The universe is big
Apr. 5th, 2016 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI was thinking about colonising other planets via the Stargate network
as you do
which led to looking up some numbers.
In the milky way the Stargate has 39 symbols, 38 plus point of origin, leading to 1,987,690,320 hypothetical possible gate addresses according to wiki. But google suggests the current best guess on habitable planets in this galaxy is about 11,000,000,000 - though we're really guessing a lot of things to guess that. So even if every address was a functioning address to a currently habitable planet, that's like 90% of the galaxy that you can't dial. And we know there's a ton of non functioning gate addresses. The 8th chevron dials other galaxies entirely, so that's not an area code around here. And they haven't found a gate with an unfamiliar symbol set, that I recall, though the points of origin remain distinctive. So there's probably not other gates with new sets of 39, even though that's theoretically possible. I imagine something like Birmingham New Street only with different Stargate systems on every platform. Ugh.
So. There's a lot of habitable planets out there. A lot.
So I was thinking that all the science fiction aliens could be in the same galaxy easy peasy.
Not if they're all from alpha centauri, obviously, but even then there's wiggle room in the 'oops wrong number', like when Centauri claimed humans were relatives.
But the ones who are just from random stars? No problem.
And they'd stay away from the gate network because it's infested with goa'uld and hasn't been maintained or updated for like ten thousand years so all sorts of buggy things are happening like the red sun problem and the black hole. Spaceships of your own would look way attractive compared to maybe dialling a black hole. Between that and the tech suppression efforts of the system lords you'd get a lot of low tech civs on the gate network but as soon as they knew how they'd get out of it. So even more gates wouldn't go anywhere. So there's plenty of room for all the other imaginings.
If you head out in different directions you'd get a completely different set of neighbours.
... I was thinking this mostly because of trying to fit Marvel and Stargate together, which kind of doesn't, though you'd have to start with vibranium=naquada and vibranium+trinium=adamantium and then Wakanda would either have been mined out by Ra or would be why the rebellion against Ra, because they'd found a whole new deposit and they could see a whole lot more digging in their future, but also see how to power stuff they weren't supposed to have been touching.
But you could also have the Star Trek universe out there, because the set of people they met was pretty much a coincidence of Vulcans having flown by at exactly that moment.
But then what would happen to science fiction? Would you only have all those stories about Mars and never get around to other star systems? Or is it all secretly true the same way Wormhole Extreme is, and the originators get really wound up about the stereotypes introduced by later writers who only had the fictions to work from?
It is cleaner day and I'm bored.
Of course all the civilisations of fiction could also be on the Stargate network because 1,987,690,320 is a really big number. If you dial 3 completely new gates a day, every day, you'd still be looking for new planets for a couple million years. 1,815,242. That's a lot. Of course they didn't dial them only 3 a day, or only go to new planets, and they kept finding addresses that didn't dial, but still. Especially because so many places forgot what a Stargate was. Everyone could have one and just not notice.
But if there's still 90% of everywhere not on the system... wow that's a lot of millions of years to even look at them all.
... wait, why did the Ancients have so many gates? Especially on planets that might not have anything interesting. How did they go visit them all?
They'd spread out and use lots of gates. So, like, a thousand gates could visit everywhere in a couple thousand years? That's still a lot of years.
How many worlds had Ancients on them?
... how many worlds only had a gate because Ancients programmed them to be dropped everywhere and didn't really think through the consequences?
... because experiments where they didn't think through the consequences seem to be kind of a hallmark.
You wouldn't go three places a day. Each gate activation can last 38 minutes. You can dial the next one in less than a minute. So 24 hours divided by 39 minutes is like 36 gates per day, maximum.
That's still 151,270 years to visit them all.
Or like 152 years from 1,000 gates. That's a lot more doable.
And there'd be gates that don't dial so those would be quicker to get through.
... wait, they have to be able to dial home again. Doh. Er, much less than 36 gates per day, unless one gate goes in and one goes out.
... actually teh Antarctic gate kind of did that? Like, when they couldn't dial the regular gate they got the other gate? Huh.
I did some traffic calculations once that reckoned you could get about as many people through the Stargate as you could through Heathrow Airport. Can't remember my maths, it's on here somewhere. But even two of Heathrow Airport, one in one out, doesn't seem like much for a whole planet. I mean, more than that of people want to visit or pass through Britain, so it seems like Earth would be substantially more busy.
But then what would be reasonable traffic figures for a global spaceport?
Most people mostly want to go places that are closer to home.
It's just with 1,987,690,320 potential destinations to choose from even if only one person wants to go to each you could have 1,987,690,320 trying to get off world. I mean, there's enough of us. But they'd not be able to get all those places so they'd get frustrated. ... if they even knew about all 1,987,690,320 places in the first place, which they wouldn't until hundreds of years of cataloguing from thousands of planets, and then the cat would be out of date by the time the next party went. ... also my math doesn't plan for those thousands of planets keeping in touch with each other.
Really you'd need a regular set of visits to important planets and new exploration around the edges.
But if somewhere is important you get multiple flights per day, so if you have 1000 important places and 36 possible destinations per day, well...
Of course you can open the gate for shorter lengths of time, obviously, increase the max number of destinations, but you can't increase how many people in total get to them. Like having many smaller planes instead of regular big ones.
What kind of civilisation needs the gate system with these numbers?
I'm thinking it's so easy to fracture and fragment that they inevitably would. Way worser than the Cherryh Alliance/Union stuff, if so few people can go so many places.
I keep thinking about a mutant homeworld for Magneto. If they dialled the gate themselves then there'd be a 1/1,987,690,320 chance of finding them by random dialling. Though obviously if they're sensible people they'd have used an explored address. There's still a bunch of those after 10 years.
How many empty worlds did they find that were even marginally suitable for colonisation?
I know the empty world narrative is creepy, as is colonisation as a word, because historically there have been rather a lot of people standing around trying to get people's attention to point out they were in fact there first, and historically they have been responded to with genocide.
So, bad.
But it's a very big universe and we're dealing with very long timespans when we think of intelligent life evolving so finding a planet with no intelligent life to contest occupation seems kind of likely.
... Science Fiction has much more fun with the places that seemed empty but ain't, or the ones where empty isn't the half of the problems.
But I kind of like the idea of giving people a petri dish to start their preferred civilisations. I mean, that's going to go wrong in plenty enough ways just from people being people. Even without the people including Magneto.
But Magneto with a mutant homeworld that's actually a safe haven and not just a target... would he be able to relax? I think not, because he couldn't bring every mutant there forever, he'd feel responsible for the ones left behind. And if you have more than one wave going there the possibilities for discovery increase. But still.
... some people I kind of want to give a world and a holiday.
GURPS Space suggests you need 10K people for a self sustaining high tech level society. Lower numbers and the tech level inevitably drops. And I'm pretty sure they had to make up that number, but I want to poke it and possibly run experiments or find where the natural experiments are. I mean, 10K is smaller than the UEA, there's universities bigger than that, and no single university is the whole cutting edge of even one field. So could they maintain the existing tech, but go slow on progress? And that's just a university, which at the moment is dependent on cities to, you know, grow students. How much of a society do you need to do each essential job? Which tasks are essential, at the current tech level? Not essential under capitalism to earn money for labour, actually necessary to keep civilisation turning. And once you're down to a small group, what mindset would you need to have to keep the essential roles filled?
Where I live has about 18K people, and it doesn't have a university. Two high schools and one sixth form, yes, but people are dissatisfied with the quality even then. And one of those high schools mostly feeds from the surrounding villages. ... er, creepy phrasing.
... but I kind of mean it?
Like, the GURPS assumption is that less than 10K means an Outpost that is not self sustaining and needs people and resources from outside. But I'm really wondering about that 10K border. Because towns don't do all the things when they're that small.
You'd certainly have to design it carefully.
Natural experiments on colony size would be isolated populations on Earth. They're probably in harsher terrain though. And they can always see the other bits of the world, and the travel time is minimal, with very few barriers, more legal and economic than technical.
A 10K population that doesn't swap members with the neighbours, does continue a university level education, and is entirely self sufficient?
It doesn't exist yet, does it?
Maybe you could travel with a university in a box. Open University only more so. But you'd still need experts to mark your work.
You can get quite a lot of experts in a space colony. I mean Atlantis was half expert.
But none children.
Why I keep circling back to this problem is it's a medium scale How Do People Work. I mean, there's more than 7 billion people on this planet, that's way too many for me to get my head around. Countries are still pretty large. But colonies are potentially a smaller system with still all the working parts. How small can you pack a civilisation? Is 200 people going to be a representative or working sample? How about 1,000? How about 10,000?
What kind of skew or influence would you introduce simply via the sorting process?
The idea that Atlantis ended up very, very queer simply by bringing mostly people who didn't report being married is pretty plausible, at that time.
And obviously you'd get people who left the planet for a reason. You'd try and sort by compatible reasons, but you'd get clashes between different colonies that way, and you'd probably get clashes within a colony. Because put three people in a room and get five opinions.
I need to study much, much, much more and I don't know what bits.
Studying history isn't massively helpful because it seems to be mostly about who fights who. Fighting is the bits that don't work, I want to know how stuff works when it's working.
Also I'm not so much studying as picking up library books that seem in reasonable condition, and I haven't even done that for a couple months.
Really though, history of Britain is too huge a subject, how I to get my head around other people histories that maybe did better?
Library.
Okay, cleaner has been and gone, I'll think of something else to do.
as you do
which led to looking up some numbers.
In the milky way the Stargate has 39 symbols, 38 plus point of origin, leading to 1,987,690,320 hypothetical possible gate addresses according to wiki. But google suggests the current best guess on habitable planets in this galaxy is about 11,000,000,000 - though we're really guessing a lot of things to guess that. So even if every address was a functioning address to a currently habitable planet, that's like 90% of the galaxy that you can't dial. And we know there's a ton of non functioning gate addresses. The 8th chevron dials other galaxies entirely, so that's not an area code around here. And they haven't found a gate with an unfamiliar symbol set, that I recall, though the points of origin remain distinctive. So there's probably not other gates with new sets of 39, even though that's theoretically possible. I imagine something like Birmingham New Street only with different Stargate systems on every platform. Ugh.
So. There's a lot of habitable planets out there. A lot.
So I was thinking that all the science fiction aliens could be in the same galaxy easy peasy.
Not if they're all from alpha centauri, obviously, but even then there's wiggle room in the 'oops wrong number', like when Centauri claimed humans were relatives.
But the ones who are just from random stars? No problem.
And they'd stay away from the gate network because it's infested with goa'uld and hasn't been maintained or updated for like ten thousand years so all sorts of buggy things are happening like the red sun problem and the black hole. Spaceships of your own would look way attractive compared to maybe dialling a black hole. Between that and the tech suppression efforts of the system lords you'd get a lot of low tech civs on the gate network but as soon as they knew how they'd get out of it. So even more gates wouldn't go anywhere. So there's plenty of room for all the other imaginings.
If you head out in different directions you'd get a completely different set of neighbours.
... I was thinking this mostly because of trying to fit Marvel and Stargate together, which kind of doesn't, though you'd have to start with vibranium=naquada and vibranium+trinium=adamantium and then Wakanda would either have been mined out by Ra or would be why the rebellion against Ra, because they'd found a whole new deposit and they could see a whole lot more digging in their future, but also see how to power stuff they weren't supposed to have been touching.
But you could also have the Star Trek universe out there, because the set of people they met was pretty much a coincidence of Vulcans having flown by at exactly that moment.
But then what would happen to science fiction? Would you only have all those stories about Mars and never get around to other star systems? Or is it all secretly true the same way Wormhole Extreme is, and the originators get really wound up about the stereotypes introduced by later writers who only had the fictions to work from?
It is cleaner day and I'm bored.
Of course all the civilisations of fiction could also be on the Stargate network because 1,987,690,320 is a really big number. If you dial 3 completely new gates a day, every day, you'd still be looking for new planets for a couple million years. 1,815,242. That's a lot. Of course they didn't dial them only 3 a day, or only go to new planets, and they kept finding addresses that didn't dial, but still. Especially because so many places forgot what a Stargate was. Everyone could have one and just not notice.
But if there's still 90% of everywhere not on the system... wow that's a lot of millions of years to even look at them all.
... wait, why did the Ancients have so many gates? Especially on planets that might not have anything interesting. How did they go visit them all?
They'd spread out and use lots of gates. So, like, a thousand gates could visit everywhere in a couple thousand years? That's still a lot of years.
How many worlds had Ancients on them?
... how many worlds only had a gate because Ancients programmed them to be dropped everywhere and didn't really think through the consequences?
... because experiments where they didn't think through the consequences seem to be kind of a hallmark.
You wouldn't go three places a day. Each gate activation can last 38 minutes. You can dial the next one in less than a minute. So 24 hours divided by 39 minutes is like 36 gates per day, maximum.
That's still 151,270 years to visit them all.
Or like 152 years from 1,000 gates. That's a lot more doable.
And there'd be gates that don't dial so those would be quicker to get through.
... wait, they have to be able to dial home again. Doh. Er, much less than 36 gates per day, unless one gate goes in and one goes out.
... actually teh Antarctic gate kind of did that? Like, when they couldn't dial the regular gate they got the other gate? Huh.
I did some traffic calculations once that reckoned you could get about as many people through the Stargate as you could through Heathrow Airport. Can't remember my maths, it's on here somewhere. But even two of Heathrow Airport, one in one out, doesn't seem like much for a whole planet. I mean, more than that of people want to visit or pass through Britain, so it seems like Earth would be substantially more busy.
But then what would be reasonable traffic figures for a global spaceport?
Most people mostly want to go places that are closer to home.
It's just with 1,987,690,320 potential destinations to choose from even if only one person wants to go to each you could have 1,987,690,320 trying to get off world. I mean, there's enough of us. But they'd not be able to get all those places so they'd get frustrated. ... if they even knew about all 1,987,690,320 places in the first place, which they wouldn't until hundreds of years of cataloguing from thousands of planets, and then the cat would be out of date by the time the next party went. ... also my math doesn't plan for those thousands of planets keeping in touch with each other.
Really you'd need a regular set of visits to important planets and new exploration around the edges.
But if somewhere is important you get multiple flights per day, so if you have 1000 important places and 36 possible destinations per day, well...
Of course you can open the gate for shorter lengths of time, obviously, increase the max number of destinations, but you can't increase how many people in total get to them. Like having many smaller planes instead of regular big ones.
What kind of civilisation needs the gate system with these numbers?
I'm thinking it's so easy to fracture and fragment that they inevitably would. Way worser than the Cherryh Alliance/Union stuff, if so few people can go so many places.
I keep thinking about a mutant homeworld for Magneto. If they dialled the gate themselves then there'd be a 1/1,987,690,320 chance of finding them by random dialling. Though obviously if they're sensible people they'd have used an explored address. There's still a bunch of those after 10 years.
How many empty worlds did they find that were even marginally suitable for colonisation?
I know the empty world narrative is creepy, as is colonisation as a word, because historically there have been rather a lot of people standing around trying to get people's attention to point out they were in fact there first, and historically they have been responded to with genocide.
So, bad.
But it's a very big universe and we're dealing with very long timespans when we think of intelligent life evolving so finding a planet with no intelligent life to contest occupation seems kind of likely.
... Science Fiction has much more fun with the places that seemed empty but ain't, or the ones where empty isn't the half of the problems.
But I kind of like the idea of giving people a petri dish to start their preferred civilisations. I mean, that's going to go wrong in plenty enough ways just from people being people. Even without the people including Magneto.
But Magneto with a mutant homeworld that's actually a safe haven and not just a target... would he be able to relax? I think not, because he couldn't bring every mutant there forever, he'd feel responsible for the ones left behind. And if you have more than one wave going there the possibilities for discovery increase. But still.
... some people I kind of want to give a world and a holiday.
GURPS Space suggests you need 10K people for a self sustaining high tech level society. Lower numbers and the tech level inevitably drops. And I'm pretty sure they had to make up that number, but I want to poke it and possibly run experiments or find where the natural experiments are. I mean, 10K is smaller than the UEA, there's universities bigger than that, and no single university is the whole cutting edge of even one field. So could they maintain the existing tech, but go slow on progress? And that's just a university, which at the moment is dependent on cities to, you know, grow students. How much of a society do you need to do each essential job? Which tasks are essential, at the current tech level? Not essential under capitalism to earn money for labour, actually necessary to keep civilisation turning. And once you're down to a small group, what mindset would you need to have to keep the essential roles filled?
Where I live has about 18K people, and it doesn't have a university. Two high schools and one sixth form, yes, but people are dissatisfied with the quality even then. And one of those high schools mostly feeds from the surrounding villages. ... er, creepy phrasing.
... but I kind of mean it?
Like, the GURPS assumption is that less than 10K means an Outpost that is not self sustaining and needs people and resources from outside. But I'm really wondering about that 10K border. Because towns don't do all the things when they're that small.
You'd certainly have to design it carefully.
Natural experiments on colony size would be isolated populations on Earth. They're probably in harsher terrain though. And they can always see the other bits of the world, and the travel time is minimal, with very few barriers, more legal and economic than technical.
A 10K population that doesn't swap members with the neighbours, does continue a university level education, and is entirely self sufficient?
It doesn't exist yet, does it?
Maybe you could travel with a university in a box. Open University only more so. But you'd still need experts to mark your work.
You can get quite a lot of experts in a space colony. I mean Atlantis was half expert.
But none children.
Why I keep circling back to this problem is it's a medium scale How Do People Work. I mean, there's more than 7 billion people on this planet, that's way too many for me to get my head around. Countries are still pretty large. But colonies are potentially a smaller system with still all the working parts. How small can you pack a civilisation? Is 200 people going to be a representative or working sample? How about 1,000? How about 10,000?
What kind of skew or influence would you introduce simply via the sorting process?
The idea that Atlantis ended up very, very queer simply by bringing mostly people who didn't report being married is pretty plausible, at that time.
And obviously you'd get people who left the planet for a reason. You'd try and sort by compatible reasons, but you'd get clashes between different colonies that way, and you'd probably get clashes within a colony. Because put three people in a room and get five opinions.
I need to study much, much, much more and I don't know what bits.
Studying history isn't massively helpful because it seems to be mostly about who fights who. Fighting is the bits that don't work, I want to know how stuff works when it's working.
Also I'm not so much studying as picking up library books that seem in reasonable condition, and I haven't even done that for a couple months.
Really though, history of Britain is too huge a subject, how I to get my head around other people histories that maybe did better?
Library.
Okay, cleaner has been and gone, I'll think of something else to do.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-05 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 10:16 am (UTC)Of course, the thing with colonies on new worlds is that unless the planet is very hostile, they won't stay small for long. You'd have a big emphasis on fertility in the first few generations.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-05 09:20 pm (UTC)