bilateralrope wrote: ↑2019-06-19 01:47pmThree problems with that:
- Waste heat at the receiving point. We are talking a shitload of energy, which means a shitload of waste heat (unless you want to claim, and prove, 100% efficiency at the receiving point). What materials could withstand that ?
Why are you assuming you'd send all that energy in a single beam rather than from a single solar collector (or perhaps a small cluster) to a specially designed receiver station? Also, Star Trek has some pretty nifty tech that can withstand phaser hits for at least a little while, why are you assuming they can't deal with some simple microwaves or focused light?
Also, please do the math and show how large a solar collector you'd need to threaten to melt something on earth and how tight the beam would have to be. You made a claim, so I'll expect you to support it.
- The width of the beam expands over distance. So anything around the receiver is going to have to deal with being hit by all that energy.
No shit, that's why you park your receiver somewhere where nothing else gets bathed in that energy and then beam from it to your destination. That second distance will be short enough that you won't have nearly so much bloom.
I also awaiting your math on how much the various transmission methods will spread and why this couldn't be solved with something like a series of relay stations if it is an issue.
- If someone hacks into the system telling the satellites where to send the energy, they can point it at other things in the system. Melting whatever they point at. Trek isn't very good at computer security but, even if they were, this would pose a major political obstacle for your swarm.
Assuming that any given satellite is powerful enough to melt anything, that they can be easily hacked, and that Star Fleet has no way to respond to this is such a disaster were to happen is a bunch of negatives I can't disprove. Once again you'll need to show your work here if you want to stay in this debate.
Is that something Trek science is capable of?
Why wouldn't they be? All matter and anti-matter are formed of very basic particles the only difficulty is getting those particles to arrange into the form of matter/anti-matter that you need at the moment. That can generally be solved with high levels of computational power and a supercollider both of which want all the energy they can get.
We are talking a substance that is used to control matter/antimatter reactions. That's not normal matter
Please prove this claim. As far as we know Dilithium is mined from fairly normal planets and was formed by completely natural processes. As such it would seem to be fairly bog standard matter that the UFP has found works well in controlling A/AM reactions. Given that the mechanism behind this has, to my knowledge, never been explained there's no reason Dilithium has to be particularly exotic.
Why do you think people are leaving Earth to found colonies in Star Trek ?
I could only speculate given the sheer number of reasons people travel and have traveled and settle/resettle in real life. If you have proof that there's some major driving factor that invalidates people living in full earth gravity space habitats or even becoming info-morphs and living on a server somewhere please provide it.
How do you convince them that your habitats meet their goals better than settling an uninhabited planet ?
You literally invite them into your space colony or make an advertisement touting the benefits of life on your habitat. The same way you convince people of anything.
One way might be to offer more living space than Earth's major cities can with each new settler getting say 20 acres in your new habitat while still having light minute communications with Earth. That would likely sell a lot of people on making the jump.
Please show me the population growth rate calculations you used to conclude that the population is unrealistically low. What kind of birth rates are we talking about ?
For Earth alone, using the current population of ~7.7 billion and a growth rate of 1.2% annually (the current growth rate) we'd produce 471.8 billion people in the 345 years between now and the start of TNG. That's for one planet. I could calculate a sliding scale where birth rates decline, but I suspect that once space colonization becomes a reality and space is no longer a constraint combined with hitting a level of resources that don't require one, or possibly both, parents to work will see a new and prolonged baby boom which could serve to even out population growth.
That's nearly half a trillion people just from one planet and the entire UFP is supposed to have just under a Trillion from all their member worlds. Does that seem realistic to you?
Capturing it to store brings the problem of storage, which tends to be explosive due to the energy density involved. It seems safer to let the energy be "wasted" than storing it.
Who cares if antimatter bunker 4672 explodes when you purposely built it far enough away from anything else that a full reaction couldn't possibly harm anything? Space is huge and the level of reaction you can get from a well-designed storage tank should be minimal by comparison.
As for using it, they need to have some reason to use it. Building a large fleet for the sake of a large fleet isn't a good reason. Nor is building that large fleet to collect resources for the sake of collecting resources.
That is actually a worthy goal if one wishes to start collecting and merging galaxies because one realizes that such is the best way to survive in a galaxy that no longer produces new stars. The UFP thinks small when they could be thinking of ensuring that all member species survive not just the deaths of single stars but the deaths of every star.
[/quote]You need to find a problem that the current fleet can't handle and building a dyson swarm to build a larger fleet is the quickest way to get the fleet to the necessary size. So, how long are you thinking the swarm itself would take to build ?[/quote]
The Swarms build speed is scalable and depends on how many resources you want to devote to the mining and building phase of the plan. It scales really well depending on what you allow materials to be gathered from and how many of those materials you convert into more miners and fabricators (with the intention of either recycling those assets or sending them onward to the next mega project that somebody has cooked up). It also depends on just how fast Trek can build things, which I don't know if we have solid numbers for.
I can quote an idea somebody else has put forward about building a Dyson swarm with modern Earth technology and extrapolate from their though.
Bob Swindell wrote:We DO have the technology, or at least theoretical technology within our grasp, of creating a Dyson swarm, or an orbital cloud of space stations that functions the same as a Dyson sphere in harvesting most if not all of the sun’s power output.
So let’s run a few quick numbers and very rough assumptions.
The Earth’s aphelion is about 152,000,000 km (the maximum radius of its elliptical orbit). Since we want the Earth to still get some sunshine, we’ll put our Dyson radius at 160,000,000 km. That gives us a potential shell of 32 Quintillion square kilometers.
A relatively small Stanford torus capable of housing 10,000 people would, stood on its edge to maximize its disc face to the sun, have an area of 2.5 square kilometers.
Stanford torus - Wikipedia
For safety, let’s give it lots of elbow room. Let’s say it is no closer than 100 km to the nearest next habitat. That now takes up 31,416 square kms. That means within one orbital ring, we can fit 2.5 million of these habitats, or tilted at different orbital planes in rings going out from the first ring, you have plenty of room for over 10 trillion Stanford torus habitats, each with 10,000 inhabitants. And you are still capturing less than 1% of the sun’s energy output.
How much mass is that? One Stanford torus requires about 10 million tons of material, including metals, rock or soil for radiation shielding, and water/air. That’s 102 quintillion tons of material (102x10E18 tons). For comparison, that is about 10 times the total mass of the asteroid dwarf planet Ceres. So there’s PLENTY of material in our solar system to go even this far and consume all the asteroids and quite a number of moons and comets. We could ratchet up the swarm density a hundred fold (so that the toruses were actually within sight of each other and noticeably blocked the sunlight from outside the solar system, housing a combined total of 10 quintillion inhabitants comfortably) if we were willing to cannibalize most of the Jovian moons entirely along with large chunks of some of the planets (Mercury seems like it’s not doing much right now).
How much time would it take? An unbelievably huge amount of time by our standards. The first one made could be done within 20 to 25 years of full tilt dedicated effort. Now that you have your lunar infrastructure in place, torus numbers 2 through 10 could be done in half that time. The next hundred could be done in half that. After that you are now completing one per year for the next few hundred, then several per year when you reach a thousand. It would be a slow exponential growth rate. When you reach a million habitats, you may be producing several hundred or even several thousand per year. But to reach a swarm of trillions of habitats, it would still take you millions of years. The Earth wold have gone through several geologic periods of glaciation and warming in that time. And old habitats would have had to be replaced. Your production capacity may plateau out as all your effort goes into replacing old habitats rather than growing your total number.
By the time you had even a partial Dyson swarm in place, over 99% of all of humanity would be living in space.
Not even going to touch on harvesting Hawking radiation. Can’t really be done for trillions of years when the background temperature of space cools a lot more than the temperature of an event horizon.
Edit: Corrected for a math error in the mass of the swarm and what it would take to make it.
This is for modern Earth. Given that Trek won't have to bother with doing anything so mundane as setting up space manufacturing infrastructure and given that they can build something the size of a Galaxy Class at a rate of around one every 2 to 4 years
by Mike's own calculations they should be able to build the larger in surface area but far less massive and energy-intensive torus stations being proposed here at a rate of at least tens per year with very little investment.
I'm going to assume that the just Earth's manufacturing capacity, expanded slightly to accommodate this project, will start out producing 20 collectors/habitats per year and double that rate every five years as more energy is available to power expanded mining and construction efforts. There will obviously be variables that cannot be accurately factored into such projections but I'll present that math here to give an idea of how quickly this can be done even at a fairly slow starting rate and rate of growth.
I'm going in 30-year chunks to save time. With the first 30 years of this project, you'll have 6,300 collectors built. After 60 years you're at 409,500 collectors and well into the swing of building these stations. After 90 years you're at 1.542 million collectors and could have 15.420 billion people living on them. In 120 years you're at 72.944 million collectors and now have living space for almost the entire official UFP population to live around a single star. By year 150 you're at 3.702 billion collectors and can carry 37 times the UFP's entire population around Sol. At year 180 you're at 196 billion collectors and the end is finally in sight. When year 210 of this megaproject comes around you'll have hit the 10 trillion habitat goal that our initial outline suggested we aim for, with a population capacity of 100 quadrillion people and the capacity to fill in the empty 99% of your swarm's area if you desire more collection capability.
Keep in mind that is this conservative estimation given how easily Trek should be able to manufacture these, simple by Trek standards, solar collectors. If we stretch the limits of their transporter and AI technology to their logical limits we could probably increase this rate even further and complete the project in a mere 100 years and finishing the swarm in decades to follow. You could also slow things down and divert this manufacturing capacity to building other projects at any time, holding at a steady pace rather than increasing the production rate for a decade in order to build something else.