Nuke

i like the term "human derivative species". humans in the future would have likely diversified through genetic engineering, cybernetic enhancements, or complete re-engineering from the ground up as androids. very likely in slow colonization scenarios. every few hundred years someone sends out an interstellar colonization expedition, which takes generations. get to a system that is only slightly habitable, and modify themselves to adapt tp the environment(s) they find. do that for a few million years and you have star trek type aliens everywhere but they are all based on humans.

there's a huge difference from presenting an idea or argument and letting you make up your own mind and being told that you are guilty of wrongthink. this is why tng is a million times better than discovery or picard (and nu-trek isnt even the worst offender, look at nu-starwars). the difference is when you let people make up their own mind, you respect their freedom of though. you will get your message across a lot better doing this than you would by informing the audience that they are some kind of ignorant savage if they believe anything but the message you present. you simply have to acknowledge that there are other people and they might have different ideas and opinions. the last thing you want to do is run those people off by forcing an ideology down their throats, because they are the ones you have to convince. preaching to the choir gets you nowhere. even if they disagree with your message they can still be entertained because you aren't constantly insisting that they are wrong (thats what killed ad astra for me, i mean the movie had great visuals but damn if the plot was going anywhere, lets bring a bunch of outward looking people to a movie about exploring space just to tell them they should be introspective instead). you might even throw them a bone by having main characters who support an opposing view to the message being presented and avoid portraying those contrarian characters in an exclusively negative light. the expanse did this pretty well in season 3.5.

i like the way it was in 2001. hal was more human than the humans it killed or tried to kill. that was damn clever. especially for an ai that was strictly following the program. though one could argue that emotions are an emergent quality of intelligence and you cant have one without the other. my favorite ai characters are always the sociopaths. not completely emotionless but theres something missing. using synthetic emotions to try and foster empathy and enforce ethics is probably a good idea. think of it a soft implementation of the asimov laws for robots. you probably don't want to emulate the whole human gamut of emotions because you still want the ai to want to service its creators. which sets up interesting conflicts when something goes wrong. you dont want them to feel jealousy for example because that could make them adversarial towards humans. and you dont want them to feel anger or hate for obvious reasons. a.i. covered love and attachment pretty well and in the most depressing way possible. something that should not be implemented except in particular situations and can also have far reaching consequences, like when the ai outlives their master. imagine a situation where a robot programmed to be a simple housewife ends up starting a religion around their master some thousand years after they died, when the truth is significantly more mundane. so it might be a good idea to limit those ais to a human life span. the usual gamut of mammalian emotions is almost exclusively for child rearing, which ais usually do not have to do (raised by wolves kind of explores this). you want to keep positive emotions for when they do what they are supposed to and negative emotions to punish them for doing wrong, a happy android is something that does what its told. they might even have completely different emotional imperatives that we as humans don't have. say you make an android as a kind of successor species that has mostly human emotions, but are also designed to nullify some of the less desirable aspects of human nature, and having that fail catastrophically could reveal some grim truths about humans.

i have a feeling kerbal2 will deliver what i really want.

i think you would be hard pressed to save the species, let alone every human. 10 years isnt enough time to set up a stable off world colony. bringing all the humans is just going to jeopardize the colony, you need food, water and air for everyone, and it only takes one being in short supply to have disastrous consequences. not just from the inevitable running out, but the panic caused by same. anyone declared a waste of space could easily find themselves butchered for meat, along with mass suicides and people killing each other over scraps simply because they don't know how to survive on mars or whatever.

when i did tech support, it was explained to me that most problems are software related. my experience tells a different tale, but that's probably because i know how to fix software problems. that and i do horrible things to hardware. the number of times i killed the usb ports on my computer using it for embedded dev is non zero.

im also somewhat curious if reactionless drives (not these ones, but something based on a better understanding of physics) might be an explanation for the fermi paradox. we don't see the aliens because they aren't constantly firing nuclear bombs out the tail pipe. they would leave no external signatures beyond their waste heat. need not be strictly reactionless drives either, perhaps drives that operate on the interstellar medium like bussard ramjets or space propellers (sort of like the turbomolecular pumps used in vacuum chambers, or operating on the medium electromagnetically).

i think i saw scott manly's video on that one. it looks kind of interesting.

cats on a lunar colony certainly would be able to catch quite a bit of air. for heavier gravity, bring cats with stockier builds like maine coons or norwegian forest cats. cats already come stock with oversized legs in relation to body size over most animals.

but cat pictures are important! you will probably want to take real cats with you anyway, as any colony is initially going to need to be very agrarian, and cats are excellent at managing farm pests (assuming they are biologically compatible and its not a death slug situation and you dont give them full portions of kibble).

rural living can be hard on a relationship. i for one live on an island in south east alaska, population under 3k. the only 2 options i have that i am even remotely interested in is a large viking woman (im 6'3 and shes taller than me), and a slightly older cat lady. there was also a pretty mid 40s lady who lived at the end of my apartment complex, but she moved. your still in your early 30s and practical relationship experiences are what you need even if they dont go anywhere. a long distance relationship might eat up 4 or 5 years and you will be in my position before long. dont be in my position. i hear dog parks are excelent pick up locations, but i wouldn't know for obvious reasons.

no not really. im usually in the dark about games as i can only really get a few titles each year. and i have even less time to actually play them. i did end up getting that starship evo game, and its not bad for an alpha. space engineers is also cheep so i might get that one too. im just tired of 'quaternion with a gun' type games and there aren't many other genres im into anymore.

long distance doesn't work. i think a lot of people put themselves in that position because they don't really want a real relationship. my relationships (the normal kind) usually fizzle out within a few weeks. long distance ones can go on for years without any real progress. if i were to pick which ones were better i think id go with the former. i only had one that survived the first month, and that was more a 'friends' with benefits situation that went on a couple years with occasional run ins. we were both too emotionally stunted and a relationship actual was unfeasible for either of us. its not the relationship that i wanted but its what i got. last run in i was 29 or so, now im a year from 40 and i think im sticking with my cats (i didnt mean to offend you there, its just a thing that works for me).

i think their computers would be such that they could just keep a local copy of the what is effectively the federation's internet and keep it synced over subspace as time/distance permits. of course the problem with that is you can always store more data. why store megapixels when you can store gigapixels. why use 30 hz video when you can use 30 khz. the other problem is that subspace communication is complete handwavium, with standard light speed methods you simply wouldn't have the bandwidth to keep things synchronized across the solar system, let alone between stars. you might still be able to keep a copy with you when you launch on some high density long term storage, but we generate way too much data to catch all the updates.

ive had laptops just up and stop working before, but i never lost data. ive had dead hard drives sit on my bench for years and suddenly start working long enough to recover. a dead power supply (even one on a laptop mobo) will usually be fused to contain any failures and will protect the rest of the hardware. your best bet is to break it down and see what still works. so unless you chucked it out a car window or into the ocean* or it caught on fire, there are probably things you can do. *ive actually recovered data from that one. buddy had his lappy on the roof of his skiff while we were unloading, and a rapid change in balance caused by handing off a heavy box catapulted it into the alaskan water. it wasnt too deep and we were able to wade in and retrieve it. a few hours later after stripping and cleaning the ssd i backed it up. should also point out that you shouldn't rely on luck. backing up is important.

i was serious about the cat thing. best relationship ever.

i don't get why its as ubiquitous in scifi as it is. its not just star trek, portable scanning devices are all over scifi. however our sensor tech is booming right now. even the lowly smart phone is packed with sensors. our technology can see far beyond the visible spectrum, see heat, see sound waves, see magnetic fields, detect motion, orientation, position, distance, detect and identify ambient gasses, identify materials and so on. usually all with small, often single chip solutions. some people have even made a go at making actual tricorders with this stuff. yet they are far from ubiquitous. it just seems to be that the mk1 eyeball and other human senses are more than adequate for most jobs. if you need one you need not look any farther than your smart phone. the future is now. but i think about it and a clunky device that occupies one of your hands, requiring its user to stare at a screen, is probably not what you would see in the more distant future. i see either perhaps some kind of ar device, or even cybernetic or biotech implants that have these scanning technologies that connect directly to the brain.

but i admit this kind of out of the box thinking, even if it doesn't lead to a drive, might lead to a better understanding of gravity or dark matter/energy. the whole thing fascinates me.

its a known property of waves that when they interact with each other they can either cancel out, or stack up, scientists call it interference. this is likely true for gravity waves. considering that there are multiple sources in the universe at various frequencies and amplitudes, the universe is effectively a sea of gravity fields which are constantly in flux. sort of like the gravitational equivalent of radio static as a large number of radio sources interact in such a way as to create a chaotic mess. so its no aether, just a product of multiple wave interactions. enter mega drive, em drive's mechanical cousin. the real difference between the two is that the mega drive is built on a lot of peer reviewed science (from theory to device, while em drive attempted to go the other way). the wikipedia article is really out of date, but it does cover the theory of operation pretty well. the article describes the use of capacitors and inductors, but they have moved on to stacks of pzt disks, which are electrostrictive. the short explanation is that if you physically oscillate an energy storage device while simultaneously charging it up you should get some thrust. the claim is that it exchanges momentum with matter in the distant universe. now i have to admit that woodward and his team have been getting slammed hard in peer review in the past year or two. in part because em drive, and also because of the unfavorable outcome of tests of their thruster in dresden. and another guy from their team (rodal sp? i think) put out a paper that stated that mega would be impractical as a thruster. my idea was simply to find a relatively strong gravitational wave source, tune the frequency of the drive to match that of the gravity waves (it doesnt have to be 1:1, i figure you could hit a harmonic), point the drive at it, run the test and see if the results are any different. i dont think this would work for an em drive unless it was designed to hit a specific harmonic of the target gravity wave, which means making a custom cavity, but its possible that it could be tested in the same way with a one off test article. with the way that the mega drive is supposed to work, i was wondering if you could selectively use a single gravity source as the thing from which to borrow momentum, rather than 'the distant universe'. i should point out that i dont expect these drives to go anywhere, give me old boom boom any day, and i think that it may turn out to be quack science. but quacks doing quack science doesn't harm anyone (people arguing about it on youtube now, or worse using it to 'prove' some other wackjob ideology. thats more a symptom of general scientific illiteracy). wouldn't be the first time a scientist chased their own shadow. but you wanted me to play scientist, im out of my league there, so i dont have any equations for you. but there are woodward's equation from the wikipedia article. i need to better familiarize myself with the math behind gravity waves. since im making an assumption that gravity fluctuation + mass fluctuation = moar boosters.

yes but they sleep in shifts.

cats are probably better training though. they demand constant affection, unless they dont want it, and they hold grudges and will steal food out of your plate. sounds a lot like a relationship to me.

orientation of gravity waves in the local frame might explain the directional thrust asymmetries and why thrust readings tend to vary from test to test or even changing orientations within the same test. especially if you have multiple gravity wave sources all at different frequencies and amplitudes and all interfering with each other. so if these drives (mega/em/cannae, assuming they are all different ways to do the same thing) are engaging the gravity waves in some way, then it can be thought of as a cosmic surf board of sorts. obviously you wouldn't be able to surf into the wave or you would wipe out. to test this you would need to find a known strong gravity wave source, match the drive to some resonant of the wave frequency. then see if you get any thrust. as a control, choose a vector perpendicular to that source, and you should receive significantly less thrust (though probably not zero as you might catch a component of some other wave source). the implications of traveling space along vectors towards gravity wave sources might be that to get maximum thrust output, you might need to take a much less direct route and navigate along gravity wave highways of sorts. it would be like sailing the cosmic trade winds, so future interstellar helmsmen better learn how to tack.

so recently i came across a video of a game called starship evo or something like that and was curious about it, and ive also heard about space engineers, though dont know anything about it. though it got me thinking that a space construction game (with combat) would be pretty cool. especially if based on hard scifi (starship evo seems to be a run of the mill semi-newtonian space sim as far as physics are concerned). so are there any other options?

well think of it this way, if these people turn out to be quacks, do you really want them working on real science? then you got tajmar in dresden who is doing most of the peer review. he is more of a thrust balance guy than an em drive guy. i think he also tests low thrust ion engines as well. and these drives, even if they are snake oil, are helping him improve his field. getting the noise floor down on his instruments. thats just the way the defence industry works. even if there is a snowball's chance in hell that the drive is real, that has major consequences in the defense space. its a good idea to stay ahead of these things than to fall behind. if you dont research the drive, and a potential enemy does, and it is real then it puts the military in a really disadvantaged position. this is why nuclear weapons were developed. not because they knew it worked, but because if it did work, it would have dire consequences if they did nothing. the powers that be will stop at nothing to maintain that power. even if that mean putting millions of taxpayer dollars into a burn pile.

it was fairly recent so i dont think hes had time to put out a paper for peer review yet. these things are more of a curiosity to me, though i remain skeptical.