Last weekend, I was at Norwescon 44. I wasn’t on any panels and didn’t work in the dealers room this time, so I had lots of time to be in panel audiences. I took lots of notes. So, here they are.
Success on Another Planet – 3pm
From the description:
News flash: The universe is not like Star Trek the original series. You’re gonna need more than a red shirt to succeed.Colette Breshears (M), Alan Andrist, Michael “Tinker” Pearce
The first point, which I believe Michael Pearce made, was to not colonize a planet. Colonize a space. Why go to a planet to mine, when most if not all of the resources you’ll need are available in much shallower gravity wells? For example, our local asteroid belt has a lot more resources available more easily to get to than Earth does. The only reason it seems hard is because we’re starting from Earth. But if we have developed the capability of crossing interstellar space, the asteroid belt would be a lot easier to get to (and to get resources out of) than going all the way down to Earth and climbing back out of the gravity well again for every load.
My own thought is why even land on the planet with a rocket, when it would probably be easier to start off building a space elevator and go up and down with that. Again, it only seems hard to do from our point of view because we’re starting at the bottom.
Life is what makes Earth Earth-like
Michael Pearce
If we find an Earth-like planet, there probably will be life there. Our atmosphere, and even a lot of our geography, was shaped by life.
If we do find life, though, we probably won’t be able to eat it. The good news is, that means it probably won’t be able to eat us. Most likely, the microbes we find there will be incompatible with our biology, so it can’t infect us and give us weird space diseases.
Why go?
For one, data. We’d send probes first, but may launch people before they get there. A fast probe would most likely take 80+ years to get to Proxima Centauri, plus another four years for the data to get back once it does.
What Does “Success” Look Like
General consensus is self-sufficiency. A colony that doesn’t need anything shipped up from Earth to sustain itself. Given the distance, and the time it would take to get anything from Earth, or even send signals back and forth, it would likely have to be self-sufficient from the beginning.
Resources it would need, at a minimum
- Food
- Water
- Shelter
- Power generation
- Light
- Protection from stellar radiation (A good magnetosphere would be best.)
- Gravity
Getting to another system uses so much power, that the ability to generate power for everything else would be pretty much a given.
Food can be grown inside structures using multilevel farms and hydroponics more efficiently than using farmland.
Water is about the most common substance in the universe. Shouldn’t be a problem finding some. It’s also easy to purify – any natural source will be full of stuff you don’t want. (Alien microbes, heavy metals, salt, etc.) Those are all easy to remove. Fun trick for doing it in space: Boil it off at room temperature by lowering the pressure to nearly nothing.
Light? Most planets have a day/night cycle, though it’s unlikely to be ideal. Fun story ideas: Tidally locked planets (one side perpetually light, one perpetually dark) would be very appealing to vampires. Planets with multiple moons might be appealing to werewolves.
We’ve found a lot of “super-Earths”, 4-5 times the size of Earth. They may not have 4-5 times the gravity, though. It depends on mass/density.
Audience Question: Does 3-4 times as big mean diameter, or volume?
Answer: It depends on the publication. Look up the original source to know for sure.
Shelter’s simple, too. You brought one with you. You can build more. Send your robots down to build shelter while you’re mining the local asteroid belt for raw materials and building a space elevator. (Sol’s asteroid belt is largely carbon, which is exactly the element you want to build a space elevator out of. Other systems may vary, though, which is why we send probes first.) Should also be able to 3-D print houses/domes/whatever we end up living in by then, too.
Why would aliens invade us?
The flip side to why would we invade another planet. If it has intelligent life on it, it’s easier to just go somewhere else instead of try to take over. Could we co-exist peacefully? Maybe. Unlikely to find the exact same planets inhabitable, though. In the movies, aliens often invade because they want our resources, but there aren’t many resources on Earth that aren’t more abundant and easier to get to in the asteroid belt.
What about protecting the ship on the way there?
According to the physicists on the panel, traveling at up to about 13% of C is easy enough to armor against things in interstellar space hitting the ship. When you get to 50-60% C, it gets exponentially harder and no known armor would work. (That’s why the Enterprise uses deflector shields.) (The original series had people like Dorothy Fontana and Gene Coon who actually thought about these kinds of things. Writers who came later and didn’t understand it thought it was just technobabble, so they started doing that instead, which is sad but not really relevant to the panel.)