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.
Obviously Cora’s translator automatically converts units of measurement to the listener’s home planet standard. It defaults to metric for Earthlings because, well… you know.
Another option is that it knows that it’s the units Digit specifically is used to work with, since science and engineering use SI units.
Science, yes. Most real-world engineering, at least in the US, no. I wish it did, but no. Maybe Digit’s type of cutting-edge inventor-level mechanical engineering, but not real-world engineering used to build things.
I still have to use use old files that reference the US Survey foot which was obsolete decades ago.
In any country outside US , Liberia and Myanmar metric system is the oficial system an dused in engineering ..
The definition of an inch since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
The agreement defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meters and the avoirdupois pound as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms.
The US customary units are based on metric system since the international yard and pound are two units of measurement that were the subject of an agreement among representatives of six nations signed on 1 July 1959: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The SI system is based on metric units.
Fun fact: Digit uses both English units and metric in her work. She interfaces with a lot of scientists, so using metric is important and it gets used pretty heavily. But since engineering in the US is so tied to English units…
To be clear, this is just my headcanon. But it explains so much about her work that isn’t necessarily adequately explained by her attitudes.
My assumption for the best universal units would be some multiple of Planck length and time. The speed of light needs time and distance as part of it, so I don’t think it’s as useful. The ratio would be the same, naturally, but you could use fortnites or something and distance changes. Planck units are “easy” for technological societies to find out and convert to their own stuff.
The real question is what the base of your unit system is. 2 is easiest, I’d think. So, and I’m not going to do the actual math, the standard galactic inch might be P*2^32 or something. Although I wrote a funny story on writing prompts on reddit about a really dumb mathmatical system… So it could be something near incomprehensible too. Like base 13. With some non positional notation.
You can construct a non-arbitrary system of measurement by setting the units for length, time and mass such that c (the speed of light), G and h_bar are all equal to 1. The one drawback to that system is that the units are not on a familiar scale. So then you’ll have to have the commonly used unit of lenghth be something like 2^70 times the base unit.
As for dumb mathematical system, there’s no reason your base has to be an integer. You could represent numbers in base pi, for instance, so pi = 10, but every integer greater than pi would have an infinite non-repeating pi-imal representation.
Do I sense a KOTOR fan in you, Dave?
Delighted to see at least one other person saw Starforge and thought of KOTOR
I bet Dave could draw a cool looking Revan.
I played the original KOTOR back in the day, and was a little leery of straight up copying the idea of a StarForge, but a little googling showed that it’s not a wholly unique idea. Matter replicators would take a lot of power. Stars have a lot of power. Solar panels exist.
The StarForge was just a well implemented mcguffin for that story, and honestly, what else would you call something like that. A solar printer? That’s an incomplete description of its functions and poor marketing. So, StarForge it is.
This can fabricate tons of magical space steel of dozens kilograms of gold in a day – but no palladium or rhodium? Or why are those valuable to Cora but gold isn’t? (p. 1367 + few more after that)
I wonder how it’d fabricate Gold, as that’s only formed naturally during a Supernova?
Same with Rhodium and Palladium.
Fusion plant, and a couple of particle accellerators and ultracentrifuges. Then follow the right path(s) to Bang the isotopes you want.
*Possibly* apply some Time Magic to hurry up some decay delays.
Galactic tech is not nth-level, but it’s still *highly* advanced, with a Magic™ element to it.
They can do industrial-scale what we can only do lab-scale…
Atomic level printer what uses gluons (and other quark particles) just like any other hyper advanced 3d printer?
Actually we’re pretty sure that most of the gold in the Solar system was formed during a single kilonova (merger of two neutron stars) somewhere within 1,000 light years.
Pretty sure she was just using a few example high-value materials that would be familiar to someone on earth. Dave didn’t have room to list several dozen options.
“High value” is not how I’d describe even gemstone-grade synthetic corundum (the mineral sapphires are made of). We make hundreds of metric tons of the stuff annually, and the price is pretty low. Meanwhile, 200 kgs per day would put this thing’s annual production at 36.5 metric tons a year, I.E. less than modern Earth. It’s literally one of the easiest minerals to make, at least amongst the ones that don’t form at room temperature, and one of the first to be mass-produced commercially. Even if we’re talking about pure chemical composition, it’s just aluminum and oxygen, both fairly common elements.
Honestly, I think Cora is just spitballing, and may not have had high grades in geology class.
Or Cora just isn’t up-to-date on what Terrans consider valuable and/or hard to make. Gold is the most famous high-value element on earth, so she knew that one. Reflexium is something she knew that was valuable to her. She wanted a third item and came up with something that missed the mark. It all flows in the comic.
“Human-friendly” measurements are the good use-case for using imperial measurements. Miles, yards, feet, inches, etc… are all very easy to use. Metric is for math.
“1 mile across” is a good size for a human-livable towm. The others are all much more self-evident.
Metric is good for Earth engineering programs Math.
I dislike galactic unit of Light Year, because reliance on “Year” will vary for different orbitals.
As someone raised in Metric and Imperial system metric is used for small-scale measurements (centimetres, millimetres, micrometres, etc) and imperial is used for large-scale measurements (feet, yards, miles, etc).
The crossover is inches/centimetres and even feet.
So I know an inch is roughly 2.54 centimetres and I can roughly scale up from there (1ft=30cm, 1yd=90cm, 1m=3ft 4in, 1 mile=1.6km, 4km=2.5 miles, etc).
Sadly it’s not quite the same for weights and fluid measures.
Plus I only know Celsius, with Farenheit being a totally foreign concept.
They’re easy to use because you grew up with them. I’d rather use one unit for my height than two and would rather measure thin or small objects in millimeters than ¹⁄₃₂’s of an inch (or memorize more wacky conversion rates for “barleycorns” or “lines” or such). I know what it feels like to walk 100 meters or 1 kilometer; it’s as “human-friendly” to me as miles are to you.
1 yard = you just took a step.
1 foot = length of your foot, or the distance across your spread hand.
1 inch = the length of your thumb from the tip to the first knuckle.
1 pound = A good weight that you can hold in your hand.
1 mile = the maximum distance you want to walk to the shops for your groceries.
That’s what I mean by “human-friendly.” They naturally fit a human use.
1 yard is about 1 meter. 1 foot is about 3 dm. 1 inch is about 2-3 cm. 1 pound is half a kilogram. 1 mile is about 1,5 kilometers. So 1 meter is a good step. 1 dm about the length of your finger. 1 cm is about the width of a finger nail. 1 kilogram is also a good weight that you can hold in your hand. 1 kilometer is a 10-15 minute walk.
All of that still fits human use. It’s just habit.
Indeed, the important invention of the metric system is not the base units themselves (though the creation of one standard unit for each of the base physical quantities (all seven of them) is by itself also a transformative invention in physics).
Instead, it is the uniform decimal scaling by a factor of 10 that made it the basis for modern physics. It was a great seismic shift to system of measurement as was the introduction of the decimal numerical and the number zero over the old roman numerals. Adding 138462 to 22458 is trivial compared to roman equivalent. Which cannot actually be expressed as the largest number without resorting to apostrophus or vinculum is 3499 (and that is a late period invention, before it was 849). Still adding DCCLXIV to CDXXXLLVII is … convoluted)
1 meter = you just took a slightly larger step
Not sure why you would care about a third of a step?
1 cm = about the width of a finger (for women anyway)
1 kg = a good weight that you can still hold in your hand :) Also, a liter of water
1 km = the distance you can run at a moderate pace before you feel the need to slow down a bit.
Any system of measurements can be made to fit the human body if you try a little creativity.
(e.g. the meter may originally have been derived from a circumference of the earth, but the division factor was chosen to they got close to the length of a good (land-surveyor’s) step. Same with the gram really, though there they were off in their division by a factor of about 1000 so they metrically used the kg as the base unit rather than the g, as the former was much more useful in everyday life than the later).
Considering the when and where, I’m pretty sure the Meter was derived from the Parisian Yard, and only justified as the distance from the North Pole, to the equator, through Paris, divided by 10,000,000.
If Napoleon and those French scientists really wanted to be consistent, and find a convenient measure that was based on the earth, they would have used the full polar circumference, divided by something convenient, like, say 1,000,000,000, which would have been around 4cm, or a little over an inch and a half.
Napoleon wanted the cannonballs bought from one area to fit in the cannons bored out in another area. Standardization was key. Apparently, across France, and certainly across his empire after it grew, a yard was a little different in different places. A Parisian yard was longer than a British yard, but more importantly, was different than in other parts of France.
Considering that France at the time had an estimated 250.000 plus units I would say that some standardisation was more than just a convenience.
I think most people’s foot size falls well short of one foot, anyway. It’s about the size of my forearm, elbow to wrist.
You mean to say they fit your personal use very naturally. Looking just at adults and eliminating the outliners (of which there are a lot) we still get a lot of variance in those.
The length of a step changes both from person to person but also based on mood and how much you are in a hurry. I would consider anywhere between half a meter to a meter 25 a normal step.
The length of my foot and the distance across my spread hand isn’t even the same, not to mention for people have different size feet and hands. I estimate about 1:1.3 ratio between the smallest and biggest common size shoe.
Again, people have different size hands, although I’ll give you that this one probably has the least variance of those.
I seriously have no idea what you mean with “a good weight that you can hold in your hand”. Anything between 300g and 3kg sounds appropriate to me.
Some people just go down to the street to pick up the delivery of their groceries and anything more than that sounds like a bother to them. Some people regularly go to a difference settlement for groceries. Personally the distance I want to walk to shop for groceries swings between “there is no way I’m leaving home today” and “yeah, 4km sounds good” with NO in between. Getting dressed is the actual obstacle.
Let me try your method:
A meter is the distance between my hands when I go to hug someone.
A cm is exactly a hundredth of it, the width of the fingernail on the pointing finger.
A mm is exactly a thousandth of a meter, the smallest distance easily distinguishable to the naked eye.
A km is exactly a thousand meters, about the distance I would walk before realizing I forgot my phone.
A kg is the mass of a medium bottle of water.
A ton is exactly a thousand kg, the mass of a small car. Also the mass of a cubic meter of water under normal conditions but that’s not something you see everyday.
A gram is exactly a thousandth of a kg, the mass of a paper clip.
A mg is exactly a thousandth of a gram. …Ok that one really isn’t in human scale.
“because you grew up with them” – I grew up in Germany. Thing to keep in mind, decimal/metric is easy only in the sense that units are named in decimal increments. So learning the names isn’t hard, and converting from one value to another is a simple matter of multiplying or dividing by powers of ten. But using them is a different problem. For all its clunkiness a foot and an inch are easy to use when the thing you’re worried about is fractions. A third of a foot is four inches. Easy. A third of a meter is 33.333… cm. Messy. And someone else mentioned that feet and inches correspond more closely to human centric measures, the length of a foot, or the width of a thumb, sort of thing. When the French had their revolution and decided to invent the meter, it was based on the circumference of the Earth divided by 40,000. Everything was kind of based on that, even the second was 1/2 the period of a meter long pendulum. None of it considered, OK, so how do I look at something and tell how many centimeters long it is?
honestly, its just intuition
I can easily guess roughly how long something is in cm based on the 30cm ruler that every kid gets for school, that is my universal unit of measurement and after using it for decades I dont need to have one at hand to know roughly what 30cm are
as for meters, just use your height, I am 1.7 meters tall so the height up to a little bellow my waist is 1 meter, easy
Most old human mesurement is based on a base 60. It is actually better at angles like mesureing PI than base 10.
Some say it is a holdover from before the flood that had some very advanced things that had things we can’t do to this day.
I don’t know about most. The Sumerians and Babylonians used it extensively, and the Chinese used it for their calendar, but other than that not so much.
They’re going to have to sedate Digit for this stopover, for everyone’s safety.
It’s a good thing spaceship windows aren’t made of regular materials, because I’m sure the phrase “nipples hard enough to cut glass” applies to Digit right now.
The meter used to be defined as 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the north pole to ther equator, which is a power of 10. Similar to the nautical mile which is 1/21,600th of the distance around the equator, which is not a power of 10, but is a nice multiple of the number of seconds in a day.
The seconds thing is a twofer since the planetary grid is DMS. Although, when using Decimal Degrees, going more than 6 places to the right of the decimal is irrelevant. On a planet the size of the Earth, 6 numbers have a resolution 1.1 mm. On a planet the size of Jupiter, you get the 7th dugit for 1 mm resolution.
Survey grade gps units only have 5 digit resolution, and that is only possible with concurrent measurements and a bunch of post processing math.
Galactic standard unit? Probably something based around the speed of light and other universal constants.
Just as Cora notes that Dabbler has no need for Earth currency, I can’t help but wonder why Cora would have need for ANY currency from a tournament if she has this. But at a guess, its probably restricted in some of the things it can produce, such as the rare earth metals Cora suggested they could pay her in.
I’m sure they still need money for things. Convenience at the very least like buying a top of the line space part is still faster and easier than fabricating one, especially if you’re out having space adventures too far away from Dabbler’s star forge.
The Kilogram is actually defined using the Planck constant.
Because measurements showed that the original Kilogram and the copies shared with other countries had deviated by 5ugrams and there was no way to really know which had deteriorated and which way.
The meter is defined as a fraction because that is an REALISABLE method of testing. Any government-sponsored lab with proper equipment should be able to follow the procedure.
All SI base units have realisable methods.
Are you saying feet are a better unit to measure the height of humans? Also humans really aren’t the only thing we measure regularly, when I think of the length of a meter or a few I think of a typical bedroom’s size.
Also I say “a meter 68” for example, which is mostly short for “one meter and 68 centimeters” but it’s also 1.68 m because that’s how the metric system works.
About how arbitrary the actual sizes are, you are right. The more basic units like a meter and a second have been decided on long ago and when they were redefined it was better to just tell the people who are used to math and unit conversion to handle them than try to get everyone ok with the size of everything changing all of the sudden.
It’s that close to the star because it’s solar powered. Closer = more power per square meter of panel.
At least until you spend more power dissipating the heat from being close than you gain from being closer.
You can also do interesting things like straining the corona for antimatter particles for more power. Though that’s probably done by automated collector ships, rather than the base.
But then you want the base to be fairly close. Mostly for speed in cargo transfer rather than spending more power boosting to its orbit to return the cargo, since the amount of power you would get from that far outstrips the power required for orbit changes.
Yes, the metric system originally was based on things that turned out to be less universal than they thought. So current definitions are a bit of a compromise between being more universal and also not being too different from the original version.
This has happened to the Imperial system as well. An inch for instance is now exactly 2.54 cm. It didn’t used to be.
Digit: “I want one!”
Cora: “Well, the plans would cost more than the GDP of Earth right now. Maybe when you guys get a better exchange rate.”
Wait till you are close to using the entire output of your. Then save a considerable fraction of that energy budget for the next, say, thousand years.
By that time you might have enough that the corporations that build these things are willing to at least speak to you.
Dabbler’s life is so interesting. I wonder how old she really is? I get a vibe that’s she’s still relatively young for her species of possibly immortal genie/alien hybrids.
Aren’t Succubi technically some kind of undead, or gestalt construct?
I think I remember something in the backstory…
Their origin is technically as sort of undead constructs yeah but at this point so much interbreeding with other species has occurred and with succubus also at least partially being shapeshifters it’s really hard to get consensus on genetics. Dabbler has at least said she’s an alien and her sister Parfait is also part djinn (I don’t know if they have the same father) So I’m not actually sure what Dabbler specifically is. I think maybe she said it once? I only said genie because I remembered Parfait is part genie.
I found the page for Dabbler’s genetic situation which seems a very niche case for succubi in general.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1021-the-family-tree-contains-several-mobius-branches/
She is also part shapeshifter or doppelgänger but maybe not all succubi are?
She’s “over a hundred and sixty years” older than Sydney (p637), so 180-something.
She’s a Succubus/Doppelganger/something hybrid. Her HALF SISTER, Parfait, has some genie in her.
“has some genie in her”
…naaah, too easy…
Special relativity ruined this sort of this. There is no universal length, time, or even order of events. They all depend upon the relative speed of the observers. Read about the “Barn Door Paradox”
Even more weirdly they do agree on acceleration that’s general relativity.
It is possible to write the Standard Model of particle physics without having to have units like Meters of Kgs, with 26 dimensionless constants (like the ratio of electron mass to up quark mass. Doesn’t matter what units you choose, the ratio is the same).
There are true universal time, distance, and weight measures (and a few others besides). They’re defined by a mix of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and we have every reason to believe that any other sufficiently sophisticated civilization anywhere in the universe would measure the same values.
But they’re not of sizes practical for every day use, so we multiply those basic units by effectively-arbitrary numbers to get useful units. We have no reason to believe anyone else would use the same multipliers.
200kg of sapphire? Cute, we need to go through way more than that at the shipyards depending on the ships in the build cue. But about 2? Maybe three cruisers a day, a dozen destroyers the big stuff always goes to a specialized fabber or shipyard. Then there are Titan class ships (which to be fair started out as just titan class asteroid turned in to solar sized orbital defense platforms and someone got a bright idea to move them with fusion bombs)
yup… sapphire is not that hard to make ( as are rubies and emeralds, same family….)
You *could* do 200kg in a sizeable backyard, even in a single batch if you’re brave enough. ( The reaction is about as exothermic as Thermite, actually a variation on it….)
It’s already commercially available, marketed as Gorilla Glass. ( which is nothing more or less than artificial sapphire..)
I thought that Gorilla Glass was glass, that had been chemically treated to swap out some atoms to make a denser glass.
Sapphire glass IS a thing.
Gorilla Glass is just tempered glass with better marketing. Solid sapphire would actually shatter more easily to a distributed hard hit.
But yeah, we’ve been able to make industrial quantities of corundum and even diamond for over a century now on Earth, and make consumer quantities of gem-grade precious stones for decades. A just-less-than-VonNeumann industrial facility with the energy and raw material output of a star ought to be able to produce TONS of the stuff in a day, in whatever shape or color you need.
Emeralds are not the same mineral as rubies and sapphires. Emeralds are a form of green beryl (beryllium aluminum silicate, formula: Be3Al2(SiO3)6), while rubies and sapphires are forms of corundum (aluminum oxide, Al2O3). Completely different minerals, the only thing they have in common chemically is that they contain aluminum.
While synthetic rubies and sapphires are relatively easy to make by fusing alum powder and can be extruded in large crystals with relative ease (still not a hobbyist endeavor, if you want good quality), emeralds are much more difficult. They’re either flux grown in a platinum crucible over the course of months, or created through a process meant to replicate natural hydrothermal conditions that form emeralds, which also isn’t especially fast.
I See… A Solar-powered Von Neumann factory, probably collecting and transmuting matter from stellar wind. You could probably dramatically increase production rate (at least for a while) if you towed something like 16 Psyche to close orbit and used it for raw materials.
Let one expand and you can have a Dyson Swarm on the cheap in shortish order.
A Fun idea Sydney or Digit to suggest: Bribe Dabbler with …something, buy a boot-strapping self-replicating “seed” and install it on close Sol orbit. Would bootstrap for Terran space industry *really* nicely.
lmao, Dabbler really just has an Economy-Destabilizer-9000. It makes the concern about giving earth too much all at once make sense.
gateway to space? print molecular bonded cables for your space elevator
solar smelter? print up the heat shielding that also generates power for the smelter.
space power grid and solar regulator for earth? start printing the earth stationary orbit sized solar collectors. bonus acts as a solar sail if you need to adjust earth’s orbit (slowly).
Military grade = lowest bidder or most corrupt
military grade is a buzzword.! yes MG describes very specific military tests.. but outside that it means noting.. example: Ford,. MG aluminum,, never used by the military, and never tested to military standards,.. just words added to sell…
Oooh, I absolutely love the concept of a Starforge. That kind of Nth-level technlogy where you grind material down to the molecular level and then reassemble it. The power to build a world from nothing. To bring life to lifeless matter! To MOVE THE VERY STARS IN THE FIRMAMENT! Such a thing might make one A GOD.
I must suppress the Evil Laugh. I think there’s medication for that now…
I’m reasonably sure that this is still well within “things we are pretty sure we’ll be able to make without even leaving our solar system using some good old self replicating von neumann probes and particle accelerators, it’s just a matter of time but no new science is needed” standards, so nowhere near reaching Nth-level tech.
yeah, Nth level tech is not “build whole planets” tier, its “rewrite the laws of reality of the whole universe and create entirely new laws of physics if you want” tier
Let’s define a universal 10-base system! I take suggestions for names.
First is time. Let’s round things up to a straight 10^10 Cesium 133-cycles (or vibrations) – that’s about 1,1 seconds.
Length: How far light travels in 1/10^9 time units – that’s about 1 foot.
Temperature: 0 at absolute 0, and.. I don’t know, 10 is the temperature at which helium becomes gas in vacuum? Makes 1 unit be about 0,4 celsius I think (I only found the boiling point at 1kPa).
Ok, that was all the time I had for these funsies. Comments, suggestions?
Look up ‘Planck Units’. They’re the universal length, time, mass and temperature units you described. Everything else can be built from those three (one Planck speed is one Planck length per Planck time, for example. It also equals light speed).
So the thing about the SI units being defined by Cesium, or the distance light travels in a given time, is taking the pre-existing metric system, and attaching them to an actual universal constant that won’t just deviate because one was stored near the arctic circle and the other at the equator. Metric’s base 10 system with its already (mostly) determined lengths, weights, and speeds was built arbitrarily and agreed upon – no one bothered to get consensus from the physical universe when they did this.
As for space expanding, the length of a lightyear doesn’t change – just the number of lightyears between any two given points. Saying that the expansion of space stretches a lightyear is like saying the length of a mile changes because someone picked up the mile marker and walked off with it.
Anything that revolves around base 10 will not be popular in the wider galaxy. It makes maths (math for the colonial readers) much harder by only being divisible by 2 and 5.
Binary is probably more universal, but the only precise divisors for any given number will be powers of 2, a real pain if you want to split something into say 3 equal parts.
Base 12 is MUCH better for everyday use in pre-computing cultures because of the number of divisors – 2,3,4, and 6 – make it much easier for things like working out prices, equal shares, cutting things into even lengths, etc. which is why it was used for things like currency, months, feet and inches, etc. – most of the problems are because apes like us like to do this stuff on our fingers, so our number systems roll over at 10 and people don’t like the extra hassle of conversion. This led to stupidity like the UK pound being split into 20 shillings of 12 pence, which added a lot of extra pain when trying to work out e.g. compound interest.
Except that we are not dividing by pure brainpower anymore and have not been for a surprisingly long time.
Nowadays we stick with a wide variety of computing devices for things like that, which don’t care at all about what base they are to represent their base 2 calculations in.
At the end of the day base 12 has its own indivisibles, just a few less at the very low end of the range. Once you get to the bigger numbers the percentage of indivisables trends the same way as it does with decimal. And by that time we use a calculator anyway. 7843011 divided by 14891 is not going to purely in our minds (except for a handful of people who trained themselves to perfect a useless skill ;))
Historically humanity has used base 12 (the babylonians used it, that is why we have 12/24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. But only their priests could do calculations).
It did not stick because 10 is more convenient to learn. We have ten fingers to count on as children (and occasionally as adults). Only for time did the base 12 derived measurements survive, but that is because we rarely do math with clock times so keeping to the old system was more convenient than changing it. As soon as we start measuring time differences we are back to base 10 again.
Any mission is a stealth mission if there are no witnesses left to tell about it.
Mission accomplished, no one saw us leave.
A LARP game I was involved with used to hold Orc-Fest, an all bad guy weekend which determined which player would play the King of the Orcs over the next year, an NPC role that would give you some serious XP to spend on your character. All players swore an oath to play by Orcish Rules of Honor; Don’t do it. Don’t get caught. Don’t leave witnesses. :D
Laughing Luna is dead on. Just like the second was originally based on the length of the day with a traditional set of subdivisions, the meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole. That’s not precise enough or constant enough for modern science, so it’s been redefined, but it makes more sense when you see where the number originally comes from.
It’s also useful to know for estimations. The circumference of the Earth is pretty much exactly 40,000 km (the polar circumference, the equatorial circumference is a bit more because the planet isn’t a perfect sphere).
Regarding the metric system. Its base is the kilogram, which is fully arbitrary. Every other unit (except second, which is slightly less arbitrary) is just a derivative of that arbitrary magnitude.
This is why they spent a truckload of money making the most roundest of objects ever (a silicon sphere), so they could redefine the kilogram as a specific number of silicon atoms.
All units are relative. Look at Horsepower, that started as a marketing term, then became the defacto way of judging engines and now electric motors. None of us need to know how many horses our motors can replace, we are simply familiar with the term. Knots came from a convenient was to measure sailing ship speed, they just keep using it because they had no reason to change. I would guess the unit of distance would end up being the distance between two popular destinations (<>Kessel Run<>)
There used to be a lot of hard sci-fi written about stuff like this up until the early 90s. Then some of the sci-fi became sci-fact with top secret things the goverment put a stop to scientist wrighting things that could give people ideas.
Which really has slowed scientifc advancement. Shame that parinoia slowed things down so far.
Look at spaceX and how fast they are advancing. They know that their teck is going to be stolen by China and other countries so just keep advancing so it is already old teck by the time they make it.
I belive the book that stopped hard sci-fi was the little known one one about controling weather systems using microwave radar, We saw evidence of this in 2005 with Katrina and 4 hurcanes being pushed around to make a X over Walt-Disney World.
did you know: the British are reason that the US, uses the imperial system.
way back when, Ben Franklin wanted US converted to metric, and had the powers that be, converted to the idea,. but the British stole the ‘measure units’,. forcing the US, to use imperial…
That would be a neat trick, since Ben Franklin died (admittedly not very long) before the metric system was developed. That said, probably would have been interested in the idea.
As someone mentioned, you’re going to want your starforge to be as close to the star as possible without overwhelming your solar collectors, because power/area is inversely proportional to distance. You’re also going to want a less active star than that roiling mess shown, so that you’re less prone to damage from flares, and your power is more consistent. A white dwarf like Sirius B would be ideal.
Vernor Vinge talked about a stellar forge in Stranded in Realtime, and the main use made of it there was in manufacturing antimatter, which is an extremely energy intensive process.
DaveB
I must congradulat you on the art on this page. I rarely see such detail that looks so good. The way you portray light is a thing of beauty.
Thank you. It inspires the imagination.
Thanks! It was a real challenge trying to decide how much detail to put vs how much light blowout there should be. Obviously the view from the window, and also the external view would be like 98% dimmed and filtered, cause anything else would be not just blinding, but immediately fatal. So it was just artist’s choice really. Glad you liked the results.
You need to be 0.01 SS or less to be allowed to use it.
What’s a SS? It’s an unit of accident prone distractability based on Sydney Scoville’s distractability. Digit, you’re 13.131313 SS, you’re not allowed to think about it without supervision!!
If Deus is so smart, why didn’t he make one of THESE so that he never runs out of money, then he makes more until he obscured the entire sun because greed MUAHAHA?
OH, right, false greed.
…………which means they can afford to dring SURGE, the discontinued drink collectors can’t get their hands on because of how much some people are willing to pay to DRINK IT so there is hardly any left.
Creating sapphire is actually pretty easy. It’s just fused aluminum oxide. We can mass produce it fairly easily, and have been making gemstone-grade synthetics for over a century, probably more like 150 at this point. I would imagine the difficulty of printing any given gemstone would be down to the complexity of the base crystal units in the lattice.
Every mineral has a smallest unit, a set of elements arranged into a specific structure that’s repeated over and over to form a crystal. Those can be very small and simple (carbon, SiO2 as found in quartz), or extremely complicated. This is different from a simple chemical formula, because the same elements can be rearranged to form completely different structures, with different physical properties. Impurities-other elements trapped in the crystal, but not a part of it-are also a thing, but are generally kept out of discussions because they’re so variable from sample to sample. I’d imagine that these base units would be what a “printer” would use as feedstock to make an artificial gemstone, and the more complicated the base unit is, the more difficult making the base gem would be.
The big four gemstones, I.E. emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, are all relatively basic in terms of their base units. Diamond is pure carbon, sapphires and rubies (same mineral, corundum, just in different colors) are aluminum dioxide (SiO2), and emeralds are beryl, or beryllium aluminum silicate (Be3Al2(SiO3)6) with some trace chromium impurities). So the hardest to make of those might be emerald. Something like tanzanite, a form of zoisite (Ca2Al3(SiO4)(Si2O7)O(OH), with some chromium and strontium impurities) would probably be much more difficult to produce than any of them.
Alternatively, it might come down to how finicky their crystalline phases are. The same baseline material can form different minerals based on the temperatures and pressures under which they form, which are called polymorphs. As an example, Al2SiO5 can be andalusite, kyanite, or sillimanite, depending on the surrounding conditions. The same applies to graphite and diamonds, or corundum and alumina. But I think manipulating temperature and pressure would be fairly easy with such controlled conditions, so I’d bet more on the base crystalline units determining how difficult and time-consuming it would be to produce a given mineral.
…In case you couldn’t tell, I really like geology. Specifically geochemistry, since that’s where it and my actual major (chemistry) intertwine.
The Meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 the distance from The Equator to The North Pole along a line of longitude running through Paris. this was before the speed of light was known. The other 6 basic units were also defined as the measurement of some physical entity. Later it was realized that it would be better to define them in terms of some physical constant that was not subject to change. Thus the meter was defined as 1/299,792,458 the distance travels in 1 second. (1/300,000,000 will work for all but the most exacting measurements.) the other units were defined similarly. The second was taken as is from the existing units of time. This is why we have a 24 hour day instead of a 10 metric hour day, etc. The year is defined by the time it takes the Earth to complete 1 orbit around The Sun. This is done to keep seasons, very important to farmers and others, consistent with the calendar. Incidentally, with the definition of the meter as 1/10,000,000 the distance from The Equator to the North Pole, the circumference of The Earth is, by extension, exactly 40,000 KM. The actual circumference is slightly more than that because The Earth is not a perfect sphere, but 40,000 Km will work for every day purposes.
Everyone else let themselves get distracted by questions about the StarForge and the metric system, and I’m just sitting here with a question about Nthaniel’s new errand…
Is “every human on Earth” a representative sample of “every human in the universe”?
Just to clarify, the speed of light *is* a constant. It travels through the medium of space at a constant speed. The fact that the medium itself is expanding does not change the speed at which light moves through it. Eventually distant parts of space will be expanding away from each other faster than the speed of light such that galaxies will eventually red-shift then disappear forever, however light will still be traveling at the same speed it always has been.
If it takes a day for a facility this size to make 200kg of sapphire, that’s not really impressive. We’ve already seen Deus with a facility full of Mat-Fabs that could presumably do the same thing. Visibly impressive but horrifically inefficient if some dude could out-produce it with a bunch of off the shelf machines. You should probably consider bumping those numbers up by a factor of 100 at least if you want this thing to actually seem like the amazing planetary-economy-breaking thing the commentary suggests it’s supposed to be.
Sapphire is a particularly bad example, being one of the first gemstones to be mass produced synthetically, to high quality, and also one of the most chemically simple. It’s also not the generic term for the mineral, which is corundum. Rubies are red corundum, sapphires are every other color. We produce something like 100 tons of the stuff annually. Or at least that’s the number I could find.
That said, it depends on how those things work. If they’re doing something like accelerated, directed chemical vapor deposition, then many (but certainly not all) gems would be fairly easy to fabricate. If not, or if you’re working with, say, a complex aluminosilicate, then it may be a lot trickier. I’m not going to bust out the phase diagrams, but suffice it to say that some of the more obscure minerals out there are extremely finicky in terms of how they form, and in some cases, the environment in which they form (mostly pressure and temperature) dictates their structure. Of course, the same is sometimes true for metals and ceramics, so who knows.
HEY DAVEB!
HAND Width vs FOOT Length is really down to “ease of multiple unit measurement”
Think about it. If you’re measuring how many “Hands” a stick is, you’re going to wrap your dominant hand around it, then put your off-hand directly against that, wrap, and release with the dominant, moving it to the top. So when you’re done you have an number of hand widths in length. If you tried to do ‘wrist to fingertip’ you wouldn’t be able to hold it. plus there’s a lot of variation in finger tip length, but width is pretty consistent.
Likewise, when measuring with feet, you use a “heel – toe” step. Again, width is more consistent than heel-toe length, but that part of the measurement when you put the left foot against the right side of the right foot, without falling on your ass or moving your right foot, makes heel-toe the preferable measuring method.