Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Unanswered Questions from the Alice-verse

<< < (11/16) > >>

Neko_Ali:
The biggest problem with the 'The trees are the enemy' theory is that we only have the word of Alice on all of that. The siblings paint a different picture of life Up There. Mostly that it's safe, but boring. And everyone has everything they need, but lack unique experiences. Assuming that Alice is right and the trees do want to invade/remove the Earth-bound population it would indicate that things aren't as stable Up There as the kids think. Depending on where they are, orbital or lunar colony they could be running out of easily obtainable resources to break down and recombine with their nanotech. Or maybe whatever population controls they are using are not effective enough for their production to keep up with the population growth and they need more space. It's considerably easier to expand on a planetary body with appropriate atmosphere than a space habitat. Or to adapt people to exist in a zero atmosphere environment, if they can even do that.

That doesn't explain why they had to send the kids to Alice's town though. Whatever their goal is they could have dropped a colony starter crew in some remote area with enough tech to kickstart a settlement. Something that would be incredibly easy to do if they make use of nanotech reassemblers. Just send down a hive machine, feed it raw material and wait for it to start producing custom order nanomachines to build whatever you need.

All of this still makes me thing whoever or whatever is responsible for the siblings presence, it's directly targeted at Alice. Someone is testing her I think, for some reason.

ReindeerFlotilla:
Part of the reason that seems fishy to me is physics.

Now, I've no idea if Jeph even knows this, but it ALOT harder to operate up and down a gravity well than it is to just stay in space.

Admittedly, the kids seem to expect Scotty to get involved. Assuming transporters, the Trees are actually in good shape, resource wise, just dealing with NEOs. Atop that, they've had 1000s of years, which is plenty of time for jaunt to the Kuiper belt and back with an absurd comet.

Frankly, there's nothing on Earth they really need but bacteria. One assumes they had plenty of those up in space too, since humans are more bacteria, by weight, than they are human. (Don't tell Hannelore. Not that she doesn't know, but don't make her think about it.)

Water? Beam some up from the Gallilain moons. Soil? Mars is raw soil. You'll need poop to make it useful, but you've got all those people? Metal? Asteriods. C-type asteroids are rich in raw organics, and you've got bacteria to spare. Air? CO3 plus plants = Air. Mars and Venus, again. Lots of CO2. Hydrocarbons (for some reason, I guess?) Titan, baby.

If you have a big enough transporter, you don't even need rocket fuel to break Earth orbit. Just beam it out. Can't beam that far? Beam it as high as you can and let it fall. You can beam it down to Earth, you can probably beam it pretty high. We else would you need the technology than to reach other habs? Those could be 7, 8 thousand kilometers away. Classic gravity assist. If done right you zoom off at escape velocity. It wouldn't take a lot of planning to build a civilization that spanned the Solar system. So why Earth?

The only logical reasons I can think of are Sentiment or someone has already laid claim to the rest of the solar system. It could be the blink, but then I wonder again why it chose to take a war that would ended in days and drag it out over millennia.

Neko_Ali:
Well we don't know how far their transporter technology works, or if they have interplanetary ships. It wasn't supposed to be possible to beam things down to the surface. That could have been a technological limit. It's possible the trees have been quietly trying to send agents to the surface for a long time now, and it's just with Ardent and Gavia that they were able to land their targets on the surface, instead of say 40 miles up. It's all speculation since we only have a limited understanding of what kind of tech they have available.

BenRG:
The way Gavia spoke into the air and requested to be taken home suggests the existence of matter teleportation technology of some sort.

Why might the Praeses want the planet? For that old, old reason for envy, covetousness, theft, pillage and war throughout history: It is there and they don't yet control it. Maybe, just maybe, whoever created those things created their minds to mimic those of humans just a bit too well.

I do wonder if the Praeses are still fighting the war millennia later, still trying to prove that the biotechnologists were right on the ruins of the other factions' civilisations.

ReindeerFlotilla:

--- Quote from: Neko_Ali on 20 Aug 2015, 09:58 ---Well we don't know how far their transporter technology works, or if they have interplanetary ships. It wasn't supposed to be possible to beam things down to the surface. That could have been a technological limit. It's possible the trees have been quietly trying to send agents to the surface for a long time now, and it's just with Ardent and Gavia that they were able to land their targets on the surface, instead of say 40 miles up. It's all speculation since we only have a limited understanding of what kind of tech they have available.

--- End quote ---

Beaming in from 40 miles is a valid method. Sure the subject would break the sound barrier on the way down, but it's survivable. Some dued got red bull to pay for him to prove it. Guy named Felix. He wasn't the first. He got the first guy to be his ground controller, which was a nice touch.

Basically, beaming into any altitude less than LEO would mean that you could beam out far enough for a gravity assist to work as a means of making escape velocity. You needed move more mass than a large man, either. In most of the payload is reaction mass and nanobots, they can build whatever you need once they reach the target asteroid. (You could cut down remass by using an ion engine. in some profiles it would be slower (in most long range profiles, it wouldn't, but 100s of years. Time's not much of an issue.) While we don't know what it's really like in AG, the physics of our world say that with the blink giving them a position in orbit, it took out the most difficult part of building a sustainable population of people off Earth. The people are out of difficult part of the gravity well. Building interplanetary ships would be a relatively easy thing for a nanobot enabled society, and the resources of the Jovian system alone dwarfs everything you could squeeze out of Earth. This only doesn't work if you rangelimited from LEO, and even then beaming a nanobot probe, remass and an ion engine as far out as you can buys you a good amount delta v.

I could explain in more detail, but the key point is that as long as you get away from the major drag of the outer atmosphere, it's pretty much a free lunch. (Obviously, it's actually stealing a tiny bit of Earth's lunch, but that's not really important. Earth's a big eater.

Even with a level of monomaina at play, a few decades of failing to retake the surface would lead a logical thinker to note that the vast majority of resources are elsewhere, and noone is there to stop them taking them. So, again, it must be sentiment, which would enclude envy and all that other stuff, or there is something out there and those resources are denied.

Either way, I'd say the blink wasn't very effective.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page