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Gatecrashing issues

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Sat, 2013-07-27 17:34

Erenthia

Gatecrashing issues

So I'm working on a piece of fiction that involves a new settlement being set up on a world that is geologically very similar to Earth, and I've realized I am missing several key pieces of information. (Mostly this is because I like to establish very detailed histories just in case I might need them) 1) What is the smallest possible size for a fusion reactor? As complex as fusion is, a reactor is still a collection of atoms and shouldn't require more than either a very powerful magnet or a laser (and some hydrogen). Given the increased efficiency of batteries, input power storage shouldn't take up too much room. Could scientists in EP get this down to the size of small house? A room? A briefcase? Obviously smaller reactors would end up producing less power, but a community that until recently was small enough to run off high-efficiency solar might not need the best fusion plant out there. 2) How is mining done? I've done some research and apparently with highly sensitive accelerometers you can map subterranean density even today, so with EP tech I'm imagining a sort of topological map, but instead of showing elevation it shows density by color. Hundreds of drones with extremely sensitive sensors should be able to point to various mineral deposits. Once found, I was imagining a sort of root system built by a specialized fabber. 3) How are buildings built? For my part I can't see any reason why a Protean swarm couldn't build a building. It would need more resources than for an ecto, but honestly I think the complexity of a basic structure would be significantly less than an ecto. This raises the question: how long would it take a protean swarm to make a 20m by 20m by 10m box with a few rooms, basic lighting, mesh connections, etc? I'm thinking only the most basic utilities as things like CMs and such can be added later. I'm inclined to say it would take 24 hours, but I don't really know. 4) What the best way to get an ego through the gate? After the infrastructure of the colony is in place, and you want to start populating it, you'd want to send through as many egos at one time as possible. Can you run a fiberoptic hardline through the gate while it's open and transfer egos from one server to another? Or would it be faster to simply load them onto a REALLY big storage device and wheel the whole thing through gate at once?

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Sun, 2013-07-28 10:55

Holy

Erenthia wrote:2) How is

Erenthia wrote:
2) How is mining done? I've done some research and apparently with highly sensitive accelerometers you can map subterranean density even today, so with EP tech I'm imagining a sort of topological map, but instead of showing elevation it shows density by color. Hundreds of drones with extremely sensitive sensors should be able to point to various mineral deposits. Once found, I was imagining a sort of root system built by a specialized fabber.

I like that root system idea. You can have nanobot build transport vessels to the mineral ore (or whatever ist is that interests you in the underground). Then your target substance could be dissolved using detergends and pumped up to the surface. There you can precipitate it and have your stuff. Perhaps you should also have something precipitate in the underground to prevent formation of instable cavities. Densitiy mapping is an interesting tool. As far as I know other tools for prospection today are ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography. Then you have information on density, subsurface structure and electrical conductivity.

Sun, 2013-07-28 11:50

Erenthia

I actually found the Thumper

I actually found the Thumper in Gatecrashing (page 163) that uses ultrasound to do geological surveys, so I'll probably throw that in. As far as the root system, I also plan to have the roots also expand laterally at about 0.5 meters under the ground forming a grid. New buildings can bud off the root system and have full connection (mesh, power, water, really everything) to everything else. It can also grow the equivalent of motes all the way through it. What I'm looking at now is, once the root system expands laterally enough, if it could grow a dome over the whole city. Not necessary unless I decide to make the atmosphere problematic (which I might) but it's a cool idea so I'll probably come up with an excuse to use it. As for Fusion reactors, Sunward has an Expensive (20,000) airship with a small fusion reactor built into it. So I'll assume that it's something that a group of colonists can get access to fairly early on, and that it's the size of a small to large room. (I'm also looking at compressed hydrogen for energy storage). Still looking into ego transfer. And now I'm looking into excuses to get the community to build a space elevator and/or mass driver to get into space in their new system. That way when the indentures revolt they can have something important to take over.

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Sun, 2013-07-28 13:43

godmoney

ego transfer

the cost effective way would be to load everyone up on a big hard drive and put it on a dolly and roll it through the gate since gate time averages 50,000cr a MINUTE. and protean swarms spend an hour per price tier building items. so have another dolly with a block of material and a swarm loaded up, roll into position, press play. need a bigger house, put two together.

—

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi!?!

Sun, 2013-07-28 16:00

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:1) What is the

Erenthia wrote:
1) What is the smallest possible size for a fusion reactor? As complex as fusion is, a reactor is still a collection of atoms and shouldn't require more than either a very powerful magnet or a laser (and some hydrogen). Given the increased efficiency of batteries, input power storage shouldn't take up too much room. Could scientists in EP get this down to the size of small house? A room? A briefcase? Obviously smaller reactors would end up producing less power, but a community that until recently was small enough to run off high-efficiency solar might not need the best fusion plant out there.

Hmm... Haha! Of course Robert Freitas has a reference somewhere in Nanomedicine: http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/6.3.7.2.htm He writes: "As for the D-T reaction, one calculation for laser compression of D-T fuel pellets indicated that the minimum pellet diameter to achieve (explosive) ignition is ~4.2 mm and requires a total incident energy of 11.2 megajoules 602 in a ~nanosecond pulse. Smaller pellets could not achieve energy breakeven.* It is estimated that the minimum dimension of a high-temperature fusion reactor may be on the order of centimeters.1023 But even if a ~10^11 joule/m^3 energy density can be obtained with diamondoid materials allowing the reactor core to be as small as (5 cm)^3, a 2.3-cm thick Pt shield for the 14.1 MeV neutrons only reduces the incident intensity by half. Thus the smallest medically safe D-T fusion reactor is probably at least ~1 meter in diameter (e.g., to reduce incident fast neutron intensity by ~10^6 upon exit)." "Medically safe" is probably also biomorph safe. I assume a one cubic meter reactor is enough for an ordinary gatecrashing group, although as always there are cooling considerations: it will at least produce as much heat as useful electricity, so you better have a stream to put your fractal cooling fins into. Reference 1023 is Norman Rostoker, Michl W. Binderbauer, Hendrik J. Monkhorst, "Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor," Science 278(21 November 1997):1419-1422. for those of you who want to really dig in.

Quote:
2) How is mining done? I've done some research and apparently with highly sensitive accelerometers you can map subterranean density even today, so with EP tech I'm imagining a sort of topological map, but instead of showing elevation it shows density by color. Hundreds of drones with extremely sensitive sensors should be able to point to various mineral deposits. Once found, I was imagining a sort of root system built by a specialized fabber.

You can do some preliminary mapping this way, but you also need chemical information. Time for other probes to drill. Looking at http://pason.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=209&Itemid... shows something fun: the energy required to get a unit of rock out of the way scales as the inverse square of the hole diameter - small holes are less efficient. But the total volume drilled away scales as the diameter squared times the length: as you make your drill x times smaller, the total energy stays roughly the same. Nano-drills can also push much harder and rotate much faster, so they will be better than current drills. Yet, I suspect drilling is still relatively tedious. Once you have found good deposits of what you need, you will want to drill into them, gather the elements you want, and run them through your fabber. Note that for much of EP nanotech oil is pretty ideal: carbon compounds can be turned into so much. So drill into the right spot, and start pumping out delicious oil... except that in many places this is hard. I would not be surprised if many gatecrashers would want to do a bit of fracking - nanosystems can do some of it by hand inside the rock (imagine branching diamond drill-roots), but I suspect the efficient method is to pump down water. Again, the gatecrasher team will want to have a good source of water.

Quote:
3) How are buildings built? For my part I can't see any reason why a Protean swarm couldn't build a building. It would need more resources than for an ecto, but honestly I think the complexity of a basic structure would be significantly less than an ecto. This raises the question: how long would it take a protean swarm to make a 20m by 20m by 10m box with a few rooms, basic lighting, mesh connections, etc? I'm thinking only the most basic utilities as things like CMs and such can be added later. I'm inclined to say it would take 24 hours, but I don't really know.

Nanoswarms are great for monitoring and influencing a volume, but they are pretty inefficient at building stuff. You will waste time and energy as the little motes ferry mass from point A to point B. Hierarchical assembly of objects is much more efficient: use small assemblers to make pieces that larger assemblers combine, and so on. One neat approach is to build a building fabber: you get a package out from the CM that you assemble into a free-standing framework. An extruder starts extruding wall-material, 3D printing the whole building. The wall material is presumably sand or other local stuff mixed with "cement" nanomachines: first you make buckets of those, then you mix the stuff with them, then you pour it into the extruder. Note that the cement can easily make mesh connections - in fact, it probably already is.

—

Sun, 2013-07-28 18:59

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:
Erenthia wrote:
1) What is the smallest possible size for a fusion reactor? As complex as fusion is, a reactor is still a collection of atoms and shouldn't require more than either a very powerful magnet or a laser (and some hydrogen). Given the increased efficiency of batteries, input power storage shouldn't take up too much room. Could scientists in EP get this down to the size of small house? A room? A briefcase? Obviously smaller reactors would end up producing less power, but a community that until recently was small enough to run off high-efficiency solar might not need the best fusion plant out there.
Hmm... Haha! Of course Robert Freitas has a reference somewhere in Nanomedicine: http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/6.3.7.2.htm He writes: "As for the D-T reaction, one calculation for laser compression of D-T fuel pellets indicated that the minimum pellet diameter to achieve (explosive) ignition is ~4.2 mm and requires a total incident energy of 11.2 megajoules 602 in a ~nanosecond pulse. Smaller pellets could not achieve energy breakeven.* It is estimated that the minimum dimension of a high-temperature fusion reactor may be on the order of centimeters.1023 But even if a ~10^11 joule/m^3 energy density can be obtained with diamondoid materials allowing the reactor core to be as small as (5 cm)^3, a 2.3-cm thick Pt shield for the 14.1 MeV neutrons only reduces the incident intensity by half. Thus the smallest medically safe D-T fusion reactor is probably at least ~1 meter in diameter (e.g., to reduce incident fast neutron intensity by ~10^6 upon exit)." "Medically safe" is probably also biomorph safe. I assume a one cubic meter reactor is enough for an ordinary gatecrashing group, although as always there are cooling considerations: it will at least produce as much heat as useful electricity, so you better have a stream to put your fractal cooling fins into. Reference 1023 is Norman Rostoker, Michl W. Binderbauer, Hendrik J. Monkhorst, "Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor," Science 278(21 November 1997):1419-1422. for those of you who want to really dig in.

0_0 Medically safe fusion reactors? Interesting. Also I imagine at least some of the heat is reclaimed with thermovoltaics, but since enough gatecrashing crews end up in extremely cold worlds, I imagine their fusion generators to have the option to connect to a molten salt system for storing heat. Even if you don't need the heat to keep from freezing to death, you can save it to convert to electricity slowly over time (hell you could even run an old fashioned steam generator if you were desperate). As I understand them (not very well!), fusion reactors need to operate in cycles so keeping the heat around to provide input power for the next cycle is probably a good idea. Thanks.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Quote:
2) How is mining done? I've done some research and apparently with highly sensitive accelerometers you can map subterranean density even today, so with EP tech I'm imagining a sort of topological map, but instead of showing elevation it shows density by color. Hundreds of drones with extremely sensitive sensors should be able to point to various mineral deposits. Once found, I was imagining a sort of root system built by a specialized fabber.
You can do some preliminary mapping this way, but you also need chemical information. Time for other probes to drill. Looking at http://pason.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=209&Itemid... shows something fun: the energy required to get a unit of rock out of the way scales as the inverse square of the hole diameter - small holes are less efficient. But the total volume drilled away scales as the diameter squared times the length: as you make your drill x times smaller, the total energy stays roughly the same. Nano-drills can also push much harder and rotate much faster, so they will be better than current drills. Yet, I suspect drilling is still relatively tedious. Once you have found good deposits of what you need, you will want to drill into them, gather the elements you want, and run them through your fabber. Note that for much of EP nanotech oil is pretty ideal: carbon compounds can be turned into so much. So drill into the right spot, and start pumping out delicious oil... except that in many places this is hard. I would not be surprised if many gatecrashers would want to do a bit of fracking - nanosystems can do some of it by hand inside the rock (imagine branching diamond drill-roots), but I suspect the efficient method is to pump down water. Again, the gatecrasher team will want to have a good source of water.

I've also been thinking about fabricating oil as a method of energy/mass storage. It has great energy density and since you're probably going to have lots of extra carbon and hydrogen from your digs you might as well store it as something useful (and you get to store energy and mass at the same time). Now an EP drill system can likely just build more drill as it sinks into the ground, but what about mimicking a plants root system? Is that going to be categorically less efficient than old-fashion drilling?

Arenamontanus wrote:

Quote:
3) How are buildings built? For my part I can't see any reason why a Protean swarm couldn't build a building. It would need more resources than for an ecto, but honestly I think the complexity of a basic structure would be significantly less than an ecto. This raises the question: how long would it take a protean swarm to make a 20m by 20m by 10m box with a few rooms, basic lighting, mesh connections, etc? I'm thinking only the most basic utilities as things like CMs and such can be added later. I'm inclined to say it would take 24 hours, but I don't really know.
Nanoswarms are great for monitoring and influencing a volume, but they are pretty inefficient at building stuff. You will waste time and energy as the little motes ferry mass from point A to point B. Hierarchical assembly of objects is much more efficient: use small assemblers to make pieces that larger assemblers combine, and so on. One neat approach is to build a building fabber: you get a package out from the CM that you assemble into a free-standing framework. An extruder starts extruding wall-material, 3D printing the whole building. The wall material is presumably sand or other local stuff mixed with "cement" nanomachines: first you make buckets of those, then you mix the stuff with them, then you pour it into the extruder. Note that the cement can easily make mesh connections - in fact, it probably already is.

It's true, and I've been trying to think of ways around it (mostly because, as my other post shows, I want to mimic the Zerg as much as possible). What I'm imagining is the creation of large numbers of beetle-sized bots that climb into position and interlock with each other in just the right place. I will definitely use building fabbers, though I'm imagining walls with robotic arms that self-assemble when dropped on site and then shift (like a flexbot) to create doors and windows wherever they're wanted. All this is starting to make me think that, unless the place you want to put the building is somewhat distant, you could probably get a 20x20x10m building up in about 12-18 hours. You pull the crasher truck up to the site, tell the AIs where they're supposed to go and the walls and ceilings crawl into place and merge.

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Mon, 2013-07-29 02:15

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:

Erenthia wrote:
Also I imagine at least some of the heat is reclaimed with thermovoltaics, but since enough gatecrashing crews end up in extremely cold worlds, I imagine their fusion generators to have the option to connect to a molten salt system for storing heat. Even if you don't need the heat to keep from freezing to death, you can save it to convert to electricity slowly over time (hell you could even run an old fashioned steam generator if you were desperate).

Sorry, but that doesn't work because of thermodynamics. You should certainly try squeezing out as much useful work as possible from the reactor heat, but in the end waste heat *cannot* do work - that is why it is waste heat. Thermocouples become less efficient as they heat up, so you need to let the heat go somewhere. Energy storage only works briefly. Looking at http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sensible-heat-storage-d_1217.html suggests that salt storage can maximally take up 621 MJ/kg. So when you run your one megawatt reactor (slightly less powerful than a standard 1.5 MW wind turbine) and assuming you have about 50% total efficiency, you will fill one kilogram of energy storage every 10 minutes. I hope you brought enough for the duration of the whole mission... (this is also why it is hard to thermally stealth spacecraft - it works briefly, but not long enough to matter)

Quote:
I've also been thinking about fabricating oil as a method of energy/mass storage. It has great energy density and since you're probably going to have lots of extra carbon and hydrogen from your digs you might as well store it as something useful (and you get to store energy and mass at the same time).

Oil/gasoline is great as energy storage (46 MJ/kg), but if you make it you need to get the carbon and hydrogen. Hydrogen is easy on an Earth-world, just electrolyze water (and in EP, oxygen-hydrogen energy storage is probably really competitive too), but you might have to look for carbon if there is no good biosphere (why mine underground if you can disassemble local flora and fauna?) Making oil means you have to pay the energy cost. If you have a fusion reactor or some other good energy source this is affordable.

Quote:
Now an EP drill system can likely just build more drill as it sinks into the ground, but what about mimicking a plants root system? Is that going to be categorically less efficient than old-fashion drilling?

I think a nano-drill is going to be rather efficient, likely like a root. Normal drills apply force and vibration to cause cracks that dissolve the material, a root applies some force but also does local microscale disassembly. Much less wasted energy, at least. Plus it can circumnavigate hindrances.

Quote:
All this is starting to make me think that, unless the place you want to put the building is somewhat distant, you could probably get a 20x20x10m building up in about 12-18 hours. You pull the crasher truck up to the site, tell the AIs where they're supposed to go and the walls and ceilings crawl into place and merge.

I agree. Then you have your barn-raising party.

—

Mon, 2013-07-29 14:03

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
Sorry, but that doesn't work because of thermodynamics. You should certainly try squeezing out as much useful work as possible from the reactor heat, but in the end waste heat *cannot* do work - that is why it is waste heat. Thermocouples become less efficient as they heat up, so you need to let the heat go somewhere. Energy storage only works briefly. Looking at http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sensible-heat-storage-d_1217.html suggests that salt storage can maximally take up 621 MJ/kg. So when you run your one megawatt reactor (slightly less powerful than a standard 1.5 MW wind turbine) and assuming you have about 50% total efficiency, you will fill one kilogram of energy storage every 10 minutes. I hope you brought enough for the duration of the whole mission... (this is also why it is hard to thermally stealth spacecraft - it works briefly, but not long enough to matter)

To what degree is "waste" subjective though? (I know very little about thermodynamics) For instance, if you're on a snow-ball world, then there's no need to take the electricity from the reactor to run heaters when you can pump the waste heat around and use it to heat your habitat. On a more temperate world, other applications of direct heat might be useful for other things as well. (I'm a little out of my depth at this point so I won't speculate on [i]what[/i], but what I'm getting at is that you could save up heat to be used AS heat later and somewhere else)

Arenamontanus wrote:
Oil/gasoline is great as energy storage (46 MJ/kg), but if you make it you need to get the carbon and hydrogen. Hydrogen is easy on an Earth-world, just electrolyze water (and in EP, oxygen-hydrogen energy storage is probably really competitive too), but you might have to look for carbon if there is no good biosphere (why mine underground if you can disassemble local flora and fauna?) Making oil means you have to pay the energy cost. If you have a fusion reactor or some other good energy source this is affordable.

This brings up a really good point. Dissembling local flora and fauna is probably the best way to go at first. At some point you're going to run into ecological issues though, and it seems like you'll need heavy elements eventually one way or another. I know you can do a lot with carbon, though I find myself thinking you'll need steel, aluminum and titanium (among others) for [i]something[/i]. Truth is, I actually don't know the limits of pure carbon as a building material but my suspicion is that iron would be pretty high on the list of elements you'd want sooner rather than later.

Arenamontanus wrote:
I think a nano-drill is going to be rather efficient, likely like a root. Normal drills apply force and vibration to cause cracks that dissolve the material, a root applies some force but also does local microscale disassembly. Much less wasted energy, at least. Plus it can circumnavigate hindrances.

This makes me think that largely nanite based root system could grow rather quickly. Nanodrills are interesting, but I'm having a hard time imagining them. Are you talking about drill bits too thin to see that dig out tiny core samples (potentially for miles) or more of a fractal drill bit? The former seems rather fragile, though potentially very useful for taking core samples, while the latter seems like it could be absurdly fast (though the math you've linked to earlier in this thread would seem to indicate that a fractal drill bit wouldn't be as fast as I'm imagining).

Arenamontanus wrote:
I agree. Then you have your barn-raising party.

Though in this case the bard raises itself why you do all the partying :-) I'm wondering about the expense involved in doing it this way. (Mostly because nanotech destroys modern intuition). But I can't help but think it would be easier to simply churn out more typical building materials coated in nanocolonies that bind to one another (so it's rather like building with legos) but the mobility systems save a LOT of work. The question is, just how much more expensive would they be? Edit: As a side note: this is starting to seem a LOT like minecraft (especially with all the popular mods)

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Mon, 2013-07-29 17:01

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:

Erenthia wrote:
To what degree is "waste" subjective though? (I know very little about thermodynamics) For instance, if you're on a snow-ball world, then there's no need to take the electricity from the reactor to run heaters when you can pump the waste heat around and use it to heat your habitat. On a more temperate world, other applications of direct heat might be useful for other things as well. (I'm a little out of my depth at this point so I won't speculate on [i]what[/i], but what I'm getting at is that you could save up heat to be used AS heat later and somewhere else)

Waste heat in thermodynamics is terribly objective, but also mildly tricky. Your example with the cold world is good: use the heat from the reactor to heat the habitat. You are not getting any work done from the heat, but it is *useful*. The important part is that since energy is conserved, eventually it has to go somewhere. Put a box around your base: eventually the energy produced by the reactor will leak out one way or another and reach an equilibrium with the outside environment. You might learn something from http://what-if.xkcd.com/35/

Quote:
This brings up a really good point. Dissembling local flora and fauna is probably the best way to go at first. At some point you're going to run into ecological issues though, and it seems like you'll need heavy elements eventually one way or another. I know you can do a lot with carbon, though I find myself thinking you'll need steel, aluminum and titanium (among others) for [i]something[/i]. Truth is, I actually don't know the limits of pure carbon as a building material but my suspicion is that iron would be pretty high on the list of elements you'd want sooner rather than later.

Carbon is pretty versatile. Diamond for windows, knives and beams - perhaps partially hollow or laminated into superstrong composites. Buckytube ropes and fabrics. Graphene as super-cardboard. Various complex nanomachines and compounds making computers, smart material surfaces and whatnot. I suspect that 80% of the things around us in a normal home could be made using nearly 99% carbon. Still, other elements are useful. Nanoassemblers need tooltips from various more exotic elements (hydrogen and germanium at the most extreme, see http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/MinToolset.pdf ) I can imagine important uses of fluorine, chlorine, nitrogen, oxygen, various metals and so on. It is tough making magnetic fields and superconductors without rare earths, you want to fluoridate your surfaces to make them really inert, and alumina is much less burnable than carbon compounds. Iron is a metal like any other; aluminium is likely more common, lighter and can substitute in a lot of places. Other common elements that might be good building materials are magnesium and titan.

Quote:
This makes me think that largely nanite based root system could grow rather quickly. Nanodrills are interesting, but I'm having a hard time imagining them. Are you talking about drill bits too thin to see that dig out tiny core samples (potentially for miles) or more of a fractal drill bit? The former seems rather fragile, though potentially very useful for taking core samples, while the latter seems like it could be absurdly fast (though the math you've linked to earlier in this thread would seem to indicate that a fractal drill bit wouldn't be as fast as I'm imagining).

I think very thin drill bits are not the way to go: they are fragile and it is hard to send energy to them. So the drill will rather be branching: you drill a central hole using a drill where you pump down energy to the end, which is the only rotating bit. From time to time the drill spouts new drill bits at the sides, sending out further roots. Most likely stay macroscopic, but some might just send snaking tendrils along cracks to pump out useful stuff.

Quote:
I'm wondering about the expense involved in doing it this way. (Mostly because nanotech destroys modern intuition). But I can't help but think it would be easier to simply churn out more typical building materials coated in nanocolonies that bind to one another (so it's rather like building with legos) but the mobility systems save a LOT of work. The question is, just how much more expensive would they be?

Good thinking. To make stuff out of random raw materials requires you to break all chemical bonds, move the atoms somewhere else, make new bonds. That is a *lot* of energy. If you instead make simple lego pieces as feedstock, the only cost is binding them together (and of course making them in the first place, which might have happened off-planet - plus, the devices for making them can be super-optimized for making legos rather than being a general assembler). I think bots are more important than nanoswarms for putting up your base camp.

Quote:
Edit: As a side note: this is starting to seem a LOT like minecraft (especially with all the popular mods)

With good enough nanotechnology, the world *is* minecraft.

—

Mon, 2013-07-29 19:19

#10

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
Waste heat in thermodynamics is terribly objective, but also mildly tricky. Your example with the cold world is good: use the heat from the reactor to heat the habitat. You are not getting any work done from the heat, but it is *useful*. The important part is that since energy is conserved, eventually it has to go somewhere. Put a box around your base: eventually the energy produced by the reactor will leak out one way or another and reach an equilibrium with the outside environment. You might learn something from http://what-if.xkcd.com/35/

Well I certainly learned not to let my daughter near my hair dryer! :-) But now I feel a bit more confused than I did before (which isn't a bad sign. It means I'm learning something). If we're being very strict about waste heat not accomplishing Work then it shouldn't be able to apply a force across a distance (I'm going on what I vaguely remember from high school: W=Fd) Yet if waste heat can be capture and transmitted through something like a molten salt system you could use it as a principal energy source for a light gas gun, firing satellites into orbit. (obviously it wouldn't be the sole energy source but theoretically you could get quite a lot of mileage - literally - out of applying waste heat in that way) Now perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but in this case you are performing work, though some portion of that heat will escape into the environment. I guess my question here is, how do you know when a particular quantity of heat has become waste heat and when you can still get work out of it? (We're pretty off topic with this though, so if you just want to point me to a book or something I won't mind)

Arenamontanus wrote:
Carbon is pretty versatile. Diamond for windows, knives and beams - perhaps partially hollow or laminated into superstrong composites. Buckytube ropes and fabrics. Graphene as super-cardboard. Various complex nanomachines and compounds making computers, smart material surfaces and whatnot. I suspect that 80% of the things around us in a normal home could be made using nearly 99% carbon. Still, other elements are useful. Nanoassemblers need tooltips from various more exotic elements (hydrogen and germanium at the most extreme, see http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/MinToolset.pdf ) I can imagine important uses of fluorine, chlorine, nitrogen, oxygen, various metals and so on. It is tough making magnetic fields and superconductors without rare earths, you want to fluoridate your surfaces to make them really inert, and alumina is much less burnable than carbon compounds. Iron is a metal like any other; aluminium is likely more common, lighter and can substitute in a lot of places. Other common elements that might be good building materials are magnesium and titan.

It looks very much like deep mining is not going to be terribly important in an Earth-like biosphere. But even a root-based system could wreak ecological devastation if it over uses certain elements. That said, you're probably already engaging in slash-and-burn if you're looking at building a colony, but I suppose it's not 100% necessary. You might be able to develop some kind of equilibrium with the surrounding ecology, but you're certainly going to be dramatically impacting it even if you try to live like Space Druids. Not I have to decide where my colonists drew the line on ecological impact (and since they were hyper-corp funded they probably didn't have much chance to be Green, even if they wanted to)

Arenamontanus wrote:
I think very thin drill bits are not the way to go: they are fragile and it is hard to send energy to them. So the drill will rather be branching: you drill a central hole using a drill where you pump down energy to the end, which is the only rotating bit. From time to time the drill spouts new drill bits at the sides, sending out further roots. Most likely stay macroscopic, but some might just send snaking tendrils along cracks to pump out useful stuff.

I was thinking the same about very thin drill bits, but I wasn't sure. As I said before, nanotech doesn't always jive with human intuition. You're nanodrill idea sounds very similar to my root-system concept. Glad to see I was on the right track. These can double as a means of providing resistance to high winds (that, along with not building in square shapes to begin with).

Arenamontanus wrote:
Good thinking. To make stuff out of random raw materials requires you to break all chemical bonds, move the atoms somewhere else, make new bonds. That is a *lot* of energy. If you instead make simple lego pieces as feedstock, the only cost is binding them together (and of course making them in the first place, which might have happened off-planet - plus, the devices for making them can be super-optimized for making legos rather than being a general assembler). I think bots are more important than nanoswarms for putting up your base camp.

Agreed. That also means that some specialization is always going to be useful. Just having your Industrial CM done doesn't mean you're finished. I also like the image of cutting materials with a light-pen instead of a saw (you draw a line and the material separates at that place). Though to be honest most design is probably done in simulspace before the raw materials are even printed. This means we now have three very distinct methods of construction. The slow and inefficient method of growing a building with nanotech allows you to build buildings in places you can't even necessarily reach. There's the faster and most efficient method of assembling via lego-bricks that magically stick together, done under typical circumstances. And finally the very expensive but very fast way where the building materials ARE the bots. This is more likely to be done in a military situation or after a disaster. You've helped me flesh this out quite a bit. Thanks.

Arenamontanus wrote:
With good enough nanotechnology, the world *is* minecraft.

I kinda wish this was taken more into account in the setting. But then again if it [i]was[/i] it would probably take away from the more typical RPG aspects. I remember a fellow D&D player telling me if he saw The Stronghold Builder's Guide at his game table one more time he'd throw it in his fireplace. Still, some WoD style traits wouldn't be uncalled for. I know WoD operates at a lower level of granularity than is typical for EP, but with traits like Spaceship, Patron and Minion/Partner already in play, it wouldn't be too unprecedented. One character I came up with (if I ever get the chance to actually [i]play[/i] rather than DM) was an alpha fork of a Brinker who had himself as his Patron. The homebody version of himself was busy building up his home hab, currying Rep and designing new toys, while his (somewhat psychosurgically modified) offshoot handled things in person that absolutely needed the face-to-face approach.

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Tue, 2013-07-30 04:12

#11

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:But now I feel

Erenthia wrote:
But now I feel a bit more confused than I did before (which isn't a bad sign. It means I'm learning something). If we're being very strict about waste heat not accomplishing Work then it shouldn't be able to apply a force across a distance (I'm going on what I vaguely remember from high school: W=Fd) Yet if waste heat can be capture and transmitted through something like a molten salt system you could use it as a principal energy source for a light gas gun, firing satellites into orbit. (obviously it wouldn't be the sole energy source but theoretically you could get quite a lot of mileage - literally - out of applying waste heat in that way) Now perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but in this case you are performing work, though some portion of that heat will escape into the environment.

Warning: small physics lecture. OK, we are on the right track here. There is a difference between heat (which in this discussion is the same thing as energy - indestructible, can only get shuffled around, tends to spread out) and temperature. Heat moves from high temperatures to low temperatures. (What temperature really *is*, is complicated) Now, when you have a temperature difference you can use that heat flow to do useful work. There is a fundamental limit to how efficient this can be (Carnot efficiency); the bigger the temperature difference, the better. The amount of energy you can use for this work depends on how much heat you have. In the fusion reactor example you get heat at a very high temperature inside, and you can use this to do work. But the heat cannot be destroyed, so it will have to spread out as low-temperature energy somewhere. You might let it warm your habitat or just get rid of it by having a cooling system in a cold outside location (in the later case you might get a bit of a boost in efficiency, since the temperature difference is slightly higher). You cannot turn all the heat into work because of Carnot efficiency, so some things will run hot or warm. Everywhere there is a temperature difference you can try to extract work, but the overall efficiency will be lower since the temperature differences are smaller. You could view the habitat as a big, complicated heat engine around the reactor, and the only thing that matters is the energy flow from the reactor to the big environment - Peliter elements, heat exchangers, indoor heating, anything else is just complications where the total work is bounded by the total temperature difference. This is why you cannot power anything from just cosmic background radiation: there is an awesome amount of heat out there, but it has all (nearly) exactly the same temperature. No temperature difference = no energy flow, and no work. And yes, it is possible to power things by using a very cold object, allowing your ambient heat to flow into it. But the efficiency is still just the temperature difference. Good power sources have huge temperature differences (high efficiency), but sometimes it makes sense to extract fairly weak energy sources if they are cheap, like how some cities use the mild temperature difference between sewage water and the environment. Here there is a lot of low-temperature heat that can be turned into smaller amounts of high-temperature heat using heat-pumps - inefficient, and mostly used for local indoor heating, but cheap. As I mentioned temperature is a bit tricky to really explain. It is really a measure of how the entropy (disorder) of a system grows with its heat energy. And in a hydroelectric dam energy gets converted *apparently* without involving heat: the same reasoning as for heat engines applies, but with new terminology.

Quote:
I guess my question here is, how do you know when a particular quantity of heat has become waste heat and when you can still get work out of it? (We're pretty off topic with this though, so if you just want to point me to a book or something I won't mind)

Something is waste heat when it has reached the same temperature as the outside big system. In the case of the gatecrasher base, it means the ambient temperature in the environment around it. In space, when it is 3 Kelvins (the cosmic background radiation). Of course, long before that it is pretty useless.

Quote:
Quote:
I think bots are more important than nanoswarms for putting up your base camp.
Agreed. That also means that some specialization is always going to be useful. Just having your Industrial CM done doesn't mean you're finished. I also like the image of cutting materials with a light-pen instead of a saw (you draw a line and the material separates at that place). Though to be honest most design is probably done in simulspace before the raw materials are even printed. This means we now have three very distinct methods of construction. The slow and inefficient method of growing a building with nanotech allows you to build buildings in places you can't even necessarily reach. There's the faster and most efficient method of assembling via lego-bricks that magically stick together, done under typical circumstances. And finally the very expensive but very fast way where the building materials ARE the bots. This is more likely to be done in a military situation or after a disaster.

Sounds good. Some smart materials might be bot-like: not really fully functional bots, but able to flex and move a bit, when controlled by a builder AI. A lot of construction of a base is likely IKEA-style assembly: the CM gives you flat packs of stuff, full of helpful AR instruction. Put section A next to section B, signal to them to bond. Add widget X to the holes in gadget Upsilon. Brick Lamed complains that it should not be on top of brick Sha...

—

Fri, 2013-08-02 22:56

#12

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
Warning: small physics lecture.

Wherein, I hijack my own thread. This sounds very much like potential energy due to height, in an abstract sense. It comes to mind especially since heat is often modeled as a fluid if I understand correctly. So if you took water and raised it to some height you could exploit some of its energy as it traveled back down. If you take temperature to be equivalent to "height" and the total heat energy to be (based on) the mass of the water, you would obviously not be able to get any more energy out of the water after it hit ground level. This makes me wonder why [i]anyone[/i] believes we can tap vacuum energy, since it is the definition of "ground level" in this abstraction. Unless we're living in a false vacuum, in which case wouldn't attempts at tapping zero-point energy run the risk of "popping the bubble" so to speak? (If so, would it be conceivable that such an effect would only be "local" - as in maybe only a galactic cluster and not the whole shebang?) If any case, it sounds like fusion reactors have the opportunity to be [i]very[/i] efficient, and a larger one more so than a smaller one. Especially if most of the mass of a large reactor was heat storage and you ran it in very short cycles. (like a 5% up time duty cycle) All this talk of widespread construction and thermodynamics has me thinking of a video I watched long enough ago to have forgotten the source. (It may have been a TED talk) In this video the speaker talked about the energy input to energy output ratio of various civilizations. He put it in terms of "how many calories do you get back for every calorie you expend on getting food?" with differences between 1.1 and 1.2 being quite dramatic. This makes me think it's possible to calculate a civilization equivalence based on energy control (like the Kardeshev scale, but scaleable and relevant all the way down to hunter-gatherer tribes). If we had such a metric, we could calculate how many transhumans you'd need to generate the equivalent of the Roman Empire in 1 year (given access to whatever EP tech they wanted but starting largely from scratch). I'm guessing the answer is startlingly low (especially if you allow for "reproduction" through AGI programming and/or forking).

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Sat, 2013-08-03 05:07

#13

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:Arenamontanus

Erenthia wrote:
Arenamontanus wrote:
Warning: small physics lecture.
Wherein, I hijack my own thread.

Which gives me an interesting brief idea for an adventure: what happens when the captain of a ship hijacks it? And why? Hmm... maybe shades of The Hunt for Red October... in space... with antimatter!

Quote:
This sounds very much like potential energy due to height, in an abstract sense. It comes to mind especially since heat is often modeled as a fluid if I understand correctly. So if you took water and raised it to some height you could exploit some of its energy as it traveled back down. If you take temperature to be equivalent to "height" and the total heat energy to be (based on) the mass of the water, you would obviously not be able to get any more energy out of the water after it hit ground level.

That is a good analogy. The minor difference is that there is an absolute zero level to temperature, while water can be as high or low as we want. Only differences matter in potential energy (and electrical potential), but temperature is slightly different.

Quote:
This makes me wonder why [i]anyone[/i] believes we can tap vacuum energy, since it is the definition of "ground level" in this abstraction. Unless we're living in a false vacuum, in which case wouldn't attempts at tapping zero-point energy run the risk of "popping the bubble" so to speak? (If so, would it be conceivable that such an effect would only be "local" - as in maybe only a galactic cluster and not the whole shebang?)

Yes, I have always wondered why people go on about it. I think some people think vacuum energy could be converted into other energy forms and they have lower "potential energy", but if this were true (no science I know backs it up) I definitely think something like vaccuum decay could happen.

Quote:
If any case, it sounds like fusion reactors have the opportunity to be [i]very[/i] efficient, and a larger one more so than a smaller one. Especially if most of the mass of a large reactor was heat storage and you ran it in very short cycles. (like a 5% up time duty cycle)

Yes, there are big economies of scale here. The nanomedicine page looked a lot at the problem of just capturing the energetic particles: it is hard on the nanoscale, but with enough shielding or coolant it is of course easy. And the hotter the core is, the more efficient.

Quote:
All this talk of widespread construction and thermodynamics has me thinking of a video I watched long enough ago to have forgotten the source. (It may have been a TED talk) In this video the speaker talked about the energy input to energy output ratio of various civilizations. He put it in terms of "how many calories do you get back for every calorie you expend on getting food?" with differences between 1.1 and 1.2 being quite dramatic. This makes me think it's possible to calculate a civilization equivalence based on energy control (like the Kardeshev scale, but scaleable and relevant all the way down to hunter-gatherer tribes). If we had such a metric, we could calculate how many transhumans you'd need to generate the equivalent of the Roman Empire in 1 year (given access to whatever EP tech they wanted but starting largely from scratch). I'm guessing the answer is startlingly low (especially if you allow for "reproduction" through AGI programming and/or forking).

Sounds cool. I am reminded of Eric Chaisson's ideas about the free energy rate density: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/reprints/EnergyRateDensity_I_FIN... and Robert Aunger's similar thoughts: http://usm.maine.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Collaborative%20of%20Glob... See also http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-articles-science-... for at least a lot of cool and data rich graphs.

—

Sat, 2013-08-03 15:36

#14

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
Which gives me an interesting brief idea for an adventure: what happens when the captain of a ship hijacks it? And why? Hmm... maybe shades of The Hunt for Red October... in space... with antimatter!

That is a story begging to be told. There's too many ways to tell it to nail them all down, but the first one that comes to mind is the Jovians getting ahold of a TITAN artifact that lets them build a ship that can completely outclass anything else in the system, and now they are gearing up for a jihad against transhumanity (starting with TITAN of course). The commander however, is not ready to see so many people die in the name of "purity"

Arenamontanus wrote:
That is a good analogy. The minor difference is that there is an absolute zero level to temperature, while water can be as high or low as we want. Only differences matter in potential energy (and electrical potential), but temperature is slightly different.

Well gravity wells do also have an absolute bottom if I understand correctly, but it's an analogy, it's not meant to be perfect. Thinking of energy as a fluid has given me other ideas as well (see below)

Arenamontanus wrote:
Yes, I have always wondered why people go on about it. I think some people think vacuum energy could be converted into other energy forms and they have lower "potential energy", but if this were true (no science I know backs it up) I definitely think something like vaccuum decay could happen.

Now I am imagining vacuum energy as a fluid with infinite surface tension. If this is a valid analogy then it seems possible to give the surface a good smack and create waves that could potentially be ridden, which sounds enough like Alcubierre drive that it might actually be the same thing. It also makes me think that even though you probably can't [i]extract[/i] vacuum energy, the ZPMs of Stargate SG1 might not be too far off as a type of enormous battery, although you'd need to be able to manipulate gravity to such an extent that you could create an area of space to control your fabricated false vacuum. This is all obscenely speculative but it makes for some great TITAN artifact ideas. (And Promethean boons now that I think about it) This also makes me wonder, is there a relationship between the concept of "the fabric of space" and vacuum energy? Because it sounds an awful lot like they are either very closely connected or the same thing entirely. Masses are boats in the fluid the change the structure of the sea just by sitting in them (so gravitational potential energy is essentially a function of vacuum energy - which actually everything probably is). Black holes would then have so little buoyancy that they actually fall into the sea of vacuum energy creating a whirlpool that even light can't escape from - hmm, I think I'm starting to get out of my depth here so before I crazy with the analogies, I'll just stop and ask if I'm even remotely on the right track.

Arenamontanus wrote:
Sounds cool. I am reminded of Eric Chaisson's ideas about the free energy rate density: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/reprints/EnergyRateDensity_I_FIN... and Robert Aunger's similar thoughts: http://usm.maine.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Collaborative%20of%20Glob... See also http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-articles-science-... for at least a lot of cool and data rich graphs.

I took a look at the first one, but I'll be honest - I'm having a very difficult time understanding it. The way scientific articles are written I always feel like they're building up to saying something but never quite saying it which leaves me feeling like I somehow missed the point entirely. I'll keep at it.

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.

Mon, 2013-08-05 09:03

#15

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Erenthia wrote:Arenamontanus

Erenthia wrote:
Arenamontanus wrote:
Which gives me an interesting brief idea for an adventure: what happens when the captain of a ship hijacks it? And why? Hmm... maybe shades of The Hunt for Red October... in space... with antimatter!
That is a story begging to be told. There's too many ways to tell it to nail them all down, but the first one that comes to mind is the Jovians getting ahold of a TITAN artifact that lets them build a ship that can completely outclass anything else in the system, and now they are gearing up for a jihad against transhumanity (starting with TITAN of course). The commander however, is not ready to see so many people die in the name of "purity"

This could be a follow up to my adventure Indigo Latitude, if certain things happen (when I ran it, one jovian did defect with a super-ship, but he just became a space pirate). But one can run this basic plot using most factions - a Titanian captain who starts to realize what a disaster it will be if the new stardrive is opensourced, a Consortium contractor fleeing inner system oppression... even a Factor colony defecting from the lattice because of the information it learned from the Europan lifeforms.

Quote:
Now I am imagining vacuum energy as a fluid with infinite surface tension. If this is a valid analogy then it seems possible to give the surface a good smack and create waves that could potentially be ridden, which sounds enough like Alcubierre drive that it might actually be the same thing. It also makes me think that even though you probably can't [i]extract[/i] vacuum energy, the ZPMs of Stargate SG1 might not be too far off as a type of enormous battery, although you'd need to be able to manipulate gravity to such an extent that you could create an area of space to control your fabricated false vacuum. This is all obscenely speculative but it makes for some great TITAN artifact ideas. (And Promethean boons now that I think about it)

It works as a handwavey explanation given by the techies. "OK, you don't know Wolfram-Sheffield theory. Quantum field theory? Not even that... quantum mechanics? Lagrangian mechanics? No... well, think of vacuum energy as a fluid, and this machine as something that makes waves in it..."

Quote:
This also makes me wonder, is there a relationship between the concept of "the fabric of space" and vacuum energy? Because it sounds an awful lot like they are either very closely connected or the same thing entirely.

Now you are getting close to interesting questions. Spacetime (the "fabric" on which all the fields and other physics plays out) has properties of its own - the most obvious is that heavy masses curves it, with a particular proportionality constant which determines how strong gravity is. But there is another constant, the cosmological constant, which is tells how much spacetime wants to "roll up" by its own. If spacetime is a fabric, this would be the tendency not to lie flat. Quantum field theories have tried to explain this constant based on fields acting as evenly distributed virtual mass that causes this tendency. Unfortunately all their answers tend to be huge or super-huge, not really really tiny as the constant actually seems to be. Big unsolved mystery. If there were a way of messing with the cosmological constant locally, you could probably do awesome and weird things with spacetime. It might work best for large volumes rather than small, so instead of the gravity drive for your ship this might be something to hide a solar system - or inflate it into a baby universe.

Quote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
Sounds cool. I am reminded of Eric Chaisson's ideas about the free energy rate density...
I took a look at the first one, but I'll be honest - I'm having a very difficult time understanding it. The way scientific articles are written I always feel like they're building up to saying something but never quite saying it which leaves me feeling like I somehow missed the point entirely. I'll keep at it.

There is a certain style, and you eventually learn to read it (or fake it) when you are ready for tenure or so. Of course, some articles are also just badly written. A lot of them, actually. The above papers are all trying to find a link between what civilizations do and thermodynamics. Very interesting, very speculative. Not at all as solid as quantum field theory (which after all gives good predictions, no matter how crazy it is), not to mention thermodynamics (which is super-solid: we have been trying to fool it for centuries, only to see how strict it is). So while we can trust that supercivilizations likely obey the laws of thermodynamics, whether we can predict something about what they do is another matter (I am even working on a paper about that, loads of EP relevant ideas for later).

—

Tue, 2013-08-06 00:30

#16

Erenthia

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
It works as a handwavey explanation given by the techies. "OK, you don't know Wolfram-Sheffield theory. Quantum field theory? Not even that... quantum mechanics? Lagrangian mechanics? No... well, think of vacuum energy as a fluid, and this machine as something that makes waves in it..."

And here I was thinking I was on to something. Wikipedia actually has a host of information but it's not exactly well organized, so my attempts at becoming a cyber-autodidact have met with limited success. I'd been getting a lot of mileage out of the fluid analogy, but as you pointed out elsewhere, the fabric of space and vacuum energy are not the same thing and Alcubierre drives manipulate the one and not the other. Still a quick google search tells me that at least some people are theorizing their might be a relationship between inertia and vacuum energy which has me holding on (perhaps more tightly than I should) to the fluid model. For instance, while you probably can't extract work from vacuum energy, if you could move it around (which does seem to happen in the Casimir Effect) and "supercavitate" through it, you might be able to achieve extremely high G accelerations without having to worry about inertial effects. Though I'm starting to worry that taking this fluid analogy too far will lead me astray.

Arenamontanus wrote:
Now you are getting close to interesting questions. Spacetime (the "fabric" on which all the fields and other physics plays out) has properties of its own - the most obvious is that heavy masses curves it, with a particular proportionality constant which determines how strong gravity is. But there is another constant, the cosmological constant, which is tells how much spacetime wants to "roll up" by its own. If spacetime is a fabric, this would be the tendency not to lie flat. Quantum field theories have tried to explain this constant based on fields acting as evenly distributed virtual mass that causes this tendency. Unfortunately all their answers tend to be huge or super-huge, not really really tiny as the constant actually seems to be. Big unsolved mystery.

A curved spacetime containing an energy that exists a sort of "floor"...gah now I'm seeing a shallow bowl filled with water. My subconscious has really gotten stuck on this fluid analogy. I'm also curious how we know vacuum energy is evenly distributed. We probably don't know of anything that could constrain it, though actually now that I think about it, if the universe is expanding the density of vacuum energy might be lowering over time, so extremely old black holes might have a higher internal density for vacuum energy than the outside universe. I wonder if that differential influences their evaporation at all (assuming my guess is correct about vacuum energy density decreasing over very long time periods)

Arenamontanus wrote:
If there were a way of messing with the cosmological constant locally, you could probably do awesome and weird things with spacetime. It might work best for large volumes rather than small, so instead of the gravity drive for your ship this might be something to hide a solar system - or inflate it into a baby universe.

This is the biggest reason I want to understand physics. I'd like to be able to answer questions like, "What if we changed this one law in a certain way in a local area, what would a person be able to accomplish?"

Arenamontanus wrote:
There is a certain style, and you eventually learn to read it (or fake it) when you are ready for tenure or so. Of course, some articles are also just badly written. A lot of them, actually. The above papers are all trying to find a link between what civilizations do and thermodynamics. Very interesting, very speculative. Not at all as solid as quantum field theory (which after all gives good predictions, no matter how crazy it is), not to mention thermodynamics (which is super-solid: we have been trying to fool it for centuries, only to see how strict it is). So while we can trust that supercivilizations likely obey the laws of thermodynamics, whether we can predict something about what they do is another matter (I am even working on a paper about that, loads of EP relevant ideas for later).

Unfortunately I've gotten rather accustomed to RPG manuals where I know exactly what I can skip and what will give me the lego blocks I'm looking for, to create whatever monstrosity is currently overflowing from my imagination. I think that's made me rather lazy. Though when you realize that Engineers are just Power Gamers for the laws of physics, it puts a lot of things in perspective.

—

The end really is coming. What comes after that is anyone's guess.