Proxima Centauri

[Diche Bach]

I think some handwavium is inevitable. The trick is to place it at the right point in the narrative that consumers who would spit out their coca-cola laughing if you present it too soon maybe will just roll their eyes and (assuming they have already bought in to the story) roll with it.

I'm thinking that: since Proxima Centauri is rather distinctive to its two sisters, it did not evolve in situ and rather represents a migrant star which was captured into the orbit of the Alpha sisters at some point in the distant past. Probably lots of problems with that? But like I said, some handwavium is essential. The initial sub-relativistic nano bot probes made some preliminary discoveries that hinted at this and a decade later, a second wave of probes confirmed it. While it was hotly debated, the idea gradually emerged that this star and its children had been captured at some point in the distant past, though no consensus could emerge about how long ago that happened nor which direction it came from (mystery).

The initial surface robots (which arrived two decades after the second wave of nano probes) provided confirmation that it was captured migrant star and that much of the solar system didn't make any sense (exceptionally dense planet with remarkably potent magnetosphere). Some laser ablation samples suggested that the composition of some surface igneous rocks were off the charts in one way or another and that was enough to drive the scientist crazy. All kinds of whacked out theories emerged and it was decided pretty clearly that, even though the planet was no "Eden" (but then again the Oort cloud in the Alpha system was even worse), the planet was really worthy of additional intensive study and in particular a surface robot capable of doing extensive drilling and lab analyses of mineral samples. This took another few decades (all of this is background to the game btw, not upfront stuff) and revealed the presence of several elements in the "stable island" zone, the Holy Grail!

By the time the player unravels all of this, he/she will have played the game for hopefully 20 to 50 hours depending on their personal pace, so if the fact that the half-lives don't make sense occurs to many hopefully it won't be too jarring.

[KerikBalm]

Now that I think about this.... going interstellar to mine some super heavy elements in the island of stability... is basically part of the plot of Avatar. They outright called it Unobtanium, which many people should have recognized as being just as scientific as saying that they were there to mine "handwavium"

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unobtainium

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum?from=Main.Handwavium

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MineralMacGuffin

This would be basically the same, you're going to pandora proxima b to mine unobtanium superheavy elements in the island of stability. At least this way there is some attempt to explain what the plot device is and why it is rare... even if it is wildly optimistic as to how stable these elements would be, and its handwaving away why proxima b would have them but a neighboring solar system would not.

[Green Baron]

Yeah, but Avatar (i do like the film !) is more about morale than scifi, the latter being only the setting. It is like Conquest of Paradise or The Last of the Mohicans:

Evil, greedy white man ready to kill for gold/land/unobtanium ("do not obtain") against pure nature loving indigenous folks.

Always makes for a nice story :-)

 

Edit: the main "problem" of scifi is that there is an idea, a premise, a notion and now we are looking for a reality that fits best. On the way physics and nature is shoved aside or the rules relaxed until it fits our idea.

That is okay, but don't continue looking for natural explanations once you have constructed your system/ship/resource thing, your world has become a fantasy world on the way and nature can't help out any more.

Edited November 8, 2017 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

Never saw Avatar, but what I had in mind seems a bit less priggish and laden with moral certainty; leaning more Fallout (the original) or MadMax (the original) than anything Disney would ever conceive of funding these days. If one thing is obvious from looking at Pewdiepie's numbers over time: Disney are fools for leaving so much money on the table. Hell, Minecraft: zero virtue signalling at all and enormously popular.

[Diche Bach]

9 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Edit: the main "problem" of scifi is that there is an idea, a premise, a notion and now we are looking for a reality that fits best. On the way physics and nature is shoved aside or the rules relaxed until it fits our idea.

That is okay, but don't continue looking for natural explanations once you have constructed your system/ship/resource thing, your world has become a fantasy world on the way and nature can't help out any more.

Well, I could just "say" that the planet is rich in minerals, so rich that: within a framework of diminishing resource abundance (still there but hard to get to) it was deemed worthy of a mining colony. Leave the handwavium out of altogether and hide behind "supply and demand" and "increasing competition" and "recent history of wars destroying ever increasing quantities of materials."

As KB pointed out, the Sol System is abundant with booty, but within 200 or 300 years of the "Solar System Mineral Rush" initiating, those abundances may not look quite so "abundant" anymore to any particular entity and especially to an entity which found itself unlucky, slow at the starting gate, or kicked out as a result of a preceding war, etc.

2017: Germany has no problem buying as much petro products as it wants

The picture was rather different in the 1938-1939s, at least from the standpoint of the pedant government. They didn't want to BUY their oil they wanted to OWN it, and they felt they deserved to do so, thus: Stalingrad. Obviously the reasons to declare war on the USSR were far more complicated than that, but the point is: scarcity can be "artificial" and lead decision-makers to extremes of decision making which are irrational, risky and horrific.

We still have "plenty" of gold right here on Earth, but they are digging deeper and its economics are becoming more constrained all the time. Assuming no change in technology, safety standards, etc., there could come a point where it literally is more economical to mine rare earth minerals from rocks in space than from boiling hot layers of rock kilometers below the surface of Johannesburg. That same logic applies to all the resources in the Sol System, though the scales of "diminishing return" are obviously quite enlarged.

ADDIT: Oh Jebediah, the lengths that forum designers/programmers go to prevent "mean talk" . . . so the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  were best likened to "pedants" were they!?  Right!

Edited November 8, 2017 by Diche Bach

[Green Baron]

I fail to see the link to pedants in Germany 3 generations ago and i do not want to go deeper into that terrain.

Today's major states in Europe (i mean France and Germany and maybe the Brits return) are rather busy planning a more sustainable future, energy and transportation wise. I hope those efforts last a little longer than a legislative period because it might lead to leading technology.

As to the projection what is up or down in 2-300 years, i can't participate because predictions are difficult, especially those regarding the future (that has become my standard slogan :-))). But i sure know (as a former archaeologist) that the past has never been a blueprint for the future. Human subsistence have gone through major changes and not all were leading to something more desirable than before, but since the invention of division of labour and overpopulation the older ones always pushed the challenges over to the next generation, so those after us may have other problems than spacey dreams.

Who knows what people need or not in 300 years, maybe few are left, maybe they live between the planets. Probably rather the former than the latter. Maybe Holy Elon withdraws his plans for BFS next year because they don't work out or he runs out of money. What if we ran out of visionary billionaires :-) ?

 

I mean, if you're into scifi writing then construct your world and don't care too much about plausibility. We'll find the inconsistences :-) Even The Marsian and Interstellar are full of "Oh no that's not how it works !", who cares ? If the story is nice, the plot somewhat understandable, the characters recognizable then go and find a publisher :-)

[DAL59]

The only problem with the Martian is the one storm at the beginning though.  Way better than any other film for accuracy(except for 2001).

[magnemoe]

14 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Yeah, but Avatar (i do like the film !) is more about morale than scifi, the latter being only the setting. It is like Conquest of Paradise or The Last of the Mohicans:

Evil, greedy white man ready to kill for gold/land/unobtanium ("do not obtain") against pure nature loving indigenous folks.

Always makes for a nice story :-)

 

Edit: the main "problem" of scifi is that there is an idea, a premise, a notion and now we are looking for a reality that fits best. On the way physics and nature is shoved aside or the rules relaxed until it fits our idea.

That is okay, but don't continue looking for natural explanations once you have constructed your system/ship/resource thing, your world has become a fantasy world on the way and nature can't help out any more.

Loved Avatar, its an serous lack lack movies of catgirls in fur bikinis, catgirls in fur bikinis flying dragons and fighting gunships  In an petty hard sci-fi setting 

Now if you look past the catgirls and the cool stuff you find some issues, first pushing the spaceship to .7c doing 1.5g would require an Kardashev scale 1+ civilization. 
Your main pollution is heat, energy is pretty much free and pollution free, you can remove pollution by making plasma of it, this adds heat. 
All the energy make you wealthy, very wealthy compared to US and EU today, this solves lots of problems and creates others. 

Unobtanium had been nice, however underground mining would resolve the entire plot. Or simply mine another place.Both issues is standard on earth. 
You also don't need it based on your tech level still its nice. 
And they mined one spot and hit one tribe on the entire planet. this has zero impact, Yes the locals reacted violently as they have an right to do.

The gripping hand and the stuff you want to fight an war over is the soul transfer at the end, create an avatar like your younger self, transfer into it.
Ask any old dictator "do you want to live forever young"

Out of hands long ago so pulls tail hard: the goddess  who did the soul transfer and defended the planet felt far less natural than the keyboard I write on now. 
Now the sentinel forest and the flying mounts with the neural usp makes far more sense as an construct, 
The na'vi was the previous miners. No I have no idea how to handle the issue outside of changing underwear. 

[Diche Bach]

Publishers? Pfft! Who needs 'em!? Valve can take their cut for handling distribution and to some extent marketing and pricing. If I manage to get a reasonable prototype running (and secured via every trick of encryption, scrambling, obfuscation and trickery I can muster) I may be able to raise enough funds to hire some artists, musicians and editorial staff to give it beautification before it goes alpha. But this first one is just me, and if that means it is only Distant Worlds Universe grade in looks, well so be it. Dwarf Fortress looked even worse and that one has a cult following.

Anyway, I do appreciate you guys providing feedback to help me make more informed design decisions!

[Green Baron]

Oh, sounds cool !

[kerbiloid]

Please, don't forget that the extraterrestrial mining will become possible, say, decades later.
And it will require more advanced technologies than the humanity has now.
This, in turn, means that this will happen after the human industry will become totally automated, so not so much humans would be required to run the equipment.
In fact, this means that only a few of colonists could do something useful.

(Like on the Earth, where the most part of humanity will stay unemployed.
Not so many people are so nerdish to make science, not so many of them are enough talented to make arts, not so many are enough healthy to look at them as at sportshumans.)

So, we can expect a growth of IRL-MMORPG lifestyle and a raise of non-rational motivation, such as eclectic cults, downshifting groups and life-long roleplaying societies.
In this case, at some stage of the technological development, we can expect some amount of semi-autonomous thematic colonies founded by different "marginal" * groups.

Their social and economic models could widely vary, being based on non-rational motifs. Say, farming "natural" potatoes and turnips in an artificial ground heated by a fusion reactor.
Only high priests can speak with the reactor spirits, while others operate with shovels and pickaxes.
Makes no sense? Just look around.
"Why in the space?" (Not to offend somebody). Why a salt lake deep inside a rocky desert?

(Catgirls in fur bikini on spacesuits would be possible, too, but less probable, unless they are a supervillain guards.
But of course, any such society should be enough rich and serious to have a lot of money to spend them on the colony creation.
So, unlikely catgirls would really be in trend. Look too dubious for a respectful cult.)

* "Marginal" - neutrally speaking, i.e. "not mainstream". **

** Though, many of them would be "marginal" not only neutrally speaking.

On 07.11.2017 at 10:46 PM, KerikBalm said:

Well, the medium-rich person who is financing the interstellar ship (and who will presumably be a passenger on it) likely doesn't want to work on his own. So why not bring slaves err prisoners. Even if they aren't prisoners... (S)He could say "its my ship, I can charge you whatever I want for the life support and shelter, my fee is 100% of what you produce"... the workers/slaves/prisoners would get O2, food, and water. The ship owner gets everything else. The system becomes his/her family's massive fiefdom.

So, the practical suggestions have already started.
 

On 07.11.2017 at 10:49 PM, Diche Bach said:

ADDIT: and about those magical heavy elements . . . I'll have to read this a couple times for it to sink in (and consult other basic primers to refresh knowledge of simple concepts) but, short takeaway: IF such things were to be found in a distant place like Proxima:

1. What would they be useful for?

Spoiler

 

On 07.11.2017 at 7:33 PM, KerikBalm said:

25% CO2 atmosphere (although I think it would actually be much higher). Significant water loss has occurred, leaving not a lot of liquid water on the surface. It freezes at night, it all evaporates during the day, so its just got liquid water near the terminators. The loss of water is disrupting its plate tectonics, which (combined with the slow spin) is weakening its magnetic field. The planet is in entering a death spiral... on the geologic time scale (here, we're winging it to say that it lasted this long, since it seems to be on the order of 4.5 to 5 billion years old). Its still got millions of years more or less in its current condition. Its too hot at noon to go out, too cold at midnight to go out, but dusk and dawn are fine. Agriculture is done mostly in hydroponics underground to protect against the temperature swings. Living space is also underground, but at least the colonists can go outside for a couple days every ~11 days. They can mine for thorium/Uranium for power, or just have massive solar farms to supply power (given that most solar panels have absolutely terrible efficiency with IR light ... I'm not sure how well we could make solar panels which use very high frequency UV light). When going outside, they need to keep their skin covered, and wear a respirator because the high CO2 concentration can rapidly cause hypercapnia, but at least pressure suits aren't needed. The atmosphere itself protects against Xrays and charged particles (even if that strips away the atmosphere over time).

A typical colonist's outfit*

Spoiler

*The wand is optional.

Edited November 9, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Diche Bach]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Please, don't forget that the extraterrestrial mining will become possible, say, decades later.
And it will require more advanced technologies than the humanity has now.
This, in turn, means that this will happen after the human industry will become totally automated, so not so much humans would be required to run the equipment.
In fact, this means that only a few of colonists could do something useful.

(Like on the Earth, where the most part of humanity will stay unemployed.
Not so many people are so nerdish to make science, not so many of them are enough talented to make arts, not so many are enough healthy to look at them as at sportshumans.)

So, we can expect a growth of IRL-MMORPG lifestyle and a raise of non-rational motivation, such as eclectic cults, downshifting groups and life-long roleplaying societies.
In this case, at some stage of the technological development, we can expect some amount of semi-autonomous thematic colonies founded by different "marginal" * groups.

Their social and economic models could widely vary, being based on non-rational motifs. Say, farming "natural" potatoes and turnips in an artificial ground heated by a fusion reactor.
Only high priests can speak with the reactor spirits, while others operate with shovels and pickaxes.
Makes no sense? Just look around.
"Why in the space?" (Not to offend somebody). Why a salt lake deep inside a rocky desert?

(Catgirls in fur bikini on spacesuits would be possible, too, but less probable, unless they are a supervillain guards.
But of course, any such society should be enough rich and serious to have a lot of money to spend them on the colony creation.
So, unlikely catgirls would really be in trend. Look too dubious for a respectful cult.)

* "Marginal" - neutrally speaking, i.e. "not mainstream". **

** Though, many of them would be "marginal" not only neutrally speaking.

So, the practical suggestions have already started.
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

A typical colonist's outfit*

  Reveal hidden contents

*The wand is optional.

Damn. Those are some interesting ideas kerbiloid. I don't think I've ever encountered a futurist fiction that tried be so unintuitively "realistic" as well as "naturalistic." I might have to think how to incorporate some of that stuff.