[purim]

We burn dinosaur juice to make engines that burn distilled dinosaur juice to push an object 1/20th of the engine fast enough to escape gravity. To deliver an oxygen making device that weighs roughly a quarter of the engine that has the output of 1 tree to Mars will take a dozen launches.

There's no way this is scalable. Whatever innovation we produce here, has to be super light and super small enough to be economical.

We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in.

If there's an alien race that has discovered locomotion via warping the space around it (sort of like a bubble formed around an object under water allowing friction free movement) then our solution would be funny to them.

"So you dig up this dinosaur juice, you then, chuckles, light it on fire to push a tiny payload on top of it to put stuff in space?"

"Then your hope is to weaponize it so you can fight better wars and colonize other planets to dig rocks and ship it back home?"

All of this must be amusing and depressing to an alien race that has mastered space travel and then some.

[ballenf]

And then the alien with a better knowledge of their own history and development will retort, "They are really no different than we were when we carried our food supplies around on our uppermost IR signaler organ. Given that they are almost asking the right quantum questions, they are probably within reach of that critical spatial dimension compression discovery that changed everything for us. I give them 2-3 more revolutions of Planet 9. Granted, based on our survey of other developing species, they do have a 26% chance of blowing themselves up in the process."

[aeyes]

RP-1 is not the only type of rocket propellant currently used. Delta and Ariane for example use liquid hydrogen and you don't need to "dig up dinosaur" juice for that.

[Gene_Parmesan]

I find this common assumption that non-Earth lifeforms will automagically have found ways to break the laws of physics curious. Given the age of universe, it's highly likely that most other lifeforms will have developed within a rounding error of us, on geological time scales.

And as for ETs being peaceful zen wizards, the fundamental problem of resource scarcity would seem to be universally applicable. It's this resource scarcity that causes species which are good at competing to develop. So it seems likely that any species intelligent enough to become technologically advanced would have a history of belligerence similar to ours.

Thinking aspirationally about what sort of species we should strive to be is great. But I find the belief that, across the universe, humans are specially anti-progress to be a little silly. The laws of physics are universal.

[revolvingocelot]

I find the framing "break the laws of physics" to be curious. Does that mean the Newtonian laws of physics, which are enough to launch rockets but not enough to create the GPS network? General relativity is enough to create the GPS network, but not travel faster than light or connect two points in space without the intervening distance or whatever.

It's fallacious to presume that we -- or any other species -- will automagically find ways to beat the lightspeed barrier, but it's also hubris to presume that our current understanding is the most "correct" that it can be. Could there be some new sea change in our understanding of the world, that allows for things general relativity considers impossible or incoherent?

My understanding of the "peaceful zen wizards" trope was that if you've got the technology to cross the unimaginably big [0] gulfs between stars, let alone the gulfs between inhabited stars, you concomitantly no longer want for resources or territory in any way that civilizations of our Kardashev type [1] understand them. What's the point of belligerence, culturally, [2] at that point? And if you do want territory and mining and extraction and whatever, why not use a combinatorial explosion of Von Neumann machines? The only reason to send actual people would be to say hello to the locals and look around.

[0] cf. Douglas Adams' intro to THGttG

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[2] I acknowledge that humans are genetically belligerent, but we can just choose not to be, especially in conditions of plenty. The fight is close, but culture ultimately beats genetics. I present, by way of example, the condom.

[PeterisP]

Something that's a rounding error on geological time scales is immense in the time scale of technological development.

The development of life took a few billion years to get to where we are now, so if for some otherwise equivalent civilization that highly random process took 0.1% faster or slower, then that makes for multiple million years of difference in development.

If we encounter another civilization, then it would be a wildly implausible coincidence if they happened to be close to us in technological level - say, just a thousand years or so; a more advanced civilization would be much more advanced - and we can see just how much things change in just a few centuries of technological development.

[idiotsecant]

It's also pretty likely that any sufficiently belligerent species with access to technology at our level or greater will use that technology to destroy themselves in exactly those kind of resource conflicts, in which case the filter works in the direction opposite you claim here - only species capable of suppressing belligerence are able to make it to the stars.

[cercatrova]

We do not burn "dinosaur juice." Petroleum is basically all fossilized plant remains.

[oynqr]

It's a joke.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in

We had cryogenic rocket engines in the 60s [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_rocket_engine

[klabb3]

I guess liquid is better than gas but any propellant is quite limiting on large spacetime scales.

[Dylan16807]

Let's consider the other options:

Climbing a very good rope. I think this option is the most medieval.

Using a huge launcher brings to mind trebuchets.

An electric plane can give you a higher platform but I'm skeptical of that getting fast enough to be the bulk of a launch.

Antigravity magic? I guess that's not medieval, but I'd argue that magic is in some ways quasi-medieval.

Rockets are likely the least medieval option.

[marcosdumay]

> Rockets are likely the least medieval option.

You mean big explosions targeted at the right side? If the Dark Ages had that, they would be lit!

[narrator]

Let's say we could use some sort of wonder technology that ETs gave us to take something as big as a container ship and send it to Mars for cheap. Well, now you got the resources of earth supporting two planets and not just one. That's not an improvement. Might as well live underground instead.

[antasvara]

In theory, you would use Earth's resources to develop Mars to the point where it could produce resources, instead of just consuming them.

The goal is to send just enough resources that settlers can then create more of the products they need using the resources present on Mars. If you can (for example) figure out how to cultivate Mars soil to make it hospitable to Earth plants, you could turn Mars into a net exporter of food.

All of this is theoretical of course, but it's not implausible to assume that there's a "tipping point" past which inhabitants of Mars are self sufficient or can even export things to Earth.

[narrator]

How many millions of people do you need to be self sufficient for 3nm semiconductors on Mars? TSMC has 65,000 employees. ASML has 32,000 employees and 5000 suppliers. I think at some point the Mars project would reach a point where you hit a population ceiling because too much stuff that couldn't be made on Mars would have to be imported and there aren't frequent enough launch windows or cargo capacity to do it.

[monocasa]

Because of that, I think it's more likely we'll build up an micro g manufacturing base. Manufacturing without super fund sites, and you can drop the finished goods in any gravity well that wants them, earth or mars.

[narrator]

Don't you think manufacturing semiconductors in deep space adds even more complexity on top of the already ridiculous complexity of doing it on Earth or Mars?

[marcosdumay]

It looks to me that doing almost anything in deep space adds less complexity than doing it on Mars. But I agree about Earth.

[Teever]

I think a better question is how many hundreds, or thousands of people do you need to be self sufficient for 45nm semiconductors on Mars.

[mr_toad]

> How many millions of people do you need to be self sufficient for 3nm semiconductors on Mars?

At a guess, 23.19

However you don’t need the latest process node to produce most electronics. And integrated circuits are probably the last thing you’d produce off world.

[outworlder]

Clubs made out of animal bones were perfectly serviceable but look silly to us now.

Who's to say that this advanced alien race didn't have the same pains (or worse!) when they started their space program?

> There's no way this is scalable.

There is - we need to stop shipping devices from Earth's gravity well.

[throwawaylinux]

> There's no way this is scalable.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the "dino juice" side of the equation. Global extraction is enough to fly a couple million of the biggest rockets every year and that's only counting dino fart extraction. Add in equivalent energy from dino juice and dino... cookies? and you'd be looking at somewhere above ten million rockets every year.

Fossil fuels are about the most scalable and scaled enterprise on the planet. They produce most of the energy to feed, house, and transport billions of people.

[oefnak]

We can create rocket fuel from water and solar power.

[AstralStorm]

Alternatively, it has to be manufactured on Mars with materials available there. That is much more tenable.

By the way, hydrolox is not dinosaur juice. Methane would be but insufficient specific impulse is a problem.