Incompatible System

[Hidden One]

Let me throw in a name into the hat as well.

"What pumpkin?" - a surprisingly bright orange and rotund science vessel that keeps forgetting to cloak when taking peeks into systems

 

[TheUnicorn]

We're getting there.

Click to shrink...

On a shoe string budget, but yes. We're not there yet.

Especially since FTL is probably impossible.

Click to shrink...

There are a number of ways within our current understanding of physics that could lead to FTL, so I disagree with that statement.

 

[Vyrexuviel]

On a shoe string budget, but yes. We're not there yet.


There are a number of ways within our current understanding of physics that could lead to FTL, so I disagree with that statement.

Click to shrink...

The problem with most of them is that while this particular solution to the equations does indicate FTL, the problem is getting that particular field to work. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.

When you need to figure out how to manipulate the Higgs Boson field in order to make your FTL drive, you've got a LOOOOOOT of work ahead of you. And the energy requirements might be prohibitive, even when you figure out how to do that.

 

[Firestorm_100]

Flying cars are all fun and games until you end up with a Cadillac in your second floor bedroom.

Click to shrink...

We don't need a flying car for that. A couple of years ago one of the houses in my town (Epsom, Surrey, England) ended up like that. The house is behind a few trees at the end of a straight bit of road that has a few bumps in. Someone one night came tearing down the road took the corner then managed to swerve across the road, mount the pavement, broke down a fence and hit a car cause it to jump into the area and land fully in a bedroom. Lucky it wasn't the main bedroom as the owners were asleep at the time and no one died.

Car smashes into Epsom couple's bedroom | ITV News

An Epsom couple had a lucky escape after a speeding car was launched into their first-floor bedroom as they slept. | ITV News London

www.itv.com

 

[Avernus]

The problem with most of them is that while this particular solution to the equations does indicate FTL, the problem is getting that particular field to work. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.

When you need to figure out how to manipulate the Higgs Boson field in order to make your FTL drive, you've got a LOOOOOOT of work ahead of you. And the energy requirements might be prohibitive, even when you figure out how to do that.

Click to shrink...

And when people look at a proposed method of FTL long enough, they typically find a reason it won't work.

My personal belief is that there's probably some as yet undiscovered physical law that outright prohibits FTL, and we are in the position of pre-Laws of Thermodynamics people trying to design a perpetual motion engine. We don't know that it can't work, so we keep trying.

 

[Ace Dreamer]

Reminds me of a BT story where the OC found that their reality got mirrored in BT like they did in ours (with codex for military forces).

Click to shrink...

I wasn't aware that British Telecom (BT) had a whole genre devoted to them, including fanfics...

(Hint: where TLA means 'Two-Letter Abbreviation' there often isn't enough cognitive 'grit' to give minds the traction needed to deduce your context. IMNAAHO)

EDIT:

I'd be inclined to use 'BTech', assuming that's the focus - yes, I've played Battletech, and in general didn't find the tech level very... impressive. Yes, I know why, but, I really like more fun ideas in my science fiction... If you've got giant fighting robots try and make them more interesting, say, like Five Star Stories...

Spoiler: A picture? Why?

Knight of Gold

I could see the humanx trolling the Mass Effect races with giant mecha, that 'teleport' (Blink) in, release incomprehensible messages, then disappear...

 

[Avernus]

I wasn't aware that British Telecom (BT) had a whole genre devoted to them, including fanfics...

Click to shrink...

BT=Battletech I think?

<googles> "Amaris" is from Battletech apparently.

 

[sdwood]

Flying cars are almost pointless in the sense of what we think of as cars but flying. Because ordinary people would be flying them, and maintaining them, and ordinary people are incredibly dangerous.

Click to shrink...

I want my flying car.

Note the key word there: 'my'.

There is no way in hell I want the morons who are on the roads here in DFW to so much as get to see a flying car unless it's mine as I fly by; they can't manage in two dimensions, there's no way that giving them another dimension to fuck up in is a good idea.

And when people look at a proposed method of FTL long enough, they typically find a reason it won't work.

My personal belief is that there's probably some as yet undiscovered physical law that outright prohibits FTL, and we are in the position of pre-Laws of Thermodynamics people trying to design a perpetual motion engine. We don't know that it can't work, so we keep trying.

Click to shrink...

My belief is the opposite, but I'll freely admit that it's a religious belief, not a scientific one.

 

[SufficientEnergy]

The primary problem with flying cars are gravity and space, moving to space solves both.

Moving between asteroids in the asteroidbelt, Pluto and it's moon or adjacent o'neill cylinders in a dyson swarm have deltaV requirements that a car sized rocket could provide. The rocket may also be a car that you can drive in the habitat after a wash, because space dust can be nasty.

More than not commercially viable - currently fusion based power generation is impossible at any cost.

Click to shrink...

You say impossible at any costs I bring you pulsed thermonuclear power, engineers and scientists have been trying to scale it down for the last 70 years.

Spoiler: Pulsed thermonuclear power just add solar panels

Detonating a smaller device with lasers in a large cavern filled with steam was proposed in project PACER. Energy would then be extracted from the steam using heat exchangers and turbines like in a normal power plant. The problem with it was that efficiency scaled with size, a bigger bomb burns more of it's fuel with the same detonator as a smaller device, it got to inefficient when scaled down to the size of a large commercial power plant.

 

[Ace Dreamer]

While I don't think the Blink Drive, on anything WIMP-based, will be the FTL mechanism that works in RL, I strongly suspect one will be found. Multiverse Theory looks the most likely route, in current science, as it sidesteps the whole 'FTL breaks causality' bit... Or, as ever, I might be totally wrong.

Finding there's even more fun ways to do FTL (than E0 & WIMP) would upset this story, but, I'm pretty sure this author is smart (note I didn't say 'sane' ) enough to not do that.

 

[PrimalShadow]

Seriously, the phone market has taken trillions of dollars of research to get to where it is today.

Click to shrink...

Source on that figure?

 

[Blaflaix]

On the other hand, we'd probably have fusion now if the sort of money, time, and research that's gone into cell phones had been put into fusion research...

Click to shrink...

This might not work as well as you'd hope.
The tech base required for a cell phone is actually pretty low, with everything else going into improvements.
The tech base for a fusion reactor is much higher, and we aren't there yet.

The translated webnovel Scholar's Advanced Technological System goes into detail on the development of a fusion reactor and involves things like: superior superconductor materials, specific solution to Navier-Stokes equation for high-temperature plasma, and a wall material that can survive a neutron beam well enough to repair itself... unlike any other material we can make.

It's one thing to make incremental improvements.
It's an other thing to dump money into stumbling around blindly looking for something that might not exist at all.

 

[J-Sail]

Source on that figure?

Click to shrink...

Not quite the hard figures you're asking for, but gives a good idea as to how that is reasonable as a figure: Evolution of mobile phone industry
The thing about it is that it is difficult to point to any one, single timeline of R&D as the "knock-on effect" (i.e. money for advancement in one field has the results used in another) is always a factor. Then you consider SATPhone networks on top of this... Not to mention militarized applications...

Speaking of cellphones and flying vehicles, some here have supposed that we have insufficient tech base to be able to implement such right now, other than motive means. In my opinion, this is patently false:
1) There are already "convertable" flying cars.
2) Private air commutes by individuals is already a thing, with several communities built around common airfields instead of roads.
3) The average teen in a first- or second- world country, and many more adults outside of that, carries sufficient tech to be able to play AAA games. Such games are able to track literally thousands of collision detection/avoidance instances across a network - easily more than is required to implement a Star Wars/Fifth Element style air-car environment.

The major problems for SAFELY implementing even autonomous ground car systems is:
1) Regulation: Mandating at least minimal detection and networking equipment, to include retrofits (this would include "sidewalk hazard" detection). Mandating a common communications framework for the information sharing, to include distance of sharing of information (minimum of twice the stopping distance at a given default speed (highway/freeway)). Criminilization of disobeying/bypassing these requirements.
2) Acceptance: Big Brother becomes MUCH more enabled to control daily lives, even outside tin-foil hat conspiracies. Then there is the religious aspect that pops up from time to time...
3) Economic: Either subtly implementing the system that politically minimizes the cost, or presenting the bill upfront and watch people scream about wasting money...

In regards to nuclear power in general: There are several pieces of tech we could implement NOW that would dramatically improve the situation, if it weren't for the fear mongers, realpolitick, and the resulting NIMBY crowd of idiots. As to fusion power specifically, there is an alternate to the tokamak reactor that has been in development for longer, at lower cost, and potentially more effective, if anyone wanted to invest in it: The stellerator reactor. The problem, of course, is politics and sunk cost fallacy.

 

[Neruz]

It's one thing to make incremental improvements.
It's an other thing to dump money into stumbling around blindly looking for something that might not exist at all.

Click to shrink...

Current fusion reactor designs that are being built are entirely about incremental improvements though, no new technology is needed to make a reactor of ITER's design economically viable for example; just incremental improvements.

In fact one of the major reasons we've started to see fusion reactor technology finally look like it might be getting somewhere in the not too distant future is because the concerns with and changing public opinion on fossil fuels has caused a number of oil and power companies to start investing in fusion R&D.

As to fusion power specifically, there is an alternate to the tokamak reactor that has been in development for longer, at lower cost, and potentially more effective, if anyone wanted to invest in it: The stellerator reactor. The problem, of course, is politics and sunk cost fallacy.

Click to shrink...

Untrue, investigating the potential practical viability of stellarator reactor designs is the entire purpose of Wendelstein 7-X, which is currently expected to achieve 30 minutes of continuous operation by 2021. Investments into stellarator designs have historically been less attractive than tokamak designs due to engineering issues that have only been recently or partially resolved; stellarators are simply more complicated and harder to build than tokamaks.

 

[J-Sail]

While I agree on the aspect of engineering issues, those issues are more nearly solved for "in practice" use than the tokamak from what I have been able to find. I would suggest individual unit complexity is near meaningless to getting a working model online - it can always be refined later, especially with the empirical data collected that can then be used for modeling future versions.

 

[Neruz]

While I agree on the aspect of engineering issues, those issues are more nearly solved for "in practice" use than the tokamak from what I have been able to find. I would suggest individual unit complexity is near meaningless to getting a working model online - it can always be refined later, especially with the empirical data collected that can then be used for modeling future versions.

Click to shrink...

Figuring out if that is true is one of the purposes of current experimental stellarators like Wendelstein 7-X, but stellarators didn't pick up again until the 90s when it became apparent that tokamaks had their own similar but different engineering issues and new construction methods allowed for increased quality and performance of magnetic fields, which opened up the theoretical possibility of stellarators being viable. Until then, tokamaks just looked like a much more reliable investment, and the relatively experimental nature of the technology in general makes it difficult to point to something and say whether it is conclusively superior to something else or not.

Whether or not that will turn out to be true depends largely on how Wendelstein 7-X goes, initial results have been promising, though the key will be whether they manage to achieve continuous operation or not. If they can demonstrate continuous operation as expected, that will likely be the impetus needed to draw major investment into developing economically viable stellarator designs.

 

[mp3.1415player]

There's been some recent work on using permanent magnets in stellarator designs to significantly simplify them, which would also reduce the cost considerably. It shows some promise in areas of plasma stability and control which is the hardest part of the whole design. This could not only make fusion power finally viable, but much cheaper than via a tokomak even if anyone can ever make that process work in the first place.

The budget for fusion research is steadily rising, but it's still a tiny fraction of what it needs to be. If the same sort of funding was dropped into that as goes into fossil fuels, it's quite likely that much more progress would have been made by now. But I suppose better late than never and people do seem to be slowly realizing that there's a limit to what can usefully be done with renewables, and that fossil fuels have to be moved away from as soon as feasible.

 

[Dr. Professor]

There's been some recent work on using permanent magnets in stellarator designs to significantly simplify them, which would also reduce the cost considerably. It shows some promise in areas of plasma stability and control which is the hardest part of the whole design. This could not only make fusion power finally viable, but much cheaper than via a tokomak even if anyone can ever make that process work in the first place.

The budget for fusion research is steadily rising, but it's still a tiny fraction of what it needs to be. If the same sort of funding was dropped into that as goes into fossil fuels, it's quite likely that much more progress would have been made by now. But I suppose better late than never and people do seem to be slowly realizing that there's a limit to what can usefully be done with renewables, and that fossil fuels have to be moved away from as soon as feasible.

Click to shrink...

The way I figure it, the world of 'The Great Sci-Fi Future' needs two key inventions... The first being a space launch infrastructure that doesn't rely on chemical propulsion, something like a Skyhook. Because as amazing as the advances in recoverable rocket boosters have been, there's only so much you can get the cost down, there. True large-scale space infrastructure must ultimately have more tools than rocketry in its arsenal. Once you start building that infrastructure up, you can start building large-scale orbital structures, and the means of actual, viable, mass-transit to space. That's when you can really start climbing the ol' Kardashev ladder

The second would be viable fusion energy. It just unlocks so, so much.

So this is exciting news~

 

[EmperorArthur]

I think rockets will get you significantly farther than you think. It's not quite as economical as airplane, but the same general rules apply. You can have ridiculously capital intensive launchers and still middle class affordable tickets.

 

[Valmond]

My favorites are space elevator and catapults (basicly a railgun that shoots a shuttle into space).

 

[Orphiex]

I think rockets will get you significantly farther than you think. It's not quite as economical as airplane, but the same general rules apply. You can have ridiculously capital intensive launchers and still middle class affordable tickets.

Click to shrink...

Oh, definitely. SpaceX has been making huge strides in that area. The problem is that the key element of SpaceX's cheaper orbital lift capabilities is their hardware. Any increases in fuel efficiency are incremental.

To go into more detail, Elon Musk's key insight for SpaceX (as I understand it) was that most of the pricetag for a rocket comes from the fact that their components are bought from third-party suppliers. The rocket nozzles, the motherboards, the avionics... all of their price tags have some serious percentages tacked on, and that's before any adjustments necessary to bring together all those components from different manufacturers. By making their rockets in-house, down to the smallest components, SpaceX knocks off something like 80% of the price tag without compromising on the rocket's quality or integrity.

There's a few other factors that let them provide significantly cheaper lift, of course; among other things, those reusable boosters are a big step forward. So I agree that the venerable rocket has a lot of oomph left in it yet. That being said, they still burn fuel like a mofo. Now, if SpaceX can crack the orbital scramjet or the aerospike...

 

[Aeternus iter]

The budget for fusion research is steadily rising

Click to shrink...

Yep, it is probably an effect of the more globalized research initiatives, meaning that even if governments (and it is still mostly governments I think) are paying only a little bit all that funding goes towards the same goal meaning they can share research, yay globalization.

there's a limit to what can usefully be done with renewables

Click to shrink...

It is almost insane what you can do with praticly free (-powerplant & infrastructure) power, some examples are:

• Massive desalination plants turning the Sahara in fertile land, although effects on climate and rainfall changes due to this will need to be taken into account.
• Massive air filtration plants that clean the air (you could even create fuel from carbon in the air to use as a battery, but then it is probably better to just create hydrogen or use straight up batteries where possible).
• Materials like glass or aluminium that cost a lot due to the energy requirements to make them will massively drop in price (AKA greenhouses incredibly cheap) and other materials will also get a lot cheaper.
• Indoor farming becomes feasible, as does the lighting very very very large areas.
• Power active support to build massive space towers, orbital rings, or building entire new layers around the earth (shell worlds or Matryoshka Worlds).
• You can (more easily) launch people into space using many hundreds of kilometres long railgun (you need that length so that the acceleration over distance does not kill people).
• Mine the Stars, and then I mean The Stars, not asteroids or other planetary bodies (although this works just as well on gas giants), I really mean mining a hot ball of plasma like the Sun which contains 99.86% of all the solar systems known mass.
• Of course power massive space ships.
• And much more.

 

[sdwood]

The translated webnovel Scholar's Advanced Technological System goes into detail on the development of a fusion reactor and involves things like: superior superconductor materials, specific solution to Navier-Stokes equation for high-temperature plasma, and a wall material that can survive a neutron beam well enough to repair itself... unlike any other material we can make.

Click to shrink...

These are all assumptions. For example, if we actually knew that the latter was a requirement ITER wouldn't exist.

I would suggest that fiction is not a suitable replacement for actual research.

 

[ChrisPikula]

The way I figure it, the world of 'The Great Sci-Fi Future' needs two key inventions... The first being a space launch infrastructure that doesn't rely on chemical propulsion, something like a Skyhook.

Click to shrink...

Personally, I'd like to see something like a space-fountain. Sure, it'd be a bit of an engineering nightmare, but it's mechanically feasible with current understood technology, which is more than a lot of other systems can say.

Micrometeorites are still a problem though, but not like they are with a lot of other space launch infrastructure.

 

[Dr. Professor]

I think rockets will get you significantly farther than you think. It's not quite as economical as airplane, but the same general rules apply. You can have ridiculously capital intensive launchers and still middle class affordable tickets.

Click to shrink...

Middle-class affordable as a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, maybe. A trip to a truly opulent orbital hotel and casino, perhaps.

But even if all you have is skyhooks and some sort of hypersonic aircraft to couple with it, you've got something that even lower-middle-class might use for vacations, and the upper-middles are gonna use it with the same frequency as they go to some place like Hawaii now.

If all you have is skyhooks and something like a Lofstrom loop to couple with it, you've got something that might have middle class workers in space, the equivalent of oil rig workers, where they transit out for long periods and treat coming home as the vacation. You've got lunar and asteroid mining, with heavy equipment going up (rockets are better for that), people transiting in and out (that's what you need the other stuff for) and payloads parachuting down.

That's short and medium term.

Ultimately I'm not talking about just theoretically affordable here. I'm not just talking middle-class, here. In the long term, I'm talking making a daily commute to orbit feasible, something you can buy a monthly transit pass for the equivalent of maybe a hundred bucks. I'm talking mass freight up and down, on a similar scale that we ship stuff on trains and ocean freighters. Hell, if you go with an orbital ring (which is both more useful and actually easier to build than a space elevator) and have dynamic support structures, I might be talking literal freakin trains to freakin space.

That is what I mean by sci-fi future.

I don't think you can do that with rockets alone.