Tech Level 8 Solar System

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

You wouldn't want to do this with Earth, but Venus needs the shade if it is to be properly terraformed some day. The shade takes the form of a ring shaped giant solar collector, Actually it is one giant solar power satellite that stretches all the way around the planet in a 24-hour orbit. A one point on the inside of this Solar Collector is a light source that shines down on Venus with Earth level illumination, the rest of the energy collected goes into antimatter production. The antimatter produced is anti-hydrogen, but that in turn is fed int a series of fusion reactors, the anti-hydrogen is fused into anti-helium, the anti-helium is fused into anti-carbon and so on until anti-mercury is produced. Anti-mercury would make an excellent starship fuel, it is very dense, 13.546 tons/meter^3, liquid hydrogen is 0.070 tons per cubic meter. A displacement ton can hold 1 ton of liquid hydrogen or 189.644 tons of liquid mercury. Mercury is also a liquid at room temperature, it can fit in a small space, which makes containing antimatter in mercury form that much easier, as there are fewer walls you have to prevent it from coming in contact with. This makes an antimatter reactor nice and compact although very heavy! When it gets used up you discard it!

No one is going to waste the material to make this a sphere, or even a cylinder. It would be a challenge to make a large enough circle. It would have to be a statite on the far side of Venus’s L1 (to balance out the push of the solar wind); it would need lots of Reflectance Control Devices, as featured on Ikaros, in order to stay in position. The anti-matter thing is a non-starter; where are you getting these baryons to make antimatter from???

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

If it is simply in orbit around Venus, it doesn't need to be a statlite, you could make it as thick as you please! As for where you get the baryons from, that's easy, Earth's Moon! Gravitationally Earth's Moon is the easiest source of matter to build this out of, remember Earth's Moon has about 3 times the amount of matter as does the asteroid belt, so there is plenty of material here, and its low gravity, and the fact that Venus is the closest planet to Earth means, you can mine the Moon, built solar power satellites out of the Lunar material just as O'Neill suggested, and then you can send some of these Solar Power Satellites over to Venus, using mass drivers, and lunar rock as reaction mass. The Solar Power Satellites, once in Venus Orbit, link together until they form a continuous circle around Venus above the equator, and then you link more Solar Power Satellites to the edges to widen this shade, until its width exceeds the diameter of the planet Venus, once it is wide enough it casts a shadow over the entire planet, the planet will cool, in the mean time, we mine the planet Uranus for hydrogen, it is the least massive of the gas giants, so it will be a very popular source for hydrogen, send the hydrogen to Venus, and it reacts with the carbon dioxide to produce water vapor and graphite. From inside the ring we build an artificial light source. One good bright light source is lasers, now lasers are monochromatic, but we can fix this by combining the laser light together using either prisms or a diffraction grating, to produce solar intensity white light, we produce a disk shaped illumination source on the inside of this ring, and from the surface of Venus, it looks as the Sun does from the surface of Earth, and since this ring rotates once every 24-hours, this image of the Sun is seen to rise and set from the surface of Venus, producing a 24-hour day/night cycle. A dimmer circle with phases can produce an image of Earth's moon, this will rise and set as seen from Venus' surface so we can have some moonlight.

Antimatter is made the same way it is made in laboratories on Earth, only in much larger quantities, you create a high concentration of energy in one spot and then equal amounts of matter and antimatter appear from space, usually this is accomplished by colliding protons with a target and collecting the antiparticles and trapping them before they can make contact with matter and annihilate back into the gamma rays from which they came. In principle you can reverse any reaction with elementary particles. Matter and antimatter make contact and annihilate into gamma rays, but you can also produce gamma rays by colliding two protons together at high velocity, some of these gamma rays are energetic enough to form a proton and an antiproton, others produce an electron and a positron. Once you produce an antiproton and a positron, you can make an antihydrogen atom. If you make many antihydrogen atoms, you can fuse them together to make Antihelium and so forth down the periodic table of anti-elements, eventurally you can make an anti-mercury atom through this process. If you do it over a large enough area, you can make tons of antimatter in the nice compact form of anti-Mercury, and with such a small volume for so great a mass, you minimize the structural mass of the containment system.

An antimatter starship consists of a rotating ring of matter/antimatter rockets. The anti-Helium is contained in a tank made of anti-iron, The Anti-Iron is held apart from its matter container using magnets to keep it centered. There is a valve in the anti-iron tank which when released produces a spray of anti-mercury, combine it with mercury from the exterior matter tank on the outside, and you produce an annihilation reaction, channel the pions with a magnetic field so you can obtain thrust from these pods. Extending from these 6 pod are 6 cables which hold a spaceship with fusion drive in its center. As the pods accelerate, the tow the ship with these six cables which also keep the ship centered and away from the pion/gamma ray exhaust coming out of these rockets. Some other antimatter rockets fire forward, to ionize the interstellar medium ahead of the ship and a magenetic field arounf the crew section deflects these now charged particles around the ship and protecting the inhabitants inside.

 

[fusor]

If it is simply in orbit around Venus, it doesn't need to be a statlite, you could make it as thick as you please! As for where you get the baryons from, that's easy, Earth's Moon! Gravitationally Earth's Moon is the easiest source of matter to build this out of, remember Earth's Moon has about 3 times the amount of matter as does the asteroid belt, so there is plenty of material here, and its low gravity, and the fact that Venus is the closest planet to Earth means, you can mine the Moon, built solar power satellites out of the Lunar material just as O'Neill suggested, and then you can send some of these Solar Power Satellites over to Venus, using mass drivers, and lunar rock as reaction mass. The Solar Power Satellites, once in Venus Orbit, link together until they form a continuous circle around Venus above the equator, and then you link more Solar Power Satellites to the edges to widen this shade, until its width exceeds the diameter of the planet Venus, once it is wide enough it casts a shadow over the entire planet, the planet will cool, in the mean time, we mine the planet Uranus for hydrogen, it is the least massive of the gas giants, so it will be a very popular source for hydrogen, send the hydrogen to Venus, and it reacts with the carbon dioxide to produce water vapor and graphite. From inside the ring we build an artificial light source. One good bright light source is lasers, now lasers are monochromatic, but we can fix this by combining the laser light together using either prisms or a diffraction grating, to produce solar intensity white light, we produce a disk shaped illumination source on the inside of this ring, and from the surface of Venus, it looks as the Sun does from the surface of Earth, and since this ring rotates once every 24-hours, this image of the Sun is seen to rise and set from the surface of Venus, producing a 24-hour day/night cycle. A dimmer circle with phases can produce an image of Earth's moon, this will rise and set as seen from Venus' surface so we can have some moonlight.

Antimatter is made the same way it is made in laboratories on Earth, only in much larger quantities, you create a high concentration of energy in one spot and then equal amounts of matter and antimatter appear from space, usually this is accomplished by colliding protons with a target and collecting the antiparticles and trapping them before they can make contact with matter and annihilate back into the gamma rays from which they came. In principle you can reverse any reaction with elementary particles. Matter and antimatter make contact and annihilate into gamma rays, but you can also produce gamma rays by colliding two protons together at high velocity, some of these gamma rays are energetic enough to form a proton and an antiproton, others produce an electron and a positron. Once you produce an antiproton and a positron, you can make an antihydrogen atom. If you make many antihydrogen atoms, you can fuse them together to make Antihelium and so forth down the periodic table of anti-elements, eventurally you can make an anti-mercury atom through this process. If you do it over a large enough area, you can make tons of antimatter in the nice compact form of anti-Mercury, and with such a small volume for so great a mass, you minimize the structural mass of the containment system.

An antimatter starship consists of a rotating ring of matter/antimatter rockets. The anti-Helium is contained in a tank made of anti-iron, The Anti-Iron is held apart from its matter container using magnets to keep it centered. There is a valve in the anti-iron tank which when released produces a spray of anti-mercury, combine it with mercury from the exterior matter tank on the outside, and you produce an annihilation reaction, channel the pions with a magnetic field so you can obtain thrust from these pods. Extending from these 6 pod are 6 cables which hold a spaceship with fusion drive in its center. As the pods accelerate, the tow the ship with these six cables which also keep the ship centered and away from the pion/gamma ray exhaust coming out of these rockets. Some other antimatter rockets fire forward, to ionize the interstellar medium ahead of the ship and a magenetic field arounf the crew section deflects these now charged particles around the ship and protecting the inhabitants inside.

OK, enough already. This has left the realm of scifi and veered off into pure fantasy. It's certainly not TL 8, it's just a bunch of baseless statements and assertions. "Sure, we'll just make anti-hydrogen and then fuse it together to make anti-helium, and then make antimatter versions of every bloody element in the universe and do all of that at TL 8 because sure, why not?" (because obviously at TL8 we've got nuclear fusion of normal elements. Oh wait, we haven't - never mind any way of making heavier elements that aren't on the standard fusion chain). Seriously, you're just making this all up as you go along, vomiting it out of your mind without any further thought into posts here. It's utter nonsense. Pretty much everything you've said here is utterly wrong and totally pie-in-the sky.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

OK, enough already. This has left the realm of scifi and veered off into pure fantasy. It's certainly not TL 8, it's just a bunch of baseless statements and assertions. "Sure, we'll just make anti-hydrogen and then fuse it together to make anti-helium, and then make antimatter versions of every bloody element in the universe and do all of that at TL 8 because sure, why not?" (because obviously at TL8 we've got nuclear fusion of normal elements. Oh wait, we haven't - never mind any way of making heavier elements that aren't on the standard fusion chain). Seriously, you're just making this all up as you go along, vomiting it out of your mind without any further thought into posts here. It's utter nonsense. Pretty much everything you've said here is utterly wrong and totally pie-in-the sky.

I interpret Tech Level 8 to mean, anything our current understanding of physics allows. Tech level 9 requires a new understanding of physics. Antimatter has already been made in our laboratories, abet in minute quantities,

http://phys.org/news/2011-03-physicists-antihelium-nucleus-heaviest-antinucleus.html

Physicists observe antihelium-4 nucleus, the heaviest antinucleus yet
March 22, 2011 by Lisa Zyga report

(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1932, scientists observed the first antimatter particle, a positron (or antielectron). Since then, scientists have observed heavier and heavier states of antimatter: antiprotons and antineutrons in 1955, followed by antideuterons, antitritons, and antihelium-3 during the next two decades. Advances in accelerator and detector technology led to the first production of antihydrogen in 1995 and antihypertriton (strange antimatter) in 2010. Now, scientists with the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed another state of antimatter for the first time: the antimatter helium-4 nucleus, which is the heaviest antinucleus observed so far.

As the researchers report in a study posted at arXiv.org, the antihelium-4 nucleus consists of four antiparticles: two antiprotons and two antineutrons. To observe the new antimatter, the scientists collided gold nuclei with each other a billion times. These high-energy collisions produced a quark gluon plasma, which is a hot, dense matter that contains roughly equal numbers of quarks and antiquarks. As the plasma cooled, it transitioned into a hadron gas and produced protons, neutrons, and their antiparticles. The scientists observed a total of 18 antimatter helium-4 nuclei in this gas, demonstrating that antihelium-4 does indeed exist.

As the scientists noted, antihelium-4 will likely be the heaviest antinuclei to be observed for quite a while. The scientists predict that the production of the next heaviest stable antimatter nucleus, antilithium-6, is beyond the reach of current accelerator technology.

The amount of antihelium-4 that the scientists observed in the current experiment can be modeled very closely by thermodynamics, which suggests that there’s not a lot of naturally occurring antihelium-4 in the Universe. In fact, the scientists predict that we’re very unlikely to see any of it in space; if we did observe antihelium-4 in space (or any antinuclei heavier than antihelium-4), it would mean that the antimatter is being produced by another mechanism. And if there were another mechanism for producing antimatter in large enough quantities that we could observe it, that would indicate the existence of a large amount of antimatter somewhere in the Universe.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is currently scheduled to launch in April, is carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station to search for particles of antimatter in cosmic rays. The scientists predict that the spectrometer will not detect any antihelium, but if it does, it could have significant implications for antimatter research. One of the biggest questions that cosmologists have is why the observable Universe is made almost entirely of matter and not antimatter. Finding a part of the Universe that contains more antimatter than expected could help scientists find an answer and shed light on what was happening during the early Universe.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-03-physicists-antihelium-nucleus-heaviest-antinucleus.html#jCp

I figure that an antimatter propelled slower than light rocket is a lower tech level than a Faster than light Spaceship such as one using the fictional technology the Jump Drive, as his article indicates, antimatter has already been produced, its existence is an established fact, all we have to do is figure out a way to ramp up production. and really Anti hydrogen is an inconvenient form of antimatter, if we want to get close to the speed of light, we will need a starship that is mostly matter and antimatter to be annihilated, so in order to do that, we need to limit structural mass of the containment system, and in order to do that, we need a dense form of antimatter. Anti-mercury, I believe fits the bill, it is a very dense substance, over 100 tons of it fits within the space of 1 dton of hydrogen, but the containment vessel for it need only be 1 dton, it would be small compared to the spaceship it is towing, lets say a 100 ton scout vessel, each one of the engine pods has 100 tons of matter/antimatter in the form of mercury/antimercury, and we have six of them arranged in a ring held apart by the rings spin and centrifugal force. Lets place these pods at the end of 50 mile long cables from the scout ship it is towing. When this arrangement accelerates, the scout ship is pulled along in the center staying well clear of the rocket exhaust and the associated radiation. the Scout Ship is heavily shielded just the same. Some of the rocket exhaust is directed forward to ionize the interstellar matter ahead of the ship so it can be directed around the crewed vessel using a magnetic field. Yes it is fantastic, but all well within the known physics and science of today. For a Jump drive we need a new theory of physics that has been proven, we don't have that yet, do Tech level 9 requires a future understanding of science that we don't yet have. Tech level 8 in my opinion, is anything that comes before that. I believe most scientists will agree that we will harness antimatter long before we ever break the light barrier, which most physicists will tell you is impossible to do!

Just so you know though, I'm keeping the antimatter thing as a sidebar, it is a very large assumption to make that we can produce tons of antimatter in the 22nd century, it might happen, its just that we have a long way to go before we achieve that. There are other means to travel to the stars that are less PC friendly, there is the low berths and staged fusion starships, these will take centuries to reach the nearest star, and are limited to no more that around 10% of the speed of light. Laser propelled light sails is another means, though it requires continued home base support to keep the lasers shinning, and a very large laser emitter. Probably the staged fusion rocket is the closest to reality.

 

[fusor]

I interpret Tech Level 8 to mean, anything our current understanding of physics allows. Tech level 9 requires a new understanding of physics. Antimatter has already been made in our laboratories, abet in minute quantities,

I suggest you read up on how elements are made (nucleosynthesis). Making helium is one thing, but making something like mercury or iron would require truly ridiculous energies and conditions that won't be replicable in accelerators (never mind that you're making the antimattter versions of those, and in enough quantities to make ship components like fuel tanks out of them). That's why you're off in total fantasy land with this.

 

[Reynard]

"I interpret Tech Level 8 to mean, anything our current understanding of physics allows. Tech level 9 requires a new understanding of physics. Antimatter has already been made in our laboratories, abet in minute quantities,"

Creating a few particles that can be observed for nanoseconds is different from producing and containing usable quantities for practical and commercial functions. The description for tech level infers common practical application of scientific theory. The theory of steam power, with very primitive working models, existed in Roman times (TL 1) and could have lead to railroads if taken beyond curiosity but we don't see practical use until the 19th century (TL 3). Rocket technology has been around for centuries, around TL 2, but doesn't become practical until TL 5 and greater. We mess around with theories of anti-matter for a century but we have come nowhere near it's use for more than knowing it's there. Commercial/practical use of anti-matter is a very long way in the future not TL 8. We're still waiting to fulfill achieving the tech level 8 of fusion so we're stuck in TL 7.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I interpret Tech Level 8 to mean, anything our current understanding of physics allows. Tech level 9 requires a new understanding of physics. Antimatter has already been made in our laboratories, abet in minute quantities,

I suggest you read up on how elements are made (nucleosynthesis). Making helium is one thing, but making something like mercury or iron would require truly ridiculous energies and conditions that won't be replicable in accelerators (never mind that you're making the antimattter versions of those, and in enough quantities to make ship components like fuel tanks out of them). That's why you're off in total fantasy land with this.

Well look at the size of this thing! It is planetary in scale, if anything could make anti-mercury, I would say something like this could, in two dimensions it is larger than Venus, it has more surface area than the planet Venus, and it collects more solar energy, that said, I think it might be a little too advanced for the 22nd century, I think we would be lucky to be in the same situation that Gerard O'Neill assumed we would be at by the mid 21st century. I think if we do build a starship by 2100 AD it will likely be a multistaged fusion rockets operating on the same principles as reusable single staged fusion powered spaceships. Basically a spaceship carries a smaller spaceship as cargo, which in turn carries an even smaller spaceship which carries a smaller spaceship than that. The smallest ship is what explores Alpha Centauri, it has a crew in automated low berths, its crusing speed is 5% of the speed of light at it takes 88 years to arrive there, the ship is largely funded by NASA, the ESA, and the Indian Space Agency, the main expense is in building the lower stages that carry the smaller stages as cargo, it is loaded up with Helium-3 and deuterium, and hydrogen as reaction mass, and gradually accelerates out of the Solar System with a crew frozen in low berths, a semi-AI computer watches over them and monitors their condition. I'll say this ship is launched by 2075 AD, and arrives in the Alpha Centauri system by 2163 AD, which is the year I'll have this setting in. We have all these space colonies in the Solar System and meanwhile, 4.4 light years away, we have a crew that I just awaking out of their low berths, as the receive a greeting from Mission Control, with a bunch of downloads containing new technology from 2059 AD. The ship is small, about 1000 d-tons, it contains a number of exploration vehicles including a shuttle, some ground transports and some aircars for the planet below, the planet is Earthlike, I'll use the stats for Prometheus the planet from the OTU.

The stats are X785700-0 Prometheus orbits Alpha Centauri A G2V, has intelligent tool-using inhabitants, about tens of millions of them. has three gas giants, 2 planetary belts and 4 other rocky worlds, has a dense atmosphere breathable by humans, on the highest peaks, the atmosphere is standard.

 

[fusor]

Well look at the size of this thing! It is planetary in scale, if anything could make anti-mercury, I would say something like this could

You need a supernova to make mercury (or indeed any element heavier than iron)! A piddly sunshade isn't even remotely enough to do that. Just because you would say it could do that doesn't mean it actually can.

It just shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You're just making all this up off the top of your head with no idea about how anything actually works and throwing it out here. I'd suggest that you actually make some effort to actually understand what you're suggesting first, before bombarding everyone with your nonstop braindumps.

 

[Reynard]

I swear there are only a couple people on this thread who are taking the whole thing FAR too seriously. Really, if the thread hurts too much when you read it, stop reading. calm down and go to other less stressful threads. You're not protecting the rest of us who have not trouble reading.

 

[fusor]

I swear there are only a couple people on this thread who are taking the whole thing FAR too seriously. Really, if the thread hurts too much when you read it, stop reading. calm down and go to other less stressful threads. You're not protecting the rest of us who have not trouble reading.

I stayed out of it until he posted something particularly egregious. If someone is presenting something that is supposedly a "tech level 8 solar system" and then going on about stuff that is clearly far beyond that, I think I'm justified in pointing that out. It's not taking it "too seriously" when what's being presented isn't what it's claimed to be. What annoys me (beyond the barrage of useless graphics) is that these posts are just streams of nonsense - most of what Tom says is just factually incorrect and pure fantasy and he doesn't address any of the points raised. It's just a constant idea dump with no vetting or filters.

"As for where you get the baryons from, that's easy, Earth's Moon! Gravitationally Earth's Moon is the easiest source of matter to build this out of, remember Earth's Moon has about 3 times the amount of matter as does the asteroid belt, so there is plenty of material here, and its low gravity, and the fact that Venus is the closest planet to Earth means, you can mine the Moon, built solar power satellites out of the Lunar material just as O'Neill suggested, and then you can send some of these Solar Power Satellites over to Venus, using mass drivers, and lunar rock as reaction mass"

For example, the section quoted above is just wrong. It's actually easier to get to many earth-crossing asteroids in terms of energy and deltaV than the moon. The Moon is more like 25 times more massive than the asteroid belt, and Venus isn't "the closest planet to Earth" (which itself is meaningless since planets move around their orbits. Sometimes Venus gets closer to Earth than Mars does, and sometimes Mars gets closer than Venus does). And then later he's going on about mining Uranus (why? there are much closer sources of hydrogen to mine. Like earth's oceans, for example. or the ice on Mars) and casually talking about sending that to Venus (from 20 AU away? Yeah, right). And so on.

And making anti-elements in large quantities is just nonsense. We're nowhere close to even making normal elements, and the energies required are enormous for that - and he's talking about casually making antimatter elements heavier than iron in large amounts? That's beyond pure fantasy at TL8.

If he wants to present it as "Ancient level engineering projects" (or even "Tom's nonsensical stream of consciousness thread") then that's fine. But this certainly isn't anything resembling "near future scifi".

 

[Reynard]

The thing is you're freaking out about it. If it's that distressing, go on to another thread and never look back. I do that to many threads here that are of no interest, offensive or just nonsensical to me. If you think what Tom is doing is so patently wrong then ask the moderators to stop it rather than continually ranting and fanning your own flame. If the moderators have no problem then it's considered okay.

Stay Calm
...and....
Move Along

 

[fusor]

The thing is you're freaking out about it. If it's that distressing, go on to another thread and never look back. I do that to many threads here that are of no interest, offensive or just nonsensical to me. If you think what Tom is doing is so patently wrong then ask the moderators to stop it rather than continually ranting and fanning your own flame. If the moderators have no problem then it's considered okay.

Or maybe Tom might actually listen for once and change how he presents what he writes and actually think through things before he posts them, since it seems he's chosen to use MGT boards as a dumping ground for his material. As it is the vast majority of what he writes is utterly irrelevant to MGT, and is posted here unsolicited (it's not as if anyone even asked for anybody's opinion on what a TL 8 solar system would be like or on the Cyrannus system from BSG, he just started posting his charts here without any sign that anyone would be interested. Which again is why I keep saying he should do this on a blog but he refuses to do so).

Or maybe he could just ask questions about things for his settings instead of just posting the settings here uninvited. And maybe he could listen to what people say about them. Maybe he could actually answer questions instead of using every response as an excuse to post even more of his braindumps which have nothing to do with what was being asked or discussed. (I mean for god's sake, I pointed out how he didn't understand how nucleosynthesis worked and instead what I got was him going on about his sunshade and then prattling on about ships to Alpha Centauri. What did that have to do with what I said? Absolutely nothing.)

But I suspect that may be asking too much. It's not like his modus operandi has changed over the years that he's posted here and on CotI.

 

[Reynard]

Then report him to the moderators most insistently and make it clear his posts are ruining everyone's enjoyment of this forum. I'm assuming everyone else are too afraid to stand up to this behavior so you need to be the one as you have shown the most willingness to call him to task. You have made it clear you will not be satisfied otherwise. Maybe you should make clear to others to stand up and also report this.

 

[fusor]

Then report him to the moderators most insistently and make it clear his posts are ruining everyone's enjoyment of this forum. I'm assuming everyone else are too afraid to stand up to this behavior so you need to be the one as you have shown the most willingness to call him to task. You have made it clear you will not be satisfied otherwise. Maybe you should make clear to others to stand up and also report this.

If the moderators ever feel they have to do anything when things are reported around here, it's just much to say "hey everyone, get along now" and that's it (it's either that or it's to say "stop complaining, we don't care"). They're not interested in policing this sort of thing - and besides which, there are no officially laid down rules here to enforce anyway. Perhaps this is why Tom's chosen this board to be his personal blogsite, because nobody else would let him behave this way on another board.

If he wants to write endless posts about his settings then fine, I can ignore that - and I did for quite a while. The issue that brought me here was his total lack of understanding of how things work - that sort of thing is fair game for criticism but whenever anyone does that all we get back are excuses and more of his stream-of-consciousness setting dumps, and it's very hard to be patient with him when he's got a history of doing that. And it's really hard to discuss a particular issue when he keeps moving on and changing the subject (like he did in his response to my post earlier).

When people ask him questions about what he posts, he should answer them and not brush them aside or use it as an excuse to move onto some other bright shiny thing he wants to talk about - and when people point out the flaws in his ideas, he should address them, and he should stop dumping his ideas onto the board until those points are addressed. But it's like he's got a pathological need to get this stuff out there (and apparently to present his ideas in as inefficient way as possible with totally useless and unnecessary charts) even when it's not relevant to what's being asked or discussed, and even when he's the only one posting on his threads he doesn't seem to get the hint that people aren't interested in what he's posting.This really isn't what one could consider to be "normal behaviour" on a group discussion board. It's really frustrating to deal with, it's really frustrating to watch, and it's really hard to ignore - especially when it keeps bumping up the page every time he adds a new stream-of-consciousness to his threads.

 

[AndrewW]

If the moderators ever feel they have to do anything when things are reported around here, it's just much to say "hey everyone, get along now" and that's it (it's either that or it's to say "stop complaining, we don't care")

Not exactly. There has been cases of user accounts being banned, it's not very common though.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Well look at the size of this thing! It is planetary in scale, if anything could make anti-mercury, I would say something like this could

You need a supernova to make mercury (or indeed any element heavier than iron)! A piddly sunshade isn't even remotely enough to do that. Just because you would say it could do that doesn't mean it actually can.

It just shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You're just making all this up off the top of your head with no idea about how anything actually works and throwing it out here. I'd suggest that you actually make some effort to actually understand what you're suggesting first, before bombarding everyone with your nonstop braindumps.

No, you don't! Gold has been made in a laboratory without a supernova, it is just an energy intensive business. When you fuse something heavier than iron, you lose energy in the process. A Supernova supplies that energy with its gravitational collapse, but there are other ways to make heavy elements. Particle accelerators have made all sorts of elements, even synthetic ones.

You see this chart? All the synthetic ones have been made in a laboratory, not in a supernova, We wouldn't know about the elements at the bottom of the table if we couldn't make them! We can make any of these elements, even ones heavier than iron, all it requires is energy to do this. Just correcting you. I'm sure if we had access to a lot of energy, we could make all sorts of different elements by the ton.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I swear there are only a couple people on this thread who are taking the whole thing FAR too seriously. Really, if the thread hurts too much when you read it, stop reading. calm down and go to other less stressful threads. You're not protecting the rest of us who have not trouble reading.

I stayed out of it until he posted something particularly egregious. If someone is presenting something that is supposedly a "tech level 8 solar system" and then going on about stuff that is clearly far beyond that, I think I'm justified in pointing that out. It's not taking it "too seriously" when what's being presented isn't what it's claimed to be. What annoys me (beyond the barrage of useless graphics) is that these posts are just streams of nonsense - most of what Tom says is just factually incorrect and pure fantasy and he doesn't address any of the points raised. It's just a constant idea dump with no vetting or filters.

What is beyond tech level 8? What tech level are the pyramids of Egypt? You see a tech level 1 society, such as Ancient Egypt can build a skyscraper! Ancient Egypt couldn't build an airplane or a computer, those are examples of things beyond their tech level, a skyscraper is not, they just aren't commonly built by tech level 1 societies.

"As for where you get the baryons from, that's easy, Earth's Moon! Gravitationally Earth's Moon is the easiest source of matter to build this out of, remember Earth's Moon has about 3 times the amount of matter as does the asteroid belt, so there is plenty of material here, and its low gravity, and the fact that Venus is the closest planet to Earth means, you can mine the Moon, built solar power satellites out of the Lunar material just as O'Neill suggested, and then you can send some of these Solar Power Satellites over to Venus, using mass drivers, and lunar rock as reaction mass"

For example, the section quoted above is just wrong. It's actually easier to get to many earth-crossing asteroids in terms of energy and deltaV than the moon. The Moon is more like 25 times more massive than the asteroid belt, and Venus isn't "the closest planet to Earth" (which itself is meaningless since planets move around their orbits. Sometimes Venus gets closer to Earth than Mars does, and sometimes Mars gets closer than Venus does). And then later he's going on about mining Uranus (why? there are much closer sources of hydrogen to mine. Like earth's oceans, for example. or the ice on Mars) and casually talking about sending that to Venus (from 20 AU away? Yeah, right). And so on.

Depends on how you define "easy", the Moon is all in one spot, Earth crossing asteroids are not! If you want to mine the Moon, you can do so all in one spot, but it takes additional energy to find and retrieve each Earth crossing asteroid, and the Moon has more material than they do. As for energy to get things off the Moon, that comes from the Sun, and the Sun provides it for free!

And making anti-elements in large quantities is just nonsense. We're nowhere close to even making normal elements, and the energies required are enormous for that - and he's talking about casually making antimatter elements heavier than iron in large amounts? That's beyond pure fantasy at TL8.

haven't you been listening? I said I was going to leave it as a side bar, yet you continue to debate me on this subject, I don't know why you are so determined to argue over these points, is it some power trip you have?

I really don't care, I've moved on, I had an idea and decided to share it, you don't like it too bad! I'm done with this topic, but your not. What's the matter with you? Do you have some kind of "Poindexter Complex" or something? Its a game! Something doesn't have to be possible to be in the game, Geez! What's possible and what's likely are two different things!

If he wants to present it as "Ancient level engineering projects" (or even "Tom's nonsensical stream of consciousness thread") then that's fine. But this certainly isn't anything resembling "near future scifi".

How do you know? Have you ever been to the Near Future? Do you think the Near Future is at all capable of surprising you? I think Artificial Intelligence is in the Near Future, even though Traveller presents it as Tech Level 17! I don't think the development of a machine that can think is nearly as hard as going faster than the speed of light. I think building large scale structures requires greatly expanding the work force, whether that is a work force of humans of machines does not matter. The key enabling technology is probably Artificial Intelligence, once we have that we can build as many as we want and artificial intelligence can build as many artificial intelligences as they want. Program one machine to build another and then program them all to build a planetary Solar Shield, it is really a simply principle, you place a solid object inbetween the Sun and a planet, it is just very large, and it requires a large work force to construct, probably many more than their are humans on Earth today, but with AI, we can build as many as we want, so long as there is material to make them from.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Then report him to the moderators most insistently and make it clear his posts are ruining everyone's enjoyment of this forum. I'm assuming everyone else are too afraid to stand up to this behavior so you need to be the one as you have shown the most willingness to call him to task. You have made it clear you will not be satisfied otherwise. Maybe you should make clear to others to stand up and also report this.

If the moderators ever feel they have to do anything when things are reported around here, it's just much to say "hey everyone, get along now" and that's it (it's either that or it's to say "stop complaining, we don't care"). They're not interested in policing this sort of thing - and besides which, there are no officially laid down rules here to enforce anyway. Perhaps this is why Tom's chosen this board to be his personal blogsite, because nobody else would let him behave this way on another board.

If he wants to write endless posts about his settings then fine, I can ignore that - and I did for quite a while. The issue that brought me here was his total lack of understanding of how things work - that sort of thing is fair game for criticism but whenever anyone does that all we get back are excuses and more of his stream-of-consciousness setting dumps, and it's very hard to be patient with him when he's got a history of doing that. And it's really hard to discuss a particular issue when he keeps moving on and changing the subject (like he did in his response to my post earlier).

When people ask him questions about what he posts, he should answer them and not brush them aside or use it as an excuse to move onto some other bright shiny thing he wants to talk about - and when people point out the flaws in his ideas, he should address them, and he should stop dumping his ideas onto the board until those points are addressed. But it's like he's got a pathological need to get this stuff out there (and apparently to present his ideas in as inefficient way as possible with totally useless and unnecessary charts) even when it's not relevant to what's being asked or discussed, and even when he's the only one posting on his threads he doesn't seem to get the hint that people aren't interested in what he's posting.This really isn't what one could consider to be "normal behaviour" on a group discussion board. It's really frustrating to deal with, it's really frustrating to watch, and it's really hard to ignore - especially when it keeps bumping up the page every time he adds a new stream-of-consciousness to his threads.

Do you own these forums? Do they belong to you? And who appointed you as the policeman of what's "Normal". Is there a rule that I'm not supposed to argue with you, or to disagree with anything you say? If you say it, it must be true, is that it?

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

If it is simply in orbit around Venus, it doesn't need to be a statlite, you could make it as thick as you please!

No, no you can’t. A statite would be cheaper. If you propose the orbiting sphere/cylinder version, you would be fired... out of a cannon, into the sun.

As for where you get the baryons from, that's easy, Earth's Moon!

No one is shipping matter from Earth’s Moon to Venus just to make antimatter. They’d find a way to make it on the moon, if they could get the most appropriate precursors there. Which you have not yet stated a proper case for.

 

[fusor]

No, you don't! Gold has been made in a laboratory without a supernova, it is just an energy intensive business. When you fuse something heavier than iron, you lose energy in the process. A Supernova supplies that energy with its gravitational collapse, but there are other ways to make heavy elements. Particle accelerators have made all sorts of elements, even synthetic ones.

I'm well aware of all that. You're wanting to make it in huge quantities though - you're not going to do that in a particle collider. And those transuranic elements have also only been made in miniscule quantities because they're incredibly unstable (and we're at the edges of what we can make any more anyway given the power we can put into the accelerators).

I'm sure if we had access to a lot of energy, we could make all sorts of different elements by the ton.

How, by magic? How many particle accelerators do you think we'll need to make tons of an element from scratch by bombarding it with neutrons or whatever. You're just handwaving everything away here.