MILSPEC-555: "EVACUATING A PLANET"

TA: Handout #2



Be advised. It has been determined that evacuation plans should be system specific, to take advantage of system specifics.

This is a humanitarian project receiving assistance from many systems.

Weird Harold wrote:I think you're ignoring the first big problem with my idea: Bubble sidewalls that can cut through kilometers of bedrock don't exist and cutting that much rock with a force field is likely going to create some explosive problems. Explosive problems that would make Project Orion look absolutely under-powered and reasonable.

Second, "Contragrav towers" don't just extend upwards. They have basement levels -- apparently LOTS of basement levels -- and you'd have to cut below those levels or through those levels (at least on the outskirts of your ground level in the bubble. Anchoring the towers after lift-off won't be a problem because most of the bubble will be in micro-gravity. (gyms, hospitals, and similar places will have grav-plates.)

I'm not ignoring the sidewall issue (I specifically touched on it in my first post, actually), I was just focusing on the issue that I could try to put numbers to rather than the more ambiguous ones. And yeah, you need a good chunk of depth to catch the foundations/underground parts of the towers, which is why I was postulating at least a full km of rock underneath.

Some sort of Force Field "bubble" to hold air, water, food and people. Contra-grav to lift the bubble into space. Probable some inertial compensation or grave plates to permit towing to a "safe harbor."

The "Bubble" doesn't have to be spherical and it doesn't have to be big enough to pick up an entire city; a neighborhood at a time or even one contra-grav tower at a time would work. The trick is to pick up as much as possible in each bubble.

Something along these lines perhaps could be feasible, though again it's one of those solutions that has to have been planned and constructed (at massive expense *for every planet you want to protect*) in advance. It does however at least provide a supplemental method of getting people into orbit rather than just a bajillion round trips by shuttles/etc. The problem of what you *do* with them all still remains, though.

I mean, ok, now you have a billion people floating in hundreds of thousands of makeshift lifeboats (probably mostly the cut-off aboveground portions of towers) in orbit around a planet devastated by whatever calamity prompted the evacuation. How much life support endurance - food, water, air, power - does each of those bubbles have? (Note that these makeshift lifeboats are unlikely to be able to support life indefinitely, even if you can somehow maintain the utterly massive flow of shipping required to satisfy the life support needs of an entire planetary population.) Do you have hundreds of thousands of ships instantly available to tow them somewhere, and if not how long will it take to assemble such a fleet or how many round trips will it take for the amount of ships you *do* have? *Where* do you tow them - even if there's another habitable planet in the same system, it's unlikely to be able to absorb a billion people on no notice, and otherwise you're faced with trying to boost them into hyperspace (a la the Masadan LACs in HotQ) and tow them for weeks to various other systems. Can their life support hold out long enough for that, especially since you're going to have to accelerate slowly (since grav plates are less effective than compensators) and avoid grav waves (since they don't have sails)? Are they even going to be shielded enough to survive the hostile environment of hyper?

Assuming you have all of the equipment ready in advance, with literally the entire rest of humanity ready to pitch in with warships (given the hyper generator and tractor performance requirements) to tow life support bubbles and freighters to carry life support supplies, and that none of the above caveats is a show-stopper, then you might be able to save some fraction of a planetary population this way, though even here my guess is that the simple travel time logistics are going to doom a nightmarishly high number of people. The main problem, really, is that 'ready in advance' thing - it just doesn't strike me as the sort of infrastructure that would be remotely economically feasible to build and have waiting 'just in case', and once you realize you actually *do* need it you probably don't have time to build it.

Jonathan_S wrote:Of course the other bubble sidewall issue is we’ve never seen any example I can recall of an Honorverse sidewall or “forc3 field” capable of holding air. If they had such a thing you’d think they’d use it to temporarily close off and pressurize boat bays.

To be fair, the text describes sidewalls and wedges as being made of extraordinarily strong localized gravity fields, strong enough to near-instantly reduce any material objects to their constituent atoms. The only reason they're safe for the ship is that they're way out there in space - I could easily see the lack of use as boat bay doors to simply be because they'd shred the surrounding structure of the ship. But if we're just talking a bubble sidewall around a chunk of ground and atmosphere, then as long as there's a bit of a gap between the sidewall and the ground perhaps it could be done.

Lecture: Proposals

How fast can Grayson's orbital habitats be built?

Can Skydomes of Grayson assist?

Can the communal civilian habitats of TIY be quickly built at the risk of ghetto communities of trailer parks in space? We need solutions people! Not excuses.

MuonNeutrino wrote:Something along these lines perhaps could be feasible, though again it's one of those solutions that has to have been planned and constructed (at massive expense *for every planet you want to protect*) in advance. It does however at least provide a supplemental method of getting people into orbit rather than just a bajillion round trips by shuttles/etc. The problem of what you *do* with them all still remains, though.

Trying to evacuate an entire planet on short notice is extremely improbable in the Honorverse in the first place. I see no problem with proposing improbable solutions.

I did say in my first post that it would require pre-planning and a lot of R&D. That pretty much has to be a given because bubble-lifeboats aren't off-the shelf technology.

What you do with a few billion people in orbit depends on who, what, where, when, and why. One possibility would be to dig big holes in the nearest moon or desert planet and bury each lifeboat and dig tunnels between them to form an underground civilization.

Saving parks, preserves, and agricultural areas would be crucial to long-term success. The bigger the bubble, the longer survivors will survive. If you can pick entire cities, a typical RW city can survive 72 hours without rationing food and water. Parks, Preserves, and agricultural areas can extend survival times by bringing along the production of food and oxygen as well as CO2 scrubbing.

There is some balancing point between bringing the entire planetary crust and just moving the people into orbit that will ensure maximum survival with enough resources to start over and/or minimize impact on those who provide refuge.

Bring too little and you've only delayed the time crunch to provide safety and shelter. Bring too much and improbable becomes impossible.

In the spirit which this class was proposed:

Puppeteer stepping disks with the secret "interstellar upgrade" to let people walk from planet to planet. At that point the problem really boils down to two sets of criteria.

1) a) how fast can every disk on the planet facing extinction be upgraded to the "interstellar" version. b) how do you keep people from trying to carry eveything they own when they go to step through (and are you allowed to just shoot the ones who create havoc) and c) how do you manage the lines.

2) a) getting enough disks on other planets upgraded to the " interstellar" version, b) covincing the leadership and population of those planets to take X (in the millions if not tens of millions or more) of refugee population which are going to be mostly destitute and may not have any practical skills for that world but are going to play merry hell with the compitition for employment AND drain the resources of said planet supporting the refugees till they can either be gainfully employed (at more than subsitance level) or shipped onward somehwere else.

What is comming at the system/planet and what can be done to divert it or destory it?

Even with the resoures and capabilites in the Honorverse we are aware of, you are not going to move 500 MILLION people off planet and set them up in orbital habitats or find them even refugee camp living in other system even if you could get them off planet and out of the system. The capasity to do that doesn't exist.
Your not going to do it for 100 Million.
Your not going to do it for 5 Million.

You are going to see what happens with that many people discover that they are going to die shortly and there is SOME very limited ability to escape. I guarantee it isin't going to be pleasent.

Oh, professor, by the time you read this, my transport will have cleared the hyperlimit and I will be on my way to a small system that has been advertising for people with my educational and skill set background. The marviolusly mini-micro-fusion weapon from Section V in the Advanced Military Devices School which is enclosed will detonate in- have a nice day--- 3, 2, 1.........
("discontinuity" as per Larry Niven in Ringworld)

I can't remember the exact details and am too lazy to do the maths, but do recall an article from many decades ago that if you were to march the citizens of China five abreast onto evacuation ships, their birthrate would negate any gains.

Daryl wrote:I can't remember the exact details and am too lazy to do the maths, but do recall an article from many decades ago that if you were to march the citizens of China five abreast onto evacuation ships, their birthrate would negate any gains.

I believe that statement shows up in Heinlein's _Tunnel in the Sky_ and it is wrong. If 5 abreast means 5 per second (that's about 5 feet spacing); then that is 18000 per hour; 432,000 per day; and 157,680,000 per year (non-leap year). That will clear China's population in less then a decade. Now the world on the other hand will take 40+ years (that means you need more columns of 5 abreast).

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I believe that statement shows up in Heinlein's _Tunnel in the Sky_ and it is wrong. If 5 abreast means 5 per second (that's about 5 feet spacing); then that is 18000 per hour; 432,000 per day; and 157,680,000 per year (non-leap year). That will clear China's population in less then a decade. Now the world on the other hand will take 40+ years (that means you need more columns of 5 abreast).

Heinlein's assertion was (probably) correct when it was written. China has done a great deal to reduce its birthrate and population growth since then. I believe it was "marched four abreast" rather than five, and not an original to RAH assertion. (some versions add "in front of a machine gun."