Grrl Power #1408 – Celestial self-refilling Xmas stocking
It’ll probably be a few pages before we see Nthaniel again. He’s going to do a quick census of all humans in the universe. Or maybe just a statistically significant sample size.
I don’t know why the starforge is that close to the star. (Besides it looking cool.) I assume the solar panels also convert heat and every other form of radiation into electricity as well. If you’re wondering why everyone in space doesn’t have one of these, well, the startup time is a lot. They also contain a lot of materials that are hard to replicate, so a Starforge starter kit is really, really expensive. Like, GDP of a planet for like a decade. And granted, part of that is that the people who know how to make them don’t just put the specs out on Gal-net for anyone to try and build themselves. The galactic economy mostly revolves around energy, time, information, and entertainment, but it’s also well understood that if everyone had unlimited access to matter replicators and unlimited power, the economy would probably fall apart. So how did Dabbler get her hands on one? The short version is she got a good look at one and figured out how to build her own. It was fidgety and had a much longer start-up time than an industrial one that a multi-planet empire could afford, but she found a star out in BFE and let it do its thing.
Dabbler’s automated construction process didn’t build the entire base. Mostly it consumed a portion of that asteroid the base currently sits in, then constructed a few habital rooms, which she started stocking with computers and fabricators to accelerate the next steps, then made a huuuuuge cavern to stockpile base construction materials, set up a bunch of automated defenses, then went off adventuring for like thirty years and totally forgot about it. Then she came back, found the base all built, albeit a tenth the size of it is now, and that it had been taken over by space pirates who were mad at her because her automated defenses whittled them down to like 30% of their starting numbers. But they had built themselves back up to a respectable number, so it turned into a really fun side mission where she had to infiltrate their ships one at a time and hack the main computers so they’d accidentally target each other instead of destroying the base when she took it back. And by took it back, I mean a stealth mission that inevitably deteriorates to ultra violent room clearing when the stealth portion fails. Because Dabbler’s life is a video game. It’s obviously also a XXX hentai seduction game, because… you know.
And now that I’ve had five seconds to think about it, I think she’d be more into seducing the low-rank ensign pirates who have the Yellow Key in their inventory than seducing the grizzled captains who have main computer core access. Yeah. That feels right. Also… there’s less chance that the low rank pirate has gotten privileges with captured… stock. They’re space pirates. Dabbler is a fan of CNC, but not NC.
It’s a little odd that Cora is using the metric system, but I guess she’s doing conversions for the Terrans’ benefit. Unfortunately, they’re Americans, so if her conversions are off by a factor of ten… Actually they probably wouldn’t know. The metric system is kind of funny, though. 1 gram is supposedly 1 cm^3 of water. I assume fresh water at sea-level in 1 G of gravity at 4°C, which is for some reason when water is at its highest density. A lot of that in stuff that doesn’t really hit on a universal scale. The reason I say it’s funny is that while the metric system is all about powers of ten, a meter is defined as how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second. That’s not a power of ten, and come to think of it, a second is pretty arbitrary. I mean, not arbitrary. It’s 1/60/60/24/365.25, of a year of the planet that happens to be in the habital zone of our solar system. Hardly a unit that would be adopted galaxy-wide. Of course, a second has retroactively been defined as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium atom, which is probably a pretty stable constant, but still feels a little arbitrary.
It got me thinking, what would be acceptable galactic standard units? I think the main problem with the metric system is that a meter is not terribly human friendly. People like round numbers and I think 90% of adult humans are between 5 and 6 feet tall. Which is 1.524 to 1.8288 meters tall. I think most metric countries actually use CM for height, but my point is, I think CMs are too small, Ms are too big. Decimeters aren’t bad actually. They’re almost 4 inches, so “a hand” in horse-imperial. I mean, I think literally the only time “hand” is used is for measuring horse-shoulder height, which is odd. Now that I think about it, it’s super odd that a foot is the length of some arbitrary king’s foot, while a hand is the width of a hand. Yeah, I’m not defending the imperial system either.
Anyway, I do like a measurement based on the speed of light, which is really just the universal speed limit for massless particles. You’d think that would be a pretty stable constant – except, the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating, so a light-year from 14 billion years ago is a very different measurement than is it now. Which means even a light year isn’t a constant. So I don’t know what an actual proper constant would be. Probably molecular vibration, which is only good for time and not distance. Even that will change with the heat-death of the universe, but for now, it’s probably pretty stable. If you don’t factor gravity in. Something in a tall building does experience time at a different rate than something at sea level because its affected by less gravity. Granted, it’s probably somewhere in the septillionth decimal place, but the difference between a planet with 1 gravity and 1.1 gravities might be in the billionth decimal place. So there goes that constant.
Basically I’m pretty sure the way it would work is the dominant military or cultural race, or just the first one to spread across the galaxy gets to dictate what their standard units are, and everyone else has to do conversions.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I’m glad the output isn’t obscene
That kind of structure has to put a large percentage of any growth into maintenance, though economy of scale thresholds will help with that. Having a *staffed* facility has a ton of benefits but the biggest drawback is definitely the maintenance costs.
This feels appropriately end-game level gear that fits with dabbler’s known background and foresightedness (and greed for gadgetry)
Actually the output is close to realistic, but actually a little bit low. If you take the energy output of the sun’s surface and find how much energy is captured by 100,000 km^2 of solar panels, then compare it to the energy needed to create 200kg of matter, you find that it would take somewhere between 2s and 2min to gather that much energy. In the strip she says it takes a day, so it’s a bit low, but like you said, maybe some of the energy is spent on maintenance and such. Also maybe the matter replicators themselves aren’t very efficient.
You also must consider that the Starforge may not be able to direct all of its output into any given material, as evidenced by the fact that the daily output was different for different materials.
For instance, “dozens of kilograms of gold” actually seems really low since gold is just a pure material off of the periodic table, whereas Reflexium and Sapphire would both have a crystal structure of multiple elements.
I can only assume the low gold output is because, frankly, pure gold wouldn’t be particularly useful for someone who had the resources to build a Starforge (see earlier discussion of the Geomancer pulling gold out of the Earth’s core).
There is also the fact that A LOT of that energy would have to go into keeping the forge at the appropriate height to not get pulled into the star and melted, as it’s in an extremely close orbit. Not to mention shielding the structure from the immense radiation and heat the star is giving off.
its a little crazy how advanced this piece of tech is
but then Nth-aniel goes and does a quick sensus of every living human in the universe just on a hunch, really sets how far apart the Nth are from everyone else in the universe if they can just do something like that
Not only did he do that, he did so by walking, not a ship, not teleportation… WALKING. That’s a power level so high that the dude just defies space-time with the same casualness you or I would view walking to our mailbox in the morning to check our mail.
I love this. And I would note: something like this is actually achievable IN OUR OWN LIFETIMES. IN THE NEXT CENTURY. If we put time and other resources into it, we could achieve this. A solar powered space station and automated construction facilities? The only thing we can’t do – yet – is readily convert materials into different materials. But between the asteroid belts and the oort cloud and all the other things out there in our system, we have a LOT of raw material already available.
I honestly think we’re maybe 20 years out from being able to build replicating factories, if we put our minds to it. The biggest obstacle is actually how much of manufacturing tech is proprietary rather than published, or worse, black art that just gets passed informally from one generation to the next.
All systems of meassurement are random, arbitrary and completely meaningless to any other cuture unless it ws imposed on them or they had to learn it for commerce or to scam people that didn’t use that system. Metric is for people who can’t do math and can only shift decimal points around a little, that gives us plane crashes because the conversion was off when the calculating fuel load.
That said, I’m 5 ft 27 cm…BRING BACK THE FARTHING !!!!
Planck units are arguably natural but not particularly convenient (except the Planck mass which is around 22 micrograms).
You’d need a unit derived from something fundamental. The speed of light is actually a really good baseline for a universal system of speed because if everything is measured as a percentage of the speed of light, that’s a universal constant. But then like you said, that’s not particularly convenient when you’re talking about the average freeway speed being 0.00000895C. But it is technically functional… Until another civilization rocks up with a base 12 number system and now you need a universal system of numbers to even communicate the value as a percentage.
1 gram (g) of water is 1 cubic centimeter (cm^3) at standard temperature and pressure (STP). That’s 20 degrees Celsius (°C), 1 atmosphere (atm). How was this not a comment before I got here?
Admittedly, the density difference between STP and 4°C, 1 atm is not much. It’s certainly measurable, and it can easily result in some critical differences. For example, if you store 40 liters (l) of water at 4°C and 1atm in a container that is basically 40l, and then you let it warm up to 20°C, you’re going to have a mess, and if your container was closed, well it’s now open. Somewhere. But when talking astronomic terms? Whatever. It’s a rounding error.
A gram was originally defined by the density of water at zero degrees Celsius, then was redefined to be at four degrees, and then was redefined by setting the value of Planck’s constant. It was never defined by water at STP, except for people used to working in very cold laboratories.
Leaving aside the temperature that water is at for the 1g (which I don’t think was ever 20°C) it also helps for figuring out units of energy since those are based off that same unit of water. They did put some thought into the whole “universality” thing.
You could base this on weights/speeds of smaller subatomic particles, but that gets weird fast. Almost as weird as Imperial.
The problem with relating the speed of light to all those is probably the SECONDS. Because a multi tiered time system with base 60 inserted for two increments in the middle only is whack-a-doodle.
Stupid planet not having exactly stable orbit with the day/night matching up perfectly with a solid decimal number of days per orbit…
If you want a universal system of weights you’d use x number of atoms of something as a standard mass. Which is being done now, with a very accurate mass of silicon, google International Avogadro Project.
A universal system of measurement would have to be done in terms of so many wavelengths of light of an exact frequency in a state of zero relative motion with no or standard gravity affecting the measurement. Such would probably have to be done in space, and the selected count would be the standard length.
There are a number of natural standard clocks that could be used, and we do, currently cesium clocks, it’s all a matter of deciding how many counts are a standard second.
What we do now is calibrate the traditional measurements in terms of the more accurate natural measurements. Which works, but really is because nobody wants to recalculate EVERY calculation done since the dawn of science.
As long as her Star Forge doesn’t use the dark side of the force and get’s corrupted by any Sith Lords, things should be fine.
Deus has a nice operation going.
But compared to Dabbler, he is doing beginner stuff.
Kardashev scale << 1 vs ~ 1 – I don't think most people have a grasp on the sheer amounts of energy a star produces.
The impression I have from what I’ve read is that the speed of light is a constant that has not changed since the creation of the universe and is relative to both everything and nothing. Like, for two objects moving directly toward each other at 50% of light speed relative to each other, light emitted by each is moving at light speed relative to both of them in every direction, even though they are themselves moving at a high percentage of the speed of light themselves. And for two objects each moving at the speed of light toward an object directly in between them, they are also moving at the speed of light relative to each other, even though the distance between them is reducing at twice that pace from the perspective of the unmoving third object in the middle. Geometrically it’s nonsensical but apparently it’s the way massless particle waves work and serves as the upper bound of velocity for everything in the universe relative to each other?
Geometrically (well, differential geometrically, anyway) it makes sense if you consider that spacetime is mathematically speaking not a flat 4-dimensional Euclidean space; it’s a manifold that can curve in complex ways. And it is defined to curve in precisely the way that makes all light rays straight lines, everything else be damned.
Regarding the cesium atom vibration thing, originally a second was defined as 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of a day, but then they noticed the Earth’s rotation was slowing down by just a tiny bit over time that could only be noticed by super-precise measuring equipment (like clocks running on cesium vibrations because quartz crystals are too inconsistent), and just redefined it as the number of cesium vibrations that happened in what was 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of a day at a specific day and time and latitude and altitude. (Supposedly GPS satellites move fast enough their clocks have to expressly compensate for relativistic-speed time dilation and occasionally need to be resynched, even though they’re also using atomic clocks?)
Also, yes, decimeters would be a much more convenient measurement for “human size” than meters, but outside the U.S. they *just* use centimeters. Which has got to be a point of difficulty for little kids under, say, 5-to-6 years old, who can count to twenty but not to 100, and can probably remember their height in feet plus inches and understand the difference (even though they may not really understand fractions unless they’ve learned to measure stuff for baking), but the idea of 96.5 centimeters is generally going to be a more advanced concept for a 3-year-old than 3-feet-2-inches. (And even though a human’s height typically fluctuates over the course of a day by a few mm due to passive gravitational compression while standing and decompression from deliberate or instinctive stretching, a lot of Europeans apparently still insist on using the first decimal point.)
It’s also worth noting that cm are only really used for height/length measurements of animals and the “1 milliliter = 1 cubic centimeter” conversion; for everything else macroscopic where whole meters are too big, millimeters (with or without one decimal place) are used instead.
Also worth noting, one mile was originally defined as “1000 standard paces of a Roman legionnaire marching in formation”, which is only possible to standardize because armies on the march tend to get forced to march in sync, both in the cadence and length of stride. With a “pace” defined as “two steps”, that came to 5.28 of what eventually was defined as the standard “foot”.
The current definition of “foot” as a standard unit of measurement is apparently derived from the length of the feet of Henry I of England. Before he made the decree to use his own foot as the standard it tended to be based on the foot of whoever the local lord was, which could vary widely from one fiefdom (or generation, or conquest) to the next.
Dabbler’s intelligence remains extraordinary. I’m starting to suspect her father was Nth level or close to.
“People like round numbers and I think 90% of adult humans are between 5 and 6 feet tall. Which is 1.524 to 1.8288 meters tall”
You see this a lot with American complaints about metric, for some reason they don’t do a straight conversion, but increase the precision, probably because of whatever programme or calculator they used for the conversion. You use the degree of precision that suits the task at hand, for a person’s height in inches that’s the inch or half inch, and the half inch isn’t too different to the centimetre. So which is easier to express, 5 feet 8 and a half inches, or 1.71 metres? Or just round it to 5′ 8″, or 1.70m
And it’s important to remember US Customary Units are neither Imperial nor ‘English’ – some units are the same as Imperial, others are significantly different, cf the pint, where the US pint is 20% smaller than the Imperial pint. And some US measures just don’t exist in Imperial. Cups?!?
I don’t know why, but this made me think of Peggy. And then I ran across the story of Major Mary Jennings Hegar. It seems Dave Barrack might have modeled Peggy after Major Hegar.
Meter is a very human measurement, it is one step. When you need to measure the length of anything it is usually distance, which you do by walking that distance, not by laying down again and again and again and again. That would be silly, and you’d get dirty.
In almost every real world case where you care enough to measure length using steps makes more sense, it historically didn’t matter how high a person is, but it very much mattered how much farm land they own. A hectare is a hundred are, which is 10m by 10m, so a hectare is 100m by 100m. So if you own a hectare you could walk around the edges of your land in four hundred steps.
I could very well be wrong but as far as I understand:
– ARC and its subcategories are basically a branch of the military
– They are primarily based out of the USA
– The American military has, for many years now, largely ported over to metric
– Science is largely handled in metric across the globe
So having Cora describe something like this in metric – or, if there’s Universal Translator tech at play, having it auto-converted to metric – just seems logical to me.
For other non-native English speakers (or non-USians): BFE is “Bum-Fuck Egypt”, meaning “middle of nowhere”.
If you want a reason for it to be near this sun it could have a stabilized solar prominence running through it. High energy plasma running along a powerful magnetic field would be much denser than radiant light
That is one brutal way to tease an engineer. “Look at what I got and you can’t have!” Oh, the sweet suffering…