Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[Suicide Junkie]

You also need to increase the chance-per-turn of an event in settings.txt.

There is a setting each for low, medium, and high event frequency.

[AgentZero]

Oi, folks, back on topic! We're supposed to be helping out Starhawk here. Just a few thoughts on 'tech balance' from my 3rd Dynasty Universe (the one Hell is for Heroes is set in. Look forward to a few new chapters this week, btw). In that universe, humanity is signifcantly more advanced than any other race in the galaxy, aside from one which is ridiculously more advanced but has little interest in the affairs of 'inferior' races. However, humanity isn't terribly aggressive in this universe, since they got lucky in the grand scheme of things and have a large number of habitable worlds. I've got a spreadsheet somewhere with all the details, but just winging it, the Terran Imperium (as it is known) consists of 2,252 habitable worlds, of which only 1,823 are colonized. In contrast, the Tauran Empire, which is roughly the same size cubic-lightyear-wise has 1,452 worlds to it's name and has colonized them all. This creates tension between the two empires, since the Taurans want to expand, but humanity isn't about to start giving away bits of it's empire, even if it hasn't really got a use for them.
Terran ships tend to be fast, heavily armoured and pack so much firepower it would liquify your brain to even think about it. The Taurans on the other hand tend to just cobble together ships with an eye towards building them quickly, rather than having them last very long once it hits the fan.
Other races have mainly been confined to a few star systems, and eargerly greet any conflict between Terrans and Taurans (yes, the name similarity is on purpose) as an oportunity to slice off a little piece of the big pie.

As for the whole whether or not an FTL race would have found us by now, I think most arguments are flawed by assuming that an alien race would have even remotely the same motivations as our own. Furthermore, while I find the notion that we are the only sentient life in the universe absurd on simple grounds of probablilty, even if there is more than one sentient race per galaxy in 99.99999999999% of the universe, ours could still be one of the many where only one sentient race has evolved.

And someone just answer one question for me because I honestly don't know the answer: Our solar system is located in one of the arms of the Milky Way's spiral, now does that make it part of the older (first to form) or newer parts of the galaxy?

[Suicide Junkie]

And someone just answer one question for me because I honestly don't know the answer: Our solar system is located in one of the arms of the Milky Way's spiral, now does that make it part of the older (first to form) or newer parts of the galaxy?

The sun is 5 billion years old.
It is a 3rd generation star; it contains heavy elements which can only be produced in superheavy stars and supernovae.

The largest stars burn up in less than a billion years. The smallest ones can last nearly forever.


http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/GHZ/GHZmovie.html
The general idea is that it takes longer to make enough heavy elements for rocky planet formation in the outskirts of the galaxy since there are fewer supernovae. But close in, there are too many supernovae, and your planets get scorched too often.

[Wolfman77]

Seems to have alot of newer stars.

"Sol is located 67 ly north of the galactic plane within a roughly 200-ly wide band that is rich in gas, dust, and newborn stars," from this page

http://members.nova.org/~sol/chview/chv5.htm

[Slick]

"north" ???

[Suicide Junkie]

Based on spin and the right hand rule, I suspect.

[Slick]

Then there would be a "south" but no "east" or "west".

[Hunpecked]

AgentZero writes: "As for the whole whether or not an FTL race would have found us by now, I think most arguments are flawed by assuming that an alien race would have even remotely the same motivations as our own."

Obviously it's tough to generalize from one data point. It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that both biological and cultural evolution favor expansionism in intelligent species. Biologically, species that don't try to increase their numbers and ranges tend to get wiped out by competing organisms and/or environmental changes (ice ages, asteroid strikes, etc.). Culturally, stagnant civilizations are usually overrun by vigorous expansionist competitors. If a sapient alien species is as culturally diverse as our own (e.g. because of varied planetary habitats), even a SINGLE expansionist culture would end up determining the character of the whole race.

The same principle holds on a larger scale. Perhaps evolution for some reason favors introspective sentient species. Maybe the universe is full of "flower children" who make love (with birth control), not road trips. If so, then FTL doesn't exist, because it takes only ONE vagabond culture in ONE species with practical FTL and a billion year head start to put ALL the hippies out of business.

With STL only, the same thing should happen on a galactic scale, so I can buy the argument that we're either first or alone (more or less) in the Milky Way, as unlikely as that appears. There are of course other possibilities, some of which we've already covered.

AgentZero also writes: "Our solar system is located in one of the arms of the Milky Way's spiral, now does that make it part of the older (first to form) or newer parts of the galaxy?"

According to the article below the first stars in our galaxy formed about 13.6 billion years ago. That makes our sun, at 5 billion years, a relative youngster.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ge_040817.html

I assume that 13 billion years ago local conditions could have led to star formation just about anywhere in the galaxy, but most "old" stars formed near the galactic center and in the galactic "halo" of globular clusters. Spiral arms are areas of new star formation that shine brighter than the rest of the galactic disk due to the very young blue giant stars within them. Our solar system has been around the galaxy 18-20 times since it was born, so our current location in a star forming region is a coincidence.

[dogscoff]

Hunpecked said:
According to the article below the first stars in our galaxy formed about 13.6 billion years ago. That makes our sun, at 5 billion years, a relative youngster.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ge_040817.html

But according to that same article, our galaxy is almost as old as the universe. When the universe was born, it was all hydrogen- there were no heavy elements. It is the ongoing process of star-burning that turns dull old hydrogen into stuff like carbon and oxygen that we need for life. The older the universe gets, the more hydrogen is turned into heavy elements. Therefore, looking at it the other way, as you look back in time towards the Big Bang the amount of heavy elements in the universe dwindles down to nothing.
Since these heavy elements are needed for life, shouldn't the probablilty of life dwindle away with it?

Or, to put it another way, we may be among the first life to emerge, because it's not the amount of stars that have existed over the last 13.whatever billion years that matters, it's the availability of heavy elements- and they've never been more available than right now. Give it another 10 billion years and there could be life springing up all over the place, because the universe will be a much heavier place than it is now. It may even get *too* heavy for life at some point, which would mean the Drake equation would have to factor in some sort of bell curve with "suitability for life of heavy element/ hydrogen ratio" on one axis and "time since big bang" on the other.

[Hunpecked]

Dogscoff writes: "...as you look back in time towards the Big Bang the amount of heavy elements in the universe dwindles down to nothing. Since these heavy elements are needed for life, shouldn't the probablilty of life dwindle away with it?"

Absolutely. Note, however, that we're dealing with averages and probabilities here. In regions of unusually rapid star formation (galactic cores, globular clusters) the interstellar medium could be sufficiently enriched with "metals" (atomic number 3 and above) in a billion years (the most massive stars are thought to go supernova in under a hundred million years). Such regions are also pretty hostile to life (black holes, sterilizing radiation), but given the vast number of galaxies in the universe, it seems likely that suitable combinations of conditions would exist in many of them. If so, even after 4-5 billion years of evolution, life forms in these regions would have a 7 billion year head start on us.

While researching this post I came across an interesting article from 1996:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/new...eases/1996/37/

Judging from Hubble images of distant galaxies, it appears that the rate of star formation in the universe peaked about 3 billion years after the Big Bang (BB), at about 10-15 times the current rate. By the time our sun was formed, some 8-9 billion years post-BB, most of the stars the universe will ever have had already been born. That means we've also already had most of our supernovas, so Dogscoff's curve (lovely diagram, BTW) should probably be skewed to the left.