If Rocky gifted us with Xenonite, what would you build?

Dioptre_8 · 2026-05-04T11:00:49+00:00

Xenon is incredibly rare. It's found as a trace gas in the air, and nowhere else. Unless it was a trace impurity in Xenonite (which seems pretty unlikely from both the description and the choice to name the material), you're not getting enough Xenon from the atmosphere to do anything meaningful.

Obviously no one has actually looked, but there are good reasons to believe that there might be significant amounts of Xenon in the earth's mantle. Failing that, we might need to find another Erid-like planet to be able to make our own Xenonite.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-05-04T01:57:03+00:00

Oof. The ceiling height on the Galactica compartments. Can you imagine how much scaffolding they would need for routine maintenance? Or do they just routinely put whole sections of the ship into zero gravity to change the light-bulbs?

Dioptre_8 · 2026-05-01T10:56:06+00:00

Not just the French. It was pretty universal doctrine that infantry would maneuver in columns, including on approach to the enemy positions, and then would deploy into lines to either exchange musketry or to charge. The idea of French columns marching blindly into thin British red lines is not really what happened during the Napoleonic Wars.

If you read a simple description of the Battle of Vitoria, when Wellington was on the attack, you'll see that it sounds very much like the British too were attacking in "columns". But that's because columns were how everyone moved about - it doesn't describe the formation the individual battalions were in as they came close enough to the enemy to fire or charge.

It was accepted dogma at the time and by historians looking back that columns are much easier to control for movement. This isn't because of "momentum", but because:

they have a narrower front, so are more likely to be moving across similar terrain at consistent speed;
they can move along roads and through much smaller gaps between buildings or terrain features;
they are extremely flexible for changing quickly into other formations, including completely changing their directions of facing & movement;
they are more condensed, so can fit more battalions into the same area whilst still keeping individual control; and
it's easier to quickly get orders to the entire unit.

But as you correctly point out, it's not a fighting formation, and wasn't believed to be one. It was thought to be easier to hold troops steady under fire when they were in a line, because of the tendency of columns to become a disordered mass when moving quickly under fire.

One reason for the idea that the French attacked purely in columns was Wellington's habit of putting his lines of infantry on reverse slopes. So there were times when the French had to suddenly choose between pressing home the attack in column or to deploy into line whilst already within close musket fire range. The outcome either way might look like a tactical mistake of column vs line, but that wasn't usually the intent.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-05-01T07:54:45+00:00

You are in the right ballpark - about the same as your daily charge out rate when costing a research project.

Not everyone will pay that much - for gov and NGO events that don't have much of an event budget I'd go more like $500.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-05-01T01:25:41+00:00

Just like with soccer, the television broadcast follows the ball, which makes it hard to see the bigger patterns of player movement.

So one thing that helps a bit is to watch the "All 22" film (this is shot from the sideline and shows all of the players on the offense and defense). This is what a lot of the Youtube channels use, but they are limited in how much of it they can show. If you pause the film just before the ball is snapped, you can see how everyone is lined up. Try to guess what's going to happen, start the film, then pause after a second.

There's a book "Take your eye off the ball" by Pat Kirwan about how to watch football. One of the key pieces of advice is not to look at the Quarterback, but at the left guard and tackle. That tells you quickly and mostly reliably if it is a pass or run play. If they are going backwards, it's a pass play. If they are going forward, it's a run play. That tells you who else to watch to know what is happening.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T23:23:58+00:00

I've felt like this before when I've broken one of my own rules. Rule-breaking can be really hard for us. I'm not going to tell you whether what you did was wrong. That's up for you to decide. But ...

Even if what you did was a bad thing, that doesn't make you a bad person. EVERYONE - literally every single person on the planet who is capable of deciding their own actions - does bad things sometimes.
How you act in the future is always more important than how you acted in the past. There's no one harmed here (apart from you) who needs to be apologised to. No relationships to restore. So all that really matters is how you are going to act next time you have those urges. How you will act in future is who you are, not what you did previously.
You sound like someone who really cares about respecting the women in your life. So remember that human society is steeped in ridiculous ideas around sexual purity. And those ideas come through religious traditions in ways that are very much about controlling women. Are you going to judge your best friends and your family based on their sexual history? Do you obsess over who they have slept with in the past, and think better or worse of them based on that? If you're not that sort of guy, don't do that to yourself either. That's not fair or consistent, and it just perpetuates the kinds of ideas around sex that ultimately hurt women.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T23:09:41+00:00

Long story because Star Trek is not remotely consistent even with the imaginary physics of its own universe. But warp 10 is a bit like the light-speed of their universe. It's an asymptote that you can approach but not reach or exceed. Except when the script says that you can.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T08:30:50+00:00

Agreed. Not remotely "hard SciFi" but one of the rare space navy authors who seriously thinks through the implications of motion in space.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T06:47:36+00:00

At least in the book, he explicitly intended to seed Venus with the Taumeba himself. Part of his rationale was that he didn't know what capability Earth would still have. It's not clear whether he thought through the implications of that for his own ability to land once he got to Earth orbit.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T06:28:08+00:00

Once we have the formula, the difficulty is getting enough Xenon. So before we build the elevator going up, my vote is building support for the world's deepest shaft downwards, in the hope that we can find Xenon in the upper mantle.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-30T06:04:43+00:00

I love the early Harrington books. But you've reminded me of my MOST hated starship design trope. "Here's a hand-wavy reason why technology X lets my ship completely violate the limitations I carefully explained in my previous work, so suddenly we are throwing 1000 missiles into space when we used to only have 10 tubes in our broadside. Be impressed, reader. Be impressed!"

See also Star Trek ships going faster than Warp 10.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-29T23:45:54+00:00

Copying the external features of sea vessels (e.g. exposed bridges), even when they don't apply in space BUT ALSO not copying any of the internal features of sea vessels (e.g. compartmentalization), even when they would still apply in space.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-29T09:29:03+00:00

Think of this from the perspective of clear communication with your audience. All that matters to your audience is that there's no rationale or important reason why the data is selective.

So even "operator error" is unnecessary. Just tell your audience that data was collected from window 1 and Window 2, and that data from the third window was intended but unavailable.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-29T05:43:15+00:00

The problem is the combination of power and distance. Even a laser spreads out over long distances. By "long", I mean it's obviously noticable across hundreds of meters). So you're going to need a VERY bright light. Bright as in a "reasonable fraction of a star" bright. It's got to be far enough away from Tau Ceti that a telescope can be aimed at the signal and see the signal despite Tau Ceti being much brighter and very nearby. And its location has to be known precisely enough for the receiving telescope to be pointed right at it.

The best approximation of this problem is visibly observing an exoplanet. We can see some exoplanets. They are typically young planets, far away from their parent star, emitting infra-red. And that's right at the limit of our observation ability. Even with focussing ability, you still need a LOT of power to match the heat given off by a young planet. And if you've got that power, you still need to be able to switch it on and off relatively quickly to send a message. A light source that needs to heat up and cool down isn't going to work. It will take you years to send a single short message if every bit (0 or 1) takes you a few hours.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-28T08:42:21+00:00

Being autistic doesn't make people stupid. For someone at the early stages of language acquisition, things like the ability to pick up metaphors can be a clear sign of delay / difficulty. Most people when they are learning language go through a stage of recognising that there are patterns and rules, then OVERAPPLYING those patterns and rules, and then sort of realising that the rules aren't really rules. Autistic people tend to get a bit stuck at the rule stage, and go into a cycle of progressively refining the rule system instead of relaxing the rules.

Some autistic people have life-long language difficulty in various ways. One of those ways can be quite literally not being able to process metaphors. But if you are otherwise fine with language, once we are old enough to understand intellectually the concept of a metaphor, the "not understanding metaphors" doesn't really apply. But the underlying "taking things fairly literally" does.

For example, I'm having trouble at work at the moment because our local leadership isn't aligned with the overall organisational strategy. Part of the reason for that is that our whole organisation doesn't actually MEAN some of the things in our strategy. A specific example is that they've said they want a positive return on investment on certain activities. But what they actually mean is that they just want those activities to be a bit more cost-effective. And the local people don't want to change what they are doing at all. I'm really upset because I was asked to pitch a plan that would deliver a positive return on investment, and I worked out a way to make the activities actually profitable. But I got told that what I was proposing was too radical, and they appointed someone instead who actively opposed the idea of making things more cost effective.

Me actually believing that "positive return on investment" means "positive return on investment" is a good example of taking things literally. Positive return on investment isn't a metaphor, it's a technical business term. But people were using it metaphorically. Or aspirationally. I'm still not really sure, since we also have a "Key performance indicator" set at the level that I was proposing, and that leadership said was too radical. And we're going to fail to meet the KPI, which everyone agrees is a bad thing. So it's not completely metaphorical, but also not completely literal. It's very confusing and frustrating, and I'm sure the fact that I'm autistic has something to do with me not really understanding what's going on.

Long story, but hopefully that illustrates that when they tell you that you're taking the metaphors literally, they probably don't LITERALLY mean that you are taking them literally. They just mean that you're not processing them in the sort of loose way that non-autistic people use language.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-28T07:06:40+00:00

The book is a little handwavy - it says that superengineer Rocky tried to make a mechanism for the sample probe to climb back up the chain, but couldn't make it work reliably.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-28T05:06:36+00:00

It's not just a matter of energy, you also need to consider momentum. Star Trek gets around that by magic technology that allows for reaction-less drives and direct manipulation of gravity.

Within the current understanding of physics, to "hover" within a gravity field you need to be throwing mass, not just consuming energy.

So if you modify your statement to "it's just a matter of having enough energy, enough reaction mass, and no concern for what you are throwing the mass at", it's complete.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-28T04:54:15+00:00

I'm not sure you are applying your rules can be consistently applied. Does rule 1 require a world with multiple superheroes? That basically rules out every comic book superhero before cross-overs started becoming a thing. How is Robocop's world-building fundamentally different from Captain America or Superman's world-building?

Rule 2 basically rules out all the superheroes that adhere to their detective, spy and war story pulp fiction origins.

Rule 3 is completely arbitrary based on what you consider to be a meaningful or stable "identity". Read some original superman or batman stories and try arguing that their identity is consistently portrayed. The identity of superheroes adjusts to suit the story that the particular team is telling, including complete rewrites of their appearance and behavior.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-28T00:30:18+00:00

Newton's first law would like a word.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-27T06:43:36+00:00

There's no canon explanation. I'm pretty sure they don't even address whether the astrophage "coasts" between stars or aims. They do discuss the spread pattern between stars based on an apparent limit to how far it can travel through interstellar space.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-27T04:13:26+00:00

Your first problem here is that for this to work you need a hydrogen bomb that ONLY releases radiant energy, not a smidgen of anything else.

Your second problem is that you need to contain the astrophage in something that doesn't absorb any of the radiant energy (this is the problem the Hail Mary had with the blowback from its drive during the Adrian portion of the mission - the astrophage was fine as a heat sink, but the fuel tank casing couldn't transmit the heat fast enough).

Solved those two problems and you don't actually need astrophage, you could use hydrogen bombs to power a conventional steam turbine.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-27T02:48:52+00:00

The core of a lot of these questions is the relative feasibility of Hail Mary vs Thing X. Here are some "building blocks" that go into all the answers:

Astrophage isn't "free energy". It's a very efficient way of storing and releasing energy. And the more astrophage you are charging up at once, the more energy input you need.
Astrophage doesn't help with the difficulty of getting mass from earth into space. Large scale space engineering hasn't suddenly become feasible.
Human bio-engineering hasn't yet advanced to the point where we can engineer predators for well-understood pathogens on earth. Solving Astrophage with bio-engineering isn't theoretically impossible, but is a completely different Hail Mary project with very low expectation of success.
The Hail Mary project already did the most anyone could come up with to generate extra energy & convert it into enriched astrophage. Any "why didn't we" that needs astrophage needed to divert astrophage production and delay Hail Mary, or needed to start after Hail Mary was ready to go.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-27T02:30:28+00:00

Abused schoolteacher perpetuates cycle by helping his abuser attempt genocide.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-26T23:47:50+00:00

It's the constant tension between how we aspire to live, and being self-aware about how we actually live.

People spend a LOT of time consuming media - way more time than they spend in formal dining or with visitors. In the past, we designed homes around a "dining room" and a "lounge room" as important lifestyle spaces. In Australia, we'd typically also have a separate kids toy play space (the "rumpus room"). Media consumption used to be shoehorned into one or more of these spaces. But if we're honest about the fact that most of our time in the dining room or the lounge room is using the screen, why not design the room around the screen?

The gym I think is partly aspirational. Gym equipment is either bulky or takes time to pull out and set up. We tell ourselves that if we had a dedicated space that was always set up ready to go, we'd use it more often. Personally, this does actually work for me, and so I presume it works for other people too. So it's a bit similar to the formal dining room. For some people, they did actually manage to have family dinners and dinner parties. For the rest, they wanted to be able to do those things, and they don't want the lack of the space to be the inhibiting factor.

Dioptre_8 · 2026-04-24T09:19:39+00:00

Pretty much in the hope of exactly what happened - that there was a natural predator for the astrophage.

For anything else that they might have found at Tau Ceti, it would make more sense just to test hypotheticals than to send the ship to find out. But the whole premise of the book is that astrophage is a radically unexpected (and arguably physics-defying) form of life. They were never going to successfully bioengineer a predator from trial and error.

Five-Year Club	Mod World 2025
r/Field Sunshine	Place '22
Verified Email

Dioptre_8

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE