/sci/ - Science & Math

>implying there aren't intelligent races in the galaxy way more advanced than us

>>2719661
>implying there are

With the speed of light being the limiting factor, a universal (no pun intended) government seems extremely inefficient
Most likely every star system will have it's own, mostly independent government

If we're ever to make it that far, we need a fundamental paradigm shift.

No longer can we be as the molecules that make us are, replicating and competing with our own progeny for resources. We have to make our purpose the attainment of new knowledge. Exploring.

No need for bullshit politics if we make it to that point. Getting the rest of mankind on board with the idea probably ain't happening though, friend.

>>2719671
>implying you know there aren't

arrogance everywhere.

>>2719661
Depends on what generation the sun is.

>>2719653
As a whole? The political formation of humanity will be competing with each other.

The simply odds of probability would make it inconceivable that there aren't intelligent creatures other than man out there.

there will be no overall political organization. The distances are wayy too large.

But a society that tries to take the galaxy will be highly religious. There is no other motivator for spending the trillions of dollars required for interstellar travel.

I'm waiting hopefully for Scientology to found a SpaceOrg branch.

>>2719724
POWER is the motivation
unlimited power

Probably the same as now. Hundreds of different groups, all being dicks to each other and starting shit over nothing.

Politics.

Politics never changes.

>>2719769
You really think we'll be exploring the galaxy on that path?

>>2719775
People explored the world that way, which would have been the greatest leap into the unknown at that time. There will never be a one world government, people hate each other just too much and the cultural differences, despite the cancer of Anglo culture, are just too great.
As soon as practical space travel becomes possible, everyone will be at it. Within centuries every rock within tens of light years will be flying a different flag and shouting at another rock other trade violations.
Any attempt at an interstellar empire will fail, for the same reason the brits lost America from the empire - distances and times too great, too much centralised control to be effective for the local situations, attitudes between colonies and earth will be too different, and most importantly people resent being told how to do stuff by people who aren't there.
The best you can hope for is some kind of vague alliance or commonwealth type arrangement

/thread

non-structual cooperation through metaphysical communication by the higher beings we will become

>>2719833
America broke away from the british empire due to dumb shit like "the production of shovels is outlawed" and other crap. The Empire wanted the colonies to be a big customer base and was outlawing production, raising taxes, and then expected highly taxed people not making any money to buy East India and other companies shit.

But other than that you are 100% correct. Different people, different ideas, and going somewhere else to do your own thing is the best thing to do in that situation.

>>2719769
>>2719775
Yeah that is pretty much how it will go. There is not such thing as FTL communication or travel so it will be like the days of ancient empires IN SPACE. Roman and China both had absolute control over their spheres of interest but didn't come into conflict because they were to distant to wage war on each other.

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion can get us to the stars at a maximum velocity of 0.1C assuming that you have to decelerate again, if not you can reach 0.15C which will be important for latter. Also we will assume that there is no faster than light travel. Because that would open up another can of beans since humanity could convert an amount of mass equal to the observable universe into human flesh in 6,000 years if the 1994 population growth rate could be maintained. And it could be maintained if the superluminal travel would allow humans to access new resources fast enough.
So assuming that you could send out self replicating probes that would travel at an average velocity of 0.1C and that it would take each probe 100 years to make a 100 copies of itself each time that they entered a new stellar system, you could still visit every stellar in the Milky Way in under 1 million years. If theses probes carried humans or mechanized human descendants then our civilization could also spread as quickly. Even if we discount confined fusion as an energy medium for a reaction engine, hydrogen/antihydrogen reactions could still be used and we know they would work if there was enough antihydrogen. The solution to that being solar powered particle accelerators orbiting in the inner solar system. They would take in hydrogen from the solar wind and produce antihydrogen using abundant energy. A laser assisted launch could also increase the acceleration of outgoing ships of any type if a large solar powered array of lasers with an output greater than a petawatt was used.

>>2719950
We'll probably colonized and dominant the galaxy in the next million years or so, and their will be a few little interstellar pocket empires that can be controlled because the stars are only a light year apart. But these little empires will usually just threaten each other with relativistic kill vehicles. Occasionally there will be war and a few hundred billion people will die, but that is the price of living in the wider universe.

Aliens of course must be exterminated, and we should focus our aggression on them when possible. But since they haven't already conquered the galaxy with technology we could make today they are either:1)nonexistent in the Milkyway or 2)total pussies that don't like imperialism.

>>2719958

You think we could take on hundreds or even thousands of alien races that have more advanced technology? Get real.

Just think about how much more there is to OWN!

>>2719950

> There is no such thing as FTL.
Herp derp.

Seems like Galileo died in vain. People will still believe in dogma, regardless of the evolution of science.

>>2719972
It takes more exotic matter than the entire mass of the visible universe and more energy than Jupiters mass converted directly to energy with no wast as per E=MC^2

also
>Derpty derp I'm a faggot that insists on my space opera pipe dreams instead of using proven engineering to get shit done. I want my FTL magics.

>>2719972
Dogma is slightly different to the fundamental laws of physics
The speed of light isn't like the sound barrier, the other example people use.

>>2719971
ALL THAT EMPTY SPACE WILL BE MINE!

OK, so maybe FTL will be invented someday. But let's assume not. Also, let's assume we don't get cryogenics, because let's face it, even if you manage to freeze somebody without forming ice crystals which shatter their delicate biomolecules and such, you still have the problem of AWAKENING THE DEAD when you unfreeze them.

Then we get to the stars in ships that take decades to get there. This means, most likely, hollowed out asteroids carrying hundreds or thousands of people. The distances are so great, that they can't really interact physically. Maybe different star systems communicate, but they form dramatically different cultures.

God it sounds awesome.

>>2719661
yes, but the distances are so great that it's vastly more probably that either they or us will be extinct in the time it would take to cross the void

>>2720061
It would really suck to be a woman on one of those ships

>>2719969
More advanced technology doesn't stop a relativistic kill vehicle from hitting your planets. The position of an object moving faster than 0.12 C cannot be determined by a stationary observer, physics says so. So they cannot be intercepted.

You would program probes to seek out life bearing exoplanets and crash into them an top speed, which for nuclear pulse propulsion is .15C if you burn all the fuel and don't plan on decelerating. And if you programmed those same probes to accelerate toward any repeating, terminating radio signal and crash into the source body you could all target intelligent species. For that matter you could have them detonate there bomb stockpile before impact to scatter relativistic shrapnel cones at space habitats.

When probes or colonists arrive at a new stellar system they should create several thousand non-replicating rvks and launch them at any non-human derived transmissions they detected in salvos of ten thousand or so. That would ensure there are enough rvks to soften up the civilization being targeted. Then you could just invade with colonization ships. And if those vessels used confined reaction engines they could use the engine exhaust as a weapon to attack enemy forces as they decelerated into the system. Now it will probably take hundreds of years of relativistic bombardment and several waves of invading colony ships to invade a stellar system. But a stellar system is worth the effort, and better in the hands of men than aliens.

>>2719972

>Seems like Galileo died in vain.

Galileo had evidence and then made a claim. There is no evidence FTL travel is possible, if you want to do some research and prove that is untrue you'll be a very famous man.

>>2719972

You seem informed, when did /sci/ become the New Age beerhall?

>>2720079
They way we defend ourselves from these sort of attacks would also be our long term survival strategy. Completely disassemble the all the rocky planets of every stellar system we can get access to and use that mass to build Dyson Swarms of space habitats around the local stars. That way we can continue to survive around those stars until they burn out, which in the case of the lowest mass red dwarfs would be about 120 trillion years. The largest lofstrom loops possible with current engineering can lift 500 million tons a year and since you could only fit about 1000 on earth it would take nearly 10 million years to disassemble the planet. But it can be done only with proven technology, no super materials or new energy sources needed. You could power them using huge convection towers that contain liquid halite, which would be heated by the hot lithosphere you are uncovering. And of course the job would only get easier as the planet is taken apart: less gravity, more heat being radiated, more materials for building and maintaining the loops. That said you still have to use nuclear pulse propulsion to move the material for the first loop into orbit, about 2 million tons of it. But with nuclear pulse propulsion that is doable. We can conquer the cosmos with only what we know today, no soft scifi stuff needed. It will just take a very, very long time. Now of course you can't disassemble stars, or for that matter high mass objects like gas giants. But the earth sized planets or at least large portions of their lithospheres can be consumed.
The Launch Loop - A low cost earth-to-high-orbit launch system LOFSTROM, K H AIAA, SAE, ASME, and ASEE, Joint Propulsion Conference, 21st, Monterey, CA; United States; 8-10 July 1985. 1985

the only possible way a one world government would come into existance is if we, humans, as a collective entity found an enemy that required all of us to band togheter to destroy it.

Ofcourse though, after that I'm pretty sure we'd continue to our old ways quickly. It takes multipile such occasions to actually form a true "one world" government. You can see the unification process of Europe as reference.

First WW1, then WW2, then the cold war and now we might get close.

>>2720131
Do you ever think about the innernet helping out in that regard?

In 2011, I can speak with a Libyan right now, through my laptop, not through my state dept. Young people of today have a powerful, powerful communication tool never before seen.

>>2720099
COLONEL! Where have you been i keep trying to get a hold of you! We must chat!

>>2720144

Yeah that's all fine and dandy until you start trying to figure out a common form of governance. People of different cultures are too different to try and lump them all togheter, conflict WILL be the invetable result.

>>2720105
This wold make our stellar systems difficult to effectively lay siege to, since the number of space habits ensures enough survivors to repel most invasions.

And we aren't seeing any stars dimming as they are surrounded by dyson swarms so it is safe to say that no one else has been actively pursuing this strategy at least in our half of the galaxy.

The most important thing is to get out there and start securing stellar systems. If we find any aliens controlled stellar systems even an uncoordinated attack by several human controlled systems is better than just one.

We really need to preemptively declare war on the entire galaxy and have a million year lead on anyone else that starts launching berserker probes to be sure that we are not attacked in an unacceptably vast fashion.

FTL is exactly like the sound barrier
physics has not been solved and our first solutions might not be correct

>>2720153
That is a terrible idea, and once we present ourselves as the hostile aggressors we mark ourselves as a target.

Sun-Tzu still applies in space. Play the defensive game first, wait until the enemy presents itself, then swat down the extended arm of their aggression and... next step depends on exactly what the fuck they are.

>>2720150

And where have you sir been? Every time I saw you I was like "Hey Boomer were you trying to get in touch?".

Jeez.

Well anywayas, IRC as usual. I just made a #sci channel in undernet.org because I can't bother you with looking for this 'tarded new nickname.

>>2720201
Physics is NOTHING like the sound barrier. The "Sound Barrier" was a nice term for a benchmark engineers set for themselves. Anyone seriously interested knew it could be broken, it was just a question of who would do it first.

The "Lightspeed Barrier" is much more of a fundamental obstacle. It cannot be overcome with simple a more powerful engine. All signs point to "apparent FTL" only, without true FTL. And even then, only because no observation has yet ruled out a few limited forms of "apparent FTL". As science advances it actually does more to rule out possibilities than confirm them. To overcome these obstacles requires accepting them and being clever, not denying their existence.

I just want to get to space so we can have flight sims in space that aren't either ridiculous like Freelancer or overly complicated like that one that's never ever gonna come out that's like five times more complicated than LOMAC

... /sci/ should make a space game.

In order to even get there we need a planned economy

I wonder how dogfighting will work in space. I bet it'll be more like air combat is on earth rather than like naval combat like TV shows and movies always show, maybe with a few big ships in the background like aircraft carriers or those really big flying carriers and superplanes in Ace Combat

>mfw thrust vectoring, thrust vectoring everywhere

>There is not such thing as FTL communication

Really quantum entanglement somehow dosen't work now?

Also implying there will be no FTL communication by the end of 2100... seriously look how much we advanced since the 60s, did a world wide interconnected infrastructure for information seem possible? Petabytes of data storage and PETAFLOPS of processing power?

NOPE. They sure as hell didn't. In the 60s they didn't even know about DNA.

>>2720316
yes they did

>francis & crick
>1962

>>2720316
>Also implying there will be no FTL communication by the end of 2100... seriously look how much we advanced since the 60s, did a world wide interconnected infrastructure for information seem possible? Petabytes of data storage and PETAFLOPS of processing power?

FUCK

YOU

PIC MUTHAFUCKIN RELATED

>>2720316
>quantum entanglement somehow doesn't work now

IT NEVER WORKED! Why do people think it's real!? I'd call you a troll, but too many people in real life actually believe that bullshit, so you might legitimately think that.

>>2720326
Well they didn't in 1960 and 1961.
Plus they really didn't know much about it then now did they. It was just a beginning.
And in 2010 we made life. Artificial life.

we're already the dominant force in the galaxy.

galaxy and universe are not interchangeable terms.

>>2720299
>>2720284
THREAD NOW ABOUT SPACEFIGHTS

NOT LIKE IT WASN'T BEFORE BUT NOW IT'S MORE ABOUT ACTUAL FIGHTS THAN POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY

>>2720348

>And in 2010 we made life. Artificial life.

Not reaaaaaallllyyy.

FTL Communication.

Build a metal rod, longer than 1 light year, stretching from one destination to the next.
One end, poke out Morse code with the metal rod.
Message reaches destination instantly.
Congratulations you have instantaneous communication, FTL.

>>2720348
"cloning" has been around for a while, bro

>>2720339
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Could you please explain why it doesn't work?
Because we still can't do it in economical way?
Is it because the concept doesn't work?

Are you also skeptic of carbon nabotubes? Do they also not work?

>>2720360
>BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

>>2720376
Oh, so you are a troll. Nevermind.

>>2720376

1 - When an entangled pair collapses, it does so randomly. The "end state" is random, that is. So anyone on the receiving end will not know what is being sent to them. Quantum communication is indistinguishable from background noise.

2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

I can link to Wikipedia too!!!!1!

>>2720370
>>2720375
They took a cell bacterial membrane and inserted artificially made DNA into it and technically made the first man made lifeform.

It's like let's say taking a hull of a car and building a motor and interior tech for it.

>>2719972
I'm not going to start a shit storm but he was by all accounts a devout catholic who was shocked that thee church opposed his teachings. By all means he was an apologist for the dogma you speak of. His daughter whom he loved very much followed her father's wishes and became a Nun.

My Sources
http://galileo.rice.edu/fam/maria.html
Sharratt, Michael (1994). Galileo: Decisive Innovator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

>>2720214
Not when you take into account how quickly a relativistic civilization can spread. You yourself have to spread everywhere and check the spread of others if you don't want to be swamped.

>>2720397
And I can link back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication

It's theoretically possible.

>>2720372
actually the rod would just break. It would be pushing against itself not even at the speed of light, but more at around the speed of sound and likely just shatter under its own resulting compression.

... I think.

>>2720411

Okay, you're a troll.

Back to the science.

Has anybody other than me read this great book? I mean, I know Charles Pellegrino gets a lot of hate due to the PhD thing, and for generally being a hack, but that guy saved me from my luddite anti-societal ways and turned me into a humanity-fuck-yeah transhumanist ;_;

True story ;_;

>>2720372
That wouldn't work because
>1. It's from a trollscience pic,
but more importantly,
>2. Any reverberations that are sent down the pole would eventually dissipate.
That, and such reverberations WOULD NOT TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT.

>>2720382
IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU GET SHOT IN THE TRADE LANE LIKE THE DOG YOU ARE.

>>2720439
Dismissing ideas that work mathematically but can't be yet proven by experiments.

Sure is SCIENCE around here fag.

In the far future a living starship of human descent begins breaking maneuvers so that he can decelerate into an orbit around the binary system have has traveled to using a hydrogen-antihydrogen annihilation engine that produces thrust by heating reaction mass(usually water) with the matter-antimatter reaction and ejecting striped hydrogen and oxygen nuclei out the engine's exhaust cage. It was a journey like countless others that his ancestors had made in ages past. But this time as he began his deceleration 5 years ago he encountered something never before recorded in the history of his race, a repeating but terminating electromagnetic emission in the radio frequency. This would not have been an unusual thing, if not for the fact that the stellar system he was entering is not recorded as being colonized.

Even with all his computing power it takes nearly a year to decipher the first signal, for it does not correspond to any transmission format utilized by his ancestors. The transmission is simply jumbled inscrutable audio. As he draws closer to the origin of the signal, something changes and now an obvious visual signal is being transmitted with the audio. And he sees them, beings utterly unlike in contour and behavior to any of this own forbears. They are simple little things, with simple little machines. But his kind began in the same fashion. Indeed according to his archives, the first craft capable of interstellar travel was a nuclear pulse propulsion vessel based on a design drawn less than 60 standard years after the invention of radio. It is amazing what intelligent life is capable of, and it is even more amazing that even with the light speed limit interfering with communication between the disparate and often mutually hostile human colonies, no one has ever reported evidence of an existent intelligent species not descended from the venerable Homos sapiens sapiens. As these things are now, his kind once was. As he is now, they might one day become.

>>2720468
Deep within his labyrinthine mind of circuits and wires an ancient protocol is activated. It is a reaction as old as his race, and so infinitely useful that it has endured the forgotten eons of evolution and redesign his kind have undergone. Several thermonuclear detonations ring against his hull as his attitude adjustment system spins him. A few moments latter equivalent detonations occur to halt his tumble. He is once again aligned for a breaking maneuver. He increases the force of the magnetic confinement fields around his exhaust cage to further collate the plume of stripped nuclei his petawatt engine is about to emit. He does a final calculation to ensure that the plume with strike the planet that from which the transmissions still poured. He knew from the wars of his own kind that the plume would displace a portion of the planets upper atmosphere about 350 kilometers wide with the force of several megatons per second. Over the course of a minute the collated core of the plume would tunnel through the atmosphere and contact the planet's surface. He knew that the planet had a magnetic field and therefore a molten core. The plume would burn its way down to the asthenosphere, which would then explosively outgas and expel ultramafic extrusives, covering 10-15% of the planets surface.

His engine fired. For these beings were like unto men, and therefore were a threat to him just as all his own kind are. But they were not of his species and therefore that threat was not tempered by the desire to exchange information, designs, or genetic material in the tradition of his race. And more than that, he had no love for the idea of sharing the stars with another species, for the stars of providence of Mankind alone.

>>2720441
you're not tapping the metal rod. you're pushing it.

Congratulations, you have FTL communication.

>>2720435
unbreakable metal rod

>>2720466
>can't be yet proven by experiments.
that's sorta a really important part, bro

>>2720480
even then it'll only move at like, the speed of sound.

You're better off just using a radio. This is like using a courier with an F-15 instead of just sending an email.

>>2720485
"Tapping" and "pushing" the rod are both instances where you're moving the rod; they're only of different magnitudes. The atoms at one end of the rod would not instantaneously move when atoms at the other end move. If anything, it would snap in half from the applied forces due to its massive length.

>>2720496
It is, that why you don't dismiss them you remain open about them until they're proven wrong, thats how scientific theory works.

People laughed at the theories that predicted something like a big bang, a few years ago people laughed at theories that suggest something byeond the big bang today they don't.

>>2720480
>unbreakable

We are talking about the physical universe here. Reality does not reflect what you whip up in your head.

>>2720531

"FTL hasn't been proven to be impossible, so it must be possible." This is different because, it has.

>>2720485
Sound is a compressional wave idiot that's why it travels through fluid mediums like air. Pushing equals compression doffus.

Also >>2720477 hard scifi humanity fuck year!

>>2720531
>have theory
>theory proven wrong by experiments
>NO NO NO I AM NOT GOING BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD THIS SHIT WORKS I KNOW IT *breaks down crying in dingy apartment with incomprehensible math scribbled on every wall in fading chalk*

>>2720341
>2100

if humanity survives till then

The next total war will be a dark one for sure.

>>2720569
>The next total war will be a dark one for sure.

>>2720544
"FTL hasn't been proven to be impossible, so it must be plausible."

This is what I am saying.

Also for fuck sake didn't the last century of innovation and discoveries kind of prove the point that we can't say for sure that something can't be done until we actually try it a lot of times.

>>2720583
Not like this.

Living things can move under their own power, so surely, we can create machines that work automatically. Thus, we make engines.

Flight was possible, we could see that. Birds and bees fly just fine, so surely, we can replicate that. Thus, we make planes.

We ourselves can do math, and know enough about electronics that we can make simple devices that calculate things. Thus, we make complicated turing machines.

We know that we have these computers, and that things can be plugged into other things, thus we have networking.

However, we don't see things travel faster than light, so it's not so immediately apparent that we can figure out how to do that.

>>2720579
the gulf war did not take place in a nutshell

"BAWWWWWWWW, winning using superiro technology to totally assrape enemies is bad. Except for the part where it gets you what you want with less expense, casualties, and risk. But still it's BAD M'KAY"

The best war is the war your side winnings quickly, cheaply, and with the least losses. The best wars are always a slaughter.

And that slaughter shall be visited upon the xenos ten fold.

Pic: note intentional misspellings are intentional, it's a troll image after all.

>>2720649
>"BAWWWWWWWW, winning using superiro technology to totally assrape enemies is bad. Except for the part where it gets you what you want with less expense, casualties, and risk. But still it's BAD M'KAY"
>mfw this post

illiterate /k/ommando spotted, that's sorta not it

>>2720622
Exactly we calculated black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, and white dwarfs existed with math even before we observed them. But we can't calculate an effective way to move faster than light that doesn't require more mass than the hole universe and more energy than the galaxy emits in a day. And most of those are latter proven to be bad math in the first place.

We could see fission tracks in uranium ore, we understood half life and radioactivity. With these we realized what fission is capable of, but we have never observed a particle exceed c in a vacuum. And we have never seen space fold into a tunnel.

We need data, we cannot make bricks without clay. Just making up bullshit and wish fulfillment won't cut it.

>>2720622
While you do make a point... you just dismissed everything that on the size of a molecule and less.

Yes it's true most of the things we do are based of nature even the idea of splinting atoms and a lot of things, but really just because you can't see air dosen't mean it dosen't exists. We have yet to find particles and maybe even dimensions that might enable us to use FTL communications and I dare say FTL travel.

And that not to say mathematically FTL communications doesn't impossible but actually plausible. I'm not saying it does exist I'm saying it could well exist based on the math for it. There universe creation theories that span 10 dimensions. Dosen't mean they exist but they could, just as well as the fact that you and everything could be made of 1 dimensional stings.

>>2720761
Um, we inferred molecular and atomic structure through centuries of chemistry and tinkering. You can determine the valance state of an element by seeing what other elements it forms compounds with.

Once again we have never observed superluminal behavior under any circumstance.

The problem everyone has with the FTL fetish is that we don't need FTL and their is no prospect for ever getting it. So until we find something that indicates it is possible we should just use relativistic travel. We have 120 trillion years until the last red dwarf burns out, even propagating at an average speed of 0.01C we could still conquer the universe in under 1 trillion years. So lets go for it. There is not reason to sit around and wait for some magic FTL breakthrough that may never come.

this all begs the question of "why the fuck do we want to go to space"

>>2721027
Because we are supposed to have balls. For sake of exploration! When did mankind lose this sense of adventure? Yearning for knowledge?

FOR THE EMPEROR!

We'd simply burn the heretics.

Bump