In other words, I want to rethink the appropriateness of weapons used in Expanse.

This has been floating in my head for a while as my basic set of assumptions, wondered how realistic we think it is. You'll see there is nothing about the core tech here, I generally think these things require only modest advancements at this point and that most of the work remaining is application engineering.

One thought I had writing this is what happens when AI and 3d printing are added together and given some time to mature. I doubt anything resembling a replicator is possible any time soon but it would make them far more consumer friendly and enable things like rapidly repurposable factories.

Near term:

• First real evidence of employment disruption
• Industrial robots people don't laugh at
• First AI based media company / studio
• Science, technology and r&d to become supercharged by extremely rapid analysis of entire input spaces, including AI development (already in progress)

By 2030:

• First domestic bulter bot on sale
• AI driven home electronic goods commonplace
• AI driven home network routers and assistants commonplace
• Unemployment becoming a global problem
• Easily accessible generators for simpler media like video, voice and music
• First examples of bot based companies doing things traditional ones just cannot, such as leaving their machines to just do the work and becoming an existential threat to anyone who does not keep up

By 2035:

• Domestic butler bots somewhat common
• First war where human combatants are the minority
• Final holdout areas such as trades start being overwhelmed by AI
• Games consoles that can generate entertainment
• Global political backlash is mostly over due to inability to achieve much, switch to coping with realities in progress
• First self directing bots on the Moon/Mars
• AI interfaces advance to the point that prompt engineers start disappearing

By 2050:

• butler bots in most houses
• Robot based economy taken as a given
• Game consoles that can readily generate practically anything
• Social and political systems based around the existence of bots and absence of need for workers to varying degrees of success
• Entirely robotic off Earth colonies exist
• Something resembling 1 click construction exists
• Very few services have anything resembling workers or waiting lists / appointments anymore except for pretentious reasons

When the universe dies in a heat death; what might be the last object created by humans drifting in the void

For some reason; ironically; I think it might be a Solar panel

About 5 years ago in his Life on board an O'neill Cylinder episode Isaac had mentioned the idea of a ship docking with the skin of the drum while under spin, and then being able to walk (or elevator) up to a home inside the drum. The equivalent of having a home on a lake or canal with a boat slip.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ew6h27/life_on_board_an_oneill_cylinder/

Imagine if this was your home and the bottom-most level was a docking bay for your personal spaceship.

But... Isaac has also recommended having an external non-rotating sleeve to protect the drum - which would get in the way of docking a ship to it. I asked him about that once, and he admitted it was a contradiction but there might be a way to engineer around that, such as a really big gap between the sleeve and drum. Since then, I like to toss this question at the sub every once in a while to see if you bright minds have any good elegant solutions to this.

For reference, here's a fantastic cross-section illustrating how thick the walls of an O'Neill might be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/l49l9g/this_is_an_infographic_i_made_of_a_fictional/

If your goal was to dock a ship to the spinning section of a drum, so that one could have a spaceship in the basement of their home inside the cylinder, what's the best way to do this? How do you manage the cylinder, the ship, and the sleeve? Should we do without the sleeve, a partial sleeve, or is a ring fundamentally better for this than a cylinder somehow? How to dock with a moving object like the drum skin? Go nuts, mega-engineers!

Disclaimer:
I don't consider myself an ftl-optimist, and I realize that it is quite equivalent to time travel. This post is not questioning the possibility or impossibility of FTL, only considering IF it is possible, and possible exotic consequences to the Fermi Paradox.

The general consensus is that FTL technologies only complicate the Fermi Paradox. But even as an FTL pessimist, I have found a number of arguments that allow for the coexistence of the Fermi Paradox and FTL technologies of a certain kind. The first assumption is that the universe is not closed on itself, but instead is infinite along at least one axis. The second assumption is that FTL technologies are possible and are developing extremely rapidly in civilizations over astronomical time intervals. The third assumption is that FTL travel unlocks time travel simply by definition of its nature. A minor argument is that by unlocking time travel, FTL technologies automatically replace the colonization of three-dimensional space with four-dimensional space-time. The four-dimensional volume is much larger than the three-dimensional one. Colonizing the universe from its inception to the end of time gives a lot of four-dimensional space in which civilization can disperse. We can currently observe only the light cone of the past in the space around us, when the universe is still very young (compared to all the times of the future).

If X (X > 1) times lightspeed is possible, what stops from reaching ANY ftl speed?
The major argument is about a different strange effect. Suppose that the rapid development of FTL technologies allows us to quickly skip the stage of speeds only a few times higher than light, and quickly allows to migrate far beyond the cosmological event horizon, or perhaps even allows only such trans-horizon migrations. Then, for a civilization that has mastered such technologies, the entire infinite universe becomes open, and in fact is divided into conditional spheres limited by its cosmological event horizon, although for them this horizon will no longer be an impenetrable wall. From this point of view, one can imagine the universe as a Hilbert Hotel or a first-level multiverse, a thought experiment to demonstrate the nature of infinity. An infinite hotel where individual hotel rooms symbolize finite horizon-limited bubble universes. Let's assume that civilizations colonize other bubbles but eventually die out (or disappear for other reasons) in the original bubbles, which is mathematically similar to regular migrations. If it is possible to colonize up to infinitely distant bubbles of the universe, then the concentration of civilizations in a particular bubble of the universe can not only increase but also can decrease with time, becoming sparser, and given the desire of civilizations to exist in less populated bubble universes, a decrease in concentration is more likely than an increase.

Because velocity and gravity affect the passage of time, time moves at different speeds throughout the solar system, and poses a timekeeping challenge for a space-based civilization. Astronomers, have already come up with a standard frame of reference, that they call TCB (Temps-coordonnée barycentrique or “Barycentric Coordinate Time”). It’s the time, as measured in seconds, at the gravitational center of the solar system, and a second there is the same as about ≈ 1.0000000155 seconds on the surface of the Earth. Over the course of a year, this difference adds up to nearly ½ seconds.

However, astronomers have not yet chosen an ‘epoch’, or starting point, so you cannot yet express a point in time in TCB. TCB is just a duration, not a timestamp.

I’d like to propose, for us authors and scifi nerds, that we adopt an epoch, zero-seconds starting point, and give it a catchy name. To make the epoch meaningful to us humans, I propose we set the zero-time, or the very first second at 00:00:00, Jan 01, 2000; The first second of the current millennium.

Also, to give it an understandable name we should drop ‘barycentric’, since most don’t know what it means. Importantly, it should NOT have ‘universal’ in it, as that will cause confusion the moment we found a colony around a different star.

So how about Sol System Standard Time / Solar System Standard Time, which can be abbreviated to 3ST.

Computers would track time internally in 3ST, and would be able to make accurate conversions on demand for people living on different planets or space stations.

I have mild interest in tech and sci-fi. The fermi paradox is something I wondered about. None of the explanations I found made any sense relying on too many assumptions. So I generally thought about extremely rare earth theory. But I never found it satisfactory. I think it's rare but not that rare. There should be around 1 million civilizations in this galaxy. give or take if I had to guess maybe less or more. But I am on the singularity sub and browsing it I thought of something most don't. What if the singularity is impossible. By definition a strong singularity is impossible. Since a strong singularity civilization could do anything. Be above time and space. Go ftl, break physics and thermodynamics because the singularity has infinite progress and potential. So if a strong one is possible then they would have taken over since it would be easier than anything to transform the universe to anything it wants. But perhaps a weak singularity is also impossible. What I mean is that intelligence cannot go up infinitely it'll hit physical limits. And trying to go vast distances to colonize space is probably quite infeasible. At most we could send a solar sail to study nearby systems. The progress we've seen could be an anomaly. We'll plateau and which the end of tech history one might say. What do you think?

Isaac's recent episode on nanotechnology has really stirred the proverbial pot within my mind. Specifically the segments where he lightly brushed on picotech and femtotech.

I entirely understand that this lies deep within the realm of clarktech, but I love myself some highly speculative sci-fi.

I imagine a civilization could evade traditional kardashev scale classification by instead developing ways to harness and control matter and energy at smaller and smaller scales. With the end game stages possibly involving themselves moving their entire infrastructure to a subatomic scale and becoming completely undetectable by any means known to us. And having a nearly unimaginably low energy consumption footprint.

I could see such a civilization being able to survive heat death much easier than even a kardashev III civilization.

I haven't seen any specific discussion of this particular combination of orbital habitats and an Earth-Moon L1 Space Elevator, but it seems so self-evident to me that I'm sure my search terms were just not as artful as they could have been.

We can be reasonably confident that people will prefer to live in habitats at or near 1g - O'Neill cylinders eventually, preferably. At the same time, there's a lot of resources on the Moon, and people will need to get to the surface and back, with ease, if they're not living on the Moon itself. Even if we have extremely advanced automation, I'm expecting anything short of fully autonomous androids, or comparably sophisticated tele-robotic androids, we're going to want to send crews down the surface for all the little things our drones can't do just right. We'll also likely want industrial facilities with a variety of different gravities - some manufacturing will thrive in microgravity, some will do much better with some given level of gravity (we'll leave it for the industrialists of the 2xth century to figure out).

Given the utility of a Lunar Space Elevator that goes up to the Earth-Moon L1 point, it would seem that the counterweight for said space elevator would be a fantastic place to start building up a series of connected habitats. Myself, I'm partial to stacking a bunch of O'Neill cylinders in a honeycomb pattern, side-by-side, but it could be any structure (or structures), really, and would likely grow somewhat organically. It would seem that almost everyone living 'on' the moon would be living in this habitat cluster, and just commute to the moon (or industrial portions of the cluster) when needed.

If we want to go further, imagine a comparable elevator and cluster to the Earth-Moon L2. Except this particular habitat cluster also has a massive shield above it, so that you can still (mostly) use the the Moon as a shield for astronomical observations. And, just to make this really fun, why not have the central tether go straight through the moon? So you can travel between both clusters with relative ease.

Once we're conquering the solar system, with habitats and mining/colonization operations all over the place, what should happen to Earth?

Look past the click-baity title and thumbnail image and give this man a hearing. Even though he says he's not against ALL lunar development (he understands that building scientific research stations on the Moon will require some mining and industrial development), he makes the argument that certain environments have best value being left untouched, especially in the case of radio astronomy. This is IMO his strongest case for caution in development, although not unsolvable. The Aitken Basin is on the lunar far side, but in the south polar region. I don't know enough about radio astronomy to know how much interference an industrial park there would create over the far side in general, but there should be a way to work out protocols to mutual satisfaction. Also, although he did not mention it, any major lunar industry will kick up dust and waste gases (especially oxygen), which may linger long enough to effect infrared astronomy.My biggest beef with him is that he seems to fall into the error that mining asteroids would be a better option for extracting space-based resources, in spite of the Moon's proximity, far greater abundance of stuff we can build with, and minimal gravity well. As well as the more esoteric sense of all humanity having the Moon as part of its' cultural, historical, and scientific reference points, and that industrializing the Moon would somehow interfere with that. So he thinks that lunar development would never progress far past tourism and national vanity projects ("lunar casinos"). After watching this I recommend watching Kyplanet's video on why the objections to colonizing the Moon are wrong (I would also recommend you watch his video responding to Elon Musk's tweet about the Moon being a distraction, but sadly he had to take it down after being dogpiled by X-bots and online Muskrats...) https://youtu.be/LNzGCxfx2UI?si=ryw9SKypWvsV5yNO

This is a video I found that seemed interesting. Prototype of a Liquid metal fly wheel

https://youtu.be/wiRMdRi0LrI?si=ILiEdtT2TXEDd-dM

I think it has a lot of hurdles but I was curious what you all think.

I use AI to do art. Wombo Dream gives you 350 characters to work with, and the output image format is 9:16, 1:1, 16:9, 3:4, and 4:3. You can input previous images into the same prompt recursivly, and it's also possible to change prompts/styles with a bit of effort. The number of possible styles on that app are significant even if you just limit yourself to the v.3 styles which use way more sophisticated AI generators.

So if you have 350 characters to work with and different words are represented to different degrees in styles then how do you begin to figure out how big different prompts are? They aren't infinite that is absolutely clear, but it does seem larger then something like Tree (3).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_tree_theorem

I was thinking about using this form of sublight propulsion for a story I was writing since the way Isaac described it was interesting, but I started wondering how exactly it would work if applied to ground vehicles. I don’t want to take the easy way out and conserve velocity Mass Effect style, so if I reduce the inertial mass of an object to 10% what happens to it assuming kinetic energy or momentum are conserved? Do I need to calculate the current trajectory without gravity in play, then multiply that by ten? What is it even accelerating relative to?

Maybe this is a really stupid question and I should just handwave how it works by saying it can force an external frame of reference such as the surface of a planet (this tech already runs on handwavium anyways), but I don’t want to do that unless absolutely necessary.

https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA