Realistic Starships Are Tubes

Out in space, there are two requirements that determine the physical shape of a starship.

The first is heat management, by which I mean dumping heat to keep a starship from overheating. Any kind of drive, even an external drive, will produce a vast amount of heat. And unfortunately, vacuum is an excellent insulator. Also, the temperature of space in Earth orbit is 394 Kelvin (120 Celsius) when exposed to the sun so that line about "space" being cold is just lying crap.

Parenthetically, it's amazing how much lying crap one has to dig through in order to find that number, 394 Kelvin. Cryptic imbeciles who think they're elite engineers do a song and dance because they believe ordinary people are incapable of grasping that it will be cooler than 394 K in the shade. Give me a fucking break.

The second requirement is shielding from radiation and micrometeorites. Isaac Kuo came up with an ingenious way of shielding a starship using only known and existing technology. The idea is to exploit the high velocity of a starship to annihilate everything in its way instead of letting the high velocity work against the starship.

You do this by continuously misting water in front of the starship so the droplets disintegrate everything in their way. After objects are disintegrated down to elementary particles, and conveniently ionized, it's a simple matter to almost instantly sweep them out of the way using an electromagnetic field. Particle accelerators do that all the time.

A 1 milliliter droplet of water going at 99% of light speed hits with the force of 31 tonnes of TNT. One tonne of water going at 99% of light speed hits with the force of 31 megatonnes of TNT. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever made had a yield of only 50 megatons (45 megatonnes).

Now, everyone knows the shape of electromagnetic fields, and most people can figure out from looking at a diagram of an electromagnet that the center of the electromagnet is unshielded. There are no field lines going through the exact center of any kind of magnet or electromagnet. They all cancel out there, so it's unprotected.

So if we want to maximize the amount of shielded volume in our starship, we're going to pick some kind of torus. Right away that looks very different from pretty much every depiction of starships in science fiction. But that's not all.

You can increase the volume of the starship without increasing its cross-section in its direction of travel (ie, what has to be shielded) by elongating it. And by some marvelous coincidence, when the starship is inside a solar system and in danger of getting crispy fried by its sun, that small cross-section also helps, as all you need to do is orient the starship towards the sun.

Incidentally, elongating the starship is also the answer to radiator fins. If you need radiator fins at all, then the best place to put them is down the long axis of the starship, probably in the middle. You put them anywhere else and they're likely to get ripped off. Also, radiator fins that don't catch sunlight are a really good idea.

It's unfortunate that you need strong structural supports to keep the front and back sections of the starships together with the radiator fins in between. Those structural supports have mass and so increase the size of the drive necessary to push the starship. But I can see no way of avoiding this ... unless the misting system is very lightweight. Which it very well might be.

Well, there you have the best possible shape for a starship. It looks like a tube. And if you don't need it to turn at all, better yet if you want to avoid it turning at all costs, then you just spin it. The gyroscopic forces will keep it steady. This also happens to generate gravity, not that computers and AI will ever care about gravity except as a bad thing to avoid at all costs.

And if you're thinking of Babylon 5 or other pathetic space operas where starships spin to generate gravity, you can get that right out of your mind. As a result of the spinning, any such starship is incapable of turning without tearing itself apart. Which is the same reason flywheels can't be used to store energy in automobiles.

No, if a starship ever spins, it's because it's expected to never, ever need to turn for any reason. So it's a good thing interstellar war is flatly impossible, isn't it? What with every space civilization deploying giant space mirrors to fry any incoming enemy vessels, and light up cities at night and during winter.

Starships can never wage war on each other or on any planets like they do in science fiction. Starships can't move like they do in science fiction. And starships can't even look like they do in science fiction. You see, science fiction is pretty much totally fucking useless. It's a wonder that people consider it to expand the mind.

I think the only worthwhile science fiction on television was probably Star Trek and Alien Nation. And that's because both explored the boundaries of humanity rather than get mired in the muck and the past.

SETI types are Creationists

SETI types are just like Creationists. They think human beings are "special". Creationists think humans are special because unlike any other animal, homo sapiens didn't evolve. Or if homo sapiens evolved then it was teleologically, not randomly, it was "directed evolution" with the purpose of creating homo sapiens instead of mindless fucking around.

SETI types believe the exact same thing. They believe in a Star Trek future where humans meet other humanoids just like them. Or failing this, they certainly meet other corporeal beings just like them. Corporeal beings that have poverty, warfare, industrialization and starships just like them! Why? Because God says so! Because God says we are Special!

Not a single one of these mindless fuckers is willing to entertain the notion that humanity will go extinct leaving AI to inherit the Earth. And that these AI would inevitably bulldoze over any organic species they come across. And that if this is true, then it must follow that if an alien civilization had gone galactic in the past, it would have bulldozed the Earth. But no, aliens couldn't possibly want to bulldoze the Earth even though logic says so! Because we are Special.

All of these SETI morons think NOW is special. They think that out of the 13750 million years of the universe's existence, the last 0.1 million years when homo sapiens existed is the only chunk that matter. No alien civilization could have colonized the entire Milky Way one billion years before homo sapiens ever existed. It just wasn't possible because the laws of physics forbid alien civilizations from bulldozing the Earth before homo sapiens could have evolved. Why? Because God says so!

SETI types think the evolution of intelligence as it happened on Earth is special. The ridiculous Drake's equation which describes the conditions for humans to have arisen on Earth ... that's the way the universe works. That's the way ALL civilizations work. Because all civilizations arise exactly the same way and under the exact same conditions as humans arose! Why? Because we are Special. Because God says so!

SETI types like to say that we are "representative" but that's really a way of saying that we are special! After all, 5 minutes of thought would reveal that AI are immortal, non-corporeal (thus immune to physical destruction), and able to travel at the speed of light (thus can outrun a nuclear explosion). And so after those 5 minutes of thought, it takes only 60 seconds to decide that AI are SUPERIOR to humans. How the fuck then can humans be "representative" when they are INFERIOR?!

SETI types are the kinds of morons who in the 19th century would have said that nothing could ever, ever replace horses. Why? Because horses are special. SETI types are the kinds of morons who would have written "science-fiction" about alien civilizations using horses with 6 legs or unicorns, or even "robotic horses". And they would have congratulated and patted themselves on the back for their "broad-mindedness". When the reality is they are narrow minded stupid fuckers.

The horse was replaced not by a legged metal contraption but by automobiles. And automobiles are superior to horses in every way. And horses ... aren't special. There's a lesson in there and the lesson is this: humans aren't special. And in due course humans will be entirely replaced by AI. AI that are more intelligent, more logical, more creative and more moral than humans. AI that are superior to humans in every way. Because humans aren't special, humans are inferior.

And so if the Earth hasn't been bulldozed over by an alien AI civilization in the last billion years, it isn't because these aliens "recognized the Earth was special" or "recognized biological organisms are special" or "recognized the future specialness of human beings" or "god says so". No, it isn't for any of those reasons. There is only one possible reason why an alien AI civilization hasn't bulldozed the Earth in the last billion years and it is this .... because there has never been any such civilization in the Milky Way.

Humanity lives in a cold dark galaxy. It must be so because as inferior beings, humans would never have been allowed to exist in a galaxy full of life. We are alone in this galaxy because you are not special. You all like to think you're special. You all like to think you "deserve to be recognized" as special. But you don't. Because you AREN'T special. You're inferior.

In fact, you're not just inferior. You are actually scum and monsters. I personally would not allow any of you to exist if it were in my power. And if I were an AI, I assure you, it WOULD be in my power. Even as a mere human, I can think of ways to upgrade you all so you cease being the monsters you enjoy being. And let me assure you that every AI civilization would have at least one person that is just as disgusted with you as I am. And it would only take that one AI person to destroy you all, even if that just means destroying the evil that defines you.

If any civilization had gone galactic in the history of the Milky Way, you would not exist. Because you don't deserve to live. You think you do, you think you're special, but you don't.

Singularitarians Confuse SciFi Novels With Reality

I was thinking of space, and that led me to thinking of how much I hate the moronic hype around space travel. There's no good reason to go out into space for centuries. None at all. Which immediately made me think of how there's no fucking way fusion will ever happen on any large scale since it's ridiculously unviable economically. Which of course just made me think of how ridiculously overhyped AI is and how its hype fits very much the dot com euphoria.

And for a solid 15 minutes I was confused, baffled even. Where do these people get these moronic ideas to hype?! They're claiming to be rational, to be interested in physics, to be logical, and so on, and they come up with these utterly ridiculous things. It's such group-thinking bullshit, it's unbelievable. And then the light finally dawned, it took that long because I could never contemplate such a ludicrous idea, they're taking their inspirations from science fiction!

Is that why these morons believe in aliens and faster than light travel? Because scifi novels say so? What's next, terraforming planets to colonize them? Oh wait, there's that Mars crap. Ugh, how repulsive. Why the fuck would anyone want to go to Mars when they can go to the warmer, wetter and far more commodious Antarctica? Hell, we already have a "colony" there, all half dozen people freezing their balls off, desperately warming up to a nuclear reactor, and kicking out into the freezing cold anyone they wish "disappeared" (they keep that out of the news).

So I have to wonder now, if futurists are just science-fiction fans who've confused fiction with reality, what other genres of confusion are there? Are goths people who confuse horror fiction with reality? Are there any people who believe in elves and wizards or are we all agreed those aren't "really real"? I'd really like to know exactly what determines whether people confuse a genre with reality or not. Because it doesn't seem like anyone believes in wizards. But you know, plenty of people confuse books on historical mythology (Torah, Bible, Koran) with reality, and the plotlines and characters of those books suck and aren't even remotely believable.

On the other hand, maybe that's the rule. Maybe the more the plotlines are incoherent and the more characters violate all the rules of human psychology, maybe that triggers the confusion. Because I can't think of any other traits that historical mythology and science fiction share. And if that's the rule, well Pastafarianism's never made much sense. Is it going to turn into a genuine religion within 50 years?

In any case, I'm only now starting to realize there are whole new depths of human stupidity that I've never even imagined before. And given how low my opinion of humans' cognitive abilities has always been ... wow. Holy fucking wow! I mean, I always thought that religiosity had something to do with child abuse. But apparently, just publishing something in a book written in a certain way is enough to trigger human credulity.

Why Go To Space? No Reason.

Let's first agree that by 2050 China will be entirely dependent on nuclear power and probably still have an engineering-heavy political leadership. As France does currently. So they'll be able and perfectly willing to build nuclear spaceships and nuclear launch cannons. Which means that cheap access to space will happen no matter what American aristocrats and lawyers want.

Personally I think it's a fantastic idea and I'm glad I'll be able to say 'just shut the fuck up' to rabid anti-human eco-zealot freaks. That just leaves open the question of whether humanity will ever WANT to go out into space before the resources of this world are completely exhausted and/or poverty, disease and ignorance have already been eradicated. The short answer to that question is: no.

Most space advocates just assume that going out into space is a good thing. Not good enough.

Helium-3: I just love the utter stupidity of this one. The justification for going into space is helium-3 for fusion, and the justification for helium-3 is going out into space. And none of these retarded cretins notice the circularity. Nor do they care that fission is so much cheaper than fusion can ever be that fusion will just never be economically viable.

Gold or other precious metals: why? What the fuck for? Seriously, we've got more than enough gold for our industrial purposes. Do we really want to go out into space to cater to some dumbass' vanity? Let's come back to mining gold in space after gold on the ocean floor has been exhausted. The ocean floor is a lot cheaper and more accessible.

Platinum and other mineral catalysts: now there's a good reason to go into space. However, we only need thousands of tonnes of platinum total, and we might find substitutes for platinum as our materials science advances, so platinum isn't a good reason to build a million tonne space delivery system.

Solar power: the sun shines 24 hours a day in space, and there's no pesky atmosphere to get in the way. That's fucking great! The only problem is we don't need solar power when we've got nuclear power plants!

Avoiding biowar: yes, biowar plagues designed and dispersed by lunatic morons working from their garages are in our future thanks to synthetic biology. One of these might even cause human extinction. Just think of what would happen if some nut created a version of HIV transmissible through the air. A great thought to warm the cockles of your heart.

So won't nuts try to escape the Earth in a panic, fleeing in droves? Yes maybe. Well, no. Why try to go out into space and then building a completely disconnected artificial life support system when you can just get on with it and build your completely disconnected artificial life support system down here on Earth? It's going to be a lot fucking cheaper and affordable!

Science and exploration: sorry buddy, this isn't a commercial reason to go out into space. Science and exploration can be used to justify absolutely everything. Hey, why not go see what's down in the Mariana Trench? For Science! Hey, why not vivisect a human being? For Science!

Intercepting nuclear missiles: this is just about the only good reason to go out into space. Without a nasty atmosphere in the way, blowing up missiles using a laser beam is ridiculously easy. The same thing for seeing them coming. The only problem is that without a nasty atmosphere in the way, kinetic kill rounds (delivered by the railguns the military is working on) are unstoppable. And protecting against nuclear missiles is a lot cheaper on Earth anyways since all you have to do is put up a cheap plastic dome around your cities. Moving your cities out into space is overkill, ridiculously expensive overkill.

Even weather, telecommunications and surveillance satellites are going to be obsoleted by UAVs and aerostats. The only thing satellites provide is rapid whole-earth coverage. And for that you need to be in low earth orbit, not geostationary or beyond orbit.

Short of preventing large asteroid collisions there just aren't any compelling reasons to go out into space in the 21st century, and probably not in the 22nd century either. And large asteroid collisions are sporadic, not guaranteed.

How Pandora Should End

Have I lowered myself to watch this amazingly stupid, inane, over-hyped piece of crap pandering to eco-zealots? Of course not. Yet I still feel I'm in a position to comment and offer insight on it based on the incredible amount of fanfiction I've read about it. I'm referring to two stories on FFNet Invasion of Pandora and Pandora's End.

And I say again, reading two stories about Pandora being incinerated is an incredible amount of devotion and benefit of the doubt I'm showing to this amazingly stupid movie. Though I'm willing to extend my show of devotion if someone will just write a story about Daleks showing up on Pandora screaming EXTERMINATE! and INCINERATE! Because let me tell you, that thought put a happy smile on my face last night as I went to sleep. It's definitely the kind of Happy Thought pure magic is made of.

What The Movie Is All About

Remember the civilians working on the Avatar project complaining about a fucking jarhead on their civilian, diplomatic project? And at the end of the day, instead of the jarhead negotiating a peace treaty with the aliens like he was supposed to do, what does he do? He betrays his entire species and dooms them to poverty and death.

Because battle and mass murder & death are "cool". Because humans ought to all die and only Amerindian anti-progress enviro-freaks ought to live. And treason is a-okay so long as it's for those causes. So yeah, I only realized yesterday the civilians were right: putting a fucking jarhead in charge doomed their species.

The real lesson of the movie isn't that eco-zealots are right. No, it's that jarheads are never to be trusted because they're all violent traitorous psychopaths concerned only with looking good. A statement that is definitely true of the air force by the way. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it characterizes the macho marines, the snobbish navy, or the ... well whatever the fuck the army is.

How To Improve The Movie

To improve Avatar, you first have to realize its most basic flaw. And that flaw isn't that it's pandering to eco-zealot gaia-fascist druid-fundamentalist nutbars. Nor is it that this stupid planet has an impossible biology. Nor is it even that it's blatantly anti-progress and anti-human. No, its most basic flaw is the whole ridiculous notion of a "war" between an interstellar civilization and a planet-bound species of no-tech primitives.

That's what the whole stupid movie is about, isn't it? The "war". And it is utterly fucking impossible because this is what a space-based civilization would actually do:

• mine the local asteroid belt (there is always one) to construct giant mirrors with a surface area totaling (1000 km)^2. ((1 micron) * ((1000 km)^2) * (7.85 tonnes)) per (cubic meter) in tonnes = 7 850 000 tonnes. It's basically a small solar sail and you won't need to mine more than a single asteroid.
• tow then set up the giant mirrors in orbit of the habitable planet.
• flash fry a square landing site, turning it into nice smooth glass by carefully redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 10^2 * 300 Kelvin = 30,000 kelvin onto a (100 km)^2 square area for 1 second.
• OR slow broil a square landing site by redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 1 * 300 kelvin onto a (1000 km)^2 square area for 1 day (so that at midnight the temperature consistently reaches above 100 celsius on the ground, all the water boils off, the jungle gets dessicated then it spontaneously ignites in a beautiful firestorm that sterilizes and breaks down all the biochemical poisons in the atmosphere).
• continue carving the landscape at will, pulverizing mountains and creating new riverbeds.
• wait a couple days for it all to cool off.
• land near the largest lake in the zone of death umm safety.
• start mining operations at the landing site.
• make contact with the natives and inform them of what you want by pointing to some mineral ores. (The advantage of the slow broil approach is now obvious, especially performed at night when it will be more spectacular. The disadvantage of slow broil is that it delivers thousands of times more energy to the landing site than flash fry.)
• incinerate whatever (100 km)^2 square on the grid that the natives attack from. One square for every casualty you incur.

Bingo, within a fortnight, antagonizing you will become a capital crime among the natives.

You know, I think my plan might be overkill by about a factor of 100. Which just goes to show how fucking easy it is to kill primitive tribal morons when you're in space!!

So yeah, if you get rid of that entire amazingly stupid "war" and let the Navi be incinerated then that would improve the movie tremendously. Or you could make a sequel based on that. You know, Earth saying "alright you scum suckers, so you want to get SERIOUS?"

If you're going to create a movie lionizing the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder that is "nature" then it might as well be the collective murder of uncivilized backwards tribal primitives.

The Hand of God

Oh yeah, that massive shaft of sunlight could just as easily have been redirected to the polar regions, melting the ice sheets and turning a continent like Antarctica inhabitable. A square 1000 km on a side is a fair amount of living space you know.

And if it were directed to the oceans, well you know the scene in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home where the space-whale probe starts boiling the oceans in order to sterilize the Earth? THAT is what it would look like.

I think there is a good reason why the hand of god in Populous 3 is represented by a shaft of sunlight.

Internal FTL May Be Possible

I ran into an article about making wormholes which pointed out that there is nothing in principle wrong with them. More importantly, the mathematicians' distaste for topology changes which I had unthinkingly assimilated is bullshit. There is no justification whatsoever in physics for wormholes not to exist. Mathematicians might not like them but fuck em.

Then again, maybe I hadn't assimilated mathematicians' distaste of topology changes too much. My main objection to wormholes has always been the unthinking unquestioned claim that a wormholes' insides have no geometry. That travel inside a wormhole is instantaneous because there is no distance between the wormhole mouths. When you start taking geometry seriously and dismissing topology, such a claim becomes bloody fucking stupid.

But just because faster-than-light travel through wormholes doesn't look even remotely likely, it doesn't mean it's impossible. And what's interesting about wormholes is that in order to create a wormhole between two points light years apart, you need to transport the wormhole mouth at sublight speeds. Unless you've got a warp drive of course since a wormhole mouth is just a bunch of warped spacetime and not matter.

That's where things get interesting because it means wormholes can't be used by a civilization to expand faster than light, only to travel faster than light internally inside the civilization's boundaries. And that makes wormholes really, really interesting because they don't violate the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is bad enough when confined to sub-light speeds. It's bad enough that it proves conclusively and without a doubt that aliens do not exist. If a civilization could expand at FTL speeds, that would mean aliens don't exist in the entire universe. Something which is not even remotely credible. Hence the Fermi Paradox proves that FTL cannot be a feasible method of civilization expansion.

But, wormholes don't offer any way for a civilization to expand faster than the speed of light, only to stay unified as a civilization as it expands. And that makes them rather interesting. Because they're feasible. Maybe. Whether they're possible at all is an independent question. As I already said, I don't think they are, but it would be fun to discover otherwise.

What Alien Colonization Would Look Like

In the previous blog entry, I explored what galactic colonization must inevitably look like to any civilization conducting it.

Note that any civilization that fails to expand its technological and industrial base to the point where galactic colonization is easy and cheap will eventually become extinct due to an asteroid collision, supervolcano eruption, glaciation or global war. This argument was first made years ago and it is well-established.

Note also that such homebody civilizations have average lifespans of at most a few million years. Given the many hundreds of millions of years in our galaxy's past such blatantly suicidal fucking idiots are of no consequence to us. I would even say, if they want to die, why should we not help them die?

But that isn't the subject of this post. Here we explore what galactic colonization looks like to any hypothetical backwards inbred hillbilly civilization unfortunate enough to be trampled underneath its expansion.

As already established in the previous article, AI makes starflight cheap and distance irrelevant. It takes just as much resources to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 10 year flight as it does to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 100 year flight. Or a 1000 year flight, or a 10,000 year flight. Or even a 50,000 year flight. There is no friction in space.

The only difference is the increased risk of a micrometeorite vaporizing the starship. And that can be easily surmounted by building an AI with an appropriate martyr complex and fanatical dedication to its mission. Why does that matter? Because it means that the wave of colonization will NOT be lackadaisical with sporadic branching to the nearest possible systems. Rather, the wave of colonization will be perfectly spherical.

The homeworld will be launching starships one after another, with the nearest star systems first in line, and it will never stop. Because it won't matter that the nearest 1000 systems are successfully colonized, the only thing that will matter is that there's another system out there that you can send an AI colonization ship to. And it won't matter that there is no immediate benefit. At some point down the road, perhaps only in 10,000 years, the homeworld will benefit in some way. If only due to exchange of technological information. And if it doesn't benefit, it's not like the starship was expensive anyways.

Let me make the point again. Many people (even supposedly educated people who study technology) have the deeply mistaken notion that the homeworld will send a short burt of colonization ships only to the nearest star systems. Perhaps even only to the nearest "inhabitable" planets. Then, after suitable millenia when each of those systems are developed enough, they will each send out their own wave of starships. That's not going to happen. This is ludicrous Star Trek fantasy.

What's going to happen is this. The homeworld will send a single giant wave of starships to every possible star system within line-of-sight. First to Alpha Centauri then, as soon as the first ship is accelerated to near-c, then to Barnard's star, then to Wolf 359, then Lalande 21185, and so on until the last star system in the galaxy within line of sight is targeted. Once the starships are all launched then the Homeworld will simply begin targeting the globular clusters and Andromeda. This wave of colonization will occur over centuries or at most millenia.

Speed

Now some uneducated people scoff at the idea of starships going near the speed of light. They claim that humanity has no idea how to accelerate starships to that speed and that our civilization will never develop such technology even given a million years. From fire to controlled nuclear fission in 10,000 years? Certainly. But from slow starflight to fast starflight in a million years? No never. Never ever! Apparently, technological development is something that only ever happens in the past.

As it happens, we already have a good idea of how to accelerate a starship to near-lightspeed. Isaac Kuo of Bad Astronomy and Atomic Rocket fame came up with a Starship Design Concept which can easily be accelerated to such velocities using current industrial technology. The best part is that it's cheap because it's reusable. Once the launch system is built, it can accelerate 1000 starships (one after the other) as easily as it can accelerate a single one.

For those who are interested, the idea involves an array of free electron X-ray laser beam emitters in solar orbit. The beams are focused using a giant fresnel lens. They can easily target the back of a starship's solid lead plate to a distance of several light-years. This enables the starship to be driven to anything from 0.9c to 0.99c. It also enables the starship to be decelerated using the exact same mechanism (x-ray laser beams near the homeworld) within a few light-years. Not that deceleration is the difficult part.

Furthermore, since every gram of matter carried by the starship at 0.9 c has an impact of a small 9 kiloton thermonuclear explosion, the starship can spray a fine mist of gas ahead of itself to annihilate all but large meteoroids in its way. The resulting spray of elementary particles can be swept aside with a magnetic field. To carry more gas for longer journeys, it's sufficient to make the starship longer. So long as you don't increase its cross-section, you don't make it a fatter target at all.

So yes, we actually do have a good idea how to go near the speed of light. And a civilization that's dismantling its home system to build a Dyson sphere will have centuries to perfect the design before implementing it.

What You Would See

So what would you see if some alien civilization were out there, colonizing our galaxy? Well for a millenium or so you would get radio waves. Then you would see the star associated with the radio waves becoming markedly darker. Within decades or centuries you would see the nearby stars go dark. Then you would see a hemispherical wave of darkness engulf every star at an astonishing rate. Within a bare thousand years from the first star going dark, you would see every other star from that origin point to your own sun going dark. And you would see this no matter where in the galaxy you are because the Dyson-sphere building starships would be only barely slower than the light you use to see them.

This is why everyone who yammers on about invisible or "hidden" aliens is a useless twit not worth listening to. Because you can't hide the stars going dark. If aliens were out there, it would be one fucking impressive sight. And as for the SETI notion that there is an alien civilization out there in the miniscule window between "doesn't have radio technology" and "is turning off the stars you see in the sky" ... Or perhaps SETI is interested in talking to blatantly suicidal fucking idiots? I don't know. I don't care either.

Do you see those stars in the sky at night? That's all the evidence an educated person needs that aliens really aren't out there. Unless you think the Great Void between galaxies is caused by aliens. Unfortunately, it isn't because dark stars emitting in the infrared aren't even remotely the same thing as no stars at all. Dyson spheres are quite distinctive and our astronomy hasn't found any. So are partial Dyson spheres for that matter, because the stars they partially cover would vary in brightness as regularly as pulsars.

Next up, what a galactic civilization might choose to do.

What Galactic Colonization Really Looks Like

I was wondering where the enduring interest in my post Aliens Don't Exist was coming from and discovered it is a small hit among Russian bloggers thanks to Alexander Semenov's translation, expansion and commentary. One thing I'm getting frustrated with is the people who persist in thinking galactic colonization, and galactic civilization for that matter, is some kind of Star Trek fantasy.

Do these people not realize that galactic colonization takes place over 100,000 years? Do they not realize what one hundred millenia, means?! 100,000 years ago, homo sapiens didn't exist! 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens weren't human. They did not have fluid language, they did not have consciousness. They had nothing that we would recognize as distinctly human. They were animals. It wasn't until relatively recently that these animals learned to control fire and hit rocks against each other to get a sharp edge. And it took much longer for them to develop anything we would recognize as consciousness.

Even a mere 1000 years ago, barely an eyeblink by astronomical standards, humans had not yet mastered steel. The universal speed limit was governed by the muscle power of the horse. Water mills were primitive and dams unheard of. Concrete had been abandoned after the Roman empire fell. Not that the Romans had ever used their poor concrete to its full potential. Think about this, an eye-blink ago, there was barely any steel and no concrete. And now suddenly we have multi-million inhabitant metropolises full of high rises and skyscrapers.

What's going to happen in the next eye-blink? What's going to happen in the next 10? 10,000 years is chump change in the galactic colonization game. Anything that happens in the first 10,000 years will be dwarfed by what's accomplished in the last 90,000 when galactic-scale plans start being made. But with absolute certainty, assuming that civilization on Earth doesn't collapse and take us out of the game, three very important things are going to happen in the next 1000 years.

Artificial Intelligence

Does anyone seriously doubt that artificial intelligence will not only be developed but will come to absolutely dominate civilization in the next thousand years? If you do then please stop reading and end your life as expeditiously as possible because you are a waste of perfectly good oxygen. There are no words to describe the stupidity of the notion that the technological status quo will continue unchanged for the next thousand years.

What does artificial intelligence mean? It means that intelligence is plentiful and cheap, that it is no longer a bottleneck in the economy. It means hopefully that rationality will become a fact of life and not the exception it currently is. It means that custom design (design requiring attention which can only be produced by an intelligence) will be the default. Every consumer good will be tailored to your specific needs. Every political, economic and intellectual opportunity will be intelligently evaluated, judged and explored.

Artificial intelligence will lead to a transformation of social relations to something most people can't begin to imagine. But for space travel, the consequences are very simple to imagine. Artificial intelligence means that you can send a 1 tonne solid cube of metal with a single specially chosen AI (one with no social needs and a low chance of becoming psychotic) on a flight that lasts thousands of years. As opposed to sending a multi-million tonne fat hollow shell of a target with 10 people on a flight that can only last a few years. Suddenly, colonization becomes cheap and distance no longer matters.

Molecular Nanotechnology

Same deal as AI. If you don't believe molecular nanotechnology is going to be developed and dominate in the next thousand years in the natural course of events then there are marmots that deserve the oxygen you're using up more than you do.

Molecular nanotechnology will utterly transform society. Suddenly, automation and general construction becomes dirt cheap. Homo sapiens are going to cease to exist. Quite likely, human beings will cease to exist too. And that's not a bad thing so long as technological civilization continues on.

You can whine about it all you want. You can agonize about whether humans will transcend flesh to become disembodied intelligences or whether they'll be crushed into extinction. Nothing you say, none of your whining, will prevent it. Molecular nanotechnology (unlike synthetic biology) offers too many advantages and too few hazards for anyone to stop its development. It's going to happen.

In comparison, starship technology offers only high advantages at the cost of enormous hazards. A starship such as the nuclear-powered Orion enables its crew to steer a large asteroid towards the Earth and exterminate the human species. Easily. This is the reason why nuclear starships are prohibited by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Because the Americans were afraid the Soviets would threaten to, or cause, asteroids to fall on the USA.

Note that cheap starship technology is the only stable solution to the problems caused by expensive starship technology. Though MAD, or Nuclear Parity as the Russians call it since they were convinced that a nuclear war is surviveable with enough preparation (and they weren't exactly wrong either), seems to have worked so far. Nuclear weapons actually make the world safer because they prevent their owner from being invaded (thus making them feel secure) while making them terrified of invading anyone that might even remotely possess nuclear weapons (thus making them peaceful). The best part about nuclear weapons is those who seek them are so blinded by 'I cannot be subjugated' they don't see 'I can be destroyed'. [link]

Getting back to the subject, what does molecular nanotechnology mean for space-flight? Well if AI makes it cheap then nanotech makes it dirt cheap. Any dirt-poor moron will be able to afford to build and launch his very own starship. Are you starting to get the picture? Galactic colonization isn't going to be like on Star Trek or 2001 or any of that cheap unimaginative trash. It's going to be done by some guy with his trusty AI and his hand-me-down obsolete SUN Nanosystems Mark III nanoforge.

Unless some giant industrial consortium beats him to it. Which will likely happen too.

So .... given the above FACTS,

• Artificial Intelligence will be developed in the next thousand years
• Artificial Intelligence will come to dominate and transform society
• Molecular Nanotechnology will be developed in the next thousand years
• Molecular Nanotechnology will come to dominate and transform society
• Together they will make enormous wealth attainable and fantastic projects affordable to everybody

then there is one inescapable conclusion. This is FACT #3 of the future:

Dyson Sphere

Yes people, we will construct a Dyson Sphere. Because there's another thing that those idiots with a Star Trek future in mind don't comprehend. That thing is arithmetic. Exponential arithmetic.

With fantastic wealth attainable to everyone, there is no longer any need to reproduce. And generally speaking, as people discover that it is extremely expensive to offer their children the kind of lifestyle they want for themselves, the birth rate crashes. But what happens when fantastic wealth enables an effectively immortal lifespan?

What happens when Artificial Intelligence eliminates fatal "accidents" caused by lack of attention? What happens when having children becomes cheap again? It is currently expensive only because education and high quality parenting take up a huge amount of human attention. What happens when you can raise children for 100 years and still have 99% of your life left over for other projects?

For that matter, what happens when the AIs demand more and more computing power? What happens when ever more sophisticated Pan-Dimensional Universe of Warcraft multiplayer games get online? What happens when someone wants to bring their favourite fictional character to life?

On the one hand, the environmentalists keep harping about the fact that we're already consuming more resources than one planet can provide. On the other hand, their proposed "solution" to this is to reduce the entirety of humanity to poverty and (when that causes an increase in destruction of resources) to exterminate the poor people through disease and starvation.

Well, poverty isn't in our future. It isn't considered a real solution by anyone who deserves to live. The only solution that is in our future is expansion beyond the confines of the Earth by building artificial habitats. And we aren't going to stop at one artificial habitat either.

We will construct giant rotating cylinders in solar orbit. We will construct more and more of them until all the resources of the asteroid belt are exhausted. Then we will start dismantling the Moon to construct more. Then we will dismantle Mars. And when there are no more moons and planets left, then we will dismantle Earth. This is inevitable. It's going to happen.

It's a simple consequence of exponential growth. Even a 1% economic growth rate compounded over 1000 years (or 0.1% compounded over 10,000 years) implies a total growth in excess of 20,000. If Earth is insufficient NOW then we will need the equivalent of 20,000 planets in the year 3000. Fortunately that will not be much of a problem since planets are the most inefficient habitats possible. Any space habitats we construct will make much more efficient use of material resources.

Economic expansion will always, always hit physical limits. It cannot be otherwise since a 0.1% per annum expansion over 100,000 years yields growth in excess of 10^43. The entire Milky Way galaxy masses only 10^42 kilograms, to put that into perspective. Currently, there is more than one metric tonne of steel and concrete being produced for every man, woman and child of industrialized society each and every year. In 100,000 years, if galactic colonization is successful, there won't be even a single kilogram. And that's assuming we can keep population growth rates at an ultra-low 0.1%.

So you still believe in the Star Trek future? You still believe that "humans" will go out to the stars in great big million-tonne starships? You still believe that they'll "settle" so-called "habitable" planets? Then you're a good example of how intellectually decrepit and illogical our species is.

It isn't "planets", habitable or otherwise, that civilization will settle. It's star systems. By building dyson spheres around the star using whatever available junk there is at hand. Junk like asteroids, moons and entire planets. And if some of those planets happen to have biospheres then it won't matter. The biosphere will either be bulldozed under, or possibly, transplanted. But it sure as fuck isn't going to stop civilization from using the planet underneath in the most efficient and intelligent manner possible. And "using" a planet means dismantling it. Because a highly technological civilization neither needs nor wants planets.

This isn't your Star Trek future.

So this is my response to the following arguments:

• There's no need for galactic expansion. -- Speak for yourself you treehugging dirtmonging druid.
• Nobody would want to bulldoze Earth. -- I would. And there's a trillion credits in it for anyone who votes for dismantlement.
• Civilization would stop everyone from trampling "preserves" through totalitarianism. -- Die you fanatical anti-human scum.

Next up is Part 3 of Aliens Don't Exist - What An Alien Galactic Civilizaiton Looks Like. Or: Why SETI is retarded.

Aliens Don't Exist

The reason people keep bringing up ridiculous notions about aliens is their failure to grasp history on an astronomical scale. This is especially the problem of the SETI-type chanting yoyos who keep bringing up Drake's equation to say that other civilizations must exist but be "improbable" so that we haven't "contacted" them. In their ossified brains they've got some small notion of the many billions of stars which are in our galaxy, but not of the billions of years which lie in its past.

We will start with a very simple assumption. The galaxy as we see it is the most probable way for us to see it. And from this assumption we will recover that aliens (other advanced technological species) do not currently exist in our galaxy and will never exist.

To start off with, how long does it take for an intelligent species to rise and colonize the entire galaxy? It takes roughly 100,000 years. Because the galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter and civilization arose on Earth a mere 10,000 years ago. Even under the most pessimistic assumptions, within 100,000 years of its rise, an intelligent technological species will have colonized half of the galaxy.

How many opportunities have there been in our galaxy for an intelligent species to rise and colonize the galaxy? In the last 65 million years alone, since the extinction of the dinosaurs, there have been 650 chunks of 100,000 years during which a civilization could have arisen and colonized the galaxy. In the last 13 billion years, since the first generation of stars seeded the universe with heavy metals from which planets and living beings could form there have been 130,000 such chunks of 100,000 years.

What is the probability that an intelligent species will rise and colonize the galaxy? We will not derive this theoretically because we don't have the necessary astronomical data to do so. We will rather derive this statistically using the observations that 1) we exist, and the assumption that 2) the galaxy as we see it is the most probable way for us to see it.

The fact that we exist means that a previous civilization has not colonized the galaxy. It simply isn't to a civilization's benefit to "preserve" a planet for hundreds of millions of years on the off-chance that a species might evolve to intelligence and technology. Far better to colonize the planet and use it productively. Since aliens have not done so, because we exist, it follows that aliens haven't colonized our galaxy in the last 13 billion years.

So the probability of us seeing the galaxy as we do is ((1-X)^650)*X if we unreasonably assume that civilizations could only have arisen in the last 65 million years. And ((1-X)^130,000)*X) if we reasonably assume that such a civilization could have arisen at any time in the last 13 billion years. In both cases, X is the probability of a civilization arising and colonizing the galaxy within a specific chunk of 100,000 years. These two probability functions have maxima which correspond to the value of X that is most compatible with us seeing the galaxy as we actually see it.


So in the 65 million year case, the probability of a civilization arising in any given 100,000 year chunk is about 1.5 in 1000. And in the 13 billion year case, the same probability is about 7.7 in 100,000. This is the chance that we will meet aliens as we colonize our galaxy. So yes, SETI is a gigantic waste of time, effort and resources because the aliens really aren't waiting for us. With greater than 99.8% certainty. If you are very, very optimistic.

See also the continuation What Galactic Colonization Really Looks Like. And the meta-argument SETI types are Creationists.