What if Safehold wasn't the Federations only forlorn effort?

evilauthor wrote:That in my mind at least is an order of magnitude less sophisticated than a fabber's ability to make ANYTHING... or at least any kind of macroscopic object. And I can easily see different models of fabbers having different manufacturing limits with the only the very highest quality fabbers able to make more fabbers.

It would be silly to base humanity's survival on less than the very highest quality fabbers.

There are dozens of ways that a small -- even counter-top sized -- fabbers could make more fabbers. Esepcially if a fabber like OWL's can make a fully functional PICA with a PICA's nanotech repair function. IIRC, there is textev claiming that a PICA's repair function could rebuild every part of a PICA even if it was totally trashed.

Take one Fabber capable of making and programming nanotech repair bots and program a continuous stream of nanobots programmed to build fabbers. When enough fabbers have built enough fabbers, reprogram the nanobots to build a variety of needed/desired items as well as bigger fabbers. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until you have everything you might ever need or want.

You're right – I don't remember that one at all.

Louis R wrote:You must have missed that thread. Or threads? Anyway:

Some have speculated that there are one or more such installations, in the care of a group that was at least as good at going underground as the SSK, possibly with even less idea of what the legacy is that they're guarding. Not implausible - where there are two successful underground organisations there's obviously room for 3. Particularly if they're effectively completely passive, since that would mean no waves to rock the Inquisition's boat and get them noticed. If so, they may eventually surface.

Other than that though, while I would say that it's entirely possible that there are one or more abandoned Fallen facilities, they would be and will probably forever be irrelevant. If they escaped detection and destruction in the immediate aftermath of the War, when Chihiro would have been using all his resources to find them - and probably had a pretty shrewd idea of where to look for them - they aren't findable from the outside. Not until someone builds a Planetary Proctoscope that can look right through Federation shielding, at any rate. By which time any such installation will be a museum piece to be placed alongside the remains of OWL, Nahrmahn and the Alban sisters.

Peter2 wrote:
There's something which has been hanging around in the back of my mind since more was disclosed about the War against the Fallen. I wonder what the chances are of there being one of the Fallen's fabrication sites left anywhere? The chances must be very low, but if the site was as well hidden as Merlin's hide-out (and a bit more accessible!), it's something that RFC could introduce if needs be. All it would need would be for those who knew about it to have been wiped out in a pogrom &/or a raid gone wrong.
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Post HFQ. Inspired by the mention of industrial modules in Khody's diary.

Peter2 wrote:You're right – I don't remember that one at all.

Thanks!

Louis R wrote:Post HFQ. Inspired by the mention of industrial modules in Khody's diary.

Peter2 wrote:You're right – I don't remember that one at all.

Weird Harold wrote:There are dozens of ways that a small -- even counter-top sized -- fabbers could make more fabbers. Esepcially if a fabber like OWL's can make a fully functional PICA with a PICA's nanotech repair function. IIRC, there is textev claiming that a PICA's repair function could rebuild every part of a PICA even if it was totally trashed.

Take one Fabber capable of making and programming nanotech repair bots and program a continuous stream of nanobots programmed to build fabbers. When enough fabbers have built enough fabbers, reprogram the nanobots to build a variety of needed/desired items as well as bigger fabbers. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until you have everything you might ever need or want.

I'm not sure repairing a PICA would be useful if the "brain" were damaged enough so the stored personality was lost. I wonder what might happen if a PICA were activated without a stored personality. There's obviously some basic functional programming in it; probably in the hardware itself.

OrlandoNative wrote:I'm not sure repairing a PICA would be useful if the "brain" were damaged enough so the stored personality was lost. I wonder what might happen if a PICA were activated without a stored personality. There's obviously some basic functional programming in it; probably in the hardware itself.

You'd have a catatonic PICA. Without a personality, it'd have no motivation to do ANYTHING.

OrlandoNative wrote:I'm not sure repairing a PICA would be useful if the "brain" were damaged enough so the stored personality was lost. I wonder what might happen if a PICA were activated without a stored personality. There's obviously some basic functional programming in it; probably in the hardware itself.

Exactly how indestructible a PICA might be is irrelevant to the nanobot repair capability illustrates TF-Tech capability to build macro-scale devices with nano-scale constructors. That means a table-top sized fabber could build an aircraft carrier with a full complement of planes -- or anything of any size you can imagine; it just needs raw materials for the nanobots and raw materials for the nanobots to use.

Weird Harold wrote:

Potato wrote:Read RFC's post here:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6244&start=20

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6244&start=24 works better.

Apologies for the thread resurrection, but I figured this was better than starting my own, identical thread.

It's an interesting thought experiment...

What sort of hypothetical survival strategies MIGHT have worked, OTHER than terraforming an earth-type world?

RFC's stance seems to be that most forms of deep-space, sublight probes or habitats would not have been able to escape detection by the Gaba. If we accept that as authorial fiat, what else does that leave?

Personally, I'm a little surprised that no-one tried buried, hostile-enviroment vaults... If Battle Steel can do half the things we think it can, and if the Federation was half as wealthy as they sound like...

I'd be really tempted to try things like building a secret earth-tunneling mini-base, hiding it REALLY unlikely locations, then ordering it to go completely silent for a few hundred years, or even a few thousand.

You could hypothetically land a sealed mini-base on the surface of Venus, tunnel underground, seal yourself in, and then go to sleep for a few hundred years.

It would be a pain to build, and it wouldn't even be guaranteed to ever get back out of Venus's atmosphere under it's own power... but if the hull was thick enough, and anti-corrisive enough, it might be able to survive a one-way landing trip. Getting back out in 500 year's is the PICA's problem.

Likewise, you could try hiding an aerostat deep inside the atmosphere of Jupiter, or a submarine at the bottom of the Marinas trench, tunneled into a hide-away dug into the side of the trench wall.

You could drop something down into the seas of Ganymede, or the Methane Lakes of Titan. or the Ice-Crust of Europa.

And of course, if you successfully hide ANYTHING dormant for a few hundred years, then you have an entire range of options for what you want to bet your lives on when it finally wakes up...

Do you rebuild in your current hidden location, or make a break for it?

Cryosleep humans, PICA'S, Virtual Humans, or pure AI's? Lab-grown humans from stored DNA profiles?

Sublight stealth or hyperlight running for it?

Hundred-year time-scales, or Thousand-year, or even million-year? how long do you want to run or spend rebuilding, before you risk announcing yourself to the Gaba again?

Smallest possible Von Neuman Probes, or largest possible stealthy factories?

I think the gist of it is that if they'd managed to get another colony out past the siege lines - human, PICA, VP, or some combination - it would've been on a similar timetable. A few centuries. By now either the Gbaba would've shown up and destroyed Safehold, or they would've been visited by their victorious human brothers and sisters and lifted up. The mere fact that a thousand years have passed and nothing's happened strongly indicates no other humans made it out.

If I remember right, the Gbaba detected human colonies primarily by looking for radio signals and - especially - neutrino emissions. Nuclear fusion and other high energy technologies emit them and they're impossible to block (as far as we know). No amount of shielding helps. A limited number of small fusion cells like the ones in Merlin and Nimue would be invisible because there's a certain amount of noise generated by radioactive decay inside planets and high energy interactions in the upper atmosphere, which produce a steady stream of neutrinos. A society of a billion PICAs would probably leave an easily visible footprint though. Even if they otherwise led a spartan minimalist existence.

And a whole civilization powered by terawatts of fusion energy, using fusion based spacecraft engines, and so forth, would be like a brilliant floodlight to anyone with a sensitive neutrino detector who happened to drop in at the edge of the system. I wonder if the Gbaba take planet habitability into account during their searches. Would they even bother scouting a system with no terraformable planets? Would they look at rogue planets in interstellar space, or planets around pulsars? Do they examine every asteroid, every object in Kuiper belts and Oort clouds?

Dilandu wrote:Basically this idea was suggested (by me ) - that the Von Neimann-type probes, crewed by PICA's could be cheaper and more effective solution. Considering the personality copying/stroing technology, even the total evacuation of human race - in terms of stored personalities and DNA sequence - onboard such ship could be realistic.

RFC basically stated, that they haven't got enough time. If Federation have more time, they would launch another colonization efforts - maybe even "mankind evacuation scenario", described above. But they have time to launch only the Safehold fleet from Solar System. So, they basically decided to stuck with old-fashioned, but less technically risky solution.

P.S. It is possible, that other Federation colonies made attempts to launch their own colonization fleets, before they have been destroyed. Also it is possible that there were some individual efforts (custom-build high-stealth ships with PICA crews, designed to wait in depowered mode until Gbaba's gone, and then crawl away).

Readers interested in a tale of this sort should look up James Hogan, in which the initial Alpha Centauri colony effort is robots plus human cells. Of perhaps more interest except the author said it did not happen would have been someone very early on looking at the Alphanes -- does anyone else remember that book other than the all-remembering author -- and deciding that the time to go elsewhere was now, not after the aliens are found.