Avoiding Cliche

[Wanderlog]

OK, boys and girls of every age, want another big bad cliché? Here it is: planetary colonization and competing for planets.

A typical plot of an endless stream of SF-like books is warring for star systems containing habitable planets. People live on those planets, and intruders wan to settle there themselves, so they try to eliminate previous owners. Or people just rush forward to the Universe trying to find star systems with Earth-like planets.

Why is it a cliché?

First, the main advantage of an Earth-like planet is an opportunity to breath freely without wearing oxygen masks. However, look at an average human being. (S)he can survive only if the air contains exact percentage of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases. If there is too much oxygen, a human would die of oxygen poisoning. If there is too little of it, a human would suffocate. If there is too little carbon dioxide, a human would stop breathing as hir brain's respiratory center will stop functioning. If there is too much of it, a human would suffocate. The difference between breathable and non-breathable air might be tenths of per cent of a gas. As it would be too optimistic to expect that every Earth-like planet's atmosphere is an exact replica of the Earth's, we won't be able to get rid of breathing devices.

Add to it poisonous gases - it's any chemically active gas like sulfur (di)oxide. If there are such gases, you have to wear a pressurized environmental suit all the time. Any damage to the suit would mean (almost certain) death.

Then there is a matter of climate. Humans can exist only in a relatively narrow range of external temperatures (40-50 C or so). Shift the planetary surface's temperature range ten degrees up or down, and you'll need environmental suits.

At last, there is the matter of building objects (houses, plants, and so on) on the surface while fighting with hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and too low or too high gravitation, fighting with atmospheric and water corrosion, and so on. And harvesting minerals on the planetary surface is very hard as we have to struggle with gravitation and friction all the time.

In other words, even an Earth-like planet will be unsuitable for "natural living" as it exists on Earth.

Where will we live, then? In space. Building a space station is much more expensive than that of a surface house, but once built, it'll serve almost endlessly while requiring minimal maintenance. And we even can use asteroids as foundations for space houses! Life support systems will be no more complex than on the surface, there is plenty of minerals in asteroids (there are huge belts of amorphous matter orbiting any star), there is no friction or gravitation, so we can easily get the minerals extracted, refined and sent to any place we wish. There is plenty of free energy in space as well. And so on.

In other words, the humanity won't search for or colonize Earth-like planets on purpose. It will be occasionally done if such a planet is discovered by accident, but planets will be rather health and spa resorts than industrial and living bases. Most human activity will be concentrated in the Great Void out there.

So, to continue the point about atmospheric gases in permanent disequilibrium (Lovelock), your volcanic gases include oxygen and methane?

Oxygen - definitely yes. Methane? Possibly no, but there is plenty of it in the space where there never was any life (like gas giants).

A GRB is one of those events of which it can be said that the only real defence is not being there when it happens.

There is the area around a GRB where you die whatever you do (short of escaping far away) and many areas where you can survive it if you take appropriate defense measures. As the space is huge, even in the Galaxy core the probability of getting caught in the first area is much lower than of being outside of it.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

planetary colonization and competing for planets.

The only reason to do so is ego. It is no use to ease home planet population pressure (that might need 300,000 people A DAY to be shipped) and of no possible resource or economic value.
Even if people had cheap to run star ships, any interstellar trade would be tiny compared to planetary trade. Not in 500,000 years would a civilisation run out of resources on their own planet, never mind their own solar system.

 

[Wanderlog]

The only reason to do so is ego.

I'd use the term "rigid thinking".

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Would Stalin or Hitler if they had Starships?

Some leaders are not rational. Would the Galactic Council stop them?

 

[Zebra Wizard]

OK, boys and girls of every age, want another big bad cliché? Here it is: planetary colonization and competing for planets.

A typical plot of an endless stream of SF-like books is warring for star systems containing habitable planets. People live on those planets, and intruders wan to settle there themselves, so they try to eliminate previous owners. Or people just rush forward to the Universe trying to find star systems with Earth-like planets.

This is just human nature, we have always been competing for land. just look through history, european countries went crazy planting a flag and saying the land was theres. And even now nations are competing for land/dominance. Russia supplying syria with weapons to make sure they stay in power so russia can keep their military base/dock. The chinese pushing into the south china sea with artifical islands. US installing military bases all around the world.

what you said about spacestations vs land could be argued both ways, you note all the "possible" complications on land, but none of the guaranteed complications in space, no air, gravitational pull of planets, orbit speed, rotation and the list goes on.

 

[KyleAW]

There is one reason to colonize planets that comes to mind; Access to massive amounts of resources that are needed. Not talking wandering around without spacesuits comfort on the surface or 'Edens' but space nations would fight over resource heavy planets no question!

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Access to massive amounts of resources that are needed.

No civ in reality would run out of local resources.
Bringing resources between star systems more pointless than bringing sea water half way round the world.

 

[KyleAW]

I understand that but with the theoretical size of the universe, there is a realistic possibility that two groups within a single system would need access to the same planet, if there are few that have reasonable levels of accessible resources. Then it is just a matter of whether they get on or not.

 

[Zebra Wizard]

No civ in reality would run out of local resources.
Bringing resources between star systems more pointless than bringing sea water half way round the world.

This is true, though they maybe rare elements that cannot be found anywhere else, such as a new power source (which could be a resource war rather than land). But in history countries would colonise islands for little reason other than to own it. For example the falkland islands war argentina vs britain, which was only 30 years ago and theres barely anything there.

I could imagine in space, it would be entire planets rather than single islands.

Likely if there were any wars, it would be over rare resources, between corporations rather than countries. 2 powerful countries fighting is usually not in the best interest in either, but they can use buffer states/corporations to fight their wars for them.

This is getting off-topic i think, and could be an entirely different thread.

Thinking on it a bit more, Cliches are not nessecarily bad, sometimes they are. Especially in characters, because it pulls you out of the story.

Alot of romance novels are cliche but they work. Some people love cliche.

Name of the wind, which is one of the most popular epic fantasy of this decade is a cliche (orphan journey to become the best in everything). However people love it, and its a huge success.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I could imagine in space, it would be entire planets rather than single islands.

You can pretend it for SF, but in reality it's not scalable. What counts on a Planet is quite different with Interstellar, esp. with cost of lifting off planet.

maybe rare elements that cannot be found anywhere else, such as a new power source

Unobtainium? Again might be acceptable in SF&F but vanishingly unlikely in real life.

There is Real Life and Fiction. I agree that sometimes Leaders or Nations do stuff that isn't rational.
Fiction there are different levels of realism. Only knowns realistic contemporary or historic -> Speculative -> Hard SF -> SF -> Space Opera -> Fantasy.

 

[Mirannan]

You can pretend it for SF, but in reality it's not scalable. What counts on a Planet is quite different with Interstellar, esp. with cost of lifting off planet.


Unobtainium? Again might be acceptable in SF&F but vanishingly unlikely in real life.

There is Real Life and Fiction. I agree that sometimes Leaders or Nations do stuff that isn't rational.
Fiction there are different levels of realism. Only knowns realistic contemporary or historic -> Speculative -> Hard SF -> SF -> Space Opera -> Fantasy.

That depends entirely on the technology of the setting. It's been noted that the energy cost of lofting something into LEO is around $5 per pound; if your setting has a Beanstalk or some sort of laser-launch system, then launch costs might actually be quite low.

For interstellar travel, again it depends on how the travel works. Many fictional hyperdrives don't actually use all that much energy.

And finally, it depends on how much energy is available. A Kardashev type II wouldn't have much trouble.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

That depends entirely on the technology of the setting

And in a story in a book, rather than real life (or video) you have unlimited effects and technology budgets.
LEO isn't what counts, Escape Velocity. (minor quibble)

A Kardashev type II

All of the Kardashev is a simply a fantasy / speculative thing. If Kardashev type II was real, I doubt they would care much about random planet on another star unless they were like the Borg.

 

[Wanderlog]

Would Stalin or Hitler if they had Starships?

They definitely would. However, the reason for it wouldn't be that they really needed the planet. They simply sought dominance over the entire world. A planet would be just a place where someone could establish an independent settlement, which would have to be prevented at any cost. As controlling an entire planet in such a way is almost impossible (on Earth, no regime was ever able to completely get rid of guerrilla jungle and forest safehouses), total planetary bombardment (and turning it into a highly radioactive desert) would look more attractive and cheap solution than keeping troops and building military bases there.

This is just human nature, we have always been competing for land.

Not fully correct. "We always WERE competing for". Past tense, not present. The last war for land ended 70 years ago. Ah, well, there was also Iraq's invasion into Kuwait, Russian annexation of Crimea peninsula, China arguing over some islands with Vietnam and Japan, a conflict between Argentina and England over Falkland Islands and so on, but they are exceptions that only confirm the main rule.

In the past, land was a major resource for survival. People needed land to grow crops and breed herds of cattle. As farming was very inefficient before tractors and modern methods of breeding were widely implemented, farmers needed HUGE areas of lands. 70-90% of population lived in the countryside and were such ineffective farmers. Today, it's quite the opposite. Farmers are only 3-5% of population of developed countries. They use much smaller territories to produce much more food than before. Even agrarian technologies of 1960s allowed (in theory) to support up to 60 billion people on Earth. I trust today this number is much bigger.

So, the truth is, the modern civilization doesn't need so much land at all. If we move to the space, agrarian space stations will produce even more food as they can use the inner space much more effective than on Earth. It means that the main reason for competing for territory will become non-existent.

Russia supplying syria with weapons to make sure they stay in power so russia can keep their military base/dock.

Russian support for Syria is based on a totally different reasons, trust me. I won't go into details here, though. It's off topic.

Access to massive amounts of resources that are needed.

First, as Ray already said, our civilization is completely unable to consume mineral resources even on Earth. Technologies gradually turn extensive harvesting into intensive one. Today, we harvest mineral, oil and gas deposits that half a century ago weren't considered deposits at all as those minerals were non-extracting. In a century or two, we'll be able to harvest all needed chemical elements directly from the ground under our feet. And any chemical element is contained in the Earth's crust in amounts so huge that we can't even imagine it.

Secondly, Earth (and any shaped planet) is just a tiny grain of sand in an endless sea of unshaped matter orbiting stars and flying in between them. You don't need a planet to harvest everything you need.

It's been noted that the energy cost of lofting something into LEO is around $5 per pound; if your setting has a Beanstalk or some sort of laser-launch system, then launch costs might actually be quite low.

...and if you don't need to lift something into an orbit, it'd costs you nothing. Why would we deal with the gravitational well all the time if we can live outside of it and never bother with lifting anything from there?

 

[KyleAW]

Haha, I'm going to bow out of suggestions. It is clear my knowledge on the subject is somewhat eclipsed by others; back I go to watching the thread instead

 

[Ray McCarthy]

land was a major resource for survival

Chinese seem to be just bribing African leaders to get control of resources. Sometimes bribery includes nearly free railways, Mobile phone systems or fibre broadband.

Today, we harvest mineral, oil and gas deposits that half a century ago weren't considered deposits at all as those minerals were non-extracting.

Companies have bought the Slag and Tailings to process as now cheaper than a good mine.
It's not economic to process domestic waste tips yet.

Many supposedly scarce elements are not actually even mined at all. They are waste by products of digging up something else. The "rare earths", lithium etc are not at all rare. We'll never use them up.

All scare stories about resources are about existing in use places, not stuff we know is there we haven't started exploiting, never mind exploration of places we haven't exploited.
Even hydrocarbons (fossil fuel) can be synthesised in the deserts using sea water and solar power and waste carbon. We don't do it because the stuff in ground is cheaper.
We don't ever need to "mine" asteroids in space, unless it's to build something in space. The idea of mining asteroids and bringing the stuff to Earth is just nice backdrop for soft SF. Getting the same stuff on Earth will ALWAYS be cheaper. Even good SF authors that know science put fiction all the time because it's a better story. Very little SF is about realistic future economics, technology etc but simply telling fun stories with "technology" and/or "Space" instead of Magic.

 

[Piousflea84]

OK, boys and girls of every age, want another big bad cliché? Here it is: planetary colonization and competing for planets.

A typical plot of an endless stream of SF-like books is warring for star systems containing habitable planets. People live on those planets, and intruders wan to settle there themselves, so they try to eliminate previous owners. Or people just rush forward to the Universe trying to find star systems with Earth-like planets.

Why is it a cliché?

First, the main advantage of an Earth-like planet is an opportunity to breath freely without wearing oxygen masks. However, look at an average human being. (S)he can survive only if the air contains exact percentage of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases. If there is too much oxygen, a human would die of oxygen poisoning. If there is too little of it, a human would suffocate. If there is too little carbon dioxide, a human would stop breathing as hir brain's respiratory center will stop functioning. If there is too much of it, a human would suffocate. The difference between breathable and non-breathable air might be tenths of per cent of a gas. As it would be too optimistic to expect that every Earth-like planet's atmosphere is an exact replica of the Earth's, we won't be able to get rid of breathing devices.

Add to it poisonous gases - it's any chemically active gas like sulfur (di)oxide. If there are such gases, you have to wear a pressurized environmental suit all the time. Any damage to the suit would mean (almost certain) death.

Then there is a matter of climate. Humans can exist only in a relatively narrow range of external temperatures (40-50 C or so). Shift the planetary surface's temperature range ten degrees up or down, and you'll need environmental suits.

At last, there is the matter of building objects (houses, plants, and so on) on the surface while fighting with hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and too low or too high gravitation, fighting with atmospheric and water corrosion, and so on. And harvesting minerals on the planetary surface is very hard as we have to struggle with gravitation and friction all the time.

In other words, even an Earth-like planet will be unsuitable for "natural living" as it exists on Earth.

Where will we live, then? In space. Building a space station is much more expensive than that of a surface house, but once built, it'll serve almost endlessly while requiring minimal maintenance. And we even can use asteroids as foundations for space houses! Life support systems will be no more complex than on the surface, there is plenty of minerals in asteroids (there are huge belts of amorphous matter orbiting any star), there is no friction or gravitation, so we can easily get the minerals extracted, refined and sent to any place we wish. There is plenty of free energy in space as well. And so on.

In other words, the humanity won't search for or colonize Earth-like planets on purpose. It will be occasionally done if such a planet is discovered by accident, but planets will be rather health and spa resorts than industrial and living bases. Most human activity will be concentrated in the Great Void out there.

Interesting. I was going to say the exact opposite... I think it's cliche to assume that people can survive in a sealed ("Generation Ship") environment, without any access to consumable supplies other than trace amounts of hydrogen gas.

One of the huge advantages of living on a planet is that you can throw away and replace matter as needed. Even a small, low-gravity planet contains more matter than most civilizations could ever use. If your manufacturing process creates a certain amount of unusable slag, you can throw away that slag and harvest more minerals. If you want to dissipate heat by boiling off a liquid (ammonia, water, nitrogen, whatever), you don't miss the molecules that were boiled off. If you're only able to recycle 90% of your trash, you don't miss the other 10%.

A civilization living far away from any planets is forced to recycle absolutely everything. When traveling through deep space, you only have a finite number of carbon atoms, a finite number of iron atoms, etc... If you recycle 90% of your trash and throw away 10%, after a few generations you will run low on all sorts of matter. Your solar panels may produce a huge amount of energy (at least until you get to deep interstellar space, where there's not much light) but they will eventually wear out. Will your manufacturing process be able to make a new solar panel without wasting a single atom of raw material from the old panel? Unlikely.

Consider that modern manufacturing processes use a vast amount of water and oil for cooling, quenching, protecting metallic surfaces from air, etc. If some of that water boils off during the process, it's okay. If some of the oil combusts or breaks down, it's okay. If you're in an interstellar Generation Ship, every water molecule, every hydrocarbon chain that you lose can come back to haunt you (or your descendants). Now, a non-interstellar ship could replenish all of their molecules by harvesting them from asteroids, but it might require different types of asteroids to provide all of the materials needed, and there's an awful lot of empty space between asteroids. An interstellar ship would have no such option, as interstellar space is much more empty.

I see people living on solid worlds (moons and planets of Earth size and smaller) not because they are "habitable" but because you can mine a helluva lot more raw materials from a Mars-sized body than you could from a boulder-sized asteroid. Asteroid mining will remain valuable because of the super-heavy platinum-group metals that sink to the core of planets so that you can't get to them, but for common things like water and iron they will be much more expensive and inconvenient than planets.

 

[Glitch]

First, the main advantage of an Earth-like planet is an opportunity to breath freely without wearing oxygen masks. However, look at an average human being. (S)he can survive only if the air contains exact percentage of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases. If there is too much oxygen, a human would die of oxygen poisoning. If there is too little of it, a human would suffocate. If there is too little carbon dioxide, a human would stop breathing as hir brain's respiratory center will stop functioning. If there is too much of it, a human would suffocate. The difference between breathable and non-breathable air might be tenths of per cent of a gas. As it would be too optimistic to expect that every Earth-like planet's atmosphere is an exact replica of the Earth's, we won't be able to get rid of breathing devices.

Not to detract from your post. I done a little research on breathing air for a story involving deep pressure submarines and it gave some interesting data.

For instance, the apollo missions used pure oxygen, but at a much lower air pressure then sea level to avoid oxygen toxicity - about 5 psi.

No breathing equipment or enclosed habitat should introduce carbon dioxide. Above 1% you can feel drowsy. Above 7% can lead to unconsciousness.

Basically we can breath 21% oxygen, 79% nitrogen at sea level 14.7 psi. However, both oxygen and nitrogen become toxic at high pressure.

Deep divers use different mixtures to prevent decompression sickness. Oxygen, helium and hydrogen.

In theory this should allow you to play around with the planets atmosphere a little. If you lower the atmospheric pressure you can increase the oxygen count. Reduce the nitrogen count and increase another suitable gas etc...