Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️more sci-fi should deal with the fact that your average Enterprise starship has a fuel tank measured in Chicxulubs of antimatter
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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"
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
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
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.
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"
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.
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
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".
.katie caliber (alice)@foone this whole thread sounds a bit like how people talk about nuclear reactors being bad but I'll admit I'm by far not smart enough to argue about it
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀Jon's Law: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction.
The scifi author must consider the ramifications of the civilian use of the equivalent of thermonuclear weapons. How would you like to have the captain of the Exxon Valdez with an antimatter drive tramp freighter? The more devastation a drive can wreck, the shorter the leash the captains will be on.
So if drives are too powerful, there won't *be* any colorful tramp freighters.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#johnslaw
Bobby Politte@nyrath @foone Just flying the ship into a planet at full impulse would be devastating. I’m not sure why the genesis device what such a WMD worry for the Klingons when a warp-driven drone would be just as destructive.
The Killing Star absolutely ruined space travel for me… aliens aside, eventually, every ship is a weapon. You just need some fanatics.
60sRefugee@bpolitte @nyrath @foone As I recall from the novelization of "Search For Spock", the Klingons feared that if the Genesis Device worked to specs (which ultimately it didn't), it would be a Weapon of Mass Creation: instantly convert entire planets into whatever you want them to be; so you could wipe out your enemies and then move into the newly terraformed planet. A monopoly on it would remove the Mutual from Mutual Assured Destruction.
Sannemen@bpolitte @nyrath @Foone as I grew up watching Star Trek, that’s the bit that suspended my suspension of disbelief: “we have a whatever-zer weapon capable of destroying your planet!”. Yes, but you can also accelerate matter to multiples of the speed of light! You don’t need a weapon to destroy a planet, you just need an Ensign at the helm to get the pedals switched!
Custard Smingleigh@foone
All I did was show up at a stranger's house and try to show him the cool trick I can do with a plutonium sphere, two hemispherical neutron reflectors, and a screwdriver. Now he and his entire neighborhood try to shoot at me on sight before I can get near them.
All I did was show up at a stranger's house and try to show him the cool trick I can do with a plutonium sphere, two hemispherical neutron reflectors, and a screwdriver. Now he and his entire neighborhood try to shoot at me on sight before I can get near them.
ctrlsaltdelete@foone the Honor Harrington books kinda suck but what they do get right is that even the smallest, most lightly-equipped ship capable of interstellar travel is also capable of rendering pretty much any planet uninhabitable, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is because there is a huge confederacy of planets whose single point of foreign policy agreement is that they will fuck up the day of anyone who takes advantage of that
Michael Gemar@foone This seems like an extension of the Kzinti Lesson.
Riley S. Faelan@foone Neither word appeared in the world-famous Halifax Telegram. https://darrenfisher.ca/december-6th-1917-on-that-cold-day-in-december-the-halifax-harbour-and-surrounding-communities-were-ripped-apart-by-a-massive-explosion/
December 6th 1917: On that cold day in December, the Halifax Harbour and surrounding communities were ripped apart by a massive explosion
“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.” -Vince Coleman, Train Dispatcher December 6th 1917 On that cold day in December, the Halifax Harbour and surrounding communities were ripped apart by a massive explosion. Homes and buildings were flattened. Windows shattered everywhere. The
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@foone counterpoint: mass extinctions are depressing
sometimes departing from reality is a good thing, IMO.
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🚀 🌗@foone Niven & Pournelle dealt with that a bit in The Gripping Hand sequel to Mote in God's Eye. The orbital & space colonies survive the routine apocalypses of the homeworld by distance, but that just leaves them to decay.
Gazoche@foone Not to mention, antimatter explodes when it touches LITERALLY ANYTHING. So the only way to store it is in a vacuum capsule with a magnetic field that keeps it from touching the walls.
If the capsule is breached or the magnetic field stopped for any reason, everyone dies.
Matt Palmer@foone or "hold my beer"
endrift 🏳️⚧️@foone ah yes, the Great Filter: Oops! All Antimatter Annihilation
Maciej Krüger (mkg20001)@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.
@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
JP@foone energy requirements are the A #1 thing that sci fi prefers to gloss over. it's incredibly boring and kinda humiliating that we can think up all kinds of fun interesting futures, but then at the end of the day space is so brutally vast that the math just never adds up re: the energy needed to cross those distances in less than hundreds of thousands of years minimum (ie time spans that can't support a population outside its home planet (cryonics also being a big joke))
Kevin Granade has moved@jplebreton @foone one of the crazy things is that workarounds like data-only FTL and mind transfer is somewhat more feasible.
Seth Richards@foone In the context of Star Wars, I've always thought the Millennium Falcon is a social-political impossibility even if we pretend it's a technical possibility. The energy levels required are far too high for Han Solo to win such a ship in a card game. Even if there are no accidents, imagine what such a ship could do if intentionally crashed by a terrorist group?
@foone Any society which harnessed FTL travel would either maintain tight control over it (the Space Guild from Dune says hi) or would tend toward self-destruction. Possibly one, then the other?
Yes, I know, thinking too hard about Star Wars...
@sethrichards @foone I'd say in the star wars universe FTL is *somehow* inconcievably more efficient. Sure that in of itself is improbable, but that's the setting.
Meanwhile star trek embraces the fact that their starship require immense amounts of power without seriously considering the implications of that.
Solarbird 
@kevingranade @sethrichards @foone Funnily enough, the closest I can come to an example of Star Trek dealing with it is in Lower Decks, the silly version that is also my favourite version lately. (In "First First Contact" the Cerritos crew have to find a way to stop a damaged Federation ship from destroying a planet's civilisation by crashing into said planet on what's supposed to be a first contact mission.)
arky@foone Nah. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make and distribute enough phosphorus in less than 15 gigayears? Starting with only hydrogen and helium, nothing else? Phosphorus, which is indispensible for all three of the trifecta: phospholipid bilayers, nucleic acid backbones (both RNA & DNA), and adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
@foone It's an odd-numbered nucleus, isn't very stable under the conditions found inside stars, and of course, once you make the stuff, it has to survive whatever cataclysmic explosions distribute it back out into the interstellar medium, so it can eventually be part of a planet and get used for something. Carbon, oxygen, even nitrogen come out in huge quantities, but not the phosphorus. It's a limiting factor: you can't get evolution started without enough of it.
@foone Since the cosmos had been cooking this stuff up and distributing for a mere 8 gigayears at the time the Solar system began to form, that particular condensing cloud must have been particularly enriched in phosphorus.
@foone And you know, even if it weren't for that, we wouldn't have the kind of magnetic field that we do (and protective van Allen belts) without Theia dropping her iron core in to merge with Earth's when Theia became the Moon. How common do you think giant solitary satellites formed in this manner are?
Eric Forste@arkiuat You do realize that singling out a particularly enriched phosphorus cloud in our local Milky Way 6-odd gigayears ago as a unique phenomenon runs counter to a long tradition in history of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_center_of_the_Universe
Kassil@foone *vague gesture toward the Odyssey lander that got fucked because The Capitalists didn't want to spend money on important testing*
Popeye Otaku@foone thasa nother thin that annoyed me, the TOS Enterprise ship designer wisely decided they should probably not have the warp nacelles be manned and keep them as far away from the main ship as possible -- then they jus put the warp core on the main ship affer that
Hugo Mills@foone I think it's mentioned in ST:TNG somewhere that a Constitution class starship (e.g. Enterprise) could wipe out all life on a planet in some brief period of time... and that's normal operation, *without* explosively scuttling it with extreme prejudice.
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@foone same reason people picket Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, but not the nuclear subs operated by much less trained personnel within sight of the same.
Pxl Phile@foone I guess the foreign civilization has their reasons not to welcome a thousand WW III bomb ship that is orbiting their planet
4censord 
@foone Star Trec kind off deals with that, in the technical manual for photon torpedoes says something like:
Although they contain not much antimatter, photon torpedoes can convert a significant part of that into energy, by splitting it up into tiny pellet and reacting all of them simultaneously with matter.
In comparison to when the antimatter where blobbed up (like in a starship tank), after initial contact everything would be so dispersed that not that much reaction happens any more.
So kind of like the pressure-vessel of nuclear weapons, when everything starts reacting, it disperses and stops
(this only applies to space of course, crashes are still a menace)
In the German book series "Justin Time" about time travel, the actually have something like that.
They had sent a probe back in time to observe the dinosaurs, but its antimatter reactor malfunctioned and almost wiped out all life on earth.
Tom Spettigue@foone ...megatons, methinks?