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Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

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Cjdavis103 said:
and when we hit the overpopulation point? if no one dies then someone is gonna need to feed them all .
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I don't think we'll be running out of space in the galaxy that the Citadel races can currently only access ~1% of any time soon.

Cjdavis103 said:
only a matter of time and Population increases at an expontail rate ( including krogan post genophahage cure) with the number if deaths drasticly decreased the number of births will sky rocket a few thousand years and you will start looking ata lot of issuise

and you dont see any issues with that moraly with that?
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If we haven't figured out how to reach other galaxies in a timescale that involves thousands of years when we're starting with arc reactors, I will make Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's hat and eat it. If we, by some bizarre anti-miracle, manage to run out of galaxies before we solve every problem related to population ever, I will literally eat a dick.
 
azoicennead said:
I don't think we'll be running out of space in the galaxy that the Citadel races can currently only access ~1% of any time soon.


If we haven't figured out how to reach other galaxies in a timescale that involves thousands of years when we're starting with arc reactors, I will make Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's hat and eat it. If we, by some bizarre anti-miracle, manage to run out of galaxies before we solve every problem related to population ever, I will literally eat a dick.
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you know what go for it if you think we can do it and beat out the reaper handily lets do it
 
azoicennead said:
If we lose to the Reapers, everything you mentioned is a non-issue due to all involved races coming down with a serious case of the deads.
Ergo, we plan for victory.
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I apologize there seemed to be some confusion here I was advocating that Niger and better guns might help us more right now then the eternal life thing

Also on an unrelated note what's the chances you guys think of the alliance letting us take a look at the Mars arcive? I mean we are there golden hen at this point they should jump at the chance for us to develop more crazy stuff for them with some protheain tech
 
azoicennead said:
If we lose to the Reapers, everything you mentioned is a non-issue due to all involved races coming down with a serious case of the deads.
Ergo, we plan for victory.
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Cjdavis103 said:
I apologize there seemed to be some confusion here I was advocating that Niger and better guns might help us more right now then the eternal life thing

Also on an unrelated note what's the chances you guys think of the alliance letting us take a look at the Mars arcive? I mean we are there golden hen at this point they should jump at the chance for us to develop more crazy stuff for them with some protheain tech
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This reminds me too much of what the US does in Muv Luv Alternative...

Ergo nothing good.
 
Cjdavis103 said:
I apologize there seemed to be some confusion here I was advocating that Niger and better guns might help us more right now then the eternal life thing
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No they won't. We need not just quantitative, but qualitative changes in order to break the cycle. One such change is eternal youth technology. If nothing else, it undermines Reapers' philosophical position of superiority ("we are eternal"). In addition to that, eternal youth would greatly boost strategic capacity for resistance, especially guerrilla resistance. As parts of the other technological advances, we are developing entirely self-sufficient ships capable of operating without entering port or maintenance for indefinite periods of time. Such ships, if they are to be of use against Reapers (either as escape pods or as a form of resistance meant to make it impossible for Reapers to "finish" the cycle and go back into dark space), require eternal crew.

Besides, with eternal youth, we'd see a great boost in scientific research rate in the galaxy, if only because professors and engineers would stop dying.

As to overpopulation... Firstly, there's plenty of space. Secondly, more space can be made with space habitats. Thirdly, this is Mass Effect races we are talking about; they have experienced the terrors of uncontrolled breeding as shown by krogans. They'd be able to control their populations, I feel.

And eternal youth, on its own, doesn't lead to perfect immortality. It just removes aging and aging related diseases from the list of natural causes of death.
 
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Gear said:
Overpopulation - The Perennial Myth

This has been making the rounds of humanity since pretty much forever. Plato wrote about it, as he wrote about the fall of civilization because teenagers of his time were less respectful than they were when he was a youth.
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The money quote from that article:
Finally, it should be noted that the population explosion has begun to fizzle. Population growth peaked at 2.1 percent per year in the late 1960s and has declined to its present rate of 1.7 percent. There is no doubt that this trend will continue since, according to the latest information supplied by the World Health Organization, total fertility rates (the number of births per woman) have declined from 4.5 in 1970 to just 3.3 in 1990. That is exactly fifty percent of the way toward a fertility rate of 2.1, which would eventually bring population growth to a halt.
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If you dig down into the statistics, you see the problem is even worse than shown in the article. We already know that increasing tech level and quality of life are inversely correlated with birth rate: that is, as people's lives get better, they have fewer children. The kicker here is that the statistics quoted above are a global average, taking into account both the relatively high birthrates in third-world countries and the even lower birthrates in advanced nations. Europe and the Americas actually have a fertility rate of less than 2, meaning that most modern nations are actually declining in population, and the only reason that for example America has a positive population growth rate is the constant influx of immigrants.

Now fast forward 160 years. It is, in fact, actually rather remarkable that there is any population growth at all in the ME universe. The only way to square this with reality is to assume that childbirth is heavily subsidized in modern ME human society. This does work, but it's fairly costly: take France, which has the highest fertility rate in the Western world at 2.01, which is notably still unsustainably low. They can get up to that still-too-low fertility rate by spending 4% of their GDP on subsidies for having children, more than the 3.8% that the US spends on its lavishly expensive military during the same period. The nations of the human Systems Alliance must be throwing vast amounts of money at people to induce them to put up with having kids; the flip side of that is that an easy way to slam the brakes on "unsustainable" population growth would be to stop, or even just slightly cut, those subsidies.
 
TheEyes said:
Overpop... none of the ME races have even hit Type II civilization status yet, so even if energy economics limited us to what energy we could get from the galaxy's stars (which we're not, thanks to the Arc Reactor) we'd still be underpopulating the galaxy by a factor of trillions.
Yes, that's going to be a problem, in a few centuries, but by then Revy's very likely to have invented some type of Computonium that we will be able to offload our meatbrain v1.0 onto.
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Earth is already overpopulated with 13 billion people in canon.

The fact that the universe is bigger does not matter when your average person cannot move to another planet without selling everything they own and have no real incentive to do it.

Do not forget that there is also the Hanar, Asari and the Turians who more or less have the same evironment needs.

Do not forget though, I firmly believe that the complete opposite would happen, people would continuously put off having children because there is no longer a time limit for it, leading to a decline.
 
...13 billion is not overpop, not unless they are somehow still using manpower instead of even just the automation we have today (note: 40-50 billion is the estimate of how many people we can produce food for JUST with what we have today... so yeah)
 
Ehorin said:
...13 billion is not overpop, not unless they are somehow still using manpower instead of even just the automation we have today (note: 40-50 billion is the estimate of how many people we can produce food for JUST with what we have today... so yeah)
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It's an issue of population density, I suspect.
Also, the problem with ending world hunger isn't just producing the food, it's distributing it.

Tabron89 said:
The fact that the universe is bigger does not matter when your average person cannot move to another planet without selling everything they own and have no real incentive to do it.
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So what you're saying is we should figure out an excuse to bankroll people leaving Earth, to give them the money and the reason?
(The reason being a job, presumably.)
 
An aggressive colonisation program designed to shift at minimum half the planetary population off of Earth would do a lot to strengthen the System's Alliance's position both domestic and foreign. The problem is that you'll also need to shift all that industry, and industry is expensive to shift.

However, the SA does have the worlds necessary to pull it off, both in numbers and in quality.
 
azoicennead said:
It's an issue of population density, I suspect.
Also, the problem with ending world hunger isn't just producing the food, it's distributing it.


So what you're saying is we should figure out an excuse to bankroll people leaving Earth, to give them the money and the reason?
(The reason being a job, presumably.)
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cheap space travel makes distribution a non-issue(or should) Population density? you could fit every single human alive today in just ALASKA with ease... so yeah...
 
oh so now mega cities are all overpopulated? what about New York, or heck, Istanbul! Istanbul has a over a million people, it is so populous there were rumors about it wanting to become a city state a few years back. You really think Megacities are going to be worse? And let's not forget that ME tech makes building easier so buildings are probably larger on average and we can get some REALLY big buildings today
 
Tabron89 said:
I firmly believe that the complete opposite would happen, people would continuously put off having children because there is no longer a time limit for it, leading to a decline.
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Well, we can take the money we're saving on geriatric medicine and institute a program of genetic colonization: that is, we collect egg/sperm from people, and employ others to have and raise children. Expensive, sure, but not particularly difficult to understand. I'm not sure it'll even come to that point anyway; it seems to me like people will be willing to have kids after a century or two, once they've had a chance to raise enough in savings to fully pay for them. It's just hard to justify racing into childbirth when you're not sure if you can really afford it.

azoicennead said:
It's an issue of population density, I suspect.
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No; it's an issue of doomsayers regularly predicting the end of the world within their lifetimes since man has been capable of articulating the thought. Overpopulation is only a problem in RL because of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, and how our energy economics are tied to carbon-producing fossil fuels. Even then we're not worried about humanity going extinct, so much as we're worried about the hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of people that might be displaced or die on an Earth that is less suited for human occupation thanks to a warmer, more volatile climate.

In ME they've moved beyond all those concerns thanks to He-3 fusion power (and now Arc Reactors), so there's really no issue at all with overpopulation. Heck, there are already hundreds of millions of humans living away from Sol; if it weren't for the Reapers then humanity's future among the stars would be assured even if Sol explodes "today".

azoicennead said:
So what you're saying is we should figure out an excuse to bankroll people leaving Earth, to give them the money and the reason?
(The reason being a job, presumably.)
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My solution is a resource rush: Appia allows for modular, cheaply mobile space stations, which in turn allows for mining operations to be quickly set up and torn down near more modest deposits and smaller asteroids. Between that, and some of our laser mining ideas, we can set off a new gold rush in space (this would be much easier if we had free reign to sell Repulsor-based tech, of course).
 
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Worldbuilding is the meat of a good story.
And if the questers provide it the GM can focus on other things (or use it for brainstorming).
 
The main problems Earth has in ME I think is mainly supplying meat/protein to its population without causing massive damage to either existing ecosystems or the environment, after all cows beat cars in the whole pollution/climate change area, so its likely that Earth is shipping in meat from other planets or relying on vat grown stuff, if the laws are not that hard on cloning.

The second one is that they are currently relying on He 3 fusion, which means that they are shipping in fuel for it, as He 3 is pretty rare on Earth, unless they are cracking lithium apart at the atomic level for it.

Ehorin said:
cheap space travel makes distribution a non-issue(or should) Population density? you could fit every single human alive today in just ALASKA with ease... so yeah...
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Eezo grants cheap spacelift and makes FTL possible...what it does not do is grant cheap starships.

FTL grade drive core can easily run into the millions from some of the calcs done in this quest, so starships are more or less going to be owned either by corporations or people who have sold two or more houses or won the lottery, these people do not want to go back to living on a planet, you do get people considered 'spacers' because of this.

If a corporation is involved in transporting colonists, the corporation would want to get profit from them all, even with the cost of the Eezo taken into account, which of course drives the price up.

There is even one Energy mega corp that treats the colonists they ferry as either a closed market or employees.
 
Swapping from cattle and other livestock based sourced of proteins to various beans and nuts as sources for proteins would greatly increase agricultural efficiency when it comes to protein supply.
 
PI-Cs-SD-1 Augur

Role - Surveillance, Reconnaissance, Expensive toy for the idle wealthy, covertly looking at babes/beefcake

Weaponry
  • 1 hardpoint for an optional gun pod.
Power System
  • 1x Paragon Industries Arc Reactor (2MW)
Engine System
  • 1x prop-fan
  • 1x small repulsor (removed on civilian version)
  • Paragon Industries RCS module
Additional Systems
  • Paragon Industries VI for autopilot (software modules available on Paragon Industries website)
  • Remote Controllable out to 20km (controllers available for out to 3000 kilometers and everywhere in between)
  • GoPro 39000 GVX Extreme camera with real time feed and broadcast capability (visual only)
  • Compressor for RCS module
Cost - 3600cr
Production - 0.15

Description:
Made out of sturdy plastic, and ceramic construction, the Paragon Industries PI-CS-SD-1 is a lightweight inexpensive small scale drone capable of being deployed anywhere there is an atmosphere and occasionally also in places where there isn't one. Its large wingspan allows it to get away with a smaller and quieter propulsion unit while also flying far above the usual range of personal and non-dedicated vehicle mounted motion trackers. Advanced construction means that while the drone's wingspan is almost 2 meters across, it produces a skin return akin to that of a small Terran Robin. Unlike the R-SD-2, the CS-SD-1 is capable of operating in vacuum due to its repulsor's thrust vectoring while also having much greater maneuverability because of its more powerful RCS module.

It is also low cost and can be fitted with numerous modules provided by paragon industries at low cost or by an open source community.


PI-R-SD-2 Auspex

Role - Surveillance, Reconnaissance, Expensive toy for the idle wealthy, covertly looking at babes/beefcake

Weaponry
  • 2 mounting points (infantry small arms only)
Power System
  • 1x Paragon Industries Arc Reactor (3MW)
Engine System
  • 6x Ducted rotors
  • Paragon Industries RCS module
Additional Systems
  • Paragon Industries VI for autopilot (software modules available on Paragon Industries website)
  • Remote Controllable out to 20km (controllers available for out to 3000 kilometers and everywhere in between)
  • GoPro 39000 GVX Extreme camera with real time feed and broadcast capability (visual only)
  • Compressor for RCS module
Cost - 4100cr
Production - 0.16

Description:
Made out of sturdy plastic, and ceramic construction, the Paragon Industries PI-R-SD-2 (Paragon Industries Rotor Small Drone 2) is a hexacopter type drone no more than 1.5 meters across. Advanced aerofoil ducted rotor blades and advanced construction means that this drone produces a skin return akin to that of a hummingbird while being capable of flying far above the usual range of personal and non-dedicated vehicle mounted motion trackers. Additionally, due to its hexacopter design, it trades off the ability to operate in vacuum for the ability to hover in one place almost indefinitely.

For extra speed or maneuverability, the drone is equipped with a very powerful RCS module that also allows it to operate in vaccum for short periods of time.

It is also low cost and can be fitted with numerous modules provided by paragon industries at low cost or by an open source community.

Now with Greco-Roman names.
 
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Hazard said:
Swapping from cattle and other livestock based sourced of proteins to various beans and nuts as sources for proteins would greatly increase agricultural efficiency when it comes to protein supply.
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If Paragon industries came out with vegetarian equilvalents to the many meats, in texture and flavor, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Tofu... not so much.
 
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