KerikBalm

Beyond looking cool... is there any purpose to bases in space/ other celestial bodies? The only resource one can extract... is electricity The closest thing to a station that makes sense to me... is having part of your ship stay in orbit when you send down a lander. Is there any real purpose to these bases? Something that can increase efficiency/effectiveness of the space program? If not.... Could anyone point me to a version 0.19 compatible mod pack (My mac is running Leopard, and no later version of KSP works on mine, but I've back ported some stock parts) that allows some resource gathering? I was thinking of something like Nuclear reactor module + atmosphre processor module + chemical lab + fuel storage tanks = a fuel producing station on planets with an atmosphere... or at least maybe something for Laythe that can convert intake air to oxidizer. Maybe a drill + refinery + chemical lab for solid bodies with no atmosphere?

As I already said.... "If its not one of 1-5, then there should be multitudes of technological civilizations with controlled fusion, whom can at least colonize their local solar system, and thus are likely to be extremely long lasting. It seems incredulous to me that of these multitudes, not one has embarked on an expansionist phase. Therefore I conclude the problem lies somewhere in 1-5." "it would also be conducive to defense... we'd start to establish a buffer zone between us an other potential alien civilizations... the best defense is a good offense and all that. If we start an expansion program, we're less likely to be swallowed by an alien's" "Survival of the fittest will surely operate galaxy wide (not that survival of the fittest = always war, there are many symbiotic relationships where each entity increases its fitness through cooperation). Species that expand will persist and become more prevalent, species that don't will disappear." If we assume technological civilizations are common, then it seems incredulous that not a single one has embarked on an expansionist phase. Also, add in the billions of years they have to change their mind, and potential advances beyond that (ramjets and Antimatter), that make it even easier and shorter to do so. If there are only a handful of such civilizations, this objection is reasonable... if there are millions of them... this is not reasonable. If there are millions across the galaxy, and they only spread locally, you'd still see the galaxy becoming pretty full, pretty fast. And there are strong incentives to expand locally... at least within the nearest 10 light years or so, where travel isn't *that* hard with sufficiently advanced slower than light travel. I don't buy the argument that the galaxy is packed full of technological civilizations, but not a single one has decided it would be a good idea to expand beyond their start system. Likewise, I don't buy the argument that the galaxy is packed full of technological civilizations, but every single one has decided to hide their existence or operates in a way that we can't detect them. These arguments can work if we assume only a few civilizations, but thats assuming some variant of Rare-Earth.

"Aliens come to take our minerals/water/women/whatever is so laughable." Yes, it is laughable... wouldn't they rather go to Ceres, or some other body with a low gravity well where it is easy to extract and you don't have to deal with potential biohazards? Imagine if Aliens came and just said "We claim everything in this system outside Earth's orbit" maybe they'd follow with an offer of technology to earth in exchange for Earth making some stuff for them to help kick start their colonization of our system (assuming a single colony ship arrives, and that the startup phase is a colony ships' hardest part) "In that case, there could be a missile heading our way right now to end our threat to interstellar civilization. A preemptive strike to ensure we never have a chance to become a threat." Also something reasonable at first, there's been some sci fi written on that premise, both where Earth does the killing, or gets killed. But again.... as soon as you expand beyond your home world, such a threat no longer makes sense. If 1-planet species A sends a KEW to wipe out the home planet of multi-system species B.... then Species A has ensured its own destruction. Before you send a KEW, you better be damn sure that they won't be able to strike back. If they have self sustaining industry on various moons and asteroids - then all you accomplish is stirring a hornet's nest. So a multi-star system species, or even a species that is confined to its home star but has self sustaining off-world colonies, are not so vulnerable, and thus likely wouldn't feel so threatened as to resort to genocide. They could in that case beam a simple warning: *insert stuff to allow them to decipher the language of the message* "Warning, we exist acorss multiple star systems, with colonies on multiple planets, and industrial capabilities on smaller cellestial bodies, we cannot be wiped out in a first strike, but you can. Do not attempt to leave your home system, or the planets in your home system will be destroyed by reletavistic KEWs" That threat of anihilation by KEWs, is precisely a reason to begin sending fusion/Ramjet/antimatter powered vessels to other stars (not to mention, those vessels can also function as KEWs themselves, and form part of your retaliatory capabilities). Expansion ensures the survival of the species. Survival of the fittest will surely operate galaxy wide (not that survival of the fittest = always war, there are many symbiotic relationships where each entity increases its fitness through cooperation). Species that expand will persist and become more prevalent, species that don't will disappear. I don't see fusion power as an insurmountable hurdle, and across the millennia, Epochs and Eons, of the last billions of years such a mentality surely would have won out eventually, long enough for a massive diaspora to start.... So.... we're back to the Fermi Paradox..... where.... are.... they???? Variants of the Rare Earth hypothesis + evolution being unlikely to lead to technological civilizations like ourselves, seem to be the only answers that make sense to me, and aren't incredibly pessimistic about our own future (technological civilizations destroy their ecosystem/themselves through industry and war, before leaving their home planet) Ultimately, every clade on Earth is doomed if we don't get off this rock. If we do, we'll surely take many of them with us. We are simultaneously the greatest threat to the survival of other species on Earth, and their only chance of long term survival (well, the extremophile archea and bacteria probably have ~4 billion years left... but the multicellular life may only have 1 billion)

"the fact that we don't see fusion-powered alien ships flying around our solar system suggests that interstellar travel might not so widespread." Yes, it certainly suggests that... but the question is why is it not? Is it: 1) Few planets actually suitable for life to arise/start? (habitable != conducive to abiogenesis) 2) Few planets actually suitable for complex life? 3) Evolution from simple (like single cells) life to complex (multicellular or syncytical for example) is infrequent or too slow given the life time of many stars? 4) Complex life rarely evolves into a species that establishes a technological civilization? 5) Technological civilizations rarely last long enough to achieve controlled fusion? 6) Civilizations that achieve controlled fusion rarely use it for interstellar travel? If its not one of 1-5, then there should be multitudes of technological civilizations with controlled fusion, whom can at least colonize their local solar system, and thus are likely to be extremely long lasting. It seems incredulous to me that of these multitudes, not one has embarked on an expansionist phase. Therefore I conclude the problem lies somewhere in 1-5. I'd say we're only a century or two away from controlled fusion.... and at that point we can begin sending drones carrying biological packages, etc, even if the voyage is too long for us. It would ensure our legacy, and it would also be conducive to defense... we'd start to establish a buffer zone between us an other potential alien civilizations... the best defense is a good offense and all that. If we start an expansion program, we're less likely to be swallowed by an alien's (for that matter, if we encountered aliens more primitive than us, I'd hope we'd study them, rather than exterminate them). When you think of other possible technologies, like bussard ramjets, the travel time (especially due to time dialation), shrinks a lot. Then if you consider a civilization that has some sort of collective consciousness (borg like?), then its even more likely that they would find it worthwhile to expand. Generally, the overall picture of life, is that it expands where it can. Why should technological civilizations be any different?

You're assuming that species never leave their home system. Any species that has mastered nuclear fusion will have the capability to colonize the entire galaxy in ~10 million years. If there was some alien species, spread throughout the galaxy... munching/mining on rocks in orbit around Alpha/beta/proxima Centauri, communication with them would be quite easy. So that means either: Earth like planets are very rare, or its very unlikely that we'll achieve controlled fusion before we destroy our planet, or are wiped out by some other event. One a species has fusion powered spacecraft, I'd say they are very very likely to persist, I can't imagine any extinction event that would wipe out a species/civilization that spans multiple stars - short of a concerted extermination effort by another sentient species. Either planets like ours are rare, or we're very very very likely doomed to self annihilation, or some combination thereof.

So I wanted your thoughts on this fusion drive system I've added (duplicating stock part models and changing their stats and names). I was basing it around a dense plasma focus reactor (I think these need more development, they look much more promising than toruses from what I've read). Anyway, these reactors #1) are approaching the conditions needed for P-B11 fusion, #2) are acheiving fusion rates of toroidal and ICF reactors many times their size, and thus wouldn't need to be scaled up as much to break even, #3) produce an ion beam stream that can be directly used for high ISP thrust, or decelerated against a magnetic field for direct generation of electricity. So my system has 5 parts: 1) A P-B11 fusion Reactor 2) A High ISP "nozzle" consuming P-B11 fuel 3) A 1/10th ISP high thrust engine consuming P-B11 fuel and Xenon gas 4) A P-B11 fuel container 5) Stock Xenon containers To make my fusion system work, I've added a resource "IonBeam" generated by the reactor, so you can only run 1 of the 2 engines at once. As for the stats.... I decided my reactor would be 50% efficient... or rather that it generates 2x as much power as it consumes - so it only has to decelerate the ion stream enough to remove 1/2 its kinetic energy. Given KE = 1/2 mv^2, this means approximately an ISP of approximately 70% the maximum listed over here at atomic rockets: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#hbfusion That results in an ISP of 70,000 (!!!) Next, I decided that a net output of 500 Megawatts was "reasonable", and a reactor weight of 3.5 tons was "reasonable", and calculated how much thrust I could get with that much power, at 70,000 ISP.... Skipping the calculations (I can show if you want)... I arrived at 1,428.6 Newtons... or 1.428 kN -> which I rounded to 1.5 kN.... 3x the thrust of the games Ion Engine (though these ion engines are already unrealistically powerful for gameplay purposes, since you can't time warp with active engines) - with a much much worse T:W ratio. Going back to 1/2mv^2 ... if you lower your ISP by 10x, you can increase your thrust by 100x... so I figured I'd do that, so I did some technobabble about how a high energy ion beam is used to superheat the Xenon propellant into a plasma... And I figured this system would be ~80% efficient.... so I made another thruster, this time with only 7,000 ISP (1/10th the max), and instead of 1.5 kN, I multiplied that by 80.... 120 kN of thrust.... Now we're talking:) It uses the Nuclear engine model, and adds another 1 ton (reasonable I think). You'd be surprised how many Xenon tanks you can go through with such an engine... but it easily achieves SSTO. It seems a bit OP'd I'm not sure this 1/10th ISP, 80x thrust engine is a good idea.... seems a bit unrealistic... but I did the math... and it seems to me that if one assumes a 500 MW reactor that fuses P-B11 (If you used Helium3-Deuterium, you'd get even higher ISPs!) is reasonable... then it seems this would be the result... maybe I need to crank up the reactor weight......

Suppose that Fusion power is achievable and practical (I'm very optimistic about Dense Plasma focus designs). A spacecraft with a Propellant: total mass ratio similar to the Saturn V, propelled by a fusion powered design, would be able to achieve speeds of a significant fraction of the speed of light (like 20% !!!). The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across... if you can get a spacecraft going 20% of the speed of light... suppose they save some delta V, and average 10%.... thats across the galaxy in a Million years.... life has been here on Earth for roughly 4,000 million years. Suppose during that time that they get bussard ramjets (at least for braking after accelerating using fusion propellant, allowing them to use more to accelerate and less to decelerate)... they'd likely get even faster speeds. Of course, speed to traverse the galaxy is not the speed it takes to colonize it.... lets assume that they spend roughly 10x as much time developing a colonies, as they do traveling to establish new ones (not unreasonable when traveling even at 10% the speed of light means voyages of hundreds of years)... 10 million years for a space faring civilization with fusion power to colonize the galaxy. Considering how easy it would be to move about a solar system with fusion, they may prefer asteroid belts and small moons to planets with large gravity wells - a completely space faring civilization - They could be everywhere, and they wouldn't need to hide their presence... like a single planet species might want to ensure its not discovered (as another single planet species may decide to kill it with a KE impactor to eliminate the threat, before the same thing happens to them). There's plenty of time for aliens to visit, and there's little reason to hide. Also consider: * The first generation stars, and their planetary systems would be deficient in the heavier elements needed for life. * The conditions at which life can exist, are not necessarily the same as those which allow for abiogenesis to occur (indeed, if the "radioactive beach" hypothesis is correct, and the major contributor, life could be very rare) * The conditions that allow for life are not the same as the conditions that allow for complex life possessing high metabolisms (Ie, even if Europa is habitable, no space faring life will evolve there * Life may not necessarily evolve in the direction of intelligence. There wasn't really any major evolutionary innovation between the end of the Permian, and now, as far as I can tell (ie, high metabolism, limbs that could be easily adapted to manipulate objects, brain structures), yet 300 million years passed before we have a species that has a chance at achieving fusion powered (or better, ie, antimatter) space flight. * The "habitable zone" around red dwarfs (by far the most common star type) means any planet there would be tidally locked... meaning no thermal cycling from day and night cycles (may have been important in abiogenesis). It also means that the atmosphere will need to be pretty thick, or almost entirely absent .... the night side will be extremely cold, and the atmosphere will freeze on the night side, and be locked away in icy deposits... or the atmosphere will need to be thick enough for sufficient heat transfer/insulation to prevent this * The emission spectrum of red dwarfs is primarily in the infra red, combined with the requisite thick atmospheres, and absorption spectra of gasses, there will be little opportunity for direct photosynthesis, which will limit the complexity of life there, and its not unreasonable to think that these conditions preclude space faring life. *larger stars burn out faster... for 3.5 out of nearly 4 billion years of life on earth, we didn't even have macroscopic multicellular life. This is an exceedingly long time frame, and given the replication time and expected diversity of life at that scale (its not like we're sampling only mammals, and looking for something very specific like verbal communication with grammatical structure), so I'd say on other earth like planets, its probably going to take a similar time - although this time is likely highly altered by the prevalence of extinction events - you want enough to break out of evolutionary local maxima, but no so many that ecosystems and diversity are constantly collapsing. * Our star only has about another billion years or so before its output increases to the point that Earth will be hostile to complex life. Life on Earth has gone 80% of the way through the usable life time of our star, without producing a space faring species. We have a chance to be that species... but it also seems likely we may wipe each other out, and set earth's ecosystem and life back so much it may be another 300 million years.... given our use of fossil fuels, I'd say we're Earth's only shot, and we're perpetually 1 major war away for annihilation. * Any civilization that decides not to expand, will be at a severe disadvantage to one that does expand. There will be strong selection pressure towards expansion (just like there was towards self replication during abiogenesis) Given the lack of heavier elements, we can conclude life likely didn't arise until billions of years after the big bang - when enough stars had gone super nova. We can also assume that it would be another 2-6 billion years for life to evolve to become space faring (assuming we are on the threshold, and applying a +/- 50% time scale to our own) - which may be too long. I'd say generally only G and K type stars would have a chance of producing spacefaring life. Given the time frames, its not unreasonable to think that we're one of the first (in the cosmic time scale) in our galaxy. Even if we take the metallically requirements and evolution rates into account.... I still see no reason we couldn't have had space faring life in our galaxy a billion years ago.... so If that life takes 10 million years to spread throughout the galaxy. That still leaves it as a 1% chance that we are here during the "expansion" phase of another civilization. So lets say thats unlikely. That means - there are no other space faring civilizations that possess fusion drives in our galaxy, or they're leaving us alone and we can't detect them. I think its highly likely that a species that gets to our technology level either a) destroys itself, or develops fusion power very rapidly (cosmologically speaking, even if its 10,000 years from now). Thus, a variant of "the rare Earth hypothesis" is what I conclude to be the most likely to be correct.