Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
I wonder how much lower it'd actually be, given space travel/habitats, new colonies, pirate raids etc and the additional dangers they bring with them.
Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
I wonder how much lower it'd actually be, given space travel/habitats, new colonies, pirate raids etc and the additional dangers they bring with them.
- Location
- Australia
Er, no. I really can't agree with this, and not just because you're calling the delay in release a crime against humanity.
I mean, we're basically speculating on magical-science fantasy land anyway, why not fix the prison system so it actually works like it's supposed to and reduce crime?
Denying people access to Eternal Youth tech when everyone else has it is sentencing them to a slow, withering death.
Shepard's Post-Reaper To-Do List:
+Fix School System
In our Post-Reaper Magical Fantasy Land, there'll be less at least.
As well as the traditional post-war Baby Boom, aided by all the revolutionary new tech people will have. And while Eternal Youth alone won't make people unkillable, they will be as hard to kill as a Captain America with personal Arc-Reactor fuelled shieldbelt and very fast access to emergency aid VI's.
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Well, repulsor drive Would increase the distance ships could go from relays, unless I'm misremembering?
That Should open up more worlds, too.
Or at least, it would if the SA weren't being butts about it
With Repulsors and full load Eezo cores a PI Frigate can manage 60LY/day with an endurance of around 50 hours so that gives a maximum range between discharging at 125LY. Let's be conservative however and say that factoring in discharge time* it can manage 100LY per 50 hours or simply put 2LY/hr.
*Time to find a gas giant, travel to it, spend an hour discharging, and resume course.
The diameter of the galaxy, or at least the important parts where there would be relays, is roughly 100,000LY. Therefore with a 2LY/hr average speed any relay finding trip will take at most 50,000 hours or more approximately; 5 years and and 4 months.
That is a long time but it's also the maximum time. The average journey is going to be far shorter. The Codex describes Primary Relays as propelling starships "thousands of light years". Now this could be taken to mean anything between 1,000LY and 999,999LY but going by the galaxy map, I know it's not the most reliable thing but it's the only thing we have, I'd say they tend to average around 10,000LY.
A 10,000LY trip would only take 5,000 hours or about three and a half months. That is far more reasonable.
Of course that is only the time taken to travel is only part of it. The ship still has to explore the area to make sure there are no Rachni or other hostile races out there. So I figure six months per trip sounds about right. Which is quite fast considering that you can send out exploration ships for multiple Relays at once.
Incidentally the only 15LY/day ships, they were probably using even slower ones actually due to fuel concerns, would have taken approximately 2 years and three months just to cover 10,000LY.
- Location
- Leeds
My mistake, would you hazard a guess as to how often a new Relay is opened?
Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different? — Col. Corazon Santiago "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"
While I don't believe it's ever mentioned in canon my guess would be once or twice a decade.
My reasoning being that while a 15LY/day Frigate could traverse the distance in ~2.3 years in practice they are going to be using probes with small drive cores and ion engines which would significantly increase the travel time.
These probes would be designed with those features as a cost saving measure. Because when sending unmanned probes off into interstellar space for years on end there is a good chance they'll be destroyed, both by natural phenomena and hostile aliens, so multiple probes would have to be sent.
These probes would also have to have some kind of self destruct system because you can't risk any hostile aliens who captured them tracing them back; because that could lead to the very war they were designed to prevent.
Then of course you have to consider time for these slow probes to explore the entire region around the Relay. You couldn't get away with something as easy as only checking the nearby 100LY since there could be aliens with faster ships or willing to travel further. So star or other noteworthy destination, such as Secondary Relays, needs to be inspected within a rather large area.
Finally there is the legal process of getting approval to launch the mission to begin with. I have no doubt there are a nearly endless list of hurdles to jump over before such an application would be approved.
So all around once or twice every decade sounds about right.
Which is actually pretty good since each Primary Relay probably allows access to thousands of star systems. Because there are over fifty star systems within just 16.2LY of Earth, a distance a regular ME ship can travel with a single discharge, and each Primary Relays often has a number of Secondary Relays nearby.
- Location
- Leeds
I notice you don't suggest a way for returning the information, would you be leaving a line of comm bouys behind or would there be a on board VI that would return with safe or dangerous as an answer?
Well if the VI deems it's safe it can just activate the Relay on it's end and return.
I'm not particularly worried about a population boom. The modern world already deals with declining birthrates and odds are, the Alliance has a similiar problem that it mitigates in some way.
Functionally, immortality wouldn't boost population growth into insane ranges, but most likely get it to ~2-3% without measures to slow it down. It may even reduce growth as people figure 'I'll wait until after the first century for starting a family'
And if it gets too much, China had a One Child policy before, so it's not without precedent. The Alliance also has a fuckton of garden worlds it has yet to fill up. It's likely to take a century even with insane growth to fill that up.
Even further, ME has worlds that are covered in one, gargantuan city. I'm fairly sure our energy and matsci tech is quite capable of repeating that, while feeding them all is easy via vertical farming and the like.
Simply put, causing a societal collapse with the vastly increased lifespan is pretty fucking hard to do in ME (unless you are the Krogan, whom apparently can't restrain themselves).
On the benefit side, we not only keep people from dying a slow, withering death, we also make pension schemes obsolete, which means more money being used by consumers to buy stuff instead of supporting pensioners. Medical costs are gonna fall like a rock as aging diseases ain't a thing anymore. The only expense is the Youth Treatment, which is probably fairly cheap in comparison.
Lets say we are just limited to the Sol system. We have asteroids, moons and whatever else is useful. How many people do you think can be supported on the raw material in the system? I'm fairly sure hundreds of trillions are quite doable. We have unlimited energy via arc-reactors, matsci to build a fuckton of O'Neil cylinders (if we want to save on Eezo) and plenty of organic materials to feed them all.
Functionally, immortality wouldn't boost population growth into insane ranges, but most likely get it to ~2-3% without measures to slow it down. It may even reduce growth as people figure 'I'll wait until after the first century for starting a family'
And if it gets too much, China had a One Child policy before, so it's not without precedent. The Alliance also has a fuckton of garden worlds it has yet to fill up. It's likely to take a century even with insane growth to fill that up.
Even further, ME has worlds that are covered in one, gargantuan city. I'm fairly sure our energy and matsci tech is quite capable of repeating that, while feeding them all is easy via vertical farming and the like.
Simply put, causing a societal collapse with the vastly increased lifespan is pretty fucking hard to do in ME (unless you are the Krogan, whom apparently can't restrain themselves).
On the benefit side, we not only keep people from dying a slow, withering death, we also make pension schemes obsolete, which means more money being used by consumers to buy stuff instead of supporting pensioners. Medical costs are gonna fall like a rock as aging diseases ain't a thing anymore. The only expense is the Youth Treatment, which is probably fairly cheap in comparison.
Lets say we are just limited to the Sol system. We have asteroids, moons and whatever else is useful. How many people do you think can be supported on the raw material in the system? I'm fairly sure hundreds of trillions are quite doable. We have unlimited energy via arc-reactors, matsci to build a fuckton of O'Neil cylinders (if we want to save on Eezo) and plenty of organic materials to feed them all.
- Location
- Leeds
Just to clarify, its eternal youth, not immortality. The key difference regarding population control is that menopause is no longer a thing. And all the old gross people are no longer either.
Personally, I would expect at least some of these missions to be crewed, likely with asari crews. To asari 10 year journey wouldn't be out of the realms of possiblity, and this allows asari to maintain political power over the space exploration.
I doubt it. While sure a 10 year journey isn't much to an Asari having a crew makes the whole thing incredibly more difficult, dangerous, and expensive.
Because now you have to carry supplies (air/water/food), a larger reactor and hydrogen supply to support the increased power demand, manufacturing equipment to replace damaged parts since failure now means death, and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm likely not even thinking of. Then on top of all that you need a larger thrusters and FTL Drive as well as more reaction mass for those thrusters to account for all that extra mass.
Multi-year space missions are hard. It's the reason why IRL we haven't gone to Mars yet after all.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Fuck that! Fuck that with a rusty spork.
The political disengagement of the electorate isn't a inevitable result of how the system is structured. The only reason a system would work as you describe, is if people let it.
*deep breath* Ok, wait. That's was a personal trigger for me. What are we actually arguing about?
- Location
- Leeds
Rusty spork indeed. Unfortunately you haven't really provided a counter argument as Chargone's post was basically saying that apathy in the majority lets this happen. Where as you are saying this will only happen if the majority let it happen.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Right, ok.
Russia for example has an incredibly apathetic electorate, and the government for the most part works hard to keep it that way. This is largely the result of all the trouble that came from the dissolution of the USSR (fun fact: the collapse of the Soviet Union was heralded as a great triumph in the west, but it really made everything worse in the long term in the east).
The counter examples I can think of are the US and Canada. Obama, Trudeau and maybe Sanders now. In each case the electorate got tired of an administration and voted in someone new, they became politically engaged and got involved in the process.
Furthermore, as far as I'm aware, political engagement is proportional to education level - google 'political engagement' and 'education' and you'll get dozen of peer reviewed papers documenting this.
PS. The US pre-post-secondary educational system is a joke and should in no way be used as the basis of comparison for the one the Alliance is likely to have have.
- Location
- Leeds
Thats better thanks.
Goes down after education in economics, as the joke goes.
Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
What you'll generally find is that a large majority kept right on voting how they always do, with a minority of "swing voters" who Do care changing sides in any given election. This is part of why gerimandering (sp?) works. (Of course, the US system is a mess of layers of representatives and delegates who aren't actually obliged to cast their constituency's vote the way the constituants voted, vote weighting, electoral fraud, and all sorts of other shenanigans, legal and otherwise, to the point where holding it up as an example of a functional democracy is to win an argument on the subject by way of incapacitating your opponent with laughter so he annot continue. I'll admit to knowing nothing about canada.)
Various things Can increase how many people actually care enough to think beyond "my parents and grand parents voted for this party in every election. Good enough for me!". MMP instead of FPP, government actions which directly and obviously screw over the individual in question. Other stuff which doesn't come to mind at 4:20am. Though... local experience would tell one hat education doesn't lead to better voting habits so much as leaving the coubtry entirely because the pay's better elsewhere
That same unwillingness to think when someone else can do it for you is also a arge part of how cults get going. And why some incredibly Dumb ideologies manage to actually gather followers.
On balance, representative democracy's better than other systems primarily on the basis that (representatives/2)+1 people are far less likely to agree to be idiots in the same way at the same time than a single ruler. And it's ot even as good at that as you'd think.
All that aside, I'll still take a properly set up representative democracy over anything else anyone's come up with so far for running entities larger than can be managed with a town hall meeting. Just... don't expect members of the general public to care about anything they can't Obviously See is affecting their day to day life.
This post brought to you by "posting at 4:30am, still haven't slept yet" productions.
- Location
- Leeds
It only just occurred to me how off topic this is.
Something to keep in mind though is that with an electorate with a lot of free time on its hand, say like an electorate with a 20 to 30 hour work week, is certainly capable of being drawn into extensive political engagement simply because they are no longer tired of working long hours every day.
Something else to consider is the existence of VIs. We know that VIs are capable of analyzing vast amounts of data and making optimal choices based upon the data set and the desired outcomes, that is one of the fundamental parts of Elcor combat tactics after all. So there is no reason why there can't exist VIs that analyze all the relevant information and produce a set of pros and cons relevant to it's owner for each possible candidate.
It would make informed voting significantly easier. Furthermore you could likely set it up to alert you whenever a proposal comes up that is relevant to your interests which makes with your Representative on matters that concern you a lot easier.
Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
Yeah, it has kind of wandered dramatically off topic, hasn't it.
Probably best to stop there then, i guess.
- Location
- Leeds
What if whoever makes the VI's has a political agenda though? I mean people still watch hugely biased news channels so I doubt they'd change.
- Location
- Leeds
Not until the mods show up.
Full steam ahead.
Simple solution would be making the code for them open source. That way anyone concern about the issue, such as the various political parties, could check to ensure that they are fair and unbiased.
That and I wouldn't be surprised if there were laws and regulations outlawing designed to prevent intentional bias in data analysis tools.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
The Milky Way contains 200 billion stars*. If 0.01% of those stars are part of the network, there are 20,000,000 relays. If 1% of those relays have been explored, the Citadel races have explored 200,000 relays**. To achieve this number, they would have to spend the last 2,700 years exploring an average of 72 relays per year. Assuming each relay provides access to 4 star systems within travel distance for Eezo FTL, they would also have access to 800,000 star systems, meaning the singular reason for continued exploration would be to explore.
The galaxy is fucking huge.
* Estimated between 200 billion and 400 billion.
**Yes, if 1 in 10,000 star systems has a relay, there are nearly as many relays as the population of several major European countries. EDIT: Was thinking of a previous figure when I made my previous comparison.
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