2300AD energy sources

[tneva82]

how long might similar quantities of oil last on worlds with populations of under one million? The pops of a lot of these colonies are barely larger than a small-to-mid-sized 20th Century city.

I would guess their oil consumption would stretch longer than did here on Earth. Might go two centuries or more before it got bad.

Does the population really STAY at one million...

One presumes when they go to stars they have technology to create living space so space shouldn't be that much issue. And something that's worth noting is that the industrial revolution was what really kickstarted the ridiculous population increase in OUR world from around 1 billion to 7 billion...Pre-oil human population stayed relatively stable barring black plague's etc and even those were recovered pretty fast(relatively speaking).

What's keeping us at any check is space and food(mainly the oil needed for farming sufficient food is starting to get mighty expensive). New planets decrease this problem so logically another population boom is to be expected.

 

[Lemnoc]

What's keeping us at any check is space and food(mainly the oil needed for farming sufficient food is starting to get mighty expensive). New planets decrease this problem so logically another population boom is to be expected.

Thing is, you can double a population of 250,000 over several generations before you'd really see a towering curve on the scale of the post-industrial world—but point taken.

Another factor keeping population in check (besides the resources you name) is that families tend to breed less as they prosper. Consider Europe, which has been at ZPG (in some places negative territory) for a generation now. The reason for a big family, historically, was insurance against casual extinction. Prosperity leads to death control—so you have lower infant mortality rates, less disease, longer and fuller lives—and that security leads to birth control.

What you're seeing today in most reasonably prosperous societies with good death control and poor birth control, such as Mexico and much of Latin America, is the imposition of secondary, social values (usually religious) about the sanctity of life and the "sin" of infertility. Will these values be in place three centuries hence, probably somewhere in some form.

---

But, getting back to your point, one fact that often gets glossed is that the early American colonies were, in fact, breeding much faster and were much more healthy overall than Europe in the same period. The food, the open space, clean air, rugged outdoor living and desire to expand into undiscovered country, all these things did lead to a very robust birth rate (and lower death rate) in the Colonies.

Take a look at a menu of foodstuffs the Colonials were consuming at the time, for example, as opposed to British nationals (the vomitous gruel they were larding out in the film Master & Commander springs to mind). But, also, surprisingly, the consumption of LIQUOR, grain alcohol, was amazingly high in the Colonies, as a means to calories in an era without refrigeration. I saw somewhere where alcohol accounted for perhaps a quarter of the daily calories consumed by a 17th century Virginian.

So, anyway, not outside the realm of possible / plausible you'd see robust growth on these worlds.

 

[tneva82]

What's keeping us at any check is space and food(mainly the oil needed for farming sufficient food is starting to get mighty expensive). New planets decrease this problem so logically another population boom is to be expected.

Thing is, you can double a population of 250,000 over several generations before you'd really see a towering curve on the scale of the post-industrial world—but point taken.

Well would the planet have 250k to begin with?-) Earth population's population estimates range up to 15 billion in year 2100(high end of estimate albeit). There's what...32 planet colonized in 2300AD? (think I read that number somewhere. Don't have much of previous knowledge of the setting but sounds interesting). Even if it's "just" 10 billion that's quite a lot of excess population to ship to the nearest planets to work as seed of population boom

But anyway yeah probably oil based energy production will be likely source of power for initial colonies, at least provided there's abundance of oil/gas/etc to be burned in the planet colonized barring some serious breakthrough at cold fusion allowing those to be used dirt cheaply and safely(keeping in mind likely rugged conditions to begin with).

 

[Rick]

Also there is an assumption here that the present mania for monitoring CO2 hasn't been proven to be completely stupid in 300 years. I must admit I see earth in 2300 as more Blade Runner than the Stepford Wives.

Apart from it being unlikely being proven stupid it will be moot point in 300 years anyway. Even if humankind survives we'll be running out of oil far before 300 years has passed.

I believe the point of the 'runaway greenhouse scare' may already have been proven as unfounded as the 'new ice age scare' of the '70s - at some point, crying wolf will no longer get the reaction the alarmists are looking for and they'll stop doing it. As to running out of oil, I think we have passed the point where all presently known oil deposits are in decline (ie - half empty). Unless we find new deposits, oil will have to be reserved for other petrochemical uses and we'll have to find another energy source at some point - which is unfortunate as most proposed 'clean' energy sources don't have the technology to make them reliable yet.

 

[Mithras]

Who brought up horse drawn carts? There are no horse-drawn cart using colonies in 2300AD! Fuel cells, wave power, hydroelectric, wind turbines ... no horses.

EDIT: Please tell me there are no horse drawn societies.... ..

 

[Captain Jonah]

Who brought up horse drawn carts? There are no horse-drawn cart using colonies in 2300AD! Fuel cells, wave power, hydroelectric, wind turbines ... no horses.

EDIT: Please tell me there are no horse drawn societies.... ..

You want to check that with Colin :lol:

Side notes on what has been covered before.

A colony is going to expand at the rate it can feed itself. We are not looking at a situation where western agencies can buy up vast quantities of cheap surplus grain and ship it to the third world where the availability of advanced western medicine from other aid agencies means the birth rate far outstrips the death rate and local food production now.

A colony will feed its people or they starve. So birth control and planned children will be a must until such time as it is stable enough and large enough to be developing food surpluses.

If you can feed one hundred thousand people then you are not going to be wanting a few thousand children a year arriving over the next decade or suddenly you need to produce enough food for another 30 or 40 thousand unproductive mouths.

On the other hand if you can expand food production by a thousand people a year then that sets a limit to children. A lottery or rota system for having children perhaps.

The same applies to power. Your colony could be a thousand log cabins with a thousand families having children and hunting in the woods for their own food but without industry, infrastructure, production etc that colony is hardly going to be repaying the money spent on it anytime soon.

As regards oil. We are NOT running out of oil, no where near. We ARE running out of cheap oil. Big difference. Off the coasts of Canada and Alaska are significant reserves, Israel has as much off its coast as may be left to the Saudi’s. Argentina is getting aggressive over the Falkland islands over the sizable oil reserves there.

Plus you have shale, tar, coal, remaining natural gas etc all of which are progressively more expensive to produce.

One of the biggest wastes of Oil is that many of the products are non recyclable. I'm no tree hugger and I find most Global warming Alarmists, Tree huggers and Environmentalist Hippy types to be so short sighted as to be almost committing cultural suicide.

BUT conservation of resources, preparing for changes in global climate (natural ones not the whole man made CO2 panic) is important. We breath the air, we live on the land and eat the food. I like fruit, having to find a way to replace the bees or say good buy to the orchards is a real concern. So is massively rising prices of everything caused by waste earlier on and now limited supply due to costs.

I live in Britain, public transport cannot handle snow and ice as it is, heading in to a possible Maunder minimal or mini ice age where it gets cold enough for the Thames to freeze over again will be an utter disaster for this country since it simply isn't prepared and all the Global warming idiots are making it worse by panicking over a fake problem while urging preparations for the wrong changes.

Likewise a colony must be able to survive and function under many extremes, its a bit far to send to the home country for aid when those minus 40 winters roll round or when the summer storms bring zero humidity across the crops from the great southern wastes a thousand miles away. That takes power to warm buildings, clear snow and ice, pump water etc. A decent initial survey should determine these things before the colonists arrive but its a bit late if your new world has an un expected 50 year solar storm cycle that hadn't been seen before you arrived.

I hate the whole use it and throw it away idea, it’s good for consumerism but so short sighted. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

A new colony with access to the technologies that should hopefully be developed over the next few decades to make plastics recyclable or just make better use of them, methods of getting more from less oil and other such ideas means that a 22nd century colony arriving on a world can easily have enough cheap oil, properly managed, to last it hundreds of years of expansion up to the point where it is at or past the billions mark.

 

[GJD]

Personally, I think the most radical discovery would be a better way to harness the energy from natural resources, by which I mean that at the moment to turn oil or gas or coal into electricity we burn it to make steam which is used to turn a series of high and low pressure turbines which generate electricity (although I believe that there may be some gas power stations that run on gas turbines). Likewise, nuclear power stations heat water to make steam to run turbines.

All of this is quite inefficent, between 50-70% of the potential energy is lost during the process (so says Wikipedia and BBC Bitesize). There are energy losses all over the place, waste heat, friction and so on. This means we need 2-3 times as much raw material as is produced in energy. There are some materials that convert heat directly into electricity, but their efficency is even lower.

An interesting development would be if we discovered or manufactured a material capable of converting heat directly into electricity with a better efficency than through mechanical means. Not impossible in 2-300 odd years, twilight exempted, of scientific discovery.

I'm also inclined to think that a lot of the start up colonies might have a central power generator that's dropped as a sealed unit to last, say, 10 years before major maintenance. Residents would all hook into that and use rechargeable electric vehicles, or small fuel cell vehicles and use the central plant to run a Hydrogen cracking station. The original material had an example of a frontier fuel cracking station that ran off solar power.

G.

 

[Colin]

I had a great big reply composed, then had to leave my desk. When I came back, I was logged out.

So, quickly... It's your game. If you feel a need (or want) to change the sociological and technology assumptions I made, feel free. I had my reasons for the choices i made, though.

Animal power is rare as the sole motive source on colony worlds. Some regions do, sometimes fro cultural reasons, sometimes becauase teh found nation is cheap, or intent on keeping them down. Animals are more about food than motive power. Then again, some people like hourse.

Most colonists have access to a variety of vehicles, from ATVs to tractors to farm multibots, either personally or on a shared basis. Fuel sources for these vehicles are preferentially sources that can be run personally, or as part of small communities, rather than commodoties supplied by governement or corporate sources. So biomass reactors, algae stacks, and solar/hydrogen fuel stations over centralized oil wells and refineries.

Earth is dominated by "Green" governments and organizations, and they control colonial policy. These Green goverments can be oppressive control freaks, or dedicated conservationists. Your choice.

However, if you want your colony worlds to be dominated by flare-off stacks and oil derricks, go right ahead. I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. You're just proceeding from different assumptions than me. As long as you are having fun, nothing else matters.

 

[Rick]

:lol:

hourse

Please, please tell me that word was meant to be 'horses' :shock:

I read it and thought that you might have missed the first letter off, or meant 'houris' :lol:

 

[Colin]

Ugh. So many typos, so little time. Yes, that was meant to say "horse". I was in a mad hurry. There are a mess of other typos in there as well, but I think the meaning is clear enough.

 

[Golan2072]

I think that biogas could be a very common source of energy on open-air colonies. The technology involved with it is very simple and quite cheap; anaerobic digestion of animal dung and other sorts of organic waste produces both the Methane gas and a residue which could serve as a good fertilizer; and you can either burn the gas directly for cooking, heating and light or scrub the CO2 out of it and run internal combustion engines (or even fuel cells build for methane) on it.

It might even be cheaper than drilling for oil, especially at the smaller scale of operations.

 

[Captain Jonah]

:lol:

hourse

Please, please tell me that word was meant to be 'horses' :shock:

I read it and thought that you might have missed the first letter off, or meant 'houris' :lol:

You never know with these strange colonists, going to the starts to allow themselves to live as they wish :twisted:

I think that biogas could be a very common source of energy on open-air colonies. The technology involved with it is very simple and quite cheap; anaerobic digestion of animal dung and other sorts of organic waste produces both the Methane gas and a residue which could serve as a good fertilizer; and you can either burn the gas directly for cooking, heating and light or scrub the CO2 out of it and run internal combustion engines (or even fuel cells build for methane) on it.

It might even be cheaper than drilling for oil, especially at the smaller scale of operations.

Until it was used up it was possible to find small scale Oil deposits on the surface.

Likewise if you have enough plastic sheeting a decent sized bog or swamp can be covered over and the released gas piped off for use. Not sure I would want to build the colony there but a few hundred acres of swamp being used to farm gas and then sent up river using the river that feeds into the swamp to supply the colony is viable.

Imagine a couple of red neck types on flat bottomed swamp boats running a methane still down in the swamps and towing some big plastic containers of the gas up river at night :lol: :wink:

Or something that we haven't covered. 4th+ generation nuclear plants are clean, efficient and leave little waste. In a space age society getting rid of small volumes of radioactive waste isn't hard. A prepared nuke plant can be dropped in place and run for decades with minimal supervision required. Think about those dust bin sized units that were being talked about a while ago.

The waste can be launched into the deep void between the stars or maybe even stored on the local moon, after all what could go wrong with storing nuclear waste on a moon :lol: :wink:

 

[AndrewW]

The waste can be launched into the deep void between the stars or maybe even stored on the local moon, after all what could go wrong with storing nuclear waste on a moon :lol: :wink:

The moon could break away from its planet and you would have Space 2399?

 

[Rick]

Heh - thought that was the main advantage of setting up a colony world way out beyond the civilised core worlds - you get to make up the rules!

I was thinking about how a colony might start out and considered that one way might be to cannibalise the colony ship - there would be 1 big power plant (from the main ship), and a few smaller ones from the shuttles. If you keep a couple of shuttles running to skim/process fuel, you could have enough power for the colony for quite a few years.

 

[Lemnoc]

I was thinking about how a colony might start out and considered that one way might be to cannibalise the colony ship

I've also thought this would be a very intelligent way to build a colony ship, too.

Makes for an interesting design challenge, to think of a ship that is intended to be scrapped and taken apart on destination. Lots of bolted together sections, and a disposable star drive. Or a stripped down stardrive surrounded by a modular liner. A single reusable drive could move several colonies.

 

[Rick]

I was thinking about how a colony might start out and considered that one way might be to cannibalise the colony ship

I've also thought this would be a very intelligent way to build a colony ship, too.

Makes for an interesting design challenge, to think of a ship that is intended to be scrapped and taken apart on destination. Lots of bolted together sections, and a disposable star drive. Or a stripped down stardrive surrounded by a modular liner. A single reusable drive could move several colonies.

Several semi-streamlined modules that can be attached to an engine module and landed on the surface - medical being the most important, possibly an industrial/fabrication module as well, housing can be produced from the ships' internal compartment walls. If you carry livestock as embryos, you might need a separate incubation/vetinary module. Could be done. After a few generations, you'd have a core 'landing site' colony, with a much larger spreading colony around it.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Depends on the weather/climate etc of the new colony.

You don't need to drop entire buildings if you are starting somewhere with weather like the Med. You can drop containers with the tools, industrial plant, medical and research equipment etc along with enough building materials for the first buildings.

Your med bay, research labs, vehicle hangers and factories could all be housed in tents if the weather is good. Local wood for the frames, plastic of fibre sheeting, the only real imported stuff you would need to start with would be aside from any sealed, insulated, contamination resistant fabrics for the labs would be ropes, cords, nails etc.

Most of this lot can be dropped by parachute and guided down to a beacon. The colony shuttle can bring down the rest.

The core of the colony ship should never touch the ground. It’s very wasteful to dump the entire ship on the ground as spare parts when the drive core can run back home and return in three months with the next load of cargo and new colonists.

The bulk of a stutter-warp ship engineering volume is the power plant and thruster fuel. The actual stutter-warp and drives are small, unlike traveller. A carefully designed ship can jump out, spend several weeks dropping wave one while refuelling on the shuttle return runs, then the 50% of the ship that is the ship not the detached cargo flies home. You can drop a small fuel refinery with the cargo and once the ship is refuelled this can be used to build up a colony fuel reserve for the main reactor that came down in a container.

The containers themselves become sturdy structures for delicate storage of for critical functions, you colony reactor could come down as a single self contained unit.

Also since the world has been pre scouted bringing in a few machines designed to work with the local chemicals and sands and you can start throwing up concrete very fast, we already have lunar and mars concrete formulas from experiments done with returned samples or robot scans.

 

[Strithe]

The shipping containers could come in handy as well:

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/shipping-container-homes-460309

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Is 2300AD basing itself on some sort of liberal agenda "eco-friendly" or "green" energy politics? That would be good reason enough for me not to get the book or even game in the 2300AD era.

 

[GJD]

What makes you say that? I think Colin (the author)'s quote is fairly self explanatory:

So, quickly... It's your game. If you feel a need (or want) to change the sociological and technology assumptions I made, feel free. I had my reasons for the choices i made, though.

Animal power is rare as the sole motive source on colony worlds. Some regions do, sometimes fro cultural reasons, sometimes becauase teh found nation is cheap, or intent on keeping them down. Animals are more about food than motive power. Then again, some people like hourse.

Most colonists have access to a variety of vehicles, from ATVs to tractors to farm multibots, either personally or on a shared basis. Fuel sources for these vehicles are preferentially sources that can be run personally, or as part of small communities, rather than commodoties supplied by governement or corporate sources. So biomass reactors, algae stacks, and solar/hydrogen fuel stations over centralized oil wells and refineries.

Earth is dominated by "Green" governments and organizations, and they control colonial policy. These Green goverments can be oppressive control freaks, or dedicated conservationists. Your choice.

However, if you want your colony worlds to be dominated by flare-off stacks and oil derricks, go right ahead. I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. You're just proceeding from different assumptions than me. As long as you are having fun, nothing else matters.