/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11344257
>Do you eat much air anon?

plants do.

but they are plants, and I'm a mammal, so your strawman doesn't make much sense, does it?

but then, you already knew that, didn't you?

but you go ahead and play dumb, since that's what you love to do.

>>10623384
Preaching to the choir here, but Star Trek didn't make good point that you needed such paragons of virtue precisely because those tech are ridiculously dangerous. There were just here to justify the plot. Teleportation itself was just a ways to save money.

Schlock Mercenary is literally built as a Reverse-ST, our "peaceful explorer" became mercenary, their starfleet is ridiculously corrupt and those techs are used as weapons anytime they can be. But as a result the plot is built precisely around those tech and extremely regulated.

>>10623469
The original claim started by using LASER-powered photon-sail which are functionally no different from laser weapon.
http://www.larryniven.net/kzin/worlds.shtml

Now, this still work the same for most speculative spaceship propulsion, narrowing the exhaust does provide benefit: The more you send in an exact direction the less kinetic energy you lose. The effectiveness is just a ratio between the mass added to focus and the propellant lost due to spread.

The point isn't that they make the best weapon, it's that they can be used as one and kill people who forgot that an unregulated transport spaceship is one captain away from being a weapon.

>>10623515
No that's not a comparison. It's that something don't have to look like a weapon for you to be deadly.

How small can you make a human society while it's still valid and sustainable? Too few people and they'll start going batshit. From some old stuff I've read, two hundred or so was considered a good low number, but that was from the fifties or so.

Second question: If you can upload entire human personalities to computers as AIs, how many of them can you substitute for people? How important is physical contact and presence for people's sanity?

The question is for a science fiction story I'm working on. A ramjet style ship that will spend years isolated from civilization. The ship doesn't need to be genetically valid, just keep its crew sane.

Picture tangentially related.