Sci-Fi Civilian Vehicles, Equipment and Technology

I think it’s also worth noting that literally every known colony in recorded history was in a location where humans already existed. The Europeans discovered exactly two places, everywhere else, they moved in on land that had already been cultivated and worked for tens of thousands of years by the people who already lived there.

(Said two locations are the Norse discovering Iceland and the British discovering Bermuda.)

At this point, we basically have to assume that any planet we find is either going to be toxic to us or just completely barren. And that would have a large psychological impact that doesn’t really match up to anything on Earth.

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 4:19:39 AM

Where does my planet fall into this spectrum? Microbial life resembling stromatolites and a Venus-like atmosphere which can be breathed only with a bit of medical help.

Probably super depressing because it sounds very grey and with super dense cloud cover. So it’d be pretty dark like, all the time and there’d be nothing visible growing. There’d also be the question of if it’d even be possible to grow anything without enclosed environments with powerful lamps.

Methods that would work on humans to get us to breathe other stuff a little easier probably couldn’t translate to plants, and we’d need a hell of a lot of fertilizer because a planet like that wouldn’t really have, uh, soil or at least not soil with any nitrogen in it.

A planet like that would raise a lot of questions about why it’s even worth colonizing on a large scale given the crazy amount of work that would need to go into making it even a little viable.

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 4:26:55 AM

Actually, the planet in question is cloud-free, but pretty dark ... twilight-dark, though, not night-dark. Perpetual dusk illuminated by a powerful aurora. That said, other planets in the system have even less breathable atmospheres and the necessities of FTL travel/surrounding space environment mean that you need to colonize this one to get anywhere.

The natives didn't just grow from the trees like moss. I'm not talking exclusively about European colonialism, Zendervai - humans have migrated and colonized new lands since we first walked the savannah.

I guess we can compare relative comforts: going from one subsistence or hunter/gatherer scenario to another didn't represent a huge change in lifestyles. Going from Earth to Mars, on the other hand, would, and it would suck for anyone involved without a lot of effort put in to relieve the stress.

I don't know why anyone would imagine that we'd dump a shipload of colonists on Mars and expect them to figure things out. The terminal dependence of any space colony on the homeworld would require massive effort to support it, keep it supplied, and keep it happy.

Our hypothetical Mars colonists will have enormous advantages over both prehistorical migrants and European settlers in that we can send all of Netflix and Disney+ on a stack of flash memory cards. We know how to package food safely. We'll have modern medical care and the best scientific knowledge we can muster.

Regardless, it'll still be incredibly hard and not for the kind of person who would complain about creature comforts or balk at being asked to do unpleasant tasks. It's likely that bearing and caring for children would be the last thing on their minds for quite some time, but humans being what they are, it'll happen eventually and we need to be prepared to deal with it.

Sooner or later, though, the colony will need to grow organically, not merely by absorbing migrants. That's how you go from "colony" to "self-sustaining civilization".

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2023 at 4:34:32 AM

Don't call it Venus like if it doesn't have a dense permanent cloud cover.

Venus-like basically means 3 things: super toxic atmosphere, super dense atmosphere with permanent cloud cover and a weird-ass spin that means a day is longer than a year.

Your planet doesn't seem to have any of those.

All of the problems I stated still factor in though. Plants can't grow in aurora-light, and I wouldn't be surprised if a kind of aurora-psychosis showed up in the population.

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 4:34:15 AM

We might actually need to cultivate the land with robots for a few years before the first settlers arrive. The first few years are probably going to be miserable.

I interpret "Venus-like" in this context to mean extremely high pressure, although I agree that without permanent cloud cover and lead-melting temperatures I don't know how you could reasonably make the claim.

I also am not aware of any candidate atmospheric material that could be 92 bar at the surface and transparent enough that aurora light could get through, but I suppose anything is possible if you put enough fiction in your science fiction.

Also, I say this all the time: the mere capability of terraforming or colonizing a planet negates the need to do so. More than likely humanity will build tons of space station habitats where we control literally every aspect of life.

Why spend time terraforming when you can make a station cheaper, faster and more practically.

Now if we found literal Earth 2.0 that sort of kind of changes things…somewhat. But space beats it out in almost all categories.

Well planets do have benefits, such as magnetospheres. Find a planet with a good magnetosphere and set out to terraforming and you have protection against cosmic radiation.

Planets also don’t wear out as fast as a space station would.

Also they have a bit more durability. You don’t have to worry about meteors the size of basketballs ruining systems on a planet. Or potentially destroying it outright. You do on a space station.

Don't forget worrying about power or gravity... or airtightness. Terraformed planets do have a host of advantages.

Or radiation. Atmospheres and magnetic fields help with that.

Though I am curious as to studies on this if you have any, because while I know a lot of people cant deal with that, I also am pretty sure there are individuals who can, like just personally speaking I know a lot of my friends get upset when they cant see the sun for a while, but there has literally been weeks where I have not seen any thing but darkness and have been fine....

Also I think I have heard reports of people who actually had problems adapting to how open the normal environment is after growing up in kowloon walled city.

I agree with the fundamental point of "psycology is a huge thing to consider" but I do think there is more adaptability to different environments then is being perscribed here, its just you have to find the right people.

Well, space stations around my planet are impossible for several reasons, mainly the nearby neutron star that emits enough gamma rays to instantly fry anything not protected by a thick atmosphere. "Thick" here meaning 10bar carbon dioxide with few clouds, however - closer to Venus than to Mars, mostly, but not exactly identical.

(Noting also that magnetic fields do not protect the surface unless the atmosphere is very thin. And that not all kinds of radiation are stopped by magnetic fields.)

"magnetic fields do not protect the surface unless the atmosphere is very thin"

I suppose you mean "magnetic fields make no difference unless the atmosphere is very thin" - they will still deflect charged particles regardless of how thick the atmosphere is, of course.

But in the case of a neutron star the radiation is pretty darn intense, not to mention that as you write there are X-rays and gamma rays which are not affected by magnetic fields.

The question is if even your thick atmosphere would help. Have you done any calculations on this? And even if it does help, wouldn't the intense radiation strip it away pretty quickly?

Also, there's the question of how the planet's atmosphere, or even the planet itself, survived the supernova explosion that produced the neutron star...

Edited by GnomeTitan on Nov 16th 2023 at 11:25:43 AM

Oh, that's a can of worms that physicists and astronomers are just unwinding right now. The basic thing is that particles (charged or not) with energies between 10 and 1,000,000 electron volts can heat the upper parts of an atmosphere until it falls off. Examples of such particles are "hard" UV radiation, X-rays and solar wind particles. Particles with less or more energy than that on the other hand are absorbed in deeper layers where they can't meaningfully affect the evaporation of an atmosphere.

Magnetic fields can deflect charged particles that aren't too energetic, true, but there are holes in the magnetic poles that are sufficient to negate this protection for atmospheres. One sees in the Solar System that Earth, Venus and Mars lose their atmospheres at comparable rates and there is a well-supported notion that Earth's magnetic field destabilizes our atmosphere.

Anyhow, the neutron star is an old star that emits nearly pure (it's complicated...) hard gamma rays with energies orders of magnitude larger than the examples mentioned above. Thus they penetrate deep in the atmosphere, but according to studies about cosmic rays on Venus 10bar should be enough to keep the surface safe, and they are not effective at stripping away the atmosphere. Granted you can't fly aircraft on my planet without serious radiation hazards. Also, the neutron star predates the planet - the planet formed from the leftover material of the supernova, as Real Life pulsar planets are expected to.

I was responding to your comment that "magnetic field do not protect the surface" rather than the atmosphere, but the question of how long the atmosphere will last near a neutron star is an interesting one. I've never ventured very far into the topic of atmospheric attenuation of gamma rays (the formula for attenuation in air did appear in the textbooks, but IIRC it was applied to lab situations rather than to entire atmospheres).

I thought of the possibility that the planet had formed after the supernova, but in that case the question is rather how enough volatiles to form such a thick atmosphere could have survived the SN. And is the radiation from the neutron star enough to keep the planet warm enough that the atmosphere doesn't condense?

Such a planet would be a very fascinating one to visit, but maybe not a very pleasant place to live.

By the way, is your neutron star a pulsar, or is it so old that it has radiated away its angular momentum?

Edited by GnomeTitan on Nov 16th 2023 at 4:41:07 PM

Yes, I too am curious how it acquired an atmosphere after the supernova.

Gamma ray attenuation in gases roughly occurs at a pressure equivalent to that of Earth's ozone layer. So if the atmosphere is thinner than it is at Earth's ozone layer, the gamma rays can pass through uninhibited.

As for acquiring atmospheres, same way through which Earth, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto obtained their atmospheres - it formed through a proto-planetary disk, except that that disk was formed when a supernova took place within a common envelope (the star started out as a binary and underwent a complex merger). Supernova debris and merger debris and the previous envelope mixed to form a new disk. This disk also gave rise to a red dwarf (OK, brown dwarf, but metallic enough to maintain nuclear fusion) which is the main heat source of the planet.

Pulsars lose both their heat and their spin over time. In practice, the former takes only a few millions of years and the latter can take a very short time or many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe. My neutron star has long since lost all its heat but will spin down over a timeframe of +100 trillion years.

Metallicity isn’t a determinant on whether or not fusion succeeds. It’s all heat, pressure and gravity with regards to natural hydrogen fusion.

Otherwise the first stars would never have emerged in the early universe where there was very little in the way of heavy elements but plenty of hydrogen and helium.

If I remember right, brown dwarfs can reach lithium burning as far as nuclear fusion reactions but cannot ignite into hydrogen. They’re unsustainable because lithium burning is only supposed to be an intermediate step between stellar nebulae and emerging protostars. Not a long term existence.

A brown dwarf either burns up its lithium supply quickly and burns out fading from the visible spectrum or it brightens into a true protostar and reaches ignition and turns into a red dwarf or small main sequence star.

It's a bit more complex than that. Metallicity governs how hot the core of a dwarf star can become during its formation. The more metallic the dwarf star, the less mass it has to have for proton-proton fusion to begin - and the less warm its surface is.

We can't actually tell from the outside whether a given star is fusing hydrogen or not. We can just make a guess that a star with a given surface temperature, mass and metallicity has or has not hydrogen fusion. Since all dwarf stars close enough to the Solar System to be visible have roughly similar metallicities, that means we can define a minimum mass for proton-proton fusion and distinguish between red dwarfs that exceed it and brown dwarfs that don't. But if we are discussing a more or less metallic star, the dividing line shifts and you can no longer say "it looks like a brown/red dwarf, it doesn't/does have proton-proton fusion" without redefining the "red/brown dwarf" distinction.

The fictional star in my setting is much more metallic than any star in the Sun's neighbourhood. Thus while it looks and weighs like a brown dwarf, it actually has proton-proton fusion.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Nov 17th 2023 at 11:01:19 AM

Been discussing that it is possible to synthesize methane from air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen) for industrial use in case hydrocarbons become unavailable when a thought occurred to me.

Would it be economical in the near future to convert hydroelectric dams into hydrogen bottling facilities on the basis that both the raw material and the energy to electrolyze and chill it is abundantly available in the same location, without requiring a giant solar farm?

From what I've read, the answer is no, not with today's energy prices. This may of course change in the near future, especially if the demand soars for green hydrogen for other purposes where fossil fuels or biofuels are not an option, such as fossil-free steel manufacture.

Another exception is if the power plant is in a very remote location, where it would be cheaper to distribute the energy as hydrogen than to build power lines.

Edited by GnomeTitan on Feb 26th 2024 at 8:38:13 PM

There are plans for carbon-neutral energy infrastructure that involve the use of green hydrogen and/or methane for applications requiring very high temperatures and/or energy densities, while everything else runs on electricity (solar/wind/hydro/etc. + batteries). Nuclear power is of course an option in this system.

Hydrogen is at best around three times less efficient to produce, store, transport, and convert to useful energy than the electricity itself, so you only want to use it for applications that can't practically be adapted to electric power.

One such is metallurgy, where smelting requires temperatures that cannot easily be achieved by resistance heaters. Another is rocketry. Aviation is on the margins: it is likely that long-haul aircraft of the future will be powered by hydrogen, synthetic kerosene (e-fuels), or the equivalent.

To achieve carbon neutrality, it is not necessary that we produce zero emissions; it is merely required that we remove as much carbon as we're emitting. Hence, electrolysis.

If you're in such a remote location that running power lines from a hydro plant is impractical, just put up solar panels.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 2:50:58 PM