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.
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
