The Archangel Syndrome v1/v2 (Page 11 of 25)

Wormgate?

Very good write up. Did Hinklee win the Nobel Prize?
How about slingshot?

I have a question about the number of worlds and population for my story's galaxy. Currently the 60 most populated worlds make up over 95% of the total population of 50B. Those are small numbers, but I did it that way because I felt terraforming would be a very long and dangerous process, with a high failure rate. This was based on research I did years ago. Specifically, humans can really only colonize worlds that already have a breathable atmosphere, which basically requires at least some pre-existing lifeforms, most notably to produce oxygen. So, at a minimum, there would be microbes, which could be lethal to humans. Terraforming a planet involves transporting huge quantities of soil from an existing terraformed world to support early colonists and to seed the soil conversion process on the new world to support the growth of human crops. However, because of the pre-existing lifeforms, human colonies usually get wiped out from exposure to incompatible lifeforms. Although humans keep attempting to colonize other planets, the failure rate is very high. They've been at this for 1,600 years with little progress.

I was considering making the terraforming process more successful, with at least one trillion people on many hundreds of worlds. However, one limiting factor is the fact that New Bethlehem is supposedly highly strategic to both the Realm and the Imperium because of its huge reserves of unspecified natural resources. By the time Apollo becomes emperor, the Imperium is on the verge of financial collapse and some see conquering New Bethlehem as a way to buy time. That logic works when you only have 50B people and 60 planets, but doesn't make much sense if there are hundreds of colonized planets and thousands more already identified for future colonization (and mining of resources). Under those circumstances, New Beth becomes much less important. One way around this is to make New Bethlehem one of the major sources of some rare element needed to power stardrives to use the star portals.

I'm leaning toward doing the latter, although I wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on the two options.

Thanks
Dirk

That's a huge undertaking, though, to make a dead planet with no oxygen and soil livable. It's also gotta be able to hold an atmosphere. Mars, for example, can't hold an atmosphere long term.

If you have to limit yourself to planets with an existing breathable atmosphere generated by microbes and plants, then you have to risk contact with alien life forms. Terraforming a planet with existing life on it could easily be lethal  The process of converting the soil for human use is the easy part.

Let me continue from above. From a fusion point of view, I would assume that water loaded with deuterium (hydrogen with 1 extra neutron) and/or tritium (hydrogen with 2 extra neutrons) would be highly valuable. Tritium is radioactive so that might have to be dealt with from a drinking point of view but its half-life is 12 years so it might not be an issue. Does this make sense?

A quick check of space.com, Wikipedia, and YouTube about terraforming Mars shows why it'll never happen. It's theoretically possible but totally impractical. I'm better off with a simplifying assumption that humans are compatible with primitive life on more planets than I allowed for in my previous drafts. In reality, it's almost certainly impossible, but it's also closer to the fictional universes of Star Wars and Star Trek. Far less ludicrous than teleportation of ships via star portals as a means of FTL travel. :-)  I'd still want them to terraform the planets, though, which mostly involves converting the land into soil better suited for human use than alien soil alone. It's a slow process that basically involves composting on a planetary scale. You'd almost certainly end up with some alien microbes in the mix, but I'm assuming humans have a certain level of tolerance.

Maybe we can get Elon Musk to go. :-)

Thanks for your help, K.dot/George.

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New topic. I want to rename AI, which I've been using to refer to the artificial intelligence unit in ships, palaces, and Joseph's church. It's not horrible, but I'd prefer something word-like that doesn't require pronouncing letters. AIU is no good. Aside from unit, there's also component, module, data processor, and processing element/engine.

artificial intelligence module - AIM
artificial intelligence component - AIC
artificial intelligence data processor - AIDP or AID - the latter ain't bad (e.g., the ship's AID)
artificial intelligence processor - AIP
artificial intelligence processing element - AIPE or APE - naturally, I like the latter (e.g., the palace APE)

The acronym doesn't have to start with A. It could simply be Intelligent XXX...

Hmm.  I was thinking Artificial Cognition Engine--ACE.

A far as fusion, the best target right now is pB11 -- proton/Boron 11.  Straight hydrogen with boron 11 has the potential to consume (most of)  the energetic neutrons it produces and release its energy in alpha particles, which are less harmful to materials and people.  Since they are charged particles (unlike neutrons), it should be possible to capture their energy electromagnetically and avoid the heat engine trap--or at least capture a large fraction of it electromagnetically.  Heat engines have inherent efficiency limits (Thermodynamics!)

AIDE is a generic term to replace AI. I'm going to use wiseones for sentient AIDEs, which fits along with wisewatch, wiseeyes, wisepad, etc., from Lo Bidda Corporation. And they're still artificial because they're not biological.

Science question. My star portals are basically just a big, black ring in space, made up of segments that can spread out to form a virtual ring big enough for whatever ship wants to pass through it. Since I prefer the rings to be mysterious (think the monolith in 2001), I want to say that they are of unknown composition. However, they also have to be visible to the human eye, so some visible light (e.g., from the local star) must reflect off of it. However, if light reflects off of it, won't the reflected light have spectral lines revealing its composition?

Thanks
Dirk

Here's a tech that might mess up up the absorbtion and emission spectra: https://phys.org/search/?search=Meta+lens&s=0