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Where are the Hard Science 4X games?

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by Not_Sure, Apr 5, 2017.

  1. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Something occurred to me the other day.

    For the life of me I can not name one single 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate (Civ, MoO, MoM)) that is galactic with hard, real life, science.

    Games like Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations always delve into a mixture between Star Wars and Star Trek. Both are fine, but both are firmly a fantasy setting. (Yes, Star Trek is fantasy and not real science).

    It's all good and fun, but I want to know why no one has tried to do a game where all the tech is anchored in reality.

    So for starters, no FTL.

    I REALLY don't want to get into it, but let's just agree with 99% of physicists and say FTL is impossible.

    So rather than making all these ships to zip around the galaxy and making contact by moving from location to location, it's more about exploring from your solar system and leapfrogging around start to star and converting them into mega structures over time.

    Things like Dyson Swarms, Dyson Spheres, Ring Worlds, Disc Worlds, Solar star ships, Stellar Cannons, Matrioshka Brains, and ultimately Kugelblitz Cannons.

    Real quick, that's:
    Dyson Swarms - A star surrounded by a cloud of solar collecting satallites to gather all the energy.
    Dyson Spheres - A solid structure around a star that gathers 100% of its energy.
    Ring Worlds and Disc Worlds - Duh.
    Solar star ships - A star surrounded by satalites or a structure that allows it to move the entire star by light.
    Stellar Cannons - Pointing the energy out of a sun in a direction as a weapon.
    Matrioshka Brains - A series of Dyson spears around a sun that converts all energy into computation power.
    Ultimately Kugelblitz Cannons - Pointing light from multiple stars at a tiny point to create black holes which would make the ultimate weapon AND allow you to create black holes for power.

    Then the technologies developed could be more realistic like instead of "Warp Drives" (which is nonsense, sorry), you have things like space elevators and mass drivers.

    Obviously the game would take place over billions of years, due to the limitations of c.

    Some other huge tech that would play a part would be:
    -Simulated reality
    -Immortality through medicine
    -Nano technologies
    -Self replicating robots
    -Grey Goo
    -AI
    -Antimatter
    -Perfected Genetics
    -Augmented intelligence
    -Fusion Power



    Ultimately I see the game playing out as you start in one star system.

    You search your observable area for useful stars.

    You looks for other races and can obscure your location to avoid conflict.

    Eventually you re-purpose your system for a mega-structure for power/production, research, exploration, or warfare.

    And as you explore the galaxy you gobble up star system after star system creating an armada of star systems used as giant star ships.

    And at the end conflict become inevitable and you blow each other up.



    What do you think?
     
  2. JoeStrout

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    Sounds like fun to me. Though a bit depressing too (I like to think that by the time we're immortal and hyper-smart, we can think of nonviolent ways of resolving our differences).

    But, yeah, I'd play it.
     
  3. LaneFox

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    Hard Sci-Fi 4X would be hard to classify as 4X since the scale is significantly less 'grand' - a cornerstone of 4X.

    Stellaris is probably the closest to what you're asking. Hard Sci-Fi is also really slow, FTL travel concepts are what keep sci-fi interesting enough to enjoy at a good pace.
     
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  4. JoeStrout

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    Well, that's true if you place it in multiple star systems. However the solar system is far larger and richer than most people imagine (see the video in my sig). There are room & materials for trillions of people living comfortably in millions of city-sized space habitats (or artificial realities the size of entire worlds). And the travel time between them would still be measured in hours.



    So, you could place quite an epic (yet realistic) 4X game right here in the solar system.
     
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  5. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    "Real science" when thinking of future science is rather subjective. Are your enemies aliens? Do you even have any enemies at all since there is no scientific evidence of aliens? (making the game more sim city than strategy)
     
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  6. JoeStrout

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    Unless your enemies are also human (or some future branch of humanity). That has an interesting implication: instead of starting out widely separated, as is traditional in 4X games, you'd all be starting in the same little corner of the galaxy, bumping elbows from the very beginning, and fighting to capture more and more of the wilderness that surrounds you all.
     
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  7. LaneFox

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    So basically, The Expanse: The Video Game
     
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  8. EternalAmbiguity

    EternalAmbiguity

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    Umm, "duh" what?

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11183/could-we-build-a-ringworld-17166651/

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11098/could-we-build-a-dyson-sphere-17110415/

    What do you mean by this? It's easy to just throw up seemingly advanced ideas, but how do they tie into the world, or the game?

    What is the purpose of simulated reality? The only purpose this has is entertainment, or perhaps creating things we can't create in real life (read: entertainment). How would this be a useful tech for a space-faring species?

    Immortality through medicine. Good luck with that one. Your body automatically dies through apoptosis. The name for apoptosis inhibition...is cancer. You might do something through telomeres, though.

    Self-replicating robots. What does this mean? A robot that can build another like it, if you put in the necessary materials? A robot that magically has the materials to build more like it without drawing them from somehere? The second is impossible, the first isn't really all that special (and I would like to see a situation where it is used).

    Grey Goo. This might have wartime potential, but it's difficult to see any other use for it. Especially considering that in space the only living things are going to be humans. Basically you purposely design your robots to eat people, or you have no reason to design them to consume organic matter at all. it's not a problem of runaway robots in either case.

    AI. I think this is valuable, but we know little enough about it to be able to determine where it will go and how possible it is.

    Antimatter. What is the purpose of using this as a technology? The only outcome I see is energy production, and I imagine there are a lot more practical ways to get that (such as nuclear fusion as you mention).

    Perfected genetics sounds a lot like "immortality," or perhaps you're referring to the idea of designer babies?


    Basically, are these supposed to be random techs in a tech tree, or are they ideas you're planning to explore during the game? If they're supposed to be in a tech tree, okay. If they're something you plan to explore in game, half of them are not feasible in some way or another.


    How do these city-sized space habitats relate to one another in spatial distribution? That's a significant part of the 4X experience - that various things such as resource availability or simply habitable zones require some strategy in the location of "bases." If everything is a base that receives supplies from earth, I don't really see how you include that element of it.

    Where does the eXplore go, basically. Or the eXploit for that matter.


    Ultimately the problem is that real, hard (edit: and practical) science is either kind of "boring" or kind of "scary." Look at how science is portrayed in media.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2017
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  9. JoeStrout

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    They'd be arranged in pretty much the same way as the physical matter in the solar system: mostly in the plane of the ecliptic, with a heavy concentration in the main asteroid belt, around each gas giant, the trojans ahead of and behind the gas giants, the centaurs, and the Kuiper belt. Plus the Oort cloud if you want to include that.

    Yeah, that certainly wouldn't be the way of it. The Earth would be a tiny part of the economy by this point.

    I agree, to some extent — particularly socially. Humanity has been getting more and more peaceful as it matures (current presidents notwithstanding — we're talking broad trends here). Extrapolated a few centuries or millennia, and it's reasonable to expect that war will be mostly a topic of historical games.

    However, you could easily reject that notion, and still make a war (or other 4X) game where the science is hard. It's just an additional constraint on your creativity... but if you're creative enough, I think you could design an interesting game (or plot or whatever) anyway. I don't expect life in the future to be boring, so I don't see why games set in the future should be.
     
  10. EternalAmbiguity

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    Fair enough, fair enough.

    I'm probably looking at it the wrong way. I'm looking at it as if the OP is focusing on the hard science as the focus of the game. If it's a "normal" game against a backdrop of hard science the OP is arguing for, then sure. If the OP is arguing for a game about hard science though, I don't see it being particularly successful.

    And ultimately, unless you're making it the focus of the game...then why? What is the benefit of it? Moving to science fantasy allows one to make a more engaging game through the features mentioned by the OP. That's part of why those games exist - it isn't just because developers are only interested in science fantasy.
     
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  11. Serinx

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    So a game where it actually takes 6 months to travel to another planet?
     
  12. JoeStrout

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    I'd assume we have fusion drives — so, it only takes days (or weeks) of game time to get around within a solar system. Or years/decades to travel between the stars. But 6 months? Nah...
     
  13. cdarklock

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    You want a game based on hard, real-life science where the player does things we've never done using technologies that don't exist, on a time scale that exceeds the entirety of human existence and indeed the existence of planet Earth itself?

    Even if we could see billions of years into the future, and we precisely duplicated the actual state of affairs at that time, Clarke's law would just jump up and eat your game alive. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And everyone would handwave your game as fantasy.

    It's just so much easier to say "I made some S*** up, because it's fun."
     
  14. Not_Sure

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    Nah, that's been done to death.

    Dyson spheres and solar systems made into ships has not.
     
  15. Not_Sure

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    Where to start?

    Take your pick:
    -Seeded organs
    -Printed Cells
    -Bionics
    -Cancer cell targeting resonating microwaves
    -Nanobots
    -Digitized brains
    -Basic genetic treatments

    Yeah, I watched that same documentary, "The Immortalists". Those people are clearly dumb, but that doesn't mean that immortality isn't in our future.

    A lot of people are expecting us to cross the singularity within 30 years. After then, whatever is possible will be possible.
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2017
  16. cdarklock

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    I'm pretty sure it has. "No 4X game has ever let you build a Dyson sphere" simply doesn't pass the sniff test, even if I can't name one that did.
     
  17. cdarklock

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    But this is what you asked for. A game based on real science. Why are you upset that the real science is inconvenient?

    I mean, maybe that's why this doesn't get done.

    I do have some game or other which I found rather interesting... The Last Federation, that was it. You're expected to spend months on certain tasks. Instead of landing on some planet and helping them out in a day or two, you hang out there for months getting the job done.

    It would be relatively simple to scale time up to a factor like, every second is a decade. Or a century. So when you want to go to Procyon at 0.05c, which would take 224 years, you're not looking at a long boring wait. But then you have the problem of simulating the passage of centuries on planets - a minute from starting the game, you're looking at a difference in technology like someone from the high middle ages waking up in a Holiday Inn.

    We can't simulate that. We don't know what it looks like. We're no more able to predict it than Chaucer was able to foresee the internet.
     
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  18. Not_Sure

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    Okay, not "ever". But there are WAY more Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek, and Star Wars settings out there.
     
  19. cdarklock

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    Imagine that a time traveler went a thousand years into the future and came back, then made a perfectly accurate game about how technology progressed over that time.

    How would you tell it apart from those?

    EDIT: Also, what about Kerbal Space Program? It's probably the single most realistic space game ever made.
     
  20. Not_Sure

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    When it breaks unbreakable scientific laws I'd call that "magic".

    FTL ships is magic.

    Automation and mega structures are not.
     
  21. Not_Sure

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    Mainly though I'd like to break free of the conventions of most "sci-fi" games such as needing to go to a planet to look at it, ships only meters apart in space, lasers that move slower than bullets, and so on.
     
  22. cdarklock

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    So, everything fun and exciting, then.

    Play our new game, where you simulate spending centuries to figure out that you are alone in the universe and just how cost-prohibitive colonising other planets really is. ;)

    I mean, the answer's kind of staring us right in the face here: we don't have games based on real science, because real science is boring as hell and not fun.
     
  23. Not_Sure

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    Nah. Real life is AMAZING.
     
  24. cdarklock

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    Well, yeah. Make a game based on real sex and you'll be hella rich. Science, not so much.
     
  25. LaneFox

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    At one point the earth was flat so I think your argument carries less weight than you expect it to. Plenty of 'impossible' things have occurred.
     
  26. ZakCollins

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    Most people don't care if sci-fi conforms with our current understanding of the universe because our current understanding of the universe is extremely limited, and most likely wrong in many aspects. Nobody has ever accurately predicted what the world will be like in 50 years, let alone the hundreds or thousands of years into the future that sci-fi usually takes place in, and so you might as well do whatever is fun and interesting rather than using our almost-certainly-wrong predictions.

    100 years ago nobody had even imagined computers like they exist today, and so they obviously could not predict how massively they have changed the world. The experts at the time would have said it is 100% impossible to ever calculate 2.7 trillion digits of pi, since that would take a mathematician billions of years to do, and they were correct using their understanding of the world, and yet we have now done this impossible thing using computers. I have little doubt there will be inventions and discoveries like computers in the future, that allow what is seemingly impossible to happen. I think any sci-fi world that doesn't have the impossible happen is unrealistic.
     
  27. EternalAmbiguity

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    People are quoting things I don't see up there so I'm not sure what's going on...anyway, I'll respond to the other post later, but...

    As someone with a Chemistry and a Biology degree...science really isn't all that fun to the average person. It just isn't.

    No one REALLY cares about you incubating monkey kidney cells with silver nanoparticles and then running ICP on them to determine how much gets into the cells. No one really cares about your radically-polymerized oligomer that's a derivative of another that was made ten years ago. No one really cares about sydnones (zing!).

    Chemistry that's useful, like GC-MS, is incredibly incredibly boring. Biology that's useful--well, the jury's still out on that one :p

    Practical science just isn't that interesting.
     
  28. JoeStrout

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    But you have to distinguish between a game that is about science, from a game that is set in a scientifically believable universe.

    There certainly are hard SF fans — I'm one of them, and there are enough others like me that this is a genre (or subgenre, perhaps) in both literature and movies. I see no reason why it couldn't be a viable subgenre in games, too.

    Of course a book/game/movie needs to have interesting characters, plot, etc.; but if it also portrays a vision of the future that I think might actually happen, to me that is much more interesting than one that is obvious fantasy.
     
  29. EternalAmbiguity

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    You know, years ago in middle/high school I had this idea. I never did anything other than make a title, which I regret. Anyway, the title was "A Dissertation on Human Vivisection," and the idea was separating the human brain from the body. Years later when I learned about Raidan in MGR I was fascinated to see the same idea. But...

    Only one of these gets at the real problem: the human brain. The human brain programs the body to shut down after a certain amount of time. This is independent of any disease or ailment. And we haven't figured out why that happens.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence

    As I mentioned before, it's been associated with telomeres, but I haven't seen any research that either A) extends/maintains the length of telomeres, or B) shows any advance in human lifetime from such an effect (I think it has been done for some invertebrates, but I'm not sure off the top of my head).

    And honestly, the "digitized brain" idea is kind of ridiculous, because the human brain is not merely a series of electrical impulses. There's the consciousness, the spirit, the human "soul" if you will. That's not merely a part of the cells making up the brain. No one knows where it is.

    If we can figure out what the human brain is, then we can probably figure out FTL travel.
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2017
  30. EternalAmbiguity

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    Thanks for reigning me in. I keep forgetting.

    This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Why? Just why? And more importantly, how? How do you take a series of bodies following an intricately designed path governed by a dozen different forces on the macro scale (and an infinite number on the micro scale), rip or tear it from its roots, and expect it to function correctly? Ridiculous.
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2017
  31. aer0ace

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    How about a game like Plague Inc? A game that piques the interest of as large an organization as the CDC has to have some weight on this discussion. Just approaching it from a different angle, since OP seems to be all over the map with the subject in regards to reality and possible reality, and fiction. Shouldn't you be finishing up Bravely Bear?;)

    EDIT:
    Er, just realized the reality->fiction thing is from other contributors, but still... The discussion is still generally all over the map...

    EDIT2:
    Added emoji so as to prevent the message from being misconstrued.
     
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  32. JoeStrout

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    Do you want the five-minute argument, or the full half hour? :) I'll be glad to oblige in either case; this is something I've been thinking carefully about for a long time.

    But it's really not on topic, so we should probably do it in a private conversation.

    Actually, I'm with @Not_Sure on this one... I suspect FTL travel will forever remain impossible, mostly because if that's not the case, then the Fermi paradox suddenly gets a lot worse. But I think we'll probably have mind uploading within a few decades, certainly within the century. But again, please PM me if you want to engage in that discussion.

    (I also think that a cure for biological aging is probably not that far off, but it may be a harder problem than mind uploading.)
     
  33. EternalAmbiguity

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    I'm not talking about uploading a mind Halo AI style. I'm talking about duplicating the human consciousness. I recognize the former as possible (and think it's a fascinating idea). I' ve seen no evidence that the latter will ever happen.

    I took a look at a few pages there, but didn't see any real definitive statement on creating a consciousness. Which one should I go to? Or if you don't have one but do have comments on it, feel free to PM me.

    Edit: and I suspect FTL travel will remain impossible too. Feel free to deduce my opinion on the beginning of that sentence you replied to :p
     
  34. cdarklock

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    High five. We seem to agree a lot. We should hang out.

    At some point, you have to explain the believable science, though. If you don't, there's no way to know it's real science. And the explanation will be boring.
     
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  35. Billy4184

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    Interesting topic, and I agree with the premise. In fact one of my pet hates with SF writng is that (much like programmers with procedural generation in fact) writers just seem to be unable to contain themselves from going way overboard with scope, to the point where it becomes sort of a meaningless kaleidoscope of magnificence that doesn't have any lasting effect.

    There's so much imaginative stuff that can take place within our own solar system - I liked the fact that Destiny took familiar settings and used them to great effect. Although it's not incredibly SF as such, I take a lot of inspiration from Metal Gear in the way they paint a fantasy over familiar or near-future settings without getting trapped in any moral obligation to realism. Ultimately for any games I make that rely on a substantial amount of atmosphere/story, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do anything outside the solar system.

    The way I see it, the solar system is the next frontier, it's what I find compelling to think about and imagine. Why anyone would want to skip that and go straight to some faceless fantasy planet in some other galaxy is beyond me.

    PS while I'm quite keen to see semi-realistic themes and settings, I'm quite wary of semi-realistic gameplay - with games, I definitely subscribe to the idea that nothing should get in the way of fun. If fun can be made out of something realistic, so much the better, but otherwise realism should take a back seat here.
     
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  36. cdarklock

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    Here's a question.

    When a player wants a "hard science" style 4X game...

    Why?

    I mean, here's a clue...

    What I kind of see here is two unrelated desires. First, not needing to go to a planet to look at it is about convenience - we have the technology to look at a planet without going there. Some small amount of information should be available about the planet.

    But that's a very small amount of information. The closest exoplanet to Earth is Proxima Centauri B, iirc, and basically what we know about it is where it is and what the temperature is probably like. Also it has an orbital period of like, a week and a half, or something. We don't know much more than that. And for planets farther out, we know even less.

    Then you have the question of ships only metres apart in space, and lasers moving slower than bullets. This is about believability. Space is really really big, and thus really really empty. Lasers are really really fast, and bullets not so much. But we're trying to eat the cake and have it too, here: we cannot believably have much information about another planet without getting close enough to it that we may as well just finish the trip.

    Unless, of course, we invent some fantastical technology that lets us scan planets in detail at interstellar distances. Which takes us right back to where we were, with the game not being based on real science. Once you crack the shell with one magic technology, the egg is broken and you may as well make an omelet.

    I mean, step one, you can determine from one star whether the planet orbiting another star is worth visiting. Why not make step two, you have FTL travel and can easily go to that planet? They're both equally not real.
     
  37. Not_Sure

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    Not true.

    The idea that scholars anywhere ever thought that the world was flat is complete fabrication.

    You can see the curvature of the Earth from a mountain. The Moon is a clearly a sphere. The Sun is a sphere. Stars visibly move when you head at least 200 miles north or south.

    Now bumpkins who deny climate change and the like, those were the people who believed the world was flat. But anyone actually involved in higher education knew.
     
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  38. Not_Sure

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  39. cdarklock

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    Or very nearly so. It's documented that we've known not only that the Earth is round, but pretty much exactly how big it is, for about 2,500 years.
     
  40. Not_Sure

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    But there IS a lot we can know about stars by looking at them.

    We can examine spectrum shifts to know how the star wobbles and see if there's any large masses close to it.

    We can also look at it's light levels and tell when planets pass in front of them.

    We can tell how old they are, what kind of star they are, how long they'll last, how big they are, how dense, a general idea of the composition of the materials present in the system, if it will turn into a black hole, and much, much more.



    While on the other hand, C is impossible to get around.

    And since this seems to be rubbing people the wrong way, let me explain why.

    To start, ALL of everything in the entire universe exists because of the limits of causality. AKA, c. AKA, the speed of light.

    You know that H. P. Lovecraft quote "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Because if we could there would be no thought, just being.

    The Universe is sort of like that.

    If there was not a speed limit all things would happen in an instant and there would be no Universe.

    The Universe does not exist without C. Period.

    So let's shoot down some ways presented to get around it.

    Wormholes - Don't exist. They don't. There's no evidence that they do or should. And if there were, there's no reason to think we could use them in any constructive way.

    Quantum Entanglement - Well, for one, you'd need something at both ends so getting it to the location would be limited by C. Also, we do not yet know if it is possible to put information into the particles. We only know we can observe them and see that they contain the same information. But even if we could, it seems likely that it would make more sense to send information rather than matter. And again, only if you traveled there the slow way first to set up the receiving end.

    Warp - Yes, you can go FTL if you manipulate Time/Space itself. And yes, Time/Space does in fact seem to be manipulable. HOWEVER, again as with quantum entanglement, you need to get to where you need to do the stuff before you can move there. So you need to "warp" the space in front of the ship, but you still need to move whatever is doing the warping to the space in front of the ship.

    I will say, that personally, I think it may be possible to move FTL between two locations that you are already at. So huff it out to a location, set up shop, and then link it in with a network of locations.

    But then this opens the door for time travel, and that's absurd on its face.
     
  41. Not_Sure

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    Sorry to reach so far back into the thread, but I really wanted to address this.

    If we encountered another race that was transforming star systems at the same time as us, eradication or complete merger would be the only two possible outcomes.

    It's game theory.

    We'd be two civilizations with guns to one another's heads and at one point someone is going to pull the trigger, so it might as well be us.

    One of the biggest blunders in all of human history is that the US and England didn't immediately enter a war with Russia after WWII. We had the technological edge, we had the economy, we had the forces. Instead we sent troops home and let them build their own nukes and put the entire world at peril.

    Multiple times we've come close to annihilation because we allowed a competing force to enter a standoff with us rather than stomp out a transparently corrupt government.

    Since then every single major conflict has been a result of this. Vietnam and Korea were about communism. Muslim extremism is a result of us arming the Taliban to fight off the Russians and is fueled by contempt. Iraq was about securing resources away from Russia.

    And rather than knocking over a beaten down country when we had the bomb and they didn't which would have had a one time cost of a couple million lives, we've set up a system that will assure the loss of millions more and will most likely end with a nuclear war when a mad man gains control or there's a technical error.

    Or you know, maybe a megalomaniac that is aging fast and wants to leave their mark on the world before they die because they're an obese 70 year old that is going to die soon anyway, so why not?
     
  42. cdarklock

    cdarklock

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    You didn't say stars. You said planets. Those are different things.

    Speaking purely for myself, I think it's a really good question that needs to be asked, and we will learn a lot by discussing it. I'm not upset about the discussion, I'm enjoying it.

    That's just an article of faith. Replace C with God and you have a mediaeval priest thumping his Vulgate.

    Quantum tunneling exists. We know for a fact that particles can travel from point A to point B without crossing the space in between. We don't know for sure how - "quantum tunneling" is a pointless speculative phrase, like anything that starts with "quantum" - but it implies that FTL travel at some level is possible. If you don't have to cross the space in between, then the limit on how fast you can cross space is irrelevant.

    The other two things you mention are just other speculations on better names for the same thing, really. It's the same basic concept: that if a single particle can travel from point A to point B, then theoretically any arbitrary number of particles can travel from any arbitrary point to any other arbitrary point, but please do not explain it like Orson Scott Card did in Children of the Mind because wtf. (OSC is, of course, a religious individual and therefore predisposed to certain explanations. That is not how science works.)

    Maybe it's just a whole hell of a lot more complicated. So you could either send a ship 15 light years at 0.05c and it takes three hundred years, or you could spend five years building a computer designed explicitly to calculate the proper FTL trajectory, which then takes eighty years to finish the calculations and six years to get there at 2.5c. You still get there over 200 years faster.

    Why? I mean, if you can say the universe doesn't exist without C, surely it is just as permissible to add as an article of faith that time flows in only one direction - forward. That you move from the past to the present to the future, and never the other direction, regardless of what it looks like tachyons might be doing.
     
  43. cdarklock

    cdarklock

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    Again, why? Game theory only comes into play if the other race is transforming the same star systems we are. Absent a mutual exclusivity issue, we wouldn't even necessarily need to interact.
     
  44. EternalAmbiguity

    EternalAmbiguity

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    Why are they calling it a "Dyson" beam? I get the feeling people are just tagging random popular names on to things to give their ideas validity.

    And that may be the wrong video. A couple minutes in they mention some other video where they talked about moving a solar system, but give no kind of justification for it.
     
  45. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Oops! You are correct, wrong link.



    I think the Dyson part is because it's part Dyson Swarm/Sphere.
     
  46. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Okay, so you take a group of stangers and put them in separate rooms. You then tell them that if they wait 10 minutes they will be given $100. However, if they opt to leave at any moment they will be given $10 and all the others will be given nothing and not be told who opted out. So they all know that they will get a larger sum of money so long as no one screws the others over.

    In this experiment, almost all of the time someone will take the $10.

    Now instead of $10, it's whether or not someone will be exterminated.

    The only logical thing to do is strike first and not give them a chance to do the same thing.

    And it's better to do it when you have a couple of stars than it is when you're sprawled across the galaxy.
     
  47. EternalAmbiguity

    EternalAmbiguity

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    I just found the popular mechanics article.

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/spa...-how-to-move-an-entire-solar-system-17000392/

    It's...it's a Popular Mechanics article. Long on speculation and short on fact.

    Last year my grandmother got me a Popular Science subscription for Christmas. I remember why I always looked at the first couple pages and threw them in the trash (I remember an issue that had this comic about moving to Mars for water, and using rockets fueled with H2. *facepalm*).

    I also found this: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=29579

    And a few interesting comments that echo my thoughts on the whole idea.

    "'[F]orce generated by the stellar radiation field on its surface is matched by the gravitational force of the star on the mirror'; i.e., the backward force (thrust) acts on the shield and is just sufficient to maintain its position. Where’s the force to propel the system?

    I see only the gravitational attraction of the shield on the star, and this would be close to negligible."

    "There seems to be an assumption that if you apply thrust to the star its planets (those you haven’t deconstructed to build your megastructure) are just naturally “dragged” along. Is there an explanation of how that actually works without the constant thrust, however low, tugging your planets out of equilibrium?"

    (It doesn't. You would have the cluster!!!! of all cluster!!!!s on your hands)

    In short, this idea is garbage.

    In length:

    --I've seen no evidence that you'll actually be able to move the Sun by reflecting its emitted radiation on itself; in fact, if the Sun is getting LARGER and HOTTER then the energy it is emitting cannot possibly be enough to influence it (especially given that since we're trying to direct it, we're not capturing all of the emitted energy). Additionally, how are we going to keep receiving the prerequisite amount of energy here on Earth to not freeze to death if our big mirror is blocking an enormous portion of the Sun?

    --I've seen no evidence that pushing the Sun will not wreak absolute havoc, absolute 1134 (<--it worked on calculators, ya know...) on the gravitational forces upon the Sun, already spinning due to the galaxy, already affected by the millions of stars in that galaxy. Not to mention the planets rotating around the Sun, being affected by it and one another. The moment a couple of them shift out of equilibrium, you have the potential for truly horrific consequences. Consider that the three-body problem is not solvable. Consider that we can't even predict the weather. Consider the fact that we can never know all of the variables needed to adequately represent a complex system, and the initial variables to predict it.

    In short, this idea is garbage. Is this what passes for science these days? That's...that's...that's boring.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2017
  48. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    I figured that one implied the other.

    Also, the need for living space will most likely not be a thing in 100 years.

    It makes more sense to minimize the needs of a human body than it does to continually sprawl out.

    Once we are able to contain a living nervous system and keep it alive, while at the same time inputting senses that are higher resolution than our own natural ones can detect, and there is no need for human labor. It only makes economic sense to move to a simulated reality.

    Why stay in a body that is more prone to break down, requires more nutrients, needs space for psychological reasons, needs gravity, and is capable of inflicting physical violence and terrorism?

    And if you don't have the need of a body, why stay on a planet?

    Better to strip the planets for resources to make more virtual worlds that are far more cost effective.

    Meanwhile the occupants don't really care if it takes forever moving around the galaxy slower than the speed of light because they're happy living out their own virtual lives.

    Of course if you agree with Elon Musk (and I do), if virtual world can happen, then they most likely have happened. And the chances of us being in the real world and not a simulation are extremely low.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2017
  49. EternalAmbiguity

    EternalAmbiguity

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    The more I think about this, the more I feel it's an implicit suggestion of intelligent design :p
     
  50. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Nah, nah, nah...

    In my scenario once you died in the virtual world rather than throwing away the nervous system I would link them up to another virtual world where people are aware of their previous virtual life.

    Of course with medicine being so advanced you may have more people who died in a virtual world than have not, which would require them to be moved to multiple virtual worlds for after death. And of course to make people happy I'd put all the nice people in one and all the turd-buckets in the other and....

    :eek:

    Never mind...