Comment Re: I've always felt the great filter (Score 1) 314
I'm referring to bootstrapping a rocketry program.
I'm referring to bootstrapping a rocketry program.
? You challenged my claims. I'm not permitted to rebut?
IMO no rocketry program is going to get off the ground (literally) without burning some sort of hydrocarbons. And charcoal isn't going to work.
the transition from charcoal to coal was critical to scale industry to the point where it could even support a rocketry program. And you can't make rocket fuel out of charcoal.
Agreed entirely on pretty much everything above.
Suggest a substitute for hydrocarbon chains that can bootstrap a technology program. While you're at it, how much energy is required to get something into orbit. Assume something of nearly zero mass.
I agree this is definitely a possibility.
Basically, you get around all of that by not sending delicate bags of mostly water. You send something a lot more durable and long lived.
IMO you underestimate exactly how fundamental universal turning machines are to the math and underlying structure of this universe.
That said, as I posted above, all of this is nonsense. IMO the great filter is much simpler: the availability of cheap energy dense fuel to bootstrap an industrial economy capable of developing the technology to escape our gravity well.
The energy requirements are enormous.
You don't need to send a live being to make contact btw. The Fermi Paradox includes all other kinds of contact.
> solar/wind/water/ storage is not enough.
See my other post. You're not going to boostrap a rocketry program based on non-hydrocarbon fuels.
Please suggest a energy dense replacement. Don't say hydrolox. That isn't going to work as a starting point for a ton of different reasons.
If your planet does have enough stored energy to develop technology, no civilization is going to develop the technology to reach the stars (or even local orbit).
Certainly escaping our gravity wells requires burning carbon chains of some sort - Hydrolox is just too hard to use as a fuel during the early stages of rocket development. It is quite possibly the LEAST likely fuel you can start with to get a rocket program working.
Even liquid oxidants for use with hydrocarbon based fuels are hard w/o refrigeration tech - which is going to require all sorts of stuff. You're going to have to start with solid rocketry - aka gunpowder (surprise surprise, burning sulfur and
Some light reading about the development of technology and the energy requirements.
Agreed.
No idea what an "energy" based being would act like. How does pure "energy" interact with anything else (including other "energy") w/o a physical medium?
Waves might interact, but they don't change direction w/o very strong curving fields, which you can't just create with other EM waves. Something has to curve space time. The only thing we know that does that is... mass.
There is no way we could have made it to the industrial age without coal. There is literally no other source of fuel as energy dense or cheap.
You can't make solar panels w/o an industrialized economy.
Maybe we can maintain our technology w/o fossil fuels. But we would have never developed them w/o burning carbon chains. Suggest another energy source with the same density and availability
You're not going to make steel with wind power or dams big enough to require... steel.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
