programmable biological machines
Efforts at programmable biological machines YouTube , what kind of robot would you prefer, one that was indistinguishable from you or one that was non biological, although it will be cheaper to have these biological robots give birth to each other as it is cheaper and greener than having them bio printed. Although their initial specs are well...you decide
Efforts at programmable biological machines YouTube , what kind of robot would you prefer, one that was indistinguishable from you or one that was non biological, although it will be cheaper to have these biological robots give birth to each other as it is cheaper and greener than having them bio printed. Although their initial specs are well...you decide
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In that galaxy far far away from here, the civilization created programmable biological machines. Life was good and care was taken before releasing these new products for use in the general population. These machines were very important for the well being of the civilization that had a lot of time on its hands. The main consumers were those seeking quality 'personalised' masseurs, musicians and other soft comforts to pass time. At this point in time the civilization was bored with each other and everyone had switched height, body weight, skin colour, body features, gender and race n times, everyone was just bored, even the non biological robots had gone from being normal to being monotonous. A new attraction was needed in town.
The algorithms running this new biological machines were put under rigorous simulations for quality control.The ones that passed the tests were ported to the biological machines with a 100 year lifespan and were fertile by age 10 and tested offsite in another universe for safety before reintegration into service of the civilization.It should be clear that these machines could not tell the difference of when they were in a simulation or not. Due to engineering issues it was soon noted that the programmable biological machines liked each other and so they were given time off from serving their masters inorder to mingle and produce young at each cycle. Life couldnt have been any better for the civilization. Everyone was happy, the machines were happy in fulfilling what they had been created for, the masters were happy and kept a balance between biological and non biological machines.
It is not clear what really happened to this civilization , a great war may have broken out or not, but an observer at a point in time observes a very advanced builder ship making a request to the kernel for purposes of survival exiting hyperspace in a new dimension deploying advanced technology causing a massive reaction (whether it blew itself up or not is not clear), at that point in time the observer is lost for words and when questioned by another observer on what they saw they mumble 'in the beginning there was nothing, then big bang'. Its not even clear how many ships came from hyperspace, one story goes that a ship entered a new formed universe after the first ship and found a suitable host planet where it bio printed life (here we see code degeneration and adaptation taking place), its not even clear whether it printed members of the civilization, their programmable biological machines, a hybrid or even a creation of the programmable biological machines, there were rumours that one could tell the difference, since the programmable biological machines would have remnant service behaviour, ... the saga goes on
At this point it might be good to remember that we are talking about a video game executing in 'the environment' we had previously defined and bears no relationship to reality or science, its a piece of fantasy for entertainment purposes only
The algorithms running this new biological machines were put under rigorous simulations for quality control.The ones that passed the tests were ported to the biological machines with a 100 year lifespan and were fertile by age 10 and tested offsite in another universe for safety before reintegration into service of the civilization.It should be clear that these machines could not tell the difference of when they were in a simulation or not. Due to engineering issues it was soon noted that the programmable biological machines liked each other and so they were given time off from serving their masters inorder to mingle and produce young at each cycle. Life couldnt have been any better for the civilization. Everyone was happy, the machines were happy in fulfilling what they had been created for, the masters were happy and kept a balance between biological and non biological machines.
It is not clear what really happened to this civilization , a great war may have broken out or not, but an observer at a point in time observes a very advanced builder ship making a request to the kernel for purposes of survival exiting hyperspace in a new dimension deploying advanced technology causing a massive reaction (whether it blew itself up or not is not clear), at that point in time the observer is lost for words and when questioned by another observer on what they saw they mumble 'in the beginning there was nothing, then big bang'. Its not even clear how many ships came from hyperspace, one story goes that a ship entered a new formed universe after the first ship and found a suitable host planet where it bio printed life (here we see code degeneration and adaptation taking place), its not even clear whether it printed members of the civilization, their programmable biological machines, a hybrid or even a creation of the programmable biological machines, there were rumours that one could tell the difference, since the programmable biological machines would have remnant service behaviour, ... the saga goes on
At this point it might be good to remember that we are talking about a video game executing in 'the environment' we had previously defined and bears no relationship to reality or science, its a piece of fantasy for entertainment purposes only
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Beyond the Local Neighborhood
Sure…
30 - 50 AU … the KBOs, already talked about
100 - 10,000 AU the Oört Cloud, …also chatted up.
10,000 - 250,000 Local Interstellar space - of which we know most-nothing at present, except average density of matter. The Oört Cloud is not expected to just "drop off" at 10,000 AU. It could well extend to ½ the distance to our nearest neighbor stars. Whereupon, by convention we'd call all the bloblets inhabiting the space between ½ the distance all the way TO the next stars, their Oört clouds.
4.1 LY to 10 LY - there are only 12 known "starry" objects. This number will surely increase, but not terribly helpfully. There are 3 Brown Dwarfs (which emit no visible light, just infrared); there are 9 stars. 7 of the stars are themselves very dim Red Dwarfs; astronomers have found that just about all red dwarf stars are energetically chaotic, not almost remarkably stable like Old Sol. Huge surface eruptions (coronal mass ejections) and flares dominate their long term behavior. Terrible candidates for life. Fine for planets!
The three more normal stars are
× 4.4 - Alpha Centauri "A"
× 4.4 - Alpha Centauri "B"
× 8.6 - Sirius "A"
And that's about that. Sirius, a double-star has a white dwarf about 1 solar mass along with the 2.1 solmass type A blue-white giant, which we see easily by eye. Binary stars aren't thought to be very good candidates for much planetary formation, the binary gravitational rotating field being quite destabilizing to inner-orbit planetoids. It is not known if Sirius has outer planets.
Sirius tho' certainly is bright enough to support "habitable zone" planets 2.7 to 4.1 AU out. Whether such orbits would be stable remains an open question. What it really suffers from is that it is - astrophysically - a veritable toddler star system. Only 300 million years old (Earth as a "middle aged" system is 4,700 million years; Lalande is over 8,000 million. If we reference these to human years, with Sol = 40 years, then Sirius is 2½ years, and Lalande is 68.
10 to 50 LY we have 129 stars larger than "M" or below red/brown dwarfs. From "O" → "K" classification. If the space from 10→50 is populated with about as many dwarf stars as the first 10 LY, then there ought to be about 500 or so dwarf stars; maybe 5× that many if we include brown dwarfs.
50 to 100 LY is equally rich in stars, and with dumb simple math we can calculate that there's ONE non-dwarf star per 4,000 LY³, then there ought to be 1,000 stars in 50→100 LY. A LOT.
The only real reason to put a cut-off (for consideration) at 50 LY (or 100) is that these kind of distances, with nearly-magic-but-still-physics-limited propulsion systems, may well be reachable by humanity (or it's cyber servants) in a humanly conceivable time frame. At 20% of c, 50 LY is "only" 250 years distant. 300 Years to get back some kind of communication confirming “it got there”. Pictures, photogenic handshaking and all that.
Beyond 100 LY to 1,000 LY (transit time of 500 to 5,000 years), well … there are a million non-dwarf stars or more. We don't even really know how many, but statistically it makes sense. 500 year transit times tho' are kind of a buzzkill for science. Maybe really, really forward thinking science. But not the kind mankind is well regarded at performing.
IT IS FOR THIS SIMPLE REASON that I feel that humanity's role in populating the stars really is more of a colony of ants infesting Texas. The swarm may only radiate a kilometer a year from a colony. But mindless tho it is, and with NO long term plan, the ants still will colonize ALL of Texas in a hundred years. Well longer than any queen ant will live. Well longer. We may be like this.
When you abstract that thought forward, you then begin to realize that we could well expand outward nearly indefinitely. Just really slowly, and nearly incommunicado with all prior parties. Imagine "the Pilgrims" without return ships. Imagine "the Americas" without telegraph. Without radio. Imagine (perhaps impossibly) modern civilization without significant science, the transistor, the microchip, the Internet, microwaves, television, phones or any other trapping of the modern connected world.
Because these are too weak to span the stars. I've done the math; it doesn't work out. So, we become incommunicado, anonymous, separate. Unlike any “space opera”, we do NOT have "freighters and trading magnates, warships, shuttles and transporters". Not within the distances and by induction, the timeframes involved.
However, technology is compact - when we do eventually plan sober missions to go to nearby star systems "in person", (generation ships), the near-totality of human intellectual understanding fits in a few petabytes of memory space. Remember, even a well-diagram-filled engineering book only takes maybe 0.025 gigabytes to store. 0.000000025 petabytes. One could store 40,000,000 unique engineering references in a petabyte.
So we will definitely be carrying a large and self-sufficient compliment of technology, raw materials, made-stuff, makeable stuff, knowledge and enough people to also act as living repositories for it. Generation ships necessary need hundreds, if not thousands of people, and not peeps frozen with wry smiles in pods. Living people, reproducing people, teaching people, learning people. People to keep alive all the necessary skills, knowledge, "muscle memory" and so on of the tech they will eventually "seed" their new homes with someday.
Even if they never, ever, talk to "Earth" again. Its OK. Like ants, we don't NEED to. Just consider: before we "rediscovered" Japan in the 1500s, it was a country full of people, evolving their own society, technologies, religion, power and economics. They didn't communicate with us, or us them. It didn't matter to either party. So it shall be with the emigrating generation ships.
_______
Consider reading Brian Aldiss's Heliconia Trilogy some time. It remains basically the only serious 'generation ship' narrative in Science Fiction. It has its quirks, but its also a "thinker".
GoatGuy
well thats the neighborhood how about upstate
Sure…
30 - 50 AU … the KBOs, already talked about
100 - 10,000 AU the Oört Cloud, …also chatted up.
10,000 - 250,000 Local Interstellar space - of which we know most-nothing at present, except average density of matter. The Oört Cloud is not expected to just "drop off" at 10,000 AU. It could well extend to ½ the distance to our nearest neighbor stars. Whereupon, by convention we'd call all the bloblets inhabiting the space between ½ the distance all the way TO the next stars, their Oört clouds.
4.1 LY to 10 LY - there are only 12 known "starry" objects. This number will surely increase, but not terribly helpfully. There are 3 Brown Dwarfs (which emit no visible light, just infrared); there are 9 stars. 7 of the stars are themselves very dim Red Dwarfs; astronomers have found that just about all red dwarf stars are energetically chaotic, not almost remarkably stable like Old Sol. Huge surface eruptions (coronal mass ejections) and flares dominate their long term behavior. Terrible candidates for life. Fine for planets!
The three more normal stars are
× 4.4 - Alpha Centauri "A"
× 4.4 - Alpha Centauri "B"
× 8.6 - Sirius "A"
And that's about that. Sirius, a double-star has a white dwarf about 1 solar mass along with the 2.1 solmass type A blue-white giant, which we see easily by eye. Binary stars aren't thought to be very good candidates for much planetary formation, the binary gravitational rotating field being quite destabilizing to inner-orbit planetoids. It is not known if Sirius has outer planets.
Sirius tho' certainly is bright enough to support "habitable zone" planets 2.7 to 4.1 AU out. Whether such orbits would be stable remains an open question. What it really suffers from is that it is - astrophysically - a veritable toddler star system. Only 300 million years old (Earth as a "middle aged" system is 4,700 million years; Lalande is over 8,000 million. If we reference these to human years, with Sol = 40 years, then Sirius is 2½ years, and Lalande is 68.
10 to 50 LY we have 129 stars larger than "M" or below red/brown dwarfs. From "O" → "K" classification. If the space from 10→50 is populated with about as many dwarf stars as the first 10 LY, then there ought to be about 500 or so dwarf stars; maybe 5× that many if we include brown dwarfs.
50 to 100 LY is equally rich in stars, and with dumb simple math we can calculate that there's ONE non-dwarf star per 4,000 LY³, then there ought to be 1,000 stars in 50→100 LY. A LOT.
The only real reason to put a cut-off (for consideration) at 50 LY (or 100) is that these kind of distances, with nearly-magic-but-still-physics-limited propulsion systems, may well be reachable by humanity (or it's cyber servants) in a humanly conceivable time frame. At 20% of c, 50 LY is "only" 250 years distant. 300 Years to get back some kind of communication confirming “it got there”. Pictures, photogenic handshaking and all that.
Beyond 100 LY to 1,000 LY (transit time of 500 to 5,000 years), well … there are a million non-dwarf stars or more. We don't even really know how many, but statistically it makes sense. 500 year transit times tho' are kind of a buzzkill for science. Maybe really, really forward thinking science. But not the kind mankind is well regarded at performing.
IT IS FOR THIS SIMPLE REASON that I feel that humanity's role in populating the stars really is more of a colony of ants infesting Texas. The swarm may only radiate a kilometer a year from a colony. But mindless tho it is, and with NO long term plan, the ants still will colonize ALL of Texas in a hundred years. Well longer than any queen ant will live. Well longer. We may be like this.
When you abstract that thought forward, you then begin to realize that we could well expand outward nearly indefinitely. Just really slowly, and nearly incommunicado with all prior parties. Imagine "the Pilgrims" without return ships. Imagine "the Americas" without telegraph. Without radio. Imagine (perhaps impossibly) modern civilization without significant science, the transistor, the microchip, the Internet, microwaves, television, phones or any other trapping of the modern connected world.
Because these are too weak to span the stars. I've done the math; it doesn't work out. So, we become incommunicado, anonymous, separate. Unlike any “space opera”, we do NOT have "freighters and trading magnates, warships, shuttles and transporters". Not within the distances and by induction, the timeframes involved.
However, technology is compact - when we do eventually plan sober missions to go to nearby star systems "in person", (generation ships), the near-totality of human intellectual understanding fits in a few petabytes of memory space. Remember, even a well-diagram-filled engineering book only takes maybe 0.025 gigabytes to store. 0.000000025 petabytes. One could store 40,000,000 unique engineering references in a petabyte.
So we will definitely be carrying a large and self-sufficient compliment of technology, raw materials, made-stuff, makeable stuff, knowledge and enough people to also act as living repositories for it. Generation ships necessary need hundreds, if not thousands of people, and not peeps frozen with wry smiles in pods. Living people, reproducing people, teaching people, learning people. People to keep alive all the necessary skills, knowledge, "muscle memory" and so on of the tech they will eventually "seed" their new homes with someday.
Even if they never, ever, talk to "Earth" again. Its OK. Like ants, we don't NEED to. Just consider: before we "rediscovered" Japan in the 1500s, it was a country full of people, evolving their own society, technologies, religion, power and economics. They didn't communicate with us, or us them. It didn't matter to either party. So it shall be with the emigrating generation ships.
_______
Consider reading Brian Aldiss's Heliconia Trilogy some time. It remains basically the only serious 'generation ship' narrative in Science Fiction. It has its quirks, but its also a "thinker".
GoatGuy
literature survey
Shape of the universe - Wikipedia
Milky Way and Our Location | NASA
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/solar-systems-in-galaxy.html
List of galaxies - Wikipedia
Andromeda–Milky Way collision - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_galactic_nucleus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_cloud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/solar-rotation.html
https://www.universetoday.com/107142/is-everything-in-the-universe-expanding/
curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/1066-can-two-galaxies-move-away-from-each-other-faster-than-light-intermediate
Shape of the universe - Wikipedia
Milky Way and Our Location | NASA
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/solar-systems-in-galaxy.html
List of galaxies - Wikipedia
Andromeda–Milky Way collision - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_galactic_nucleus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_cloud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/solar-rotation.html
https://www.universetoday.com/107142/is-everything-in-the-universe-expanding/
curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/1066-can-two-galaxies-move-away-from-each-other-faster-than-light-intermediate
@nania
I think OnAudio gave us all much to think about in post #119 but I would add one less dramatic technology that I have seen work in person and one which is purely theoretical.
1. standing dipole electrical generation - incredible as it seems, you can place wires in a magnetic field and create a kind of resonance tank that continually replenishes. It's essentially a vampire tap into a field which starts electromotive generation. The one I saw was able to generate 2.8W
2. OAD - acronym for Organized Atomic Disassembly. I have only read about this but it exploits the elemental physics OnAudio linked. The theory is that a molecular mass (any substance) can be unlocked electrically with astonishing amounts of energy being produced (as much as 10,000x over unity at 0.3% efficiency). All that is required is to find the voltage and resonant frequency key of the substance. The claim is that the key to graphite has been recently discovered. Stan Meyer's water engine worked using the same or similar technology.
I think OnAudio gave us all much to think about in post #119 but I would add one less dramatic technology that I have seen work in person and one which is purely theoretical.
1. standing dipole electrical generation - incredible as it seems, you can place wires in a magnetic field and create a kind of resonance tank that continually replenishes. It's essentially a vampire tap into a field which starts electromotive generation. The one I saw was able to generate 2.8W
2. OAD - acronym for Organized Atomic Disassembly. I have only read about this but it exploits the elemental physics OnAudio linked. The theory is that a molecular mass (any substance) can be unlocked electrically with astonishing amounts of energy being produced (as much as 10,000x over unity at 0.3% efficiency). All that is required is to find the voltage and resonant frequency key of the substance. The claim is that the key to graphite has been recently discovered. Stan Meyer's water engine worked using the same or similar technology.
Ummm… if you mean CG work, you're right. Technically, it is an empty glass. Thin plate glass (uncurved!) on the cheap set props. No shielding essentially. Instant gratification (no acceleration/deceleration) physics violation. Technobabble SciFi “technology” attribution.
Personally I think it makes for good SciFi movie props. And when you deploy magic for your SciFi, then anything is possible. The only way to save the movie from becoming a pointless B-movie is to give it great personal dynamics (which the vid clearly was trying to foster). People-interest, not tech factuality.
Up next, of course, is zero-point-energy extraction (the power has to come from somewhere, and a Rossi generator to make all the steampunk work.)
Let's get back to reality: we're bound by physics of accelerations, velocities, the speed of causality (often slightly erroneously called speed of light), distances and the vastness of space. IT IS HUGE.
The “big problem” facing the next generation of space enthusiasts is that SciFi has come SO far with computer graphics and the almost limitless leveraged inventiveness of CG artists, that on the ground expectations of the future are … well … quite fictional.
EVEN if you “invent the as-yet-unknown, but mundane” 1 G constant-force acceleration device, Mars, from Earth is bound by
D = ½at² (but you can't beat needing to decelerate)
t = √(2D/a) (for half the trip)
T = 2t
T = 2 √( 2 × ½ × 100,000,000,000 ÷ 9.81 m/s² )
T ≈ 200,000 s
T ≈ 56 hr
T ≈ 2.3 day
And that's with the constant acceleration device. Supposing (as Arthur C Clark did) that one might be able to take MUCH stronger accelerations by using liquid cavity-filled unconscious travel (i.e. filling lungs with an oxygen-bearing liquid, etc.) of about 100 G, then
T = 2 √( 2 × ½ × 100,000,000,000 ÷ 1,000 m/s² )
T ≈ 20,000 s
T ≈ 5.5 hr
T ≈ ¼ day
Max speed? (half the total time)
v = at
v = 1000 × ½ × 20,000 s
v = 10,000,000 m/s
v ≈ 3.33% c
Now THAT is fast. To give some idea how fast, consider the impact of one chip of paint. Small … size of a fingernail clipping. 100 μm thick. Density of 2.5 g/cm³.:
m = ρV (density times volume)
V = 2 mm × 10 mm × 100 μm
V = 2 mm³
V = 0.002 cm³
ρ = 2.5 g/cm³
m = 5.5 mg
m = 0.0000055 kg
E = ½mv² (relative velocity impact, in joules)
E = ½ 0.0000055 kg × 10,000,000² m/s
E = 275,000,000 J
If 1 kg of TNT delivers 1,000,000 calories … ≡ 4.184×10⁶ J/kg then that little chip of paint delivers 275×10⁶ ÷ 4.184×10⁶ = 65 kg of TNT worth of explosive power, concentrated in a fingernail clipping sized piece of protective armor.
Let's just say … it'd take QUITE a tough shell to repulse that safely. My bet is that it'd just fly right through as a brilliant blue-white slightly expanding cone of plasma, and right out the other side … thru everything between. You, a tank full of gas, wiring, whatever. Not good. Not good at all.
THAT IS THE POINT - when you consider even “mundane magic physics devices” such as constant acceleration mythical reactionless drives, when you reach sub-relativisitic speeds inside the Solar System, there ARE particles of 'stuff' that you have to worry about. Because they're evil.
_______
Long ago - in my teens - I thought thru this stuff, and I realized that the “solution” to the impact shielding thing is to have - afore the stern - either a series of tough plates made out of tungsten powder and a rubbery binder … separated by maybe 3 radii each (of the ship)… perhaps 250 plates all told. Each 1 cm thick. All of them on a network of redundant trusses.
Any impactor would definitely blow a hole in the front plate(s). But the cone of debris would carry a lot of mass (losing a lot of energy), and would make holes in nearer plates. And so on. But would run out of steam by dispersion alone within basically 100 meters. Most of the blasted tungsten would be recovered on the back plates. Constant renewal (making more plates) then positioning them forward would be a job for the self-built autonomous micro robots, around the clock.
LORD HELP YOU, should you run into an actual rock, though. Again, in keeping with “physics magic”, I've always liked beaming forward a super-high energy electron beam, or electron-proton (alternating bunches) beam, which would self-form a neutral beam (as the electrons would combine with protons to make high velocity neutral hydrogen). Remember, it is not (because of physics magic) a reaction-mass, or propulsive beam. Just a way-clearer. Or a remarkably bright “sparkler”. Making ALL objects glow like phosphorus lights when they're hit.
The BIG rocks you just nudge the whole craft around. Quickly.
The FIST sized rocks, you might be able to do the same for, but maybe not.
If "not" then sending precisely controlled pellets of tungsten in their general direction would blast them to smithereens, and clear the path. we are - in the realm of physics magic - talking about really, really powerful computers and really, really good optics.
GoatGuy
PS: again - for comparison value, a fist-sized rock (which are EXCEEDINGLY rare inbetween the planets, statistically) might have a mass of 1 kg. At 3.33% c, that comes in at ½ 10,000,000² = 50,000,000,000,000 J. Which is about 12,000,000 kg (12,000 metric ton, 12 kt) of TNT. About the size of Hiroshima… in a fist sized chunk of space rock.
Likewise, from a “my ship is a Kamakazi weapon” point of view, the 2,500 ton ship has a kinetic energy of 30,000 megatons of TNT. While not a planet destroyer, it certainly is up there with civilization destroyer or more. Such a ship would burrow over 10 km into the surface and send up an entirely vaporized cone of debris a million times its mass into the stratosphere.
Bad. We have to remember that with limitless physics magic devices. You don't need “photon torpedoes” when you have lumps of rock that'll get everyone's attention, and keep it. And are really essentially unstoppable.
UNLESS you have really powerful lasers, with high aperture diameter mirrors, space-based, just to defend against incoming threats. Assuming a UV (250 nm) laser, an object maybe only 10 m in cross section 'diameter', and knowing you need to focus 1 GW on its front face (10⁹ / π5² = 12.7 MW/m² … = 1,200 W/cm²) for no less than 2 or 3 minutes (100 sec, say) and its velocity is 3.33% c (10,000,000 m/s), then you need 10,000,000 × 100 × 2 (safety) = 2,000,000,000 m (2 million km) of ability to focus a 10 m spot of a 1 GW laser. Using [( 10÷ 2,000,000,000 ) = 1.22×250×10⁻⁹ / D ] and solving for D, you get 60 m diameter perfectly figured mirror. it'll be loaded with 350,000 W/m² of face UV radiation. But hey… you could definitely burn up an incoming impactor, and turn it to a blast of gas. Gas that'd expand to maybe 1 km in the 100 seconds at the speed of sound in a rarefied gas. It'd still pack a punch, but nowhere near as lethal. A light-show.
GoatGuy
Likewise, from a “my ship is a Kamakazi weapon” point of view, the 2,500 ton ship has a kinetic energy of 30,000 megatons of TNT. While not a planet destroyer, it certainly is up there with civilization destroyer or more. Such a ship would burrow over 10 km into the surface and send up an entirely vaporized cone of debris a million times its mass into the stratosphere.
Bad. We have to remember that with limitless physics magic devices. You don't need “photon torpedoes” when you have lumps of rock that'll get everyone's attention, and keep it. And are really essentially unstoppable.
UNLESS you have really powerful lasers, with high aperture diameter mirrors, space-based, just to defend against incoming threats. Assuming a UV (250 nm) laser, an object maybe only 10 m in cross section 'diameter', and knowing you need to focus 1 GW on its front face (10⁹ / π5² = 12.7 MW/m² … = 1,200 W/cm²) for no less than 2 or 3 minutes (100 sec, say) and its velocity is 3.33% c (10,000,000 m/s), then you need 10,000,000 × 100 × 2 (safety) = 2,000,000,000 m (2 million km) of ability to focus a 10 m spot of a 1 GW laser. Using [( 10÷ 2,000,000,000 ) = 1.22×250×10⁻⁹ / D ] and solving for D, you get 60 m diameter perfectly figured mirror. it'll be loaded with 350,000 W/m² of face UV radiation. But hey… you could definitely burn up an incoming impactor, and turn it to a blast of gas. Gas that'd expand to maybe 1 km in the 100 seconds at the speed of sound in a rarefied gas. It'd still pack a punch, but nowhere near as lethal. A light-show.
GoatGuy
30,000 megatons wouldn't even put a dent in space time, let alone create a space or time warp. And that's a wee bit more than 1.21 gigawatt-seconds. Considering that in the dilithium age the amounts of power generated for routine Space flight would be astronomical, any sort of a war would be pointless and counter productive. It would last all of 30 seconds, with no survivors on either side, or any evidence that either civilization ever existed. "One photon torpedo ought to do it". Deflector shields would be useless against any real weapon, and necessary just to boil off all the space debris you'll run into on the way to Risa.
Re: Goatguy
You know what would be an interesting method? Keeping a lake of liquid metal all around your ship to deflect and absorb the energy of any impacts. You then keep it adhered to the side of your ship using strong magnetic fields powered by a fusion reactor and you clean and absorb the debri which it collects and use that as either ship building material, fuel, or missiles.
It could be as deep as you want it to be and as large as you want it to be. You could even absorb and store it into your ship to make port access holes for entry and egress into the ship and you could shape it into any form that you want it.
And the best part is is that you could shape it into any shape you want it in order to deflect or absorb the impact from larger meteors in your path in an emergency.
Sort of like a magic fist that comes out the front of your space ship to meet head-on targets.
Abosrbing any sort of space-borne radiation would also be an easily done bonus of the liquid lake.
I suppose you could do it with a gas aswell, much like how a planet protects its surface from larger meteors, but it would require a lot more energy in order to adhere it to the side of your ship I suppose.
You might also get away with keeping a large gas cloud adhered to your ship through a baloon type material which can be repaired in real time by nanobots.
This gas cloud or liquid metal would then also act as an early warning system for any meteor storms or objects surrounding your ship and then allowing your ship's computer to act accordingly and create thrust to avoid it.
You could even use the liquid or gas as an early warning system for any gravitational fields which might be in your vicinity.
I suppose you could do it with water too but you would have to stop it from boiling off in the vicinity of a sun.
You know what would be an interesting method? Keeping a lake of liquid metal all around your ship to deflect and absorb the energy of any impacts. You then keep it adhered to the side of your ship using strong magnetic fields powered by a fusion reactor and you clean and absorb the debri which it collects and use that as either ship building material, fuel, or missiles.
It could be as deep as you want it to be and as large as you want it to be. You could even absorb and store it into your ship to make port access holes for entry and egress into the ship and you could shape it into any form that you want it.
And the best part is is that you could shape it into any shape you want it in order to deflect or absorb the impact from larger meteors in your path in an emergency.
Sort of like a magic fist that comes out the front of your space ship to meet head-on targets.
Abosrbing any sort of space-borne radiation would also be an easily done bonus of the liquid lake.
I suppose you could do it with a gas aswell, much like how a planet protects its surface from larger meteors, but it would require a lot more energy in order to adhere it to the side of your ship I suppose.
You might also get away with keeping a large gas cloud adhered to your ship through a baloon type material which can be repaired in real time by nanobots.
This gas cloud or liquid metal would then also act as an early warning system for any meteor storms or objects surrounding your ship and then allowing your ship's computer to act accordingly and create thrust to avoid it.
You could even use the liquid or gas as an early warning system for any gravitational fields which might be in your vicinity.
I suppose you could do it with water too but you would have to stop it from boiling off in the vicinity of a sun.
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The liquid metal idea is vexed by the fact that it'd be hot - unless you used the only low-temperature liquid: mercury Hg - and being hot, it'd be hard to expel your interior heat-of-existence.
In one of my ditherings, instead of a series of tungsten-powder-in-chloroprene plates, I formulated a long thin cone of fluffy ice snow. Again, 200 m long, snow density of 'packed winter snow' or about 400 kg/m³ (60% less than water itself). The idea again is “impact here… and be destroyed/absorbed”. Using snow has the decided advantage of not having mechanical strength, so that impact kinetic energy wouldn't be able to burst the column. That in turn means you'd be able to conserve your snow store.
Keeping it from evaporating is easy enough: keep it cold. And that too is easy enough in space with sun-shields - high efficiency reflectors - and being open to the blackness of space itself. For simplicity, I envisioned that the snow would be fabricated into 1 m (edge) tetrahedra, which are well known to seamlessly fill volumes. the tetrahedral pillows also don't have long seam-gaps. Moreover, the 'bots' rebuilding the inevitable damage could just replace individual tetrahedra with re-made units. The envelope? Tungsten wire mesh!
I keep choosing tungsten because it is relatively abundant, it is fantastically heavy (dense), and really strong (high Young's modulus). Maybe a 'pillow of snow' itself has no intrinsic strength or adhesion or much else, but wrapped in a tetrahedral woven tungsten pillowcase, well … now it is a different color of sheep.
The real problem with condensed matter (masses of liquid, thick solids) is that it tends to transmit kinetic energy well to its exterior. Take a look at YouTube especially starting at +0:30 into the clip. Just consider how “just a bullet” expands the condensed matter jello-stuff.
Now imagine an impactor coming in not at 1,000 m/s (bullet) but 10,000,000 m/s. 10,000× faster. It'd make a bullet look like it was standing still.
The “good thing” is that your impactor is going to be completely vaporized by impact, heated to plasma (100,000° K). But the plasma still has mass, so it continues to charge forward. Converting (in my case) snow to plasma. After the impactor has made it thru 30,000× its own mass worth of snow (or tungsten) (2¹⁵), it will have slowed to subsonic speed. However, it and the ice/tungsten it drags along will also be 30,000× times the impactor mass.
If you read the prior post, the “fingernail clipping sized paint chip” weighing 5.5 milligrams then blooms to 150 grams of cooling plasma in the snow. Not terribly large, really. But being subsonic, the mechanical energy of expansion is absorbed by the powdery snow efficiently.
Statistically - to the robotic maintenance crew - there's little urgency in repairing the damage. It doesn't extend very far into the snow-bag column, and statistically it is unlikely to be re-hit soon. But sure… walk out a few tetrahedra and pile them in front of the entry hole as a patch.
For something as big as a pebble (10 grams), with an energy of ½(¹⁰/₁₀₀₀)10,000,000² = 500 GJ → 120 tons of TNT… it is the structural arrangement of our pillows that then determines how the energy is dissipated. Again, the pellet turns to plasma. But if the forward pillows are WAY forward (a kilometer or 10 forward!) the expansion of the plasma cone itself 'solves' the dissipation problem. The poor tungsten water-snow pillows forward get blasted to plasma. But the plasma having converted most kinetic impact energy into heat, will radiate like a star. A kilometer (or 10) long lance of brilliantly glowing plasma is going to dissipate that heat in milliseconds. Even 500 GJ worth of it.
Surface area exceeds 1,000 m × 2πR, where R is an expanding envelope of plasma. R = 1 m by 1 km down. At 3% of c. So, you've got 5,000 m² of dissipation surface. At 100,000°K. Stefan-Boltzman law tells you that that surface will radiate P = σT⁴ where σ = 5.670367e−8.
P = 5.67×10⁻⁸ 100,000⁴
P = 5,670 GW
We need to get rid of 500 GJ tho, so…
E = Pt
500 GJ = 5,670 GW • t
t ≈ ¹/₁₀ sec
So there you are. A lightning bolt of brilliant light, expanding cone, straight as an arrow. And gone. You lose all the matter, but what the heck. Merely a bump in the road.
GoatGuy
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