Whistle blower says non-human bodies recovered from crash

[Umbran]

I’d venture a guess that alteration would be faster barring a very lucky find.

I would expect terraforming into a colonizable state to take centuries. It requires radically changing the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and surface of the planet, and that coming to some new stable equilibrium before you can really colonize it. On planetary scales, that coming to equilibrium takes time.

And that's without including other geological processes. Imagine a dry, but tectonically active world. We introduce enough water to form oceans. Well, it turns out that water is a great lubricator of geologic fault lines, so we just stomped on the gas pedal of the planet's tectonic plates and volcanism!

I’m not sure this is a reasonable jump. If you grow moss in a lab, no one calls it genocide when you dispose of it to make room for something else.

Sure, but having the unquestioned self-confidence that we can do whatever we like to a planet isn't really working out for us. So, maybe we should question the idea that the potential of an entire planet is ethically similar to the potential of a few petri dishes.

 

[trappedslider]

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I would expect terraforming into a colonizable state to take centuries. It requires radically changing the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and surface of the planet, and that coming to some new stable equilibrium before you can really colonize it. On planetary scales, that coming to equilibrium takes time.

And that's without including other geological processes. Imagine a dry, but tectonically active world. We introduce enough water to form oceans. Well, it turns out that water is a great lubricator of geologic fault lines, so we just stomped on the gas pedal of the planet's tectonic plates and volcanism!

Cool. until we both have advanced degrees in xeno-geology and have the means to test any of this, I’m not interested in getting into the weeds about a thing I wasn’t even talking about.

Sure, but having the unquestioned self-confidence that we can do whatever we like to a planet isn't really working out for us. So, maybe we should question the idea that the potential of an entire planet is ethically similar to the potential of a few petri dishes.

Okay. Who said it was, first of all.

Second, a hypothetical alien civ turning a dead planet into a bio lab is not remotely related or equivalent or vaguely similar to what humans are doing to Earth.

The two are so far apart, we would have to solve some of the issues raised in this thread before we could bridge the gap.

 

[Clint_L]

If you could manage 90% c, you would also shave off almost 60% of your traveled distance, due to Lorentz contraction.

Space is almost completely empty, but emphasis on the almost. At 90% c you would be hitting stuff all the time, and even the tiniest impact would be devastating.

 

[Nikosandros]

Space is almost completely empty, but emphasis on the almost. At 90% c you would be hitting stuff all the time, and even the tiniest impact would be devastating.

Yes, of course. I just mentioned the length contraction, because I saw it wasn't taken into consideration when estimating travel times. Naturally, even the number I provided is a totally rough extimation, without taking into account accelerations.

 

[Stalker0]

Terraforming becomes most likely with the power of “grey goo”.

If you can make nanite swarms that can self replicate than your on your way to massive planet reorganization.

Ultimately you have two principal tiers.

1) chemical reorganization. Basically moving atoms around to form whatever molecules you need. Your only limited on the atomic compositions present on the planet.

2) atomic reorganization. Nanities that could engineer the nuclei itself (and survive the fusion/fission energies released) would be the ultimate in industrial power, as now you can literally turn most any substance into any other. This model is only limited by energy…and such a tier would likely give you total control of fusion as a power source.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Terraforming becomes most likely with the power of “grey goo”.

I have issues with the classic grey goo, in that I think the thermodynamics does not hold up.

If you can make nanite swarms that can self replicate than your on your way to massive planet reorganization.

Ultimately you have two principal tiers.

1) chemical reorganization. Basically moving atoms around to form whatever molecules you need. Your only limited on the atomic compositions present on the planet.

This is basically life. This is what life does.

2) atomic reorganization. Nanities that could engineer the nuclei itself (and survive the fusion/fission energies released) would be the ultimate in industrial power, as now you can literally turn most any substance into any other. This model is only limited by energy…and such a tier would likely give you total control of fusion as a power source.

This is going to take tremendous energies and similar amounts of waste heat and a lot of what comes out will not be in the ground states.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I have issues with the classic grey goo, in that I think the thermodynamics holds up.

This is basically life. This is what life does.

This is going to take tremendous energies and similar amounts if waste heat and a lot of what comes out will not be in the ground states.

I kinda figure, "practical" von Neumann machines might be indistinguishable from anything living. Sure, you could imagine we're building them from metal or something, but metal is so much rarer than carbon. And organic molecules are the sh*t in potential self-organizing capabilities and stability and what not. I guess there is a decent possibility that there is some other chemical composition that works better in vacuum, but it could be your probablem would be building a self-replicating machine that needs less common materials. (And even carbon-based life still needs rarer materials - but also comparitively less. Once you want something like mitochondria, you need phosphor)
Silicium-based life has been hypothesized, but at least my cursory "internet research" suggests that the devil is in the detail, and many more complex molecules build from it wouldn't be as stable as their carbon-based equivalent.

The worst case is that interstellar spaceship looks like a star system and is more like a spacetrain, with gravity defining your rails, and you don't take a lot of stops...

For "how common" is life:
Now that we have finally found the first star systems, we found a lot that don't like ours. Due to the technical limitations we're working with, we are more likely to detect more massive planets than ligher planets, so it doesn't mean our type of star system is unique. Yet, but it is still interesting that most star systems we found look different from ours, including having a planet type not found in our system. Super-Earths are rocky planets like Earth, e.g. they are not gas giants, but they have far more mass, which makes certain aspects of life harder to accomplish (if not impossible). And we also found Water worlds (or at least one), which sounds cool first, because "Life needs water", but it turns out the water is so deep that the pressure creates a barrier that doesn't let through minerals and elements that are needed for life, so it would probably need to come from asteroids (but it still drops to the bottom eventually and might still become unavailable.)

Our star system has at few general features that make it rarer:

• a G type main sequence star (a common star, but less common than red dwarves, less massive starstheir habitable zone is closer, but their emission seems to vary more, which could ultimately mean that while the average temperature is okay, the sudden changes wipe out forming life.)
• rocky planets in the habitable zone
• some water on a rocky planet in the habitable zone
• Big Gas Giant that helps deflect asteroids from rocky planets in habitable zone

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I kinda figure, "practical" von Neumann machines might be indistinguishable from anything living. Sure, you could imagine we're building them from metal or something, but metal is so much rarer than carbon. And organic molecules are the sh*t in potential self-organizing capabilities and stability and what not. I guess there is a decent possibility that there is some other chemical composition that works better in vacuum, but it could be your probablem would be building a self-replicating machine that needs less common materials. (And even carbon-based life still needs rarer materials - but also comparitively less. Once you want something like mitochondria, you need phosphor)
Silicium-based life has been hypothesized, but at least my cursory "internet research" suggests that the devil is in the detail, and many more complex molecules build from it wouldn't be as stable as their carbon-based equivalent.

I think we could tweak single celled organisms to produce some plastics. What would be a big breakthrough would be biological refinement of metals.

The worst case is that interstellar spaceship looks like a star system and is more like a spacetrain, with gravity defining your rails, and you don't take a lot of stops...

For "how common" is life:
Now that we have finally found the first star systems, we found a lot that don't like ours. Due to the technical limitations we're working with, we are more likely to detect more massive planets than ligher planets, so it doesn't mean our type of star system is unique. Yet, but it is still interesting that most star systems we found look different from ours, including having a planet type not found in our system. Super-Earths are rocky planets like Earth, e.g. they are not gas giants, but they have far more mass, which makes certain aspects of life harder to accomplish (if not impossible). And we also found Water worlds (or at least one), which sounds cool first, because "Life needs water", but it turns out the water is so deep that the pressure creates a barrier that doesn't let through minerals and elements that are needed for life, so it would probably need to come from asteroids (but it still drops to the bottom eventually and might still become unavailable.)

My gut feeling is that life may be common but technology may require significant tides (that is a large moon around a terrestrial planet) and that might be rare.

Our star system has at few general features that make it rarer:

• a G type main sequence star (a common star, but less common than red dwarves, less massive starstheir habitable zone is closer, but their emission seems to vary more, which could ultimately mean that while the average temperature is okay, the sudden changes wipe out forming life.)
• rocky planets in the habitable zone
• some water on a rocky planet in the habitable zone
• Big Gas Giant that helps deflect asteroids from rocky planets in habitable zone

That is what we have got so far. We will get a better handle with newer telescopes that can do spectroscopy of planet accompanying stars.

 

[Stalker0]

I have issues with the classic grey goo, in that I think the thermodynamics does not hold up.

I actually think one of the biggest issue is the cancer problem, or "evolution".

You make that many copies and your going to get variant code, eventually you might evolve a secondary machine that disobeys the prime directive, aka cancer. So controlling that is going to require a lot of same things the body has now, probably an immune system and the like, which would slow down the replication ultimately.