Oni2 talk:Beyond Dragons

Title

The title is inspired from old phrase Here be dragons. It means to explore unknown and therefor dangerous terrain.

Deep space is no friendly location for life. So "beyond [all those] dragons" there better be something of worth that justifies the efforts.

Planned topics:

• space exploration
• synthetic life as tools
• "contamination" of lifeless habitats with life
• alien life
• knowledge acquisition
• self-discovery
• self-altering

Is alien life hostile?

Some people say alien live is likely hostile. I think this is only partially true. There should be more friendly than hostile aliens - if they exist at all.

What enables a specie to safely travel between stars or even galaxies?

Space is a dangerous place: as an alien you have to master all kind of biotechnologies to repair your cells destroyed by high-energetic cosmic rays or by accidents. In worst case you have to replace whole limbs and organs.

The ship has to be repaired as well from time to time. Meteoroids and even micrometeoroid can penetrates the ship. For strong and self-repairing materials, machines and electronics you have to master nanotechnologies.

Bio and nano techs are completed by powerful computing techs which in turn require a global society to collaborate.

Also you need to process any matter and in worst case you have to transform by the means of fission or fusion.

Say, you want to produce new oxygen after an accident and you need extra fuel but required type of matter isn't available. Either you can transform matter or you die.

If any tech is insufficient then the space program is likely to fail. At the point where an alien is able to travel in person to planet Earth its society has mastered all the required technologies and if they did, they don't need our resources. They just could go anywhere, terraform any dead planet and avoid the hostile contact with humans. If it is just about matter you can fly to your home star, collect plasma and cool it down.

The only logical reason such capable species would seek the contact with others knowledge acquisition may it be cultural or scientific. A predator behavior - that denies the probable ethics necessary to collaborate and reach other worlds - should be a statistical anomaly or at least very unlikely.

Ill-minded motivations based on absurd politics, philosophies or religions should be doomed to fail.

A interstellar travel puts your very nature to a test. You cannot argue with nature. Either you are true or you are not. Space doesn't forgive any mistakes.

Nah, not really. If the alien race has become so much advanced that space travel is foolproof then non-scientific aspects increase in weight again. In that case any alien youngster could devastate a planet. Hopefully their education would have improved as well. Maybe they have supervising AIs on board?

Entities

Geo-ship

Transformed Earth...

One low-tech possibility would be to build some sort of a giant, long railgun with the sun as power source... Better fasten your seat belts. ;)

Nameless ship

Sometimes called "flying rock" or "cemetery" as it is mostly made from Bioc-infected soil which originates from Green Village battle ground. Declared as bio- and nanohazard, it was left behind.

Wanderer

A group of young creatures (on their "initialization trip") who met the crew of "flying rock". [...] Together they learn how to move and live in space.

Conflicts at first contact.

Events

(Incomplete.)