Broomstick wrote: ↑2020-10-25 10:29amThat seems like an awful lot of work
Does something count as work if it's done via just intelligent enough AI and basically automated to the point where an engineer just needs to make sure it doesn't disassemble anything it shouldn't and that any check engine light warnings get investigated?
- you could just leave a star as-is and tap what you need as you need it. Due to entropy converting solar energy into another form for storage and back to something you use again is going to involve loss along the way.
That's only short term though. That star won't always be there.
Not to mention a black hole getting loose - which is almost inevitable given a long enough time scale - is going to be a very destructive force, even more so than an active star. Certainly if you have an application that requires a black hole that's one thing but just making an storing them? Sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
An orbiting body, which is what a small black hole is, doesn't just 'get loose' it sits in a predictable orbit and can even have a fleet of warning beacons orbiting it assuming its large enough.
Not to mention a "small black hole" used to provide gravity is going to result in some very weird gradients. Not sure that would be comfortable to live with. Or, if you're at a great enough distance that tidal forces aren't turning you into a strand of spaghetti I'm not sure if you're going to get any sort of gravity useful for, say, keeping a human body healthy.
If you build a sphere around a black hole there is no gradient, it'd be the same as if you packed the middle of you hab with hydrogen, iron, silicon, etc. as mass is mass as far as gravity is concerned. The plus side with a black hole is that it functions as a source of power and gravity.
Jub wrote: ↑2020-10-24 07:16pmYou just defined the Borg.
I just described a species that, for the most part, nobody willingly fucks with. If they weren't lobotomized by Voyager and knew what diplomacy was they'd be very well setup indeed.
Frankly, a civilization that is dismantling entire star systems to build "millions" of each of a several types of ships is downright terrifying to someone outside that civilization, it would look like a plague or a blight, consuming everything in sight. That's not exploration that's consumption.
Anything outside of it will fall into one of two camps, both unworthy of consideration. Anything smaller than them that isn't expanding faster than they are will never catch up to that civilization's manufacturing rate and thus can not be a threat while anything larger has already done the same thing and, depending on the scale difference, may already control several galaxies worth of stuff. In either case, the difference in scale between groups means that the smaller group WILL be at the mercy of the larger one.
What if the desire is not to work so damn hard, kick back on a tropical beach, and chill? Especially if there's a planet where those exist already and you don't have to bother making them?
Who's working? Even in Trek they have automation and AI that means human labor is basically unnecessary except to make requests and to keep things running smoothly.
Your vision is nothing more than a rewrite of "Manifest Destiny" which was never universal at any time and is not inevitable.
So humans didn't start out in one geographical location and spread over the entire planet in a way that no other species has accomplished then...
We don't know if our descendants are going to be the sort of space-faring race you envision, or if they're going to retreat into artificial reality on just this one planet and never go anywhere else in the physical universe, or if we're going to destroy ourselves in a future war that leaves only cockroaches and scraps of plastic around. You're acting like there's an inevitable script we're following - there isn't and we're not.
If we do the VR thing we're doomed to a swift, relatively speaking, death. Is a society doomed to death in a few hundred million years really a utopia next to one that can offer all the same experiences and which can live on until the death of star formation?
Making it atom by atom is easier? Easier than sending out automated mining machines to harvest it from the environment? Um...no.
Consider this. You're setting up a solar system for people who want it 'natural' so you don't want to cut up too many rocky planets while getting things ready for moving day. You could fish it out of the system's star, but the spectrograph shows that's phosphorous poor. What it does have is a lot of materials that can be used to set up particle colliders, much of which can be bombarded into phosphorus.
Or consider an even farther future. There are very few active stars left, rocky bodies are so scattered that it costs more to go grab them than it does to harvest the energy from a black hole and manufacture new elements from 'nothing'. Think long term, like trillions of years long, and this setup makes more and more sense.
Some things are not possible. Not all problems have solutions, or solutions that you or I would like and throwing more money or scientists at the problem(s) won't change that.
Prove it. Show me a naturally occurring element or compound that MUST be impossible to create in a lab rather than being merely extremely difficult to create in a lab.
More time to party.
A-U-T-O-M-A-T-I-O-N
Is there a cosmic referee saying "oh no - you can't go back there! You have one and exactly one chance to pick up a rock, don't take it and you can never in the history of the universe go back and pick up that rock!"
YES. At the scales and time frames, I'm planning for the expansion of the universe will literally make going back for anything impossible and all it takes to not be fucked eventually is planning and automation.
Now, with solar energy it's true what is not captured is "lost" to space, but unless you NEED the entire output of a star all at once there's no need to worry about that. It's like Niagara Falls - sure, a LOT of water is "wasted" as it goes over those falls without being harnessed to make electricity or used as drinking water or whatever but it's not necessary to capture it all. We could - we absolutely have the capability of capturing all that water and using it to drive turbines, but we have never bothered to do that even though people were proposing that as early as the late 19th Century. In part, it's because society thinks the falls are pretty and there's money made by hosting people who come just to look at them. Gee, maybe our descendants will like the look of natural planets and stars that aren't entirely encased in solar collectors.
How much beauty has been lost to climate change because we'd rather burn coal than destroy one beautiful landmark?
Why do you assume it's ONLY the people who live there that will desire that? What, people won't be allowed to be tourists in your glorious future? How many millions of people every year visit National Parks, areas that are deliberately kept wild instead of developed into "something useful"?
How many fractions of 1% of our planet's population visit a park is irrelevant on the scale of a galaxy. We could leave that percentage of a percentage of systems untouched as parks if there's a desire to visit such spaces. Converting most systems to one thing doesn't stop us from having some systems kept as parks.
Living in a city is "the new normal" and yet millions of those urban dwellers support maintaining at least a portion of the Earth in a wild, undeveloped state. Some of them so they have a place that isn't a man-made city and some people of some ethical reason or some for some other reason which may be no more than "it's pretty" but humans can be whimsical like that.
Quote me saying that every single atom in the universe must be captured, processed, and consumed. Just because I advocate for large scale construction doesn't mean I'm saying we can't leave areas untouched for the vanishingly small fraction of people likely to care.
Yeah, I sort of don't want a mini-black hole in my backyard because they can be fucking dangerous.
You keep asserting this but have yet to prove it. Show me the math that says an artificial black hole is any more dangerous than the equivalent mass of anything else.
I don't see supporting evidence that human civilization as a whole is going to keep going forward in leaps and bounds without end. The Concorde was supposed to herald a new era in faster transportation ("better" because it was faster) but apparently there's not sufficient interest for it and we no longer have civilian super-sonic transportation. Standard jets are, apparently, good enough so that's what we have. We could have more, we even did for awhile, but not any longer.
Your argument is that *checks notes* one type of technology failed to capture a sustainable market share in a capitalist system all progress doomed to reach a wall... Please explain why this paradigm MUST apply to space-based post-scarcity societies?
A lot of urbanization has been forced on people, it's far from always voluntary. A lot of people living in dense cities would like to live in less dense areas.
No doubt there are some people who would like to live in a space hab their entire lives. There are a lot of people who don't and won't even if they're born in one.
You keep asserting this. Show me the percentages that make this kind of thinking a hard roadblock to the type of progress I favor.
We evolved to live on the surface of a planet. <snip>
This is a solved issue in the fictional universe we're talking about. They even have stuff I won't assume we'll ever have like artificial gravity, shields, replicators, transporters, and FTL travel.
You keep mistaking something being difficult to get started for something impossible as if Sci-Fi isn't about exploring the difficult.
Apparently that floats a LOT of peoples' boats, that's why National Parks are found all over the world these days. I think a larger fraction of humanity would vote for leaving some natural planets around to live on than you assume.
I'm making a hard sell case for a level of automation that you feel uncomfortable with. I'm arguing that there is a purpose to a Dyson swarm, that star lifting and galaxy sculpting is a smart idea, that living on planets is a wasteful luxury but I'm not saying that we ignore all dissent. Instead, I'm saying that it is likely that a demographic shift and emerging technologies will likely erode your way of thinking into irrelevance, just like the idea of women having to swim in dresses for reasons of modesty has been driven into irrelevance in many societies.
In other words, when the cancer that is your space-faring civilization is done munching it's way through the sterile rocks of a solar system it will eat the living planets there as well and fuck the inhabitants. How... colonialist of you.
Funny, though - we DO have governments that protect the uncontacted tribes these days. We do have National Parks. We still have Niagara Falls being a giant waterfall.
Maybe we learned something in the last few centuries. Some of us at least.
How far do our responsibilities extend? When Yellowstone does blow and if we should survive such an event, should we attempt to rebuild it as it was, or do we accept the destruction and mass extinction as natural and thus good? Do we save uncontacted tribes from such events or do we let them perish 'naturally'?
Because that's how high-energy physicists justify their paychecks.
But even if you design a collider that doesn't mean it will be built. It's getting harder to find funding for that sort of megaproject, just as it's hard to find funding for a lot of space projects. In reality, the "small fraction" is the number of people who want and seek such things, not the ones who don't, or even oppose them.
Why are you tying innovation to the economy when one of the joys of expansion into space is the ability to break free of such systems? You seem to think that space capitalism is necessary even in a series that states that it wants to divorce itself from such things.
Without FTL that's one fucking hell of a long commute to your "job", and just getting there would involve time spans that exceed the existence of any human civilizations we have any record of.
That's leaving aside how a wandering black hole or blowing up a star might fuck up the local celestial area. Wow, and I thought Superfund sites were bad....
If you're an immortal being, via whatever means, and you can bring many of the comforts of home with you how is this any different than waiting for anything else?
You keep asserting that wandering black holes are a major hazard, please show me the orbital math that shows this to be the case. The same goes for blowing up stars at safe distances, even though I never mentioned doing such a thing...
.... or you fuck up and turn the thing you're living on into a stranglet that eats you and your civilization in a fraction of a second and turns it into a "stranglet star".
We have no proof that such a substance exists and our theories that predict its existence also predict its exponential spread. So either we're already fucked or there's no risk.
No, it's saying that because the Amish exist we should maintain parts of the planet that don't look like downtown Manhattan.
Actually, lots of people living in dense, urban downtowns support maintaining swathes of natural or near-natural landscape, even to the point of donating their own money to the cause on top of advocating that government use tax-money to protect such places.
I suspect your view is the minority here.
You do realize that you can have parks, waterfalls, and the like on a sufficiently advanced habitat right?
Broomstick wrote: ↑2020-10-25 11:06amExcept we have no idea if those technologies will ever be developed - like flying cars. It's the future, dude, where's my
flying car?
We don't know if cloning and external wombs will exist in spite of them already existing...?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/1542 ... erm-infant
I trust that you don't need a source for cloning.
I doubt naturally breeding new humans is going to entirely out of fashion if for no other reason than sex is fun and evolved to make more life forms. It's preventing natural reproduction that takes effort. Fucking is easier than cloning. Probably more fun for most people, too.
Where did I say that it would? I'm presenting this as a way a small group of people can literally breed themselves into a majority.
Creating new minds in some other way? Then you're not talking about human beings any more. Who knows what a different species would decide, or how they would act?
So like Data or the EMH in Trek, the series we started out talking about, then? Hmm.
It might kill us all off.
As I keep saying, there is no guarantee we'll still be here next Tuesday.
I am saying that we have actual examples from past human history of human societies taking some pretty draconian actions to limit their populations. We also have examples of societies that didn't do that, like Rappa Nui, and that got pretty damn ugly. There are also examples of abandoned ruins where we don't know what the hell happened.
These are all confined to very limited pools of resources compared to what I want. Show that your ideas hold true at larger scales.
Keep in mind, I'm not arguing that these policies are inevitable. I'm arguing that the factors that may lead to them are common enough that I would expect to see policies inhibiting them in works of science fiction where they haven't occurred.
If there's infinite space to move into then those who don't want to be part of the cancer civilization can just keep moving further outwards. But you still haven't made the case they we're going to turn into a cancer civilization that consumes everything in our wake. We're humans, not locusts. Why would we suddenly start acting like a locust swarm?
*Looks at climate change and current human industry* Why indeed.
We preserve the SYSTEM, not the individual particles that make it up, any more than you preserve every cell in your own body indefinitely. You are not individual cells, you are the conglomeration that forms a living system.
We aren't though. We're preventing its direct destruction at our own hands but doing nothing about the countless other threats we ourselves are causing let alone any external threats. If your argument is that we should protect things as they are because we enjoy them then you have to admit that we SUCK at it.
My system could allow us hundreds of Yellowstones in habitats not to mention the simulated versions. Why is one version of greater value than the other?
Who knows?
I value flowers not because they are enduring but because they are beautiful, even if for only a short time. I have valued the lives of my pets even though I have a vastly longer lifespan than they do.
There are entire religions that are built around impermanence. The Japanese elevate the appreciation of the ephemeral to entire esthetics:
mono no aware and
wabi-sabi being the two I'm aware of and there might well be more.
For all we know immortals might be more into this sort of thing than we mortals are. After all, why would immortals care about building eternal monuments when they're going to be around forever? It's transient types that seem obsessed with enduring piles of rock.
You're ignoring that such groups are unlikely to ever control the territory needed to be relevant. Just as such groups haven't halted progress in reality, such groups are unlikely to stop it in fiction. It doesn't matter if they exist when all it takes is a fraction of a fraction to want my vision to overrule them.
Can't prove anything about the future, if we could, we could actually predict it and we can't.
Then posit a scenario where such a group is politically powerful enough to prevent such expansion for the lifespan of humanity and our genetic descendants. My argument isn't about inevitability its about probability and Star Trek as skipped past a lot of the hurdles that may stop IRL humanity from getting to where I envision us.
Well, hell, I've never seen the ocean in real life but I still give a damn about it. Some of us care about stuff we don't actually directly experience, for all sorts of reasons.
Would you feel as strongly about it if it wasn't essential to life as you know it?
One is built by human beings and one is not.
Which, admittedly, is a limited view of "natural" but for this discussion it works pretty well.
Here's another way of talking about it: building a nest, and activities surrounding it, are instinctive in birds. Put suitable materials in their living area and they'll start manipulating them and making the materials for nest building even if they don't complete the nest. Humans, on the other hand, do not spontaneously start mixing concrete and fashioning I-beams and rebar if you give them a pile of sand and another pile of iron ore. That takes an entire society and specialists and ancillary support tech.
And yet our instincts lead us to *gestures with a hand* this?
Well, to start, making it in a lab in a manner that results in toxic shit getting into the water people drink does matter. At least to the people drinking that water. So let's throw something in there about not harming other people, just for a start (we might later on add "harming other life forms", too, but we'll start with people).
You've added a biased assumption to the equation. Answer the original question please.
Only if space actually does, somehow, provide infinite resources and energy... but you haven't proved that, either.
Certainly, without FTL we're pretty much limited to the solar system, and that does not have infinite resources. It has a lot of resources, but not infinite. Your cancer civilization will, eventually, consume everything then starve/choke to death on waste like any other cancer.
That's only true if growth and consumption are the goal and not merely a means to the desired end. My vision has the end goal of stability for as many living conscious beings as we can provide space for as long as physically possible. That vision requires as many resources as possible but can be frivolous with them until such a time as they become scarce and even then due to sheer scale and planning will have even 'waste' materials stockpiled for when they may be required.
Assuming we're talking about human beings? While I find it morally repugnant genocide is not off the table. There have been societies utterly exterminated in history, and for lot less compelling reasons than survival in the face of a group that is acting like a cancer or locust swarm, intent on consuming everything you have and leaving you to die.
Except that none of what I'm saying does any more to doom humanity than simply stay on Earth until an extinction event happens does. Consumption of asteroids and comets, as an example, actually increase the mean time between extinction events as they relate to the Earth.
Your thinking is too rooted in the cause and effect loop that consumption causes in a closed system such as the Earth, or even Sol, but fails to account for vastly increased resource availability and a lack of an environment to poison.
Broomstick wrote: ↑2020-10-25 11:09amSee the post just before this one where I actually address this. I see no reason to repeat myself.
I am using "natural" for short hand for "processes that are not driven by human intellect or activities" which is a perfectly accepted use of the term in ordinary English. I am doing enough typing, it is counter-productive to replace one word with a ten word phrase that would just make my posts more convoluted without adding additional meaning.
What if there is no free will. Doesn’t that change human behavior from unnatural to natural? This is why I posed my challenge in the first place. You cannot ignore the other parts because they make your definition invalid.
Broomstick wrote: ↑2020-10-25 11:37amExcept.... the real world provides counter-examples.
Over and over, when you increase the educational level of women they produce fewer children. When you give women control over their own reproduction they choose to have fewer children. What does Star Trek have in abundance? Educated people and advanced medical technology.
Yes, there are a few people like the Duggers who choose to turn a human vagina into an infant slip-n-slide but they're such outliers that if it weren't for immigration from other places the population of the US would be slowly contracting, not expanding, despite abundant space and resources.
People will in such advanced societies choose to have children. I don't see it as automatic they'd have some exponential expansion of population.
Yes, this has such a halting effect on growth that we *checks notes* continue to expand both in terms of population but also energy usage and resource extraction. What exactly has stopped again?
Well, gee, maybe the Federation has a "low" population because they don't force women to churn out a baby a year for 40 years each? They let women decide how many kids they're going to have, and the answer ranges from "none" to "many" with most around just a couple or a few?
You seem to want to model human populations like locust swarms. We're not locusts.
The only societies that seem to push for churning out as many babies as physically possible are early agricultural societies, which also tend to have high infant mortality and a lot of warfare. Otherwise, there always seem to be mechanisms to limit child production whether those are scientific (modern birth control) or social (abstinence, infanticide, etc.) The Federation doesn't have a high infant mortality rate, and the wars tend to be on the borders and not constant.
And yet humans have spread in a way that nothing else has and reached populations that no other species in our weight class have even approached. No other single species on this planet has expanded as we have and whenever we've encountered an open space we've attempted to expand into it. Why do you feel the space will have any less expansion than other events in our history?
For all we know they do - we just don't see it. Certainly we do see star systems with megastructures. But not everyone in Trek is at the same tech level. Some species just don't seem to reproduce as fast as others - Vulcans, for example, seemed to have evolved towards less rapid breeding than humans (that every seven years thing) possibly because their resource-poor planet drove them towards towards it and now they can't outbreed other species.
Maybe there are limitations on building Dyson Swarms we're just not aware of, any more than stone age hunters would be aware of the problems around nuclear power.
Can you posit what these problems might be?
Because... they're using a different definition of utopia than you are?
Also keep in mind that no one is portraying the Klingon Empire as utopia. DS9 is outside the Federation, or right on the border. The Ferengi use latinum, but they're not part of the Federation, either.
The UFP hasn't taken over the galaxy. It hasn't even taken over the Alpha Quadrant. It's like looking at the Colonies in North America in 1750 and asking "why haven't they taken over North America yet?"
How can a society be a Utopia if it remains threatened at every turn and if it is not using its resources to deal with these threats? You've brought up the Culture universe before, examine closely how they handle threats and expand their influence and compare that to Trek. Then examine which society is more utopian.
Um.... tip for you. Don't go into selling real estate if you can describe Mercury and Venus as "prime" spots for colonization....
They're better than 99% of the solar system. Is the top 1% of real estate not prime?
Well... except for those genetically engineered people who tried to take over Earth and killed a lot of normal people sort of gave them an allergy to that sort of gene-manipulation. And the Borg is just making them itch even more with that allergy.
Also, we've seen more than once in Trek that while cloning is fine for awhile you can not do it indefinitely - see the episode "Up the Long Ladder".
Those situations only apply to idiots. There's no reason that you cannot correct the genetic issues in cloned tissue given the technology we've seen available in other Trek media. We've literally seen them give anti-radiation pills and create viable DNA from energy and it goes without saying that they have the computing power to store genetic sequences as well as to analyze new ones.
What Trek writers think of as 'challenging' situations are merely the small-minded fears of society reflected in a new setting.
All of which might also be reasons they DON'T breed like locusts....
The issue is that it only takes one such group to crop up to cause an issue. Is Trek still a Utopia if they have to hold peridoic purges to keep to near zero population growth?