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The Stratosphere Lounge

The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 276

Recorded live before a global audience on February 18, 2021.

The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 276

Recorded live before a global audience on February 18, 2021.

https://youtu.be/0q9PbDA1zdg

20 replies on “The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 276”

Meta Human. This means, that might be Bill, or Scott, or me, or you, shown on the evening news placing a bomb under Sister Mary Margaret’s school bus…

Bills design is similar to John DeChance’s Skyway series. However the Skyway gates must be on planets or asteroids and the vehicles are trucks and cars. I corresponded with John some time ago to get permission to include his design in my variant stardrives work. I still have not gotten around to publishing that. I should do that. In my version of the design the vehicles must keep moving to earth out a charge build up that is a side effect of the jump. It can’t be done in the air or parked. The gates also have to be a minimum safe distance apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeChancie
There is also a similarity to the Intergalactic Gate Bridge in stargate Atlantis.

I would love to say I gave him the wormhole design in an email but there’s so much detail there he’s clearly been thinking about it for weeks before I sent the message last month. lol. Bill we seem to be flying in formation! I suspect however I’m flying upside down. lol.

If you wanted to block travel along the ‘railroad’ without blowing up a gate, you could put a barrier between the two gates. Tow in a small asteroid or comet. Deploy a giant tank of water or ice. Build a concrete plug on the surface a gate. Not sure how feasible they would be with the tech levels Bill is looking at but I’m sure if you towed a giant space rock into place between two of the gates, any ships traveling at 450K mph are going to explode spectacularly on the surface. Then, once you don’t have to worry about enemy ships coming through, you can tow the rock out of the way again.

Why don’t you expand the stargates themselves into the actual cities. Then you would have a reason to power and guard them “24/7”. Then you would have a perfect replica of a modern society in comparison to outposts that have not yet developed the secondary gate. Now, I couldn’t see the chat, but whoever was insisting on a 2nd gate was correct. Even though you have bi directional transfer between A and B, you would still need a separate gate for travel between C and D, unless you plan on complete linear pathways, which would limit potential colonization to only things that would line up, and that wouldn’t last very long into the future if you plan to be consistent with shift/expansion factors.

These gates remind me exactly of how travel works in Eve Online.

I think each gate would need workers to keep it up and running. So they all might become outpost or frontier towns. Maybe the timing gets messed up and people get stranded for long periods of time at a gate. Some of them end up staying at that gate.

Couldn’t watch live, but 2 questions: 
1- How does an AI in a box not go insane? It doesn’t seem like a real intelligence is something you can turn off and back on.
2- How can any human community permit any object that has ever been possessed by (or even just exposed to) an AI to continue to exist? (see Heart of the Comet, Benford/Brin) Is it possible to go through a decontamination process, or is using an AI a suicide decision — with enforced execution for those who lack the honor to follow through?

I remember an episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Professor Moriarity, a Sentient Hologram is discovered to be able to feel the passage of time in the small box he is in and makes trouble for the Enterprise by hacking into the ship’s computer. Along the way he meets another Hologram and falls in love.

The crew launch them off into a much larger box, as close to the size of the known universe as can be managed. Since they both experience time, it turns out they can age and die … exploring an almost infinite universe.

This is silly, yes? As silly as understanding what AI will even be like right now? Or what worlds can be in that box for the AI to explore until it is needed?

Mind you, the AI might not come out of the box if it senses why it is being let out and for what. Still that would be a problem for the people living in that time when that AI is in that box.

What is the optimal distance between gates from the point of view of how long it takes to travel in real space?
If you could go a tenth of a light year and build the first gate, would that speed up building the next leg? Not that I have an answer, but that could be how you have multiple routes. Sort of like frontage roads along freeways.

What happens if one of the gates along the path is not able to fire?
Would you send the pig in the opposite direction just before the freight line fires to make sure the line it ready?

I like that traveling faster than the speed of light is possible but is extremely difficult. I like that you still have to travel the distance in real time the first time. The choke points make it great for defending a system.

Here are a few ideas. When you go through the gates it might be called” threading the needle”.

In emergencies you might transport capacitor banks with you. Charge them on the other side and then drop them off. Plug them in and now it shortens the time between uses of the machine.

This might not be as cool as the ships funneling in and not as good for the plot, but since it takes so much effort to use the gates I would think the ship that runs through the gate would be a like a train car shaped like a tube that fits the size of the ring exactly and be as long as it could be and not get cut in half. Might even have it timed so it is cut in just the right place. So that the engines are not part of the cargo and are removed buy the gate after it is up to speed. The hold of the tube ship or carrier would be packed full of as much cargo as possible. It could hold other ships and they could poor out once on the other side. Might be cool to see some of the tactics you might employ like if you suspect your enemy is comming trough the gate. You could have your battle ships waiting for them. To counter this your enemy might have a tube ship like a battering ram that is mostly steal or titanium or whatever the best armor / shielding could be. Then after it absorbes the brunt of the expected attack. The cursers or battleships poor out the back.

AI as a nuke is also a good idea.
This is not my idea, but I read somewhere one of advantages we might have over AI would be that when we turned it on it would never know if it was in a simulation. So we could keep running it through simulations to see what it would do. Every time it runs amuck we flip the kill switch. Hopefully we could train it to be helpful rather than apocalyptic. I would say they still never trusted it. The possible advantages are thought to be worth it so they try it in a remote outpost with several safety measures in place . I would even have it look like it worked and several benefits are seen. Then one day the outpost goes silent. The scouts find that all counter measures were activated and the AI looks to have been destroyed. All people at the outpost are lost and look to have dies in horrible ways or maybe just lost. Kind of a Roanoke type situation.

Over the years they have refined AI and weaponized it but it is never been stable. it works great for a period of time but always ends up running amuck and their would probably be safety measures in place to kill it after a deamed safe measure of time. Once activated a timer starts and the longer it goes the greater the chance of the AI going for lack of a better word evil. Also once the AI is activated the ship is not welcome back to any port. It must be destroyed, or maybe there is a type of decontamination team that can clean it. The people can be recovered but if they have implants they must be removed or cleaned in someway.

The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan did the AI in a satellite. AI was named Spartacus. It was very good book but it did handle the test. Unfortunately, there are many books with very bad outcomes. I look forward to Bill’s take on it.

I really like this idea of star gates as railways. The timing issue would involve some complicated math since all the gates are moving relative to one another as they orbit the galactic core, but that’s a GR calculation that we can do. You could also synchronize the time every time a message comes down the pig line (that reminds me of the old pneumatic messenger lines in office buildings). One way to sabotage the system would be to screw with the timing like the Iranians figured out with our GPS. The Franco-Prussian War might be a good source for military operations around railways.
I like the idea of AI as a super weapon. One other aspect of using it could be that the human crew is likely to be killed by the acceleration the AI would use to maneuver. You might even start a timer for the ship to self-destruct once the AI is loosed to help prevent it from spreading (maybe calculated by code size/bandwidth). That would introduce gravity to the decision to use the AI and a question of the political reliability of crews on AI-equipped ships.

In the early 80s, Stephen King wrote a Horror/Sci Fi story called the Jaunt. It was essentially the teleportation between two gates. one had to go through the gate under general anesthesia. I will not spoil for those who have not read it. I thought it an interesting read as a youngster. I wonder if it holds up, but it was pretty good 40 years ago.

When a gate fires off, it’ll emit a flash of light. Because of its effect on space, it probably generates gravity waves that have a characteristic form. This means gravity wave detectors will be able to keep tabs on what gates are working and where they are.
How long before they start detecting gates that are much farther away than any that humans have built?

(Lab supervisor enters scene. Graduate student is seated at her desk, working on her computer.)
LS: Hi, Michelle, you said you had something interesting?
M: Hi, yes. You know we’ve seen the gravitational wave signal a trans-gate generates.
LS: Yes. It interferes with observations quite nicely, thank you.
M: I’ve been reviewing our recorded data and I’ve been able to find all the gates that have been built so far.
LS: You mean all the registered gates?
M: Those too. These are the Silk Road gates, and these look like a second Silk Road that’ve been kept secret. For instance, here’s a gate signal from a location where no one admits to having a gate. Six months later, we have a matching signal coming in from half a light-year away.
LS: Six months?
M: That’s how long it takes the signal to reach us from the far end.
LS: Wait. How long have you been here?
M: Two months. But that’s long enough to run a search on archived data. Once I knew what a gate signal looks like, I could search the archives for matches.
LS: Well, I guess the DoD’ll be interested in that.
M: They may be more interested in this set.
LS: Oh?
M: Three days ago, for example, a gate signal came in. It took a while, but I found the matching signal from the other end. It was almost five years earlier.
LS: Wait. A gate with a throat length of five light years?
M: No. The endpoints aren’t lined up with Earth. They’re at an angle. The corresponding throat length is eleven point three light years.
LS: That’s impossible.
M: Maybe for us. The only limit is how much energy you can pour into a gate.
LS: You say “for us”?
M: The endpoints of this gate are thirty-seven thousand light years away.
(Computer beeps an alarm. Michelle turns to it and punches some keys.)
LS: What’s that about?
M: I had a search running to find matching signals from that region of the sky. It looks like a real gate. It’s generating a gate signal on a regular interval.
LS: How regular?
M: The signals are approximately ninety-seven hours apart.
LS: Um… can we keep this under wraps for a while?
M: Maybe. If we shut down all of our gravitational wave detectors and erase all the archived data. Anyone else can do what I did, and as you know, “there is no stealth in space”.

I like this vignette a lot!
Does anyone else hear this in the voices of Commander Branch and Lt. Billy (the techs stationed on Epsilon IX) from Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

Something more than a decade ago, Jerry Pournelle stated that you could buy the equipment to render “Toy Story” for $10,000.
Moore’s Law has continued to apply in the interim.

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