Interstellar Colonization: Restarting from Scratch

[T.Neo]

Which is... Kind of what I meant ....

Ah, I guess I got a bit confused then. :facepalm:

That's odd. Which numbers? The radiators are based off of Project Rho's equations, the sun's luminosity is crossed from a number of sources, and the solar power intake is taken from actual figures from the ISS's solar panels.

The issue is the power per newton for the sail.

Here

Keep in mind that battery of orbital lasers is going to have to be absolutely huge if it is going to push a lightsail at 1.5 g. This is not going to be a tiny satellite in LEO.

I cannot calculate the exact power rating since figures on the mass of the ISV Venture Star are conspicuous by their absence. The equation is Vs = (2 * Ev) / (Ms * c) where Vs is the starship acceleration, Eb is the energy of the beam, Ms is the mass of the starship, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. Dr. Geoffrey Landis says is boils down to 6.7 newtons per gigawatt.

In Dr. Robert Forward's The Flight of the Dragonfly (aka Rocheworld), his starship's light sail is illuminated by a composite laser beam with a strength of 1500 terawatts. This pushes the starship with an acceleration of 0.01g (about 150 times as weak as the acceleration on the Venture Star). The beam is produced by one thousand laser stations in orbit around Mercury (where solar power is readily available in titanic amounts). Each station can produce a 1.5 terawatt beam, 1500 terawatts total. By way of comparison, in the year 2008, the entire Earth consumed electricity at a rate of about 15 terawatts. Since the Venture Star appears to be more massive than Forward's starship, and is accelerating 150 times as fast, presumably its battery of laser cannons is orders of magnitude larger.

Going by the 6.7 newtons/gigawatt figure, you would need some 790 terawatts of laser power for a 54 000 ton ship (roughly the mass of Daedalus fully fueled).

Ok, so that's not the level of insanity that you'd have with Avatar's ISV (getting pushed at a whole 1.5 G), but it's still a lot of power, and likely more than would end up being used by a 'conventional' fusion drive.

I didn't say it was okay, just that people would be more likely/willing to do something like that.
Once again, I'm not saying it's okay.
H.G. Well's wasn't advocating uplift with The Island of Doctor Moreau, Charles Dickens' wasn't advocating letting the poor die with Oliver Twist, and I'm not advocating uplift slavery with this.

Good analogies.

Grabbing things, writing, and pushing buttons pretty much sums up what human hands do, aside from more specialized tasks like surgery and piloting.

Most forms of manual labour includes tasks that are a bit more complex than that.

If the main purpose of your uplifts is pushing buttons, it is a pretty odd purpose, since pushing buttons and writing stuff is a pretty cushy job as jobs go.

There was a point when you couldn't write with either hand. I'm sure with enough practice You and I could write very well with our left hands. It's just there's no purpose when the right hand already does it perfectly well, and so the poor left hand spends it's whole life unable to write.

It's muscle memory. We've trained ourselves to use our right hand, not the left, and so the right hand can write, not the left.

Wrong. And right.

Firstly, I'm a lefty... but this is a minor detail.

There's left-or-right hemisphere dominance. My left hand has always been dominant throughout my life, even before I learnt to write- that's why I I learnt to write with my left hand. I could learn to write with my right hand, but my left hand is still dominant.

The difference between humans and dogs of course, is that humans have the "firmware" that is actually needed to learn to use our hands. It's hard-wired into us.

I'm not saying that it would be impossible for a dog... but it would be much harder. In effect, it'd be unnatural.

This task isn't nearly so great as altering one of the factors that effect decision-making (aggression), and thus personality and psychology, which is decision-making. I can say; to do X, we need to do Y and Z, as I just have, but when it comes to changing a decision-making factor without effecting psychology, that's a much greater challenge.

Yes, it is. I've explained multiple times that you can change some traits by just altering one, or a few, genes.

You need to totally redesign that paw. Yes, the basic set of structures between them is the same- but so is the basic set of structures between a Volkswagen Golf and a Ferrari:

And while we're sticking with the cars-as-hands analogy here, this is what happens when a human hand gets caught in a work accident:

In both this manipulator and the brain case, though, you have to say: Does this string of DNA control these cells, to do X, Y, or Z?

But in the case of manipulator modification alone, you actually know what you want:
A)these muscles to get larger,
B)this bone to manufacture growth hormone on this epiphesial plate for a longer time,
C)these nerve cells to divide more as the fetus is developing.


But for the brain, you don't even know what you want until you're finished researching the psychological aspect:
A) Region A to get smaller
B) But do you want region B to get smaller? Does that effect aggression?
C) There's some signs that region C might balance hormones from region A, so you need to make it smaller as well. But it also balances hormones from region E.
D) Region D is also involved with aggression, but also involved with other important aspects. What do you do here?
E) Region E is necessary for a completely different function. Some of it's homones will be unbalanced if it remains the same size, so it needs to be shrunk: But if you do that it won't produce enough hormone F or G.
F) etc. etc.

I've explained this multiple times. There are genes that control for traits, traits like aggression for example.

You can activate, deactivate, add or remove these genes. You do not have to worry about what structures they change or how. Just that they work.

On the other hand, changing a paw into a hand is likely a good deal more complex. We don't know what makes a human hand a human hand and what makes a dog paw a dog paw, but it's likely more than just a gene or two. We haven't gotten into that kind of advanced genetics yet, and even if we did, doing so would likely be more complex than just switching around genes.

You only have to grow a paw, where a mistake is far more humane for an organ-sized cluster of cells than it would be for a fully sentient being, which is to test effects on the brain.

How do you grow a paw as an accurate test of genetic outcome without growing the whole animal? To grow a paw seperately at all would likely require some other kind of wizardry, and while that wizardry would be awesome to have, it defeats the purpose of running tests.

I wouldn't particularly want to create a sapient being with the risk of it being horribly deformed, either.

Granted, you're already playing this game by increasing intelligence. But do you want to double the amount you're doing it and include a whole new part of the brain, too? Is that easier than the manipulator work?

Identifying and replacing/removing/deactivating/activating genes related to aggressive and passive traits would likely be far easier than creating a manipulator from scratch.

Remember, modifying the dew claw and making the bones longer doesn't give you an instant manipulator, there are other things that have to be done as well- including the alteration of the nervous system in order to control the manipulators.

a population to shine for humanity and help us along

That sounds almost like a North Korean propaganda slogan.

In fact, great apes may even be just as good as humans, but if you want something better, why not go with the species that has already proven itself better for the past twelve thousand years?

Because dogs have proved themselves to be great dogs, but they've never proved themselves to be any good as sophonts.

Unlike just about any other animal, dogs will willingly do something for you. Why? If only to get you to like them.

They will only try to get you to like them, if they like you. Loyalty isn't stupidity.

Sure, self-control can tell great apes to work well on a team, as well as humans, but we primates have to overcome a natural tendency against it, meanwhile canines have a natural tendency towards it.

What is self-control, anyway? A dog running to attack me could be excersising perfect self-control, or a person running to beat me up could be excersising perfect self-control too, depending on what the definition of "self control" is.

Canines, on the other hand, have a natural tendency towards this organization and team effort even without having to enact self-control.

Why then are there packs of stray dogs that can be a threat to humans and other dogs? Why would a pitbull have an inclination to run out of its owners property and attack my dog for no reason at all? Why do I get barked at by the neighborhood throng of dachshunds the moment I walk out the door? Why does a loved and protected puppy act out and disobey people?

Sorry, but dogs are, IMO, just as animalistic as we are.

True, we do have a bulbous head. But there's also other things to consider, like our total lack of a snout, which entirely changes the skull structure and the ratio of different elements of the skull.

That is true. However, chimpanzees and other apes also lack a snout (even though the 'face' part of their skulls are more prominent than ours), and we clearly have bulbous heads compared to them. It's a matter of comparison.

Working off the assumption of similarly sized heads:

The goal should be a similar encephalisation quotient. Just because you have a human-sized head, doesn't mean you have a similar body-head or body-brain ratio.

In addition, being big (like the huge dog in the picture) lessens the uplift's reduced taxation on spacecraft resources, though I'm sure this particular facet would probably not be of worry to an uplift biologist.

My only concern is that you superimposed a human brain (or at least the forebrain and the back-top part of the brain) onto the dog's brain... but if the brain has to increase in relation to the body, the entire brain has to increase in size. Granted, the frontal lobe is an area which has to be big in and of itself.

But your overall conclusion is not unlike my total thumbsuck- the only difference is you posit a brow ridge increasing at the front of the braincase, where I just tried to imagine an increase in the size of the braincase as a whole. The only way to truely answer the question would be to calculate what the mass of the brain would be based on the brain/body relationship, then valculate the volume and then the size from that, and see how it would fit into the skull.

nor do we have any bones at all in our nose

Is there even such a thing as a nose-bone? All the mammal skulls I've seen just have a hole there, like we do. I think we just have prominent noses (compare the human nose to the chimpanzee nose).

And finally, as I pointed out in the earlier post, they're usually invisioned with foreheads anyways. The uplift profile is actually more accurate to most animation than the real profile, so it will probably improve their look.

Just because something looks good in a diagram (or even in animation) doesn't mean it'll actually look good in reality.

I once drew an alien creature in 2D, and then created a 3D model with the drawing as a template. The model looked exactly as it should have, but nothing like I thought it would look... ironically it ended up looking pretty alien, which was satisfying.

I would consider human-like hair a good idea, mostly because they'll look like a bald human like this, or a puppy.

If I didn't know better I'd consider this sentence to be wish-fulfillment for some kind of dog-human hybrid. :shifty:

The ears, which aren't drawn, will do a good job of making it look normal.

We have ears and chimpanzees have ears, but to a chimpanzee we probably still look like we have freakishly bulbous heads.

It's just that they still cage them, and they still treat them like primates. Even if their cage is an enclosure with lots of roaming space, and lots of activities and toys (they go a long ways to make sure they're happy).

Well, yes. But I am also kept in an enclosure, although I do have quite a bit of roaming space, and I am able to keep myself fairly busy. What's wrong with that?

Of course they treat them like primates, because that's what they are. But the treatment of apes in such cases is quite good, far better than some of the historically very poor treatment of animal test subjects, and I think, they even have a better quality of life than your average animal in the wild (where animals can be subject to disease, predation, competition, resource availability issues, and humans hunting them for bushmeat).

It's just the technology will be gradual, and these scientists will be exposed to the gradual increase of intelligence. However, do to sensory adaptation, the age-old analogy of boiling a frog by slowly warming the water, they will continue to think of them as animals all the way. Their pride and amazement at how intelligent the animals are already only makes this case worse, because it makes it harder for the newer ones to cross the "human" line because they'll be used to animals do amazing things.

There's no reason to suggest that the boiling frog analogy will hold true in that case. Scientists can fall victim to ignorance, but they're not stupid.

They can very easily see what an animal is capable of, they know about incredible behaviours, but they also know what incredible behaviours mean.

If they were capable of perceiving the whole situation like this they would agree; but as animals, they aren't.

Indeed. If they were capable of percieving the whole situation like that, then they would qualify for the same benefits and rights (and responsibilities) as humans.

But because they cross it so gradually, scientists won't be as prone to notice as people who have not seen each step of the project, or the technologies as they improve, or spent their entire life studying the animals and realize how intelligent they are.

The job of a scientist is to record and understand information, after all...

Unless they want it to go unnoticed, which they would if they thought publicity would be negative (Canine unit replacements). Companies do have a right to secrets and contracts, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it is possible for them to make it unknown. And even if it is known, and those few regulators who do know, the shock factor could easily be taken away with long walls of highly technical speech and implication, especially if it's designed to do exactly that (remove shock factor, make it seem more mundane).

I dunno, I just see that as moving into the "evil megacorp" cliche.

You can affect how something is presented to people, but you can't stop something new from being... new.

... But the puppies/babies grow up to be workers.

Only after they grow up and are taught to do their jobs and cope in society.

Once again, that's only one model for the reason you'd create such a species. When discussing this, don't forget these a number of different reasons why it could be done that could drastically effect the entire operation.

My question is what the other reasons would be. From my point of view, I can't see any reasons other than slavery or "look, I have a buddy now".

Okay, let's try not to make uplift the main focus; the main focus is more IS colonization, and as such, ISV design...

Indeed.

Looking at the fact that my radiator+engine mass was only 0.07044 kg for every 1 kg of dry ship mass, I'm looking at the concept of using antimatter engines... I'll do that analysis later... It's late.

Well, in theory an antimatter drive offers better performance than a fusion drive. The issue is the inefficiencies relating to gamma radiation, containing the antimatter, and actually producing it... which may end up making fusion preferable. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The engines and radiators only make up 7% of the dry mass of the ship? :blink: