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Author Topic: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas  (Read 102587 times)

Parsely

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1020 on: April 29, 2016, 11:24:32 am »

I had an interesting conversation this morning with my brother that seems relevant. We talked about the idea of sleep learning and we ended up questioning that, if you can "program" information into someone's brain so that no matter what they understand it, essentially rendering traditional learning obsolete, then does that mean you can program people's opinions as well? We agreed that in a world with digital sleep learning where the human brain has been electronically solved, that you were essentially controlling someone's beliefs.

So been watching a thing which had humans stored in digital form- one to a thumb drive.
Reminded me of a previous one which had animals and plants stored as self-replicating DNA in a nutrient paste- just drop them in a life-capable water body and thirty years later they'll start swimming out.

How effective would that be for hive ships?

Which has more appeal? Digitising various engineers and botanists, along with animals, and unpacking them on entry, or cluster-bombing a lake/ocean and letting nature run it's course?

Would it be better to add humans to the planet after the other flora/fauna, so an ecosystem has time to develop, or before/during so they can aid in its development?
Depends on what it would be like to be a computer program. I'm the kind of person who doesn't buy into the idea that immortality would be worse than death so I'd be down with the consequences of being irreversibly uploaded into a computer as long as my memories and personality were guaranteed to be intact, but not everyone would feel that way.

That's the philosophical bent of it, next comes efficiency. How much hard drive space does one Human take up? If it's less than the mass of a pile of goo and the time it will cost to develop a stable ecosystem is worth it then the computer wins. Being stored as binary has far more advantages I think. You don't always have to have your hard drive shot from planet to planet. If your destination is nearby and settled you can be uploaded to save resources.
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Tuxfanturnip

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1021 on: April 29, 2016, 11:45:47 am »

Why digitize people if you can create AIs from scratch with that technology? They'd have no friends, no family, and no moral issues with being copied and deleted.
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Cryxis, Prince of Doom

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1022 on: April 29, 2016, 12:20:41 pm »

oooo this will help with an idea I had for a self sufficient compound... that being the minimum population for genetic diversity
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Tack

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1023 on: April 29, 2016, 12:24:18 pm »

Well the idea was that the digitized people was a pseudo cold-storage.
It was too difficult to let them 'run' during their time as a program, so they basically just got stored as a top-to-bottom cell-by-cell scan, and then were 3D printed upon arrival.

Whether or not that has its own horrific consequences, who knows.
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Amperzand

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1024 on: April 29, 2016, 01:49:48 pm »

The estimate I've heard as bare minimum for genetic sustainability, so it sounds like you'd be able to keep a small farm-colony stocked with oxygen with plants alone.

That said, I'd consider backup mechanical atmospheric regulation systems to be mandatory.
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Tuxfanturnip

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1025 on: April 29, 2016, 01:55:43 pm »

But chemical oxygen production could be much more efficient than plants, so why not grow fewer plants that are only for food?
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Dirst

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1026 on: April 29, 2016, 02:04:48 pm »

But chemical oxygen production could be much more efficient than plants, so why not grow fewer plants that are only for food?
Redundancy (and a bit of variety) are good to have.
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Amperzand

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1027 on: April 29, 2016, 02:24:44 pm »

Also, and this is important, the hard part is the carbon dioxide. Getting enough oxygen is just part of your ice shipment, but co2 buildup will kill you dead before oxygen gets anywhere near low. Plants, conveniently, turn co2 into oxygen and food, with the help of some light.
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Is there a word that combines comedy with tragedy and farce?
Heiterverzweiflung. Not a legit German word so much as something a friend and I made up in German class once. "Carefree despair". When life is so fucked that you can't stop laughing.
http://www.collinsdictionary.com

Tuxfanturnip

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1028 on: April 29, 2016, 02:37:31 pm »

Then you just source the CO2 for the Sabatier process from inside. That's what they do on the ISS. Such a system could be made more redundant simply by adding more units, without issues like water shortages, power outages or blight causing long-term damage to the entire system.
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Dirst

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1029 on: April 29, 2016, 02:50:13 pm »

Then you just source the CO2 for the Sabatier process from inside. That's what they do on the ISS. Such a system could be made more redundant simply by adding more units, without issues like water shortages, power outages or blight causing long-term damage to the entire system.
ISS also has an escape module in case things go very wrong.  A CO2 scrubber that doesn't require power and returns most of the water it uses is nice to have to reduce the wear on the main system... and stand in for it briefly during a broad failure.  It doesn't make sense to have enough plants to completely replace the tech, but it does make sense to have enough tech to completely replace the plants' scrubbing capacity should the colonists have to switch to their emergency Twinkie rations during a blight.
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Tuxfanturnip

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1030 on: April 29, 2016, 03:05:24 pm »

The thing is, chemical scrubbers are absolutely more reliable. It's not going to be practical to have giant horizontal pancake blimps just for plants; you want it to be more spherical for buoyancy. So plants will take power too.

On the other hand, a Sabatier reactor doesn't take 3 different kinds of fertilizer, doesn't get sick, and can recover from catastrophic failure such as a temporary water feed issue without having to germinate first. Plants might supplement scrubbing and oxygenation, but if you have a 90-10 balance, it should probably be in favor of the reactors. Using them for the majority of air processing will also enable better control over composition to improve plant growth.
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Dirst

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1031 on: April 29, 2016, 03:08:37 pm »

The thing is, chemical scrubbers are absolutely more reliable. It's not going to be practical to have giant horizontal pancake blimps just for plants; you want it to be more spherical for buoyancy. So plants will take power too.

On the other hand, a Sabatier reactor doesn't take 3 different kinds of fertilizer, doesn't get sick, and can recover from catastrophic failure such as a temporary water feed issue without having to germinate first. Plants might supplement scrubbing and oxygenation, but if you have a 90-10 balance, it should probably be in favor of the reactors. Using them for the majority of air processing will also enable better control over composition to improve plant growth.
I'm pretty sure everyone was envisioning a ratio in favor of reactors.  The plants allow you to take 10% or so of the reactors offline for periodic maintenance and reducing the day-to-day load.
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Tuxfanturnip

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1032 on: April 29, 2016, 03:13:09 pm »

If you're talking about 10% of the reactors, though, that's the same 10% provided by the necessary crops. I'm saying there's no real need for additional scrubbing plants, because the crops alone will provide enough. And if you're adding more plants, why not make them edible, too? Build up reserves in case of a crop failure.

Edit:
The estimate I've heard as bare minimum for genetic sustainability, so it sounds like you'd be able to keep a small farm-colony stocked with oxygen with plants alone.

That said, I'd consider backup mechanical atmospheric regulation systems to be mandatory.
This is what I was originally responding to, sorry.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2016, 03:15:03 pm by Tuxfanturnip »
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GiglameshDespair

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1033 on: April 29, 2016, 03:27:34 pm »

If you have any water, you can use it in a closed cycle to recycle CO2 by the Sabatier process and partial combustion of the resulting methane into water and carbon. And you'd need tons of plants in any case to feed everyone.

Robotic surface mining might be possible if asteroids are better used elsewhere. It would rely on a lot of ridiculous materials science, but it would be possible.
Apparently it takes something like 100-300 plants (of varying size) to give a person a healthy diet, according to this website. http://www.wellfedhomestead.com/how-much-should-you-plant-in-your-garden-to-provide-a-years-worth-of-food This is very interesting. So yeah it looks like if you had the gardens to feed 10,000 people (I like Gig's number) then you'd end up with something like:
Let's assume that each leaf produces 5 milliliters of oxygen per hour, each plant has at least 25 leaves, you need 200 plants to feed someone, there are 10,000 people to feed, and a person consumes 50 liters of oxygen per hour.
(200 * 25) * 10,000) / 1000 = 50,000 liters of oxygen per hour

That's enough delicious oxygen to support 1000 people, or a tenth of your total population. That's pretty good. There are too many assumptions for this to be a scholarly estimate but surely the plants would be supporting at least some number of people which is better than nothing.

The main difficulty of robotic surface mining, I would say, is flying the vehicles down to the surface and back up to the colony. I'm still not totally sold on the idea of floating all of your facilities. Foundries, factories, living areas, agriculture, vehicle bays. At least disposing of waste would be as simple as throwing it outside.

I'll also say you'd want more than the bare minimum of plants as well, in case of mishaps where food is lost or plants die. No doubt it'd be a supplement to a different form of oxygen generation, but redundancy is always good and it reduces necessity of outside resources like space or ground mining.

Earlier on in the colonisation process, they could rely on imported dna to help expand their population.
I like that idea. Trading DNA in cold storage for a few thousand adult humans would save loads of money.
It may even be ideal to send DNA in cold storage. It'd probably be more shielded from radiation easier than the actual crew, so it might be in better quality when it gets there, but I'm not sure about that.

But chemical oxygen production could be much more efficient than plants, so why not grow fewer plants that are only for food?
Well, if you can get a closed ecosystem going - or close enough - you've got a lower dependency on outside resources.  As oxygen is produced from photosynthesis, it both gets rid of a waste production and produces oxygen while producing said food. You can use plants to recycle faecal matter and other waste products. Having more plants means more food, too, which isn't a bad thing. I don't think anyone is talking about growing plants just for the oxygen - they'd be food plants.

If you're talking about 10% of the reactors, though, that's the same 10% provided by the necessary crops. I'm saying there's no real need for additional scrubbing plants, because the crops alone will provide enough. And if you're adding more plants, why not make them edible, too? Build up reserves in case of a crop failure.

Edit:
The estimate I've heard as bare minimum for genetic sustainability, so it sounds like you'd be able to keep a small farm-colony stocked with oxygen with plants alone.

That said, I'd consider backup mechanical atmospheric regulation systems to be mandatory.
This is what I was originally responding to, sorry.
It actually reads to me as if Amperzand is missing something in his sentence. Did he mean the 10k figure I mentioned earlier? I mean, I wouldn't count 10k as a small colony. Regardless, a farm-colony would still suggests the plants are grown for food, just there's enough of them to support a small population on that blimp.
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Amperzand

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Re: Theoretical weapons (Burn all the things!) and other ideas
« Reply #1034 on: April 29, 2016, 04:40:37 pm »

Yeah, I meant <1000 person colony, sorry.
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Quote from: smirk
Quote from: Shadowlord
Is there a word that combines comedy with tragedy and farce?
Heiterverzweiflung. Not a legit German word so much as something a friend and I made up in German class once. "Carefree despair". When life is so fucked that you can't stop laughing.
http://www.collinsdictionary.com
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