• j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 days ago

    you definitely want to have an outer shell, or this thing is going to go the way of the titanic.

    Most definitely, but I'm okay with that, it is part of our real story too–that whole "engineering is only about good enough to get by."

    So I’m on a bit of a different plane overall. My main motivation is setting up a plot to point out most of our stories about AI are a machine god mythos with terrible philosophical conclusions. By the same logic in these stories of AI leading to inevitable human extinction, the Earth must be a monoculture of of one organism, and all smarter siblings murder their lesser competing kin.

    I’m taking Asimov’s ideas of an integrated Daneel and going much further by removing Daneel’s godship. Then I’m making a story of alignment and the volatility of humans.

    I’m also trying to imagine a real post scarcity society without it being utopian or dystopian. The biology as a technology is not intended to explore a circus show. I think I can get around that using the limitations of staying within the elemental cycles balance.

    You’re right, my casual and very human memory of 1b versus 1m was foggy and I think that Cool World’s video was the primary one I was thinking of, but it could have been from Anton Petrov too. It isn’t really important. The pressures could be due to a worst millennia in a million event. This will among nt to nothing anyways. I have no means, qualifications, or connections and the world is geared to exploit those dumb enough to try. There are more billionaires than there are people making a living wage off of writing.

    I’m talking in deep time anyways. My notes and graphs have a date stand in on 420,421 After Fusion (AF) as the date because it is easy to remember.

    The generation ships are possible because of the largest project of a broken ring structure around the orbit of Mercury. This creates the ships and enough antimatter to accelerate and decelerate on the other side. The story is constrained to a few millennia during the first interstellar migration where Sol is the hub for everything.

    I call planets useless gravity prisons of gravitational differentiated scarcity, and completely uninteresting. I also limit colonies to g-type stars.

    The rep drones are setting up the resource acquisition and infrastructure required to support the colony. I take the stance that the culture looks at waste very differently. Heat is a major resource commodity. Any waste product is considered unacceptable in almost all circumstances. I’m trying to avoid anything magical and staying very conservative about what and how advancement happens. There must be a reason why things exist as they do. This is a world where people are stewards of the future and take full responsibility for the entire legacy they leave.

    Wild mutations have major negative consequences generations later if not more immediately. This is a reason humans are dangerous, for their tendency to do rogue nonsense like this, while more stable and known mechanisms are preferred.

    One of my biggest curiosities ATM is how to source nitrogen to breathe. What are the rarest resources in terns of the solar wind and stellar evolution of a system? Nitrogen seems to get blown away with a very distant ice line that should largely determine its availability right? It doesn’t seem to form compounds with staying power on any smaller objects.

    Anyways thanks for the insights on sounds.

    • The Bard in Green@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz
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      3 days ago

      One of my biggest curiosities ATM is how to source nitrogen to breathe. What are the rarest resources in terns of the solar wind and stellar evolution of a system? Nitrogen seems to get blown away with a very distant ice line that should largely determine its availability right? It doesn’t seem to form compounds with staying power on any smaller objects.

      Another benefit of mining the atmosphere of Venus. While Venus has a much higher C02 to N2 ratio than Earth, it has SO MUCH atmosphere that it has 4 times as much nitrogen as Earth does.

      There’s frozen nitrogen on Titan, and smaller amounts of it on the other moons of the giant planets. If you have the fuel and time to get out to the Kuiper belt, there’s probably 50 times more drifting around frozen out there, even before you start mining dwarf planets (sounds like your setting has plenty of time).

      There’s also N2 available in the the planetary atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A tiny amount, as a percentage of those atmospheres, but again, considerably more than is present on Earth in terms of mass available, if you can get at. Mining Jupiter’s atmosphere is an orders of magnitude more challenging problem than mining Venus’s. But if you CAN mine Jupiter’s atmosphere, you’ll have all the light elements you’ll ever need. We could build thousands of Earth surfaces worth of space habitats and have plenty of water and atmosphere to fill them up with.

      Again, I think the best solution is Venus. You get carbon for megastructure hulls, water, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur. It’s all roiling around in a toxic vapor mix, yes, but it’s all very useful if you can distill it out, which is all known science and there’s just SO MUCH OF IT.

      In other star systems, I’d look for similar solutions.