Woah, that's a long post... nearly made my brain overheat trying to read through all of it, so I think I'll attempt to respond without going quote-to-quote:
- The ISV, while carrying a large amount of payload and infrastructure, will be optimised to carry as many people as possible in stasis. The passenger section will likely be extremely lightweight, built on thin composite materials and inflatable hulls.
Not only does this passenger section and the Apollo CM do totally different things, but there are many things that make up the mass of the Apollo CM that are simply not needed in this application.
That's a good point. The mass per crew member is a very generalized way of doing it, if you want something more precise...
I think we can at least try to gut the CSM ourselves so that we have some number to work with...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_CSM#Specifications
# Crew: 3
# Crew cabin volume: 218 cu ft (6.2 m3)
# Length: 11.4 ft (3.5 m)
# Diameter: 12.8 ft (3.9 m)
# Mass: 12,250 lb (5,560 kg)
# Structure mass: 3,450 lb (1,560 kg)
# Heat shield mass: 1,870 lb (850 kg)
# RCS engine mass: 880 lb (400 kg)
# Recovery equipment mass: 540 lb (240 kg)
# Navigation equipment mass: 1,110 lb (500 kg)
# Telemetry equipment mass: 440 lb (200 kg)
# Electrical equipment mass: 1,500 lb (680 kg)
# Communications systems mass: 220 lb (100 kg)
# Crew couches and provisions mass: 1,200 lb (540 kg)
# Environmental Control System mass: 440 lb (200 kg)
# Misc. contingency mass: 440 lb (200 kg)
[...]
# RCS propellant mass: 270 lb (120 kg)
# Drinking water capacity: 33 lb (15 kg)
# Waste water capacity: 58 lb (26 kg)
The figure given here is 5,560 kg, but on the top of the page it lists 5,809 kg.
70 kg is the mass of an average person, 70*3 + 5,560 = 5,770. Close, but still not quiet. This is a bit odd...
We'll work with the 5,560 figure since we don't want human mass, the HVR is human-to-[uncrewed]vehicle ratio.
LSS: If it takes a full day for a passenger to disembark, and disembarking is done over a period of a month, then any system that works on a cycle, providing Life support at a rate, will only require 1/30th the mass.
We can assume our system will do without waste, by recycling the water.
# Waste water capacity: 26 kg -> 0 kg
# Drinking water capacity: 15 kg -> 0.5 kg
# Environmental Control System mass: 200 kg -> 6.67 kg
(Can't get a crew couch figure on it's own, -1 kg)
# Crew couches and provisions mass: 540 kg -> 17 kg
I want to use VASIMR for the RCS system, it's the highest impulse system that is relatively low-mass, can be throttled, and ignited and re-ignited again and again. Rotations can, and will have to be done, very slowly and with advanced planning and calculation.
The CM uses MMH/N204 for RCS, the Space Shuttle Orbiter's MMH/N204 OMS has a Specific Impulse of 313 seconds, or 3,071 m/s. The R for the CM's RCS is (120/5,560) + 1 = 1.02158 For a Delta-Vee of 65.58 m/s.
If the Ve was 161,500 m/s, like VASIMR high and low gears averaged, then the R for the same Delta-Vee would be 1.0004. For our 5,560 kg ship, this would be ~2.2 kg.
# RCS propellant mass: 120 kg -> 2.2 kg
We'll use contingency mass as a ratio. 200/5,560 = ~0.036
# Misc. contingency mass: (x * 0.036)
Now we get into systems that aren't scalable with crew size. For the whole equation of the ISV's mass, these will work by addition, so the mass number I produce will be X + (Powerplant, Navigation and Communications).
# Electrical equipment mass: 680 kg -> 0 kg
# Telemetry equipment mass: 200 kg -> 0 kg
# Navigation equipment mass: 500 kg -> 0 kg
And these next two systems the ISV doesn't even need:
# Recovery equipment mass: 240 kg -> 0 kg
# Heat shield mass: 850 kg -> 0 kg
Since we're using VASIMR RCS engines, this will take a little bit of work... An RCS system needs at least 12 engines to rotate both ways on all 3 axes, with two nodes on the vessel to handle changing mass allocation (as fuel tanks stage, passengers board, fuel is used, shuttles dock, etc.).
I've worked up some math and found that 40N on a 500,000 ton ship will rotate 180* in 208 minutes, and 400N will rotate 180* in 66 minutes. The 12-engine setup will allow 2 engines to fire at once, providing twice the thrust. So if I want 12 engines for a 500,000 ton ship, that's 0.00024 kg of engine per kg of ship (minus powerplant for engines).
# RCS engine mass: (x * 0.00024)
Now, finally, structure mass. I will leave this unchanged, since although we're using lighter composites, we'll also need a whipple shield, which could up to double our mass, and lighter composites could lighten it by a wide range of factors, so, for simplicity, I'll leave this untouched.
# Structure mass: 1,560 kg
So then, our total mass is:
1,560 + 2.2 + 17 + 6.67 + 0.5 = 1,586.37 kg is scalable per person, with a crew of 3; 528.79 kg per crew member.
So far our multipliers for additional mass are 0.00024 and 0.036. I think we could also add; assuming each cryo cell weighs 140 kg, * 2.
The CM's structure to total ratio is 1.39, assuming we can chop that down to 1/2 that mass, it'll equal 1.195.
The Mass Ratio is also going to be 26, I'll raise that to 27 to add additional mass for the tanks.
The cryo tanks only effect the payload mass, other factors effect the entire vehicle's mass.
So far our multipliers for additional mass are now: 2 * (27.23124)
So the total vehicle mass is:
(528.79 kg * P) * 2 * 27.23
So for P = 1,000, 1,000 passengers;
28,797,903 kg, or 28,798 tons, without infrastructure, shuttles, engines, or radiators.
Okay, the path might be a bit windy but I'll get back to mass, just bear along.
I want the acceleration to be about 0.01 m/s^2 at the first ignition, assuming a straight-up mass ratio of 26 and MCF engines MAX, a delta-vee of 2.6e7 m/s, a starting acceleration of 0.01 m/s^2 will reach 1.3e7 m/s in ~13.5 years (taking into account change of mass through the burn), while the deceleration burn should take ~3.7 years, so the time spent firing the engines is a little more than 1/10th the total transit time. This means very little, relatively speaking, time is spent firing the engines, which means little time is wasted. However, a lower acceleration means you need radiators and an engine proportionally smaller, and thus, lighter.
I'm going to use the MCF engines and assume the engine is 10x heavier; so that:
0.12 Kg/N
8+(1/3) N/Kg
33+(1/3) MW/Kg
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/basicdesign.php#id--Heat_Radiators
(The table I was looking at said that a flimsy radiator operating at 1100 K would be 0.01 kg/kW and an armored meteor proof radiator operating at 2000 K would be 0.05 kg/kW)
With RCC radiators operating at 2,270 K and identical to the "flimsy" radiators in every way except temperature, I get 0.00055 kg/kW, taking away a little due to lower emissivity, and thicker design needed for brittle material;
0.0007 kg/kW
I just ran by some math, and I just found out that this would mean 1mm-wide radiators using RCC :blink:. I'll assume 10mm thickness, to account for cooling systems and structural strength. I'll adjust appropriately...
0.0070 kg/kW = 142.9 kW/kg = 0.1429 MW/kg
Since each kg of engine produces 33 1/3 MW of heat, and assuming I can get an efficiency of 80%, so only 20% is waste heat, and the 80% = 33 MW,
then only 8.25 MW of waste heat gets produced per kg of engine. So for every kg of engine, 57.7 kg of radiator is needed.
So, in total, each 8 1/3 newtons of thrust means 58.7 kg of engine and radiator. So that's 7.044 kg of radiator and engine for every newton of thrust.
I told you I'd get back to mass
.
For 0.01 N/kg, that means 0.07044 kg of engine/radiator for every 1 kg of ship, in total, including the radiators and engines.
(Wow, I was expecting the engines and radiators to take a
lot more mass!)
So, finally, only missing infrastructure, on-board fission reactors and perhaps even a negligable mass of navigation and computer guidance systems, our ISV masses:
(528.79 kg * P) * 2 * (27.23+0.07044)
((528.79 * P) * 2) + I + 360,000 * (27.30044)
P is passengers, and I is Infrastructure. Granted, I will also be proportionally large for the number of passengers...
So now, for 1,000 passengers, our ISV masses 38,700 tons, without being capable of carrying any infrastructure.
- Carbon nanotube propellant tanks are a good idea to accommodate a large amount of propellant with a minimal amount of mass, but will not protect against the unavoidable wear-and-tear that will occur simply within the operation of such a vehicle on timescales of a century or more.
They remain motionless and undisturbed, save for the propellant inside the tanks, for the whole time. There's no atmosphere to react with, no natural forces like wind to cause erosion, like there is no Earth.
- While a magnetic sail will require a large amount of power, so will a reaction drive. In addition, the power requirement for either will likely be far lower than for a lightsail.
But the key part is that you don't have to take that power on-board for a lightsail.
- NASA has also killed more people aboard spacecraft than the USSR did, that doesn't mean they had significantly poorer standards for their astronauts.
I never meant that, I didn't mean to be pro-Russian or anything, I made it clear I'm very much opposed to Communism and the Soviet Union, very strongly, I am, but saying they killed all their early space dogs is an unfair misconception.
- Just because a slave doesn't complain, doesn't make it an un-slave. If you could create a group of humans engineered to be subservient workers, would they not be slaves?
Enough with the slaves, I'm not trying to build a race of slaves! I'm trying to find a reason that uplift would ever occur in a way for large-scale intergration into society.
Also, if you build a race of highly productive individuals; they could have perfectly equal rights and still benefit society just by being themselves, as does anyone who works hard in their field. It's because they're productive, and when I say productive I mean someone that produces something nobody else can, i.e. someone with an extremely technical job is a good example of this. He may be paid for what he does; but no amount of money could ever really compensate for what he produces, because what he produces is so rare. Great artists, scientists, or engineers are perfect examples of this.
Payment is a way of representing an exchange, someone builds X, he gets paid for it so he can make someone else give him Y in return. While money is money, X and Y are two different things.
What if there were only a handful of people alive who were
capable of designing something like the Space Shuttle? Or composing a really sweeping score? Or making something the equivalent of an "original van gogh"? If those people were replaced with people who had equally-well paying jobs but couldn't make those products, so that we had plenty of other things, but no great art, and no Space Shuttles, then society would lose something even though the flow of money hasn't changed; namely, it would lose product.
In that same way, even with complete equal rights, same payment and everything, if an uplifted species is hardworking and good-natured; then they're benefiting society without changing the flow of money at all.
Especially if they're good-natured; if on average, they have better dispositions than humans, then that will effectively and emotionally spread to humans, and in that way, the species we uplifted will "uplift" us back. This is another form of benefiting society just by being a different species, even with identical rights and no change in monetary flow.
On another note, a very deep question is would it be morally right to make them
pay for their sapience using the tax, or a payment made in installments I described earlier, assuming they only pay for the uplift operation itself with a very small profit margin?
It's not quiet the same as slavery; they're not being denied anything, merely they've been forced to make a purchase, of buying sapience. This is something like buying someone a present, then forcing them to pay for it, except that present is
Sapience something they could not have bought on their own. What is the price of the ability to think like only humans do?
As for apes vs. dogs:
I think you put too much faith in (A) disposition and (B) disposition as unmodified specimens. For example, humans have very strong self-preservation instincts, but this does not make humans incapable of committing suicide.
True, but what happens very rarely and in specific cases is not nearly as important as what happens as a whole; as a whole; suicide is extremely rare. In the same way, if a species is highly aggressive and political, then as a whole, aggressive, political individuals will be more common. There may be saint-like individuals, but generally speaking, these will not be as common as aggressive, political ones.
Yes, btw, I am saying "political" as a bad thing
For this I generally mean manipulating people, "not letting the truth get in the way of things", etc. etc.
How they behave as animals will be how they
feel like behaving, and how their emotions act. While a predator will bite you if you scare it or hurt it, a rabit will run. In the same way, a situation that might make an uplifted ape
feel like punching someone in the face, might just make an uplifted Painted Dog
feel like whining a lot.
What they actually do as opposed to what they feel like doing, i.e. self-control, changes from one individual to another. It's impossible to say if species A will have more self-control than species B, so we can't use examples of self control or not, all we can do is use examples of what will they
feel like doing?
In addition, I feel you underestimate the ability for violence in dogs, at least to a degree. For example my dog, who is now sadly dead, had an overall temperament that would likely be spot-on for creating your subservient worker-race. Yet she was by no means incapable of making clear her annoyance or frustration when the need arose.
Likewise, any uplifted organism, save for those lobotomised to a nonthinking state, will not cooperate if they perceive their conditions or treatment to be substandard, and this could lead to violent or at least dis-advantageous behaviour.
Once again, not necessarily subserviant or workers. That was one idea for why they might be created, but it could only get by if it doesn't catch media attention until uplifting is done; a much better idea IMO is "human uplift", uplift them to uplift us, that is the whole "benefiting society" paragraph I had earlier.
Oh, and huge note here, what I mean by "better idea" is a combination of likeliness and morality. Of course, I cannot overstate how much creating a subservient race loses morally, in terms of likelyhood, however, it doesn't lose by nearly as much, since it'd be very difficult to convince a government to grant funding on the basis of "human uplift - uplift them to uplift us"
Not entirely true. Slavery of any kind, from the Egyptians to Apartheid to East Asia, would've never worked if sapient beings were this free-willed. However, many times they don't want to risk life and limb for freedom, when in slavery they get what it takes to live and
possibly a little more. Things only change for the better when they realize
they can win, assuming it's true.
There are also many dog breeds, at least, which are very dangerous and aggressive indeed, and are a danger not only to other dogs but to humans as well.
I think it's pretty unfair to compare the aggressive/cooperative traits of dogs to other animals. They are, after all, domestic animals that have had a relationship with humans for thousands of years. Chimpanzees on the other hand, are wild animals and thus their interaction with humans is bound to be different.
I think this should move to more along the lines of African Wild Dogs v.s. Great Apes, these specific species I believe are much better candidates from both the canine and primate families.
African Wild Dogs are not domestic, but their passiveness is really quiet amazing for anything that manages to survive in the animal kingdom. Instead of fighting over food, they have what amounts to
begging contests, and instead of taking authority by aggression and fear, one becomes alpha simply by
not submitting. I'm shocked this even works, but apparently it does...
Quantum computers sound very interesting, but as for the whole rationale of using them, this is what confuses me;
Apes can be aggressive. Dogs are entirely unsuited to uplift compared to apes.
Let's compare the cons of both examples:
Apes:
-Aggressive traits
-Some non-cooperative traits
- Some potentially non-cooperative traits
- Vocalisation capability does not allow for advanced speech
- Bipedality is uncomfortable for prolonged periods.
Dogs:
- Insufficient brain/body ratio/encephalisation quotient
- Insufficient vocalisation capability
- Virtually nonexistent manipulative capability
- Bipedal posture unnatural and presumably uncomfortable.
- Many traits differ considerably from those of humans.
The problems of the dog are far more severe than the problems of the ape. So why can't the quantum computer be used to help fix the ape's problems? They are actually easier problems to solve than the dog's problems.
I think the difficulty of changing personality is being massively underscored...
As for temperament, dogs prove that it can be changed. Modern dog breeds aren't as aggressive as their ancestors could have been, for example.
All it might take is the insertion, activation or deactivation of a gene or several genes, to produce a far more cooperative, far less aggressive ape.
Muscles, Tissues, Ligaments, etc. are all well-understood and act on physical principles. Finding the genetics to them is relatively simple; we're capable of it already.
The brain, on the other hand, is a mass of roughly 100 billion neurons, all connected in different ways and types with more than 100 trillion connections, and we're just starting to find models that
look similar to human brain activity, and so we hypothesize that there are clusters of connected Neurons with some neurons connected to other areas of the brain.
Literally, our level of understanding is that some areas light up more in some people than others. That pretty much sums it up. From this you can tell that some areas light up more for different types of mental conditions, and so they're getting a very general idea of things.
I simply cannot overstate what a massive achievement being able to successfully change intelligence and create a sapient being would be.
Repeating this feat twice, or even three or four times, of altering brain structures successfully to get a desired result, would be like starting the first successful nuclear chain reaction, invention of an SSTO, and the first microchip all being invented at the same time, in terms of remarkability and difficulty.
While intelligence would take the frontal lobe of the brain in anatomy, and perhaps the entire field of genetics, altering personality would take a complete, full understanding of all facets of psychology, understanding twice as much anatomy of the brain, and slightly more in the area of genetics than just uplifting intelligence.
Simply because personality is such a dynamic thing, unless you completely understand the field of psychology and twice as much brain structural anatomy in relation to genetics (to cover intelligence and emotion), you would end up destroying the delicate balance needed for normal sanity, and give them a wide range of mental illnesses,
specifically in sapient beings.
You're even taking a huge risk to make the very reasonable assumption intelligence doesn't have a powerful effect on personality, and uplift the species in the first place (Intelligence has no effect on
emotion, more like). But to alter psychology and personality would take a whole different level of scientific understanding, the pyschology of a sapient being as a whole is an extremely complex, tangled web of effects, variables, triggers, reactions, where so many things interact with eachother which causes other things to act and react, etc. etc. Unless you perfectly understand what you're doing, i.e. the entire field of psychology, you would almost certainly create an emotionally crushed mess of a being, if not emotionally crush than at least emotionally messed up or even confused beyond reason.
Even if the effects aren't that severe, though, this is an area you do not want to enter until you're sure the field of psychology is perfected.
Oh, and to add frosting to the cake, you'd also need to not just perfect human psychology, but the psychology of the animal you're uplifting; assuming it's identical to a human's is a very dangerous assumption.
And finally, paradoxically, you'd have to understand the psychology of the thing you've uplifted before you uplift it. To do this you'd have to know the psychology of another uplifted species, and even that only
may lead you to understand how your emotionally modified species might think; there's too many unknowns to say for sure. If it applies to one sapient being, does it always apply to another? Is logic universal, or do we humans have our own type of logic?
These answers will fundamentally change the very basis of how the uplifted species will exist in an extremely dynamic, complicated way.
And remember this is psychology, you could almost call it an art it's such a "soft" science, and there is no shortage of varying theories on so many different, even fundamental things.
Sure, there's a moral argument against
and for uplifting a species, granting them higher intelligence.
But to change
how they
think and feel, and not just how
well they think? This begins on some very serious moral issues. I can imagine there would be a huge fear that people might alter the emotional setup, aggression, and whatnot of
humans, and the moral issues there challenge nothing short of free will and human rights, even putting aside the "perfect race" and GATTACA arguments. Changing
personality enters a whole new battlefield, one where anti-uplift fighters have a great advantage.
I can hear the argument (not mine) coming from the left already: "If you knew I had a 'resisting personality', and that I'd disagree with you, would you change MY levels of determination, and free will?!"
Simply put; intelligence doesn't take any psychology to alter, how well you think doesn't effect your emotions, except by changing how you view things (i.e.
input into the brain, and the complex web known as psychology).
Meanwhile, changing variables within psychology would be extremely dangerous and frought with opposition.
Changing personality, i.e. aggression, would vastly increase the difficulty uplifting a species in multiple ways, meanwhile things like muscoskeletal systems are already well understood, simple mechanics, and the genes are being mapped right now. The brain is extremely complex and full of mystery, and debate in how it functions and if, and what extent it can be altered. The less you change it the better.
In addition, the morphological differences between humans and apes are fairly well understood; the arch of the foot, the big toe, the thigh and the pelvis, the curvature of the spine, and the location of the foramen magnum, the morphology of the hyoid bone and larynx/tongue to facilitate speech, the brow ridge and cranium size relationship to house a large brain.
It's all understood in part, because it tells us how we evolved.
Dogs on the other hand would need to be, effectively, completely redesigned. For example turning the paw into a manipulator would require it to be changed into a structure so radically different to what it is now, as to be unrecognisable. To accommodate a larger brain, the skull would likely have to be redesigned entirely, and to facilitate easier bipedality a whole host of relatively drastic changes would have to be implemented within the muscoskeletal structure.
I still don't understand why bipedalism is so very important. They don't need human hands, just slightly longer digits; that's assuming you're making an individual and not a more intelligent helper dog.
And while a quantum computer might be very powerful, you might end up having a huge amount of processing ability that you just don't know what to do with. Not only would you have to develop the software to deal with the genetics, but you would have to figure out what affects what where, which could be difficult, even with the help of advanced processing power.
In the end though, if you can create a sapient dog, you can create a sapient ape for far less effort. I say "ape", but it doesn't even have to be a great ape- it could be for example some species of monkey, although such an organism might be too small to be an effective worker.
Altering brain structures is incredibly difficult, and could double the difficulty of the entire project, whereas things like the musculoskeletal system are already well understood, and many genes already documented.
When you get into the brain, it's not just anatomy and genetics, it's anatomy genetics and
psychology, while you might be able to increase intelligence without paying much attention to psychology, to alter the personality at all without having perfected psychology first would lead to disasterous results in a
sapient being. Perhaps some lab animals have had aggression taken away, or whatever traits changed, but in a simple animal psychology is far more simple.
Meanwhile, an entire, complex, infant field of study is required to even understand the basics of human psychology because we're sapient. While lab animals may not have this level of complexity, if you change some personality trait in a sapeint organism you'll be effecting, enabling, and disabling a whole range of psychological effects, which will cascade and effect others.
The dynamics of it are very finely tuned, and even in the space of a single generation, regular genetic variations (not even mutations) can cause disabilities of extreme severity, but to interfere and manually change code will have a more severe effect, and will doubtless weak havoc on the careful, dynamic balance needed to maintain sanity, peace and happiness.
I greatly pity the creature that is the subject of such experimentation.
Brain size does matter. It might not matter when you compare a genius and a person with a disability, but it does matter evolutionarily- the more intelligent an organism is, the higher its brain/body ratio and/or encephalisation quotient is. You don't suddenly come up with an organism that has a brain/body ratio comparable to all its relatives and an intelligence that is magically much higher.
I do think, that if for whatever reason a dog-derived organism is created as a worker entity, it will come after an uplifted primate(s) created for the same purpose. Primates are just better candidates all-round, despite some advantages that dogs might have over them.
Still pay attention to the purpose of the uplift. I believe I remember hearing that the Soviets tried to make worker-apes during the Cold War as cheap labor, IIRC, only to realize they were in over their heads...
Dogs wouldn't be so helpful in a Labor Camp/Gulag.
However, if it's a "uplift them to uplift us" campaign, temperment would be essential, and Painted Dogs would be better for enthusiasm and personality, even if
advanced manipulators were left out. Even dogs can still press buttons, dial numbers, turn switches, and do all sorts of other things. Difficulty comes when they need to hold something, though.
If it's a "turn profit by making them pay" uplift, then species doesn't matter as much as "can they get a good job?", and so Apes or Parrots would probably win.
If it's "turn profit by selling them" uplift, then what purpose are you selling them for? Apes would never pass, simply because it would be obvious they're making a slave species. But Canines have already been working for us, living alongside us, for millenia. It will be not be nearly so much a shock to society if those same dogs talk now, and selling them will be infinitely easier, talking dog to help the elderly, talking dog to guide the blind and other disabled, for rescue teams and for police...
Or big, hunky gorilla to help Grandma, and guide the blind? That's going to be a
very tough sell.
Not to mention it's
far less subtle than using the
same species, but they can now talk.
Doubtless, though, the first application of uplift will ever be for scientific study, where Apes or Parrots, once again, win the day.
Note I'm valueing these based on likelyhood, not on how good they are morally. Sadly what's right and what's likely aren't the same thing...
