110 KiB
Building a world to write rational fiction in. Would love feedback.
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Author: u/Farmerbob1 Level 1 author*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2oi99l/building_a_world_to_write_rational_fiction_in/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2014-12-07T00:37:25
Post:
[RT] [HSF][HF][BST]
I would like to get some input about the basic premise of a world I am building to write rational fiction in.
** Go Here for the most recent version. It's too big to put in Reddit without breaking it up.
** Original version **
Humanity managed to make it to the stars, using generation ships, but shortly after the generation ships left the Sol system, Earth and it's first colony, Mars, warred with each other. The generation ships received many messages, and monitored many transmissions during the course of the horrific war which lasted several months, but eventually, the Sol system went completely silent. It is unknown if any of humanity survived in the Sol system, but there were no radio transmissions, for hundreds of years.
The planet Secundus was the second known extra-solar rocky planet with liquid water found around a stable star. It was a lifeless, barren place when the generation ship Leviathan arrived, several centuries after leaving Earth. None of the original crew or passengers were still alive when Leviathan arrived at it's destination, but the citizens of Leviathan had maintained a civil society. The colonists were mostly well-educated and industrious.
Leviathan was meant to start a core colony, and seed the world with Earth life-forms. Genetic material from almost every known creature on Earth was included in the ship's storage, and it's databases contained nearly the entire sum of genetic knowledge that the human race had collected. The colonists could populate the planet with Earth life forms, modified Earth life forms, and even new forms of life, if they wished. Unfortunately, Leviathan was not designed to be a base for heavy industry. Prometheus, which was nearly ten years from completion when Leviathan had left the Sol system had itself never left Sol. The energy of the initial acceleration of a generation ship would have been impossible to miss.
The colonists would need a habitable world in order to prosper. The star that Secundus orbited had no other rocky planets, nor any asteroid belts, and very few free asteroids. There were a few rocky moons around three gas giants, and Secundus itself had a substantial moon, but Leviathan didn't have the proper industrial capacity to establish an in-space colony. They were a forerunner ship. A terraforming ship.
For all the crew of the Leviathan knew, the other colonies might fail, and the descendants of Leviathan might be all that remained of humanity. There were many powerful arguments either way, but it was eventually decided that Leviathan would use it's available resources in the way that they were intended - to terraform Secundus and provide the best possible place for their descendants to survive, in a biological environment as close to Earth's as possible.
Tiny interstellar probes had told planners on Earth what to expect from Secundus. The planet was significantly larger in diameter than Earth, but about the same gravity. It was very iron poor, with no radioactive materials to speak of. There was some tectonic activity, and some small amount of iron in the crust.
The oceans of Secundus contained a good deal of dissolved iron, collected over billions of years of exposure to the underwater recycling of the planet's crust. Additionally, the oceans of Secundus were very large, and contained many times more water than Earth's oceans. The landmass of Secundus was split into several disconnected continents, and a great many islands, but the total area of dry land was significantly less than half that of Earth. It was almost an ocean world.
Hundreds of years had been spent planning during the voyage, fifteen generations participated. Every resource on Leviathan was planned for, every likely problem had been considered and a great many unlikely scenarios as well. Everything would be used. After Leviathan finally arrived, the great work began.
The colonists started with microbes and bacteria, yeasts and molds. Then came ferns, lichens, moss, grasses, and simple invertebrates. Soon after that were crustaceans, arachnids, insects, followed closely by woody plants, bushes, fruits, vegetables, fish and then birds. After twenty years, the Leviathan started seeding the planet with small mammals.
The lack of surface iron and other metals on the planet was a problem, The small mammals and inland plants of most types also had difficulties with lack of metals. This had been foreseen, but the geneticists wanted to see the real scope of the issue before they modified any creatures.
After some time experimenting with expendable probes dropped from the orbiting Leviathan, locusts were modified. Each year after the end of the growing season, they would emerge and head from inland to the seaside, consume seaside plants, which had plenty of iron and other trace metals in them, and then return inland to breed, lay eggs, and then die. This mass migration, every year, moved sufficient quantities of iron inland to improve the health of inland plants and animals. Most mammals that did not consume fish would still need to be modified to better retain iron.
The colonists would need metals for industry as well, and the Leviathan simply did not have the materials or industrial equipment required to create an Earth ecology as well as create the industry required to support either deep crust mining or massive water electrolysis efforts that would be needed to supply significant metals. Instead, most species of crabs were modified to collect metals from seawater for use in building their shells. From iron to silver, gold to copper, modified crab biology collected a great number of useful metals from the ocean.
Nearly a hundred years after Leviathan first entered Secundus orbit, colonists began to be delivered to the planet. Once down, nobody was allowed to return. The industrial costs of maintaining the cargo shuttles wasn't ruinous, but it was significant. Every down shuttle was carefully loaded for maximum efficiency, and every up shuttle was empty.
Humans who had lived in artificial environment inside a gigantic cylinder for decades experienced the real thing, and for the most part, they were happy. For another twenty years, the terraforming of Secundus was carefully monitored. The first colonists on the planet bore children who had been conceived there, and the first children born on the planet had their own children. All seemed well.
Leviathan was large enough to pose a threat to life on Secundus if it de-orbited, so it was landed on the moon of Secundus, in a crater. Over the next hundred years, the great ship was stripped of everything useful that was not required to operate the ship. As metal-poor as Secundus and it's moon were, creating another Leviathan would be absurdly difficult. There were already long term plans to eventually send Leviathan back to Earth when they had enough of a population to crew it and not leave Secundus with a dearth of capable adults. The colonists were confident that even if truly terrible things had been done to Earth, by the time the Leviathan could return, well over a thousand years would have passed, and it was likely that the Earth would be habitable again, if Leviathan came prepared to restore her.
It was a grand plan, but evolution raised it's ugly head. A genetic variant of sand mite developed, somehow incorporating modified genetic material, probably from fiddler crabs. The mites were extremely small, and aggressively sought out strongly conductive metals of all sorts, consuming them directly, for use in their carapaces. The colony's computers, lab equipment, even their shuttles were made entirely useless in a single season. The most sensitive and high powered computer equipment was damaged beyond function first. Those were the computers that once ran the genetic programs.
A high tech society crashed back to the equivalent of the pre-computer age in a single season, but as a whole they were strong people, and there was no question of their survival. For a thousand years or so, there was sufficient metal from the colonists' supplies to allow metallic tools to be fairly commonplace. The mites preferred more conductive metals, but would all metals and incorporate them into their carapaces.
Eventually, nearly two thousand years after the mites consumed the computers of the colony, metals were almost unheard of on Secundus. A metal tool was worth a king's ransom. No matter how well kept, if a metal tool were exposed and used, it would be consumed by the mites in anywhere from months to a few years, depending on how carefully it was protected between uses, and how often it was exposed.
**
And that's the rough world background story. Anyone spot anything in there that needs to be looked at from a rationality point of view?
Comments:
u/Anakiri [+36] (6 hours later)
"And that, Mr. Moore," concluded the head of the review committee, "is why we will not be approving these ridiculous deathtraps of yours."
"With respect, sir, that all sounds rather farfetched-"
"Do you deny that the loss of either of the vessels will damn the other, and doom the mission to failure without rapid improvisation from the survivors?"
"Well, that's true, but-"
"That alone throws your credentials into question! If we are already sending two ships to a system known to be poor in certain resources, then the first city-sized ship shall be a giant robotic supply crate and whatever autonomous asteroid mining equipment we have available. The star system should lack nothing by the time the first living soul arrives, and then Leviathan will have its own industrial equipment anyway, because having a generation ship that is not self-sufficient is lunacy."
"Actually, sir, that can't be done," said Mr. Moore. He had run the numbers on this. "With the population we have to support, we're already close to the mass limit of the-"
"So lower the population! Or are you already so near the population viability limit that a single sector hull breach could kill the mission? Even if it were so close - which would get your proposal denied all on its own - there's a genetic engineering suite onboard. God's sakes, man, you're growing deer in test tubes! Include human DNA - genetic colonists - and we can maintain an arbitrarily large genetic population for an arbitrarily small headcount. Genetic viability is not a concern.
"Furthermore," the head continued as Mr. Moore flinched, "What is this nonsense about being unable to build a space colony? Generation ships are space colonies! And this contraption had better be able to build a copy of every single part of itself, or else it will already be doomed by centuries of compounding minor mechanical problems."
"But the-"
"Granted," the man waved him off before he could even speak the obvious objection. "The main drive system and fuel are not so easily replaced. But onboard repair mechanisms alone ought to be able to build a fully functional space colony given adequate resources, if not an interstellar ship. And as an engineer, a lack of resources would be your fault, because everything is your fault. Thinking of it, Leviathan itself would serve as a quite serviceable counterweight for a space elevator, don't you think? That's cheaper, easier, and safer than messing with shuttles, and the mass of a carbon nanotube cable is practically negligible to a city-ship, even if it isn't built in to the solar sails. Hell, you could genetically engineer spiders to build more on-site, as a backup, and have your shuttles as a backup for that."
Mr. Moore gulped. He hadn't thought of that.
The head of the review committee sighed, and some of the venom left him. "Look, Mr. Moore, I applaud your terraforming plans. It took cyanobacteria two hundred million years to terraform Earth. Even with intelligent oversight, getting it down to a single century is as impressive as anything I've seen. But I must advise you to include basic knowledge of mosquito nets into all future documentation, and I urge you to recognize how extremely useful airlocks are on a barely habitable rock. That's the least of it. Your plan could fail in a dozen places, in a dozen ways, with no backup. You could get thousands of people killed. We are engineers. Imagining the worst case scenario and stopping it from ever coming about is our job. I'm sorry, Mr. Moore. I am placing you on administrative leave pending investigation for continued employment."
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+13] Godric Gryffindor (19 hours later)
And that is what makes a rationalfic within the broader genre of science fiction. Well done.
Not that it's unrealistic to have fools in charge of a big government project #civilizational_inadequacy but the mark of rationalfic is that somebody, somewhere is thinking more clearly than usual.
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
In order to offer some suggestions for changing things around to get the desired result:
The robot/industry ship did go first, it just failed when it got there. Probably due to something that a human might have been able to compensate for but the autonomous systems couldn't, information about the system that just wasn't available when the mission was launched, or maybe just from plain bad luck - a serious meteor strike in just the right place that was outside the extremely generous engineering requirements for the project. Since it takes centuries to get to the planet, it makes sense that the generation ship would be in transit at the same time, since humans aren't patient enough to wait for phase one success over that time span, especially if there are concerns about existential threats and the colony was envisioned as a back up. Maybe both ships are launched at the same time, and the industrial ship was supposed to make it there sooner because it could accelerate faster with no living souls on board - and it was in contact with the generation ship the whole time anyway through radio.
The generation ship not being able to build a copy of itself isn't that unbelievable. It can be built with dozens of redundant systems, fabrication capabilities for 99% of its internals, and still not be able to build a second copy of itself, at least not without supplies. It can simply be a case of the engineers planning for some very bad scenarios and things happening that are even worse than that (whether they're outside of scope or simply considered too improbable to engineer for).
I think that patches most of it. The second ship can (and does) complete the mission even though the first ship is toast, so you can't fault the engineers for that. Space elevators or shuttles is more a matter of what's practical given their engineering and the planet in question. Maybe space elevators are just really hard to do, or the planet has too much debris orbiting it to make that practical (maybe because the first ship's malfunction or accident left something like Kessler syndrome around the planet). I think I would actually make most of the shuttles one way only, so the generation ship would be carving off portions of itself after they had run from Plan A all the way down to Plan Y.
And if not for the mites, it still would have worked. Airlocks are over-engineering if the atmosphere is breathable, mosquito nets aren't really necessary if every lifeform on the planet is known to the colonists, so it's believable (to me) that they wouldn't have much of a defense. Or maybe they had all those defenses in place, and the mites still got in (riding on clothes, for example) and played havoc with their systems and put them in a state that was beyond recovery.
I guess I'm picturing a civilization where genetic engineering has outpaced most other technologies, and the space travel (and fabrication) technologies are only about at the level that you'd need to build a generation ship. No AI, no nanoassemblers.
u/Anakiri [+7] (9 hours later)
I mostly agree, most of it isn't that hard to fix. I just wanted to emphasize the point that, in a rational universe, smart people see probable failures coming. Whatever your first thought is, they've thought it also, and they don't like it.
I would quibble with one point, though. Airlocks are over-engineering if the atmosphere is breathable, but there should be some ground stations from before then. You can't monitor everything from orbit, after all. The shuttles should definitely have airlocks, and should be nearly impenetrable. Genetic engineering labs should have clean rooms. There are all sorts of isolated areas that should be really hard for the mites to get in to, especially once the characters figure out their technology is being eaten. As for mosquito nets, I'd expect them to have some because mosquitoes are necessary for healthy ecosystems. You can't just bring the organisms you like.
Of course, human failure is the weak point. A single lapse in procedure could contaminate the isolated areas, and over a long enough time they'll be destroyed one by one. So I'm not really disputing anything, I guess. Just that it should take longer than a single season to lose everything.
u/None [+2] (16 hours later)
u/Anakiri [+1] (a day later)
I'd be quite happy to be mistaken, but this article doesn't sell me on the idea. It talks about mosquitoes eating and being eaten and pollinating, and they're not useful for all of that. Then it says this:
“The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That’s the consequence,” says Strickman. Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease.
More healthy people. And more healthy caribou, who leave fewer caribou carcasses, and they're all harder for wolves to catch. The wolves will get by going for young and old caribou, which there will be more of. But with less disease to act as a force multiplier for them, wolves become a weaker check on the caribou, and both wolf and caribou populations can have a massive effect of the environment at large.
If mosquitoes have any value, it's because they're a disease vector. If you want to convince me it's safe to get rid of them, that's what you have to look at.
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! I loved your response! Particularly...
We are engineers. Imagining the worst case scenario and stopping it from ever coming about is our job.
I predicted that someone would come up with some rational argument that would ruin this story prompt, but I thought it would be something about the colonizing the planet or afterward. Not the very beginning before the prologue even starts!
u/krakonfour [+1] (7 days later)
The best proposal is actually a metallic asteroid, slap on a few kilometers of ice in front, drives in the back and a robotic factory in the center. The robotic factory does nothing during the centuries-long crossing, this minimizes damage.
Near the end of the journey, the factory eats from the masses surrounding it to create the space-station-creating robots.
Once the ship has decelerated into the target planet's orbit, the robots dig their way to the surface and create an orbital workshop. The orbital workshop create the colony-creating robots.
These robots are dropped onto the planet along with lumps of iron and metals. They create land-based colony-creating robots, which move onto creating the actual colony.
Only then is the genetic material hidden behind kilometers of ice and rock finally used. They create humans first. Resource-gathering genetically engineered species are the last thing on their mind. Why? They can order more iron they can ever need to be dropped next door in a matter of hours.
u/narfanator [+9] (9 hours later)
While I definitely second Anakiri's narrated remarks, I do want to say you had me at the locusts. That's mostly brilliant, and I would really love to see more of the culture and society that works with that ecology.
Your source problem, I think, is that you're sticking to the initial premise you wanted: A metal-poor cargo cult. This was clearly a great inspiration for the initial world-building iteration, but now you should drop it until you can find a reasonable way to get what you wanted. But right now, reasonable people plus your original setup don't get you a metal-poor cargo cult.
The solution is really easy: Iterate some more! Now to subject you all to an attempt at narration -
"And here we have the results from the first stage of the Drake Extrasolar Planetary Survey. We focused on G-type main-sequence stars within XX lightyears, in order to keep the ark-ship travel time to under XX centuries. We restricted our survey to systems with Earth-sized planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone, and have ranked the results based upon system resources, planetary atmosphere, and planetary water. There was some initial debate about whether to target or avoid planets with signs of life, but the question was rendered moot when none were found in any candidate systems.
Note that we are NOT considering systems with promising system resources but WITHOUT an appropriate planet - while the o'Neal cyclinders and other orbital colonies are both effective, and serve to demonstrate the viability of Arkships (after all, an Ark is basically an orbital with an engine), it is this project's specific goal to create new Earths. If you're interested in purely spreading humanity, that's two doors down with our friends at the Lagrange Survey.
With that, let's go over the results...
..which brings us to the second system on the list, the proposed target for the Leviathan and the Prometheus. Currently dubbed simply "Secundus", it was originally number eight on the list (and thus beyond the scope of the first wave), but a Dr Moore at GMO Genetics proposed an absolutely ingenious terraforming plan utilizing gene modifications from heavy metal extremophiles, allowing human surface habitation in under a century - I see some you realizing that this would means the terraforming could be done before any human saw the planet, and indeed, that's what we're aiming for!
If you'll look at page X of the report, you'll see a summary of the upsides and downsides to the system and the planet. As you can see, there's some concern about the overall heavy metal content in the system and the specific distribution on the planet, but as you'll also note, it's got a truly astounding quantity of orbital water, and the medium-sized gas giant shows a high likelihood of being able to supply the necessary fusion fuels for, well, to be frank, that second wave of colonization we're all hoping for... While this system isn't likely to reach Earth's industrial capability as quickly as our number one choice, we do think that this wealth of orbital fuel will allow the Secundus colony to beat the rest on fueling a return trip.
You'll also note that while Secundus as an overall lack of surface metals, its oceans are surprisingly oxygen rich - indeed, that's a critical part of Dr Moore's plan, and what alerted him to the system in the first place... You see, it seems as though most of Secundus' surface metals are bound up in oxides suspended in it's ample oceans... making them rather similar to the industrial sites GMO Genetics has been cleaning up for the past few decades.
Furthermore, with the exception of the undesirable distribution (and lack) of surface metals, Secundus has the most important trait of all: dullness. There's no weather to speak of, very little tectonic activity, and nothing that'll hit you while in orbit - you may or may not know, but the original system the Diaspora project was founded to examine was eventually disqualified due to system meteorites. There simply wasn't an orbit for the Ark that wouldn't see it hole within a century by a passing shower - a problem this system resolutely does not have.
In short: dull enough that the dullness is almost problematic, which makes it perfect."
Basically - Given the problems of the system, what else is true there to make colonization worth while? Work that out some more and come back - the stage after that is the shopping list to outfit the colonists with what they need to deal with the problems and capitalize on the benefits. Include things that might be true but that you won't know until you're half way there.
u/krakonfour [+1] (7 days later)
Unless you are expecting the entire solar system to be vaporized, your best rational bet is to stay in orbit until the disaster has passed, then simply mine Earth itself.
u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
It looks great, but if you want us to be able to criticize it based on rational aspects, we wouldn't be able to do very much. It seems like all of the colonists were smart enough to willingly cooperate together and leveraged their resources (intelligent people, bio-manipulation, components of their ships) near optimally. The most I can do is to be given a direct problem to help resolve or be given more details about the present day society to suggest actions for the main character.
The only thing I can think of to help is the part about computers. Computers are so useful that I can't imagine humanity not trying to recreate it. If you look up 'computer' in Wikipedia, you'll see that the oldest computers were made of stone or wood. Recently, there has been research into making a chemical computer. In addition, it states that any computer which is Turing-complete, can stimulate any other computer given sufficient time and space. I would expect there to be attempts in making computers out of chemicals, stone, wood, biology, or even diamonds if you want to go crazy. Metals (or more specifically metalloids like silicon) were the best choice of materials for computing, but not the only one.
There's even a joke about making a computer out of billiard balls as a thought experiment in the wiki article. Thank you for giving me a fascinating prompt on recreating computers without any modern materials.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
Somehow I didn't respond to this earlier. Abaci will definitely exist. I can probably get a couple ideas by looking for dwarf fortress !science! projects where they built working computers.
Something like this would be moderately insane to build in the real world. But I suppose it would be possible.
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-8269
The world does have pottery and ceramics, water power, wind power, and even steam power to some limited degree. Functional mechanical computers are certainly possible.
u/Anakiri [+3] (a day later)
Modern knowledge makes abaci basically obsolete, even with only stone age technology. Writing our numbers in decimal notation makes pencil and paper faster than an abacus for most things. Physical calculation aids are more likely to be slide rules and books filled with tables of logarithms and nomograms; that's what people actually used before computers. And that's if you're being cheap. A Curta calculator can be made entirely out of plastic (or anything else), and is nearly as powerful as a basic electronic calculator.
And that's just handheld stuff. Appliance-sized mechanical computers can do things that might astound you. They'd be hurt by a lack of metal, but they can in principle be made out of anything.
Of course, metal isn't really necessary for electronic computers anyway. You can have a computer made with carbon wires and ceramic semiconductors. In fact, machines made like that could be better than modern computers. Our reliance on metal for computer parts may be temporary. I'd also expect these people to have neural net machines made out of real neurons.
Losing metal would hurt their ability for precision machining, but hard work and innovation should cover that gap pretty quick. If nothing else, they can use stone tools to whittle under a microscope.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 days later)
I tend to be a little conservative when it comes to the idea of nonmetallic computing. Yes, it's possible, but it seems to me that without some pretty amazing breakthroughs, metallic CPU computers are just too efficient to be displaced by non-metallic CPU computers. Even though the mechanical limits of metallic manufacturing are being pushed, what we're doing today is barely scratching the surface of what might be possible in truly parallel computing. My personal machine has eight CPU processors and two GPU processors, but very few pieces of software are designed to efficiently use all ten processors as a single computing entity. Don't get me wrong, it's very possible I am mistaken, but I can't write too far outside what I know, and I'm not prepared to spend years writing this! :)
That being said, definitely some interesting thoughts here. My concern with the idea of precision machining without metals isn't the tools used to inscribe or form the end products, it's with the durability of the end products. You could make a lathe entirely of ceramics, wood and stone and then give it a ceramic bit (ceramic bits are already used today, we can make a questionable statement saying that this world has ceramics nearly as good as that of the real world). With centrifuges and simple chemistry it would certainly be possible to isolate materials for high quality ceramics.
For the colonists to manufacture handheld mechanical computers like the Curta might have been possible for a while after they first lost computers. For future generations, hundreds, thousands of years later, I don't think so. For anyone to maintain technology at an electronic age level without electronics would be highly questionable. To manufacture Curta-sized mechanical computers requires levels of fine machining that would be extremely difficult without electronics and metal tools. I will not say impossible. It was done with metal tools and no electronics back in the early 1900's, certainly.
A refrigerator-sized Curta-type device may well fit into the universe, but how many humans living in an advanced agrarian society are required to support such a device? Without metallic tools or computers, a lot of people would be spending a great deal of effort to farm/fish/hunt.
I'm imagining a society that's going to be a lot like ancient Greece in many ways. There WERE mechanical computers back then, Google up the Antikythera mechanism if you want to see the oldest known portable mechanical computer, but they would have been horribly expensive.
u/Anakiri [+2] (2 days later)
That's the thing. Your humans are going to be fighting tooth and nail to never become an agrarian society, and you're a few disasters short of stopping them.
For example, how do they not have rugged, low-effort, high-yield GMO crops? Did they want farming to be difficult? What did they eat on the trip over? The loss of tractors and combines and irrigation systems would hurt them, but a minority of farmers and ranchers should still be able to feed everyone. This frees up everyone else to work on maintaining their way of life.
Mechanical computers aren't actually that stressful to their components, since they don't really do anything. They're also not terribly complicated once you understand the basics. Consider a watch. It continuously adds a fixed quantity onto a dial, and also scales that quantity to add onto another dial. It's a basic adding and multiplying machine that easily fits in the palm of your hand. Here's an guy with no training in clockwork who carves them out of wood, making several a year. Any half-competent fool with some diagrams could carve a larger, less elegant one. When humans first started making watches, we didn't have the information theory to generalize the concepts. Now we do, and that's not going away. Simple calculators will never again be the size of refrigerators.
The information age is lost to them, no doubt. Making a programmable computer is probably infeasible. But they should be able to salvage most of their societal infrastructure, they can have calculators to help them design everything they need and keep track of stuff, and they should have a whole bunch of GMOs they prepared earlier to relieve the burden. I'd expect them to regress to a kind of schizo-tech 1910s until they concoct a working pesticide.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 days later)
Indeed, they will be fighting tooth and nail to avoid becoming an agrarian society. A vast array of science and math that the ancients never had will be available to them.
At the same time, it's difficult to truly appreciate what the lack of metal would mean. Those wooden watches made by Valerii Danevych? They have metal springs. That's the only metal part, but it's a critical part.
Even agriculture of the 1900's was heavily metal dependent. Various plants and animals could supply oils and fats useful for simple industrial purposes. Manufacturing alcohol for fuel would be trivial. Even if modern fertilization methods were impossible, simply using fish for fertilizer would help a great deal. Crude, very inefficient tractors of some sort might be conceivable, but I doubt that they would be much more efficient that animal-powered labor. Even if they are moderately more efficient than animal power, the industries to support them would also be non-metallic industries.
I certainly need to look a bit closer at what the Amish do with non-metallic crafts, but even they are heavily metal dependent.
They will definitely have books, and that will certainly allow them to maintain a society that is far saner than any other agrarian society of the past, but I do not think that, even with GMO crops, the colony would be able to devote less than half of their population to growing, gathering, hunting, and fishing for food.
The colony never envisioned needing GMO crops that were extreme variants of natural crops. They learned the lesson we are still learning today about playing with our food too much. Most of the genetic modifications to heritage Earth crops would have been for better iron and metals retention.
The original colonists' pest and weed control would probably have been handled by machines much like today's drones and Roombas. Disease and fungal infections could be treated with chemicals.
Harvesting crops is a very energy intensive task as well, though most of the population is coastal, or by major waterways.
Again, I need to examine Amish agriculture to see how they perform, and how much metal they use.
Thank you very much by the way for helping me consider the world :)
u/Anakiri [+2] (3 days later)
The metal springs actually aren't that critical. I mean, for a watch, yeah, they keep it wound and running - and Mr. Danevych uses bamboo springs for that too. But if you were generalizing it into a calculator, those are the first things you'd get rid of, since you want all the inputs to be manual.
I don't see how your people could not have extreme crop variants. Did they devote huge tracts of Leviathan to fields for growing food? Even with vertical hydroponic farms, why would you not increase your yield, basically for free? Even if they weren't that way originally, they'd definitely consider it when they suddenly double their population. Then they grow the plants from the ship on the land, and engineer them to tolerate the transition. These people clearly are not as squeamish as modern people are about toying with their food, or they would not have made it hold iron better. If they're willing to do that, why would they not be willing to make everything better for everybody by making their rice bigger? That seems like an extremely arbitrary line to draw. Even so, I can understand it taking more than half of the population farming, so they're agrarian-ish. I personally wouldn't expect it, but I haven't done the math and it's reasonable enough that I can accept it as authorial fiat.
My point with the pesticides is that the mites are going to die. A significant fraction of the population is going to be devoted entirely to the task of killing them, and they will never, ever stop until the mites are dead. They will bathe their tools in arsenic and acid, and run enough electricity through them to pop any mites that touch them. They will breed Phytoseiulus into a hideous super-predator that kills metal mites for fun. They will burn down hundreds of square kilometers of land just to have a safe place to build a laboratory. They will build masers, mostly made of glass, and wave them over everything to teach the mites why you don't put aluminium foil in the microwave. Historically, it's not common for humans to take thousands of years to fail to kill something, once they really put their minds to it.
Hmm, I think I might be coming off as a bit hyper-critical. It's a bad habit of mine, and I can never tell. I only poke at it because I like your idea!
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (3 days later)
Hypercritical is fine, as long as you are civil, and you have been!!
If you are simply talking about increasing yields, that can be done without genetic modifications, through simple breeding programs. We've been doing it for centuries already, and that process continued even while humanity left frankenfoods behind. There is no roundup-resistant corn on Secundus, for example.
If you consider breeding programs to simply be a slow method of GMO, then we will have to agree to disagree. To me, breeding programs are controlled evolution. GMO is build your own organism. They can both lead to unexpected results, but breeding programs almost never lead to unexpected results quickly.
The colony wanted a rock solid Earthlike ecology, as close to the original Earth as possible. The only genetic level modifications made were to change how Earth life dealt with metabolizing metals.
Breeding programs for larger crops, healthier plants, etc. never ended. 500 years in a slow boat gave plenty of people plenty of time to play with breeding programs, though the lean times after Prometheus were mostly devoted to planting the highest yield crops possible and ignoring other research.
After the loss of Prometheus, when the crew was too large in Leviathan, the animal population was turned into meat, everyone became vegetarian, there was a whole lot of vat-grown food being eaten, and a lot of cropland inside Leviathan was not being rotated sustainably. As the population was reduced, the crop rotations were made more sustainable first, and then food animals were re-introduced before the vat-grown foods went away.
On the planet itself, large crop pests like worms, grasshoppers, etc. were controlled by automated machines in the fields. Imagine large mechanical spiders and flying drone-like machines that hunted pest insects mercilessly, with no regard to hunger. These mechanical insect-killing machines would be programmed to ignore pollinators. Harmful insect corpses would be dropped to the ground to fertilize fields as the machines killed them. Crop-eating birds would be chased off by drones, insect eating birds would be left alone. Roomba-like drones would destroy weeds in the fields and monitor soil conditions. All agricultural machines would monitor crops for fungal or disease infections, and chemical treatments for those conditions could be deployed with pinpoint accuracy.
There was no need for frankenfoods, they had technology to protect their foods with minimal human labor cost. Humans were not needed in the fields at all, except in rare circumstances.
As for eliminating the mites, as far as I'm aware, there have been no instances of humanity being able to intentionally eliminate any pest insect, with the exception of a couple cases on islands. There have been some cases of accidental elimination due to environmental changes.
Eliminating mites would be a nightmare to contemplate for a society in the middle of technical system collapse that had grown dependent on their ability to deal with everything using technology. Mites are absurdly tiny, and they are everywhere. There are mites that live in the soil, eating detritus, mites that eat plants, and mites that live on birds and rodents. They connect to almost every food chain. Some mites can even reproduce without breeding, females simply lay eggs and the eggs can hatch into clones of the female.
This discussion has just given me an idea. I have decided that there will be an almost church-like organization devoted to an ongoing breeding program to develop mites that do not consume metals, but are more successful in the wild than metal-mites. (Note that metal mites so not consume metal for energy, they consume organics for that, they ingest metals which are then used during the growth of their carapaces to make them tougher.) The colonists do not have machines to create targeted genetic modifications, they have to do it the hard way, through selective breeding, with limited technology.
Everyone on the entire planet understands that the mites keep them from having metal tools. Everyone supports the breeders, but they have not succeeded yet. Some people might believe the breeders will never succeed because then they will no longer be needed. Others are less jaded and support them strongly.
This would create a class of person on the planet strongly reminiscent of churchmen, without requiring the creation of a religion in a rational world. It would also make a great deal of sense for the breeders to keep track of the genetic relationships of humans and domestic animals.
The church might even have large numbers of high tech tools which were preserved by various methods, then sealed in glass and stored in some sort of insect-toxic substance that would neither rot, nor damage it's environment or damage the glass. The substance would not be a hazard to humans. An extremely concentrated salt-slurry would probably work, I don't think even water mites can survive in a salt slurry.
Thank you!
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (5 days later)
If you consider breeding programs to simply be a slow method of GMO, then we will have to agree to disagree.
Why would anyone ever have to do on a clearly scientific subject. Clearly one of you is wrong, no?
The only repercussions of GMO crops I can think of is their effect on the environment for being more durable and such. But that shouldn't matter to a civilization that essentially created an environment from scratch, taking Earth's as a template and modifying it with stuff like targeted locust swarms that still need to be viable enough to survive, crabs that are suddenly more durable but also more heavy and that all need to stay viable despite large variations in said durability and weight and probably large amounts of trying not to introduce viruses or bacteria that can become harmful to humans within a few mutations. Not to mention how highly efficient robots targeting specific species is probably going to mess with the environment too.
I'd be curious to hear about other possible problems with GMOs though.
To me, breeding programs are controlled evolution. GMO is build your own organism. They can both lead to unexpected results, but breeding programs almost never lead to unexpected results quickly.
What makes "controlled evolution" more special than other modifications, other than being slow? The first vibe I get is that you believe evolution to be "good" for some reason and its controlled form to be somehow better than not using it at all. I hope that is not the case and you had something different in mind when you said that.
There are mites that live in the soil, eating detritus, mites that eat plants, and mites that live on birds and rodents. They connect to almost every food chain. Some mites can even reproduce without breeding, females simply lay eggs and the eggs can hatch into clones of the female.
Aren't all of those different species though? If the metal devouring trait appeared purely through evolution (no clue how that could happen, especially within just a few generations) then one would expect that to happen to only one mite species. If it was because of a lab mistake (only simple way I can think of that a sand mite gets traits from modified fiddler crabs) it should still be only that one species. Honestly, I would expect sabotage of the most insidious kind if mites of all kinds became metal devourers.
Anyway, I'm really curious how this setting will evolve with all the input you're getting. Good luck!
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (5 days later)
I don't think we know enough about genetics to do GMO safely today, but you are probably right that the colonists probably could have if they wanted to. But they didn't need to, other than to modify how the plants dealt with metals. With all the mechanical devices they had to protect their crops, the colonists simply didn't need GMO. Selective breeding, sure, you really can't stop farmers and biologists from finding something to tinker with, but they did it with biology, not gene splicing.
Just like we won't need antibiotics or chemotherapy drugs at some point in the future if/when we have full spectrum medical nanobots.
And if you see the most recent comment in the blog post, you will see that there has been a modification to the mite story :)
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (6 days later)
But they didn't need to
What does that even mean? If I am modifying a plant to make more viable for colonizing other planets why wouldn't I make it all around more viable and nourishing too? If the society is still capitalistic then they will look at what is cheaper, especially when it comes to fill limited space in a way that maximizes chances of survival and economic development of a colony. And I'm pretty sure that spraying every field with tiny farmbots is not the most efficient way to do that. Especially not in the long term.
The only reason I could think of them doing that instead in your story is if they somehow discovered that all ways of increasing a crop's viability and nutrition values through genetic manipulation have highly adverse effects on human health or something. But similar changes to increase iron retention don't. Which would be weird.
Also, I'm curious why you think that GMOs are so risky in general. When plants are modified to produce additional substances like pesticides (which is something done nowadays sometimes) or something I get it. But in the far future where we can safely make metal harvesting crabs and guided locusts I can't imagine that a simple increase in yield value will be much harder.
Anyway, I'll go look at your modified version now.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (6 days later)
A lot of the modifications have not made it into an additional rewrite yet. A lot of ideas have been presented below the linked post and I haven't made a new post yet.
As for GM foods, there was a thirty year report generated recently where it was shown that GM crops, while they outperform in areas that they are designed to do well in, they fail worse than normal crops when problems occur that they are not modified to deal with. On average over the long term, in varied conditions one might expect in nature, GM crops do not out-produce non-GM crops.
The colonists could certainly create slightly better crops, but there's no driving need for them to do so. The farms were communal, the labor to work the fields was mechanical. Nobody had any sweat equity or commercial interest in improving the crops, and the geneticists were firmly of the opinion that if it's not broke, don't fix it. If, for some reason, they felt they needed to create dinner-plate diameter tomatoes, they surely could have, even if they ended up with something that had an outer skin like a cantaloupe. They had no desire to go fiddling about with genetics and risk what might be the last few thousand human lives in the galaxy. They had lots of ways to deal with the demon Murphy if he stuck his head in, but they were not fond of attracting him without reason. Besides, they were concentrating on planetary infrastructure, preparing to build the industrial complex required to build the tools required to build the next tier industrial complex, etc. as they prepared to start replacing what was lost in Prometheus.
They had the technology where people could pretty much do the work they wanted to do, though everyone was required to help with community projects.
u/Nepene [+1] (26 days later)
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v28/n4/full/nbt0410-319.html
Actually, GM crops have shown substantial benefit in varied situations. If you mean things like this http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/food_and_agriculture/failure-to-yield.pdf
They only refer to studies in the USA. In developing countries they've shown much larger successes. Likely because in the USA they already have various methods to handle pests and increase yields, in developing countries they have less.
They also don't mention a large benefit of GM crops- responding to disasters like droughts.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912413000370
The 2012 yield in a drought was similar to the good yields of the 1990s. GM crops provide stability against pests and droughts.
The underlying traits, established through selective breeding, help boost the yield while genetic engineering provides protection against factors that might reduce it. You can theoretically get the same yield with organic crops, you just need huge amounts of irrigation, tilling, weed removal, insect removal and such.
Plus, the scientific consensus on genetic engineering is that it is safe and reliable, not that it's a mysterious danger that we cannot comprehend. We insert genes. Sometimes these genes do some damage to the genome, we can monitor these things. Likewise, selective breeding shuffles around genes and has mutations. Sometimes these things do damage to the genome too.
A lot in this world people aren't being very rational. GM crops are useful in lots of situations. They provide much higher resistance to frost, drought, disease, insects, they make colonies a lot cheaper to manage. A major expedition is going to have a number of GM crops and tools to make them in case there is some messed up environment because they are disaster averse, unlike most of the people in your world.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (26 days later)
I find it funny that people are so fixated on GM crops.
Part of the attraction for GM crops in industrialized nations is the density of production and the reduction of manpower requirements. If you don't have to remove weeds by hand, you can plant crop rows closer together, and need fewer farm employees. If you can grow more crops on less land, you pay less property taxes. Intensive farming also requires much more aggressive soil management as the crops pull more nutrients from every given acre of land, every growing season.
On the one side, people in favor of GM crops here are probably imagining small, extremely dense, privately managed, for-profit GM farms that require a great deal of fertilization every year. On the other side, perhaps people are imagining extremely low tech, uneducated farmers with limited access to technology to move water or fertilizer.
The colonists aren't living in either of those scenarios. They have a whole world with a small population, so availability of land is not a concern at all, and will not be a concern for centuries, if not millennia. In fact the long term plans will be for a substantial part of cropland to be in orbital farms, after the colonists re-establish themselves in space.
Labor is a complete non-issue. Even the early colonists have more than enough industry and resources to create autonomous machines to clear land, plant, tend and harvest crops.
What I am imagining are large, less densely packed, communal, non-profit, mostly-natural farms that can be perpetually managed with crop rotation and modest soil inputs like organic wastes. That's not to say that the farms would be strictly organic. The soil might need to be balanced with chemicals from time to time.
The only GM crop-improving efforts that I can say will definitely have occurred would be that crops would be engineered to better retain metals, and store them in such a way that the stored metals are easier to absorb by digestive processes.
As for the overall rationality of GM crops in this setting, part of good resource management is avoiding wasting resources. With an entire planetary biosphere to monitor after terraforming and tinkering with practically everything's genes in order to address metal scarcity in the environment, the genetic scientists are not going to tinker with things that already work, trying to solve problems that don't exist.
Saying that they didn't have access to GM crops at need is not true. The colonists had databases full of different strains of crops that would work well in different environments, courtesy of the history of human farming in various climates. Some of these electronically stored crops might be distantly related to GM crops of today.
If someone wanted to start a farm to grow a new crop at location, they would take some soil samples, gather climate data from the weather database, plug the variables into a agriculture science application, and then get a list of crops that might be suitable for the land and climate. The genetic material would then be formulated from electronic records and seeds would be 3D printed and delivered by drone to the farmer.
At the end of the day, the colonists expected to be able to tinker with crops at will, if there was a need. They had sustainable agriculture with near-zero human interaction. Low-intensity, large-land-area agriculture with near-zero human labor was working fine until the colony's technology base collapsed.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
Modifying plants to absorb and collect metals is extremely unnatural and a difficult thing to implement. Plus, 'metals'. There are dozens of them and the plant would need thousands of genes to handle the different biological pathways for all the metals. Plus, metal metabolisms are very energy-intensive, so if your plan on them to survive in the wild, they're be useless for anything else, such as being food (essentially collecting energy for you to eat).
Producing more nutritional food is child's play in comparison. Duplicating a gene that expresses the starch-forming signal in a plant is basically all you need sometimes.
The only real reason GMOs are considered dangerous are because:
-We cannot contain them once they are exposed to their wild versions. Cross-pollination can create unexpected mutations that are harmful to humans... but just generally inferior products.
-We are not accurate enough in our genetic manipulations. Our current techniques are more akin to shotgunning than scapel work. We could inadvertently create a mutation that has negative impacts on human health. However, these unexpected mutations have to pass through rounds and rounds of tests and trials that last for up to a decade. Regular beef doesn't stand up to this, and we eat it without hesitation.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (8 days later)
I think the plants are only modified for prolonged metal detention insofar they are of the type that needs metals to correctly metabolize in the first place. Similar to how cacti are better at retaining water if I got it right.
Only the crabs actively metabolize it in a novel way. Which still proves your point. I just wanted to mention the specific details OP wrote into the setting.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
If we are reasonable, during the early stages of terraformation... the colonists will have absolutely no regard for recreating the Earth ecosystem until they are in a stable situation. This involves having a stable food supply that you do not have to devote a majority of your time and resources into collecting.You are right, they will never return to an agrarian society.
They'll grow Spirulina.
If they're good with GMo, good enough to force an energy intensive process such as iron-gathering into a species like mites, then they can easily create a sort of chlorophyll bacteria that converts sunlight and carbohydrates into glucose.
This glucose can be used to feed more complex lifeforms that produce proteins.
All you's need to feed the colony for any amount of time is a chemical cracker that produces carbohydrates at the bottom, a vat of bacteria in the middle, and proteins coming off the top. Why bacteria? Minimal nucleic acid.
And please, no bad-mouthing 'frankenfoods'. Just look at the corn that goes into your chips.
I also think you're making your colonists a bit too wishy-washy dreamers. If the population becomes too large, the elderly will be left to die (no life-prolonging techniques) and the reproduction rates enforced to become lower. Food animals have no place at all on a colony ship. Meat in it's fibrous, animal form is just too inefficient. The culture vats should be used in the colony ships themselves instead of wasting space and resources recreating an agrarian environment inside a spaceship.
If you are planning on growing crops on the target planet, isn't it easier to grow them in closed environments instead of creating insect and weed hunting machines? Also, you are worried about your 100% genetically engineered species evolving into pests? Wouldn't those same genetic engineering techniques have been used to implement a kill-switch gene into the species? A kill-switch gene could be tied to the naturally undesirable traits you have forced into the species at their inception. If they evolve to discard their function, the kill-switch gene would be the first to be disrupted, removing their ability to process an arbitrary compound such as sulphur dioxide or alcohol. You spray that substance on the crops, the mutated species absorb to and die from it.
Mites cannot be 'everywhere'. They are less efficient that bacteria. If they grow into a rogue species, they can easily be kept out of clean rooms. They also need an energy source, and a pretty energy-dense one at that. Pure sugar? Whatever it is, you have control of all biological matter on the planet. If you lock it up, it will die. Bacteria are more efficient that mites. The bacteria will cause said energy source to be consumed, and between the rotting and their energy-intensive task, the mites will die very quickly because there is absolutely nothing to eat on the planet outside of your colony.
And in the end, even if everything goes to shit on the planet... you were careful enough to bring any mites from the planet up into the ship, right? Bah. Doesn't matter. Even if mites do reach the Leviathan, they have nothing to eat. It's not like the biomatter they were designed to eat is just lying in large quantities in the spaceship... My point is, even if everything becomes a mess on the planet, the spaceship is your key to repairing everything, bringing new genetic machines online or even restarting from scratch.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+4] Godric Gryffindor (19 hours later)
So far this looks like standard SF worldbuilding, I don't detect any invocation of rationality as yet.
Having one of these background facts be unknown to the characters, be important, and leave causal shadows allowing its deduction, is potentially a setup for a Fair Play Insight.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (19 hours later)
In regards to the Fair Play insight, the things discussed in this worldbuilding is more ancient history than anything applicable to the characters in the first book.
I'm hoping that I'll be able to interest the readers with at least a few fair play insights regarding the combinations of stone age technology with some ceramics technologies, water power, and perhaps even some steam power. These people were driven into the stone age, they didn't fall. They kept educating their children and writing their books to preserve knowledge as best they could. A great deal was lost, but not everything.
u/Farmerbob1 [+0] Level 1 author (19 hours later)
I'm attempting to build a rational world which I can then use to base a rational story on, not a rationalistic story.
Have I accidentally said I was going to try rationalistic writing?
u/erwgv3g34 [+1] (4 days later)
There is already a term for science-fiction stories that attempt to have a background consistent with real world physics and technology. It's called "hard science-fiction," not "rational fiction."
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (5 days later)
Hard science fiction doesn't necessarily need to be rational fiction though. All you need is a few major characters holding the idiot ball and it doesn't matter how well thought out the tech is.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (4 days later)
I believe it would be accurate to say that any science fiction that is rational would, by definition, be hard science fiction. That is, if one uses the definition I see on the sidebar.
u/erwgv3g34 [+2] (4 days later)
I've always felt that the definitions on the sidebar are a "featherless biped" kinda thing. I prefer to think of rational(ist) (fan)fiction as the empirical cluster of fiction which is cladistically descended from HPMOR and the broader LW memeplex. That's what Friendship is Optimal, Luminosity, and Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me have in common.
u/autowikibot [+1] (4 days later)
#####
######
#### Cladistics:
Cladistics (from Greek κλάδος, klados, i.e. "branch") is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are grouped together based on whether or not they have one or more shared unique characteristics that come from the group's last common ancestor and are not present in more distant ancestors. Therefore, members of the same group are thought to share a common history and are considered to be more closely related.
The original methods used in cladistic analysis and the school of taxonomy derived from it originated in the work of the German entomologist Willi Hennig, who referred to it as phylogenetic systematics (also the title of his 1966 book); the terms "cladistics" and "clade" were popularized by other researchers. Cladistics in the original sense refers to a particular set of methods used in phylogenetic analysis, although it is now sometimes used to refer to the whole field.
The techniques of cladistics, and sometimes the terminology, have been successfully applied to other disciplines: for example, to determine the relationships between the surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, or also between 53 manuscripts of the Sanskrit Charaka Samhita.
====
^Interesting: ^Cladistics ^(journal) ^| ^Outgroup ^(cladistics) ^| ^Symplesiomorphy ^| ^Phylogenetics
^Parent ^commenter ^can [^toggle ^NSFW](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot NSFW toggle&message=%2Btoggle-nsfw+cmrgr66) ^or [^delete](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot Deletion&message=%2Bdelete+cmrgr66)^. ^Will ^also ^delete ^on ^comment ^score ^of ^-1 ^or ^less. ^| ^(FAQs) ^| ^Mods ^| ^Magic ^Words
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (4 days later)
Are you saying that rational and rationalist fiction are the same thing? It seems to me that all rationalist fiction should be rational fiction, but not the other way around.
Rational fiction is internally consistent, and generally there's an understandable reason why things happened the way they did.
Rationalist fiction is all this, but espouses rationalist tenets as well.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
I believe hard scifi has a place in the subreddit, since HSF is essentially SF built rationally with the intent of realism.
u/cowsruleusall [+3] (5 hours later)
Holy shit, this is an incredible premise for a series. I'd recommend reading "Crabs Walk on the Island" by Anatoly Dneprov - it has a very interesting exploration of how evolution would work in this kind of circumstance. Other than that, I suck at writing and have no suggestions :(
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
"Crabs Walk on the Island" was a very good short story, and thought provoking. Thank You.
The purpose of the biology background setting is to create a scenario where I can have a rational reason for humans to combine stone age technology with water power, and some limited steam power. I needed to move it off-Earth, because there's simply too much metal available on Earth. I'd have to completely erase all education from every human for metalworking knowledge to disappear, and then water-power and steam-power would also be gone from collective knowledge.
I also needed to isolate the community, prevent it from getting outside help. So Earth and the Sol system had to be taken out of the picture.
I could design it as some sort of contrived alien experiment, but that's potentially a LOT darker than anything I want to do, if I wanted to write about it in a rational manner.
u/narfanator [+5] (9 hours later)
This is what's causing you your problem. You know the end result you want, and you're willing to make your people dumber in order to get it. That's not going to make the greatest scifi, and it's not going to make rational fiction at all.
Ideally, instead of making Frodo dumber when you give him the lightsaber, you give Sauron a death star, but then you just wouldn't have tried to colonize this system in the first place.
Edit: ...but that just means that when do find the problems to throw at them to get where you're aiming, they'll fill in all kinds of amazing details in your setting.
Edit 2: Go check out Eliezer's "Optimize Literally Everything" post (in this reddit under "Inexploitability"). The central take away (IMHO) is that in rationalist fiction, first you write a reasonable setting, and then you see what narrative comes from it when you add thinking characters. If you want this set in our universe, your setting is already written, so you really only get to do the latter.
If you want a specific tech and material base for your setting... why have it be modern-Earth descended at all?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (10 hours later)
There may be some confusion as to what it is that I have written. This is not the story arc, it's the backstory. The first thing I am doing is writing a reasonable setting. I have very little of the main story planned, other than a few personalities and details. I'm specifically avoiding more than that until after I have a rational back story to build on. Most of this information will be completely unknown to the characters. It's for me, though I will probably include it in the foreward of the book in much the same way that Flint does in 1632 and it's spinoff books (Speaking of which, I'm curious as to the rational fiction assessment of the 1632 book and it's offshoots. Off the top of my head, it seems to be very rational alternate history fiction.)
Back to this thread though. So far, none of the comments have created insurmountable obstacles. I am currently revising, as we speak. Once I have a solid, rational back story, then I will move forward with more detailed planning of the first book.
u/narfanator [+2] (17 hours later)
Horray! Anyway, in my experience with world-building-to-target, it's a looped iteration. You make your first guess as to the initial conditions that may result in what you want, then you completely forget about what it is you want and try to figure out where those conditions will go, then you remember where you wanted to go and revise the initial conditions and/or add happenstance events.
u/krakonfour [+2] (8 days later)
Just the concept I was looking to express in my previous worldbuilding attempts. I called it 'targeted worldbuilding', and was always trying to remind the people who replied that 'feedback loops' were more important that getting everything right on the first try.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (10 hours later)
Honestly, if this is just the backdrop for a setting, then you don't actually need any of this - especially if no one knows it. When I was reading the setting details, I was trying to fit it into the story that I assumed was there somewhere - an intrepid band of people in a world without metal, a legend of a ship high in the sky, and eventually they'd find some hidden secret, get the coordinates to a sealed off vault, find one of the lost shuttles, pilot it to the moon, restart the Leviathan, and so on and so forth.
But if the Leviathan is never going to feature in the story, then it doesn't matter. The time you spend figuring out details that aren't going to feature in the story could be better spent writing the actual story. And if you're setting the story long after all this stuff has gone down, when immense amounts of knowledge have been lost and computers are a legend that the protagonist's grandparents were told by their grandparents, then it probably doesn't belong in the story, because you'll just end up sidetracking everything to explain it to the reader. I'm one of those people who's big on cutting as much exposition as possible, especially if it doesn't serve to tell the story. If there are metal-poor people living in the stone age, then just let us know that and don't even pay lip service to how that came to be - just leave some hints, and let the reader draw their own conclusions.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (16 hours later)
Ah, but even if the reader never sees it, it's still critical for my understanding of the world, so I can write from a starting point, a reference.
It's also very possible that the people of the world might have retained a great deal of their history in books, backed up by non-metallic artifacts. They most certainly lost a great deal of science and technology, but history, perhaps not. I haven't decided yet.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (7 hours later)
I just read the story and it was a good short read. So thanks for the suggestion.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (7 hours later)
First, good start on a solid sci-fi idea. That should butter you up for some constructive criticism, right?
The generation ships received many messages, and monitored many transmissions during the course of the horrific war which lasted several months, but eventually, the Sol system went completely silent. It is unknown if any of humanity survived in the Sol system, but there were no radio transmissions, for hundreds of years.
Make sure to get your sublight travel speeds right. Hundreds of years at what speed? Months to which reference frame? Any significant time dilation while listening to the messages?
The energy of the initial acceleration of a generation ship would have been impossible to miss.
What does this mean? What kind of energy, detected by what? If you're doing hard sci-fi, I'd avoid using "energy" to mean anything generic. That way lies Star Wars and, at "best", Star Trek.
Leviathan was large enough to pose a threat to life on Secundus if it de-orbited, so it was landed on the moon of Secundus, in a crater.
Is this a Luna-sized moon? Those sorts of huge, paired sub-planets are basically non-existent elsewhere in the Sol system. Need to nail this down for things like tides. This seems to be suggesting a single moon, but Luna-like can't be assumed.
I think you need at least a lampshade for why this wasn't supported by robotic missions. Send in the robots first just makes sense. It might be the distance, the cost, or a fear they wouldn't be adaptive enough. But apparently humanity has already spent hundreds of years on this -- no FTL at all, and centuries away for the generation ship, right? The slow trip out for the probes, and the return reports at (one assumes) light speed. So why not send robots and wait a generation or two? Or just send them out even a little before the ships.
Also, why didn't the industry ship go first if they were going to (or could) hang in orbit for a century without apparent issues? They might not have known about the metal issues on the planet, but why would the long-term terraforming ship go first if it wasn't about some rush project? If there wasn't war brewing before they left (and maybe this is an issue) why not just float around in-system until the entire mission is under way together? Ten years waiting shouldn't be an issue for a ship which holds people who know they are going to die in deep space anyway.
Also, as in any rational fiction, you need to answer the computer information systems complexity question. Why isn't strong (if not super-human) AI a thing? It can be a single sentence that says, "it doesn't work" in so many words, but I think it needs to at least be answered when complicated genetic engineering is possible. What kind of computer systems can manage this, but not direct neural mapping of human brain-like systems (at the clunkiest)?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
I'd recommend reading 7th Sigma by Stephen Gould (whose most famous book is Jumper). It takes place in a section of the world where nanobots eat metals, and everyone has to use ceramics or plastics instead. It's a lot different from the setting you're talking about, but the lack of metals means there are some similarities.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (2 days later)
The primary thing that bothered me: I find it impossible to believe that a generation ship would ever be built without the capability to build heavy industry, absent some very unlikely catastrophic restriction. That right there wrecks the whole setting for me; you need to find a justification if you want it to be believable.
Perhaps the ship was sent early and only half complete because the Earth was in the process of dying? In that case, people should know what happened back on Earth, and it would have impacted the abilities of the ship -- the genetic samples likely would not have been put aboard until the ship itself was complete.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (2 days later)
The more I think about this, the more problems come up.
Why did they abandon space?
Space is terrifically useful if you are on dealing on very long time scales. Especially on a metal-poor planet.
- Asteroids provide all the metal you could ever want, both for building space stations, solar power satellites, weather satellites, etc and for shipping down to the planet to fill their needs.
- Comets provide water for reaction mass, breathable atmosphere, washing, drinking, radiation shielding, etc etc etc.
- There are almost certainly gas giants in the system. There's your source of He3 for fusion reactors.
- If you want to send Leviathan home again you need to refuel it. You're going to do that from space, not haul it up the gravity well.
Once the sand mites show up, Leviathan provides an unbreachable point where industry, computers, and serious bioengineering work can be maintained. Shuttles go down with metals, ceramic tools / machines / etc and go up empty via remote control. On the way you open them to vacuum / irradiate the hell out of the interior to kill the sand mites. If you say they need to be piloted manually, then I say "they land only on floating platforms that are carefully maintained sandmite-free, all people and goods go through obsessive decon chambers, and the shuttles don't actually dock with Leviathan."
I mentioned solar power satellites -- why devote land and industry to power generation when you can get it from orbit for cheap? Especially on a planet where there isn't much land. That should be a thing that the colonists wanted, so they wouldn't have abandoned space. If nothing else, they would have wanted weather satellites and communication satellites, so they would not have abandoned space.
Why are there no floating ecologies? If there's a shortage of land and people are getting a lot of their minerals from the ocean, there should be offshore arcologies (or, at least, mining platforms that can be converted to arcologies) to refine the metals. When the sand mites show up, at least some of these platforms will survive and maintain their industry. They provide the aforementioned safe places for the shuttles to land and transship advanced products.
In the meantime, the metals that the sandmites eat are still in their shells, and the sandmites are wherever the metals were that they ate. Can't you set up at least some cleanrooms, then bring in dead sandmites and recover the metals from their shells in order to build computers that are stored in very-limited-access-and-only-with-full-decon cleanrooms?
You now have at least one and probably multiple points where full industry and bioengineering is still usable for the foreseeable future. Given the level of bioengineering already shown, it seems unlikely that they can't find a solution for the sand mites. Even if they can't, they can abandon the land and move to a Waterworld style of life. (Again, appropriate decon measures to avoid bringing the sandmites to the floating arcologies.)
u/krakonfour [+2] (8 days later)
Consider the advantages of a planet:
-No need to mass-shield everything against radiation.
-Less energy and resources devoted to transport and thermal regulation. You can just let something sit on land. In space, absolutely everything must have remass and an energy source to move around.
-Solar power satellites are interesting... but the energy produced is directly proportional to surface area of solar panel you have. You can just lay them out on grids on a planet's surface, you know...
-Floating ecologies have more points of failure than a land-based colony. Rust, wear-and tear, floatability, sinking... you can do away with all that, and you'd want your options to be as secure as possible during your initial stages of colonization. Plus, they have incentive for off-shore ecologies until the sandmites show up. Harvesters for sea-iron would start on seabed deposits, which could be operated from the shorelines.
-Appropriate decon might not be available after the sandmite catastrophe has passed. the correct procedure is to starve out the sand mites, then melt them into slabs of metal.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (8 days later)
-No need to mass-shield everything against radiation.
People are the main thing you need to build rad-shielding for in space. They have a generation ship; this isn't an issue.
-Less energy and resources devoted to transport and thermal regulation. You can just let something sit on land. In space, absolutely everything must have remass and an energy source to move around.
I'll point out that you need to have an energy source to move around on land, too. ;>
You can just let things sit in orbit too; in general, they stay where you put them. Yes, low orbits are unstable and will eventually degrade, meaning they will need small amounts of boost to avoid destabilizing. This is a very manageable amount of energy.
As to solar panels -- they work enormously better in space than on the planet. Here are some of the advantages solar in space has as opposed to on a planet:
- No atmosphere. This boosts available power levels substantially
- No nighttime (assuming correct orbit so as to avoid planet's shadow)
- No dust to cover the panels
- No wind to move / break the panels, or scour them with dust
- No gravity, so you can make huge arrays without worrying about them collapsing of their own weight
- No clouds to get in the way
- Panels are always at 90 degrees to the sun -- harder to maintain on earth
Earth-based solar isn't really a viable option for civilization-level power. SBSP absolutely is a viable option.
-Appropriate decon might not be available after the sandmite catastrophe has passed.
That's the point; you do the decon before the sandmite catastrophe has happened. People should be doing this level of decon every time they walk in or out of a genetics lab where you are working on new / modified life forms -- you don't want any of the specimens escaping, or to bring in anything that would distort the experiments.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 days later)
The generation ship only holds so many people. While this is also the case with a planet, the upper limit is much lower.
The specialized equipment meant to be the "seed stock" of the industrial base required for a low iron / low mineral planet and a solar system with sparse resources was contained in Prometheus. Leviathan was the biological powerhouse. Prometheus was the industrial powerhouse. Either could have survived and created a colony without the other, because they both had all the knowledge required to rebuild human technology stored in absurd redundancy, but each of them had specialized equipment designed to make their half of the work easier.
I think I have said at some point that if Leviathan had been lost, the colony wouldn't have survived. I need to back off from that, because it would be irrational to design the ships that way. Prometheus would have started a colony on Secundus' moon. They would then begin building an industrial base. After a while, they would have the spare industry to terraform the planet, using equipment and techniques drawn from their knowledge base. Chemicals and elements required for organics would be retrieved from planetary atmospheres.
Remember that even without the Prometheus, the colonists were extremely technically advanced, and more than capable of small to medium sized projects. Earth based solar power is not the most efficient way to do it, but it was easy. Just like cropland, the humans were not required to do all the dirty work. Solar arrays were tended by machine.
Before the technology crash, most of the sweating humans did was during exercise to stay in shape, or sports for the fun of it, rarely for actual labor. Everyone got the calories they needed to survive, basic shelter, and basic clothing and household supplies no matter what they did. More than that required that they contribute something to society.
Your statement about the decon is something I struggled with too, at first I wanted it to be a mistake, but later I realized that would be pretty absurd. Not only that, but an accidental release of a few mites or a natural outbreak would probably not have the impact I want, so I have decided that one of the lead geneticists will actually have neo-luddite tendencies. This is not a belief they have always held, it is an outgrowth of worry about the future of the colony and the past of Earth. After the ecology is self correcting, he is going to sabotage the tech base, using organisms. In order to break down technology to start with, he will have to use more than just mites, I think, but the other biological elements of his attack on technology would be short term, unable to breed. The mites, or something like them, would be long term, to keep technology from re-developing.
As mentioned elsewhere, Lots of really good comments and observations folks, thank you all very much.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (8 days later)
Well, ok. Stonepunk is an interesting idea and the stories you write will probably be interesting. I don't buy your backstory, but that's not critical to enjoying the story itself. I will point out that you are relying on the following chain of events:
- Only four eligible planets were found
- A colony effort was sent to a terrible candidate planet instead of sending the resources to a better choice
- Two ships were sent, both of which were specialized to the point that they could not replace each other's functions
- On the way, someone went crazy and destroyed one of the ships
- When they got there, the colonists decided to abandon space (even if they intended to go back later) instead of using it as a source of metals, power, etc
- After they got there, someone went crazy and destroyed all the technology using bioweapons
- After 100 years on the surface, the planetary population was still concentrated enough that this was feasible
- All of the industrial base and genetics labs had low enough security / decon practices that this was feasible
Looking at it, I'm not actually sure why the existence and/or destruction of the Prometheus matters...even if it had arrived safely and they had had a good industrial base, wouldn't the mites still have destroyed it all?
Anyway, doesn't matter. I'll look forward to whatever you write. Stonepunk isn't something I've seen before.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
'Convoluted' is the word?
u/eaglejarl [+1] (8 days later)
The sequence is straightforward, it's just that each of the individual elements feel implausible to me.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
Mass shielding: it's for the long term prospect, once they arrive at Secundus. It is important they move everything planetside.
You are correct about the advantages of solar power in space... but consider this: you have a situation where industrial capacity is lacking, and you want to select the most robust technologies when you start building. Solar panels on the ground have no overhead costs. All you need to collect power is an electric wire, not a fancy beam emitter device. They can be cleaned, and most importantly, repaired on the ground by picking up your tools and walking over there. Remember the Hubble repair mission? Imagine you have to do that for several orbiting solar panels.
Initially, the power requirements for the colony will be miniscule. As it grows, solar panels won't be the answer, but not for the reason you'd think. Today, on Earth, solar panels are expensive to build because they contain rare metals. On Secundus, they would be prohibitively expensive.
The best solution for the Secundus colony is a solar steam cycle, where mirrors focus sunlight onto a boiler to superheat steam and run it over turbines. This of course, is best done on the ground. Afterwards, once they have gathered resources and manpower, they'll build damns for hydroelectric power. There's no nuclear elements or fossil fuels, but there's a lot of water lying around.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 days later)
I was leaning towards tidal generators as a major power source after a solid planetary industry was developed. Hydroelectric is also good, but it blocks inland waterways.
u/krakonfour [+1] (9 days later)
Tidal generators have an even lower power density than solar panels. While they may be cheaper the build, the wear and tear makes them a bad long term investment.
I don't think inland waterways is an important issue for the colonists... By the time they need to build a dam, the problem of transport has either long been resolved, or they could simply include the waterways into the design of the dam or the choice of location...
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (9 days later)
Inland waterways wouldn't be a concern from a transportation point of view. I was thinking environmental. As for tidal generators, it's very possible you are right. In fact it makes sense that you are right. I was thinking in terms of physical forces available for generating power, not in terms of repair and maintenance.
If the colony had sufficient power and dedicated industry, they could manufacture absurdly damage-resistant components for tidal power generation (Graphene and carbon nanofiber shells for components, Buckyballs for lubricants), but once they had enough power available to create a worldwide tidal power generation system, they would be back in space, and beaming power down to the planet from solar arrays in orbit.
So yea, Tidal power generation is a no-go for the colonists, even theoretically :)
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 days later)
Heh, I'm pretty sure now that you've only read the first iteration. Most of your questions are answered to some extent in the version I had to put on my blog.
Fusion was only twenty years away in this universe when the colony ships were launched, and had been only twenty years away for the last couple hundred years. Leviathan requires a monstrous quench gun to launch fuel to it at 5% of light speed (its cruising speed), and the fuel is 2% Uranium Bromide in water (Nuclear Salt Water Rocket)
u/eaglejarl [+2] (2 days later)
Nope, didn't read the blog version at first. The original was enough of a wall'o'text that I wasn't willing to invest more time, and I expected it to be a reasonable summary -- so, my bad. Anyway, I've now skimmed through the blog and caught the answers to some of what I asked, but not most of it.
I still don't buy it.
The total mass of each ship was 1.85e+10kg.
Assuming I'm doing my math correctly, that works out to over nine million tons, the size of one of the largest Orion drive ships that were speculated about back in the 1950s. (Which begs the question "why weren't they using an Orion drive?" but that can be handwaved as "no one was willing to weaponize space to that degree")
This mass most definitely includes machine shops, electronics labs, etc in order to maintain the ship itself. Adding whatever else you need to make a fully functional tech base should end up being a rounding error. The one thing that they might plausibly not have had would be a chipfab; I don't know how mass intensive those are. If they didn't have one, though, they would have had a crapton of spare chips for maintaining the ship. Why would you send two ships that were both single points of failure?
A simpler solution would be to say that there was only one ship and it was self-sufficient, but it was stratified -- all of the industry was in the back part, the genetic stock and equipment in the middle, and the living spaces in the front. (Or whatever other arrangement you prefer.) Lindsay blew up or otherwise crippled the industrial segment.
Sticking with your original design, however, I then have the following other issues:
It took a hundred years of lean times before the population of Leviathan became stable at the capacity it was recommended for.
When they arrived, Leviathan was capable of sustaining the existing population base, and they had the industrial equipment and spare parts to maintain the ship and the shuttles -- in other words, they had everything required to build a tech base.
Since they had plenty of time left on the life support, there was no rush to go down to the planet. They spent a hundred years terraforming before anyone actually landed, then another hundred years getting established, having kids, and stripping Leviathan. They had plenty of time before the sand mites hit, and there's no sign that Leviathan was running out of carrying capacity at that point.
So, they weren't short on time, machines, or parts. They also had multiple shuttles and a BOATLOAD of fuel for them. (They were making multiple round trips into a (near)Earth-normal gravity field -- they had to have had a huge amount of fuel.) So, their in-system mobility wasn't limited.
Why not spend a few decades -- or, shoot, a century or two -- establishing space infrastructure before landing? The alternative is that they landed heavy construction machinery, powerplants, and fuel in order to build the first settlement -- I pretty much guarantee that a bunch of interstellar settlers did not clear land and build houses with axes and shovels, then light their homes with candles. No, they had full electrical systems from the get-go, and generators are heavy. Why land a generator when you could put all the energy-supply systems in orbit and beam the power down?
Sure, maybe they couldn't make a space elevator with what they had onboard or could easily build, but they could make all the other sorts of space infrastructure I mentioned.
But, ok, let's say they didn't do that for some reason. So, they had no sand-mite-free zones in orbit.
Then you have the geography problem. They were on the ground for a hundred years before the sand mites hit. People would have been spread out -- there would have been multiple genetic labs, biological study stations, small communities that had their own machine shops, etc.
Since this is a small-continents-and-multiple-islands world, there would have been people living and working on various islands and other isolated communities (doing scientific research, extracting particular biological or mineral resources, etc), as well as possibly the floating arcologies I already mentioned. The sand mites would not have evolved all over the planet simultaneously, they would have hit one place. Yes, as you said, all the genetic labs in that place were wiped out before they knew what was going on, but it's not plausible that every genetic lab on the planet was wiped out simultaneously.
Some of the last equipment to come from the Leviathan had been the computers and equipment used for genetic engineering.
They were living on the planet, and continuing to terraform it, for a hundred years and there were no computers or genetic engineering labs on the planet? That's hard to believe.
Again, the stonepunk idea is pretty interesting, but I'm not sure how you're going to get there if people had to take a generation ship. An alternative might be to set it on Earth instead -- the generation ships were launched, this led to a massive war and civilization collapsed. Your metallivore sand mites were a bioweapon deployed as part of the war; it was intended that all the ones that were deployed would be sterile so that no one had to worry about them spreading but, unfortunately, a few breeding pairs slipped through and they spread world-wide, carried on all the shipping and airplanes so they were everywhere before anyone knew what was going on.
An X years later, people are trying to rebuild civilization, but all of the on-land metals have been eaten. All of the easily accessible metals on Earth were mined out centuries ago and current level of civilization does not support the machinery necessary to do the necessary deep mining.
Setting it somewhere in Polynesia or possibly Australia would give you pretty much the scenario you're looking for -- low population, no nearby metals, the only accessible land is a couple of small continents (AU and NZ) and a bunch of islands.
Doing it this way would take out all of your cool backstory, but I don't think that part is necessary for the story you're trying to tell -- as you said, all of the generation ship stuff is ancient history by the time of your story, since you are setting it "nearly two thousand years after the mites consumed the [metals]".
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (3 days later)
Thank you for looking at the idea, and forcing me to think about things from a different angle. As for the Orion system, that's a straightforward science thing. Nuclear Salt Water Rockets are like a continuously operating Orion system rather than a pulse power system. It's literally a nuclear rocket, not a chemical one.
As for the decision to leave space temporarily. The colonists did not feel rushed. They were developing the planet, which had no alien life forms, just Earth life forms. After so much time had passed, and everything seemed to be doing exactly what it was supposed to, they consolidated to the planet.
They prioritized. With the status of humanity unknown, they put 100% effort into building a stable, solid planetary base. They had the technology to build the tools to build the tools to get themselves off planet again, and that was what they were doing, building a foundation.
There was no significant concern about the planet itself somehow becoming a problem. To the community of the Leviathan, a few hundred years on the planet was just a bump in the road, part of the plan to make certain their community had what it needed, before it went back into space.
Living in space is all well and good, but space is inherently dangerous, and the star system they found themselves in was terribly poor in accessible materials. There were a couple small moons around gas giants, and the large moon of Secundus. No vast belt of mineral richness between Mars and Jupiter like the Sol system boasted.
Another Lindsay scenario (however unlikely) could doom the human race. On the planet, after the population was high enough and sufficiently spread around, ending the human race would be a completely different story. Especially with no way to drop projectiles from space. Again, racial survival trumped. The highest probability of survival with the lowest possibility of catastrophe or sabotage led them to put every human on the planet and keep them there for a while.
The development of the mites into metallivores was something that nobody considered. Genetic mutation was being watched for, and a few minor tweaks over time needed to be made, but the genetic alterations made on the planet had, in general, been stable for a very long time. The metallivore trait was not even imagined as a possible genetic mutation.
I'll need to adjust the history to clarify the decisions, I see.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (3 days later)
That still doesn't address why they chose not to build weather satellites and communication satellites. The utility of doing so is so high that not doing it seems to require serious explanation.
As to the resource-poor system...you can certainly do it, but it really starts to feel like you're forcing the issue, purpose-building an entire solar system. I don't know how common the system you describe would be and some quick googling hasnt answered the question, but it feels unlikely. Also, why would humanity send an ark ship THERE? It can't possibly be the best (or even one of the four best) options, surely?
I suppose that part doesn't matter though -- it's the world you want as the author and anthropic bias can take care of the rest. Still, the satellite thing needs an answer.
u/krakonfour [+2] (8 days later)
Metal-poor rocky planets are extremely rare, yes. They are the result of Population II stars, that are found in the galactic halo, millions of light-years from Earth.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (3 days later)
I see no reason why they wouldn't have placed weather and communication satellites. If fact I'd guarantee they did. Unfortunately, after a couple thousand years, they've de-orbited and burned up in atmosphere.
Earth sent one pair of colony ships to all four known lifeless rocky worlds with significant quantities of liquid water around single, stable stars.
As for the resource-poor system, yes, it was done intentionally. There are three gas giants and a single rocky planet in orbit around this star. The gas giants have, over the billions of years, either collected almost every bit of matter in the star system, or perturbed the orbit of other masses in the solar system sufficiently to cause them to enter a solar-intersecting orbit, or a system departure orbit. (That's why I put three gas giants in the system.) From what I know about solar system formation (not an expert, just enough to be dangerous to myself!!) The question of how the planet Secundus managed to survive solar system formation without being torn apart is probably more appropriate!
u/krakonfour [+2] (7 days later)
Wow, I need to get in on this. This is right up my field of interest. BRB after reading through the Towers of Text.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
If we consider all the arguments.... there is nothing that really compels them from leaving Earth's underground at all. A few kilometers under the surface and you're safe from basically everything.
Mites as a bioweapon would be even less plausible than the 100% genetically controlled environment of Secundus. On Earth, there are literally millions of species competing with mites for the same biomatter. They just won't survive long enough to deal significant damage to civilization, and if hey do, the mines we've opened up are still there, with more iron available.
u/krakonfour [+2] (8 days later)
Is this one of those situations where I go 'the Eagle has landed' and just stop typing out all the arguments you've already mentioned? :(
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 days later)
Was this in response to the original post, or the updated version (linked at the top) that's too big for Reddit?
If you haven't read the new one, I think I answered that there.
u/krakonfour [+2] (7 days later)
A few quick thoughts before I move onto the comments and your updated version:
-Unless you're planning on crash-landing Leviathan on the planet at orbital velocities, it would be unlikely that it changes the planet's surface characteristics significantly.
-Genetically-engineered mites are very unlikely to evolve into a ravenous grey-goo analogue. Artificial alterations that make it gather conductive metals provide negative selection bias. It's an energy-intensive task that does nothing directly for the specie's survival. Sure, they'll obtain impenetrable carapaces, but what predators do they have? A more likely scenario is that the colonists can't make the genetic trait stick.... the mites keep evolving away from it, and the new species pressure the iron-burdened mites into extinction again and again.
-Even if the replicator mites cause a catastrophic event, they won't survive for hundreds of years. If they don't die off on their own, other species without the iron-gathering burden push them into extinction. Finally, just where do the mites get the energy to attack iron directly from?!
-Iron-poor planets are usually lacking in plenty of other heavy metals. Their oceans won't be very salty.
-Huge amounts of water and little land mass means that the land masses are like the northern rocks of scotland: Cold, hot, always wet and with no topsoil.
-The hard thing is to put things back into orbit, not drop them down. Dropping resources and robots is as simple as strapping an appropriate heat shield on something and launching it with a parachute attached. Putting empty shuttles back into space is counter-productive. It is much more efficient to create one-way dropships instead of shuttles in a resource-strapped situation.... unless you have shuttles that can go up at no cost at all.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 days later)
Lots of good stuff here, and in other comments, THANKS!!
There is a whole lot of new material to sort through now, in order to re-write another iteration of the backstory.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
You wrote elsewhere that you are on a targeted worldbuilding approach. With all this new info and modifications to the backstory, how has your target changed?
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 days later)
Very little. This stuff is ancient history to the characters alive when I will be writing about, but I need it to know how to think about the world.
I need a solid base.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
Wow folks, I really appreciate this. Properly developing a rational basis for the book / series is critical. I thought of a lot of different things, but I knew others would see holes where I missed them, and you certainly didn't disappoint.
Now, I get to examine solutions, and consider them for rationality :)
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (18 hours later)
OK, After much frustration dealing with text formatting and size limits, I just decided to post the most recent version of (hopefully) rational universe backstory on the back end of my last project. (which was not rational!) That's not a really big deal, since my readers there know I'm going to be starting two new projects soon. Stop by and take a look if you want. Feel free to comment either there or here, if you like. I have been tremendously happy with the community insightfulness so far!
Oh, drat, I forgot the computer/AI thing. I'll go jump on that now.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
On Ai: Several hundred tons of infrastructure on a several hundred million ton spaceship? Just built two hundred AI. Shut down each one after a year, long before it can possible turn unstable. Switch on the second one with no prior knowledge of the first one's operation. Continue for 200 years. Select, from that sample of 200, the one with the least signs of instability, and copy its pre-launch configuration to half the AI. Repeat the process until you get a bunch of AI you can trust, then copy all of them over. You can go on for 774 years before you have to copy the same configuration twice.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 days later)
The mass of a single AI isn't a problem. The cost for a single AI wouldn't be a deal-killer either, even though it would be expensive. Having to duplicate the systems many times would become a problem cost wise first, and mass-wise second. I'm painting a picture of AI as an emerging technology. It wouldn't have a place on ships going off to start a colony, away from the few experts in the Sol system who really understand the new technology. The next generation colony ships might well have had AI systems integrated, if the next generation colony ships had ever been built.
u/krakonfour [+1] (8 days later)
You could always include a chip factory in the Leviathan, that can replace low level microchips fried by radiation... Or build new AI during the century long journeys.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (10 days later)
I have just decided on the name for the series.
'Set In Stone'
Each book will append a single word, possible two.
The first chapter will be 'Set in Stone: Follower'