MILSPEC-555: "EVACUATING A PLANET"

BLACKBOARD

555: Graduate Level.

Gentlemen. The formulation of this class comes from higher up.

PLANET KILLER: UNKNOWN ORIGIN*

*CLASSIFIED

CLASS DISMISSED TO REGROUP


.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:...
Yet the biggest passenger ship we've seen has a capacity of only thousands, and even the enormous Hephaestus space station, hardly designed to be very mobile, maxes out population at under 2 million.


...

Now with more time you could build more ships, or design life support and habitat modules for freighters. But evacuating between halves of a binary system is an absurdly good case. The only one that would be better is evacuation between a pair of habitable planets within the same system.

With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

Take a bubble side-wall as a starting point. Increase force-field density to make it impermeable to air. Make it bubble field strong enough to form even with a barrier like bedrock so it can cut an entire existing city fee of the planet. Make it big enough to envelop an entire honorverse city with mile+ high towers.

Develop (or acquire) enough contra-grav generators to lift a fully formed city-bubble into an orbit high enough to survive in impending planetary apocalypse.

Once developed and pre-placed in large cities and selected parks, preserves, and agricultural areas, evacuation can be done in whatever time it takes the Bubble to form and the Contra-grave to lift the city-bubbles out of danger. Add in any available warning time for those from outside cities, who wish to evacuate, to travel to the nearest city, park, preserve, or agricultural area.

The technology could have commercial applications that would defray R&D costs (eventually) even if the Apocalypse never happens.

Excellent recommendation. Kudos!

It is what we expect at Harvard.

Weird Harold wrote:With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

Take a bubble side-wall as a starting point. Increase force-field density to make it impermeable to air. Make it bubble field strong enough to form even with a barrier like bedrock so it can cut an entire existing city fee of the planet. Make it big enough to envelop an entire honorverse city with mile+ high towers.

Develop (or acquire) enough contra-grav generators to lift a fully formed city-bubble into an orbit high enough to survive in impending planetary apocalypse.

Once developed and pre-placed in large cities and selected parks, preserves, and agricultural areas, evacuation can be done in whatever time it takes the Bubble to form and the Contra-grave to lift the city-bubbles out of danger. Add in any available warning time for those from outside cities, who wish to evacuate, to travel to the nearest city, park, preserve, or agricultural area.

The technology could have commercial applications that would defray R&D costs (eventually) even if the Apocalypse never happens.

:D That sounds like at least 6 impossible things; guess it's time for breakfast

Jonathan_S wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

Take a bubble side-wall as a starting point. Increase force-field density to make it impermeable to air. Make it bubble field strong enough to form even with a barrier like bedrock so it can cut an entire existing city fee of the planet. Make it big enough to envelop an entire honorverse city with mile+ high towers.

Develop (or acquire) enough contra-grav generators to lift a fully formed city-bubble into an orbit high enough to survive in impending planetary apocalypse.

Once developed and pre-placed in large cities and selected parks, preserves, and agricultural areas, evacuation can be done in whatever time it takes the Bubble to form and the Contra-grave to lift the city-bubbles out of danger. Add in any available warning time for those from outside cities, who wish to evacuate, to travel to the nearest city, park, preserve, or agricultural area.

The technology could have commercial applications that would defray R&D costs (eventually) even if the Apocalypse never happens.

:D That sounds like at least 6 impossible things; guess it's time for breakfast

Isn't that the Krypton city that Brainiac stole from Superman? The only thing you left out was the super miniaturization tech, from Manticore!

Rob

Jonathan_S wrote::D That sounds like at least 6 impossible things; guess it's time for breakfast

Nope, there's still three more impossible things before breakfast.

The idea comes, in part, from an online comic that features a 'venue' named Bubbleopolis.

As for "impossible things" I'm like Will Rogers when he suggested raising the North Atlantic to 212F as a solution to submarine attacks in WWI. When told that was impossible, he replied, "I leave that stuff to the engineers. I'm just the idea man."

I have to concur with the others that this is an impractical task even for a honorverse-level civilization, and Jonathan_S' numbers make a pretty convincing example as to why.

It could ...maybe... be done (once) in a 'literally all of humanity joins together to evacuate one planet' type of effort, but even if you somehow gathered together every single passenger-capable ship humanity owned I bet you still couldn't manage it without multiple trips. For example, a billion people at a very generous thousand people average per ship (since we're talking literally every ship humanity has, they're not all bulk passenger carriers) is a million loads. And since there's absolutely no way that any one planet is absorbing any significant fraction of the evacuees (since we're talking *millions* here), those hundreds of thousands of passenger ships are taking *multiple round trips* (each probably requiring weeks or months in transit) to thousands of various planets to drop them off - I hope you have plenty of life support and that whatever calamity you're anticipating is a pretty slow one!

Weird Harold wrote:With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

<scheme for lifting cities into orbit with bubble sidewall generators and counter-grav>

Kudos for thinking outside the box, but I don't think you're really grasping the scale of what you propose to do here.

Imagine you're trying to cut out a 10 km radius hemisphere for your city. If you do the math assuming granite as an 'average' sort of rock, that's ~5.7e15 kg - almost six quadrillion kg of rock. Counter-grav is not magic - it may break the laws of physics as we understand them in our universe, but it still requires machinery.

For example, Stephanie's hang glider emergency counter grav unit was large enough that she had to wear it as a backpack. Even if you make fairly generous assumptions that it only weighed 5 kg and was designed with big safety margins so that it could lift 500 kg, that's still only a 100-to-1 ratio.

At that ratio, you're looking at ~57 trillion kg worth of counter-grav generators to lift your 5.7 quadrillion kg of rock - also known as over 6500 Invictus-class SD's worth of material. For one city. Now, this is a ballpark estimate, for sure, but it gives you an idea of the scale of the problem.

Also, where are you going to *put* all those countergrav generators? Again, counter-grav isn't magic - the generators seem to need to be attached to whatever they're lifting. Are you proposing to tunnel out under your 10 km hemisphere in advance to install your trillions of kg of counter-grav generators? And how are you *powering* them? Do you have a few thousand Invictus' worth of fusion reactors and bunkerage down there too?

And, of course, you're also going to need probably at least another few trillion kg worth of artificial gravity generators to keep the whole thing from disintegrating once it's in microgravity, given that planets, including their surfaces, are held together by their self-gravity, and this hemisphere isn't part of that anymore.

And that's all assuming that you can actually use a bubble sidewall to surgically cut out a hemisphere of rock like that. Given how... energetically... wedges seem to disassemble things, that seems to me to be highly speculative at best.

And, of course, once it's in orbit there's the question of maintaining it at a livable temperature, though *that* is going to depend on things we don't really know about how wedges/sidewalls actually affect energy transport through their surfaces.

This sort of planetary-scale geoengineering is a bit much, even for the honorverse.

MuonNeutrino wrote:I have to concur with the others that this is an impractical task even for a honorverse-level civilization, and Jonathan_S' numbers make a pretty convincing example as to why.

It could ...maybe... be done (once) in a 'literally all of humanity joins together to evacuate one planet' type of effort, but even if you somehow gathered together every single passenger-capable ship humanity owned I bet you still couldn't manage it without multiple trips. For example, a billion people at a very generous thousand people average per ship (since we're talking literally every ship humanity has, they're not all bulk passenger carriers) is a million loads. And since there's absolutely no way that any one planet is absorbing any significant fraction of the evacuees (since we're talking *millions* here), those hundreds of thousands of passenger ships are taking *multiple round trips* (each probably requiring weeks or months in transit) to thousands of various planets to drop them off - I hope you have plenty of life support and that whatever calamity you're anticipating is a pretty slow one!

Weird Harold wrote:With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

<scheme for lifting cities into orbit with bubble sidewall generators and counter-grav>

Kudos for thinking outside the box, but I don't think you're really grasping the scale of what you propose to do here.

Imagine you're trying to cut out a 10 km radius hemisphere for your city. If you do the math assuming granite as an 'average' sort of rock, that's ~5.7e15 kg - almost six quadrillion kg of rock. Counter-grav is not magic - it may break the laws of physics as we understand them in our universe, but it still requires machinery.

For example, Stephanie's hang glider emergency counter grav unit was large enough that she had to wear it as a backpack. Even if you make fairly generous assumptions that it only weighed 5 kg and was designed with big safety margins so that it could lift 500 kg, that's still only a 100-to-1 ratio.

At that ratio, you're looking at ~57 trillion kg worth of counter-grav generators to lift your 5.7 quadrillion kg of rock - also known as over 6500 Invictus-class SD's worth of material. For one city. Now, this is a ballpark estimate, for sure, but it gives you an idea of the scale of the problem.

Also, where are you going to *put* all those countergrav generators? Again, counter-grav isn't magic - the generators seem to need to be attached to whatever they're lifting. Are you proposing to tunnel out under your 10 km hemisphere in advance to install your trillions of kg of counter-grav generators? And how are you *powering* them? Do you have a few thousand Invictus' worth of fusion reactors and bunkerage down there too?

And, of course, you're also going to need probably at least another few trillion kg worth of artificial gravity generators to keep the whole thing from disintegrating once it's in microgravity, given that planets, including their surfaces, are held together by their self-gravity, and this hemisphere isn't part of that anymore.

And that's all assuming that you can actually use a bubble sidewall to surgically cut out a hemisphere of rock like that. Given how... energetically... wedges seem to disassemble things, that seems to me to be highly speculative at best.

And, of course, once it's in orbit there's the question of maintaining it at a livable temperature, though *that* is going to depend on things we don't really know about how wedges/sidewalls actually affect energy transport through their surfaces.

This sort of planetary-scale geoengineering is a bit much, even for the honorverse.

First, I swear I remember contra-grav rings that you could just put around something.

I think the idea of moving an entire city with its bedrock isn't a practical idea. It looks cool, but its a huge waste of resources on multiple, multiple levels.

However a Grayson type city is already sealed so you could probably haul that into space. Obviously a vacuum ready city would be a bit tougher than one that's just sealed against heavy metals

You probably wouldn't want to integrate the contra-grav lifters into the city, and you might want some tractors to help pull, ideally it would be some sort of massive powered ring that could float over dome cities and lift them away. You could have a handful for the entire planet.

Whatever the case, planetary evacuation is NOT beyond the ability of Honorverse if they were actually dedicated to it. They can sustain large populations in space. Manticore built hundreds of Super-dreadnoughts with only maybe ten million peoples in space industry. It would be a big outlay to have lying around, but it would be feasible.

From the infodumps Manticore has about 300 million people living in its belts. If all those resources had been spent on minimalist colony ships, the kind that send you into hybernation, I bet they would have enough to evacuate the system.

Alternatively, why even bother with homes that can't move? I mean, not being able to move around is a serious liability. What if your neighbor goes insane and starts killing everyone? Just live in ships all the time! Obviously you'll need to a few years in a random system every once and a while to expand your nomadic fleet, but stay on the move and dedicate like 1% of your resources to your defense fleet. Plus since your nomadic, MAD holds no danger for you. You can disappear into the void!

MuonNeutrino wrote:Kudos for thinking outside the box, but I don't think you're really grasping the scale of what you propose to do here.

Imagine you're trying to cut out a 10 km radius hemisphere for your city. ...

You're thinking far too small. NYC is far bigger than a measly 10km in diameter. It would be neither wise nor necessary to cut a hemisphere of bedrock/substrate, but both wise and necessary to include as much atmosphere as possible. A spherical bubble of 10-15 miles radius would probably work about right. with the center of the bubble about half the radius above ground level.

As for placement and powering of the bubble generator, that's an engineering problem and I refer you to the Will Rogers quote above your last post. :p

I think we need the next main line book really really soon because the topic thead is getting wierd.

Unless this is an Aligment solution and the extinction level event is some of Abrect's wife's weaponized nanotechnology which will "only" clear the planet of non-Star Line humans and let the repopulate with Proper humans?

Jonathan_S wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:With a little pre-planning and R&D I'm sure a contra-grav civilization could design city-sized lifeboat systems.

Take a bubble side-wall as a starting point. Increase force-field density to make it impermeable to air. Make it bubble field strong enough to form even with a barrier like bedrock so it can cut an entire existing city fee of the planet. Make it big enough to envelop an entire honorverse city with mile+ high towers.

Develop (or acquire) enough contra-grav generators to lift a fully formed city-bubble into an orbit high enough to survive in impending planetary apocalypse.

Once developed and pre-placed in large cities and selected parks, preserves, and agricultural areas, evacuation can be done in whatever time it takes the Bubble to form and the Contra-grave to lift the city-bubbles out of danger. Add in any available warning time for those from outside cities, who wish to evacuate, to travel to the nearest city, park, preserve, or agricultural area.

The technology could have commercial applications that would defray R&D costs (eventually) even if the Apocalypse never happens.

:D That sounds like at least 6 impossible things; guess it's time for breakfast

TA: Handout #1



In absence of any other proposals to lessen the impact of this very dire, time sensitive event, this proposal is worth a gold mine. All proposals are headed upstairs no matter how outlandish. Perhaps your proposal will inspire a real breakthrough. Remember, out of the mouth of babes.