Humanity has to stop being Human

[Surlethe]

Getting those people into orbit is a difficult task. It's not as if such things are easy.

Remember, we have the resources of an entire system at our beck. His point is, since the system's resources are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited, difficulty is really no barrier.

Are you going to claim to me that it's no problem at all, the extreme energy concerns? Hell, for getting that many people into orbit, I'd expect the energy output to have a significant change on the temperature of the earth's atmosphere. If resources are infinite, why do we care to leave anyways?

No, I'm not claiming it's not a problem, but rather that the difficulty is not insurmountable, and, indeed, for a civilization which is able to mine Jupiter and crack comets and asteroids for H, probably nothing they would blink at doing.

[tharkûn]

Heh.......yeah. Because "bowing down is more logical then war" is how humans have always thought in the past, besides..

So a couple of colonies fail? The energy returns allow for a hefty margin of failure. The energy gain from the single hydrogen payment of a successful colonoy is more than enough to make up the costs.

Nukes? You actually imagine nukes would be effective? After a two-decade flight through interstellar space? Long after the point when the fissionable componnents would have decayed from chemical corrosion to uselessness and the lithium-deuteride in the cores would have completely deterioriated?

I wouldn't build my nukes with fissile components. A far more mass efficient option is to use anti-matter or muons. For a sufficiently advanced society there is no requirement to have a fissile primary. If you have viable ultra high power/energy X-ray sources you can initiate the secondary sans fission. The energy levels a civilization at this stage (actually running out of energy in the Sol system) are more than sufficient to 'waste' on non-fissile primaries. If LiD is so obnoxious, then go with pure deuterium which cannot deteriorate.

Corrosion issues are technical ones, ones greatly mitigated by the ability to fabricate and "house" the warhead in high vacuum conditions which boils off even trace water, oxygen, and other contaminants. Likewise the vast majority of LiD degradation is due to atmospheric contaminants - notably water - which will be as close to nonexistant in vacuum fabrication as anything ever can be. The idea that a society which has managed to mine frigging Jupitor to its demise can't engineer a viable WMD that can transit interstellar distances is laughable.

Except that any incoming ships will be visible long before they arrive.

Only if you devote significant resources to building quality observatories with a complete view of the sky, put a good bit of computational power into finding them, and you STILL have to pay for NMD to defeat them.

Frankly let's say you launch the missiles 22 years before the colony ship. After say 2 years of accel they go ballistic and after 20 years of drifting the colony ship starts its journey. Now if you fiddle with burn times and propellent velocity you can have the missiles arrive anywhere from 20 years prior to the colony (identical trajectories) to indefinately afterwards (much slower WMD trajectory). Coming from any direction can be done by means accelerating out of plane and back to it, as well as overshooting the system and coming in from opposite earth. Given the orders of magitude performance difference between a colony ship and a missile, the missile will can get to its preferred attack vector, accelerate to its preffered attack velocity, and then go ballistic long before the colony ship ever arrives.

From the colonials perspective earth is asking them to pay for the cost of passage plus a return on investment. While the hydrogen they ship will be of extreme value to an energy depleted Sol, it is almost worthless in a virgin system. So they have the choice: gamble with their very lives with defenses assured to cost more than just sending the damn comets, or paying the danegeld and then living like kings in an energy rich evironment.

Are you going to claim to me that it's no problem at all, the extreme energy concerns? Hell, for getting that many people into orbit, I'd expect the energy output to have a significant change on the temperature of the earth's atmosphere. If resources are infinite, why do we care to leave anyways?

Do you know how much potential fusion energy exists on Titon alone? Long before you need to THINK about colonies the sun will have exploded, Jupitor will be mined to nonexistance, and the solar remenants will have been mined for energy. Climbing outsystem requires paltry amounts of energy compared to what fusion reaps.

And who the hell cares about the temperature of Earth's atmosphere? Long before even lowly Titan is exhausted as a fusion energy source the sun will expand out well beyond 1 AU and earth will be fried to a crisp. In any event a space tether (complete or floating partial) generates pitiful amounts of waste heat to get into orbit.


Why leave anyways? Because the OP starts with an idiotic post about when the solar system starts running out of useable energy. Even at that unimaginably distant point in time there still are options:
Robotics.
Colonies under gunpoint for one payment.
Nomads.
Interstellar scale hyrdogen collectors.

The conclusion that humanity must change from the broad basis by which it is defined today in order to survive "long term" is utter rubbish.

[Knife]

Crammed in together with who knows how many other people, it can be damned annoying. And in spacecraft or space station, we can assume space will always be at a premium.

It's managable, look at the 5000 personel on a US Navy Carrier. Or the hundred or so locked up for 6 months on attack subs, or even more crammed together on boomers.

[Patrick Degan]

Heh.......yeah. Because "bowing down is more logical then war" is how humans have always thought in the past, besides..

So a couple of colonies fail? The energy returns allow for a hefty margin of failure. The energy gain from the single hydrogen payment of a successful colonoy is more than enough to make up the costs.

Or the colonists simply laugh at the idea that Earth can threaten them from several lightyears away and keep an eye out for whatever might be coming a few decades down the line.

Nukes? You actually imagine nukes would be effective? After a two-decade flight through interstellar space? Long after the point when the fissionable componnents would have decayed from chemical corrosion to uselessness and the lithium-deuteride in the cores would have completely deterioriated?

I wouldn't build my nukes with fissile components. A far more mass efficient option is to use anti-matter or muons. For a sufficiently advanced society there is no requirement to have a fissile primary. If you have viable ultra high power/energy X-ray sources you can initiate the secondary sans fission. The energy levels a civilization at this stage (actually running out of energy in the Sol system) are more than sufficient to 'waste' on non-fissile primaries. If LiD is so obnoxious, then go with pure deuterium which cannot deteriorate.

Oh now we're really wanking, aren't we? A civilisation supposedly running out of fuel sources for high energy processes is going to employ high energy processes to produce antimatter for weapons —nevermind that you still haven't explained just how Earth could possibly be running out of energy given the continuing existence of a sun which should be stable for at least four billion years and four gas-giant planets which have enough hydrogen to fuel a space civilisation for uncounted millions of years.

Oh, and BTW, the reason why no thermonuclear weapon is fueled exclusively from deuterium is because it would not sustain a fusion reaction long enough to get a significant blast yield beyond the initial fission stage —at least not in any device that's of a convenient deliverable size.

Corrosion issues are technical ones, ones greatly mitigated by the ability to fabricate and "house" the warhead in high vacuum conditions which boils off even trace water, oxygen, and other contaminants. Likewise the vast majority of LiD degradation is due to atmospheric contaminants - notably water - which will be as close to nonexistant in vacuum fabrication as anything ever can be. The idea that a society which has managed to mine frigging Jupitor to its demise can't engineer a viable WMD that can transit interstellar distances is laughable.

Hydroxyls end up leaching from the high explosive components from chemical decay and migrate along the circuit pathways into the inner bomb casing, while the low-level radioactive decay of the fission pits provides a natural heat-source. This is one of the reasons why warheads have to be pulled out of service for component remanufacture in the first place.

Except that any incoming ships will be visible long before they arrive.

Only if you devote significant resources to building quality observatories with a complete view of the sky, put a good bit of computational power into finding them, and you STILL have to pay for NMD to defeat them.

Um, they would have needed such "quality observatories" in the colony ships in order to navigate and those ships will still be in orbit, and there aren't too many directions from which an attack could come.

And as for the defence issue, assuming that the colonists would be concerned that any of the warheads would function, exactly how much effort and expense would really be required to scatter shrapnel and other debris in the low and midrange orbits for the warheads to run into?

Frankly let's say you launch the missiles 22 years before the colony ship. After say 2 years of accel they go ballistic and after 20 years of drifting the colony ship starts its journey. Now if you fiddle with burn times and propellent velocity you can have the missiles arrive anywhere from 20 years prior to the colony (identical trajectories) to indefinately afterwards (much slower WMD trajectory). Coming from any direction can be done by means accelerating out of plane and back to it, as well as overshooting the system and coming in from opposite earth. Given the orders of magitude performance difference between a colony ship and a missile, the missile will can get to its preferred attack vector, accelerate to its preffered attack velocity, and then go ballistic long before the colony ship ever arrives.

You'll pardon me for laughing, I trust? Exactly what sort of dumbshit society would a) launch weapons toward a star system which is uninhabited to begin with, b) waste enormous amounts of fuel in this process, c) ignore the extant problems of carrying enough fuel for deceleration and manoeuvering for this supposed attack-in-advance, d) ensure that there would be functional missiles onboard, which increases the mass of the payload which means more fuel required, and d) then launch a colony expedition in anticipation of putting this ludicrous blackmail scheme in place after how many years which would increase the envelope of time during which the warheads could suffer component degredation? In order to ensure that the colonists ship miniscule amounts of material back to Earth which is supposedly running out of fuel for its civilisation despite the abundance of energy provided by a stable main-sequence star, four gas-giant planets, and trillions of tons of cometary ices in the Oort Cloud? And if the Sol system were really that played out (although you still don't explain exactly how this would happen), and the Earth civilisation already had the capability to send large migratory expeditions to other stars, then why wouldn't they decide that it was time for their entire civilisation to seek greener pastures elsewhere?

From the colonials perspective earth is asking them to pay for the cost of passage plus a return on investment. While the hydrogen they ship will be of extreme value to an energy depleted Sol, it is almost worthless in a virgin system. So they have the choice: gamble with their very lives with defenses assured to cost more than just sending the damn comets, or paying the danegeld and then living like kings in an energy rich evironment.

Or they simply scatter nails in orbit (or put cannister-mines in orbit) and do nothing about Earth's absurd demands.

[Darth Wong]

So a couple of colonies fail? The energy returns allow for a hefty margin of failure. The energy gain from the single hydrogen payment of a successful colonoy is more than enough to make up the costs.

I haven't been following this thread, but did you just say that it would be worth it to go to another star system just to get hydrogen, one of the most plentiful substances in existence?

I wouldn't build my nukes with fissile components. A far more mass efficient option is to use anti-matter or muons. For a sufficiently advanced society there is no requirement to have a fissile primary.

A society which is in such desperate need of hydrogen for power generation that it would undertake multi-decade missions to get some is somehow capable of safely storing antimatter for 20 years with minimal power consumption?

[tharkûn]

I haven't been following this thread, but did you just say that it would be worth it to go to another star system just to get hydrogen, one of the most plentiful substances in existence?

No. The OP talks about a solar system running out of useable energy somewhere in the ludicriously distant future (call it trillions of years). I assume that such a society will be one which has survived the collapse of the sun and fused all of the hydrogen in the local vicinity up to Iron. At that unbeleivably distant point humanity can STILL acquire more hydrogen, by say using robotics to scour the vacuum.

A society which is in such desperate need of hydrogen for power generation that it would undertake multi-decade missions to get some is somehow capable of safely storing antimatter for 20 years with minimal power consumption?

Define minimal. Any society that can ever deplete all the potential energy in Sol has got to be sucking down ludicrious amounts of energy, compared to that level of consumption, magnetic confinement is energy cheap.

The OP is rubbish. Humanity can thrive on sol until the sun explodes just by using local hyrdogen to meet its energy needs. To me that is "long term survival". Going out until the amount of useful energy in the system approaches zero, there still are options for humans to survive while still being "human". The colony scenario would never happen - robotics would be far superior to bring hydrogen back to Sol, of course that point is continually dodged. The OP is simply fundementally wrong on many levels.

[lazerus]

Define minimal. Any society that can ever deplete all the potential energy in Sol has got to be sucking down ludicrious amounts of energy, compared to that level of consumption, magnetic confinement is energy cheap.

The OP is rubbish. Humanity can thrive on sol until the sun explodes just by using local hyrdogen to meet its energy needs. To me that is "long term survival". Going out until the amount of useful energy in the system approaches zero, there still are options for humans to survive while still being "human". The colony scenario would never happen - robotics would be far superior to bring hydrogen back to Sol, of course that point is continually dodged. The OP is simply fundementally wrong on many levels.

Except that matter is just as important as energy. Transmutation, assuming it's practicly possible, would have a not-insubstantian energy requirement.

And please, try addressing my points one by one before you say i'm fundemntally wrong.

[Patrick Degan]

Define minimal. Any society that can ever deplete all the potential energy in Sol has got to be sucking down ludicrious amounts of energy, compared to that level of consumption, magnetic confinement is energy cheap.

The OP is rubbish. Humanity can thrive on sol until the sun explodes just by using local hyrdogen to meet its energy needs. To me that is "long term survival". Going out until the amount of useful energy in the system approaches zero, there still are options for humans to survive while still being "human". The colony scenario would never happen - robotics would be far superior to bring hydrogen back to Sol, of course that point is continually dodged. The OP is simply fundementally wrong on many levels.

Except that matter is just as important as energy. Transmutation, assuming it's practicly possible, would have a not-insubstantian energy requirement.

Transmutation is hardly necessary. Hydrogen could be derived by thermal cracking from any waste material and this could be easily done in solar furnaces.

However, it is hardly likely that such an eventuality would ever crop up to begin with. Jupiter has over 1.2E24 metric tons of pure hydrogen locked up in its atmosphere alone, and substantial amounts of helium, methane, and water after that, while Saturn holds an additional 4.27E23 tonnes of hydrogen in its atmosphere. All this in addtion to a sun which is going to remain stable in the main sequence for at least the next five billion years. Humanity is hardly going to reach the point of consuming all that energy before it either becomes extinct or is forced to evacuate this star system when the sun dies.

[tharkûn]

Except that matter is just as important as energy. Transmutation, assuming it's practicly possible, would have a not-insubstantian energy requirement.

We transmute elements today, that's were everything past uranium comes from. With the best possible fusion technology you can make any element up to iron from hyrdogen for a net gain of energy. Past iron you have to use endothermic nuclear reactions to build heavier atoms. Some are quite trivial - i.e. neutron absorption followed by beta decay, others require massive energy inputs (those also tend to be quite useless).

No matter what you do the matter in the solar system, short of anti-matter anihilation, you can always reuse it as long as you have the energy to do so.

And please, try addressing my points one by one before you say i'm fundemntally wrong.

Then I ask you don't bitch about the length of the post.

Assumption #1) FTL Teleporation, Wormholes, or any non-starship method of hauling people and cargo from starsystem to starsystem is not possible.

False. People and cargo can be hauled from starsystem to starsystem, you just have to live with relativity and experience transit times of decades.

Corilary #1) A starsystem cannot use extrasteller colonies to supply itself with raw materials.

False. It is within human capabilities today to build robust robotics which could go beyond the confines of Sol and return with more raw materials - read hydrogen.

Corilary #2) A starsystem cannot use extrasteller colonies to deal with overpopulation problems.

That depends on the technology and population size in question. Long before you think about leaving Sol you will be building orbital habitats. At that point it is merely a question of putting engines on them and slowly accelerating outsystem.

Corilary #3) With no method of enforcing it's will over colonies in any reasonable time frame. A mother planet cannot maintain an empire outside of it's own system.

True. The only time the mother planet has an advantage over the colony is when the colony is first starting. After that time period the colony will have sufficient industrial potential to stand up to the mother planet and any concessions the mother planet could hope to get are going to be far too costly to impose.

Assumption #2) There is enough usefull energy in one star system that a sufficiently advanced and non-wastefull human culture could supply themselves for an indefinate peroid of time.

There is enough useful energy in one star system that a sufficiently advanced decadent and wasteful human culture could supply themselves until the star it is based upon blows.

Corilary #1 The only way resources are lost is when their turned towards unproductive uses. Such as war.

The only resource which can be lost is energy. Everything else can be recovered if you have the energy to do so. Energy, for a sufficiently advanced society, is not an issue.

Corilary #2 A wastefull, or irrational human culture can and will quickly deplete all available resources in their area.

False. All availible resources in our solar system includes Titan. Titan's atmosphere is about 5% hydrocarbon. The readily accessible hydrogen there has a stupendous fusion potential which even a decadent and wasteful culture would be hard pressed to consume.

Assumption #3) Human nature is not going to fundamentally change in the forseeable future.
Corilary #1 People will still be violent.
Corilary #2 People will still be stupid.
Corilary #3 People will still be greedy.
Corilary #4 Religion will not die out.

No more so than now. Frankly violence is on a downward slide, the stupid and greedy like the fruits of civilization and hence tend to grudgingly abide by some type of social contract limiting violence so they can have their ice cream, computer games, whores, or whatever.

.
Assumption #4) Human technology will continue to advance at a steady rate, ignoring brief spikes or toughs from situational changes.

Human technology has not advanced at a steady rate, for most of human existance technology has flatlined. When viewed in the long term the last few centuries are highly atypical present trends (either the those observed in distant history or today) are not likely to continue.

Corilary #1 Weapons will continue to get more deadly and distructive.

Doubtful. There are not all that many ways to generate bigger bangs than thermonuclear warheads. Even if you do want to build such uberweapons, at some point the blast is sufficient to be harmful to you as well. There are not even all that many theoretical advantages to be had by going to more powerful weapons.

Corilary #2 Since people are not getting significantly smarter (see Assumption #3) this new technology will leave the non-educated parts of humanity in the dust, as much high-tech does today.

So what? High technology has been beyond the common man since the Romans if not before.

Intermediate Conclusion #1 There is a fixed amount of productive energy in the solar system, call it X. Humanity will consume Y as them climb up the tech tree. Leaving a fixed amount X-Y=Q available for productive use.

Q >> the amount of energy needed to sustain trillions of human beings in comfort for billions of years. Further X and hence Q being fixed quantities is absurd. Hydrogen has a density of about 1 atom per cubic centimeter and while that sounds ludicriously small you have to remember the size we are talking about - regions of space measuring lightyears in diameter. There will be interstellar hyrdogen flux if humanity begins to harvest it. Further it is not THAT hard to send a robot off to Alpha Centauri or wherever, land on a comet, fire up the water powered engines, and bring the comet home in a century or two. Q is not fixed, but the ridiciously large size of it makes that immaterial for the next few billion years.

Intermediate Conclusion #2 Every time humanity directs an indevor towards a blatnetly distructive use, Q drops.

Any drop in Q due to destructive use that is appreciable is approaching a species extinction event (including orbital habitats). The mind boggling size of Q makes any possible amount of energy devoted to war trivial in comparison.

Intermediate Conclusion #3 The smaller Q is, the larger impact decreases in Q will have on humanity. Put simply, when you have a lot to spare you can afford losing a little, when you have nothing small changes hurt badly.

Not to bad if you realize that Q is phenomenally large.

Intermediate Conclusion #3 As Q approaches zero the star system in question becomes uninhabitable.

Which might happen in a trillion years.

I can't being to speculate as to what that change will be, be it thought genetic engineering, very deep brainwashing, cybernetics, whatever. But humanity is fated to either die out, or to only be a jumping-off point for a more advanced race.

Humanity is not so fated. With only moderately advanced technology humanity could survive as some type of interstellar Moken on generation ships. With sufficiently advanced technology fusion becomes reality and running out of energy becomes a problem for the great * 10^9 grandchildren.

In short you haven't a clue how much useful energy there is to be had in the solar system. Even when it does eventually run out - after the sun blows up - there will be ways of bring more energy in. Further the phenomenal amount of energy availible to a sufficiently advanced culture makes total emigration of humanity possible (at least a trillion human beings). You are fundementally wrong.

[lazerus]

Define minimal. Any society that can ever deplete all the potential energy in Sol has got to be sucking down ludicrious amounts of energy, compared to that level of consumption, magnetic confinement is energy cheap.

The OP is rubbish. Humanity can thrive on sol until the sun explodes just by using local hyrdogen to meet its energy needs. To me that is "long term survival". Going out until the amount of useful energy in the system approaches zero, there still are options for humans to survive while still being "human". The colony scenario would never happen - robotics would be far superior to bring hydrogen back to Sol, of course that point is continually dodged. The OP is simply fundementally wrong on many levels.

Except that matter is just as important as energy. Transmutation, assuming it's practicly possible, would have a not-insubstantian energy requirement.

Transmutation is hardly necessary. Hydrogen could be derived by thermal cracking from any waste material and this could be easily done in solar furnaces.

However, it is hardly likely that such an eventuality would ever crop up to begin with. Jupiter has over 1.2E24 metric tons of pure hydrogen locked up in its atmosphere alone, and substantial amounts of helium, methane, and water after that, while Saturn holds an additional 4.27E23 tonnes of hydrogen in its atmosphere. All this in addtion to a sun which is going to remain stable in the main sequence for at least the next five billion years. Humanity is hardly going to reach the point of consuming all that energy before it either becomes extinct or is forced to evacuate this star system when the sun dies.

No no, what I meant was that humanity needs more then just hydrogen and the energy it produces.

False. People and cargo can be hauled from starsystem to starsystem, you just have to live with relativity and experience transit times of decades.

Uh.....I didn't say otherwise. Please reread what I said.

False. It is within human capabilities today to build robust robotics which could go beyond the confines of Sol and return with more raw materials - read hydrogen.

So? I truely doubt were going to run out of hydrogen. It's other materials that are an issue.

Humanity is not so fated. With only moderately advanced technology humanity could survive as some type of interstellar Moken on generation ships. With sufficiently advanced technology fusion becomes reality and running out of energy becomes a problem for the great * 10^9 grandchildren.

In short you haven't a clue how much useful energy there is to be had in the solar system. Even when it does eventually run out - after the sun blows up - there will be ways of bring more energy in. Further the phenomenal amount of energy availible to a sufficiently advanced culture makes total emigration of humanity possible (at least a trillion human beings). You are fundementally wrong.

Ehhhh. No, I'm not fundamentally wrong. But your right that I've vastly underestimated Q to the point where my results are skewed. Point conceided.

[SPOOFE]

When you have all these technologies to play with, the reasons for traveling seem almost arbitrary.

And when you get to that point, you'll have some people that will arbitrarily want to go. Some people love to travel, and some don't.

My point is, using that argument, you could just as well spend your life hooked into a VR network, supervised by robots and systems calculated to be as resource efficient as possible.

Once again you use "can" as if it constituted some sort of proof. Unless forced into it, you'll have people that WON'T want to live in virtual reality. In fact, I will postulate that most people will not want to live in virtual reality. Of this group of people, many will want to travel in space... especially if it becomes, as you put it, "almost arbitrary".

[tharkûn]

No no, what I meant was that humanity needs more then just hydrogen and the energy it produces.

And what would that be?

Uh.....I didn't say otherwise. Please reread what I said.

BS:
"FTL Teleporation, Wormholes, or any non-starship method of hauling people and cargo from starsystem to starsystem is not possible. "

FTL and wormwoles are worthless, however if you want to ship hydrogen from say alpha centauri to Sol all you need to do is accelerate a comet or whatever out of the alpah centauri gravity well and let it proceed on a ballastic course to Sol. No starships required.

So? I truely doubt were going to run out of hydrogen. It's other materials that are an issue.

So what are we going to run out of helium? That can be made by fusing hydrogen. Carbon? Triple alpha. Nitrogen or oxygen? CNO cycle. From there fusion reactions proceed Ne, Mg, Si, P, S, and Na. Going up from there you can easily generate Ni, Co, and Fe. All of this is exothermic and can be built up from pure hydrogen merely by increasing the burn temperature of your fusion reactor. Now throw in neutron breeding and all the light elements can be made from hydrogen.

Heavier elements are endothermic, however you can still produce them, for instance if you can get temperatures and neutron fluxes high enough you can use r process building up to somewhere around Z=100.

So nuclear transmutation allows a sufficiently advanced society to make any element it "runs out of" from hydrogen. Once you have all the elements it is just chemistry and egineering to make them into whatever material you wish.

Face it the only thing a sufficiently advanced society absolutely needs is hydrogen, and there is more of that than humanity could possibly consume before the sun blows up.

Ehhhh. No, I'm not fundamentally wrong.

Yes you are. Q is not a fixed quantity. Humanity will not run short of hydrogen and hence everything else before it goes extinct.

But your right that I've vastly underestimated Q to the point where my results are skewed.

Dozens of orders of magnitude, even then Q is not a fixed quanitity.

Point conceided.

Concession accepted.

[lazerus]

Yes you are. Q is not a fixed quantity. Humanity will not run short of hydrogen and hence everything else before it goes extinct.

Um.....yes. So Q is very very large. But you can't get more of it. There is a fixed amount of hydrogen in any one system.