You know the one that don't try to exploit you and actually treat you well (and pay well to )

Electrically charged antimatter, like bare positron, anti-proton or even a molecule consisting of antimatter atoms might be convenient to store inside specially formed molecules. Biomolecules can be convenient to make by using mRNA methods (the same made famous by vaccines) in cows and then taking that substance from cow blood or from some organ. Use the molecules as is or as scaffolding for other atoms, from uranium to lithium.

There might be strange extra reason to use the biomolecules as is. If panpsychism and "soul" (if that is a correct word in this context?) are real and they interface and interact with normal physics by having some biomolecules react to electric fields in ways that normal physics does not predict, that same property might happen to make biomolecules better for storing antimatter.

Would be good if the storage could be able to withstand at least acceleration of Earth's gravity without the antimatter falling to touch the matter. Antimatter can be used in spacecraft propulsion and if that is in open space with mild acceleration, much less than 1 g strength could be ok. Yes, it is fantastically difficult to make antimatter in useful amounts and get it inside the container molecules, but that is a discussion for another day.

What if the antimatter and it's container molecule are made so cold that their quantum states start to overlap like with bosen-einstein condensate?

A hypothetical exploring the possibilities of the impossible kind of teleportation, but with a very limiting factor.

You could obviously still lay pipes and cables through it, power, supplies, and communication in remote places is effectively a non-issue.

But what else can we do with a 12 inch space hole?

Like how do they use it, it so clunky and heavy, design like these would not pass in today standard (or Future Even)

Cover the entire Sun with a sphere of convex statites, each focusing on a point on the Sun's surface. These statites would then greatly increase the Sun's surface temperature, making its solar wind millions of times more powerful.

Collect the material ejected by the solar wind using electromagnetic fields, cool it, and store it in tanks around the sphere (the sphere would be actively supported, using a shell of orbiting rings, so they wouldn't need to be in orbit).

The material could then be used in huge fusion reactors to produce extra power if needed and to power the starlifting process itself.

Eventually you would end up with an actively supported shell of hydrogen and helium tanks with a little over half a solar mass and a red dwarf star remnant of the Sun that would be fully convective, and therefore could be maintained indefinitely as long as you extracted the accumulated helium from it and fed it with the previously extracted hydrogen. There's nothing stopping you from doing the whole job and completely dismantling the Sun, though.

To light the planets (if they hadn't been dismantled themselves) you would maintain a sunline on the ecliptic, which would produce artificial light with the Sun's current spectrum, the rest of the sphere would be covered with radiators with lower temperatures (but still producing plenty of visible light, probably) that could be collected by a Dyson Swarm or any habitat orbiting outside the ecliptic to provide energy.

When the starlifting process is complete you could dim the radiators a lot, but energy could still be beamed from the surface of the sphere to continue powering the habitats outside the ecliptic.

You could get the starting materials to build many statites with the systems needed to perform starlifting and the orbital rings needed to connect them from Mercury; after that the process could provide all the materials needed to expand itself.

This could technically be done on any star, as long as you have the initial infrastructure in place, but it would be faster initially on larger stars; as the process progresses using fusion reactors as the primary source of energy to power the star mining process rather than using the star's own light would tend to close the gap.

Assuming space-warp based ftl is possible in either the form of wormholes or an Alcubierre drive - and considering the tremendous energies involved could in one case easily ruin everyone’s day across an entire star system should it go boom (wormholes) and the other case is capable of sterilizing entire planetary surfaces as it’s “turning off”… do you think there would be a minimum distance from the edge of a star system alcubierre-engine fitted ships would need to turn off at, and coast in at quick interplanetary speeds? Same for wormholes;

It’s a mechanic I’ve been playing with in my mind as a way to make ftl fit into a more hard sci-fi setting.

Thoughts?

After reading this post on the feasibility of long-term asteroid mining, a notion occurred to me. Since matter can't be destroyed only transformed, will the amount of stuff that is transformed by human activity eventually reach a point where the amount that can be recycled exceed the amount that is available to extract from natural sources?

Let's say interstellar space is truly insurmountable. Humans can't expand a contiguous civilization beyond the solar system. People can leave on thousand year journeys to other systems, but after that we can't cooperate and share.

Could we continue to recycle our finite materials indefinitely? Helped a little by fusion based transmutations. With the sun's energy? Is there such a thing as a "perpetual motion machine" for matter transformation? Obviously not energy, we would use what the sun has left to give us. But is it theoretically possible to keep recycling material and each time only adding in new energy?

Eventually it might just be better for everyone to leave the system once it dries out. Leaving behind a skeleton crew of a few trillion to continue the scrap heap civilization that remains. Or maybe people leave to other systems with the promise of shooting stuff to our system? There will be an initial delay, but if prospectors that are sent out keep their promise, interstellar highways streaming giant resource chunks flying to other systems would be an inevitable thing.

What is the expected average composition of the universe with relation to the periodic table? I think most stars follow a well-understood compositional elements based on its position in the sequence. From that, one could probably infer the average atomic number distribution, ie there are so many red dwarf stars * x rate of production of iron (Fe)…

Can we expect the distribution of elements in our solar system in similar proportion in far-flung galaxies? I came to wonder this while discussing what alien life forms might look like, and I posited that they would probably end up looking somewhat similar to us if there is a comparable amount of O2, SiO2, Fe etc. if not, then the likelihood of Si based life forms or something else might increase.

The question relates more to just our solar system as of course asteroid mining will always be a thing thanks to interstellar travel, however it seems all the asteroids will quickly get claimed by nations and corporations making it a relatively short lived career.

I didn’t use any math, so this is just an assumption. Am I missing something?

Imagine that a wormhole has been created in a lab and that the authorities have decided to transport one of the mouths to another star system. The mouth is transported inside of an FTL ship (which is now moving at FTL speeds) whilst the other mouth is sitting idly in normal space (for lack of a better term).

What would happen if e.g. an astronaut were to travel through the idle end and onto the ship travelling at FTL speeds? Would they make it into the ship safe and sound or somehow perish in the attempt? Would the wormhole collapse (whether that be when it is used or when it is first transported at FTL speeds)? Would the ship blow up or would something completely nonsensical happen? I suppose if it were safe, then the crew could (in an emergency) use the wormhole to bail out of the ship and return to normal space.

Bonus question: what would happen if both mouths were being transported at FTL speeds (with one mouth on one ship and one on the other)?

Most SF stories with AI I’ve read usually have the AI already fully developed and are so advanced that they’re at a stage more like magic/Clarketech. But since we appear to be in the early stages of an actual AI revolution, I thought it would be interesting to collect some stories of authors’ predictions for the myriad directions it might development (eg. Stories that involve showing that development as part of their focus). Thanks for any suggestions!

Kind of a follow up to a topic I posted earlier, and one comment in particular on that topic. In the future (lets say 2323 AD) what would be your ideal way of interacting with AR/VR?

Would you want a headset that is high-quality but bulky (or comparatively for the future), or something far more accessible and casual but with less quality like glasses or contact lenses? Or maybe a cyborg implant to your eyes or visual cortex, which is both casual and high quality but with the drawback of being a surgical implant. Or perhaps you're uninterested entirely and still use simple physical 2D screens, very retro. Or maybe something else. What would you do?

View Poll

In transhuman societies, one thing that I think we would have to get used to is inequality under the law. I think that it would be wise for such societies to judge people by their intellectual capacity and power. To put it simply, the smarter and more powerful you get, the more extreme measures you need to take to deal with misbehavior.

For example at the lowest extreme, an unaugmented human baseline would have incomplete citizenship and as a result wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. If such an individual was even able to commit a crime it would be more an issue of incompetence on the part of society. On the other extreme, a post human moon brain controlling key infrastructure would be required to undergo constant thought auditing and be subject to instant destruction upon detection of insanity or harmful intent.

Basically, the more power you amass the more accountability is expected from you. This is the concept of equitable justice. In our society, this would be unfair and disastrous but in a society where intelligence and capability can be augmented and such opportunities are widely available it would be necessary.

So how does this effect matters? Officially we have two moons now.v