Incatena

[Pthagnar]

I'm not happy with that being the colonies' main export, but sure, they're pretty good bets.

In the light of everything since, trade imbalances and all, this is really starting to sound more like the colonies selling *equity* to Terran investors...

Banks today will loan you a few hundred thousand dollars that won't be repaid for half a lifetime, and the US Treasury will sell you bonds of the same term.

Only because the banks can sell it to some sucker if they don't like it. And only because £200,000 is barely any amount of money at all. And only because the bank and I both live under the authority of courts who will be only too happy to accept that, yes, the bank *does* own my house now and yes, I *am* going to have to find somewhere else to live. And only because all these agents are living in a quickly-updated free market where price signals can propagate healthily.

When lifetimes are ten times longer, such loans/bonds can be too.

This is a double-edged sword. These things become harder and harder to price, even assuming infinite c.

But they're not things where a new colony has a competitive advantage

Exactly the problem! They are going to have to be propped up with commodities of *real value*, or be impoverished and live in the froth of Terran first-worlder propaganda, or die.

I'm not sure where you get this... there's plenty of space habitats.
Because

They also have one huge resource— the ability to have lots of land and make lots of babies. Emigrating would be a luxury, but the fare might be credited to the colony.

If you can just build a space habitat in the empty space around Sol, and still get radio links in terms of hours with the rest of civilisation, what real value [hahahaha] does land on colony worlds have?

The Incatena would say that it was a good investment... ultimately the colonies become large contributing economies. But they’re also just the extravagance that the Incatena chose to treat itself to.

This... sounds highly likely to lead to terrifying intenecine conflict. One I am not sure that the Space Liberals should win, or even *could*. What happens when the colonies, as every colony does eventually, decides that it cares little for your rule and declares itself independent? You've ruled out interstellar war, so the only result can be misery and/or isolation!

[linguofreak]

First of all, my apologies: I used the term troops somewhat loosely. To clarify, I mean "manned military spacecraft". A military occupation of a system would likely more resemble the enforcement of a no-fly-zone or blockade than a traditional occupation. Much of your critical infrastructure is in space and likely highly automated. The invaders can likely comandeer it (or what survives after the initial relativistic bombardment and subsequent skirmishes when the invaders actually arrive) without setting foot on any planets or space habitats there may be if they manage to defeat local spaceborne forces.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty here. The present no-fly zone in Libya should be instructive: the number of plane, flights, and pilots and their cost is extremely high, and this is a tiny and two-dimensional bit of real estate. Plus the allies have a huge industrial complex and Libya doesn't. It's very hard to enforce any kind of blockade unless you have an industrial edge.

I'm speaking more of the means by which the system is occupied once military victory is achieved. By this point you've either destroyed or obtained control of the spaceborne industry in the system, and most importantly, it's energy infrastructure.

In your scenario, the invaded star system has its industrial complex right there, and building and maneuvering interplanetary vessels is going to be much easier than interstellar ones.

As well, you can hardly put in the same scenario that the infrastructure is both lightly defended and essential! If it's essential, it will be defended.

The blockade begins once the defenses have been blown away, and only if they have been.

For habitable planets it's more of a nuisance, but will cut them off from the amenities of (futuristically) modern civilization.

Well, that's another problem, even granted that a blockade were possible. What amenities are those? No one can be dependent on any outsystem resources-- materials, manufacturing, services, whatever. All interstellar trade is luxury goods; doing without them is only an annoyance.

There's still in-system stuff. You're blockading individual population centers within a system against *any* traffic, including insystem traffic, unless they do as you say. Planets are doing without any off-planet resources, including the energy from those solar panels. Space habitats are doing without any resources from outside. (They may have a small amount of solar power from their own solar panels, but they won't have access to the system power grid without your say-so).

Also, never underestimate the instability that can be precipitated in wealthy societies by removing luxuries whose removal should be "only an annoyance".

(In the Incatena there's a healthy trade in ideas. You want the latest patents, fashions, Vee content, games, DNA, etc. You want to keep up with such things to improve your own quality of life, but stopping the supply can only really be an annoyance.)

(An interesting question, one I'm still working on, is how this is all paid for. I'm not convinced that money can be transported, given the constraints I'm working with.)

Energy is going to be a huge thing. It's probably what new colonies will have the most demand for. It probably won't be *efficiently* transmittable over interstellar distances without considerable infrastructure on the receiving end.

I think you underestimate the guidability of such projectiles. At the speeds we're talking about, you're plowing through the interstellar medium fast enough that a magsail can give you a significant amount of acceleration (more than enough for course corrections).

Hmm, do you have some formulas on that? You've got higher mass and limited maneuvering time the faster you go, no?

From your own perspective you have the same mass with less maneuvering time.

From the perspective of an external observer you have the same maneuvering time with a greater mass.

From the perspective of an external observer you may also have different masses for acceleration parallel and perpendicular to the direction of travel if you define force as mass times acceleration (that is, acceleration viewed in the external observer's frame) rather than as change in momentum over time.

In any case, the accelerations needed perpendicular to your course in order to make course corrections are going to be very small if you have aimed with any sort of reasonable accuracy at these speeds.

Following a forewarned opponent's evasive maneuvers is not going to be so easy, though.

I've Googled this a bit but I'd love to get a better handle on the physics.

It's hard to find good resources. Most of what you find on the internet is aimed either at the extreme layman or at the physics grad student. Some good keywords for getting a better handle on the physics of relativity than is taught in the standard "Relativity for Dummies" blurb are "Relativity of simultaneity" (it's implied by what's taught in articles for laymen on relativity, but generally not explicitly stated, leading to misunderstandings) , "Minkowski space", "spacetime interval", and "Four vector".

Now, I also think that you're not likely to have million km solar arrays: You may well have an equivalent amount of collector area, but it's more likely to be spread out in lots of little arrays than a few big ones. (1 million km is not much less than the diameter of the sun). This would be for various reasons, both structural and defensive. (Smaller arrays are smaller targets and easier to move, thus will be less of a target for relativistic strikes.)

I'm pretty sure I was thinking of million-km-^2 arrays.

Even 1,000,000 km^2 is big for a single array. That's a square array 1000 km on a side. My gut feeling is that you'll have lots and lots of arrays maybe 10 km on a side, however big or small the total number of arrays is.

[linguofreak]

One big thing would be information. Planets with their own ecologies, or with access to aliens, would have lots of information to trade. Lifeless planets, not so much, though their very experience terraforming and colonizing would provide new information.

Lifeless planets would have their share of information. It would just be more oriented towards the fields of physics and geology than towards biology.

The big thing with information, though, is that it's a product with one-time costs that are often very high and per-unit costs that, since the computer/internet revolution are *extremely* low. This makes it *very* difficult to find a supply / demand equilibrium, and *very* difficult to find a way to prevent anyone who gets a hold of the information from undercutting the price of the original "manufacturer" of the information, who has to recoup their one-time costs.

The net effect is that information is *very expensive* for the first person to come across it, and *very cheap* for everybody else, such that it's hard not to screw one party or the other over.

The best solution, I think, is a patronage / commission system, such as seen in pre-modern Europe, wherein producers of information (artists, researchers, etc.) are either paid a stipend or one large lump sum per piece of information produced, rather than a copyright system, wherein they are paid a small amount per copy made of a piece of information.

The difficulty is that historical patronage systems tended to operate on the principle of extremely wealthy individuals funding much less wealthy individuals in their pursuit of art, research, etc. In modern society, or that of the Incatena, where the distribution of wealth is much more even, this is much more difficult. I see two solutions: Either a socialistic one (problematic in that I'm not a socialist ) in which the government commissions the production of information and passes the cost on to the taxpayer, or a more capitalistic one in which you have an organization that collects membership dues from individuals, and chooses what to fund based on what paying members vote for (with each member's vote being proportional to the amount paid in membership dues).

In either case, the information is ideally released into the public domain or under a free license (depending on the degree to which remnants of a copyright system still exist in the society in question), either immediately if the producer is paid with a stipend, or upon receipt of payment if they are payed with lump sums per unit of information released.

It may be noted that the current business model of software corporations is somewhat of a bastardization of my capitalistic model for commissions/stipends: Programmers are payed a salary for developing programs, in exchange for allowing the company to sell copies of the programs to consumers under a copyright model.

[zompist]

Banks today will loan you a few hundred thousand dollars that won't be repaid for half a lifetime, and the US Treasury will sell you bonds of the same term.

Only because the banks can sell it to some sucker if they don't like it. And only because £200,000 is barely any amount of money at all. And only because the bank and I both live under the authority of courts who will be only too happy to accept that, yes, the bank *does* own my house now and yes, I *am* going to have to find somewhere else to live. And only because all these agents are living in a quickly-updated free market where price signals can propagate healthily.

Those are good points, but investors have historically been happy with far higher risk. Our railroads, for instance, were largely financed by British investors, and that worked out fine. For us, I mean; the Brits were often screwed...

If you can just build a space habitat in the empty space around Sol, and still get radio links in terms of hours with the rest of civilisation, what real value [hahahaha] does land on colony worlds have?

Planets can be pretty nice places to live, much easier to grow really large enterprises on. Adding space for a million new residents would be a formidable project for a space habitat.

This... sounds highly likely to lead to terrifying intenecine conflict. One I am not sure that the Space Liberals should win, or even *could*. What happens when the colonies, as every colony does eventually, decides that it cares little for your rule and declares itself independent? You've ruled out interstellar war, so the only result can be misery and/or isolation!

They're already independent.

[zompist]

The big thing with information, though, is that it's a product with one-time costs that are often very high and per-unit costs that, since the computer/internet revolution are *extremely* low. This makes it *very* difficult to find a supply / demand equilibrium, and *very* difficult to find a way to prevent anyone who gets a hold of the information from undercutting the price of the original "manufacturer" of the information, who has to recoup their one-time costs.

The net effect is that information is *very expensive* for the first person to come across it, and *very cheap* for everybody else, such that it's hard not to screw one party or the other over.

The best solution, I think, is a patronage / commission system, such as seen in pre-modern Europe, wherein producers of information (artists, researchers, etc.) are either paid a stipend or one large lump sum per piece of information produced, rather than a copyright system, wherein they are paid a small amount per copy made of a piece of information.

I think there's a number of options, but first we have to get past the dominace of the distributors of information. When information was primarily distributed physically, it made a certain amount of sense for the manufacturers and distibutors to serve as gatekeepers, publicists, and middlemen, and of course control over physical copies was important. Get rid of them and we can try out new concepts and methods.

There's a value to counting copies: it's a way of keeping score. It provides feedback on what information people want. Markets are very good at distributing effort. If there's a huge demand for Bollywood musicals, then the market provides an incentive to produce more of them.

I also see information getting smarter. Protocols could be developed to accompany data packets with a pricing algorithm. I don't think consumers would object to a system that's cheap, easy, fair, and artist-focused.

At the same time, there's no need to over-reward the successful. Much present copyright law is absurd, even if we took the distributors out of it. If I buy a bit of data, it should stay bought... if the manufacturer changes formats, they can't expect to re-sell it to me. And I should be able to lend it out and resell it.

[linguofreak]

I think there's a number of options, but first we have to get past the dominace of the distributors of information. When information was primarily distributed physically, it made a certain amount of sense for the manufacturers and distibutors to serve as gatekeepers, publicists, and middlemen, and of course control over physical copies was important. Get rid of them and we can try out new concepts and methods.

There's a value to counting copies: it's a way of keeping score. It provides feedback on what information people want. Markets are very good at distributing effort. If there's a huge demand for Bollywood musicals, then the market provides an incentive to produce more of them.

There is somewhat, and it worked well with printed information. The problem is finding a way of counting copies and selling by the copy that doesn't screw one party or the other over. To be able to enforce that any price is paid at all on a per copy basis, the distributor has to have a fair degree of dominance in the process.

I also see information getting smarter. Protocols could be developed to accompany data packets with a pricing algorithm. I don't think consumers would object to a system that's cheap, easy, fair, and artist-focused.

How is this pricing algorithm enforced? DRM? And, apart from that, how do you prevent someone from copying the information once they've bought it and selling it cheaper?

The problem is that copyright infringement once took a printing press. Violators could be tracked down fairly easily. Now it's something anyone can do with a $20 USB stick and access to a computer that can access the internet.

At the same time, there's no need to over-reward the successful. Much present copyright law is absurd, even if we took the distributors out of it. If I buy a bit of data, it should stay bought... if the manufacturer changes formats, they can't expect to re-sell it to me. And I should be able to lend it out and resell it.

If you can lend or resell it, there's nothing to prevent you keeping a copy. And since your investment is only what the manufacturer charged you, you can make a profit selling it much cheaper than he's selling it.

[zompist]

I think you're assuming that people want to cheat. I don't think they do, if they feel the payment system is fair, easy, and cheap enough.

Even today DRM can be done well; Steam is the best example. It has enough advantages and conveniences for users that most of them consider it a positive thing.

If the system is good enough, most people's attitudes to piracy will be "Why bother?" Book publishing has traditionally been an example. Why bother to buy a cheap pirated edition for $2 cheaper when, if you're that cheap, you can borrow the book from the library, or buy a copy and sell it when you're done? Smart authors and publishers encouraged libraries, on the grounds that they end up increasing sales.

[linguofreak]

I think you're assuming that people want to cheat. I don't think they do, if they feel the payment system is fair, easy, and cheap enough.

Even today DRM can be done well; Steam is the best example. It has enough advantages and conveniences for users that most of them consider it a positive thing.

Being considered a good thing is not necessarily the same as *being* a good thing.

If the system is good enough, most people's attitudes to piracy will be "Why bother?" Book publishing has traditionally been an example. Why bother to buy a cheap pirated edition for $2 cheaper when, if you're that cheap, you can borrow the book from the library, or buy a copy and sell it when you're done? Smart authors and publishers encouraged libraries, on the grounds that they end up increasing sales.

For books there's a big difference between buying a used book and buying a pirated edition. For digital data you can never be sure that the used copy you just bought isn't a pirated edition.

[Pthagnar]

Those are good points, but investors have historically been happy with far higher risk. Our railroads, for instance, were largely financed by British investors, and that worked out fine. For us, I mean; the Brits were often screwed...

No. Really. By what metric is the American railroad mania a "far higher risk" than underwriting the bootstrapping of a Type 1 civilisation that is a light-century away, with whom in the worst case you can do nothing but send messages saying that you are very upset with them and will not send any more money and you're going to have to pirate your IP from now on, buster.

Planets can be pretty nice places to live, much easier to grow really large enterprises on. Adding space for a million new residents would be a formidable project for a space habitat.

N...ot really? At least, not necessarily in principle? You don't have to wait centuries for IP to get to you, you can buy processed matter easily rather than having to make it and there are many AIs watching over for malfeasance and accidents...

You cannot really say that it would definitely be a formidable project -- what if space habitats are built and have been built with this sort of modularity in mind for centuries? And so what if it *is* formidable, you were talking about how willing Incatenan financiers are to taking huge risks!

They're already independent.

Independent in the economic sense. Independent as in "hey thanks for all that infrastructural investment, thanks for all the money, we 'preciate it. You can fuck off now". Independent as in *ungrateful*. Independent only because the ultima ratio regum has pussified into saying "pleeeeeeease be nice" and cutting off media privileges.

I think you're assuming that people want to cheat. I don't think they do, if they feel the payment system is fair, easy, and cheap enough.

Yes, it is true, I am assuming this. This is why we have armies, this is why we have police, this is why we have courts, this is why we have corporate disciplinary policies, this is why we have casino eyes-in-the-sky, this is why we have security guards, this is why we have the Berne convention, this is why we have the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, this is why we have public-key encryption, this is why we have security cameras, this is why we still fucking have USENET servers still making money...

[rotting bones]

zompist: you mean colonies sell habitable space (scarce even in outer space, i should think) to accomodate earth's excess population?

[linguofreak]

If you can just build a space habitat in the empty space around Sol, and still get radio links in terms of hours with the rest of civilisation, what real value [hahahaha] does land on colony worlds have?

Planets can be pretty nice places to live, much easier to grow really large enterprises on. Adding space for a million new residents would be a formidable project for a space habitat.

Meh. Adding space wouldn't be so difficult. I'm more concerned about keeping big accidents from happening too often to make such a habitat a desirable place to live, keeping the life support going, etc.

But there are a fair number of people who disagree with me on that, and your setting seems to be operating off of a lot of their assumptions.

And whatever the case, even on Earth, where travel is easy and cheap, I don't think colonies have really ever generated enough of a population outflow to really affect the population density back in their homeland. So yes, I would say that planets in need of more living space are more likely to build space habitats than to try to ship their population several light years to another habitable planet.

[zompist]

zompist: you mean colonies sell habitable space (scarce even in outer space, i should think) to accomodate earth's excess population?

No; after the Collapse Earth did not have an overpopulation problem.

Given the costs of space travel (under known physics), colonization can't be be a solution to overpopulation.

[zompist]

Those are good points, but investors have historically been happy with far higher risk. Our railroads, for instance, were largely financed by British investors, and that worked out fine. For us, I mean; the Brits were often screwed...

No. Really. By what metric is the American railroad mania a "far higher risk" than underwriting the bootstrapping of a Type 1 civilisation that is a light-century away, with whom in the worst case you can do nothing but send messages saying that you are very upset with them and will not send any more money and you're going to have to pirate your IP from now on, buster.

[...]Independent in the economic sense. Independent as in "hey thanks for all that infrastructural investment, thanks for all the money, we 'preciate it. You can fuck off now". Independent as in *ungrateful*. Independent only because the ultima ratio regum has pussified into saying "pleeeeeeease be nice" and cutting off media privileges.

Some of the Incatena colonies were founded with just that attitude— fuck Earth, let's start over! Homeland was begun as a libertarian utopia, Armonia as a socialist one. Normally you'd be content starting a space habitat, but these are the outliers.

I don't see these ventures as shutting themselves off hermetically; there are well-wishers back home you'd like to keep in touch with, and people have a habit of sneaking in a look at contraband holo channels.

And sooner or later, probably sooner, the colonists calm down and resume full contact.

To return to the first question— neither the Brits nor Incatena investors had any ability to check up on or control the investments. And again, the Brits were often screwed; railroads were overbuilt and in other ways lost money. In contrast, it's a pretty good bet that after 300 years a colony will be spectacularly larger and more prosperous.

Edit: There seems to be a miscommunication on space habitats. I see these as fairly common, and certainly the first resort for most people who want Their Own World. Matter (e.g. metal) is a limited resource, but hey, the asteroid belt is just sitting there. Colonizing planets is a rarer extravagance. Note that by my timeline, a colony has been started only about twice a century, and less than half of those were started by Earth.

I also liked a random comment I found on a website yesterday: space habitats seemed to be popular with libertarians, but you can't deny access to your property to the guy checking for pressure leaks. If you want that illusion of 1840s freedom, you probably need to be on a planet.

[Pthagnar]

Some of the Incatena colonies were founded with just that attitude— fuck Earth, let's start over!

That is not quite the same thing. *This* is starting a colony with the attitude of helping Earth, and *ending* with it by saying "fuck Earth!", but dressing it up in fine sentiments. The moral characters of the two situations are quite different. Of course, you are an American and so probably think this is perfectly laudable behaviour and, really when you think about it, exactly the same thing.

To return to the first question— neither the Brits nor Incatena investors had any ability to check up on or control the investments. And again, the Brits were often screwed; railroads were overbuilt and in other ways lost money.

Are you trying to tell us that the Incatena are so shit at investing prudently that they make the giddiest gilded age speculators look like Solomon, and destroy planetary economies whenever they fund new colonies for god knows what ideological delusions about how lovely planetary surfaces and being centuries away from civilised company are?

[zompist]

Some of the Incatena colonies were founded with just that attitude— fuck Earth, let's start over!

That is not quite the same thing. *This* is starting a colony with the attitude of helping Earth, and *ending* with it by saying "fuck Earth!", but dressing it up in fine sentiments. The moral characters of the two situations are quite different. Of course, you are an American and so probably think this is perfectly laudable behaviour and, really when you think about it, exactly the same thing.

What does "laudable" have to do with anything? This is a setting designed to tell stories. There's not many stories you can tell when everyone behaves laudably.

Are you trying to tell us that the Incatena are so shit at investing prudently that they make the giddiest gilded age speculators look like Solomon, and destroy planetary economies whenever they fund new colonies for god knows what ideological delusions about how lovely planetary surfaces and being centuries away from civilised company are?

I don't understand the question at all, since I've just said that the British investors were more imprudent.

[zompist]

I'm assuming socionomics is going to revolve around a Jacobean understanding of macroeconomics?

It would certainly incorporate Jacobs' insights. One reason we don't today is that the data and infrastructure isn't there. We get national-level data because that's what nations have concentrated on getting. The Incatena page mentions that currencies operate at a city or habitat level.

For books there's a big difference between buying a used book and buying a pirated edition. For digital data you can never be sure that the used copy you just bought isn't a pirated edition.

I wouldn't assume that that's the case forever. Right now, Google is working on the problem of content farms— sites that steal random web pages to hide their SEO in. Are you betting that they can't solve this problem? They basically have a copy of the Web on their servers; one approach is simply to find out if the text appeared earlier somewhere else.

[Pthagnar]

What does "laudable" have to do with anything? This is a setting designed to tell stories. There's not many stories you can tell when everyone behaves laudably.

to be sure. the point is that i wasn't describing what you thought i was describing, and so the laudability comes in only in that that there is an Amusing Parallel in the histories [or historiographies?] of our two beloved nations

I don't understand the question at all, since I've just said that the British investors were more imprudent.

I really must disagree -- the Incatenan investors sound much more imprudent, for the reasons I have explained!

[hwhatting]

On the whole, my impression now is that colonies mostly are a luxury certain groups indulge in - libertarians, socialists, vegetarians, feudalism re-enactors, pick your lot. So they would be planned and financed by enthusiasts and probably will be supported by backers who are interested in the experiment but don't want to leave the comfort of their homes, like American Zionists supporting Israel or (insert emigree group of your choice) supporting this or that cause back home. So for quite a time colonies will not so much pay for participating in the ideas & information trade by exports, as receive ideas & information from well-wishing backers on the home world(s) of the colonists.
Also, while the trade in ideas & information may well be substantial inside solar systems and clusters of solar systems, I don't expect too much going on between distant systems - if sending-receiving takes up centuries, it will be difficult to organise a lively trade.

[Ashroot]

A quick question about the technology. Since your people manipulate gravity, how large an area can they effect?

Because a fun thought I had was that they could release a large portion of a star's gravity causing its matter to spew even in the upper most layers. These layers would release light. (At the moment the sun is supposed to hold a thousand years worth of light. So if fusion stops we would know in 1,000 years.) This when combined with a Dyson sphere (if technologically possible) could collect large amounts of energy. Not to mention make a once in a life time display.

[zompist]

The energy required varies by the amount of mass, so megaprojects would be highly difficult.

[Ashroot]

OK. So this won't work either?

[quote="Me]I remember mentioning star lifting to you a while ago. I also remember that you said that the Incatena have no use for the amount of energy such a system would provide. The amounts of energy made would (according to Stephen William Hawking) warp space to the point where it could be used for wormhole production. A costlier system would be simply setting up massive solar arrays; this would dim the star to a point that it would freeze all habitable planets in the near vicinity to popsicles.

I was going to discuss the solar arrays. I feel this would be an over complicated system that would go like this:

Asteroids orbiting a star are rigged with mirrors and bases. The bases report to the solar array where they are and what their angle is. The solar arrays, instead of wastefully turning light into electricity, simply refract the light into large fiber optic cables. This would be done by enlarging a system similar to this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_disk_laser and here http://jp.hamamatsu.com/en/rd/publicati ... c_0612.pdf
By synching times and transmitting information short times before the firing of the laser you could set up a ring of stationary asteroids that keep the laser going in an infinite circle through a complex entry system using mirrors. The mirrors would have small panels to absorb some of the laser for personal use. Also I propose the use of a cloud. By this I mean they would keep the lasers in a group instead of a continuous line. This would allow for frequent repositioning of mirrors for other purposes instead of only directing only one beam. Also it would allow for the mirror to move without worry of the laser being redirected in the event of an accident.

An even more interesting idea is the use of gravity wells. If your people can manipulate gravity they can use it to reposition the light beam, a mirror would suffer melting, and flexing and warping. In reality this makes more sense than a mirror.

At certain times after a saving of light has occurred, probably once a week, they could open a wormhole to a specific star system for trading, colonization etc. By pumping light into other larger gravity wells so that it doesn’t have enough speed to get out, put enough speed to not go all the way in either. They would most likely pulse the light so that it affects space even more. This would churn and bend space to a point where vela, wormhole. It would probably take a lot of energy to make but not too much to maintain.

An interesting point you could include is that a wormhole will only ever travel in a straight line. This may or may not be realistic, but a way to describe it is that a wormhole won’t open behind itself. Also you could include that the more energy you pump in the farther it goes. Even more interesting is that if you have two you could connect them doubling the distance. Such technology could cut travel down to months, weeks, days even. I think of wormholes as bridges not two surfaces of space together.

I thought it might be an interesting thing for your agent to do. Combine it with a bunch of singularity AIs and you have an action book. Not to mention how it would create an economic/political revolution.
[/quote]

[con quesa]

So, when was the last time someone died of natural causes in the Incatena universe? If it's possible to almost completely swap out the human body with mechanical parts, genetically engineer the human body out the wazoo, and lifetimes approach a thousand years, what exactly does finally cause people to die? I'm not seeing how the level of technology described wouldn't lead to clinical immortality, which is a different kettle of fish then mere long lifespans.

[zompist]

Well, the upper limit is unknown in the 50C... some people have reached a thousand years, but no one knows if they can keep it up.

My assumption, however, is that new obstacles keep coming up. That is, you solve problems that occur at 80 years, and you discover new syndromes that strike at 100... then 150... then 200. (And to some extent, statistics will get you. E.g. the rate of accidental deaths is currently about .04% per year... over a thousand years, that could mean you have a 40% chance of dying by accident!)

I'll go out on a limb and say that in the time of the book, the main problems are neurological. You can get a new heart, but you can't really get a new brain... that's kind of you there. So generally your brain eventually gets so messed up that it ends up killing you.

There's also a hot debate in the Incatena about neoteny. How much is a person of 200 going to change in their thinking? But if they don't, politics, business, and academia might stagnate for centuries. There's a habit of loosening your brain to some extent at intervals— a chance to clear out old memories, limber up the brain, and correct some syndromes— but it can't entirely substitute for the re-roll of the dice that a new generation brings.

[linguofreak]

Well, the upper limit is unknown in the 50C... some people have reached a thousand years, but no one knows if they can keep it up.

My assumption, however, is that new obstacles keep coming up. That is, you solve problems that occur at 80 years, and you discover new syndromes that strike at 100... then 150... then 200. (And to some extent, statistics will get you. E.g. the rate of accidental deaths is currently about .04% per year... over a thousand years, that could mean you have a 40% chance of dying by accident!)

My probability theory's weaker than it should be, so I wrote up a quick Java program to work the probabilities out by the "roll a bunch of dice, see how they actually come out" method.

For your number for accidental deaths, it reports an average life span at the end of a run of about 2500 years.

For the CDC death statistics from 2007, with accidents, murders, and suicides as causes of death, it comes out to about 58.6 deaths per 100,000 per year, for an average life span of around 1700 years. (Which comes close to a figure I heard of about 1500 years for only accidents and human action as causes of death).

Under this last test, about 300 out of every 100,000 make it to 10 kiloyears, and about 5700 die at 100 years or less.

[finlay]

http://zompist.com/mars/tonhasex.html?n ... ver=5&br=y

Di- did you just call people's genitals their "sex"? Bless.