Fractal Federation

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Fractal Federation

Post by fractalfederation »

My universe is 600 years into the future. They have terraformed Venus and Mars, there are 100 billion people living on Earth and over a billion living on space stations. There is a new world government called Fractal Federation. They have immortality, artificial intelligences (sentient and non-sentient), artificial reality (basically virtual reality with all five senses), they've genetically engineered new sentient species, people can transfer their minds to new bodies or have a back up in case of death and more.

I've been learning Blender and plan on making it a CGI YouTube series. I am working on the first episode now. I decided to make a new language for the government, which I call AuxLang. I created a spreadsheet and font for it. I don't have any experience with conlangs and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for it. Here is the link to the article:

https://www.fractalfederation.com/blog/auxlang/

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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by elemtilas »

fractalfederation wrote: 16 Jun 2018 05:03 My universe is 600 years into the future. They have terraformed Venus and Mars, there are 100 billion people living on Earth and over a billion living on space stations. There is a new world government called Fractal Federation. They have immortality, artificial intelligences (sentient and non-sentient), artificial reality (basically virtual reality with all five senses), they've genetically engineered new sentient species, people can transfer their minds to new bodies or have a back up in case of death and more.

I've been learning Blender and plan on making it a CGI YouTube series. I am working on the first episode now. I decided to make a new language for the government, which I call AuxLang. I created a spreadsheet and font for it. I don't have any experience with conlangs and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for it. Here is the link to the article:

https://www.fractalfederation.com/blog/auxlang/

Blake
Welcome to the family!

Basic premise sounds interesting. Hopefully you'll follow up with more interesting details of your world, stories and bits of trivia. I for one would be interested in knowing how you cram all those people onto Earth --- a kharab, that's a lot of people! Shades of the Mark of Gideon this!

As for the name of the language, just be aware that "Auxlang" actually already has a reasonably well known meaning (any kind of secondary language used for communication between people that don't share a more native language in common). Quintessential here is English, The Auxlang to end all auxlangs. There are also plenty of invented auxlangs, perhaps the best known of which are the likes of Interlingua and Esperanto. I'm not saying don't use it, but people who read your fiction (you seem to writing from this setting) will already know what the word means and may wonder why you didn't bother coming up with a cleverer name! It's kind of like Audi naming it's newest model "Automobile". Yeah...well, duh?
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Re: Fractal Federation

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elemtilas wrote: 16 Jun 2018 05:38
fractalfederation wrote: 16 Jun 2018 05:03 My universe is 600 years into the future. They have terraformed Venus and Mars, there are 100 billion people living on Earth and over a billion living on space stations. There is a new world government called Fractal Federation. They have immortality, artificial intelligences (sentient and non-sentient), artificial reality (basically virtual reality with all five senses), they've genetically engineered new sentient species, people can transfer their minds to new bodies or have a back up in case of death and more.

I've been learning Blender and plan on making it a CGI YouTube series. I am working on the first episode now. I decided to make a new language for the government, which I call AuxLang. I created a spreadsheet and font for it. I don't have any experience with conlangs and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for it. Here is the link to the article:

https://www.fractalfederation.com/blog/auxlang/

Blake
Welcome to the family!

Basic premise sounds interesting. Hopefully you'll follow up with more interesting details of your world, stories and bits of trivia. I for one would be interested in knowing how you cram all those people onto Earth --- a kharab, that's a lot of people! Shades of the Mark of Gideon this!

As for the name of the language, just be aware that "Auxlang" actually already has a reasonably well known meaning (any kind of secondary language used for communication between people that don't share a more native language in common). Quintessential here is English, The Auxlang to end all auxlangs. There are also plenty of invented auxlangs, perhaps the best known of which are the likes of Interlingua and Esperanto. I'm not saying don't use it, but people who read your fiction (you seem to writing from this setting) will already know what the word means and may wonder why you didn't bother coming up with a cleverer name! It's kind of like Audi naming it's newest model "Automobile". Yeah...well, duh?
Most of the people live in subterranean cities, floating cities and underwater cities. Most of the land has been restored to its natural state. There are some iconic surface cities, like New York City. I thought it made more sense to have a big city underground with a continuous Central Park on the roof instead of a continuous city on the surface, with no more wildlife and a smattering of Central Parks.

Food production was a concern but I have experience with growing and hydroponics. With known techniques like artificial lighting, climate controls, carbon dioxide enrichment and hydroponics; you can increase the productivity of 1 square meter by 12 times! Indoor farming lets you have 3-4 seasons a year and plants evolved with higher carbon dioxide concentrations than the present day so they are able to grow 3 times faster with higher temps and 3 times the CO2 concentration. There is also genetic modifications which could increase productivity further. Plants do need nutrients and based on my research I think the first one we'll run out of is Phosphorus. I don't literally mean no more Phosphorus, I mean no more that can be mined from ore with a high enough concentration to be economical. What would most likely happen is, there will be shortages, which will drive up prices and then ore with lower concentrations will become economical. At some point, it will become economical to recycle phosphorus from human waste. The economy becoming completely automated with AI and robotics could lower the human resource cost too.

Thanks for welcoming me, and yea, I will try to come up with a new name. I basically wanted my language to be the official secondary language, which everyone has in common.
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Re: Fractal Federation

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fractalfederation wrote: 16 Jun 2018 05:56 Most of the people live in subterranean cities, floating cities and underwater cities. Most of the land has been restored to its natural state. There are some iconic surface cities, like New York City. I thought it made more sense to have a big city underground with a continuous Central Park on the roof instead of a continuous city on the surface, with no more wildlife and a smattering of Central Parks.
Oo, very sensible! By "return to its natural state", does that mean little or no agriculture is going on and the surface world is basically a huge nature reserve? How do a 100bn people eat? Replicator / nutrient extrusion technology? Soylent green?
Food production was a concern but I have experience with growing and hydroponics. With known techniques like artificial lighting, climate controls, carbon dioxide enrichment and hydroponics; you can increase the productivity of 1 square meter by 12 times! Indoor farming lets you have 3-4 seasons a year and plants evolved with higher carbon dioxide concentrations than the present day so they are able to grow 3 times faster with higher temps and 3 times the CO2 concentration. There is also genetic modifications which could increase productivity further. Plants do need nutrients and based on my research I think the first one we'll run out of is Phosphorus. I don't literally mean no more Phosphorus, I mean no more that can be mined from ore with a high enough concentration to be economical. What would most likely happen is, there will be shortages, which will drive up prices and then ore with lower concentrations will become economical. At some point, it will become economical to recycle phosphorus from human waste. The economy becoming completely automated with AI and robotics could lower the human resource cost too.
And an interesting solution. Is the diet reduced in any way? Not all food plants are practical in such an environment, I would guess. Trees, especially. Are there any fresh garden movements in this world? What with everyone eating super veggies grown deep under Pittsburgh in nutrient rich hydrovats, surely some people crave foods grown half wild-ivated up on the surface? You know, with gentle rains and sunshine and aphids and deer and so forth? [:)]
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Re: Fractal Federation

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elemtilas wrote: 16 Jun 2018 06:29
Food production was a concern but I have experience with growing and hydroponics. With known techniques like artificial lighting, climate controls, carbon dioxide enrichment and hydroponics; you can increase the productivity of 1 square meter by 12 times! Indoor farming lets you have 3-4 seasons a year and plants evolved with higher carbon dioxide concentrations than the present day so they are able to grow 3 times faster with higher temps and 3 times the CO2 concentration. There is also genetic modifications which could increase productivity further. Plants do need nutrients and based on my research I think the first one we'll run out of is Phosphorus. I don't literally mean no more Phosphorus, I mean no more that can be mined from ore with a high enough concentration to be economical. What would most likely happen is, there will be shortages, which will drive up prices and then ore with lower concentrations will become economical. At some point, it will become economical to recycle phosphorus from human waste. The economy becoming completely automated with AI and robotics could lower the human resource cost too.
And an interesting solution. Is the diet reduced in any way? Not all food plants are practical in such an environment, I would guess. Trees, especially. Are there any fresh garden movements in this world? What with everyone eating super veggies grown deep under Pittsburgh in nutrient rich hydrovats, surely some people crave foods grown half wild-ivated up on the surface? You know, with gentle rains and sunshine and aphids and deer and so forth? [:)]
Yep, no more surface farming.

Yea I was thinking trees, mostly fruits and nuts, would still have to be grown on the surface. You can keep a tree small by constantly pruning it. You could have a really tall underground grow room. Also, there is genetic engineering, you could engineer tree species to be shorter. Genetic engineering is in it's infancy and scientists have already genetically engineered a goat to produce spider silk molecules in it's milk. If they can mass produce it, it could be an alternative to Kevlar. There is also an experiment with strawberries, which has an artic flounder gene that basically produces an anti-freeze.

I read that most of the US's farmland is actually used to support beef production. Cows eat a lot. In my universe, the majority of meat is artificially grown. Basically, it's a genetically engineered species that grows in barrels. It has no brain, so it's not inhumane. I personally think something like that is inevitable. Scientists have grown a hamburger patty in a petri dish but it's a long way from mass production.
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by Salmoneus »

Hi. There are some interesting ideas here. I hope you don't mind if I seem to be picking holes - it's my instinctive reaction to things, and you clearly have enough inspiration/imagination already... [plus, I have a 500-years-in-the-future setting myself, so i've thought a bit about these things, though I went a very different route from you.]
fractalfederation wrote: 16 Jun 2018 05:56 My universe is 600 years into the future. They have terraformed Venus and Mars
The obvious question is "how". Both planets are a much bigger challenge than you might think.

We can technologically hydrate Mars. That's relatively simple, if not easy in practice. We bash some comets into it or something. More difficult: how do you build a thick atmosphere on a planet that doesn't have enough gravity to hold it? And would an earthlike atmosphere really suffice - because Mars has no (ok, not 'no', but 'a tiny') magnetosphere. The surface is bathed in radiation that would quickly be fatal and would also rip apart any atmosphere you tried to put there. Apparently NASA have theorised building a giant space-magnet, as powerful as the earth itself, to protect Mars, in which case apparently a fair bit of terraforming happens automatically within decades - but that's only theoretical and relies on a space magnet of an almost unimaginable power. The biggest problem, however, may be gravity. Mars doesn't have much, and humans probably need a lot. The problem here is that humans can't survive weighlessness long-term, because it screws up every part of the body* - but because we've only been able to run experiments at 1g and ~0g, we don't know where the limit of survivability is. In particular, the limit of fetal survival is probably much lower, because gravity is needed for a lot of both embryonic development itself and the gestation process more generally. Gravity also makes the other problems worse - like, you'd need about three time the atmosphere of Earth just to have earthlike pressures. [a compromise: you may have enough pressure to not pop, and to be able to breath, but not enough to provide enough oxygen. So you may have people who can walk around without a space suit, but who use respirator masks and air tanks when they're outdoors.]

Note: even if Martian gravity does prove enough to survive, it will have a big impact on physiology: Martians will very clearly not be like normal humans. They'll be very tall, they'll have huge chests (but little muscle mass) and spindly legs, and they won't easily be able to visit other planets. If the gravity is survivable but not great, iirc the first things to go are bones (high levels of osteoporosis; maybe a lot of people in wheelchairs (or with artifical mechanical braces, etc)) and eyes (so they all have cybernetic eyeballs?).

*For instance: the brain is mostly liquid. Gravity creates a pressure differential between your head and your toes; if that differential is lower, your liquid floats on average higher in your body. So the amount of liquid in your skull increases, which is a problem because there's not much room there, what with the brain. The body has to work harder to decrease intercranial pressure, and to do that it does things like reducing your liquid levels directly, causing dehydration. And keeping you intentionally dehydrated puts a strain on your kidneys - so low gravity leads to kidney failure. Now of course, we can say: but people survive lying down, don't they? People lie down for years in hospitals! Yes - but the people who are lying down for years in hospitals also die a lot. All sorts of problems can develop when you become bedridden - and while some of them are due to lack of exercise, a lot of them are probably just due to not having the normal gravitational pull from your head to your toes...


Venus is underlyingly more earthlike, so it's conceptually easier to terraform - it has earthlike gravity (0.9g, iirc?), an atmosphere, a magnetosphere, etc. But in practice it may be just as hard. How do you get rid of all that atmosphere? Presumably some sort of sequestration of carbon, sulphur, etc, but how quickly can you do that? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took centuries...


HOWEVER. The obvious question may be 'how', but the bigger question is actually 'why'. Why bother doing it? Terraforming Mars in particular would be titanically, apocalyptically expensive (and Venus probably would be too, and with the reward further in the future). What's the benefit? If you can feed 100 billion people on eath, why do you need to go to Mars? And if you do want to go to Mars, why do you need to terraform it? Why not just build sealed habitats? The habitat model has the advantage of being scalable - you can start with two people in a shed, and build up to have an entire civilisation. Whereas terraforming requires a single, conscious decision to invest a huge amount, which will only be repaid by full colonisation (if at all), and that decision probably has to be taken at least a century before colonisation would be possible, so the people who decide to terraform won't even know whether there'll be a demand for the resulting land.
Now, you might say "but people want to be out in the open air! They don't want to leave in sealed, lightless, underground tunnels!" - but you're suggesting that the entire population of the earth go and live in tunnels! So why wouldn't they be happy doing the same on Mars? On Earth, your people want to restore the planet to its 'wild' state... so why aren't they happy doing that on Mars?

, there are 100 billion people living on Earth and over a billion living on space stations. There is a new world government called Fractal Federation.
Personally, I think that sounds a bit too anime as a name. At least as an official name. Real world governments would probably be called things like "The United Nations" or "The League of Autonomous Territories" or "The Ecumenical World Council" or something. It's hard to see the President of the Ecumenical World Council (etc) deciding "hey, our authority flow charts kind of look like one of those cool fractal patterns! Let's call ourselves that!".
They have immortality
No they don't. They may have agelessness?
, artificial intelligences (sentient and non-sentient)
OK - why?
Follow-up question: why do they still have people?
The course we seem to be taking now is toward hybrid intelligence: human minds enhanced by artificial means. So, wikipedia can replace a lot of your memory - an if you can access mega-wikipedia as quickly as you can access your memory, your mind has been enhanced, but also made less human (your mind now effectively incorporates wikipedia's search algorithms). The end-point is not having an artificial intelligence drive your car; the end-point is interfacing with your car so wholly that you turn the wheels and change the gears as easily and naturally as you go for a run (and you calculate trajectories and stopping distances more quickly than the current human brain is capable of, thanks to the part of 'you' that is now a computer...). You don't call an AI to turn on your oven before you get home - you turn on the oven yourself, from your office, with a thought, as naturally as reaching over your finger, or even without a thought, just instinctively. And that gets really radical when you introduce the internet. Because there's no reason a particular resource has to belong to you or me - it can be shared. And when you and I share resources that are immediately present to our minds, we're in an important sense no longer as separate as people - if, for instance, you and I can both access and alter the same memory store... ['marriage' in the future may be not having a joint bank account, but having a joint memory, or even joint senses (once our senses are enhanced by artificial sensors giving us a feed, that feed can go to as many people as we choose)].

I think the big problem with SF based on advanced IT is that with really advanced IT it's hard to have a conventional sort of story at all, and in particular it becomes questionable whether you have 'people' in the current sense at all.
they've genetically engineered new sentient species,

Why? what's the point of that? Do we not have enough people as it is?
people can transfer their minds to new bodies or have a back up in case of death and more.
Everyone seems to assume you can just 'upload' on a mind onto a computer, though there's no evidence that this is possible at all. Perhaps more feasible would be just to map the brain exactly and print a replica of it. Of course, once you can copy brains, and replicate minds, you're into a host of ethical and metaphysical quandaries.

In practical terms: would people still have children? Or would rich guys just buy hundreds of replicas of themselves?

Most of the people live in subterranean cities, floating cities and underwater cities. Most of the land has been restored to its natural state. There are some iconic surface cities, like New York City. I thought it made more sense to have a big city underground with a continuous Central Park on the roof instead of a continuous city on the surface, with no more wildlife and a smattering of Central Parks.
This does make conceptual sense. But does it make practical sense? Moving everybody underground would cost an incomprehensible amount of money. Consider: it cost over $20bn to build a couple of tunnels and a bridge in Boston (and cut so many corners that it continues to cost hundreds of millions in constant repairs). New York's 'East Side Access' underground rail project cost around £3.5bn per mile of track. London is soon to open its new rail tunnel, crossing the city from east to west: it will have cost around £15bn. Now imagine that instead of building a single tunnel - the equivalent of a single road on the surface - these projects tried to build a tunnel for each and every one of the hundeds of roads on the surface - we're talking trillions of dollars (or pounds - at these sizes, it doesn't matter which!). And then imagine building a new 'building' underground for each of the tens of thousands of surface buildings lining those roads. [There are 8,000 high-rise buildings in Hong Kong - that's just high-rises!]. We'e talking... hundreds of trillions? Per city? For almost every one of the hundreds of cities in the world? Quadrillions? Tens of quadrillions? Hundreds of quadrillions? And if you really want to return the surface to wilderness, that means you need to put all those long-distance roads and railways underground too... And that's not taking into account the vastly higher costs of life underground. [For instance, underground, heat and humidity build up quickly. So you need giant air pumps and a lot of air-refrigeration. Just think of being on the Victoria Line (substitute local equivalent here) in the middle of summer, and then imagine living like that every hour of evey day... and then of course you need super-bright lighting everywhere if you don't want everyone to get depression and eye pain...]

Who pays for all that? And why? Because there's also a pressing question of how you force everybody on earth to abandon their home - even if you build new ones, how do you force them to leave their old ones?

And why? Cities over only 3% of the land as it is, so you're not even freeing up much space!

Not to mention: it would take 600 years just to build all those tunnels...

[floating cities, while more SF in technology, may actually be more feasible in price in the long run...]
Food production was a concern but I have experience with growing and hydroponics. With known techniques like artificial lighting, climate controls, carbon dioxide enrichment and hydroponics; you can increase the productivity of 1 square meter by 12 times! Indoor farming lets you have 3-4 seasons a year and plants evolved with higher carbon dioxide concentrations than the present day so they are able to grow 3 times faster with higher temps and 3 times the CO2 concentration. There is also genetic modifications which could increase productivity further.
I agree that food isn't a real limit, per se, on population. However, it's important to note that all these techniques cost money. Specifically, they require a lot of energy: creating the equivalent of four seasons of summer sun, indoors, undeground in your case, while recycling water and air, is an immense energy drain. Where does that come from? Do you have huge stockpiles of nuclear waste? Have you covered your 'wild' planet in solar panels? Is the planet smogged by oil fumes?
Plants do need nutrients and based on my research I think the first one we'll run out of is Phosphorus. I don't literally mean no more Phosphorus, I mean no more that can be mined from ore with a high enough concentration to be economical. What would most likely happen is, there will be shortages, which will drive up prices and then ore with lower concentrations will become economical. At some point, it will become economical to recycle phosphorus from human waste. The economy becoming completely automated with AI and robotics could lower the human resource cost too.
It's obviously always possible to recycle resources, as long as we're not actually shooting our precious elements into the sun. But it costs money. If food gets more and more expensive (and given the booming population and need for everyone to live in tunnels, living space must be getting more expensive too), why do people keep having more and more children? As it is, population will plateau at probably under 10 billion - I think 14bn is the highest level I've seen. What happens in your setting to bring about this huge boom in population? How is having so many children in this situation economically profitable?
Thanks for welcoming me, and yea, I will try to come up with a new name. I basically wanted my language to be the official secondary language, which everyone has in common.
For my part, I don't think there's a problem just calling it 'AuxLang'. Your people aren't all going to be conlanging forum members, after all...
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Re: Fractal Federation

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Turning to the language, I have bigger problems...
I didn’t want Fractal Federation using a language like English as it’s legal/official language because that would be showing preferential treatment towards English-speaking cultures. Some areas that require a lot of international interactions have de facto official languages, like English for aviation. Instead of just picking a language, I decided to create a new language solely for law and government use.
A common motivation. But it's worth pointing out that any language you create will be biased toward or against some real languages. A language that is intuitive for an English speaker will be counterintuitive for a Navajo speaker and vice versa[/quote]
The language I created is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA.
N.B. the IPA is a set of symbols for notating sounds. It's not a language, and a language can't be "based on" it.
Each language has a set of sounds that are combined to make words. There are sounds that English doesn’t have, that other languages do have and vice versa. I decided to make AuxLang include every sound from all the different Earthly languages.
What!? Why!?!?
Let me rephrase that: if that's how your language works, you're creating a language that 99.99999% of people cannot even pronounce. Why would everyone in the world learn a language that nobody could pronounce? Can you seriously pronounce words like ↓ŋ̊ǂʰɮ̼ɭ̆ɥy̽˞̘ ʱːʀ̝ʟ̝̊ʼɴɢqʰɡkxʼ˨˩˦ ? Imagine the poor Tongans trying to say that!
There are two types of words, singletons like the, which are a vowel+consonant and then there are the main words, which have multiple variants, like jump, jumped and jumping.
So... you're getting rid of that "not biased toward English" thing, yes?
Main words have a base of consonant+vowel+consonant and then a suffix letter that is a vowel.
Even with CVCV words, you're still having to deal with words like ↓ŋ̊ǂʰɮ̼ɭ̆ɥy̽˞̘ ʱː˩˦↓ŋ̊ǂʰɮ̼ɭ̆ɥy̽˞̘ ʱː˨˩˦, which to me seem like quite a mouthful for everyone to have to get their tongue around...
Also, what about multiple derivations? In human languages, you can usually derive a verb from a noun, say, and then derive a noun from that verb, and so on. How would you handle words like "antidisestablishmentarianism"?
Each suffix represents a variant like a verb, past tense verb, singular noun, plural noun, adjective, adverb, etcetera. In pretty much every other way AuxLang uses an English syntax.
I'm sure you see how this is incredibly biased toward speakers of English, since English has a very unusual syntax that would be alien to everyone who doesn't speak English.
I didn’t like the IPA symbols so I created a new font with new symbols.
OK, though I would say: I don't know why everyone assumes that in the glistening far future of AI, everyone will decide to write with the aesthetics of a 1970s dot-matrix printer. I mean, it's not just you. For some reason we've collectively decided that the future, when it comes to writing, will look sort of like the beginning of computing, when computers and printers couldn't handle things like curves and multiple line length values.
I created a spreadsheet with a way to translate English into AuxLang using either the IPA symbols or the new symbols I made (FFF). Go to File > Make a copy to use the AuxLang spreadsheet for translation. The spreadsheet will display the custom font once you install it and restart the browser.
So AuxLang isn't actually a language. If the grammar is the same as in English, and the words are mapped 1-to-1 to English semantically, then you're not dealing with a language, you're dealing with a code. In your far future, everyone has decided to speak 20th century English in a barely-pronouncible code.

Why?
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by fractalfederation »

I'm not going to respond to everything because a lot of it's already been addressed on my site and I don't want to basically copy and paste my whole site.

First thing, terraforming. It's not practical at all but humans do things that aren't practical just because they want to. Like personal vehicles versus public transportation. I have a spreadsheet that I made for terraforming, its at the bottom of this page: https://www.fractalfederation.com/blog/terraforming/

Present-day economics doesn't really apply. We have artificial intelligences and robotics and self-replication. We could build a bunch of machines, launch them into space and they'd self-replicate to increase their industrial capacity and even massive projects like terraforming become attainable. Humans are proof that self-replication is possible. Nanotechnology will eventually figure it out and worst case we steal the mechanisms from biology but most likely we will find new and better mechanisms compared to biology.

Mars CAN hold an atmosphere, like Titan. It would just be very gradually stripped away, over millions of years. Once you have self-replication, building an EM shield at the Lagrange point isn't a big challenge.

Martians may have trouble when they go to Venus or Earth or a 1G space-station but how bad exactly isn't known. Worst case I think, is we may have to genetically engineer (bioform) a low gravity version of humans.

Immortality, Google says the definition is "the ability to live forever; eternal life." which fits.

Artificial Intelligences. I didn't say anything about hybrid intelligence though i did include it in my universe. My universe is culturally diverse, there are a million different ways that cultures could implement technology and in my universe, I didn't pick one, I picked them all! There are traditional humans, like the Amish. Super-humans that have cybernetic implants with all knowledge and perfect memory recall. There are cockroach-level AIs driving around cars. There are sentient AIs with equal rights. There are people that decided to have a clone instead of a traditional child. Im not picking one concept and applying it to my entire universe, I don't think that's realistic.

Genetically engineered species. why not? Maybe you are 200 years old and you are bored and want to experience something new, so you have a genetically engineered sentient avian species created and transfer your mind to the new body and take flight.

Population Control. We don't need 7 billion people. Humans are obsolete. We should just discontinue the human species and replace our selves with something better. Or you could argue, more people equals bigger economy, which equals more tax revenue, which equals bigger budget to do cool stuff like terraform. For example, the world economy is worth about 75 trillion. If the rest of the world got their economies sorted out and had a middle class as big as the US, the world economy would be worth around 370 trillion. NASA has a budget of 0.5% and 0.5% of 370 is bigger than 0.5% of 75.

Mind transfer. It's hard to say how easy it would be to do without a time machine. The brain still has a lot of unsolved mysteries. I tried to come up with a plausible scenario, like injecting nanomachines into the brain to copy all its neuron positions, dendrites, synapses and receptors. Then they can grow a new body and inject the new brain with the nanomachines to reconfigure it. It's also possible they may just genetically engineer an improved version of the human being, that is easier to do mind transfers on.

Subterranean cities. I dont think present-day economics can be applied. Within 100 years, possibly as soon as 50, we will have AI that is the leading expert in every field of science. Google has already dropped over a billion in AI research and so has IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others. AI is coming very soon, within our life-time. We will all be jobless, the current economy would be obsolete. AI doesn't have to be sentient either, a mouse brain is overkill for 90% of the jobs done by humans. With self-replication, AI and robotics; the economics is just different, its apples and oranges. The subterranean cites don't have to be dank. They can have the walls and ceilings covered with LCD wall paper, elevators that go to the surface, to a gazebo in the middle of a pristine forest.
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by elemtilas »

fractalfederation wrote: 17 Jun 2018 06:41 Artificial Intelligences. I didn't say anything about hybrid intelligence though i did include it in my universe. My universe is culturally diverse, there are a million different ways that cultures could implement technology and in my universe, I didn't pick one, I picked them all! There are traditional humans, like the Amish. Super-humans that have cybernetic implants with all knowledge and perfect memory recall. There are cockroach-level AIs driving around cars. There are sentient AIs with equal rights. There are people that decided to have a clone instead of a traditional child. Im not picking one concept and applying it to my entire universe, I don't think that's realistic.
Diversity of approach is a good thing. Whether SF or F!
Mind transfer. It's hard to say how easy it would be to do without a time machine. The brain still has a lot of unsolved mysteries. I tried to come up with a plausible scenario, like injecting nanomachines into the brain to copy all its neuron positions, dendrites, synapses and receptors. Then they can grow a new body and inject the new brain with the nanomachines to reconfigure it. It's also possible they may just genetically engineer an improved version of the human being, that is easier to do mind transfers on.
Interesting. Kind of like formatting a new hard drive and writing data onto it. One wonders if it's a perfect process! What's their success rate over say six or twelve iterations of the process? Does a polytransferred mind not pick up weird artifacts after a while? Memories of the Disorganised State or the Pretransferral State that persist after mind transfer has taken place? How do they deal with Memory RNA?
Subterranean cities. I dont think present-day economics can be applied. Within 100 years, possibly as soon as 50, we will have AI that is the leading expert in every field of science. Google has already dropped over a billion in AI research and so has IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others. AI is coming very soon, within our life-time. We will all be jobless, the current economy would be obsolete. AI doesn't have to be sentient either, a mouse brain is overkill for 90% of the jobs done by humans. With self-replication, AI and robotics; the economics is just different, its apples and oranges. The subterranean cites don't have to be dank. They can have the walls and ceilings covered with LCD wall paper, elevators that go to the surface, to a gazebo in the middle of a pristine forest.
Project Genesis.

Or Khazad Dum depending on your preference!
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by Salmoneus »

fractalfederation wrote: 17 Jun 2018 06:41 I'm not going to respond to everything because a lot of it's already been addressed on my site and I don't want to basically copy and paste my whole site.
Fair enough. And I'm sure you can appreciate that we don't all want to read through your whole site to find the answer to a specific question.
First thing, terraforming. It's not practical at all but humans do things that aren't practical just because they want to. Like personal vehicles versus public transportation.
I don't think you understand the economics of transportation!
Present-day economics doesn't really apply. We have artificial intelligences and robotics and self-replication.
Economics always applies - it's like entropy. Economics only doesn't apply when you have no scarcity - and scarcity is an inherent feature of humans, not of the world. As Epicurus said: "The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity." That is, even if you have enough wealth to build your own sun, you are always incurring an opportunity cost by doing so: because you could always be doing something else instead.
We could build a bunch of machines, launch them into space and they'd self-replicate to increase their industrial capacity and even massive projects like terraforming become attainable.
Well no, that's not possible. To self-replicate, you'd need to launch your machines at a big pile of the same resources that were used to create your machines in the first place. You still need the resources - the trickiest bit will probably be power sources and batteries, which typically require relatively exotic resources - and you still need the time to put them together. You just don't have to have a person there overseeing it, which is useful (particularly in deep space) but doesn't fundamentally alter the problems. And of course produces its own - self-replicating machines will develop space-cancer, which could be pretty devastating to the neighbourhood.
Mars CAN hold an atmosphere, like Titan. It would just be very gradually stripped away, over millions of years.
Estimates I've seen suggest decades.
Once you have self-replication, building an EM shield at the Lagrange point isn't a big challenge.
Yes, it is.

Martians may have trouble when they go to Venus or Earth or a 1G space-station but how bad exactly isn't known. Worst case I think, is we may have to genetically engineer (bioform) a low gravity version of humans.
Martians will have overwhelming trouble. What isn't known is whether they'll even be able to survive on Mars. Of course, genetic engineering is possible - but then you have people intentionally having children who will only be able to live on Mars, whose parents won't be able to live on Mars, and that takes some rather inhuman technology (in the absence of any actual reason to go to Mars).
Immortality, Google says the definition is "the ability to live forever; eternal life." which fits.
Err... no, it doesn't. Nothing in reality can have the ability to live forever, or eternal life. You can remove aging, but there's still "being hit by a bus". Or there's "planet is destroyed in a supernova". Or there's "universe descends into an irreperable heat death". Long life, sure, but not immortality. At least, not in physics as we currently understand it.
Artificial Intelligences. I didn't say anything about hybrid intelligence though i did include it in my universe. My universe is culturally diverse, there are a million different ways that cultures could implement technology and in my universe, I didn't pick one, I picked them all! There are traditional humans, like the Amish. Super-humans that have cybernetic implants with all knowledge and perfect memory recall. There are cockroach-level AIs driving around cars. There are sentient AIs with equal rights. There are people that decided to have a clone instead of a traditional child. Im not picking one concept and applying it to my entire universe, I don't think that's realistic.
There won't be uniformity. But economics (or 'evolution', same thing) will drive extinct any form of life that cannot viably compete with the most succesful forms.
Genetically engineered species. why not? Maybe you are 200 years old and you are bored and want to experience something new, so you have a genetically engineered sentient avian species created and transfer your mind to the new body and take flight.
Then that's not a sentient avian species - that's a meat-puppet that looks like a bird. But OK, there'll eventually be enough mad oligarchs to make new species, I guess.
Population Control. We don't need 7 billion people. Humans are obsolete.
That's why in the developed world, growth rates are negative.
Most societies have basically zero growth, in the long term. We happen to have come off the end of a unique century in human history where growth was rapid.
We should just discontinue the human species and replace our selves with something better. Or you could argue, more people equals bigger economy, which equals more tax revenue, which equals bigger budget to do cool stuff like terraform. For example, the world economy is worth about 75 trillion. If the rest of the world got their economies sorted out and had a middle class as big as the US, the world economy would be worth around 370 trillion. NASA has a budget of 0.5% and 0.5% of 370 is bigger than 0.5% of 75.
But this overlooks the economics. Individuals don't have children because society would be better off; they have children because they themselves would be better off.
Mind transfer. It's hard to say how easy it would be to do without a time machine. The brain still has a lot of unsolved mysteries. I tried to come up with a plausible scenario, like injecting nanomachines into the brain to copy all its neuron positions, dendrites, synapses and receptors. Then they can grow a new body and inject the new brain with the nanomachines to reconfigure it. It's also possible they may just genetically engineer an improved version of the human being, that is easier to do mind transfers on.
I agree, brain-replication is much more conceptually solid than digital mind-uploading.
Subterranean cities. I dont think present-day economics can be applied. Within 100 years, possibly as soon as 50, we will have AI that is the leading expert in every field of science. Google has already dropped over a billion in AI research and so has IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others. AI is coming very soon, within our life-time. We will all be jobless, the current economy would be obsolete.
Well, none of this really effects the economics: logic and physics keep on going (and hence so does economics, their consequence). It's all very well saying "but AI!", but AI doesn't make it easier to move rocks. And seriously, just think of how many rocks have to be moved to put 100bn underground!
Yes, maybe everyone in the future is rich enough to be able to afford it. But the point remains: why spend so much money on that, rather than on something else?
And this goes to your idea of diversity too, because you're essentially assuming uniformity here. You have 10 times as many people as today (more than). So if only 10% of people don't like living underground, you already have more surface settlement than we have today! And getting 90% of people to agree on anything is hard!
AI doesn't have to be sentient either, a mouse brain is overkill for 90% of the jobs done by humans.
Not that it matters, but no, it isn't. We can test this by training mice to do our jobs. Spoiler: they can't.
With self-replication, AI and robotics; the economics is just different, its apples and oranges. The subterranean cites don't have to be dank. They can have the walls and ceilings covered with LCD wall paper, elevators that go to the surface, to a gazebo in the middle of a pristine forest.
Again, AI has no effect on the core principles of economics, the same way the spinning jenny didn't change the nature of economics.
And AI doesn't solve the problem of air conditioning. It means that you don't need somebody at the air conditioning monitor every day, but other than that it doesn't change anything. Nor does covering the walls and ceilings with LCDs accomplish air conditioning. The subterranean heat problem is not a problem of AI or LCDs, it's a problem of basic physics.


Of course, with enough money, fusion reactors on every corner (and let's be clear, it's fusion that's the world changer, not AI or robotics), sure, you can do anything. But you seem to radically underestimate how much money that needs, and not to appreciate the economic basis of development (even with magic, you don't just wave your hand and get what's best - there's a process, and it's economic). And then the underlying problem is: sure, you can handwave a magical world of robot unicorns where nobody wants anything and everything is cheap and easy, but then you can't really have a meaningful story in that setting, because it's scarcity that drives narrative. Unless you're going to do some sort of literary novel about the ineliminability of existential ennui....

But anyway, I don't want to distract from the fact that your bigger problem is with the language.
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by elemtilas »

Salmoneus wrote: 17 Jun 2018 16:15
fractalfederation wrote: 17 Jun 2018 06:41 I'm not going to respond to everything because a lot of it's already been addressed on my site and I don't want to basically copy and paste my whole site.
If picking holes is your specialty, Devil's advocacy is mine!

A lot of valid points you make, and I'll address a few.

As a counter argument I'd posit that most if not all near-future SF stories are set in worlds with quite impossible societies, economies and technologies. Even relatively sane settings like Star Trek. Ultimately, as with any of these imaginary worlds, it is what it is!
Present-day economics doesn't really apply. We have artificial intelligences and robotics and self-replication.
Economics always applies - it's like entropy. Economics only doesn't apply when you have no scarcity - and scarcity is an inherent feature of humans, not of the world. As Epicurus said: "The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity." That is, even if you have enough wealth to build your own sun, you are always incurring an opportunity cost by doing so: because you could always be doing something else instead.
This is true. And yet it wasn't so long ago that we just decided to do one of the most uneconomical things imaginable --- putting a man on the Moon! I agree about opportunity cost: we còuld have done so many other things with all that brain power, money and energy. But in stead we decided to go to a place we don't yet have any business going. Humans don't often do what is actually best but always do what they think is best at the time.

It wasn't so long before that the general consensus was that it was entirely economical for people to own other people. Times change, economic considerations change. It seems at least plausible that in a far distant future as described that our economic truths will be long overthrown.

Imagine trying to describe to a serf of 600 years ago a world where even the poorest of people have cell phones with near instantaneous connectivity to anyone else in the world, where even poor people live in adequate to entirely acceptable housing, drive cars and have this thing called leisure time, where literacy is commonplace and basic education too, where basic healthcare is nearly universally available, where audio and visual entertainment is the push of a button away. And more importantly, these things are nòt the province of the king or the bishop, but where even poor people can afford! And not only afford, but afford to throw away when it becomes dated!

As you said: economics of scarcity comes into play. I'd hazard the guess that an economic system whose demonstrated deeds of fact include terraforming Mars and Venus has already solved the economic problems we're plagued with.
Mars CAN hold an atmosphere, like Titan. It would just be very gradually stripped away, over millions of years.
Estimates I've seen suggest decades.
Once you have self-replication, building an EM shield at the Lagrange point isn't a big challenge.
Yes, it is.
The problem with estimates is that is all they are. We won't know which estimate is right until we try. In a fictional world, there is no reason why the high end estimate can't be right. Or even splitting the difference! 500000 years in the future, assuming the Borg haven't simply wiped us off the face of the universe, simply because they can, who is to say that a process to regenerate the Martian core and magnetosphere won't give many billions of years of life to the once red planet?

With that kind of technological advance and economic scale (and, pray God, the social, spiritual and cultural evolution to meet those challenges) over the course of long centuries and longer millennia can do is, for us, clearly the province of fiction! There is no telling what will actually be possible!
Immortality, Google says the definition is "the ability to live forever; eternal life." which fits.
Err... no, it doesn't.
Actually, it does. Your search may vary, but that's actually what Google says.
Nothing in reality can have the ability to live forever, or eternal life. You can remove aging, but there's still "being hit by a bus". Or there's "planet is destroyed in a supernova". Or there's "universe descends into an irreperable heat death". Long life, sure, but not immortality. At least, not in physics as we currently understand it.
Being hit by a bus does not preclude immortality as defined. The ability to do something is not predictive of whether that thing will be done in actuality. Also with mind transferance (and presumably archival storage!), the transience of any given physical body becomes a moot point. When you're hit by a bus, and your present iteration body dies, the medico-legal proceedings begin for the design & fabrication of a new body and the transferrance of your most recent mind-dump. You might miss a few days or weeks of actual experience while the transferrance takes place, but there will certainly a be an app that will implant up to the moment factual knowledge of current events so that you'll be able to easily catch up!
Artificial Intelligences. I didn't say anything about hybrid intelligence though i did include it in my universe. My universe is culturally diverse, there are a million different ways that cultures could implement technology and in my universe, I didn't pick one, I picked them all! There are traditional humans, like the Amish. Super-humans that have cybernetic implants with all knowledge and perfect memory recall. There are cockroach-level AIs driving around cars. There are sentient AIs with equal rights. There are people that decided to have a clone instead of a traditional child. Im not picking one concept and applying it to my entire universe, I don't think that's realistic.
There won't be uniformity. But economics (or 'evolution', same thing) will drive extinct any form of life that cannot viably compete with the most succesful forms.
Thank God you're not in charge of who lives and who becomes extinct! [;)] Unless human society degrades utterly over the next 600 to 1200 years, I see no reason whatsoever why this must be the case. Yes, perhaps, if we become more Machine than Man, if our priorities shift so fundamentally that pure efficiency & economics of every action become the cornerstones of society, then yes, non-viable people (like the Amish, like the poor, like the retarded, like the handicapped --- and heck! the creative, the streetsmart but not uberintelligent) will be easy to dehumanise & eliminate from society.
Genetically engineered species. why not? Maybe you are 200 years old and you are bored and want to experience something new, so you have a genetically engineered sentient avian species created and transfer your mind to the new body and take flight.
Then that's not a sentient avian species - that's a meat-puppet that looks like a bird. But OK, there'll eventually be enough mad oligarchs to make new species, I guess.
Correct. That "species" would only be sentient in so far as there are human minds willing to be transferred into individuals of that design specification.

I'd argue that "species" is probably not even the right word to use in that circumstance.
Subterranean cities. I dont think present-day economics can be applied. Within 100 years, possibly as soon as 50, we will have AI that is the leading expert in every field of science. Google has already dropped over a billion in AI research and so has IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others. AI is coming very soon, within our life-time. We will all be jobless, the current economy would be obsolete.
Well, none of this really effects the economics: logic and physics keep on going (and hence so does economics, their consequence). It's all very well saying "but AI!", but AI doesn't make it easier to move rocks.
True, but it can be applied to solving the problem of moving rock (while at the same time ensuring structural stability!). Obviously, again because the FF has demonstrated that it has already been done, clearly the problem of merely moving rock in the first place has been solved. Presumably, the AI as it was some time in the relatively recent past came up with a new technology or a new application of an old technology and a plan to move rock with that technology. Maybe something a lot like a tricked out phacoemulsifier. That's the thing they use to suck out your cataracts. It can be used to carve, to break up and the transfer material from one place to another. A mega-engineering machine, composed of smaller synchronised components, all directed by the AI (and supervised by the human Oversight Committee), could easily tunnel out a vast architecture of aesthetically pleasing and diverse underground living spaces, install all human required infrastructure & subsystems and make it move-in ready.
And seriously, just think of how many rocks have to be moved to put 100bn underground!
Quite a bit! But just remember: Khazad Dum wasn't dolven in a day; and the hewing of a ton of ore begins with but a single swing of the pick.
Yes, maybe everyone in the future is rich enough to be able to afford it. But the point remains: why spend so much money on that, rather than on something else?
And the answer is quintessentially human: why not?

I'd posit that the economics of this future are radically different. People may not even need to be rich to afford these things. With the infrastructure in place, it may well be that society itself is what is rich enough to afford these things. Personal wealth, money, greed, the need for every individual to grasp for resources just keep body and soul together may all be moot points. The economics of the future, in the FF, may well be more like "I as an individual do not work for money. I don't buy things and don't pay for daily needs. I work for the benefit of all society, whether it's in the Summa Directorium or whether it's tweaking bots to properly sweep the streets. In repayment for this labour, I receive the benefits of 27th century existence: a home to call my own, food sufficient for the day, infrastructure taken care of, opportunities to learn & enrich my mind, the ability to store that mind and imprint it upon a new body when this one fails."
And this goes to your idea of diversity too, because you're essentially assuming uniformity here. You have 10 times as many people as today (more than). So if only 10% of people don't like living underground, you already have more surface settlement than we have today! And getting 90% of people to agree on anything is hard!
Fair point. But, again because the problem has already been solved, it becomes a matter of simple explanation. Perhaps there was a government mandate. You have a choice: relocate willingly, or relocate unwillingly!

I'd also imagine that these underworld delvings are not dank & musty cramped little caverns. They must be environmentally very open and emulative of the middleworld. There must be artificial natural light, air and breezes, occasional changes in temperature and perhaps even some simulated weather. Moving from above to below would have to be about like moving from Bourdeaux to Nice.
AI doesn't have to be sentient either, a mouse brain is overkill for 90% of the jobs done by humans.
Not that it matters, but no, it isn't. We can test this by training mice to do our jobs. Spoiler: they can't.
With self-replication, AI and robotics; the economics is just different, its apples and oranges. The subterranean cites don't have to be dank. They can have the walls and ceilings covered with LCD wall paper, elevators that go to the surface, to a gazebo in the middle of a pristine forest.
Again, AI has no effect on the core principles of economics, the same way the spinning jenny didn't change the nature of economics.
But the spinning jenny did have an effect! Whenever you change the way something is made, in this case, the spinning jenny allows one worker to produce the amount of thread twelve workers could make before, you fundamentally change the economics of everything downstream. This worker now has additional training, additional responsibility and a different level of competency. Wage structures change, workflow changes, she's producing so much now, she doesn't have to work eight days a week. She can work four and still be three times as productive. More product becomes available, prices fall, ancient businesses fail, new ones rise to the challenges, social attitudes change, people halfway around the world are (economically) enslaved to keep up with demand, wars are fought over resources, other wars are fought over anticolonial sentiment, etc. etc. Everything has been utterly and fundamentally changed, just because of one machine.

Extrapolate into the future 600 to 1200 years...AI could have astoundingly awesome and terrifying effects on future economic principles. Everything we think we know now could change in ways we can, at present, only dream of! And here is one depiction of that dream.
And AI doesn't solve the problem of air conditioning. It means that you don't need somebody at the air conditioning monitor every day, but other than that it doesn't change anything. Nor does covering the walls and ceilings with LCDs accomplish air conditioning. The subterranean heat problem is not a problem of AI or LCDs, it's a problem of basic physics.
Those are problems that, in this setting, have been attacked and perhaps at least in part solved by AI.

Of course, with enough money, fusion reactors on every corner (and let's be clear, it's fusion that's the world changer, not AI or robotics), sure, you can do anything. But you seem to radically underestimate how much money that needs, and not to appreciate the economic basis of development (even with magic, you don't just wave your hand and get what's best - there's a process, and it's economic). And then the underlying problem is: sure, you can handwave a magical world of robot unicorns where nobody wants anything and everything is cheap and easy, but then you can't really have a meaningful story in that setting, because it's scarcity that drives narrative. Unless you're going to do some sort of literary novel about the ineliminability of existential ennui....
The nice thing about money is that it doesn't actually go anywhere. It remains in the system. It moves from place to place, passing through multiple hands on its never ending journey, but it is never actually wasted.

Think about it this way: people complain (frequently) whenever we send a probe to Mars or into deep space that "we throw tens of billions of dollars into outer space!" when we could be throwing it somewhere else. That probe, at scrap prices, is probably something like $3000 to $5000 worth of junk that actually gets shot into space. The rocket falls back to Earth and can/could be recycled.

But those tens of billions of dollars are not wasted! They get blasted out of the Earth-side of the project: that money goes into people's pockets. The people that research and develop spacecraft, sure. The people that build spacecraft, sure. But also the people that find, obtain, refine, design & manufacture all the bits and pieces that go into that probe, design and build all the infrastructure, make and prepare all the food, build & maintain all the facilities, teach all the children, grow all the food, transport all the goods, perform all the non-tangible services.

I'd say $5000 > $10,000,000,000 is a pretty good return on investment! FF just bumps that up an order of magnitude.
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Re: Fractal Federation

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When I said present day economics doesn't apply, I didn't mean economics theory in general. I just meant that it would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars to build a computer as powerful as an iPhone 10 a hundred years ago, now it only cost $1000. Also, compared to 100 years ago, everyone has gotten richer, rich people are richer and poor people are richer. It's not really the scarcity of raw materials, it's the scarcity of efficiency. To build a computer as powerful as an iPhone 10 would of required the entire land area of Delaware and millions of tons of copper. Not very efficient. We developed new technologies and techniques which reduced the cost. Self-replication would have the same effect. You only need to produce the seed machines, after that they self-replicate on their own. They don't need healthcare or a salary and you don't need to purchase the raw materials in asteroid belt, they can just be declared property of Earth and be used in ways that benefit all Earthlings. Saying terraforming would cost too much, just doesn't make sense, present-day economics doesn't apply.
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Re: Fractal Federation

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So, this seems to be a pretty interesting setting so far. You mention mining the asteroid belt and terraforming Venus & earth, so they must have a relatively advanced spaceflight capability. Have they moved beyond the belt at all? Beyond the solar system? Encountered anyone else out there?

What sort of big conflicts and stories do you envision for your world?
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Re: Fractal Federation

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They have colonized other stars. They don't care about habitable planets, they just need the raw materials to build space stations. I used laser propelled light sails, with self-replicating machines as the payload. Once the probe arrives at a star system, it begins exponential growth. When the industrial capacity reaches a certain point, they start building space stations, communications satellites and incubators. The colonists then digitize their minds and send themselves to the new star via laser beam. When they arrive, they are activated in a virtual world until their bodies are ready. Interstellar travel is very difficult so there isn't any interstellar trade.
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by elemtilas »

fractalfederation wrote: 21 Jun 2018 13:44 They have colonized other stars. They don't care about habitable planets, they just need the raw materials to build space stations. I used laser propelled light sails, with self-replicating machines as the payload. Once the probe arrives at a star system, it begins exponential growth. When the industrial capacity reaches a certain point, they start building space stations, communications satellites and incubators. The colonists then digitize their minds and send themselves to the new star via laser beam. When they arrive, they are activated in a virtual world until their bodies are ready. Interstellar travel is very difficult so there isn't any interstellar trade.
That's a different take on interstellar colonisation! If the exploration probe does find a habitable enough planet, would they seek to terraform it so the new arrivals could live planetside?
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Re: Fractal Federation

Post by Curlyjimsam »

I really like the name "Fractal Federation", realistic or not.
The Man in the Blackened House, a conworld-based serialised web-novel
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