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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 04:56:51 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   more sci-fi should deal with the fact that your average Enterprise starship has a fuel tank measured in Chicxulubs of antimatter

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 04:59:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     "a spaceship crashed" shouldn't be a bunch of wreckage in a forest and plucky scavengers finding neat bits of technology to resell, it should be a "so the dominant species on that planet has been forever changed"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:04:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     even if it blows up in orbit, that's still 90 teratons of TNT going off. That's equivalent to a solar flare.

     You're still going to Have A Bad Day.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:19:26 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh, to clarify, when I say "Chicxulubs of antimatter", I don't mean, like, the amount of antimatter is equivalent to the mass of the Chicxulub asteroid: I mean the amount of antimatter has energy approximately equal to the impact at Chicxulub that extincted the dinosaurs.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:41:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     that's the thing with antimatter FTL starships: they're super dangerous in multiple ways, and that's an inherent part of how they work.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:44:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     even ignoring them potentially being armed, even ignoring that they can go very fast (and what happens when they crash into something?), just the power they'd need to store to be able to do all that makes them weapons of mass destruction on a scale we can't even conceive of

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:54:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     like, every nuclear weapon on the planet is like 1.5 gigatons. A full on world war 3 is less than ONE TEN-THOUSANDTH as energetic as the fuel tanks of an enterprise

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:57:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Thomas Lumley

     @tslumley exactly. You fuck up refueling your engines and not even the cockroaches are surviving this one

   • Thomas Lumley (tslumley@fediscience.org)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 05:57:03 JST Thomas Lumley

     in reply to

     @foone if you void the warranty, the new dominant species might be extremophile bacteria

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 06:06:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     which makes me wonder about the fact that anyone lets these starships orbit their planets, let alone sometimes they manage to land.

     Earth keeping their shipyards at Mars is a good start, I'd think if I was in charge of biosphere protection, I'd be more like "yeah ya'll can park at Jupiter, and take some chemical rockets down to Earth"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 06:08:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     because, yeah, they may be very safe normally, but when even one of these spaceships could sterilize a hemisphere from orbit, you really don't want them anywhere near you, no matter how well-maintained and friendly the operators of that star ship is

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 06:15:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah it's a one in a million chance that the warp core ruptures, but if that one in a million chance hits, it kills BILLIONS.

     so... no. keep that shit far enough away. Maybe if you're nice you can park on the far side of the moon

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 06:18:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     maybe that's the depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox:

     The kind of energy storage needed to travel the stars is so high that every civilization that attempts is eventually has a Bad Accident that Chicxulubs their whole species.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 06:22:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The cosmo is full of planets which have a few decaying unmaintained space stations in orbit of a planet where the dominant species is a small non-sapient rodent, insect or fish.

     There's a printout in one of those decaying space station of the last transmission of an FTL ship, and it's either "oops" or "oh shit"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:47:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     anyway this means that the way some people think about, like, photon torpedoes is incorrect.

     They aren't weapons per se. They're a guidance system, to let you aim where your fuel is going, and to track a moving target.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:47:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     an antimatter starship without torpedoes isn't "unarmed", it's just not able to be precise with what it's blowing up. They're always armed, because they are inherently a weapon of mass destruction, and even calling them that is understating it by several orders of magnitude

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:49:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they're not a WMD in the sense of Tsar Bomba, they're a WMD in the sense of "they can end an entire civilization".

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:50:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Growlph Ibex

     @growlph yeah, exactly. sure it's a big ship with lots of lights and air scrubbers and shit, they've got over a thousand people!

     but they also have an engine measured in TERAWATTS. That shit is a rounding error amount of energy.

   • Growlph Ibex (growlph@greywolf.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:50:03 JST Growlph Ibex

     in reply to

     @foone I've never been able to square this fact with the idea that "re-routing life support" or dimming the lights was a meaningful way to get more energy to the warp drives.

     Like, all the infrastructure to keep all humans alive on the ship for years would be a rounding error compared to energy consumed by a couple of minutes at warp.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:51:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Maciej Krüger (mkg20001)

     @mkg20001 yeah but if one nuke accidentally goes off, the local area is screwed. We've intentionally set off over a thousand on the planet, and we're mostly all still here.

     ONE enterprise is enough that we're looking at civilization coming back in 65 million years by evolved cockroaches, and humans are only a distant memory

   • Maciej Krüger (mkg20001) (mkg20001@social.mkg20001.io)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 07:51:14 JST Maciej Krüger (mkg20001)

     in reply to

     @foone maybe, on the other hand consider we have nukes stored on this planet and afaik we didn't have an oops so far (aside from two nuclear reactors). so maybe the odds aren't all that bad. or we're just lucky.