would likely have more biomass than all other life forms put together. Fate after nuclear war? They'll be doing just fine, thank you. It goes on and on. Our planet belongs to tiny critters that we can't see. We are an interesting accident, unlikely to survive long term. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care, we should, but a healthy dose of humility about our situation would not be a bad thing. We're not all that.


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## KLJo (Jun 30, 2015)

Am I the only one who avoids saying panspermia, 'cause it sounds dirty? It is on a short list with words like "duty" that always make me giggle inappropriately.

It sounds like we agree on a lot. I said, "cosmic seeding" in post #2, and was actually only half-kidding. I think you're right, it does makes more sense to go from seeded bacteria to elephant, than nothing to us, in this time frame.

I disagree, though, that a redefinition of "life as we know it" is going to be our best bet, (or even a good bet) for observing life on other planets. Certainly we've come much farther in spectroscopy, and our own understanding of carbon-based life. So, while I concede that it is _possible_, I'm gonna get all Fermi paradox up in hurrr, and say, "silcon-based alien bitches, Holla at ya gurl".

Our options are: focus a telescope and look for atmospheric oxygen (or things of that ilk)
OR
redefine what life is and create an entirely new, and unproven, possibility for the fundamentals building blocks like DNA, and the conditions under which life exists.

I know you're in great company. There are TONS of astrobiologists who wet their pants with excitement every time you mention Titan's methane-ethane lakes, and the idea that it might have been a frigid global ocean, at one point. 
Just, within our solar system, I'm more interested in Enceladus' warm, briny, ocean--conditions under which we KNOWS life can exist, as well as the aforementioned observation of gaseous atmospheres. 
Planets are plentiful, and I feel like we are not desperate enough to have to attempt a complete over-haul of everything we've ever known to get the desired outcome of alien-life confirmation. Simple or advanced.

As to the development of intelligence, I've never really been uncomfortable with the roughly 500 million years between the Cambrian and now. I'd have to give it more thought. I also think of intelligence as sort of a runaway perk. Check out IQ and the Flynn effect. I feel like once you look at ancient African climate change and the resulting deforestation that forced us to give up the safety of our trees. Once on the ground and susceptible to more predators, creativity and intelligence were our advantage, and natural selection will continue to favourite it until it stops being such a huge perk...

Ok, I'm out of coffee, and slightly worried that I will lose this again, since my phone is a jerk that hates my writing. I'll submit now with further expansion, and clarification as necessary.

Thanks for amazing food for thought, Walker et al.


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## Terry D (Jun 30, 2015)

There's a school of thought which says that natural selection is a non-factor in human evolution now. Our sickest and weakest frequently survive long enough to breed and water down the gene pool.


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## JustRob (Jun 30, 2015)

3blake7 said:


> There could be aliens on Earth. If a species a million years older than us, discovered immortality and embraced exponential population growth, they would have traveled to every star system in the galaxy by now. They may have us completely surrounded, at every neighboring star system.They could have terraformed hundreds of billions of worlds. They could have watched as planets with life, less developed, matured, achieved sentient and eventually global consciousness. They could be manipulating us through immortal agents implanted on the planet. We could be a reality TV show for scientists of an alien race.
> They could be on Earth, possibly found or there may be detectable evidence, in the form of sunshades around planets too close to their stars.
> 
> *Just something I thought of while working on my SciFi universe.. lol



They must have been bored to do all that, but just think how big their stamp collections must have been with all those hundreds of billions of worlds. Uh, perhaps I'm not quite following this discussion, but then I've always had trouble living amongst aliens.


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## walker (Jun 30, 2015)

KLJo

Your last post was amazing.

And yes, panspermia does sound, well, funny.

I'm going way back to a lecture that I heard Stephen J. Gould give in Tempe, Arizona, in the early 90s. I lived in Flagstaff at the time, and drove down to Tempe with my girlfriend to hear it.

He used the analogy of a drunk who wanders outside of a bar to explain evolution. The drunk has the bar on his left, and open desert on his right. The drunk takes a step randomly to the right or left, because he's drunk. In the analogy, the drunk represents evolving life. The bar represents where life starts, a single cell. The open desert represents a path towards increasing complexity of life. So the drunk steps left, right, left, left, right--whatever--but the drunk can never get past the bar, which is the lower limit of the complexity of life, a single cell. The drunk can however, randomly make it out into the desert, given time to take billions of steps, and become a bumblebee, or whatever. Now, if you repeat that experiment with uncountable trillions of drunks, you will get some pretty interesting things, like dinosaurs and human intelligence, but a large percentage of the drunks will end up more or less where they started, near the bar, due to the laws of probability. Those drunks left near the bar are bacteria and Archaea, and they are the story of life. The random complex things are interesting, but outliers. And there doesn't have to be a reason for the existence of dinosaurs and human intelligence, other than pure chance.

It was better when he told it, because he actually stepped to the left and right to show what he meant. It was pretty funny.


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## JustRob (Jun 30, 2015)

Terry D said:


> There's a school of thought which says that natural selection is a non-factor in human evolution now. Our sickest and weakest frequently survive long enough to breed and water down the gene pool.



Nobody's going to water down my gene pool; I don't have any children. No, I need to rethink that. Natural selection isn't the only factor in the evolution of species though, not when intelligence is an influence. There are social factors, like protection of the weakest, and selection of mates by the breeding sex. The latter is the only explanation for peacocks with big displays of feathers and aliens with big stamp collections. "I don't care if he is a cripple with only seven arms Gladys. Have you seen the size of his stamp collection?" Throughout even our limited planet natural selection doesn't explain all the diversity of life, certainly not in the males of the species. Natural selection kicks in as the prevailing influence when the circumstances demand it and modern humanity hasn't quite reached that state yet, not in every country anyway. Before humanity has to entertain any aliens it may have to entertain alien ideas to survive though.


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## 3blake7 (Jun 30, 2015)

I read about co-evolution, with viruses infecting like sperm cells and getting their genome incorporated during mitosis. Like 99% of our genome is viral DNA. Predicting emergent properties is another thing and which emergent properties, or changes in those emergent properties will offer some benefit in survival, is environmental.

I agree with a sample size of 1 intelligent species, one star system, we don't have enough data to have any realistic statistics on life. You might as well say 50/50. The complexity of life was exponential, with the really small first steps taking billions of years. To put it simply life will emerge, when all the right ingredients are present, environmental conditions are right and time. There is really no way to know whether that is rare or not. We still haven't been able to explain the formation of our solar system accurately and precisely. 

At 0.5 m/s^2, a constant acceleration drive propelled spacecraft could do 10 light years in 30 years.


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## KLJo (Jun 30, 2015)

3Blake7 said:
			
		

> At 0.5 m/s^2, a constant acceleration drive propelled spacecraft could do 10 light years in 30 years.



I'm lazy, so I'm not going to challenge your assertion that 0.5m/s^2 remains in the realm of reasonable possibility for the 30 year interval, but I'll admit that I'm skeptical.

None of this answers the question "How" though?


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## 3blake7 (Jun 30, 2015)

I was playing around with some numbers and it's actually looking a lot harder than I originally thought.

It would require an ion engine with an exhaust velocity way higher than anything we've done, like particle accelerator high but it's doable.


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## John Galt (Jul 1, 2015)

The cost of making contact with, let alone travelling to, another intelligent species (assuming one exists somewhere nearish and has such a desire) would need to be tiny in comparison to what we'd gain. 
Lately, for a fantasy project (not SF, so it isn't mentioned aside from a background thing) I have an alien (technically) species that sources the magic. Catch being, I had it be a dark matter creature. Yes, I know self-interacting DM is rare (I think we observed it one April in a galaxy far far away, can't recall the year), but hey, you never know. And to interact with matter, it needs to force itself through a dense-ish object in great number. 
I presume this topic doesn't stop at life in this universe (assuming the potential for a multiverse given the mass of the Higgs at 125 gev). It'd be interesting to see how life would develop, where possible, in universes with different constants. 

Let's face it - the gene pool could use a little chlorine. (I jest) 
@JustRob. You've given me a fantastic idea - an economic system based entirely on stamps.


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## walker (Jul 1, 2015)

Taking the speed of light as a speed limit, you would need thousands of years to get to some of these places.

Even if you could solve the physical problem of traveling at those speeds for that amount of time, how do you solve the psychological problem of people having to live together, reproduce, etc. in a tiny enclosed space for so long? 

In Antarctica, there have been problems with people adjusting for stints of several months to a year. So many problems, in fact, that applicants for positions at research stations, etc. are nowadays carefully vetted, and the most desirable applicants are what one study described as "professional isolates". These are people who can avoid the types of stressful behaviors that have led to conflict at Antarctic research stations in the past, such as long-term staring at other people (several minutes or more) and the like.

So if you pick a crew of "professional isolates" to explore space for a thousand years, how do you know that the next 50 generations of space travelers, born and raised on that same ship, will have the proper psychology to not do each other in? How do you even breed for 50 generations? Don't you normally need the resources of a hospital to ensure a safe birth, especially given the complications from inbreeding that would surely arise on a spaceship?

And what about food? We depend on photosynthesis for food, completely. In Antarctica and current space travel, people take food with them. How do you _produce_ food in space for long periods of time? Where's your carbon source? Do you recycle feces? Dead bodies? What is your light source? What about water?

I like Star Trek as much as the next guy (and I'm old enough to remember watching the original on TV as a kid) but there are so many problems with making long term space travel a reality, it's hard to know where to begin. There would have to be a complete paradigm shift in space travel, provoked by breakthroughs in physics, something like transporting yourself instantly from spot to spot, to make interstellar travel a possibility. What we do now, putting people in a spacehip, pointing it somewhere, and launching it, wouldn't work, no matter how fast your spacecraft.


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## Terry D (Jul 1, 2015)

walker said:


> Taking the speed of light as a speed limit, you would need thousands of years to get to some of these places.
> 
> Even if you could solve the physical problem of traveling at those speeds for that amount of time, how do you solve the psychological problem of people having to live together, reproduce, etc. in a tiny enclosed space for so long?
> 
> ...



Many of these questions were handled quite well in Arthur C. Clarke's _Rendezvous With Rama._


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## walker (Jul 1, 2015)

I haven't read the book, but I have this question: "Handled quite well" in an imaginative, interesting sense, or in a way which could work in real life?

If your answer is that the book is realistic, then I propose this: Show that people can live underwater, without contact with the surface, without contact with other human beings, for 10 years. 

That's a much fatter pitch to hit than 1000 years of space travel. You have water, food, sunlight, temperature constraints within which you can live, etc. You don't have to reproduce and educate future generations, deal with inbreeding, etc. Better hope that nobody gets sick down there, or has a personality disorder. Better hope that there are no flaws in the machinery that sustains you. Better hope that the scientists that design your system are better than NASA scientists. I've seen two space shuttles go down in my lifetime, and that's not to mention the numerous problems the Apollo launches had, all of them, not just 13. And those rockets had the resources of the richest and most technologically advanced nation focused on their success. Who is designing your underwater station? Who has more resources and better quality control than NASA? 

From what I've seen, we can't even make _land_-based isolation projects work, like here in Arizona in the desert. Getting _anything_ from the Earth around you, atmosphere for example, is cheating. You can't do that in space. Comparing life in a submarine, which stays submerged for days or weeks, doesn't count either. _Everything_ they use comes from being able to emerge into the atmosphere, harvest food from land, etc.

These are interesting problems to speculate about, but we're not there yet, not even close. Not only are we not there yet, but we can't even see the way. To make long distance space travel possible, we have to postulate future insights, the nature of which are unknown to us at present.


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## Terry D (Jul 1, 2015)

As in realistic. In the book Rama is a craft 54 km long by 20 km wide, a self-contained ecosystem maintained by robots as the craft's inhabitants pass the the years in some form of hibernation (presumably -- the Ramans never actually appear in the book).


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## KLJo (Jul 1, 2015)

You're right, of course. The OP did suggest terraforming, but that would blow the timeline to hell.


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## walker (Jul 1, 2015)

Terry D said:


> As in realistic. In the book Rama is a craft 54 km long by 20 km wide, a self-contained ecosystem maintained by robots as the craft's inhabitants pass the the years in some form of hibernation (presumably -- the Ramans never actually appear in the book).



Maybe we have different definitions of "realistic".

54km x 20km wide? Really? How do you build that? How do you launch it? Do you assemble it piece by piece in space? At what cost? Even tiny flaws in a very small-scale project like the space station are incredibly expensive to fix. How do you get the water up there? Do you fly it up there? At what cost? I think satellite payloads are something like a few thousand dollars per kilo, last time I checked. It's why we don't launch nuclear waste into space (that, and spaceships blowing up--there was another one just the other day) which really is a pressing problem that we need to solve.

Hibernation? Humans, or Ramans? Humans don't hibernate. Ramans might; I don't know. But I thought we were talking about human space travel.

See, that's the thing about fiction. You solve a problem, such as humans not being able to reproduce, feed themselves, etc. in space, with a wave of the hand. They hibernate! They don't need resources anymore! I love a good book as much as the next guy, I'm on a writing website after all, but that ain't real life. You don't solve problems with a wave of the hand in real life.

Here's the funny thing. We already _are_ in outer space. You can go to the farthest-flung reaches of the universe, and there is no space that is inherently more "outer" than where we are. And we have a pretty decent home. There's waterfalls, fish, elephants, and sunrises. I mean, shouldn't we make it work here first, before we look for a geographical cure?

My water challenge still stands. Show me how people can live underwater for 10 years, no contact with the surface. That is piddly baby stuff compared to space travel. You can just reach out and grab food, in the form of fish and algae, if you live in an underwater compound. The temperature is more or less decent. You have sunlight. You don't have to reproduce. Many difficulties have been removed for you, when compared to space travel. And we still can't do it.

Make your underwater station 54x20 km if you'd like. Still won't work. In fact, it might be more difficult. The more complicated systems are, the more likely they are to fail. What do you do when a key rubber gasket goes? Got rubber down there to fashion a new one? If not, do you have rubber trees? What about a steel part, or an aluminum one? Got foundries too, to make stuff for you? Are there foundries in outer space? I don't know of any. What about computers? Did you CPU wear out, or another chip? Got another computer? Can you fix it? Do you load your station up with computers, taking up valuable space, on the off chance that your computer would fail? If your computer technology is inadequate, what do you do then? Can you upgrade it, without coming to the surface? Those are the rules.

I am all for creativity in science. I think creativity is under-emphasized in the sciences. People should be encouraged to put forth outlandish ideas, within reason. But then you evaluate those ideas. Most of them get discarded. A few are valid, and worth building on. My background is primarily in biology, and humans are living creatures. I have a fair idea of what we need to live, and the abiotic and biotic factors that make our kind of carbon-based life possible. Pretty much nothing of what we need is in outer space. Even if you did recycle feces and dead bodies on board your space craft, because you can't lose any carbon, how would you grow plants in the absence of light? You'd have to artificially provide light, and where would that energy come from? The list of problems goes on and on.


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## JustRob (Jul 1, 2015)

John Galt said:


> @JustRob. You've given me a fantastic idea - an economic system based entirely on stamps.



Douglas Adams based one on leaves ... but then that was a consequence of his solution to the population explosion, the sham expeditionary vanguard of useless people.


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## walker (Jul 1, 2015)

I like the terraforming idea too. Apparently Mars will get overheated by the sun later than we will, so it would buy a little time. It's also just a really cool idea.

Mars appears to have trouble holding on to an atmosphere though, because it has a different magnetic field than Earth. Still, why not give it a shot? But we do live in a world with budgets, and limited resource, and terraforming another planet is an enormous project, unless you can do it on the cheap. The evolution of blue-green algae was all that was needed to put oxygen into Earth's atmosphere, but that did take many millions of years to work. Kind of a long wait.


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## Terry D (Jul 1, 2015)

walker said:


> Maybe we have different definitions of "realistic".
> 
> 54km x 20km wide? Really? How do you build that? How do you launch it? Do you assemble it piece by piece in space? At what cost? Even tiny flaws in a very small-scale project like the space station are incredibly expensive to fix. How do you get the water up there? Do you fly it up there? At what cost? I think satellite payloads are something like a few thousand dollars per kilo, last time I checked. It's why we don't launch nuclear waste into space (that, and spaceships blowing up--there was another one just the other day) which really is a pressing problem that we need to solve.
> 
> ...



The thing is, when you read a story (particularly science fiction and fantasy) the author is allowed to make certain assumptions about the universe s/he creates. For instance, in Rendezvous With Rama Clarke makes the assumption that the Ramans were technologically advanced enough to build a craft like Rama. His story wasn't about how that was done it was about the effect the craft had on humanity when it arrived here. If it had been about how the craft was built, stocked, and propelled then he would have been obligated to provide a logical (at least within the context of the story) explanation. 

Realistic, in my opinion, for science fiction simply means that the events in the story do not violate the basic laws of physics. The events may seem outlandish in terms of our current technology (Clarke himself coined Clarke's Law: Any technology, sufficiently far advanced, will appear as magic [think of a cave man hearing a voice recording for the first time]) but isn't that what science fiction is about? Exploring the effects of future technologies on people? 

Every time a reader picks up a work of fiction they make an unstated agreement with the author. The author promises to tell the reader a story (basically a series of well crafted lies) and the reader agrees to suspend their disbelief of those lies for the duration of the story. No fictional world, even the most realistic, can withstand absolute scrutiny. If you demand an explanation for everything you will end up reading an encyclopedia sized novel.


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## walker (Jul 1, 2015)

Terry D said:


> The thing is, when you read a story (particularly science fiction and fantasy) the author is allowed to make certain assumptions about the universe s/he creates. For instance, in Rendezvous With Rama Clarke makes the assumption that the Ramans were technologically advanced enough to build a craft like Rama. His story wasn't about how that was done it was about the effect the craft had on humanity when it arrived here. If it had been about how the craft was built, stocked, and propelled then he would have been obligated to provide a logical (at least within the context of the story) explanation.
> 
> Realistic, in my opinion, for science fiction simply means that the events in the story do not violate the basic laws of physics. The events may seem outlandish in terms of our current technology (Clarke himself coined Clarke's Law: Any technology, sufficiently far advanced, will appear as magic [think of a cave man hearing a voice recording for the first time]) but isn't that what science fiction is about? Exploring the effects of future technologies on people?
> 
> Every time a reader picks up a work of fiction they make an unstated agreement with the author. The author promises to tell the reader a story (basically a series of well crafted lies) and the reader agrees to suspend their disbelief of those lies for the duration of the story. No fictional world, even the most realistic, can withstand absolute scrutiny. If you demand an explanation for everything you will end up reading an encyclopedia sized novel.



I could not possibly agree with you more!

That's why I read!

And that's why I love inventing stuff when I write.

I'm not much of a hard science fiction guy. I don't need to be convinced that the setting of a story is realistic to enjoy it. That's why I loved Star Trek. Beam me down, or beam me up, I don't care! The stories were human. In my bathroom is a copy of The Martian Chronicles, ready to be picked up at a moment's notice.

My only thing is with making that ever so subtle leap (most of the time we don't realize we're making it) from the pages of a book to present reality. 

It's cool to dream about space travel. I do it all the time. And I do allow for future discoveries to make it possible. But for serious discussions _outside_ of the realm of fiction, I have a terminal case of science.


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## KLJo (Jul 1, 2015)

walker said:


> I like the terraforming idea too. Apparently Mars will get overheated by the sun later than we will, so it would buy a little time. It's also just a really cool idea.
> 
> Mars appears to have trouble holding on to an atmosphere though, because it has a different magnetic field than Earth. Still, why not give it a shot? But we do live in a world with budgets, and limited resource, and terraforming another planet is an enormous project, unless you can do it on the cheap. The evolution of blue-green algae was all that was needed to put oxygen into Earth's atmosphere, but that did take many millions of years to work. Kind of a long wait.



Well, we've got a few billion years. Let's just hope that cryogenics comes along in our lifetime, because I've got my Faraday box all ready to go*, and I really want to see that!!

*I don't actually have a Faraday box. THE SHAME!


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## 3blake7 (Jul 2, 2015)

KLJo said:


> Well, we've got a few billion years. Let's just hope that cryogenics comes along in our lifetime, because I've got my Faraday box all ready to go*, and I really want to see that!!
> 
> *I don't actually have a Faraday box. THE SHAME!



Terraforming isn't that hard. I think people have unrealistic timelines in their head because the only terraforming methods that have been explored were extremely subtle, like something we could do right now with the resources NASA already has. My terraforming plan only requires the ability to send 300 megagram payloads into orbit, which is about 3 times bigger than what the space shuttle can handle. There would be 300 megagram self-contained spacecraft, for each part of the industrial procedure. There would be a Surveyor, Excavator, Hauler, Loader, Feeder, Crusher, Separator, Smelter, Part Caster, Mold Caster, Grinder and Assembler. The first seven have already been made into mobile machines. The rest all exist in the industry but they usually live in giant warehouses so some development would be required to mobilize them. Once you have all these pieces of equipment in orbit, they would begin mining asteroids, 30% of which are pure iron and nickel. They would mass produce steel parts to make more of themselves. The StarTram, which would be more efficient than the space shuttle in the long run, could easily send up these 300 megagram payloads and parts that can't be produced in the asteroid belt. They would replicate for 22 years, then it would take them another 100 years to produce enough steel to build a spacecraper for Venus, 250 kilometer tall structure to pump up liquid CO2, a sunshade for Venus and around 340 million supertankers with 20 gigaliter capacities. The supertankers would move CO2 to Luna and Mars. They would also move Hydrogen from Jupiter to Mars, Venus and Luna. The Hydrogen would be used in the Bosch reaction to make water from CO2. The Haber process would also be used to make Urea which would fertilize the soil of Venus and Mars. Schreibersite could be saved from the steel making process to further fertilize the planets. In the end, you'll have Venus and Mars with Earth like atmospheres, fertilized soil and a sunshade giving Venus Earth-like day-night cycle for half the year. Luna I guess would be a vacation spot. My spreadsheet does this by the year 2600.

I haven't worked out all the little details yet but the overall idea is sound and if I do say so myself a bit more pragmatic.


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## KLJo (Jul 3, 2015)

"My *spreadsheet* does this by the year 2600."

I have no words to express the depth and breadth of my love for this sentence.


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## 3blake7 (Jul 3, 2015)

KLJo said:


> "My *spreadsheet* does this by the year 2600."
> 
> I have no words to express the depth and breadth of my love for this sentence.



You can check it if you want, I posted it on the Research forum hoping someone would.


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## dale (Jul 3, 2015)

just watched the movie 'jupiter ascending" last night. sounds familiar. and "jupiter" is just so damn hot.


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## fallenangel09 (Jul 6, 2015)

Have you  seen  mission to  Mars. That the  same  thing  that  was in that movie


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## BobtailCon (Jul 6, 2015)

Yeah, there could also be invisible, transient immaterial unicorns licking the back of my head right now..


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## KLJo (Jul 6, 2015)

It occurred to me this morning that I'm more excited about Pluto than I was about last Christmas.

8 MORE SLEEPS!


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## Arcopitcairn (Jul 6, 2015)

3blake7 said:


> With our current population growth of 19 per 1000 and immortality, our population would be 500 quadrillion by the year 3000. All we have to do, is build a giant spacescraper, send trillions into space, setup autonomous industries that mine the asteroid belt and build spacestations, then when the population of the Solar system reached critical mass, there is an explosion of relativistic pioneers. They would reach a nearby star system like hundreds of years later but they will start terraforming with the autonomous self-replicating industry and building more space stations. Our population growth would be exponential. If we did this for a million years we might be in every star in the galaxy. I think it's not that big of a stretch to assume there is other sentient life in our galaxy and that they could have evolved millions of years before us, possibly even a billion.
> 
> They are among us.



You know that most people suck, right? They've always sucked, and they will always suck? Even in the future. So I'm sure that the endless trillions of humans rampaging across the galaxy'll be a good thing.


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## KLJo (Jul 13, 2015)

ONE MORE SLEEP TO PLUTO!


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## jtgrall (Aug 2, 2015)

Technically aren't we extra terrestrials


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