Saw another post comparing space habitat sizes and thought I’d share a few slides from a presentation I did a while ago. These slides compare the sizes of existing stations with real mega structures and vehicles and fictional space stations. Hope you find it insightful.

Slide 1: Past & Present Space Stations

Slide 2: ISS vs Existing Buildings and Vehicles

Slide 3: Size Comparison with Fictional Space Stations

Here’s another comparison. I decided to include Rama from Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”. Other than just comparing the cross sectional area I’ve also included a side by side length comparison. The non-Rama cylinders are based on the cylinders I compared in my previous post (there you can find their internal area, spin time, internal volume and linear speed)

With more distance anything that doesn't require establishing a handshake becomes a lot more attractive.

Here's an idea of what the Moon could be used for. Solar powered data centers to power AI. You have multi-megawatts of solar panels powering data centers for training AIs, these data centers are accessed with the 1 1/3 second light lag, all the power stays on the Moon, it is just the results of the AI queries that are beamed back to Earth, the solar energy is used on site, thus not taking up valuable real estate on Earth.

In the past four years I've been interested in space things, I've only known that if we can travel in the speed of light it will still take millions of years to travel to another galaxy, but this year accurately this month I saw that someone said that if we manage to travel at the speed of light, it will only take us few days or hours in our perspective to reach our destination but by the time we reached a place a million years would've pass in Earth's timeline, how is that?

I know current plan is to drorbitntonpoint nemo ,but since station is modular we salvage tech andatetials while still in orbit. A mars vehicle too could be constructed in orbit in a modular fashion using still servicable components of iss or sections of iss can be launched out of orbit into a orbit around mars loaded with supplies to act as a way station so manned mission could have some supplies on site when they arrived in orbit of mars .plus an orbital presence could be used as a back communication relay with earth

I was just laying in bed worrying about how to protect a future huge civilisation from things like relativistic kill missiles and high velocity rogue stars and planets etc (eg, too fast to see coming in time to respond). And I just came up with a possible solution! I decided your defences have to be permanent and passive. Surrounding you solar system sizes civilisation in some form of wall or ablative armour is not a sensible option (as in to dissipate the impact). So I had the idea of using gravity. Basically build your civilisation in the null space between multiple large gravitational bodies (presumably black holes orbiting around their collective empty centre of mass) so that anything targeted at your system from any direction will be deflected away from the null space in the centre. I suspect this will likely be easier for protecting against natural threats as an adversary may be able to carefully target a correct approach for an impactor. Working out the maths/feasibility of this is well beyond me, but I thought is any interesting idea worth sharing. My thinking is this approach is similar to how a large planet like Jupiter can clear out a system by slingshotting things away.

I find this channel enjoyable, but there are some elements that are too frequent, and which I dislike:

Everything changes in ways we can't even imagine, except for capitalism: While the videos may toy around with the craziest technological possibilities, they often include segments about "climbing the social ladder (through economical gains)", "amassing resources", and so on, without ever considering alternatives unless it's a video of some fringe topic like techno primitivism, and even then, topics like degrowth or anarchy are more alien to his channel than actual extraterrestrial creatures.

Most videos will go on a tangent about ownership, the ultra-wealthy, and other modern constructs that we have no reason to believe would have any meaning in a trillion years.

Most importantly, it makes little sense: He admits being overly optimistic for sci-fi standards, yet the existence of a capitalist system inherently implies oppression and coercion; you either have the most dystopian horror story and capitalism, or a (still overly optimistic) utopia without it.

Overcrowding: This is a subset of capitalism, but it's common enough on his videos to deserve its own mention. I'm not using the term "overpopulation", because post-scarcity is implied, but he frequently advocates for colonies of a gazillion people, like if it was a videogame where you only care about min-maxing a bunch of emotionless NPCs.

This is somewhat understandable since in one of his videos he shows that he has a house with acres of land; it's easy to believe that having tons of people is desirable when you don't have to deal with them and when you believe that they all have it as good as you.

I'm sure that someone living in one of those Hong Kong coffins would much prefer some population controls than fitting yet another trillion people in some planet-wide Ecumenopolis.

Resource exploitation: Again part of the same, but a common topic: it's always about how you can gather all resources on sight and build a trillion habitats only to continue expanding ad infinitum. The rare exceptions are usually because of threats, local issues, or other "stay at home" paradox hypothesis.

These are the main things that put me off, and while I'll likely continue watching once in a while, I often find myself stopping his videos once he starts going on about virtually immortal post-humans investing to save money for the future, all while quoting Warren Buffet.

Are there any channels out there that explore sci fi topics without coming from this "eternal growth" lens? They can be more realistic/dystopian, but I don't mind the optimism, I'd simply prefer a channel where they explore things like having a few million robots mining resources to keep a paradise-like terraformed Earth with a total population of 100 million perpetually comfortable, instead of how to mine an extra galaxy to fill another quadrillion cylinders with people.

Question: Is General Relativity as much an emergent behaviour of Newtonian Mechanics, as much as Newtonian Mechanics is an emergent behaviour of Quantum Mechanics?

Thus, the elusive Theory of Everything may be defined by inversing our focus from measuring the micro using the macro, and instead utilizing derivation of the emergant behaviour contrasted between the micro and macro.

I know many more focused and smarter people had pondered upon this. Hence, I invoke the sacred rights of being wrong in the interwebs. Hit me with your best debate.

Children of dead earth inspired piece of art i drew one day

Ever since I found out that we didn't exist during the Dinosaurs, I've been thinking if we came from the the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs, and my speculation is that the asteroid have organisms in it and after the extinction event and the earth stabilize again the organisms that got spread all over by the asteroid started waking up and evolving, resulting to a lot of new species that are not dinosaurs to sprout including us humans

UCH (Ultra Cooperation Hypothesis) UCCs (ultra-cooperative-civilizations)

Overview: The basic premise of the UCC hypothesis is that while not having FTL travel or communication may make maintaining a cohesive empire across the stars challenging, significant modifications to human psychology could open up several paths to achieving this. These range from simply increasing humanity's governing range by doing things like raising Dunbar's Number, increasing empathy, and so on, to more extreme methods like a singleton or hivemind using brainwashing to prevent unwanted drift in thought amongst it's servants even over lightyears. So, if humanity can break the 1 lightyear governing radius, then how far can it go? That's where UCCs come in, basically operating on the idea that some very simple goal could be converged on which should have as few specifics as possible so as to be more likely to converge, with the basic rules being in this order: "1: do not cause harm to other lifeforms with this shared set of goals. 2: obey the opinions of the majority you converge with. 3: avoid causing harm to those without these mental modifications" and for these rules to remain as fixed imperatives emforced by an AI monitoring system and when possible a communal monitoring system to check for deviations. The weakness here is that it relies on definitions of concepts being something absolute that can't be twisted, or at least being hard enough to twist that the "half life" of the alignment to these goals is either functionally infinite or at least long enough that no major irreversible collapses would occur throughout the lifespan of the universe. It also benefits greatly from convergence, though that part isn't strictly necessary. Convergence seems likely though as psychological modifications would seem likely to be mainly amplifiers of pre-existing goals we humans have, with cooperation, empathy, and societal cohesion being pretty strong ones, at least strong enough for significant convergence. So you get people at first choosing small empathy mods under a mix of personal desire and perhaps social pressure, then they're mind is now warped and more inclined to adopt further modifications, and so on until converging on the UCC. Now preventing drift in the UCC relies on true alignment to goals, and a state if alignment that lasts a long time, so you may need to get very elaborate in all the little specifications to make sure even those three or so goals are maintained without any clever Monkey's Paw style work-arounds to only technically follow orders, even if it requires a "ten-trillion commandments" so to speak, that would only take up a few terabytes afterall, and even if it took up a while matrioshka brain that is still workable. From here, the various convergent, nearly identical UCCs essentially become one "faction" that can remain cohesive despite long distances, as much like the empathy-modded humans they can handle a 100 lightyear or more communication gap because they're so stable 100 years is basically nothing to them. The UCC basically has all the advantages of a hivemind without needing to be close enough for communication as loyalty remains regardless of time and/or distance. And unlike empathy modded humans a UCC could have theoretically infinite range instead of merely amplified range. Then comes the game theory aspect of this. Cooperation is essentially the most overpowered strategy as it turns competitors into allies, so logically a UCC would be the epitome of this strategy, winning not by overpowering your opponents but by making you and your opponent be on the same team, and once this happens there's basically no going back aa it's no longer team A (you) vs teams B, C, D, and so on, but rather a much much larger team A vs maybe some loose alliance of different teams that could be played against each other and some of which could even be your allies, as you may be an existential threat to their future expansion but they may still view each other as larger threats. And that's where the most impressive part comes in: the "resource cascade", where basically each time you colonize a start system, it's yours, forever (barring foreign conquest), whereas colonization for all non-UCC-members is just creating more enemies, and your new resources allow you to build bigger and better infrastructure (like ultra-relativistic beam highways) to colonize more and more systems to get more resources and so on, all the way out to the galactic rim and to every reachable galaxy. This also has some Fermi Paradox implications, as it serves as a complete counterpoint to the Interdiction and Hermit-Shoplifter hypotheses, and further solidifies Grabby Aliens. Additionally, with UCCs being eternally locked in with a certain set of goals, over time any faction that doesn't lock in their primary goals will eventually do so, and quite possibly might end up converging on the UCC goals anyway. And additionally for the UCC (plus more tame psych mods as well) it's almost more like a species that doesn't need a government as they're all like family and have absolute trust in each other, as opposed to some central empire.

I'm making a hard scifi orbital mechanics combat game called Periapsis: Eclipse and I just added Casaba Howitzers. It's always a been highly requested addition to the game, so I'm curious what you folks think of how I've implemented it! Anything fun that I'm missing? How viable do you think this type of weapon would be in orbital combat?

If you're interested in the game, you can wishlist it on Steam to help support development! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3320850/Periapsis_Eclipse/