For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[tater]

7 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Cool, but i doubt that slowly turning in ones own thoughts leads to new insights. Unconscious people don't think, or do they ? 

Yes, they dream. I recall that (and this might be superseded) the thought was that dreams help move short term memory into long term memory.

I suppose an experiment has been done n the case of coma survivors--do they have any psych issues? Did they in fact get input while comatose (if so, perhaps people in some similar state on a spacecraft have 12 hours a day of audiobooks, etc piped in)? I have no idea, but 800 years in that state would magnify any issues if there are any.

[Green Baron]

15 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

You are aware of what happens to frogs, bats, etc. when they hibernate? Your level of knowledge of biology is sufficient for you to conclude that those processes cannot be modeled for application in humans?

Yes. And what happens to humans when they hibernate ? Well, yeah, until proven to be wrong.

Quote

LOL, slowing aging is no problemo!

Yes, it is a problem. Read the paper. Edit: a problem that could be overcome to prolong life to 105-110 years. Which already happens in some areas. There live a few (not many) >100yr old here.

Quote

The fact that you obviously have zero knowledge of this well-established empirical generalization (which has existed for decades) and yet seem to feel that you are sufficiently well-informed to dismiss science fiction which would leverage these sorts of natural phenomena is what I find remarkable.

Personal stuff with missing arguments ... what to do with it ?

Quote

Like I said: I always thought you were a pretty cool, pretty knowledgeable and likeable person, but for some reason you are feeling particularly pedantic, argumentative and dismissive today 

I am sorry, but i am not the one here who is looking for a fight ...

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

19 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Yes. And what happens to humans when they hibernate ? Well, yeah, until proven to be wrong.

Yes, it is a problem. Read the paper.

Personal stuff with missing arguments ... what to do with it ?

I am sorry, but i am not the one here who is looking for a fight ...

If you are not looking for a fight then why did you start one?

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Sorry to hail in, we know perfectly that we can only freeze a body to be dead meat. If it will someday be possible to freeze and revive is pure hope. Medicine and physics say no.

Perhaps the fact English is not your first language is what accounts for your rudeness and lack of comprehension?

Quote

"Yes. And what happens to humans when they hibernate? Well, yeah, until proven to be wrong."

Same with every technology that has ever gone from imagined to real . . . your efforts to stand firm with whatever position you've taken have the appearance of  diminishing good will and increasing defensiveness from my standpoint.

Quote

"Yes it is a problem. Read the paper . . "

. . . what does this even mean? Are you suggesting to me that you are fully versed in the sciences of senescence and caloric restriction, else that you read that entire article in the time lapse between my pointing it out to you and you responding?

ADDIT: no need to read the whole thing, nor to spend 20 years of your life reading such things broadly, just read this:

Quote

Since McCay's initial documentation (McCay et al., 1935), calorie restriction has endured 80 years of research to stand out as the most robust dietary intervention to extend average and maximum lifespan and delay the onset of age-related pathologies (Anderson and Weindruch, 2012). The effect of CR on longevity is conserved across a diverse range of species from unicellular organisms such as yeast to nematodes, invertebrates and mammals. To date a range of factors have been associated with the beneficial effects of CR, a small subset of which are discussed in the next section. As with any pursuit in medical research, confirmation of the translatability of beneficial outcomes established in studies of short-lived rodents species to humans is the litmus test. The translational gap from lab to clinics can be bridged by studies in nonhuman primates, which share a high degree of similarity to humans. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) share 93% identity with humans at the genetic level (Zimin et al., 2014), and are highly similar in anatomy, physiology, and endocrinology (Colman and Anderson, 2011). Average lifespan for rhesus monkeys in captivity is ~ 26 years of age and the maximum lifespan reported nationally is ~ 40 years of age. Importantly incidence and prevalence of age-related diseases and the impact of age aligns nicely for humans and rhesus monkeys. Unlike rodents, rhesus monkeys display patterns of eating and sleeping behavior that mirror those of humans, and the aging trajectory is gradual, also like that of humans, beginning in middle age. In contrast to human studies, rhesus monkey studies can be designed to facilitate comprehensive monitoring of subjects and strict adherence to the study protocol. Given the high degree of translatability and the tractability in study design, nonhuman primates are a vital link between basic research and clinical application.

To investigate the translatability of CR's beneficial effects from rodents to primates, three independent rhesus monkey studies were initiated in the late 1980's. Two of these studies are ongoing: one at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the other at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center based at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison. The third study, performed at the University of Maryland reported favorable effects of CR, although the study was focused on obesity and glucoregulation with only a small cohort designated to CR (Bodkin et al., 2003). At the UW, the 25% restriction intervention in a cohort of 76 adult monkeys was associated with significant improvements in morbidity and mortality (Colman et al., 2009). These findings contrasted with the report from the parallel NIA study, where a difference in survival was not observed between groups within the cohort of 121 monkeys, although a trend toward lower morbidity was reported for CR monkeys compared to controls (Mattison et al., 2012). A subsequent report from UW suggested the gap between control and CR was not as great at NIA as for UW (Colman et al., 2014), indicating that comparisons between studies might paint a different picture as to the efficacy of CR in primates. This turned out to be the case (Mattison et al., 2017). Two major differences in study design included the timing of onset of CR and in the implementation of the diet. At UW CR was introduced in adults whereas at NIA CR was initiated separately in juveniles and advanced-age animals. CR did not confer a survival advantage in young onset animals; however, the old-onset NIA cohort, although not different between control and CR within the study, were long-lived compared to UW control fed monkeys. This was reflected in lower bodyweight, lower adiposity, and lower food intake, that for both control and CR paralleled the food intake of UW CR animals. The voluntary lower food intake of old-onset controls resulted in little separation between control and CR monkeys and yielded exceptionally long-lived monkeys. Six of the NIA old-set cohort lived to 40 years of age and one lived to 43 years of age, a record for rhesus monkeys in captivity. A common outcome of both studies was the significant delay in the incidence of age-related morbidity among CR animals. The take home message from this joint initiative is that CR delays aging in primates, where lower food intake is associated with improvements in health and survival. The implications of this work are broader, first that aging in primates can be manipulated, supporting the concept that aging is a valuable target for intervention and eventual clinical application, and second, that the mechanisms recruited by CR to impinge on aging will likely have utility in the development of treatments to delay or abrogate age-related disease vulnerability.

With evidence that CR is effective in long-lived species the next question is whether its beneficial effects and mechanistic underpinnings are conserved in humans. The hallmarks of mammalian CR include lower adiposity, increased insulin sensitivity, favorable lipid profiles, and increased levels of the adipose-derived hormone adiponectin. Short-term studies of CR in humans have been conducted as part of the multicenter study (CALERIE) in 2 phases. In the first phase of CALERIE studies (CALERIE-I), the metabolic effects of 6 or 12 months of CR was evaluated in overweight individuals with a target level of restriction of 20–30%. Favorable changes in body weight, body composition, glucoregulatory function and serum risk factors for cardiovascular disease were reported in CR individuals (Most et al., 2016). These outcomes were consistent with those reported for monkeys on CR (Edwards et al., 1998, Ramsey et al., 2000a), indicating species-conservation in the CR response. The second phase longitudinal CALERIE-II studies investigated the long-term (2 years) effects of 25% CR in healthy lean individuals. Results from CALERIE-II studies published so far indicate that the beneficial metabolic effects of CR observed in the 6-month CALERIE pilot studies are sustained with prolonged restriction in energy intake at 12 and 24 months. CR individuals displayed metabolic adaptation with reduced total daily energy expenditure at both 12 and 24 months and lowered resting metabolic rate after 12 months of CR (Ravussin et al., 2015). Reduction in metabolic rate has been previously linked to weight loss in humans (Kinney, 1995), and similar outcomes were reported for the early stages of the monkey CR study (Ramsey et al., 2000b) but were resolved over a longer time frame (Raman et al., 2007, Yamada et al., 2013) indicating this is likely another point of conservation in the CR response between humans and nonhuman primates. Unlike rodents on CR, circulating levels of IGF-1, cortisol, sex hormones and GH secretion were not altered in humans in both CALERIE clinical trials. Insufficient reduction in calorie intake (~ 11% CR versus the planned 25% CR) could explain some of the discrepancies on CR-induced metabolic changes observed in CALERIE compared with rodent studies; however there is also the possibility that these are species-specific differences in the CR response. IGF-1 and growth stimulating hormones did not differ between control and CR monkeys on 25% CR at UW (Ramsey et al., 2000b), and an independent study at University of Oregon reported no difference in sex hormones with CR implemented at a similar level (Sitzmann et al., 2010). Overall, these studies are highly suggestive that CR's effect on aging is translatable to humans and confirm that nonhuman primates do indeed bridge the gap between human and rodent studies.

and now tell me again about how we understand "perfectly" that induced low-metabolic or "hibernation" states will have no effect on aging and subjects will suffer degeneration all the same.

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

 . . . Anyway, aging is not stopped. They'll waste away anyway.

 

Edited October 15, 2018 by Diche Bach
elaboration of comment/question

[Green Baron]

Interstellar travel is hard to imagine with hard scifi. Are we giving up that condition, do i understand that (at least that ;-)) correctly ?

21 minutes ago, tater said:

Yes, they dream. I recall that (and this might be superseded) the thought was that dreams help move short term memory into long term memory.

I suppose an experiment has been done n the case of coma survivors--do they have any psych issues? Did they in fact get input while comatose (if so, perhaps people in some similar state on a spacecraft have 12 hours a day of audiobooks, etc piped in)? I have no idea, but 800 years in that state would magnify any issues if there are any.

I know we are getting slightly esoteric here, but if the brain works, there is metabolism and there is aging. So, if we keep them in a state where we can fill them in we'll risk them getting seriously sick or dying of old age (despite optimal no-problemo nutrition ;-)), correct ?

I think it'll be better to go with your first suggestion, human - machine - human transition. Saves life support for centuries and also makes for a nicer story. Like girl wants to go back to human, boy wants to stay machine ...

 

Not responding to personal attacks any more ...

 

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

4 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Interstellar travel is hard to imagine with hard scifi. Are we giving up that condition, do i understand that (at least that ;-)) correctly ?

I know we are getting slightly esoteric here, but if the brain works, there is metabolism and there is aging. So, if we keep them in a state where we can fill them in we'll risk them getting seriously sick or dying of old age (despite optimal no-problemo nutrition ;-)), correct ?

I think it'll be better to go with your first suggestion, human - machine - human transition. Saves life support for centuries and also makes for a nicer story. Like girl wants to go back to human, boy wants to stay machine ...

 

Not responding to personal attacks any more ...

 

You should be respectful and restrained in your claims to only those you actually have reasonable knowledge basis to make, if you do not want the quality and veracity of your arguments to undergo attacks.

You do not know what you are talking about and you are not okay with just admitting that and saying "Ah my bad. I didn't know about that."

Edited October 15, 2018 by Diche Bach

[tater]

6 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

I know we are getting slightly esoteric here, but if the brain works, there is metabolism and there is aging. So, if we keep them in a state where we can fill them in we'll risk them getting seriously sick or dying of old age (despite optimal no-problemo nutrition ;-)), correct ?

I think it'll be better to go with your first suggestion, human - machine - human transition. Saves life support for centuries and also makes for a nicer story. Like girl wants to go back to human, boy wants to stay machine ...

Yeah, that's where I think I am on this as well. The point being that even if you could put people in a novel, low metabolism state, over the vast timeframes we're talking about, I don't see how they don't die one way or another, and even if they could live, I'd worry about their mental health, lol.

I think that uploading people makes more sense. I think. Maybe. LOL.

[Green Baron]

3 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

"Ah my bad. I didn't know about that."

But i did know about it, where is the problem ;-) About freezing being impossible, therapeutic cooling not being feasible for prolonging lifes (we have been through that in this forum before), nutrition being a basis for avoiding early aging or prolonging it to >100 (but not much) years. Because it takes place.

I really do not see the problem you are having with me. And i ask to stop your attacks on me.

[Diche Bach]

22 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, that's where I think I am on this as well. The point being that even if you could put people in a novel, low metabolism state, over the vast timeframes we're talking about, I don't see how they don't die one way or another, and even if they could live, I'd worry about their mental health, lol.

I think that uploading people makes more sense. I think. Maybe. LOL.

I've been studying the broad interdisciplinary area of human biopsychology since the late 1970s. I've been studying computer science since early 2016.

In my opinion, we are CENTURIES from having even the most basic necessary understandings of human psyches to be able to "upload" people.

We are in contrast, already placing people (routinely) into a variety of altered states of metabolism and consciousness, as well as restoring normal states to people who have for reasons of disease or trauma been plunged into degenerative states (e.g., "death"). The problems of regulating metabolic state so as to induce a kind of "stasis" are already being solved, though still in elementary degrees. These problems have immediate real world benefits with real economic value (e.g., saving people from disease and trauma) and short of ethical constraints, budgetary limitations are always going to be minimal. The central problems are ones with molecular biology which are readily approached through both in vitro studies and in vivo nonhuman  studies and where there will always be populations of near-death humans with whom to gain "last-ditch" advances in knowledge.

As such, we may only be decades from having sufficient technology to gain functional benefits from placing humans into prolonged metabolic stasis (aka, "cyro-stasis") for various purposes.

18 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

But i did know about it, where is the problem ;-) About freezing being impossible, therapeutic cooling not being feasible for prolonging lifes (we have been through that in this forum before), nutrition being a basis for avoiding early aging or prolonging it to >100 (but not much) years. Because it takes place.

I really do not see the problem you are having with me. And i ask to stop your attacks on me.

Have I attacked YOU? Could you point out to me where I have engaged in an ad hominem against YOU?

From my standpoint, I have reacted to your egregiously rude, dismissive, and frankly ill-informed and pedantic commentary, which, as I said, is perhaps a consequence of English not being your native language?

Edited October 15, 2018 by Diche Bach

[Green Baron]

30 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Have I attacked YOU? Could you point out to me where I have engaged in an ad hominem against YOU?

From my standpoint, I have reacted to your egregiously rude, dismissive, and frankly ill-informed and pedantic commentary, which, as I said, is perhaps a consequence of English not being your native language?

Yes, you did. With calling me "not well informed" and presenting me a youtube video of a hopes and dreams company. After i states that freezing is not an option in a hard scifi environment. And you keep on attacking me despite me trying to deescalate. And i didn't even initially respond to you, but to @Spaceception. You keep on questioning my being able to express myself, being ill informed and pedantic. Well, i can accept the latter ;-) But only that ! The rest is just not very friendly.

Maybe you found my "no youtube accepted" rude and dismissive, i already said that i am sorry if that was misunderstood. Hard scifi needs a basis that should be discussed in science as being feasible, on the horizon, experimentally worked on. Like fusion energy for example, though it is maybe a generation or more away. But as we have seen interstellar travel is hard to imagine without some or even a lot of handwaving.

Peace ?

[Diche Bach]

3 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Sorry to hail in, we know perfectly that we can only freeze a body to be dead meat. If it will someday be possible to freeze and revive is pure hope. Medicine and physics say no.

Agree. But you don't need to freeze a body to put a body in stasis! Medicine and physics say YES to putting people into various types of stasis routinely.

[tater]

47 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I've been studying the broad interdisciplinary area of human biopsychology since the late 1970s. I've been studying computer science since early 2016.

In my opinion, we are CENTURIES from having even the most basic necessary understandings of human psyches to be able to "upload" people.

We are in contrast, already placing people (routinely) into a variety of altered states of metabolism and consciousness, as well as restoring normal states to people who have for reasons of disease or trauma been plunged into degenerative states (e.g., "death"). The problems of regulating metabolic state so as to induce a kind of "stasis" are already being solved, though still in elementary degrees. These problems have immediate real world benefits with real economic value (e.g., saving people from disease and trauma) and short of ethical constraints, budgetary limitations are always going to be minimal. The central problems are ones with molecular biology which are readily approached through both in vitro studies and in vivo nonhuman  studies and where there will always be populations of near-death humans with whom to gain "last-ditch" advances in knowledge.

As such, we may only be decades from having sufficient technology to gain functional benefits from placing humans into prolonged metabolic stasis (aka, "cyro-stasis") for various purposes.

I would concur on the centuries for uploading, I'm not one of those people who see it happening any time soon. That said, I think stasis for people is likely just as far off. There's a reasonable chance that really understanding the brain might be an AI complete problem (ie: we'll understand it only some point after we can replicate it in a machine).

I agree that certain kinds of stasis (medical coma being an early attempt) at least have real life economic incentives (which increases likelihood). On that end, I'd say that so does simply maximizing human lifespan. Many people would pay rather a lot for that.

[Spaceception]

6 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

So . . . less massive materials, more powerful bombs (per bomb mass), else some means to "multiply" the propulsive force of each bomb (like e.g., an energy field projected along the surface of the blast absorption plate that was calibrated to have repulsive reaction to the polarity of the blast wave?) could all increase the total viable velocity?

1

I know you guys are knee deep in cryonics, but I missed this.

You don't want your Orion ship to be lightweight. You want it to be heavy (To a point), akin to a sub. A lighter ship could be torn apart by the numerous nuclear blasts. And a heavier ship would smooth out the blast.

And while a bigger bomb is better, you will hit a cap eventually, where it'd likely just tear your ship apart. There's probably a reason the charges detailed on Atomic rockets never seemed to exceed 30 kilotons, and were usually half that.

But again, you'd eventually get diminishing returns.  I don't think you could get past a 0.05 c coasting velocity.

[K^2]

12 hours ago, monophonic said:

Have you considered how your technique behaves in non-trivial acoustic environments e.g. surface duct or bottom bounce conditions? And especially when some emitters are in a different region from others?

(a quick reference of sound paths for those who want one: http://www.oc.nps.edu/~bird/oc2930/acoustics/summary.html )

I've not! I was actually unaware of that sharp drop in the speed of sound at SLD. I fully expected density to vary, and I would anticipate significant lensing because of it. However, so long as the scales involved are much greater than distances between ships, the sound should still propagate just as if it departed from false source. Same deal with bottom bounces, so long as there is sufficient depth.

SLD throws the wrench into this, however. It's at just the "wrong" kind of depth, which is comparable or less than distance between the emitters, to interfere with phase array approach. Intuitively, I'd expect this to still work, considering three cases. Sub is in surface duct, and won't get anything useful from its sonars anyways due to all the reflections. Sub is in the shadow zone, and doesn't get anything useful. Or sub has direct path, and should see the false sources without any problems.

What could be wrecking it is if some of the emitters are in the shadow, allowing the sub to get a bearing on true sources. I can't possibly do this in my head or even on paper, though. I might need to write a simulation to actually test this. I've been meaning to play around with DX12 RT API, and this could be an interesting use case for it. I'll see what I can come up with.

Thanks for pointing it out! I had no idea sharp temperature drop on top of steady density increase produces such an interesting speed of sound curve.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Another possibility (for sci-fi) is near immortality of humans, combined with artificial hearts. Stop the passengers organs, then hook them up to a blood oxygenation machine which is (insert handwavium here) and can oxygenate blood much more efficiently than a biological heart. Then put everyone to sleep for however long you want. I'd suspend disbelief for that, although I'm far from an expert in how animals work. I'd suspend disbelief for cryonics as well, though.

[K^2]

31 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Stop the passengers organs, then hook them up to a blood oxygenation machine which is (insert handwavium here) and can oxygenate blood much more efficiently than a biological heart. Then put everyone to sleep for however long you want.

Sans reproduction, animal cells have inherently limited shelf life due to thermodynamics, chemistry, and background radiation (take your pick). Something is guaranteed to go wrong if you try to keep it up for astronomically significant times with overwhelming majority of neurons within the brain. Ability of neurons to be replaced is limited as is, but if you're going to have to recycle most if not all of them over the duration of the flight, keeping the brain in sleep is not an option. Without information updating as you replace neurons one by one, you'd be doing a hard wipe. And this is assuming you managed to get them to regenerate in the first place. So you could think to keep the brain in a slow dreaming state, allowing it to repair not just the cells, but also the information. And here we run into additional limitations of how the brain works, where we lose synapses over time as part of design. This is how we learn and how a lot of our memory works as well. If you allow that to keep happening, over astronomically significant time you'll end up with a senile old brain at destination at best, no matter how good your repair efforts are. And if you start repairing synapses, we're back to hard wipe scenario.

This is why we have cryogenics as an idea. Keeping the brain at very nearly absolute zero would prevent any of these things from happening. Even effects of radiation will be limited. Albeit, you'll have to deal with accumulated radiation damage upon arrival somehow. Of course, all of the standard problems of cryogenics follow, not least of which are very strictly limited by thermodynamics.

Alternatively, you could change how brain ages and repairs itself, as well as how it manages to hold on to information while retaining plasticity to learn new things. We'd have to do this if we want to attain anything like immortality, but we'd be literally redesigning human mind from ground up. Not only are we nowhere near even imagining where to start, but it also brings us into the depth of transhumanism of which it's very hard to even speculate.

Unless we figure out FTL, people who will spread through the stars will not be human in any sense we think of it now. That's if we don't wipe ourselves out first.

[James Kerman]

@Diche Bach Another longevity option that might add an interesting sub plot could be genetic editing or modification like CRISPR technology.  While this is still nascent tech at the moment the potential is there to extend lifetimes and prepare your colonists for the conditions they will encounter at their destination.  Of course this could all go horribly wrong™.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4343198/

https://www.genome.gov/27569222/genome-editing/

 https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/genomicresearch/genomeediting

[kerbiloid]

The nanites could be living in the body repairing cell damages.
But probably they are not closer than fusion and cryonics.

Also this doesn't give answers to the mainest questions: "what's mind?", "is mind limited with a puny set of chemical reactions in a handful of slime appeared from the ocean mud (and where was mathematics there)?", "how much could we replace in brain still having the same mind there?", "how great is the mind capacity?", "can two minds interact directly without senses?" and so on.

Probably these questions can be answered only by terrible vivisection experiments with hands in blood up to shoulders, performed by a hi-tech civilization.
So I guess, it's a question of the next century.

Edited October 16, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

Found a somewhat up-to-date study or better collection of ideas on interstellar travel.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323810028_Concepts_for_Deep_Space_Travel_From_Warp_Drives_and_Hibernation_to_World_Ships_and_Cryogenics

Tl:dr: Colonizing other bodies outside our solar system is many hundred years away. Practicing in our system would be the first step.

 

Interstellar travel stays a fiction for now ...

[ARS]

Quote:

"The main cannon is a dye laser beam cannon. A dye laser has color added to the medium used to oscillate the laser. By switching between media, the laser can theoretically create light with any wavelength, from ultraviolet to visible light to infrared. Every substance absorbs different light wavelengths (=colors) to a different degree. This weapon applies that principle by searching for the most efficient wavelength, and then sets the laser to that particular wavelength, which allows it to use the laser's energy to it's fullest potential. The principle of searching for that particular wavelength is for example applied in spectroscopy, where a light signal is used to determine these wavelengths for a specific sample and thus identify its composition. This laser cannon can choose the laser that will have the most effect on the enemy armor after it has finished its optical analysis, granting it more power against the target."

Is that... Possible? Increasing the laser's power by adjusting it's wavelength based on target's armor color?

Note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye_laser (For reference)

Edited October 16, 2018 by ARS

[tater]

6 hours ago, James Kerman said:

@Diche Bach Another longevity option that might add an interesting sub plot could be genetic editing or modification like CRISPR technology.  While this is still nascent tech at the moment the potential is there to extend lifetimes and prepare your colonists for the conditions they will encounter at their destination.  Of course this could all go horribly wrong™.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4343198/

https://www.genome.gov/27569222/genome-editing/

 https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/genomicresearch/genomeediting

Gene drives are certainly an interesting plot device, and could potentially be a way to simply increase lifespan, as well.

[p1t1o]

2 hours ago, ARS said:

Quote:

"The main cannon is a dye laser beam cannon. A dye laser has color added to the medium used to oscillate the laser. By switching between media, the laser can theoretically create light with any wavelength, from ultraviolet to visible light to infrared. Every substance absorbs different light wavelengths (=colors) to a different degree. This weapon applies that principle by searching for the most efficient wavelength, and then sets the laser to that particular wavelength, which allows it to use the laser's energy to it's fullest potential. The principle of searching for that particular wavelength is for example applied in spectroscopy, where a light signal is used to determine these wavelengths for a specific sample and thus identify its composition. This laser cannon can choose the laser that will have the most effect on the enemy armor after it has finished its optical analysis, granting it more power against the target."

Is that... Possible? Increasing the laser's power by adjusting it's wavelength based on target's armor color?

Note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye_laser (For reference)

Whilst tuning a laser wavelength to match target absorbance would increase energy-on-target (but not actually the radiated "power") the description is a little off.

The dye is the lasing medium, it is NOT the case that there is a lasing medium and you add a specific dye to it to change the lased wavelength, then changing the wavelength by changing the dye.

However, a dye medium can be "tuned" to a range of wavelengths, but in a fairly narrow band (give or take ~100nm).

 

It is correct that "changing the media" can change the wavelength, but "changing the media" is equivalent to "use a different laser", so its a bit moot IMO.

 

What you are looking for is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser which uses electrons as the lasing medium and can be tuned over almost the whole EM spectrum - theoretically including the X-Ray region (though Im not sure if this has been achieved in practice)

 

***NB: Oh I just read that the dyes used can be liquid, so the medium can be switched out, but this can also involves switching out the optical components as well (lenses, mirrors etc.) An FEL still offers greater EM range and utility.

Edited October 16, 2018 by p1t1o

[magnemoe]

20 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Like the soda company? I read somewhere they were asked by General Atomic at some point for a bomb delivery system for the ship. Do you have a link to it?

I don't know the book, but I found this https://www.patrickstomlinson.com/2013/10/08/coca-cola-and-nuclear-bombs/

Coke Engineer (being held in a basement in Area 51): “So, you want us to build a vending machine that can throw out several thousand, 300lb, 6 inch diameter ‘Soda cans’ once a second?”
Air Force General: “Yes, my airmen are very thirsty.”
CE: “You’re building a nuclear bomb machine gun, aren’t you?”
AFG: “No!”
CE: “AREN’T YOU?”
AFG: “…yes.”

Autoloaders for 6" shells are pretty common, larger has been build on warships", Orion is far simpler as you just load into an linear accelerator not an gun turret who rotates. Common designs was to use multiple drum magazines. 

Having the shock absorbers and trust plate guarantee to last trough the burn is probably more of an problem than loading. 

[ARS]

19 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

It is correct that "changing the media" can change the wavelength, but "changing the media" is equivalent to "use a different laser", so its a bit moot IMO.

It is indeed using different lasing medium. Basically a basic laser emitter with revolver-based mechanism that mounts different lasing medium based on color spectrum. When enemy color has been analyzed, it'll switch to the most appropriate lasing medium before firing the laser (The main point of this weapon is rapid adaptability to different targets on various color spectrum on the battlefield with emphasis on ruggedness)

[Terwin]

22 hours ago, tater said:

So you have replicated a brain in a machine format such that you can DL human experience (a leap, but one people actually seriously talk about in timeframes from decades to hundreds of years) as one tech. Robotics as another (and computers small enough to hold human consciousness fitting within), and growing mammals outside a mother as yet another. Those 3 techs might actually be easier to suspend disbelief on than cryo.

Downloading human minds and computers that fit into a robot body are not really needed for this:

Just one computer(probably with back-ups) with a few expert systems(Ship Maintenance/repair, Navigation & object avoidance, Take frozen embryo and turn it into a functional young adult starting at a pre-determined time before arrival)

With several types of drones to be controlled by those systems.(welder drones with magnetic wheels, interchangeable tool drones, multi-spectral analysis drones, etc)

At that point you only need technology to close the gap between test-tube babies and survivable premature births.(at least for the first(female) babies, after that you can just implant the thawed embryos)

20 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

Agree. But you don't need to freeze a body to put a body in stasis! Medicine and physics say YES to putting people into various types of stasis routinely.

The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system entropy increases during all spontaneous chemical and physical interactions.

Long-term stasis would require taking a human body(in part or in whole) and either preventing any physical or chemical interactions *at all* (implausible even at absolute zero), or find a way to remove all entropy generated by those processes(including the extraction process).

The *most* plausible way to do this is to slow or stop the relative passage of time for the system you wish to protect.(it is plausible because this is already believed to happen near the event horizons of black holes and as normal matter approaches the speed of light, while blocking or extracting entropy within a normal time-flow of a complex system is more akin to magic than science fiction)

Also, when reading this thread, it seemed to me that @Green Baron was making an honest effort to provide the requested information to the best of his ability, while  @Diche Bach seems to be perceiving some suggestions that disagree with the desired hypothesis as personal attacks.  Please remember that text is without tone or inflection, so any time you feel attacked, try imagining the same words delivered in a droning monotone by a bored lecturer to an equally bored class of 300+ students, and if in that context it no longer sounds like a personal attack, then there is a good chance it was not actually a personal attack.

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, Terwin said:

The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system entropy increases during all spontaneous chemical and physical interactions.

Though the closed system is like a material point. Never happens irl.

Edited October 16, 2018 by kerbiloid