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I dunno about a calculator but the math has been around since, well at least 1969. I'm not sure we can EVER develop a reaction-less drive that isn't a lightsail though, and even with the laser-propelled lightsails you'd still need to bring enough propellant for deceleration until you build a...

ROFL "my" rustled jimmies?! You're the guy who kept smashing out butthurt "I DISAGREE" posts because 1969 rocket technology can't seem to fulfill your star trek fantasy of laying pipe on green-skinned Andromedan strippers. We don't even need to accelerate at a constant 1g since we won't have...

Then dose cliometrics with all the salt you want. Are you objecting to the notion that the compulsion to address the unequal distribution of resources in any given society would inevitably diminish capital formation in those regions which would be best equipped and/or motivated to colonize...

You're the one having some difficulty with this after I've responded with citations and even some videos. If you're nursing some counterfactual when we've already sent a spacecraft that weighs more than a metric ton that will arrive at proxima centauri in 78,000 years with 1970's rocket...

I keep making it because it's true. We are bound by thermoeconomic forces to either expand our energy capacity to match our growth or contract our population to match resource scarcity until entropic externalities either force us to adapt or eventually wipe us out. That's as true for...

It's a hard notion to swallow because just about everything in human cognition is shaped by our limited lifespan. But that's just classic anthropomorphism. To a fruit fly travelling from New York to LA seems like an impossibility because their lifespan is only a couple days. They're fast...

Me? No I was just restating your position that since the universe must end anyways, some civilizations might find "peace" in humbly accepting their fate and just brew craft beer and artisanal beard butter until their sun expands to obliterate all traces of their epic slam poetry forever. I...

What the fuck? Hair and Hedman's paper was originally published in Cambridge's Journal of Astrobiology after considerable peer review. It has since been republished in several other journals. Of all the potentially controversial assertions they made, the FACT that 1969 propulsion technology...

I'm not getting humanoid alien from anything. I said if they put something humanoid in it would ruin the series.

LOL you've been trying to make this point across two threads now. What's so arbitrary about extinct and not extinct? If some externality is sufficient to eradicate ALL species that met our 1969 capabilities from colonizing the entire galaxy in the 5 billion years this has been possible, then...

You mean consciousness. Having a full connectome mapped (including the entire optic and nervous system) would HAVE to model a functional human nervous system or, well, it wouldn't be a full map! Why would anyone consider it a full mapping if it doesn't display all the expected neurochemical...

Which of the above? The fact that it absolutely happened with the the Human Genome Project? For the first seven years of the project they had only mapped 1% of the genome, then acquisition costs came down and new algorithms turned it from an bioengineering problem into an information...

You're a fucking retard. Why wouldn't it be practical and necessary when we have LITERALLY PROVEN the realism and practically of the technology in question? Hair and Hedman's paper was published in Cambridge Univerity's International Journal of Astrobiology after being peer-reviewed. They...

You're a fucking retard. "Given enough time" is exactly what it took to get from ENIAC to Pixar's first Renderman farm...and it was barely more than forty years from one to the other.

That's just pointless and argumentative. You said that you disagreed with the point of Hair and Hedman's paper that 1969 chemical rocket technology is more than sufficient to boost seedships to a quarter of lightspeed to other stars. But that basic point is ABSOLUTELY true, that's why they...

Even with conventional kerolox engines we ABSOLUTELY have the technology to boost live humans into some doomed interstellar mission. That's just an engineering problem. The question is why the fuck would we want to? We could build their ship in orbit, fill it with the biosphere and a...

Some Germans enclosed the test apparatus with mu metals and concluded the EM drive's "thrust" was just the test's cables interacting with the earth's magnetic field. Don't need the EM drive at all tho. Just assemble fifty-year-old rocket technology in orbit and launch the fuel up tank by tank...

WTF what are you disagreeing with? That technology ABSOLUTELY exists today, even without considering Dyson's Project Orion shit. You think that ion drives like the engine that kept NASA's Dawn spacecraft constant acceleration for 5.9 years doesn't exist? Because it existed and its measly ion...

Huh? Did amod move shit to this thread I'm not aware of?

?? WTF are you on about?

Again what are you talking about? I haven't posted in this thread in months if not years.

What are you complaining about, you fucking retard?

LOL Mass Effect didn't originate that idea either. Ancient wormhole tech has been a staple of scifi from Ted Sturgeon to Arthur C Clarke. Any kind of extant humanoid aliens would be dumb and ruin the series. It's almost certainly gonna pop up in the next book too, they're already suggesting...

I dunno, I've never logged into a PS4 client. As for the PC/Steam versions yeah, I logged into a non-steam client and it played fine like last a couple weeks ago. I'm aware of the steam/non-steam expansion problems, but I'm just talking about logging in and playing on a mac/steam/ps4 client...

He used to work as an astrophysicist at CERN. But his Revelation Space Series isn't some dry "hard sci-fi" thing. It's a lot more Lovecraft than Heinlein. It's about unimaginably ancient horrors doing inscrutable things and HIDING because of even more ancient and inscrutable horrors. In fact...

You CAN login to the windows client if you have a live steam subscription though. I've never tried logging into a PS4 client with my (steam) account but I imagine that would work fine. Which begs the question, could you rent the PS4 client somewhere and be able to keep playing it after...

Happens all the time in nature tho. The oldest land organism is Pando, a 80,000-year old clonal colony of trees. And that's less than half as old as the oldest organism on the planet, a clonal colony of sea grass in the Pacific that's about 200,000 years old.

That's called Survival. So far as we have empirically proven, it's the ONLY "practical reason" for all livings things to, well, live.

That's actual weaponized autism.

Finally some Chinese Censorship we can all get behind.

They would be gestated, educated and trained by the self-replicating robots....but that would be at the end of the colonization process that could take centuries. The robots would build the habitats for them and maybe even local terraforming. The embryos would stay frozen inside the seedships...

It would never be us. Unless we successfully virtualize a human connectome, the only humans that would ever leave the solar system would leave in the form of frozen embryos. Even if we stick to the modest speed of 25% of light speed, which is achievable today with some version of a...

Yep exactly. It needs to become an IMMEDIATE necessity. So get the swollest V10 gas guzzler you can find and short every solar and wind stock on the market. By 2080 there will be 12 billion humans fighting over a third of the freshwater we take for granted today. Unless we want to...

Survival. Right now everything our biosphere has ever achieved is at risk because cow farts might thaw the Siberian taiga and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that would dwarf the Permian die-off. We can either leave a space monument that says “oops” or insure the continuity of the human...

Yep, it's a cognitive bias thing and it's basically WHY everyone who pines for space travel tries to imagine a way to break the lightspeed barrier: it's because our risk horizon is constrained by our lifespans. If we had the same average lifespans as we had in the early 1700s, we wouldn't...

Yep, they'd almost certainly speciate into unrecognizable phenotypes. As mentioned before even if you added 2,000 years for each daughter civilization to rise, fall and re-discover the entire industrial age before sending out their own seedships, it would only expand the time it would take to...

The sci-fi pining for faster than light travel is just more ingrained anthropomorphism. It just seems TO US that interstellar travel must require warp drives because the timescales of the journey would otherwise be measured in the hundreds of generations It does NOT. You don’t need to resolve...

Is that Bert Kreischer?

Weird that I can't do nightfall:the ordeal now unless I buy Shadowkeep. I was spamming that over the weekend. Was there some kinda intro free period for the last week?

I was rewatching s3 as advised and it's still a fucking AMAZING season with some of the coolest battle scenes in any scifi show or movie of recent memory.