Imagine you have a ship that can achieve a highly significant fraction of the speed of light, something like 0.95c or higher, and can survive interstellar microdebris thanks to some sort of protection system. Let's also say that the ship is BIG, has lots of fuel, and is staffed by over one hundred crew members. Because of time dilation, you functionally have about 10 years of time over your 30-60 light-year trip to run all sorts of science observations.

What experiments or instruments do you bring?

When "Matter" enters a Black Hole what State of Matter does it become?

I thought 99.9% of Matter in Universe being Plasma sounds kinda high? What type of Matter makes up All the Black Holes?

I was thinking last night everything in a Black Hole must be forced into a Solid. I have no idea. But I guess Neutron Star is the most solid Solid.

Im sure real answer is much more interesting. I cant get question out of my head...

Doing seach online seems like everyones just guessing.

Sorry if you already said the answer in a video.

Thank You

Been thinking about this one for a while.

Suppose you give an autonomous construction system a very simple instruction: build a habitat that can survive for a few hundred years.

You give it raw materials, energy, some basic manufacturing equipment, and a set of constraints.

That's it.

At first, it's obviously just a machine following instructions.

It builds the first sections according to the plans. Then it starts modifying the plans because some things work better than expected and others don't.

A few decades later, most of the original structure has been replaced or altered.

A century later, the system is using materials and manufacturing methods that weren't part of the original design at all. Some of the architecture exists because the system discovered that it worked, and nobody who gave the original instructions ever anticipated it.

Eventually, even the people maintaining the habitat don't really understand why some parts are arranged the way they are. They just know that changing them tends to cause problems somewhere else.

So here's the thing I'm wondering:

At what point would you stop describing this as "a structure built by humans" and start describing it as something that developed its own architecture?

Not necessarily alive. Not necessarily intelligent.

Just... no longer fully designed.

And if the original builders came back after 300 years, would they still be looking at their creation?

Or would they be looking at something that had spent three centuries becoming something else?

I think there's a weird middle ground between engineering and evolution here, and I'm not sure what to call it.

Help me come up with one.

So according to study that I read making an orbital ring orbiting the Earth 300 km above the surface and maybe even 600 km above the surface is plausible with existing materials.

The ring itself if I understood correctly could even be a steel wire/truss and more fancy material is necessary for cables/"anchors" going from the ring to the surface and keeping the structure metastable. The "elevator" itself is almost an afterthought - a cabin that would climb up along the cable.

The question is, what is the point?

To get even to LEO we would still need 7.8 km/s delta-v. While this is probably achievable by single stage hydrolox launch vehicle (especially since it can have T/W < 1) that would still be an expendable and very expensive vehicle. To make it return to the launch site (the Orbital Ring) it would need ~15 km/s and that's definitely beyond what single-stage chemical rocket can deliver.

Any ideas?

Been thinking about a weird problem while writing some SF.

Say you have a very large spacecraft with a huge distributed computer system. At some point, part of that system starts doing something nobody expected. It isn't exactly running a new program. Nobody uploads a personality into it either.

It just... starts organizing itself.

Connections appear between processing clusters, disappear, come back in different configurations. At first you can still look at it as a bunch of separate systems working together.

Then, slowly, that stops being true.

If you divide the system into pieces, you lose more and more information about what the whole thing is doing. Eventually there isn't really a clean boundary anymore. It's behaving more like one thing.

And then one day it talks.

"Is someone there?"

That's the part I'm stuck on.

Is that its birth?

Or did it exist before that, when the system first became capable of organizing itself? Or when it became conscious, assuming we could even tell when that happened?

I also keep getting hung up on the AI that was watching over it.

Imagine another AI spending months monitoring the development, keeping its reactor stable, protecting the hardware, talking to it before it can even understand language, and basically being the only "person" around while it develops.

At what point does that stop being a creator and start being something more like a parent?

I don't mean this in the usual "AI becomes conscious and takes over the world" way. I'm more interested in the boring developmental part.

What would actually have to happen between "complex machine" and "someone"?

And would we even recognize the moment when it happened?

Digital twins sound like new technology but they have been used successfully for decades in industry, health, and chemistry. A digital twin is like a digital clone which is trained on a corpus, but with the digital twin that training is on-going instead of a static event. These twins would get updates from their counterparts in real time, and so the person would continue to evolve as the trip continues. At no point would you have to wait weeks or years to interact with a loved one as the AI would be getting continously updated. There would be more to this AI system, but this is the basic outline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

No one would have to worry about not being there for a loved one as these AI could be embodied in robotic bodies. Each crew member would get a certain number of people to stay connected with this way, and the interesting thing is both communities would continue to evolve and interact.

One thing I find interesting in discussions about future civilizations is that we often talk about whether we're going to build a Moon base, but less about what happens once one actually exists.

At first it probably looks like an expensive government/science project.

But eventually you could have communications, power, transport, propellant, construction, habitation, logistics, manufacturing, etc. — basically infrastructure that other businesses can build on.

That's where the economic question gets really interesting to me:

What would make a lunar base financially self-sustaining rather than permanently dependent on government spending?

Tourism? Launch/transport services? Propellant? Manufacturing? Data/communications? Resource extraction? Something we haven't thought of yet?

And perhaps the bigger question: does a lunar economy need to be profitable on its own, or can it be justified by the strategic/economic value it creates elsewhere?

Shameless input r/SpaceFinance is a dedicated space for discussion like this.

I watched Dr Becky’s latest video, and it seems that early data from DESI seems to indicate that the rate of acceleration is slowing over time. There are new papers from this that make the ‘Big Crunch’ a more likely scenario again. I will say that this is fairly early findings by the sound of it, and may be subject to revision.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6xkIkDP7g&pp=ygUIZHIgYmVja3k%3D&ra=m

What technology do you expect to "become realized" by 2050?

In many pieces of sci-fi media, RTSCs are one of the only truly valuable minerals left in the galaxy as all others are handled by automation. This assumes that they would:
- Exist naturally
- Still remain incredibly rare
- Be so difficult to synthesize that mining them is more economical

Is such a situation possible? A functional room-temperature superconductor existing that is naturally occurring yet incredibly difficult to synthesize even for advanced civilizations?

(Demo in comments) It is playable on mobile but much better on a pc. On mobile you sometimes have to hit the slow down/speed up button a lot. Lots of other bugs and issues all around. I am planning on redoing this project from a clean slate.

Its a project that is half world building, half science project diorama. If you want some lore I made this post earlier here. But the gist of it is, the red lines are two way highways, and each structure is the size of a continent.

I recall mention about how space habitats(once space industry is established) could be produced "dirt cheap" because the most expensive component would be the dirt, which you'd have to crank out in bioreactors.

I'm here wondering what the precise process of manufacturing dirt would entail. The specific chemical and biochemical processes, the chemical composition of the feed stock, things like that.

In principle I understand how we'd be able to make soil from rocks and water. In practice, I'd like to understand it better.

TL;DR: We may be decades or centuries away from preserving conscious continuity, but we can already begin preserving enough memory, personality, voice and reasoning to create interactive representations of people. I don’t think that makes anyone immortal. I think it could become a useful intermediate technology between ordinary archives and actual mind uploading. You can try the project here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028
Most discussions about mind uploading eventually hit the same problem: even if you perfectly reproduce the information in my brain, have I survived, or have you created a new entity that remembers being me?
I don’t think we currently know how to solve that.
But I’ve started wondering whether we’re treating preservation as too binary.
There are several things we might eventually preserve independently:
memory
personality and preferences
voice and appearance
patterns of reasoning
and, much more speculatively, subjective consciousness itself
Those probably won’t become technologically possible at the same time.
As an experiment, I’ve been building a representation of myself from memories and experiences I deliberately record while alive. The attached video is me talking to it.
What interests me isn’t that it “becomes me.” I don’t think it does.
The interesting part is that when I ask something like the meaning of life, it can synthesize an answer from things I actually said across different memories. And when I ask for a fact that isn’t in the record, it can simply refuse rather than inventing one.
That feels less like mind uploading and more like an interactive backup of the information a person intentionally leaves behind.
It obviously wouldn’t solve death for the original consciousness. But imagine this technology after another 30 or 50 years of lifelogging: decades of memories, decisions, conversations, beliefs, voice, video and personal context captured while someone is alive.
Your descendants might know you in considerably more depth than we can know our own great-grandparents today.
So perhaps there are two separate goals:
preserving the conscious person, and
preserving enough of who the person was that death doesn’t erase almost everything.
The first is the real immortality problem.
The second might arrive surprisingly early.
And perhaps these primitive “mind backups” eventually become useful source material for whatever more radical preservation technologies come later.
The attached demo is my current attempt at exploring that intermediate step. I’m curious where people here would draw the line between an archive, a backup, a digital person, and an actual continuation of the original mind.

Over a dozen launchpads for >30 launches per day. $100 billion investment, hiring ~3,000 locals and also a coastal restoration project.

https://www.spacex.com/sites/starbase-la

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2092284173730144732

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2092292773915537580

I had a really strange dream last night, and it got me thinking about this.

In the dream, I was in the basement (based on a real place I know), and there were some kind of mutants/monsters that we were trying to eliminate. I was actually holding a gun and shooting at them. What was really strange was how coherent the whole dream felt.

There were people running away from the basement, I knew where I was, I knew what I was supposed to do, and the environment seemed to have a consistent layout. It didn't have the usual dream logic where one moment you're in a shopping mall and suddenly you're on a beach for no reason. The stranger part is that I was aware that I was dreaming. At one point I felt like I was about to wake up, then I fell back asleep, and the exact same dream seemed to continue.

That made me wonder about something:

If the brain can generate such a detailed and convincing environment internally during a dream, could we theoretically exploit the same mechanism to create some kind of “virtual reality” directly inside the brain?

Instead of a computer having to render: 3D geometry,textures, lighting, NPCs,sound,etc.

Could a future system theoretically provide the brain with only high-level information or constraints, and let the brain generate most of the perceived world itself?

For example, instead of rendering an entire city, maybe the system would only communicate something like: “You are in a city. There is a person approaching you from the left. It is raining. You are holding an object.” And the brain would fill in the rest based on its own generative/predictive mechanisms.

Obviously, I realize this is very far from current technology, and dreams aren't evidence that this is technologically achievable. I'm more interested in the theoretical question.

Questions:

1. Would something like this make sense from a neuroscience/BCI perspective? Is the brain actually doing something remotely comparable to a generative game engine during dreaming/perception, or is that analogy misleading?

2. If it were possible someday, would using the brain to generate the environment potentially be more energy-efficient than externally rendering everything at extremely high fidelity? and how plausible is this from a neuroscience, BCI, and computational perspective? What would be the fundamental technical barriers?