09-21-2014, 05:28 AM
(09-21-2014, 01:19 AM)stevebowers Wrote: One of the more interesting ideas Freitas has is that a self-repping robot swarm might not find all the elements it needs, but could use fusion to create some of the rarer elements - I don't think we've ever considered the earliest colony missions as having that kind of small-scale fusion capability, although they all have fusion or catalysed fusion drives. Even the beam-propelled craft would need a fusion drive to decelerate to orbital speed. Certainly later colony missions could use fusion/transmutation to fill the gaps in the resource table, but I don't think this technology would be available for the earliest interstellar colonists.
No, we currently have fusion nucleosynthesis as not becoming available until some time after the founding of the First Federation. This as mentioned in the article on stellification engines.
I think it a fairly reasonable assumption that some amount of work would have been done and experience accumulated on both the elemental variances that can occur acorss a reasonable cross-section of star systems and on how to make best industrial use of different elemental abundances and combinations by the time we get to the point of sending out replicating probes. In terms of interstellar colonies, I would again think a good bit of survey and other background work would be done before any colony would be sent, at least prior to the Nanodiasaster.
On a somewhat related note - We seem to be diverging a good bit from the original focus of this thread. I would like to suggest that we spin off the conversation on interstellar colonization into its own thread and let this one continue on renewables.
I believe the forum should let us port the relevant posts from this thread over to a new one, if you agree.
Will give it a few hours for any objections to be raised and then see about setting that up.
Todd
