Re: antimatter rockets

Somewhere off-world is where Mook's antimatter is for real. However,
we can't even safely set a human DNA filled moonboot upon that
physically dark and nasty moon of ours.

It's so pathetic that we can't even establish a viable Clarke Station
within the moon's L1, much less of going for the cool location and
much less gamma worthy environment of Venus L2.

We're running ourselves out of fossil fuels and losing ground via most
biofuel and/or synfuel alternatives because, we still do not have a
spare/surplus cache of clean energy to work with.

Of our going off-world is currently a one-way ticket to ride, and damn
spendy at that.

Your whatever antimatter should be put on the back burner, with
instead 3He/fusion placed up front along with your cheap PV or
whatever's the clean and renewable alternative. We also need to 4X
our national power grid capacity and expand its coverage before WWIII
kicks our mostly infidel butts.

- Brad Guth


On Jan 16, 7:38 am, Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080111/sc_space/sourceofmysteriousant...

It looks like there may be pockets of anti-mater in the universe that
self-identify.

One of the interesting things about the interstellar environment is
that it looks more and more like it a competitive environment for
special resources exists.

I worked in SETI back in the 1980s and 90s - as a volunteer at OSU's
radio observatory and later as a graduate student. During that time I
had the great opportunity to attend the switchon ceremony of project
BETA and meet Carl Sagan and othres in the field.

A standard question at that time was would ETI be friend or foe?
Sagan was of the camp that they would be friend. He felt that
continuous technological advance would end all shortages and reward
cooperative behavior leaving ancient competitive instincts behind,
just as we are now learning that slavery and violence are bad, in the
future technology would put a powerful selective pressure on those
species that survived to be cooperative. By this reasoning he felt
that those that survived nuclear and more sophisticated technologies
would necessarily be friend, and the concept of foe would only make
sense to primitive cultures like ours.

I thought that arguing from our special condition today - the control
of nuclear weapons. It could be, even in our case, that the US or the
USSR or some future nation, could decide that anyone possessing a
nuclear capability other than themselves, would be at war with that
power - and would remove these weapons from that opposing power, and
maintain tight control of affairs through their willingness to use
nuclear weapons. That is, nuclear weapons would exacerbate
competitiveness in a way that would also allow us to survive. I didn't
see where Sagan got his belief that the situation I just described as
being unstable. To me it seems very stable.

No, the real issue was the environment people found themselves in.
Sure, the development of humanity sees a triumph of cooperation over
competition over the past 100,000 years as we spread across the
globe. A thin patina of cooperativeness is laid atop a deeper
propensity to fight and win one's position and hold it by force. This
might continue if technology makes holding resources and property
secondary or not important at all to maintaining wealth and power.

And to me this depends entirely on the space environment.

If by mining planets, asteroids,or even the sun itself, resource and
energy limitations that we encounter today are a thing of the past,
never to recur - then, that would be a more powerful indicator that
species generally would tend to be selected for cooperativeness.
After all if there is an infinite store house (the universe) of raw
materials, and we can get more of that store house in our pockets by
cooperating with others to get more too - then the universe itself is
creating the condition for cooperation.

However, if the universe has very special and rare resources that are
extraordinarily valuable to a technical species - and its use by one
denies its availability to another - then the universe itself is
creating conditions to reward selection for competition.

We don't know enough about the universe or technical species or what's
valuable to them, to answer this question.

And we don't want to get our answer at the end of an alien ray gun!!
lol.

So, its something I think about when I read the literature...

And the article above, seems to me to show that the universe may be
rewarding competition... by its very nature.

After all,if anti-matter is just abundant enough to undermine the
value of making anti=matter from scratch, and valuable enough to be
worth going out and getting it,and easily detected through its gamma
ray emissions - then one can imagine this being as valuable on an
interstellar scale, as oil is on the planetary scale.

Another possible rare and valuable resource might be time violating
regions that might exist around ANCIENT massive spinning black holes.
These might be the key to time travel, time signalling, instantaneous
communications and travel. The trouble with these schemes is that for
any given black hole, the bandwidth is severely limited. And a signal
sent to wish my departed grandmother happy birthday from the
future,takes up just as much bandwidth as a signal from the National
Weather Service to fix this or that levess in New Orleans before
Katrina hits. Obviously is such things exist are this valuable and
this rare and this limited - they'll be used sparingly, and be
valuable enough to compete over.

So, the presence of just enough anti-matter to be useful, but rare
enough so that everybody might not be able to have what they desire,
and the presence of massive ancient black holes at the center of our
galaxy, massive enough to be very valuable, but not enough bandwidth
for every fool thing every one might want to do.. are setting the
stage to reward competition in the future.

Now, Sagan may still be right. That there may be those to abandon
technology altogether because of the horrific nature of interstellar
war - could decimate worlds. But so could errant clouds of antimatter
drifting into worlds, or errant asteroids for that matter. Some
species may forego using certain high tech because they don't like the
way it directs them. Other species may say - good - more for us!
lol. And those competitive types may self-destruct. This combined
with a general decline in density even as numbers increase - may be an
answer to the question where are they?
.

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