3blake7

Attached is an image I made in Blender, of the first floor of a 2.8 km diameter space station. It has two rings spinning in opposite directions. It has enough space for hydroponics to support a population of 500,000 with an above average living space for each person. I'm still a noob at 3d modelling. For this image I wrote a Python script that generated everything. I even found over a thousand corporate logos, separated them into categories and did a random and realistic distribution.. lol. The shaders need some tweaking to improve realism.

I am an IT professional and a huge SciFi fan. I started working on worldbuilding a science fiction universe that I believe is scientifically plausible, while trying to include any inevitable technologies and capabilities and avoiding theoretical physics longhots like negative energy, artificial gravity, wormholes and warp drives. I've been learning to 3D model in Blender and working on making a 3d animated series for YouTube. I wanted to show viewers a future that might actually be possible instead of the scientific surrealism of Star Trek or the many other SciFi universes that have one more more elements that are definitely not possible that bring their entire house of cards down. Maybe I'm being too ambitious. Why not do a REAL 1000 year plan and promote it through the arts? I could whip together a social network/project management site. My first 3d animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fThRnJguVT0 This is a timelapse of Mars being terraformed. I made a spreadsheet to do the ballpack calculations: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gXUkVvdsvDMAcoRa-QjDw633MYGjqjJW5h6VEpKy-30/edit?usp=sharing Long story short, to terraform Venus and Mars within a reasonable time, around 1000 years, we would need viable fusion power and an autonomous self-replicating industry. I think self-replicating systems is an inevitable capability, humans are after all, extremely complex and can self-replicate. It's only a matter of time til our own technology achieves that level of sophistication. The future could be, millions of species of nanomachines, self-replicating, spreading through the entire crust of the Earth, assembling themselves into nano-miners, nano-refineries, material transport systems, nano factories, and every type of power generation using fossil fuels, fissile material and even nano-scale fusion reactors. The automated industry could mine every useful element and add it into circulation and recycle everything. Then a citizen could log into the virtual reality with all 5 senses, talk with their personal artificial intelligence, then the AI can design them something. An hour later, the dirt in their backyard begins moving, and a super-advance self-repairing, nanotechnology based motorcycle rises out of the ground. The subterranean nanomachine industry could even infect all plant life, modify it's leaves, and siphon off solar energy. We could have a completely hidden industry. We would want to create every possible variation of technology using as many different elements and use the elements in the most efficient way overall to maximum the population and/or quality of life. AI and supercomputers might become too hungry for electricity, but we could also move them out into space, send them data, they analyze it and send the results back to Earth. We could also do subterranean cities, floating cities, underwater cities, millions of space stations along with the terraforming of Mars and Venus. We will also be capable of doing immortality. I've been researching how the brain works and I'm not 100% sure it's possible but we might be able to do mind backups and mind transfers. We would probably need to invent thousands of different species of nanomachines, like one specifically designed to locate dopamine receptors, then inject them, wait long enough for the entire brain to be "scanned". Not sure how long it would take, probably be slow, since you are limited to how many nanomachines you can have floating around the brain before causing problems. Once a mind is digitized, you could upload it into the virtual world, make a backup, transmit it to another star system or download it into an android or genetically engineered body. The modified human body, could have immortality, faster regeneration, and a modified brain that makes mind uploads/downloads easier. I came up with a memory density that doesn't break the laws of physics, and we could easily fit a human mind, every single particles' velocity and position, down to picometer precision in a volume smaller than a penny. We could have a virtual population in the septillions. Anyways, I think the future could be awesome but it could also go very, very wrong. AI and robotics has the potential to crash the entire world economy with skyrocketing unemployment rates within our lifetimes. Global warming and environment destruction is a serious problem and our politics doesn't seem capable of getting the job done. Politics doesn't seem very technically or scientifically savvy. Watching Congress interview Mark Zuckerberg was a little depressing. They could have grabbed a random high school nerd to answer those questions. I am a bit obsessed and depressed when it comes to politics and SciFi makes me optimistic about the future. I want to combine them. I could setup a non-profit to manage the site, an electable committee and all that. What are your thoughts? Would anyone be interested in participating in a project like this?

I searched for it but didn't find an answer. I was wondering how many unique molecules there are in the human body. Not the total number of molecules, but the total number of unique molecules. Also, have we discovered all of them yet? Is it possible there are still chemical reactions occurring in the human body we don't even know about yet?

Cool! It's funny, I was just reading his variation of Project Daedalus, with self-replicating probes.

I found this: http://www.georgedishman.f2s.com/solar/Calculator.html Just realized I had a typo on my spreadsheet. The site has diamond sail at 11.8 million W/m^2 and I had 118 million. I already looked at beamed core anti-matter rockets, inertial confinement fusion rockets, and magnetic confinement fusion rockets. They all had huge problems. I guess best bet might be nuclear pulse propulsion or maybe a hybrid setup, laser propelled light sails with nuclear pulse propulsion to slow it down.

Assuming we have fusion power with an autonomous self-replicating industry to mass produce power plants and lasers, what's the biggest issue? Lasers are like 20% efficient so we would need like 150 terawatts for 44 days of acceleration?

I was wondering how difficult it would be to use lasers to propel a light sail (let's say 500m x 500m) to 12% of the speed of light. The payload would be 5 megagrams. Without a way to slow it down, it would fly through the destination star system too quickly. I thought about crashing the payload into something but with that much kinetic energy, it's like a nuke going off. My payload probably wouldn't survive. I was thinking, what if you have two light sails and when you near your destination, you release the second light sail and the laser array back home bounces the lasers off the front light sail. The front light sail would be speeding up with the back light sail (plus the payload), slowing down. Is it even possible to hit a 500m x 500m target 4 lightyears away? The front light sail would probably need several adjustable light sail panels that can bounce the lasers at different angles as the distance increases. I'm also aware that lasers can fan out but not sure how much in my case. I think you might have one array of lasers accelerating and another set with a different focal point for slowing it down.

I looked up the timeline of the ISS, maglev tech, etc and yea, you are right, it's like asking why no CD instead of tapes. I also recently saw a documentary on the space shuttle and they originally estimated that it would be a lot cheaper and could be flown a lot more frequently than it turned out. The Star Tram estimates are probably really optimistic, there would be cost over-runs, engineering hurdles, etc.

A cockroach receives data, environmental stimuli and processes it and reacts to ensure it's own survival. How it reacts is based on it's memory of past experiences and/or "evolutionary memory" such as genetically programmed instincts. Humans are more complex, they have layers like genetically programmed instincts, like hunger, thirst, the sex drive, the instinct to protect our young, the instinct to be a member of a group, all of which increases our individual and collective survival. We have the ability to ignore a baser instinct, like an emotion, if our conscious mind determines, based on our past experiences, that acting on the emotion could threaten our survival. I personally believe that the universe is deterministic which leads to the beliefs that there is no free-will and the future is pre-determined. If you new the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future with 100% accuracy. We are just the result of a billions of years of dominoes falling, cause and effect, reactions of reactions. Our biology is based on chemistry and the laws of physics, everything we experience is just particles and photons, our brain and even our conscious thoughts are the result of cause and effect. We have free-will over our emotions, well some of us, but ultimately there is not free-will, we are just machines processing data and reacting. What is consciousness? Consciousness is the ability to believe we are in control of our own actions, like a pinball in a pinball machine, "Weeeeee! I am in control!"

You need like 8 km/s to orbit. The Gen 1 probably needs to have a higher exit velocity since it exits at a lower altitude and has to deal with more atmospheric friction. The Gen 2 exits at 22 km so it's probably less than Gen 1. They have a book which goes into more detail but it's about $10 on Amazon.

The ISS cost a lot of money, I've seen estimates as low as 100 billion and as high as 400 billion. I've also seen arguments that it wasn't really worth it. I was just wondering why we didn't spend that money on a Star Tram. Right now, current rockets cost about $18000 per kilogram of payload. Space X, with their reusable first stage rockets, could bring that down to as low as $1200 per kilogram. I also learned about the Star Tram and on their site they claim that it could bring the cost down to $40 per kilogram. The site claims that the Star Tram can be built with known technology and materials unlike the Space Elevator. The Space Elevator gets so much attention even though there is no known material strong enough (not even carbon nanotubes). I feel like I'm missing something, am I? http://www.startram.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram http://www.maglaunch.com/

It could become more likely with immortality, people will be around to see it completed. There are already researchers working on it, like the modified virus that activates the gene that causes cells to produce the telomerase enzyme. With AI, molecular manufacturing and other automation technologies, eventually there won't be any jobs left. I think we will either become a welfare state or maybe an education state, where everyone gets paid to go to school and can study anything they want. It's hard to say how culture will change with all the new capabilities and technologies coming down the pipeline. Look at how profoundly electricity and the internet changed our society. I watched the Cosmodrome documentary which was about exactly that. Soviet rockets were decades ahead of American rockets but no one knew that until after the USSR collapsed and some Russian rocket scientists showed them to American scientists. Before that the rocket scientists in America considered it impossible to do a closed cycle, which is routing the exhaust from the turbo pump back into the nozzle's combustion chamber so you get some thrust from it and don't waste it. Here is an explanation: One of the rockets NASA is using is actually the Russian rocket. I watched a congressional hearing with Elon Musk trying to get a contract with the Air Force and he used the sanctions on Russia for hacking the election to make the case that his competitor would have difficulty importing the Russian made rockets. I just thought it was funny because every now and then all the experts will believe something that turns out not to be true. It's like the belief that the universe was stable, not expanding or contracting, even Einstein believed that and dismissed another scientist that believed the universe was expanding. Then a third scientists found evidence that supported the expanding universe hypothesis and the entire theoretical physics community accepted it and changed their views. I wish politics was like that A lot of that cost is the cost of transporting it from Earth into orbit. Most existing rockets could launch 1 kg into orbit for ~$18000, Space X's reusable first stage rockets might bring the cost down to $1200/kg, and the Star Tram site is making the claim that they could bring it down to $40 per kilogram.

To start it, you need to build a hundred machines, that make up an entire industry like: Surveyor, Excavator, Hauler, Loader, Feeder, Crusher, Separator, Smelters, Mold Caster, Part Caster, Grinder, Molecular Manufacturer and Assembler. You would also need to launch them into space using really big rockets or a Star Tram. According to the star tram site, they estimate a cost of 60 billion USD for their gen 2. I have no idea how much the Autonomous Self-Replicating Industry would cost. A lot of those machines are already available in mobile form. A molecular manufacturer isn't possible yet, but it's only a matter of time. IBM for instance is already working on 5 nanometer transistors. A neuron in the brain has a diameter of 120 nanometers for comparison. Here is a proof of concept nanofactory by the leading expert (also awarded an honorary doctorate from MIT): I think it could be done for like 100 billion USD. Once it starts mining, refining and self-replicating, it would grow into an industry worth hundreds of trillions (or more) and if you do a price estimate of terraforming using present day economy prices, it would be absurd, but this is self-replication, which changes everything. You only need to pay for the transportation into space and the seed machines. No one owns the asteroid belt or moon, so you don't have to pay for that.

For Venus: I figured the sunshade would have like shutters and would just block some of the light constantly. Maybe even do an artificial day-night cycle so half the year you have Earth-like light cycles and the other half the year it's constantly dark. I have no idea how that would effect the weather but I think the right mechanisms are in place and it could be tuned to be "just right". I would assume there would still be a super-rotation like air current around the equator, equalizing the temperature between the day and night side. Another idea I read about was to have a series of mirrors in orbit and you could have an artificial day-night cycle on the night side too. For Mars: I guess the best solution for Mars would be to have more green house gases. No idea how much I would need though. Maybe higher CO2 levels or Methane from Titan. I was just thinking, Mars needs an atmosphere with more mass compared to Earth, since there is less gravity. The atmosphere would be a little over twice the mass of Earth, which would trap more heat? Maybe too much? You might not even need more greenhouse gases to warm it up.

ORIGINAL POST is obsolete. I made this YouTube video of Mars being terraformed. I plan on rendering a new version that spins slower so you can see the changes more easily but I wanted to ask a question someone else suggested. They were wondering if the ocean would be reddish in the beginning before the atmosphere was replaced with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. If you look a pictures of Mars the sky and ground are red, would the water be reflecting the red and appear more red? I know terraforming is a huge undertaking. I have a spreadsheet where I did the calculations for terraforming Venus and Mars. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gXUkVvdsvDMAcoRa-QjDw633MYGjqjJW5h6VEpKy-30/edit?usp=sharing To summarize the approach: They designed an Autonomous Self-Replicating Industry, that could collectively self-replicate (not individually). They released Thorium powered ASRIs on moons and in the asteroid belt to self-replicate, increasing their industry's size exponentially until their industrial capacity reached the pre-determined threshold. The ASRI built an aerostat for Uranus to mine Deuterium and Helium-3 for Fusion Power Plants. The ASRI was also released on ice moons to build Fusion based factories that convert ice into Hydrogen and Oxygen fuel. The ASRI mined the raw materials to build a Sunshade for Venus, which would cool the planet and eventually turn it's entire Carbon Dioxide atmosphere into a liquid ocean. The ASRI also mass produced Supertankers that use Hydrogen-Oxygen rockets (the only fuel abundant enough to meet the demand). Supertankers moved Hydrogen and Oxygen from the ice moons to the orbits of Venus and Mars. On Venus, the Hydrogen was used to convert Carbon Dioxide into water. Excess Nitrogen was transported from Venus to Mars. Oxygen was made from excess Carbon Dioxide. Supertanker exhaust (water) also helped create oceans. Some Urea was made from excess Nitrogen, Shriebersite was also saved from mining and both were used to fertilize. Solar powered electromagnetic shields were built at the L1 points to protect the atmospheres from solar radiation. This approach required two things really: commercially viable fusion power plants and an autonomous self-replicating industry. CERN seems convinced that fusion could be viable and I think self-replication is inevitable (humans are self-replicating machines after all). I think the biggest potential problem is actually supertanker traffic jams. I'm not sure how many supertankers you could have landing and taking off per hour on Venus. How many can you have in orbit? I am saying 600 years to finish but it could be longer or shorter depending on how many supertankers you can do without collisions. The industrial effort required is gargantuan by Earth standards but I think self-replication changes the game so that's okay, you can't really look at it through a lens of present day economics. This is really the only relevant research I could find: http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/TerraformingVenusQuickly.pdf http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/TerraformSRS1983.htm

I rendered it at 8k and 4k if you have higher resolution screen. Made it in Blender with color and height map from the USGS and NASA. The water is actually based on the height map so it's a realistic layout of land and ocean.

I think it's interesting that you bring up that money has value because people believe it has value. Some politicians want to go back to the gold standard but that isn't really any different. Gold doesn't really have that many uses, except for tiny amounts in high end electronics. Gold is actually pretty useless and it only has value because people believe it has value. A currency being backed by gold really isn't any different. If culture changed and people stopped wanting gold for jewelry, the value of gold could easily drop. Backing money with something in the beginning can be beneficial, because it could help people believe in it and accept it as a value place holder. Like if a guy wanted to buy a chicken but he only had bread to trade and the guy with the chicken only wanted whiskey, the guy would need to find someone with whiskey that would trade it for bread. That's inconvenient. If there was something that everyone wanted, like a currency, then it would have 100% demand because it could be traded for anything. Once everyone in the economy believes in it because everyone in the economy accepts it as a value placeholder, then it being backed by something doesn't matter. As far as the negatives of inflation, it's really not inherently negative, the only real downside is that there may be adjustment lag (is there an official phrase for this?). If the government doubled the amount of dollars in circulation then the prices of everything would double, the products and services and the workers too. Nothing really changes, you get paid twice as much and everything cost twice as much. The downside is that the economy won't instantly change, so it's possible that some corporations would adjust their prices sooner and some workers would ask for raises sooner, so there could be a period in time where some workers are getting underpaid and some corporations are lowballing themselves. The demand for money has been increasing so most governments of the world have been printing money to prevent deflation. At first, not every person was using the currency, they were still bartering and in some places of the world, poor people still don't use a currency. As more people come into the system, you need to print more money or there could be a money shortage and that would defeat the whole point of having money. If there isn't enough money, then employers would be like, "I can't find any dollar bills but I can give you these chickens". You need to have a minimum amount of money in circulation or it defeats the point. As there are more products and services, like cable television, cellphones, websites, hospitals, cars, plane trips; a higher quality of life, an increasing population, more corporations, people with skills that make them more valuable, more bank accounts, more value in the economy overall, you need to print more money (value place holders). I was thinking it could cause temporary inflation, but you might be able to contain it by regulating trade between the "economic development zones" and the "first world" economies. Eventually, as you increase the value of impoverished people, giving them more money, them buying more, increasing demand, creating jobs, which they have been trained for, I think the inflation would be undone. For a world currency, I think you are right, that isn't necessary and would probably make the plan harder to accomplish because not all the "first world" nations would want to give up control.

I'm no expert, but UPenn is Ivy League, the others arent? Ivy League looks better on the resume. Even if the 1 year curriculum covers less, you can always do a second masters and you got your foot in the door of a top-notch school.

Just buy whatever you can afford. Macs are less bang for your buck and they aren't very common in the IT world. If you aren't gaming or doing 3D rendering you don't need to worry about the graphics card. 8 GB of RAM should be more than enough for most purposes. The only time I've used more than 8GB is when I was converting 2GB images. The only thing I would recommend is adding a second partition and installing Linux, Ubuntu to be specific. The IT world revolves around Linux so learning it is priceless. If it's not Linux it's Windows but most IT people don't like Windows and only work with it because they have to. I've only run into 1 Apple server, and it's based on Unix so it's similar to Linux on the command line. Some programs you may want to familiarize yourself with: Web servers: Apache, NGINX Relational Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL NOSQL Databases: Neo4J, OrientDB Virtualization: VirtualBox, VMWare SAN: EMC Servers: Dell Load Balancers: F5 HTTP Caching: Varnish Database Caching: MemcacheD Programming Langauges: PHP, Python, JavaScript, Java Node.js is becoming really popular. Setup an account on OpenShift, it's a free web host. You get 3 free servers. Setup a PHP one, install various PHP web softwares like Drupal or MediaWiki. Setup a Node.js one and install a web framework for it. Have fun tinkering, that's the best advice. If you don't want to do Ubuntu on a second partition, you can also setup VirtualBox and install Ubuntu Server onto a virtual machine. Then use Putty to connect to it (hint: set network to bridged adapter). Then you can install the command line tools for OpenShift onto the Linux server. Once you get comfortable with the Linux command line, you'll come to love it. Since you want to go into cyber security, Cisco is the undisputed reigning champ in the networking world. Their command line is pretty cool. You could check out DD-WRT and try flashing your own router, and tinker with that, might give you some first hand experience.

I am working on a science fiction universe but I didn't want it to be all vague about humanity's progress, I wanted a specific plausible scenario. This is what I came up with: I am calling the plan, Jumpstart the Economy. I took that GDP Per Capita for the United States and estimated that if everyone in the world lived a quality of life similar to Americans, that the world GDP would be around 370 trillion dollars. Currently it is only 75 trillion dollars. That is a huge potential for growth. I think we would eventually achieve it without changing anything but I want to accelerate the process. I was thinking if all the "first world" nations got together and created a single world currency that they could print money and invest it into impoverished communities around the world without causing inflation. From my understanding of economics, you can print money without causing inflation as long as the demand for money is increased, basically by increasing supply AND demand, by raising the quality of life of impoverished citizens of the world. If the "first world" nations of Earth printed the right amount of money and invested it by building infrastructure, like power lines and solar cell farms, vocational schools and offer guaranteed loans to graduates; they could increase their quality of life, increase their value as entities in the economy, which means they would receive more money, they would spend more, increasing demand AND supply. You could analyze existing economies to figure out the ratio between different types of jobs, like pizza delivery, electrician, nurse, etc; then only have the correct amount of openings for each job type in the free vocational schools. In two years, you could artificially create a new middle class. I am not sure exactly how much money you could print and whether it would be enough but you could also get the investors of the "first world" nations to invest in businesses in the "economic development zones". The rich would get richer and the poor would get richer, like how we are all got richer compared to one hundred years ago. The "first world" nations that invested, most of which are probably indebt, could eliminate their debt. Tax revenue would increase because of the economic growth which could also eliminate deficits. There is no legitimate reason for there to be a billion plus super poor people in the world, we have the raw materials, we have the man power, we just have bad economic policies that don't get the snowball rolling. Even food production isn't really a problem because we are already capable of much higher productivities. Like hydroponics using indoor grow lights can be 12 times as productive per square meter of area and after that you can go with hydroponic skyscrapers, and increase it even further. The grow lights would cost more but with current solar cell efficiencies, the deserts are more than big enough to support a population 10 times what we already have. I personally think most of the world's problems could be easily solved but there is one problem that prevents them from being solved, educating everyone and getting everyone to agree on a solution. I am a layman and I've only taken 1 course in economics, so if this idea has already been explored or there are some concepts I should read up on, please feel free to contribute! Thanks, Blake

I've learned a lot since I started this thread. I made a spreadsheet for each propulsion system. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockets aka Pion Rockets has three huge problems. First problem is Anti-Matter Storage Density. The only way to prevent it from colliding with the matter walls and annihilating, is to contain it using a magnetic field, or more specifically a Penning Trap. If you put more Anti-Matter into the storage container, the anti-matter particles will repel each other and expand, increasing the chance of anti-matter particles colliding with the matter wall and annihilating. If you can't store anti-matter at a high enough of a density, then the collective mass of all the storage containers negates the benefits of the pion rocket's very high exhaust velocity. There is another possibility, which is to combine anti-protons with positrons and create anti-hydrogen then freeze the anti-hydrogen into a snowball, which is diamagnetic, and levitate it. However, this has never been done before. There is also the Anti-Matter Production efficiency problem. There are a few scientists, such as Dr. Forward, that believe a 0.01% electricity to anti-proton conversion efficiency is possible with purpose built current technology. The theoretical maximum is 50%, since the creation of an anti-proton also creates a proton at the same time. If the conversion efficiency can't be increased, you would need a Dyson Swarm of millions of solar powered satellites mass producing anti-protons. The last big problem is waste heat. The neutral pions will decay into gamma rays, with some of them colliding with the nozzle and spacecraft. Even with a wireframe like nozzle, which allows most of the radiation to escape through the spaces between the magnetic coils and structural supports, it is still a huge amount of waste heat that still has to be dealt with. The best radiators, Molybdenum-Lithium Heat Pipes, would have to be massive, so massive that it completely negates the high exhaust velocity of pion rockets. Inertial Confinement Fusion Rockets has two huge problems. The first problem is waste heat, which can be as much as 20% of the energy released from fusing Deuterium and Helium-3. If you use a wireframe like nozzle, a lot of the waste heat can escape without colliding with the magnetic coils and the structural supports. You still have to deal with some of the waste heat, which will collide with the magnetic coils and structural supports. You can spread the waste heat out by increasing the radius of the nozzle. However, that means you would need stronger magnetic coils and to shoot the pellets out at a higher velocity. If you use a rail gun, shooting one pellet per second with a 4 kilometer radius bell, is possible but it requires a bigger power plant and more mass. The biggest problem is actually the power requirements for the lasers that crush the pellet and cause fusion. I am not 100% sure I calculated the laser power requirements correctly. I just read that a 2 mm pellet required about 126 watt-hours per cubic millimeter so I scaled it based on the volume of the pellet. If I did that correctly, then the power requirements are absurd and the power plant mass makes the whole idea of large ICF propelled spacecraft unrealistic. I attached an image of an ICF based interstellar ship. Magnetic Confinement Fusion Rockets. I haven't tried calculating this yet, but you have to deal with 100% of the waste heat. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. The biggest problem with this approach is that it would require a lot of fissile material and the Solar system only has a finite amount. Laser Propelled Light Sail. This is the approach I am currently exploring. I have a 0.5 x 0.5 km diamane light sail with a 3000 kilogram craft with a 1 kilogram payload. I have an array of large lasers, which shoot the light sail for 30 days, accelerating the craft to 12% the speed of light. It only takes about 30 years to reach the closest star! The problem is slowing it down, since the star you are sending it to doesn't have it's own laser array. I considered crashing it into a moon, but the kinetic energy of a 1 kilogram payload would literally hit the moon so hard, that it could start a fusion reaction. I found an experiment where they were testing bacteria's resistance to extremely high accelerations and jerks. I think my payload of self-replicating nano-machines surviving is probably 0%. I tried slowing it down using a pusher plate and nuclear bombs, but the mass of the nuclear bombs made the trip take a lot longer. What I am currently considering is a series of 5 light sails, a primary and the other light sails would be positioned to bounce the lasers and slow down the primary lightsail + craft + payload. I guess the big question is, whether or not an array of lasers can hit something that far away. Also, as the lasers bounce and slow down the payload, it will increase the speed of the reflectors, so the reflectors would need to be able to change their angle. To colonize, the self-replicating nanomachines will replicate for 12 years, then build space stations, laser based interstellar communications satellites and artificial incubators. Then colonists can have their mind copied using nanomachines, uploaded and send via laser to the new star system. When it arrives, the automated systems will grow them a new body and then install their memories and neural configurations. I read that fiber opitics can do up to 320 channels, with each being about 100 Gbit/s. Then you can have the laser beam spot only have a 200000 km diameter with a bunch of satellites in a large orbit, like Pluto, which are spaced 200000 kilometers apart. You could potentially send billions of people per year. Oh yea, for the memory size of a digitalized mind, I went with 200 Terabytes. It could be harder if you include every particle's 3-dimensional coordinates, but that's over kill. All you really need to know is all the neurons different shapes, receptors, different axons and dendrites. Every neuron is made up of the same molecules, same DNA, etc; so all that is redundant. This is the spreadsheet for interstellar laser based communications: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D36YxIC95-UDhhcnhiQubeXkO2fd5pTFO8iZh_kbGog/edit?usp=sharing

Yep, that's the one. As far as not going "all the way" with the Dyson Swarm, I'm using the Dyson Swarm to produce antimatter for pion rockets for interstellar spacecraft. 5% is good enough, that gives me enough anti-matter to launch an interstellar colony ship once every 30 years or so, with the trip taking like 75 years. It's a massive ship with 1 million colonists. Actually I just recently found a claim that anti-matter conversion energy could be 1% using the Schwinger particle pair production method, according to Dr. Obousy. Dr. Foward said we could get 0.01% using known technology in a purpose built facility, which was the number I was using when I got 5%. With Obsouy's number, it can be smaller, 0.05%. I was curious about detectability because I am trying to decide if I'll have the galaxy be empty, with no aliens or already completely conquered by a 7 billion year old civilization. I read that our star and planet is young compared to others, some have an 11 billion year head start on us. It would only take 10 million years for a civilization to spread throughout the whole galaxy using pion rockets and building Dyson Swarms to produce anti-matter along the way. I was trying to decide between the Fermi Paradox Zoo Hypothesis, with the aliens using laser based communications to make it harder to intercept their signals. I was thinking this would be likely because quantum processors would be able to decrypt most encryptions, so going to lasers makes it harder to get the data, to decrypt it. I made my own variation of Drake's Equation, which has a timeline, and even with extremely pessimistic numbers, when there is only 3 technologically advanced civilizations, there is always one with a billion year or more of a head start. If my smaller Dyson Swarms are detectable, I was thinking about going with the Rare Earth Hypothesis.

My hypothetical situation is: 5000 satellites in orbit around a star, lets say Barnard's Star. Each satellite is 400x400 kilometers and they are evenly distributed in orbit, which is 25 million kilometers from the star. They would only cover about 5% of the star and there would be equal coverage throughout their orbits, as some satellites go behind the star, new satellites would be coming out. The amount of light wouldn't change all that much, maybe a slight dimming and brightening on the left and right edges of the star. I read they have a candidate star that could be a Dyson Swarm but they are thinking it might be comet fragments. Anyways, I was wondering if my scenario would be detectable with current methodologies and technologies.

I did more research and came to the conclusion that some of my original assertions were false. I just wanted to update. So, I started a thread on interstellar travel and realized that the particle accelerator based thrusters is a completely flawed idea so scratch that. However, with Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockets you can get an exhaust velocity around 66% the speed of light according to new research. Also they found that you only need a magnetic field of 12 Tesla which is doable with current technology. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.2281.pdf. Now, you still need a lot of antimatter and the best conversion efficiency I could find was Dr. Robert Forward claiming that 0.01% was possible with current technology if we built a facility with the sole purpose of producing Anti-Matter. If we built a Dyson Swarm that covered 5% of the Sun, collecting power using solar cells with an efficiency of 68% (which is theoretically possible with multi-junction solar cells) then you could produce enough anti-matter in 30 years to send 1 million people to Alpha Centauri (4.2 lightyears away). The trip would take 75 years. I created a spreadsheet for calculating the size of the Dyson Swarm and how much anti-matter it would produce a day: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v2HqosYMZbY_RM7DjeIxC-m0qEo0lsC08b7RhSKzds8/edit?usp=sharing I also created a spreadsheet for calculating the interstellar trip, I had to guestimate masses, I would need a NASA research team to be any more precise: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing The galaxy is a 100000 lightyears across. If we divide that by 4.2 lightyears and then multiple it by the travel time of 75 years and the time it takes the colony to build a Dyson Swarm (200-500 years), we get 6-13 million years to colonize the entire galaxy. To build the Dyson Swarm, I suggested that they would have the technology for an Autonomous Self-Replicating Industry, which includes Surveyors, Excavators, Haulers, Loaders, Feeders, Crushers, Separators, Smelters, Mold Casters (like 3D printers), Part Casters, Grinders, Assemblers and Molecular Manufacturers. With all those different types of machines, they could mine asteroid belts and moons, then build more copies of themselves. Once the industry was big enough, they'd start manufacturing the Dyson Swarm. Lets just assume that this is all possible. I was reading about the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox. One of the hypothesis in the the Fermi Paradox is the Zoo Hypothesis, which is basically a Kardashev Type 3 civilization that has colonized the entire galaxy and has left us alone to develop. They are "radio silent", possibly using lasers to communicate instead. The only difference is, they would only need 5% of the galaxies light instead of a 100% like Kardashev suggested. I created another spreadsheet which has the Drake Equation on one tab and my own equation on the second tab, which makes more sense for this type of problem: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fVLi9iapqKrlOqmpYNFc0FUnMWDTvrfTUS0g3UJFdqI/edit?usp=sharing Even with EXTREMELY pessimistic numbers, far more pessimistic than Drake's Equation, I come to the belief that a technologically advance civilization would have come into existence over 4 billion years ago. That gives them plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy. Hell, they could have seeded life on Earth and watched us develop for the last 3.6 billion years. It's got me looking at all the UFO hunters a little differently, lol Would we be able to detect a Dyson Swarm covering only 5% of the star?

I've looked into both of these concepts. The biggest issue is the low exhaust velocities, which means I will need a lot more propellant flow per second to achieve the same thrust. That means bigger storage tanks for the propellant, which means more weight, which means more propellant. At interstellar distances, it can really add up. Another issue is that fissionable materials are finite, it's not renewable so once I use up everything in the Solar system, I'll have to switch to anti-matter anyways, which can be produced from particle collisions powered by solar energy. Anti-matter in effect, is renewable. The last thing is, I am not sure how much fissionable material there is in the Solar system, or how assessable it is. The Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockers is by far the top performer, once you have a ridiculously large antimatter factory. Even at the predicted capability of a 0.01% conversion efficiency, and a solar cell efficiency of 68%, it would only take a Dyson Swarm that covers 5% of the Sun to produce 1200 megagrams of antimatter a day. There is plenty of raw materials in the Asteroid belt to build it. That would allow me to send 1 million people every 30 years or so, to another star, with the trip taking about 75 years. As far as building it goes, I have an Autonomous Self-Replicating Industry, which includes Surveyors, Excavators, Haulers, Loaders, Feeders, Crushers, Separators, Smelters, Mold Casters, Part Casters, Grinders and Assemblers. It's like the entire industrial process broken down into automated spacecraft for zero G or large rovers for moons. The idea would be that they would self-replicate to a size much larger than Earth's economy, and be able to build a Dyson Swarm in a couple hundred years. This technology is nearly in our reach now so I don't think it's a big stretch to say we could have it in 50 years or so. I personally think a corporation that already produces most of those steps in mobile form, could adapt it for the moon/asteroid belt right now if they had the incentive. The harder part would be producing components like computer processors, which may be solved in the near future by NanoFactories. I saw a video by Nanorex of a NanoFactory concept that could produce a computer from nothing but Acetylene. We could mine hydrocarbons on Titan to supply a molecular manufacturer with the raw materials to build the next generation of computers for the ASRI. I originally came up with the ASRI for the terraforming plan I was working on, you can see it on my blog in the signature.