Organic technology superior?

[Nargrakhan]

I keep seeing this repeating notion in sci-fi space opera, that “organic technology” is superior to metallic technology. Exactly why is this? Plain cool factor? When it comes to sheer durability (not to mention performance) metals and electronics beat organics and tissue.

Now of course there are things organics can do that metal can’t - regenerative healing for example. But sufficiently advanced nanotechnology mimics that. Therefore you’d have “healing metal” and whatnot, without all the drawbacks of frailty in organics. Then people go around claiming EM shockwaves (although you can harden gear against that), yet organics get fried by equally common and easy to produce radiation.

Of course I suppose this is all semantics. I mean in Star Wars there’s supposedly this metal that makes lightsabers short out, yet no one attacking Jedi has projectile weapons that fire them as bullets… which would be a lot faster than those “blaster” beams… which I suppose makes some wonder, why don’t they just keep using solid projectile weapons. Not like Stormtrooper armor is all thick (i.e. Ewoks with rocks).

[ArlEammon]

I keep seeing this repeating notion in sci-fi space opera, that “organic technology” is superior to metallic technology. Exactly why is this? Plain cool factor? When it comes to sheer durability (not to mention performance) metals and electronics beat organics and tissue.

Now of course there are things organics can do that metal can’t - regenerative healing for example. But sufficiently advanced nanotechnology mimics that. Therefore you’d have “healing metal” and whatnot, without all the drawbacks of frailty in organics. Then people go around claiming EM shockwaves (although you can harden gear against that), yet organics get fried by equally common and easy to produce radiation.

Of course I suppose this is all semantics. I mean in Star Wars there’s supposedly this metal that makes lightsabers short out, yet no one attacking Jedi has projectile weapons that fire them as bullets… which would be a lot faster than those “blaster” beams… which I suppose makes some wonder, why don’t they just keep using solid projectile weapons. Not like Stormtrooper armor is all thick (i.e. Ewoks with rocks).

I think its because of the sheer wonderment factor that goes with the idea that organic technology being superior to metallic technology is cooler.

[multilis]

Organic technology might simply mean *healing*/alive, depending on usage.

Carbon btw is capable of being one of strongest materials known if nano-structure is right.

[Nerd-o-rama]

So in other words, Rule of Cool.

Star Wars is not the best subject to bring this up regarding, because a) it's not science fiction, it's fantasy IN SPACE, b) Yuuzhan Vong are freaking cheaters that happen to use organic tech. It's not that orgotech is superior, it's that YV tech is ludicrously advanced compared to normal Star Wars Galaxy stuff, and happens to be organic.

Oh, and the stuff that beats lightsabers is pretty damn frail in raw form; you have to alloy it with other metals. Combined with its rarity, that would seem to make it too expensive to use as ammo.

[Nargrakhan]

Carbon btw is capable of being one of strongest materials known if nano-structure is right.

Carbon is in organics AND metals... its a basic building block of the Universe. Most of the "uber carbon constructions" in those science journals I've seen, have more in common with metal than organics (they just take things that occur more naturally in organics, and apply it into the metal... like nanotech being like cells).

I remember there was this one time, I was listening in on a few guys discuss how it was possible - with the technology shown in Star Wars - to create robot Jedi.

Repulsor systems to mimic force telekinesis, multiple analytical systems to “predict” the future, mass network to replicate the “sense each other” in the Force... considering that under ideal circumstances (resources, mass production line) such a legion could be raised and replaced faster than normal Jedi, they’d quickly outnumber them.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Dude. That is a freaking awesome idea. Get on the horn to Dark Horse Comics. Not Del Rey, they suck.

[Talkkno]

This bears repeating,
"Captain, I'm picking up an approaching ship."

"What can you tell me about it?"

"Oh my God, it's organic! What are we going to do, Captain?"

"There's not much we can do, Ensign. Organic technology is so far beyond our grasp that we can't even imagine the power they must have. All we have is high-powered guns, nuclear missiles, and our primitive metallic armour. What are you reading from their incredibly advanced bio-ship?"

"Their ship is soft and flexible. Its construction materials are semi-permeable and laced with a network of delicate circulation passages. Instead of using impermeable high-density materials, it's made from countless tiny thin-walled cells which tend to rapidly break down in the presence of corrosive chemicals or radiation."

"What? And we were supposed to be afraid of this? Open fire!"

SQUISH ...

[Nerd-o-rama]

Presumably, a totally organic ship would have a hard mineral carapace of some sort. Really, I think you could do almost anything with biotech that you could with mechanicaltech, in theory. But it's not inherently superior or anything, and mechanicaltech is a lot easier for us metal-loving humans to get our heads around.

[Nargrakhan]

Dude. That is a freaking awesome idea. Get on the horn to Dark Horse Comics. Not Del Rey, they suck.

Heh... they probably haven't done it because either the Japanese already did with one of their sci-fi anime (God knows they seem to have one for everything), or perhaps "I sense a disturbance in the network" isn't that cool on paper. :smallwink:

They honestly had a chance to do it with General Grievous (yea a cyborg, not a robot... bear with me here). Fail on a massive level... not counting the ORIGINAL Clone Wars cartoons of course - the ones before Asoka... (*shudder*)

On a more serious note: might have a lot to do with Lucas himself. Robots seem to always be inferor to humans in that setting. Practically a slave race, despite them having full sentience and personal dreams. Poor 3CPO got mindwiped. If that isn't immoral...



But it's not inherently superior or anything, and mechanicaltech is a lot easier for us metal-loving humans to get our heads around.

Hmmm... guess it's the alien look to make it look alien. :smalltongue:

Still... there's no reason why you can't get metal too look organic as a visual appearance thing (since in space a flying brick is just as great as a spaceplane shaped object).

That Japanese anime Macross (http://unsd.macrossroleplay.org/zenbase.jpg) comes to mind

[D_Lord]

It might be the trick the an organic brain is much better then a computer. Much faster. You can throw a ball up and catch it, it takes months of programing, devilment and tests to get a computer to do that, and even then it takes a few seconds for it to calulate it. you can do it much faster. More mennory too. It's all about the speed.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Heh. Macross and Evangelion do make one pertinent point about mecha. "If you're going to have a giant human-shaped robot, why not just give a giant humanoid armor?" And in Evangelion's case, replace its brain with a cockpit.

To the above: human brains aren't faster per se. If I were to ask you to calculate pi to the 100th precision, for example, a computer would do it faster. Human brains do have some advantages in efficiency, particularly storage efficiency, that we can't replicate with binary, silicon computers. Plus the whole muscle-memory thing, which is what makes catching a ball so easy. Plus, we are self-aware and 100% adaptable, but that's a property of being human, not having a wetware brain.

[Nargrakhan]

It might be the trick the an organic brain is much better then a computer. Much faster. You can throw a ball up and catch it, it takes months of programing, devilment and tests to get a computer to do that, and even then it takes a few seconds for it to calulate it. you can do it much faster. More mennory too. It's all about the speed.

Only because of the limitations of current software and storage medium. Arguments have long been made, that many aspects in the hardware capacity of super computers GREATLY exceed that of the organic mind. There's a lot of research about technology inevitably going beyond organic capabilities: technological singularity as one example. Simply put: computers have evolved in decades, what too billions of years with organics.

Through human minds of course, but there comes a time when the meat replaces the metal.... heh... sorry... Cyberpunk 2020 crawled in there. :smallwink:

[Don Julio Anejo]

It might be the trick the an organic brain is much better then a computer. Much faster. You can throw a ball up and catch it, it takes months of programing, devilment and tests to get a computer to do that, and even then it takes a few seconds for it to calulate it. you can do it much faster. More mennory too. It's all about the speed.

Our brains are adaptive. We can learn the motions just by watching someone throw a ball a few times and then learn to do it by throwing it ourselves a few more times.

Current computers are nowhere near as advanced, and they can't learn on their own (except maybe Skynet).

I think the rule in science fiction is that they anytime they use regular microchip computers, they're not too far ahead of our modern computers. If they use biological computers, it's like taking Einstein's brain, Stephen Hawking's brain, putting them together and multiplying it by 100.

PS: the only things computers are better at are math calculations, mainly because of how our neuron pathways are wired so they only respond quickly to stuff we come across often while a computer doesn't particularly care.

But that's because for people, doing math is useless in the evolutionary sense. Our brains developed so they could do what's actually useful, like throwing a ball. Outside of civilization we don't even need to do any math except maybe basic counting so you know how much stuff you have.

Computers, on the other hand, were specifically designed to do math. Their entire architecture is based on mathematical operations.... And any software written for them is based on math or simple logical arguments (which are also math in a sense).

Hence, they're better at it.

@ below: most of the examples you mentioned are still math.

Also, they are better only at pure information recall. Factor recognition into the process and a computer is again screwed, at least for now, since no efficient algorithm exists for doing stuff like 3d image recognition, and even if one was designed in the near future it would involve far too many resources, compared to a person, who does so subconsciously, where the object doesn't even register until a person decides to actively pay attention to it.

[Nargrakhan]

PS: the only things computers are better at are math calculations, mainly because of how our neuron pathways are wired so they only respond quickly to stuff we come across often while a computer doesn't particularly care.

Actually computers are a lot more superior in many things: information recall, accuracy of processing, computations per second, simultaneous operations, redundancy, etc.

Naturally a PC is only as good as the person who assembled and/or programmed it, but that’s only because no one has figured how to make a sentient machine… which is probably for the best as far as human are concerned. No telling how a fully intelligent machine would react to all our global insanity.

[Dervag]

Of course I suppose this is all semantics. I mean in Star Wars there’s supposedly this metal that makes lightsabers short out, yet no one attacking Jedi has projectile weapons that fire them as bullets… which would be a lot faster than those “blaster” beams… which I suppose makes some wonder, why don’t they just keep using solid projectile weapons. Not like Stormtrooper armor is all thick (i.e. Ewoks with rocks).As I recall, most of the stormtrooper "casualties" due to rocks were guys who fell over when they got a bolo wrapped around their neck, or when a two or three pound rock bounced off their helmet. There isn't even any evidence that they're dead; their armor isn't visibly penetrated or dented. All we know is that they fall over.

I suspect most of them just lost their balance or were stunned. Having a rock bounce off your head will do that.


Organic technology might simply mean *healing*/alive, depending on usage.

Carbon btw is capable of being one of strongest materials known if nano-structure is right.Yeah, but in its strong forms it is very vulnerable to shattering. Diamond is hard as hell and has excellent compressive strength, so it makes good bricks, but it makes lousy armor because it smashes when you hit it hard enough.

Also, anything made of carbon will be flammable. Yes, diamonds are flammable.


Presumably, a totally organic ship would have a hard mineral carapace of some sort. Really, I think you could do almost anything with biotech that you could with mechanicaltech, in theory. But it's not inherently superior or anything, and mechanicaltech is a lot easier for us metal-loving humans to get our heads around.It's hard to see how you could make a mineral carapace of strength that would match the kind of metal alloys you can create in a blast furnace. Some metals can only be worked at extremely high temperatures or pressures, such that they'd be death on an organic system designed to create them.

Also, organic tech is likely to run into limits when it comes to things like sensor technology computers. There are problems with running high voltage or high frequency current through a device made out of meat.
______


It might be the trick the an organic brain is much better then a computer. Much faster. You can throw a ball up and catch it, it takes months of programing, devilment and tests to get a computer to do that,Umm... no.

First of all, you're using very strange rules for this little competition. You're counting the time it takes to build the computer and write the software, but not the time it took for a human being to grow from infancy and learn to catch, and not the time it took for human beings to evolve, and not the time it would take us to design an organism that could catch a ball in the same way we design a computer to catch a ball.


and even then it takes a few seconds for it to calulate it. you can do it much faster.No, you can't. I'm serious; you can't. A modern computer can solve the equations involved in catching a ball in much less than a few seconds, and be a lot more reliable than a human being.

For example, modern radar-guided AA guns can "catch" a target moving at hundreds of miles an hour with no human input whatsoever. And by "catch" I mean they can throw something else at it and hit the flying object. Which is one hell of a lot harder than actual catching. Try hitting a baseball in flight with another baseball. Go ahead. I'll wait.
_______

Let me put it this way. Which multiplies four-digit numbers faster, you or a calculator? I'm betting on the calculator. And if you've ever used a calculator, one thing you notice is that the actual calculation takes so little time you don't even notice it. Most of the time it takes for you to do math with a calculator involves you wasting time pushing buttons.

That's because a calculator, which is a very stupid kind of computer, is much better at arithmetic than you. It can do arithmetic thousands or millions of times faster than you, or me, or the smartest person on the planet.

For jobs that can be reduced to arithmetic (like catching a ball), computers kick humans' butts, because they're so much better at it than we are that it's like they live in a completely different universe than we do.

[Texas_Ben]

Carbon is in organics AND metals... its a basic building block of the Universe. Most of the "uber carbon constructions" in those science journals I've seen, have more in common with metal than organics (they just take things that occur more naturally in organics, and apply it into the metal... like nanotech being like cells).

Errr... the definition of "organic" basically boils down to "Does it contain carbon?"

Basically Sci-Fi often portrays purpose-grown living things used as ships or weapons to be superior because, were such technology available, they would most likely *be* superior. Let's just look at current tech vs nature... Spider silk is stronger, as far as I know, than anything we can produce, at the very least it is much stronger than anything we can produce on a large scale.

Basically the biggest advantages offered by growing your tools rather than building them are as follows: Reliability, Durability, and convenience of assembly.

Reliability is pretty easy to see... which breaks down more often, a bike or a horse? With a biological construct, all you have to do to keep it in working order is to provide it with the care it needs to maintain itself. For large things, ships and vehicles, this would likely be solar, supplemented with fuel, For smaller things it is likely they would have to be plugged into something. At any rate, with a mechanical device you must be constantly cleaning and maintaining it, and replacing worn or damaged parts... biological stuff does all that on it's own. Granted it would take some getting used to that all your stuff would have to excrete waste (i.e. take a crap) but hey, what do you expect?

Durability... I heard someone say earlier that mechanical-type stuff is more durable. If you are thinking creature vs. tank, then maybe. But you are discounting that these types of things would be grown to be extremely durable, likely having thick metal carapaces for vehicles, and I doubt smaller personal gear would be soft and fuzzy. Let's not forget the elements either... High-tech gear is notoriously unreliable in mud, grit, sand, cold, wetness, and a plethora of other situations. A purpose-grown biological construct would not have these drawbacks, being fully sealed within itself.

Convenience... Mechanical things take large expensive factories to manufacture, purpose grown biological constructs, on the other hand, just sprinkle some seeds in a hydroponic chamber and you have yourself a gun. Some different seeds and a bigger chamber, you've got yourself a tank. Some different seeds and a much larger growing area, you've got yourself a capital ship. Presumably this would take a lot longer than traditional assembly methods, but it wouldn't be too bad... they would likely be manufactured to grow rapidly, so figure a few days for small personal gear, a few weeks for larger vehicles, and maybe a year or three for ships and other large-scale things. Not too bad. Actually I just thought of this, but for large-scale things with ships or vehicles, the longer the organism survives, it would likely get larger, grow a thicker carapace, etc., making it more effective.

One last thing... you seem to be of the mistaken opinion that a biological construct would be all soft and furry, or at best have a turtle shell for protection. A purpose-built biological construct would likely have a thick, layered carapace not dissimilar to modern composite armor (or, presumably, whatever future-armor the people in the future are using). These things are purpose-built remember?



That's because a calculator, which is a very stupid kind of computer, is much better at arithmetic than you. It can do arithmetic thousands or millions of times faster than you, or me, or the smartest person on the planet.
That is because the calculator is purpose-built.
Lets break it down this way... Let's say you wanted to build a computer that performed all the functions of the human brain. I can guarantee that you are going to use up a lot more space than the space inside a human's head. That means that, pound-for-pound, the human brain is much more powerful than computers. The difference is that computers are purpose-built for running calculations, and the human brain has to be generalized. If you could make something like the human brain, only specialize it, it would be much more efficient than a similar piece of technology.

At any rate, this whole conversation is moot. Technology and biology will at some point merge to the point where they are inextricable. I forsee this degrading into a shouting match where people are all either "hold up mate, that is biology" or "no wai suh that is sum tech"

[Moonshadow]

So in other words, Rule of Cool.

Star Wars is not the best subject to bring this up regarding, because a) it's not science fiction, it's fantasy IN SPACE, b) Yuuzhan Vong are freaking cheaters that happen to use organic tech. It's not that orgotech is superior, it's that YV tech is ludicrously advanced compared to normal Star Wars Galaxy stuff, and happens to be organic.

Oh, and the stuff that beats lightsabers is pretty damn frail in raw form; you have to alloy it with other metals. Combined with its rarity, that would seem to make it too expensive to use as ammo.

If we're talking about what I think we're talking about, thats cortosis. And its lightsaber resistant IIRC.

[Nargrakhan]

I suspect most of them just lost their balance or were stunned. Having a rock bounce off your head will do that.

LOL... true. However that armor sure as hell isn't that great, or Stormtroopers are universally unbalanced. I've seen riot police and footage of troops in Iraq taking harder hits from stone and exploding debris than Stormtroopers, yet still keep going.

Honestly that armor seems to be more of a hinderance than help in most situations... you don't see cops in full riot gear for every operation. Stormtrooper armor ain't the future of warfare... gods I hope not. :smallwink:



Also, anything made of carbon will be flammable. Yes, diamonds are flammable.

In his defense, I don't think he means a pure carbon object, but a carbon enhanced material. After all, iron becomes steel with a bit of carbon. Still... the application of "futuristic carbon" is to perfect the structure at the molecular level, not make a crab shell stronger. Mimic the "shape" of the diamond, not the crap it's made out of: which is what organic tech seems to want. Unless there's some fundamental feature of the universe our current science fails to understand, organic tech isn't great one bit.


Errr... the definition of "organic" basically boils down to "Does it contain carbon?"

Again: carbon is in metal. It's not only found in organics. It's found practically everywhere. Even in stars and blackholes.

I suppose it's like a Dyson Sphere: by the time you could develop awesome organic tech that's superior to metal, you're really wasting your time... what that kind of superscience, you're just trying to insult your enemy's inferior tech or something. At that point, you should be straight converting things into to energy with zero loss.

Nanomachines. That's when metal does what organics can do. You can "grow" things with nanomachines. That's the whole Grey Goo nightmare in fact. That's what scientists and companies are trying to right now (not the Grey Goo... the machines growing things).

Given the properties of metal and organics: if a civilization with organic weapons goes to war with a civilization with metal weapons, and both are equal in terms of advancement, the metal is gonna win. Wood VS Steel? No question. The only time organic material is worthwhile durable, is when it's applied through technolgical means: carbon fibre or plastic for example... neither of which are very "bioship" as far as those Sci-fi are concerned.

[Texas_Ben]

Again: carbon is in metal. It's not only found in organics. It's found practically everywhere. Even in stars and blackholes.

Almost all carbon-containing compounds are organic. That is simply a matter of definitions, and that is that. If you meant biological vs technological (which is what I assumed and responded as such), you should say so. Also, what the hell do you mean, carbon is "in metal"? I want to yell at you for it, but I want clarification first :P.

[KnightDisciple]

Almost all carbon-containing compounds are organic. That is simply a matter of definitions, and that is that. If you meant biological vs technological (which is what I assumed and responded as such), you should say so. Also, what the hell do you mean, carbon is "in metal"? I want to yell at you for it, but I want clarification first :P.

Steel. It's a metal (well, metallic alloy), and often contains carbon mixed in.

[LurkerInPlayground]

Nanotechnology is just a trendy term anyway, isn't it? It's a vague catchall term for any technology which has been sufficiently miniaturized. Flat LCD computer screens and HD TV screens are, under this definition, "nanotechnology." As are microchips with circuitry that approaches the molecular scale.

If you could engineer a new material, an alloy, polymer, ceramic or mix thereof and manipulate its molecular structure to a sufficient degree, it would be "nanotechnology" but still wouldn't necessarily have self-sustaining, delicate or regenerative properties. It just means you can come up with new recipes for cool new engineering materials.

A machine composed of nothing but colonies of nanomachines working in concert is probably indistinguishable from a "living" object anyway and is thus "biological" anyway.

Human brains are more powerful than computers because of parallel processing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_processing).

[Nargrakhan]

Almost all carbon-containing compounds are organic. That is simply a matter of definitions, and that is that. If you meant biological vs technological (which is what I assumed and responded as such), you should say so. Also, what the hell do you mean, carbon is "in metal"? I want to yell at you for it, but I want clarification first :P.

One word: Steel. Carbon in metal is naturally occuring in various impure ores. Carbon is an element. Carbon does not mean Organic. There are plastics made out of carbon.

Organics happen to have a lot of carbon in them - carbon based lifeform - but that does not mean it's impossible for something organic to exist of another element besides carbon (scientists are still arguing about it... won't know the answer till we find it in the Universe or make it in a lab).

[Battleship789]

I remember there was this one time, I was listening in on a few guys discuss how it was possible - with the technology shown in Star Wars - to create robot Jedi.

Repulsor systems to mimic force telekinesis, multiple analytical systems to “predict” the future, mass network to replicate the “sense each other” in the Force... considering that under ideal circumstances (resources, mass production line) such a legion could be raised and replaced faster than normal Jedi, they’d quickly outnumber them.

Already used by Del Rey (sorry). It is from a relatively new novel so I spoilered it, just in case:

Though it wasn't an army, just a robot used to duplicate a person's biological signature and trick the robot into thinking it was the original. (Duplicated person was Anakin Solo, in the novel Betrayal.)


Star Wars is not the best subject to bring this up regarding, because a) it's not science fiction, it's fantasy IN SPACE, b) Yuuzhan Vong are freaking cheaters that happen to use organic tech. It's not that orgotech is superior, it's that YV tech is ludicrously advanced compared to normal Star Wars Galaxy stuff, and happens to be organic.

Oh, and the stuff that beats lightsabers is pretty damn frail in raw form; you have to alloy it with other metals. Combined with its rarity, that would seem to make it too expensive to use as ammo.

The Yuuzhan Vong aren't ludicrously advanced compared to the norm, just something new that hasn't been seen. They are fairly similar in the fields of space travel (other than the galaxy to galaxy movement), shielding technology (just a different form) and weapon power (evident in space battles).

The lightsaber-defeating materials are probably not common knowledge either. If my government's main diplomat's/commando's main weapon was susceptable to any material, I would see that all of the information relating to the materials destroyed or at least ridiculously classified. Though some people would have the means to find, buy and manufacture this type of projectile, there are not very many of them. And who would really try to test their alloy's efficency on a Jedi? Anyone who got the allow wrong would probably die.


Lots of good stuff on the organic vs. machine calculation debate.

I agree that a computer totally owns a human in computational power. The main difference between a computer and a human is the decision-making process, where ethics and morals are taken into account, rather than just logic. A computer with sentience could do almost anything faster than a normal human. Though, who is to say how much computation power it would take to express something like love or hate. These aren't quantifiable ideas and no one can say how long it would take for a robot to compute.


Human brains are more powerful than computers because of parallel processing.

Computers can parallel process, just not as efficently as humans, at our current technology level. We might assume, for purpose of discussion, that technology has advanced for this to be correct. However, I am not sure, atm, so I ask the thread instigator for a clarification:

We are comparing a biological system as opposed to a electronic/metallic system, yes? If yes, are we comparing opposed repairing speeds or damage output of a similar system? Or is this just a "rule of cool" type of argument, where the sheer awesomeness of "organic" supposedly trumps mechanical? Or are we asking both?

The first answer to the first debate question (opposed traits) should be: equal. A material created by humans can be just as strong, or stronger, than a naturally occuring material, just as a natural occuring substance could be as strong or stronger than a man-made substance. This can be shown by various types of armor, stronger than any natural hide on a creature, as opposed to spider silk, with its ridiculously high tensile strength.

The rule of cool argument is non-sensical. Either mechanical or biological technology can be ruled to be "superior" by an in-universe example. Neither one has innate superiority over the other. They both have flaws and strengths.

[LurkerInPlayground]

One word: Steel. Carbon in metal is naturally occuring in various impure ores. Carbon is an element. Carbon does not mean Organic. There are plastics made out of carbon.

Organics happen to have a lot of carbon in them - carbon based lifeform - but that does not mean it's impossible for something organic to exist of another element besides carbon (scientists are still arguing about it... won't know the answer till we find it in the Universe or make it in a lab).
Plastics are, by definition, made of organic polymers. "Organic" just means, "any compound composed of carbon that isn't either pure elemental carbon (e.g. diamonds, graphite, etc.) or carbon dioxide."

If you want to discuss "living" things, then that's a different topic altogether. And as mentioned earlier, it's probably best if you simply make it clear that you're talking about living or biological systems.

[Texas_Ben]

One word: SteelCarbon does not mean Organic. There are plastics made out of carbon.

Most common (I don't want to say all, but definitely most) plastics are made out of carbon, you are right.
Also, most (I don't want to say all, again because there might be some obscure exception) plastics are... wait for it... organic.


that does not mean it's impossible for something organic to exist of another element besides carbon
Ummm... yes it does, since organic compunds are, by definition, carbon-containing compounds!



A machine composed of nothing but colonies of nanomachines working in concert is probably indistinguishable from a "living" object anyway and is thus "biological" anyway.
Oh man, I totally called this in my first post. Didn't expect it to happen so soon though.

[Nargrakhan]

Nanotechnology is just a trendy term anyway, isn't it? It's a vague catchall term for any technology which has been sufficiently miniaturized.

So is use of the word “biotechnology” (now covers everything from grass to drugs). Evolution of a word to encompass a greater range, does not diminish the significance of it in a serious conversation.



A machine composed of nothing but colonies of nanomachines working in concert is probably indistinguishable from a "living" object anyway and is thus "biological" anyway.

Yes. But it makes the machine superior to the organic equivilent. That's the whole point I'm coming across: a biotech ship is not uber to a metaltech ship.


Human brains are more powerful than computers because of parallel processing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_processing).

Limitation due to how the machines are constructed: not the materials in construction. Parallel processing is a limitation of machines for now. It probably won’t be in a few decades. Like vacuum tubes were a limitation a few decades ago.

[LurkerInPlayground]

I agree that a computer totally owns a human in computational power. The main difference between a computer and a human is the decision-making process, where ethics and morals are taken into account, rather than just logic. A computer with sentience could do almost anything faster than a normal human. Though, who is to say how much computation power it would take to express something like love or hate. These aren't quantifiable ideas and no one can say how long it would take for a robot to compute.
Meh, it's probably more accurate to say that computers are faster at certain, very specific tasks that they were designed for. It's certainly possible for "idiot savant" autistic persons to handle difficult mathematical problems reflexively.

In essence, computers are basically expansions of human facilities. A pre-programmed bundles of computational reflexes. An extra bit of hardware that isn't directly welded to our brains so much as connected via less invasive means such as keyboards and "control software" that our motor centers inevitably write to handle the task of interfacing with the extra "limb."

[Texas_Ben]

One word: Steel. Carbon in metal is naturally occuring in various impure ores.
Ok good I don't have to yell at you. I have, in the past, run across people who thought carbon was... well let's just say it was an excercise in extreme frustration. If you have ever talked to a "katanas can cut buildings in half because of their super ki-powers" type, it was sort of like that, but with carbon.

[Texas_Ben]

Yes. But it makes the machine superior to the organic equivilent. That's the whole point I'm coming across: a biotech ship is not uber to a metaltech ship.


Could you do this for me: Break down exactly and concisely where you are drawing the line between "biotech" and "metaltech"... it all seems very vague, and it seems to me you are arbitrarily drawing the line at "if it is soft and squishy, it is biotech, if it is hard and metaly, it is not".

[Nargrakhan]

Man... this is a fast moving thread.... not that I'm complaining. :smallsmile:



Most common (I don't want to say all, but definitely most) plastics are made out of carbon, you are right.
Also, most (I don't want to say all, again because there might be some obscure exception) plastics are... wait for it... organic.

Aye... through technology however. Plastic is not "grown" like bone or carapace. You don't see plastic bioships in sci-fi: that would be the "technolgoical race" using plastic.

Those "Bonewraith" ships bleed and feel pain. Kinda insane (relatively speaking, give its fiction of course) when a sci-fi tries to explain a ship feeling pain, is a tactical advantage.



Could you do this for me: Break down exactly and concisely where you are drawing the line between "biotech" and "metaltech"... it all seems very vague, and it seems to me you are arbitrarily drawing the line at "if it is soft and squishy, it is biotech, if it is hard and metaly, it is not".

Vorlon and their living ships (not their perfect matter-energy conversion skills though - they're playing God with that kind of stuff). That new Star Wars race, the Yuuzhan Vong. Tyranids from 40K (awesome as hell mind you; but silly at times).

Plastic, nanomachines, metal... basically "traditional" building materials the humans use in standard sci-fi, would be the technology of metal. Star Trek ships. Star Wars ships from the movies. Most of the Robotech/Macross ships (Zentradi and Meltradi look organic, but its just metal shaped to look alive). Bishop from the Aliens movies. Data from Star Trek. They have many organic qualities, but are a machine at the core: the product of machine assembly and crafted parts.

Species 8472 from Star Trek however, would be this "biotech" grown craze.

[Nerd-o-rama]

As long as the pain doesn't override its thought processes, as it often does in animals, it's sort of necessary to assess where it's been damaged and how badly.

I'm going to assume that, for the sake of this thread, "biotech/organic" means "made out of living organism(s)" and non-biotech is primarily artificially manufactured metals/polymers/crystalline solids/what have you.

And Tyranids are always silly.

[Talkkno]

Though another problem for the Nid's is that they can't get their energy in any biological way and still perform the things we know they can perform. A quick estimate reveals that if one were to absorb 100% of all the energy that strikes an Earth-like planet (in stead of the small fraction available by harvesting plant life on Miracle Grow) it would take 5ish thousand years to strip the planet of oceans and atmosphere--a feat which the 'Nids are explicitely stated to perform on a regular basis. This doesn't even begin to adress the problem of ship-ship combat.

[Battleship789]

This thread is moving to fast :smallbiggrin:, so I'll repost my changes.

I am not sure, atm, on the nature of the precise argument. so I ask the thread instigator for a clarification:

We are comparing a biological system as opposed to a electronic/metallic system, yes? If yes, are we comparing opposed repairing speeds or damage output of a similar system? Or is this just a "rule of cool" type of argument, where the sheer awesomeness of "organic" supposedly trumps mechanical? Or are we asking both?

The first answer to the first debate question (opposed traits) should be: equal. A material created by humans can be just as strong, or stronger, than a naturally occuring material, just as a natural occuring substance could be as strong or stronger than a man-made substance. This can be shown by various types of armor, stronger than any natural hide on a creature, as opposed to spider silk, with its ridiculously high tensile strength.

The rule of cool argument is non-sensical. Either mechanical or biological technology can be ruled to be "superior" by an in-universe example. Neither one has innate superiority over the other. They both have flaws and strengths.

Technically, the correct, both politically and factually, phrase is autisitic-savant. These people are very similar to a single processor computer, if you think about it in a roundabout way.

[Texas_Ben]

Vorlon and their living ships (not their perfect matter-energy conversion skills though - they're playing God with that kind of stuff). That new Star Wars race, which has already been mentioned in the thread. Tyranids from 40K (awesome as hell mind you; but silly at times).

Plastic, nanomachines, metal... basically "traditional" building materials the humans use in sci-fi, would be the technology of metal. Star Trek ships. Star Wars ships from the movies. Most of the Robotech/Macross ships (Zentradi and Meltradi look organic, but its just metal shaped to look alive).
That seems like an artificial limitation. since the 'nids, zerg, and the like would all be sucky as all suck if they actually existed. actual biotech would be more along the lines of Neon Genesis Evangelion or the Cylons from BSG, at least in my mind.

[Texas_Ben]

The rule of cool argument is non-sensical. Either mechanical or biological technology can be ruled to be "superior" by an in-universe example. Neither one has innate superiority over the other. They both have flaws and strengths.
WTF is this? A reasonable position? On the internet? No wai.

[Battleship789]

WTF is this? A reasonable position? On the internet? No wai.

I know, I know. I am bringing logic in to solve an argument where logic wasn't the cause of the argument. And all that jazz.

BUT, I still try anyway. :smallbiggrin:

[Nargrakhan]

LOL... yea... this thread kinda derailed a lot. The fast pace of it, made it go off topic and steer farther away from what I wanted to talk about. Ended up being a Human VS Computer thing. :smalltongue:

[KnightDisciple]

....
Vorlon and their living ships (not their perfect matter-energy conversion skills though - they're playing God with that kind of stuff). That new Star Wars race, which has already been mentioned in the thread. Tyranids from 40K (awesome as hell mind you; but silly at times).
...

What's funny is that really, they don't explain why each of those groups are so much better because of biotech. They just "are". Seems a touch silly to me.

[KnightDisciple]

This thread is moving to fast :smallbiggrin:, so I'll repost my changes.

I am not sure, atm, on the nature of the precise argument. so I ask the thread instigator for a clarification:

We are comparing a biological system as opposed to a electronic/metallic system, yes? If yes, are we comparing opposed repairing speeds or damage output of a similar system? Or is this just a "rule of cool" type of argument, where the sheer awesomeness of "organic" supposedly trumps mechanical? Or are we asking both?

The first answer to the first debate question (opposed traits) should be: equal. A material created by humans can be just as strong, or stronger, than a naturally occuring material, just as a natural occuring substance could be as strong or stronger than a man-made substance. This can be shown by various types of armor, stronger than any natural hide on a creature, as opposed to spider silk, with its ridiculously high tensile strength.

The rule of cool argument is non-sensical. Either mechanical or biological technology can be ruled to be "superior" by an in-universe example. Neither one has innate superiority over the other. They both have flaws and strengths.

Technically, the correct, both politically and factually, phrase is autisitic-savant. These people are very similar to a single processor computer, if you think about it in a roundabout way.

Hm. While spider silk is nice for ropes, clothes, and soft body armor...It'll still burn. It'll tear easy. It's just a slightly better "fabric type" material.
Dervag brought up temperatures. That's one glaring weakness of biological stuff. I've seen nothing that could, say, survive atmospheric reentry, in the biological world. Maybe a couple hundred degrees F, if that. That by itself seems a strike against biotech ships.

[Nargrakhan]

The first answer to the first debate question (opposed traits) should be: equal. A material created by humans can be just as strong, or stronger, than a naturally occuring material, just as a natural occuring substance could be as strong or stronger than a man-made substance. This can be shown by various types of armor, stronger than any natural hide on a creature, as opposed to spider silk, with its ridiculously high tensile strength.

Well see I agree to a point: there are things that occur in the biological world, that do not happen naturally (or commonly) with metals and artificial materials. Spider silk is stronger than steel when you go for a one-on-one ratio comparison. Yet spider silk and waaaay frailer than steel on the grand scheme (in that it's flamable, rots faster, etc). However a steel object constructed in a manner that mimics spider silk is far superior to the original. Trying to craft armor out of real spider webs (I mean REAL spider webs)? Not working.

Thus that’s the way I see it in Sci-Fi: giving technology the properties of organics is great. However giving organics the properties of technology? Not great. Thus my hate on the new wave that "biotech ships" are so much better than your common metal and plastic ship. Those living ships are flat out inferior.

A metal ship that "heals" because the armor has nanomachines in the hull that repair damage. Great! A bio ship with "insect armor" that heals? No way. Insect shell just doesn't compare with metal. Energy rifle that fires fourth-state plasma? Great! Bio gun that generates this "bioenergy" that's just like fourth-state plasma? Not working for me.

[Battleship789]

What's funny is that really, they don't explain why each of those groups are so much better because of biotech. They just "are". Seems a touch silly to me.

Mentioned this earlier, but maybe it got skipped over (no fault on anyone, this thread is just cruising along). The Yuuzhan Vong aren't "better" because of the bio-tech, just different. The YV and normal Star Wars universe have fairly similar tech levels, just different ways of going about it. (See my first post on this page, talking about the "silly" factor being non-sensical.)

Can't say anything the Vorlon, though. I have no idea about anything that deals with Babylon 5.

And I didn't even throw in a "go to lightspeed" or "warp x" joke either. (Drat, just did. :smallwink:)

Edit: Responding to above post.


Well see I agree to a point: there are things that occur in the biological world, that do not happen naturally (or commonly) with metals and artificial materials. Spider silk is stronger than steel when you go for a one-on-one ratio comparison. Yet spider silk and waaaay frailer than steel on the grand scheme (in that it's flamable, rots faster, etc). However a steel object constructed in a manner that mimics spider silk is far superior to the original. Trying to craft armor out of real spider webs (I mean REAL spider webs)? Not working.

Yes, the spider silk is weaker on a grand scheme. However, as you mention, steel is weaker on a small scale (lower tensile strength). This suggests that some organic stuff works better than the mechanically counterpart, and vice versa, showing, again, that they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Though, I totally agree with you on the new fad of organic ships being superior to mechanical ships in ever possible way. Thats while I like the Star Wars example, being mostly even matched.

To Turkishproverb:

I think we have chosen "organic" to be a biological construct, with living organisms making up the objects in question. Bad semantics on our part.

[turkishproverb]

Organic (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=eju&defl=en&q=define:organic&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title)

relating or belonging to the class of chemical compounds having a carbon basis; "hydrocarbons are organic compounds"
Organic Matter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound)


An organic compound is any member of a large class of chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon. For historical reasons discussed below, a few types of compounds such as carbonates, simple oxides of carbon and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon, are considered inorganic. The division between "organic" and "inorganic" carbon compounds while "useful in organizing the vast subject of chemistry...is somewhat arbitrary"[1].

[KnightDisciple]

Mentioned this earlier, but maybe it got skipped over (no fault on anyone, this thread is just cruising along). The Yuuzhan Vong aren't "better" because of the bio-tech, just different. The YV and normal Star Wars universe have fairly similar tech levels, just different ways of going about it. (See my first post on this page, talking about the "silly" factor being non-sensical.)

Can't say anything the Vorlon, though. I have no idea about anything that deals with Babylon 5.

And I didn't even throw in a "go to lightspeed" or "warp x" joke either. (Drat, just did. :smallwink:)

Um, they come in and wipe the floor with people. Their weird bio-armor can block lightsabers (something that took rare, expensive materials previously). Their ships use black holes for shields. They can pull moons onto planets. Their ship guns shoot lava. It takes the galaxy several books worth of time to actually really start winning. Much of that includes upgrades to tech. I'd put that as better, even if it's mostly from being "different".

Incidentally, the "black hole shields" and "lava guns" are what I mean by straight up silly stuff. Seriously now.

[Nargrakhan]

Mentioned this earlier, but maybe it got skipped over (no fault on anyone, this thread is just cruising along). The Yuuzhan Vong aren't "better" because of the bio-tech, just different. The YV and normal Star Wars universe have fairly similar tech levels, just different ways of going about it. (See my first post on this page, talking about the "silly" factor being non-sensical.)

It shouldn't even be equal though. Those bioships should be waaay weaker. There's a difference between differing designs, and using construction materials that are inferior. A sword made of bronze and a sword made of steel are both deadly, but the steel sword is superior by far. In this case, the bio would be the bronze weapons.

It's not like comparing a katana to a longsword (i.e two different blades but with similar construction and durability for their purpose). It's like... well... comparing a turtle shell with tank armor.

[turkishproverb]

Um, they come in and wipe the floor with people. Their weird bio-armor can block lightsabers (something that took rare, expensive materials previously). Their ships use black holes for shields. They can pull moons onto planets. Their ship guns shoot lava. It takes the galaxy several books worth of time to actually really start winning. Much of that includes upgrades to tech. I'd put that as better, even if it's mostly from being "different".

Incidentally, the "black hole shields" and "lava guns" are what I mean by straight up silly stuff. Seriously now.

And yet all that STILL isn't the reason I hated those books. Funny innit?

[Battleship789]

Um, they come in and wipe the floor with people. Their weird bio-armor can block lightsabers (something that took rare, expensive materials previously). Their ships use black holes for shields. They can pull moons onto planets. Their ship guns shoot lava. It takes the galaxy several books worth of time to actually really start winning. Much of that includes upgrades to tech. I'd put that as better, even if it's mostly from being "different".

Incidentally, the "black hole shields" and "lava guns" are what I mean by straight up silly stuff. Seriously now.

They do come in and wipe the floor at first. But this is because the opponent is new and untested, not because of superiority at arms (perhaps a slight edge, as mentioned by you). The black holes are kind of ridiculous, but it works in context, for the most part. Crashing moons and ships shooting lava are no more ludicrous than destroying planets with some type of beam weapon and shooting energized plasma, "lasers," by Star Wars terms.


And yet all that STILL isn't the reason I hated those books. Funny innit?

*Laughs* (No smilie for laughter?????) I actually liked the NJO series a lot. It had its ups and downs, but on the whole I thought was a good story and worthy of being Star Wars.


It shouldn't even be equal though. Those bioships should be waaay weaker. There's a difference between differing designs, and using construction materials that are inferior. A sword made of bronze and a sword made of steel are both deadly, but the steel sword is superior by far. In this case, the bio would be the bronze weapons.

It's not like comparing a katana to a longsword (i.e two different blades but with similar construction and durability for their purpose). It's like... well... comparing a turtle shell with tank armor.

Hmmm. I can only provide an in-universe explanation (as menitoned above :smallamused:, that is getting useful) : the organics are not from our world so we have no knowledge of how strong they may or may not be. From the sources they have a similar strength to "durasteel," whatever that is, the main component of starships from the Star Wars universe. Whether or not an organic in our world would stand up to that kind of treatment is irrelevant (different worlds.)

[Nargrakhan]

They do come in and wipe the floor at first. But this is because the opponent is new and untested, not because of superiority at arms (perhaps a slight edge, as mentioned by you). The black holes are kind of ridiculous, but it works in context, for the most part. Crashing moons and ships shooting lava are no more ludicrous than destroying planets with some type of beam weapon and shooting energized plasma, "lasers," by Star Wars terms.

I always saw Star Wars as a "pissing contest" between writers.

Writer 1: I can blow up planets!

Writer 2: Oh yea!? I can blow up suns!

Writer 3: That's nothing. My super weapon plays billiards with planets.

Writer 4: No wait! I can destroy an entire solar system!

Writer 5: Amateurs... I have... BIOWEAPONS!!!

Writers 1 thru 4: OMG!!! You win! We can't beat that.

Seriously... :smallsigh:

***EDIT***
Not that I'm saying Star Wars is dumb and I hate it. I don't. Far from that.

However there really wasn't anyone "keeping the guys in check" with the firepower of things.

Lava guns? Come on now: "Sir! Our shields can't repel lava of that magnitude!" You can't keep a straight face with that kind of stuff.

[Battleship789]

I always saw Star Wars as a "pissing contest" between writers.

Writer 1: I can blow up planets!

Writer 2: Oh yea!? I can blow up suns!

Writer 3: That's nothing. My super weapon plays billiards with planets.

Writer 4: No wait! I can destroy an entire solar system!

Writer 5: Amateurs... I have... BIOWEAPONS!!!

Writers 1 thru 4: OMG!!! You win! We can't beat that.

Seriously...

HAHAHHAHAHAH. *Tries to stop laughing* (not sarcastic) This is indeed what seems to be the case with star wars writing isn't it? It is so bad that they, the writers, have shot in-universe zingers to each other (located in the novel Destiney's Way, also from the NJO era. You can look up the exact quotes on Wookiepedia I believe.)

Totally agree with your edit. And no, I can't think of that with a straight face. Also, Admiral Ackbar Cereal.

[Gavin Sage]

Reliability is pretty easy to see... which breaks down more often, a bike or a horse?

A horse.

And its emblematic of the foolishness of organic technology on anything remotely large scale. A horse requires food, exercise, space, training, and someone to pick up its manure. Plus it can get sick and its incredibly easy for them to say break a leg.

A bike you could leave in storage for a year, take it out, dust it off, and still put more miles on it a horse ever will. And what a horse can 'self-repair' amounts to bangs a bike can ignore.

Just in general organic systems are enormously complex because they have to say have blood hearts and digestive systems to keep them going as, opposed to basic electrical wiring and a battery. Even including a generator system leaves a machine much simpler then a life form, with better performance. The reason people stopped using animals in favor of vehicles is because machines are cheaper and out preform biology. Even on maintence when you consider the daily requirements of a living creature, machines need some event for them to stop working while creatures need to work daily to keep working.

Fiction ignores problems with organic machinery that are really very basic. Anything biological will require food and water to say nothing of gases like oxygen. And its got to be the right sort of chemical reaction to work, you will never be able to feed an organism rocks with enough efficiency. A solar power biologic has to root in place for nutrients and water, a solar powered machine needs sunlight. Machines just need energy and can get it with fewer steps meaning that they are inherently more efficient.

To say nothing of preformance. Can you armor an elephant enough to withstand a tank. And if you could could that elephant damage a tank in turn. Where does this elephant get this level of strength? But going back to the armor for a minute, even if you had some magic carbon armor plate... by definition you could produce the same thing in a chemical plant and then equip it on you machines. And lets face it folks there are limits on what it becomes even remotely plausible for organic tech to produce. Energy weapons, nukeclear tech, and space travel come to mind.

Okay applied phlebotnium can solve all problems, but for everything you could do mechanically you'd need greater amounts of phlebotnium to make a living organism do it as well. There you'd always need more 'advanced' organic tech then mechanical.

Note this is mostly on the macro scale here folks. I find nanotech as often portrayed to be somewhere less believable then an organic fusion reactor. All well and good to "imagine a machine that rearranges molecules" until you start asking questions like how does it arrange these molecules. If its mechanical how do you make systems that small? How do you power them? How do make a controlling computer that is complex enough to manage this, but whos complexity doesn't force a scale at which quantum mechanics starts meaning your computer only exists as a probablity and not even nessecarily a simultaneous probablity?

Nanotechnology, if it comes to be, will be a nasty goo because your nano "machines" will really be just specially brewed chemicals, bacteria, and viruses. That said it would hard pressed to be more threatening then modern chemical, bacteria, and viruses already are.

[Justyn]

Steel. It's a metal (well, metallic alloy), and often contains carbon mixed in.

No, steel ALWAYS has carbon in it. Steel is a iron-carbon alloy. Without the carbon, steel is just highly purified iron.

[Nargrakhan]

Note this is mostly on the macro scale here folks. I find nanotech as often portrayed to be somewhere less believable then an organic fusion reactor.

It's crazy, but it's actually being done:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine

There are supposedly prototypes of these things. They don't do much - very simple function and practically useless - but they're just "exhibition models" for more research.

Actually technology has its own stupid things in Sci-Fi: 50 feet mecha being the most obvious. Heaven forbid if they transform. Or how about those "missile swarms of death" that have the rockets actually crashing into each other during flight (or someone shooting one down, then blowing them all up because they were so close to gether). Yamato Cannons are also rather dumb... oh! And angel wings. Most powerful robots always have angel wings.

[KnightDisciple]

No, steel ALWAYS has carbon in it. Steel is a iron-carbon alloy. Without the carbon, steel is just highly purified iron.

Heh. I'll concede. I'm not a metallurgist by any stretch, and I was just pulling that off the top of my head.

[Battleship789]

:smalleek:
Note this is mostly on the macro scale here folks. I find nanotech as often portrayed to be somewhere less believable then an organic fusion reactor. All well and good to "imagine a machine that rearranges molecules" until you start asking questions like how does it arrange these molecules. If its mechanical how do you make systems that small? How do you power them? How do make a controlling computer that is complex enough to manage this, but whos complexity doesn't force a scale at which quantum mechanics starts meaning your computer only exists as a probablity and not even nessecarily a simultaneous probablity?

Good point about nanotech being fairly unreliable due to quantum mechanics (curse you Physics questions on wave functions!). However, we (mere humans on our planet earth) have already created a blood-cell sized guitar (with real strings!!!) 6 years ago and are capable of creating much smaller objects today. Who is to say the limit of how small these structures could get? I know I can't reasonably put a size restricion other than plank length.

As a counterpoint to the horse vs bike comparison: which breaks down more often: a particle accelerator or a horse? The bike is much more simple a device than the horse, thus having a smaller chance of breaking down. Particle accelerators, on the other hand, are an extremely complex machine that can and do have failures on a fairly regular basis. This is a better, though perhaps not the best, question on reliablity than a horse and a bike. Keep in mind also that a horse can survive for quite a few years before catastrophically breaking down, i.e. dying.

Edit:
No... please no... don't bring mechas into this debate. :smalleek: So ridiculous.

[KnightDisciple]

<snipped but solid post>

I'll put this spin on it:
Biotech might, might be better at dealing with very low levels of damage. How often do you get papercuts, scuffs, bruises, etc. on yourself? Probably more than you even know. You don't really need extra food to repair that stuff. I could carry that principle over to a "bioship" or whatnot. Metallic type materials might take more work there.
But past a certain point, mechanical is easier. You can swap parts out at your leisure. With living beings, if you don't rush, the thing dies and starts to rot.
Here's a blunter example:
If you blow off the bridge section of a Star Destroyer, and everything else stays intact, you just need to tow it and replace. You might even be able to fly it in (likely at reduced speed).
You blow a horse's head off, and it's dead. Period.
Past a certain point, wound shock means biotech would be inferior every time.

[Don Julio Anejo]

As a counterpoint to the horse vs bike comparison: which breaks down more often: a particle accelerator or a horse? The bike is much more simple a device than the horse, thus having a smaller chance of breaking down. Particle accelerators, on the other hand, are an extremely complex machine that can and do have failures on a fairly regular basis. This is a better, though perhaps not the best, question on reliablity than a horse and a bike. Keep in mind also that a horse can survive for quite a few years before catastrophically breaking down, i.e. dying.

Except how often do you ride your particle accelerator to the store to buy some groceries?

A bike (okay, a motorcycle) and a horse is a much better comparison for its utility, and a motorcycle still outperforms a horse, needs much less maintenance and is more reliable.

[Justyn]

Heh. I'll concede. I'm not a metallurgist by any stretch, and I was just pulling that off the top of my head.

Neither am I, I just watch the History Channel a lot.

[Nargrakhan]

As a counterpoint to the horse vs bike comparison: which breaks down more often: a particle accelerator or a horse?

Not really a good comparison. What breaks down more: a 1970 car or a 2008 car? In most cases it will be the 1970 car, yet a 2008 car is far more complex. As technology advances, it tends to also lessens the need to fix or maintain it. The efficiency of the construction – as well as the materials used to make it – advance more and more.

Of course the complexity to maintain something AFTER it breaksdown, is obviously more intense. Hence how people back in the day could fix a car that broke down at the side of the road, but now it takes 3 diagonstic computers and 150 pound tools. But that doesn't make it more useless. The 2008 car is far better than the 1970 car (car collector opinions notwithstanding).



All well and good to "imagine a machine that rearranges molecules" until you start asking questions like how does it arrange these molecules. If its mechanical how do you make systems that small? How do you power them? How do make a controlling computer that is complex enough to manage this, but whos complexity doesn't force a scale at which quantum mechanics starts meaning your computer only exists as a probablity and not even nessecarily a simultaneous probablity?

Basically by mimicking how nature does it, and then just doing it better. In total simplistic comparison:

Birds = Jets. Brain = Computer. Cells = Nanomachines.

Trying to power an entire city on something the size of a dime. Kinda dumb sounding... but one day having human white blood cells argumented with nanomachines? Not that too farfetched.

[Battleship789]

Good stuff on horse v. bike

Fair points, I concede some parts of my argument. But not all. I will agree with Don Julio Anejo that a motorcycle is a much better argument. So I will use it instead.

A few questions first: Does anyone know the approximate service length of a standard motorcycle? What is the average life expectancy of a horse that is rode often, though not in races? How much distance can one travel on a horse/motorcycle during it's lifetime? How much maintanence does a motorcycle require as opposed to a horse (include fuel to food/water comparisons)? Define the phrase "more reliable," as I do believe a horse works when you "start it." Concedes performance over distance and time (for the short term.)

Keep in mind I am only trying to bring up ways that biotechnology could be similar in reliablity/performance to machine technology, not that I am saying either one is better than the other.

[warty goblin]

I think this is a case of simply trying to do the wrong stuff with biotech. As previously pointed out, you can simply maker stronger, harder and altogether better material with conventional means.

Where biotech seems to me to be arguably strongest is in the creation of chemical compounds, things of that nature. Organisms secrete all kinds of stuff that can often be a real bitch to recreate artificially. If one had sufficiently advanced genetic engineering technology, there's no reason not to guess that it should be quite simple to create custom organisms for all your medicine producing needs to take just one example. They would be simple to use, just feed them, harvest them, and bingo. rarified drug.

You can take this idea further. Design an algae that produces desiel fuel from raw materials and sunlight, a bacteria that eats the dead algae, another bacteria to break the first back into raw materials and so on. Toss some dirt into a tank with the stuff, set it in the sun, and you have a more or less stable energy generation system. It's nicely scalable, the end result is almost immediately usable, and once you have it going, it doesn't take sophisticated technology to keep it running.

There are other applications as well, such as pattern recognition, which could be quite useful if you could link up to some conventional tech. I'm thinking a missile that knows what an enemy vehicle looks like and will target and destroy any it sees. No IFF system, no heat seeking, just an eyeball on the end of a rocket.

[KnightDisciple]

:smalleek:

Good point about nanotech being fairly unreliable due to quantum mechanics (curse you Physics questions on wave functions!). However, we (mere humans on our planet earth) have already created a blood-cell sized guitar (with real strings!!!) 6 years ago and are capable of creating much smaller objects today. Who is to say the limit of how small these structures could get? I know I can't reasonably put a size restricion other than plank length.

As a counterpoint to the horse vs bike comparison: which breaks down more often: a particle accelerator or a horse? The bike is much more simple a device than the horse, thus having a smaller chance of breaking down. Particle accelerators, on the other hand, are an extremely complex machine that can and do have failures on a fairly regular basis. This is a better, though perhaps not the best, question on reliablity than a horse and a bike. Keep in mind also that a horse can survive for quite a few years before catastrophically breaking down, i.e. dying.

Edit:
No... please no... don't bring mechas into this debate. :smalleek: So ridiculous.

.....
Seriously? That's not really a fair comparison. A particle accelerator is way more complex than a horse, too. That's not really a fair comparison.
*Would have posted sooner, but work happened*

[turkishproverb]

.....
Seriously? That's not really a fair comparison. A particle accelerator is way more complex than a horse, too. That's not really a fair comparison.
*Would have posted sooner, but work happened*

A particle accelerator is way more complex than a horse? I don't think you fully understand biology.

Systems, subsystems and sub sub systems. The biology of a red blood cell, a white. The chemical makeup required. Its not at all simple.

[LurkerInPlayground]

So is use of the word “biotechnology” (now covers everything from grass to drugs). Evolution of a word to encompass a greater range, does not diminish the significance of it in a serious conversation.
Perhaps, but it bears mentioning, since people are really loose about what they mean by "nanotechnology." As pointed out earlier, it's not like living organisms don't latch onto carapaces or shells or form colonies on decidedly "nonliving" surfaces.


Yes. But it makes the machine superior to the organic equivilent. That's the whole point I'm coming across: a biotech ship is not uber to a metaltech ship.
No, you are making a foregone conclusion that it would be superior.

And you're missing the point besides. If you are making a "living" ship by custom-building its microorganisms from the ground-up or using pre-existing biological "nanomachine colonies" then it seems like you've achieved more-or-less the same result. I'd also think you'd run into more or less the same kinds of engineering problems.

Besides, it's not like a hermit crab's shell is "living." And not everything in the human body has an infinite capability for self-repair anyway. Why couldn't living ships be a series of integrated biological systems that happens to live in a "metallic exoskeleton"?

Besides, "metaltech" and "biological" is a pretty arbitrary distinction anyway. Your objections are meaningless because you're essentially saying that one is more artificial than the other. Here's the thing: You're still engineering and tweaking both to the point of it being "man-made." It's just a question of whether you construct it from the ground-up or tweak a pre-existing system.


Limitation due to how the machines are constructed: not the materials in construction. Parallel processing is a limitation of machines for now. It probably won’t be in a few decades. Like vacuum tubes were a limitation a few decades ago.
I don't see your point. I'm just stating a fact to clarify the whole "computer versus brain" nonsense.


Aye... through technology however. Plastic is not "grown" like bone or carapace. You don't see plastic bioships in sci-fi - that would be the "technolgoical race" using that.
I know well what you meant, but I thought it bears mentioning that you were wrong and really missing the point others were raising about the chemical definition for "organic."

In any case, we're getting sidetracked here. Biological ships are assumed to be superior just because the narrative says that they are. It's just a thematic way of showing a really exotic technology and saying that it's amazingly sophisticated too. If it happens to be more powerful (instead of merely being a useful alternative), that's because it's as much a feat of engineering as it is the product of some radically different approach.

The actual maximum potential of a living organism as a ship versus your arbitrarily-defined "metalware" really has nothing to do with anything. Biological ships are a narrative device. "Realism" doesn't have much to do with it.

[KnightDisciple]

A particle accelerator is way more complex than a horse? I don't think you fully understand biology.

Systems, subsystems and sub sub systems. The biology of a red blood cell, a white. The chemical makeup required. Its not at all simple.

Hm. Point there. But, most of them are miles across. As far as "part count" goes, I'd say they at least approach each other.
Of course, particle accelerators have vastly different stress tolerances than horses.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Yes, but a particle accelerator is a one-of-a kind machine used for very specific testing.

A horse is an animal you ride to work and to the store if you're too poor to afford a motorbike.

Compare the number of horses it took to evolve to what it is and the number of particle accelerators that have been built. If everyone and their grandmother has a particle accelerator, it wouldn't fail much more often than, say, a Honda Civic. Because by this point we'd be able to pinpoint all the major causes of failure and make these parts more reliable.

That is why a motorbike is a better comparison to a horse. The horse may be infinitely more complex, but they essentially serve the same purpose.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Nanoscale machinery is already in use. I should know; my University is a leading research facility for it. It's not swarms of self-replicating drones designed to convert all organic material to Dream Topping, but it does exist.

[GolemsVoice]

Without regards to former arguments (I am sorry, I am really not that knowledgeable when it comes to metallurgy and quantum mechanics) I would say that biotechnology could be displayed as superior is because at the moment we can do quite alot of things with amchines, and therefore, extrapolation, or, in many cases, simply just making up, new mechanical technology is rather "common". In most of the future scenarios, people still use technology we would describe as normal, meaning, mechanical. (Sure thing, a blaster, or a spaceship, or a pod racer are not normal to us in any ways, but one would not wonder to see them in any sci-fi setting, since they essentialy ARE what sci-fi's all about) Thus, biotechnology is still something extraordinary. Think of Star Wars, and how it handled the droid army. A giant army of droids, whil truly spectacular, is more or less accepted. Robots are sci-fi. But think of what would have been had the Trade Federation used soldiers with organic weapons, 'nids-style. Even if it would be ethicaly correct, meaning that no soldier had something grafted on against his will, it still would be strange, wouldn't it?
And I think that's where the reason, or part of the reason lies. Biotechnology is, even by sci-fi standards, though not by all, since there is some very strange stuff around, different, and often, it is only a short step from "dfferent advanced technology than the advanced technology we already have" to "still different even when you consider this really fantastic stuffpeople have? It somehow IS superior, because even among such marvels of science like warp travel, giant floating cities and whatnot, it remains somehow distinct, it MUST be superior"

[Dervag]

I think GolemsVoice is onto something. Biotech-as-superior keeps popping up because biotech is alien. It's unfamiliar to us. So the writer can use it to make his aliens seem really strange. Usually, with science fiction aliens, we the reader know that the aliens will have something in common with humans. Even if their mindset and their biology are totally different, things like fire and the wheel will exist across cultures.

But a biotech-using species might not even share that with us. So they make for very alien aliens.
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I'll put this spin on it:
Biotech might, might be better at dealing with very low levels of damage. How often do you get papercuts, scuffs, bruises, etc. on yourself? Probably more than you even know. You don't really need extra food to repair that stuff. I could carry that principle over to a "bioship" or whatnot. Metallic type materials might take more work there.On the other hand, mechanical equipment is a lot more resistant to microscale damage. If you scuff a car, the car's ability to function is not decreased. It might rust out over the course of the next decade, but I guarantee you that scuffing the paint on your car will not prevent you from driving it in to work every day for years. But if you scuff a horse's skin, it may get infected. In which case it might literally swell up and die.

Organic systems need to be able to heal from low-level damage, because they're so fragile that even low-level damage is a potential threat.
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As a counterpoint to the horse vs bike comparison: which breaks down more often: a particle accelerator or a horse? The bike is much more simple a device than the horse, thus having a smaller chance of breaking down. Particle accelerators, on the other hand, are an extremely complex machine that can and do have failures on a fairly regular basis. This is a better, though perhaps not the best, question on reliablity than a horse and a bike. Keep in mind also that a horse can survive for quite a few years before catastrophically breaking down, i.e. dying.But that's an absurd standard of comparison. A particle accelerator may break down more often than the horse. It depends on the accelerator and the horse. The accelerator I work with goes for months or years without anything actually breaking. The LHC is still in the debugging phase, so it seems like they can't get the beam going for more than a few days at a time.

On the other hand, you're comparing apples and uranium here. A particle accelerator can do things no horse could ever do in a million years. The reason we compare a horse and a bicycle is because those things have similar functions. You use a bicycle (or car) for the same things you use a horse for. If a bicycle/car can do the work of a horse as well as a horse can, and if it's more reliable and tougher, it wins. Or if a bicycle/car can do more work than a horse and be exactly as reliable and tough, it wins.

But a horse and a particle accelerator can't be compared in those terms. The particle accelerator costs more to build and to run, yes, but it's a totally different thing than a horse for a totally different purpose.

If we want to be fair, we need to compare a particle accelerator with a living thing that does what a particle accelerator does. But the idea of such a thing is fantasy. Nothing in science suggests how to build one, and many things in science suggest that one cannot be built.
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Could you do this for me: Break down exactly and concisely where you are drawing the line between "biotech" and "metaltech"... it all seems very vague, and it seems to me you are arbitrarily drawing the line at "if it is soft and squishy, it is biotech, if it is hard and metaly, it is not".Let me try:

Any piece of technology which is not self-replicating or self-growing is "metaltech." Thus, toys stamped out of plastic are "metaltech," because they don't make themselves. Generally, "metaltech" will require very high power input (a lot of energy in a short time) from an external source at some point in the process of making it. Thus, to make steel you have to dig up rocks and melt the iron out of them in a blast furnace that's about as hot as a volcano, if not even hotter.

Any piece of technology which is self-replicating or self-growing and is based on the same general kinds of chemistry as naturally occuring organisms is "biotech." Generally, "biotech" will not require very high power input.

Technology that is self-growing and doesn't work on the same basic chemical platform (no DNA, no proteins as we know them, doesn't burn carbon with oxygen) falls in between the two. Depending on details I might place it on either side of the line.
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Basically Sci-Fi often portrays purpose-grown living things used as ships or weapons to be superior because, were such technology available, they would most likely *be* superior. Let's just look at current tech vs nature... Spider silk is stronger, as far as I know, than anything we can produce, at the very least it is much stronger than anything we can produce on a large scale.But while aramid polymers have great tensile strength (Kevlar is another example of that same family of molecules), that doesn't mean that an organic molecule will always be superior to an inorganic molecule.

For example, what if I need to build an electric power plant? There are organisms that generate a trickle of electric current, but there's no naturally evolved organism that can generate high voltage electric current that I can run through transmission lines to light my home. There are reasons of physics to believe that such an organism literally could not exist.

And if using biotech means I have to make do without electricity, I'll stick to what I know, thank you very much. Electricity is damned useful.
_________


Basically the biggest advantages offered by growing your tools rather than building them are as follows: Reliability, Durability, and convenience of assembly.

Reliability is pretty easy to see... which breaks down more often, a bike or a horse? With a biological construct, all you have to do to keep it in working order is to provide it with the care it needs to maintain itself.You're thinking backwards.

Horses break down all the time- ask a veterinarian. And often, when they break, you can't fix them. A horse who breaks a leg badly enough may never run again. A bicycle that gets a wheel smashed up will be good as new once you replace the wheel. And replacing a horse's leg is a hell of a lot harder than replacing a bicycle wheel.

That's another advantage mechanical technology has over organic: interchangeable parts. It's much easier to take a machine apart with a wrench and put it back together than to do the same with a living creature apart with a scalpel. And much easier to replace broken parts of a machine.

Moreover, there's another aspect to reliability- a reliable machine is one that can always be counted on to achieve the designed result. Horses can suffer psychological problems, and they can get sick. If they do, you have to spend enormous amounts of time and effort coaxing them back to health. Compared to the effort of restoring a bicycle to health, there's no contest: the horse loses. Compared to a car... well, car repairs are expensive. On the other hand, a car is vastly more capable than a horse.
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Durability... I heard someone say earlier that mechanical-type stuff is more durable. If you are thinking creature vs. tank, then maybe. But you are discounting that these types of things would be grown to be extremely durable, likely having thick metal carapaces for vehicles,How, from a biomechanical standpoint, do you grow a thick metal carapace? Can you show me any examples that even suggest such a thing would be possible? Purpose-designed organisms aren't magic, you know. They have to follow laws of physics just like everything else.

If we can't solve that problem, then we have a fundamental example of something machines can do that organisms can't- produce inch thick steel plates. And we don't have any evidence that the problem can be solved.


and I doubt smaller personal gear would be soft and fuzzy. Let's not forget the elements either... High-tech gear is notoriously unreliable in mud, grit, sand, cold, wetness, and a plethora of other situations. A purpose-grown biological construct would not have these drawbacks, being fully sealed within itself.Ever gotten sand in your eye?

Moreover, that high-tech gear can do things that organisms we know of can't do. A radar set can detect ships or aircraft from many miles away, even at night or in thick fog. You'd be hard pressed to design a creature capable of such a thing, unless it literally had a radar antenna sticking out of its head. In which case it would be vulnerable to all the other problems radar is vulnerable to.
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Convenience... Mechanical things take large expensive factories to manufacture, purpose grown biological constructs, on the other hand, just sprinkle some seeds in a hydroponic chamber and you have yourself a gun. Some different seeds and a bigger chamber, you've got yourself a tank. Some different seeds and a much larger growing area, you've got yourself a capital ship. Presumably this would take a lot longer than traditional assembly methods, but it wouldn't be too bad... they would likely be manufactured to grow rapidly, so figure a few days for small personal gear, a few weeks for larger vehicles, and maybe a year or three for ships and other large-scale things. Not too bad.How do you know this to be true? In real life, organisms the size of a capital ship... there aren't any. Organisms the size of a house (trees, whales) take decades or centuries to grow.

You seem to be attributing magic powers to "purpose-engineered" organisms. They grow at incredible speed, despite the fact that we have no idea how to make that happen. They produce shells of materials that no known organism produces, and do it quickly, despite the fact that we have no idea how to make that happen. We can't even guess how to grow a turtle with a steel shell, let alone a battleship with one.

You assume that the organism will do all this even in a very simple environment. By comparison, in the early stages of growth, all complex life forms we know of depend on some kind of specially evolved growth chamber that has a very precise chemical and physical environment. Eggs, for instance, or wombs.

As a general rule, to make something more capable, you must make the thing used to produce it more complicated. That's true in the natural world, so I don't see why it wouldn't be true of organic technology. But in that case, to grow a tank-creature you're going to need an 'artificial womb' of staggering complexity. It is not a foregone, obvious conclusion that this artificial womb will be cheaper than a tank factory.
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In short, I'm hearing a lot of claims about the capability of organic technology that don't match up to anything real I've ever heard of. The only real example of organic material you mentioned was spider silk, and that's a very slim thread to build up a world of organic technology on. Could you provide some examples or more scientific arguments about WHY you think organic technology could do all the things you think it can do?
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That is because the calculator is purpose-built.
Lets break it down this way... Let's say you wanted to build a computer that performed all the functions of the human brain. I can guarantee that you are going to use up a lot more space than the space inside a human's head.Why do you make this guarantee? What is your reasoning?


That means that, pound-for-pound, the human brain is much more powerful than computers. The difference is that computers are purpose-built for running calculations, and the human brain has to be generalized.You seem to have misunderstood how computers work. It is in the nature of computers to do arithmetic very fast. The first computers did arithmetic very fast. In fact, that was all they were good for. And boy were they good for it...

It was no great struggle to design computers that could calculate. Compared to the effort we've already sunk into trying to understand our own brains with no improvement in the brain's math ability, research into computers has paid off so well that it's almost impossible to understand.

Moreover, it is easy to control the design of an electronic computer. It is not so easy to control the design of an organic brain. We have no idea how to create 'programmed' organic brains, despite long and vigorous research into biology. Whereas we have complete control over the programming of computers, and the capability of our programmed computers is limited only by the quality of the hardware we can design.

[Closet_Skeleton]

I remember there was this one time, I was listening in on a few guys discuss how it was possible - with the technology shown in Star Wars - to create robot Jedi.

Repulsor systems to mimic force telekinesis, multiple analytical systems to “predict” the future, mass network to replicate the “sense each other” in the Force...

Proxy in The Force Unleashed is sort of like that on a limited scale.


considering that under ideal circumstances (resources, mass production line)such a legion could be raised and replaced faster than normal Jedi, they’d quickly outnumber them.

They'd be too expensive to make an army of them. Star Wars Droid armies only work because they're mostly made up of incredibly cheap droids that are useless except in large numbers.


"Their ship is soft and flexible. Its construction materials are semi-permeable and laced with a network of delicate circulation passages. Instead of using impermeable high-density materials, it's made from countless tiny thin-walled cells which tend to rapidly break down in the presence of corrosive chemicals or radiation."

Except that a biological ship would have exoskeletal armour that would be dead and made up of incredibly tough proteins.


Trying to craft armor out of real spider webs (I mean REAL spider webs)? Not working.

It has been done with silk (from silkworms) to make working bullet proof vests. It's just incredibly expensive and heavy so it never took off and was eventually replaced with kevlar.


It's like... well... comparing a turtle shell with tank armor.

A turtle's shell is designed to protect a small creature and is less than an inch thick. A tank's armour is several inches thick (or maybe not, I'm no expert), has other tricks like ablative armour and needs incredibly powerful engines and massive ammounts of fuel just to move.


A horse is an animal you ride to work and to the store if you're too poor to afford a motorbike.

What alternate reality are you living in where a horse is cheaper than a motorbike?

[Eldan]

I think this is a case of simply trying to do the wrong stuff with biotech. As previously pointed out, you can simply maker stronger, harder and altogether better material with conventional means.

Where biotech seems to me to be arguably strongest is in the creation of chemical compounds, things of that nature. Organisms secrete all kinds of stuff that can often be a real bitch to recreate artificially. If one had sufficiently advanced genetic engineering technology, there's no reason not to guess that it should be quite simple to create custom organisms for all your medicine producing needs to take just one example. They would be simple to use, just feed them, harvest them, and bingo. rarified drug.

You can take this idea further. Design an algae that produces desiel fuel from raw materials and sunlight, a bacteria that eats the dead algae, another bacteria to break the first back into raw materials and so on. Toss some dirt into a tank with the stuff, set it in the sun, and you have a more or less stable energy generation system. It's nicely scalable, the end result is almost immediately usable, and once you have it going, it doesn't take sophisticated technology to keep it running.

There are other applications as well, such as pattern recognition, which could be quite useful if you could link up to some conventional tech. I'm thinking a missile that knows what an enemy vehicle looks like and will target and destroy any it sees. No IFF system, no heat seeking, just an eyeball on the end of a rocket.

To that I can only say: most of it is already being done. Insulin for diabetics is made by bacteria. They are already breeding algae that make fuel oil from compost, and it seems to work.

[Athaniar]

I think GolemsVoice is onto something. Biotech-as-superior keeps popping up because biotech is alien. It's unfamiliar to us. So the writer can use it to make his aliens seem really strange. Usually, with science fiction aliens, we the reader know that the aliens will have something in common with humans. Even if their mindset and their biology are totally different, things like fire and the wheel will exist across cultures.


This is exactly what I was thinking earlier today (before I saw this thread). In a universe where aliens aren't "alien" enough, the real "alien" aliens have equally "alien" biotech. Vorlons, Shadows, Yuuzhan Vong, Species 8472, Zerg (all amongst my favorite aliens) are all supposed to be the real "alien" aliens, isntead of the not-that-"alien" aliens. And, in my opinion, it works. And since it's so "alien", of course it has to be powerful. Weak biotech? Never!

[nothingclever]

When it comes to sheer durability (not to mention performance) metals and electronics beat organics and tissue.

This isn't necessarily true if you achieved complete control over organic life.
Life if us humans had complete control over our bodies using our minds we could make our bodies absorb metal and use it to protect ourselves or we could grow to infinitely large sizes by removing our natural growth limits. If we could completely control our bodies down to a cellular/atomic level we'd be the equivalent of living machines. We'd have minds that can adapt infinitely better than machines and the ability to understand social nuances machines can't while being able to shoot lasers out of our eyes.

Like think of it this way, organic technology could have sentience on the same level as humans making it possible for it to upgrade preexisting programs or make entirely new ones while being able to do anything a machine can do. If you can control every aspect of an organic being than it has just as much if not more possible customization as a machine.

An organic being would be able to make adaptations faster and easier than a machine because an organic being can try to instinctively or consciously adapt to things while a machine has to be told to either by entering commands for it or by giving it a program to base decisions on.

Anyways when you really think about the two are basically the same thing. Humans are organic beings. The human brain is just a very complicated machine. Anything that isn't an inanimate object might as well be both organic and a machine. Animals and machines are made of many of the same materials. They both are made of many of the same base elements. Two big differences are that the combinations of elements are different and one thing is autonomous while the other only functions when it is told to by a person. Autonomy isn't even actually a big difference because all that means is that machine/living thing has a program that is always running.

[Llama231]

Google linkey-linkey.http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=VxQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=organic+technology&spell=1

A whole bunch of articles about this.

[This is not supposeds to sound rude.]

[KnightDisciple]

This isn't necessarily true if you achieved complete control over organic life.
Life if us humans had complete control over our bodies using our minds we could make our bodies absorb metal and use it to protect ourselves or we could grow to infinitely large sizes by removing our natural growth limits. If we could completely control our bodies down to a cellular/atomic level we'd be the equivalent of living machines. We'd have minds that can adapt infinitely better than machines and the ability to understand social nuances machines can't while being able to shoot lasers out of our eyes.
.....

Wait a sec. How could our bodies absorb metal (by this, I'm guessing in large amounts, as in several pounds)? Where would it go and not interfere?
And on the "infinite" growth....no. It's not a matter of "growth limit". It's a matter of "biology doesn't DO that". There's some principle...inverse square law? Help me out here, guys. Anyways, it basically says that, after a point, an organism can't support itself, and its organs (especially heart) can't work well enough.
Celluar and atomic are on vastly different scales, man. And how would we "completely control" our bodies like that? There's 0 precedent in nature for what you're speaking of.
Lasers? Um...no. The heat generated would sear our fleshy eyes. Anything hardy enough to withstand that would suck as eyes, as in probably not function at all.

[LurkerInPlayground]

Wait a sec. How could our bodies absorb metal (by this, I'm guessing in large amounts, as in several pounds)? Where would it go and not interfere?
And on the "infinite" growth....no. It's not a matter of "growth limit". It's a matter of "biology doesn't DO that". There's some principle...inverse square law? Help me out here, guys. Anyways, it basically says that, after a point, an organism can't support itself, and its organs (especially heart) can't work well enough.
Celluar and atomic are on vastly different scales, man. And how would we "completely control" our bodies like that? There's 0 precedent in nature for what you're speaking of.
Lasers? Um...no. The heat generated would sear our fleshy eyes. Anything hardy enough to withstand that would suck as eyes, as in probably not function at all.
You're thinking about how a body needs an adequate blood supply to sustain a body. People with gigantism merely die because they grow beyond the ability of the heart to sustain, and the heart just gives out.

But that has nothing to do with the theoretical limits of what life is capable of. You just need a bigger heart for a bigger body.

That still doesn't change the fact that everything that nothingclever says is pretty much unfounded speculation or either just an argument full of contradictions or logical holes.

[nothingclever]

But that's because for people, doing math is useless in the evolutionary sense. Our brains developed so they could do what's actually useful, like throwing a ball.
Your brain does math when calculating how and when to throw a ball. It calculates things like wind resistance, the sweat between the ball and your hand and the position of the target. Just because we don't express these things as numbers doesn't mean we aren't doing math.


Wait a sec. How could our bodies absorb metal (by this, I'm guessing in large amounts, as in several pounds)? Where would it go and not interfere?
And on the "infinite" growth....no. It's not a matter of "growth limit". It's a matter of "biology doesn't DO that". There's some principle...inverse square law? Help me out here, guys. Anyways, it basically says that, after a point, an organism can't support itself, and its organs (especially heart) can't work well enough.
Celluar and atomic are on vastly different scales, man. And how would we "completely control" our bodies like that? There's 0 precedent in nature for what you're speaking of.
Lasers? Um...no. The heat generated would sear our fleshy eyes. Anything hardy enough to withstand that would suck as eyes, as in probably not function at all.

If you could fully control your body in all ways you would be able to basically evolve yourself. This shouldn't be so hard to understand. What I'm saying should be common sense.

Your body has built in limitations. Guess what, if you could control your body the way you can a machine you could override those limitations. Why can't your bones be made of a stronger substance? Because your body can't synthesize one because it has artificial limits set on itself. Why can't you eat certain things? Because of artificial limits. These limits are contained in your genetics. If you believe in evolution than our genetics can change over time and we can adapt. That's how we got to being what we are today. Imagine if you could control your body to the degree you could a machine. You'd be able to create adaptations in yourself that take millions of years normally.

I call these things artificial limits because they aren't set in stone. Evolution proves that.



That still doesn't change the fact that everything that nothingclever says is pretty much unfounded speculation or either just an argument full of contradictions or logical holes.
If you don't believe what I say is possible then you don't believe in evolution. Good job trying to sound clever there.

Why can't we develop adaptations for ourselves through evolution or genetic modification like the ones I mentioned?
When I said something about growing infinitely larger I meant that it's theoretically possible we could do so if were able to remove whatever built in limitations on growth we have and adapted to grow stronger bones and organs to support our increased size.

[Eldan]

I would have to dig to my papers on biomechanics, biophysics and all that, but basically, creature size is really limited by an amount of factors, amongst others:
-Diffusion. Basically, every cell in the body has to be within minimal distance from a blood vessel.
-Heat distribution. While larger creatures lose less energy per body size since the relation of size/surface is smaller, they would take forever to heat up.
-Energy intake. You can't feed a thing like that.

It's not inverse square law, but it involves different exponents, so it's similar. There's a minimal and a maximal size for each kind of organism. Insects are even worse: their system of oxygen intake means they can't get much larger than they are today.

Oh, and nothingclever: those things aren't arbitrary limits: those are laws of physics and, by extension, chemistry. Certain things just don't work.

[nothingclever]

Actually those things could work but nice try. If people simply can't grow larger without dying the way we currently are why is it not possible we could develop stronger bones/organs/other ways of gaining heat/whatever you'd like to complain about some time in the future?

You people are arguing in a really narrow minded sounding fashion through the restraints on the knowledge of things we know today. Next you're going to say it's impossible for an organism not to be able to theoretically live forever even if it has unlimited resources to do so. I understand we have built in limits on our lifespans and our cells break down over time and we naturally age and become weaker currently. That doesn't mean in the future we can't find a way to stop our cells from unnecessarily dying and not regrowing. It doesn't mean in the future we can't find a way to keep our hormone levels and other chemical levels the same as when we are young and keep our bodies in a state that is able to use the chemicals it produces without overloading.

"No one will ever create a typewriter that types what we want to say without us physically touching the keys!!!"

Uh, voice dictation software and the computer? That's how you people sound.

We can grow human limbs on animals and you think we'll never be able to grow animal limbs on humans? Yeah, ok, sure.
You think a turtle will NEVER be able to grow a shell that's basically made of steel regardless of how much time passes? Wow, get an imagination to go along with whatever scientific education you have. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will.

"A baby will never be born from something other than a mother's womb!"

Uh... cloning?

[RPGuru1331]

I keep seeing this repeating notion in sci-fi space opera, that “organic technology” is superior to metallic technology. Exactly why is this? Plain cool factor? When it comes to sheer durability (not to mention performance) metals and electronics beat organics and tissue.
Two things.
1: Because they're doing something we can't fathom. You mentioned star wars; We can at least envision, say, speeders. We have hover craft, we have VTOL capable craft. We can't miniaturize or mass-produce such things for private use, but we have a frame of reference for how one could create the craft on its own.
2: Fiction, including Sci-Fi, often includes creatures who's skins are legitimately at least as durable as their alloys (which of course are beyond our own). Given this, it's not a big leap to orgo-tech. That's something that you can't factor in when applying 'real world' stuffs.

[LurkerInPlayground]

If you don't believe what I say is possible then you don't believe in evolution. Good job trying to sound clever there.

Why can't we develop adaptations for ourselves through evolution or genetic modification like the ones I mentioned?
When I said something about growing infinitely larger I meant that it's theoretically possible we could do so if were able to remove whatever built in limitations on growth we have and adapted to grow stronger bones and organs to support our increased size.
You're wrong. Evolution is an explanation as to how descent-with-modification works by natural selection and by inheriting genes.

It doesn't make pointless speculations about what is possible in a living system, especially, as somebody pointed out earlier, if there has been no prior precedent for it. It also says nothing about artificially engineering life by direct intervention from human beings.

In other words, evolution doesn't say anything about what is possible through human intervention. So it's quite meaningless to accuse me of "not believing in evolution."

I'm criticizing you because you make factual mistakes like this one and can't even be bothered to structure your arguments. That, and you make a lot of baseless assumptions and expect people to respect you for making them.

For example, you dismiss all criticism as "narrow mindedness." This isn't exactly doing anything to win me over since it tells me that you can't take healthy skepticism when it's directed at you.

Epic phail.

[Gavin Sage]

You think a turtle will NEVER be able to grow a shell that's basically made of steel regardless of how much time passes? Wow, get an imagination to go along with whatever scientific education you have. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will.

Here's the weakpoint of this kinda thinking. Enough applied phlebotnium and speculation renders anything possible. This is not the same as answering the thread's title of "Organic technology superior?" however.

Thus its not a matter of whether a turtle can have a shell harder then steel, but how many loops does the turtle need to go through to get to that point versus say an equivalent mechanic process?

I submit that organic technology by needing to support a living organism ontop of whatever else it is doing automatically less streamlined in its processes. Thus runs headlong into problems like the second law of thermodynamics. Thus machinery will be more economical and quicker to develop, thus is inherently superior as an approach.

[RPGuru1331]

I submit that organic technology by needing to support a living organism ontop of whatever else it is doing automatically less streamlined in its processes. Thus runs headlong into problems like the second law of thermodynamics. Thus machinery will be more economical and quicker to develop, thus is inherently superior as an approach.

I must point out that just because machinery is more energy efficient from a physics stand point doesn't make it more economical. After all, cost depends on a lot of factors besides how much energy something gives out.

Granted, human history usually finds that the biological factors can increase costs more then the others. It is, for now at least, still cheaper to fly then to cross the same distance by boat, because of the cost of feeding folks during that voyage.

[Dervag]

Except that a biological ship would have exoskeletal armour that would be dead and made up of incredibly tough proteins.This is a good time to analyze the definition of the world "incredibly." "Incredible" means "cannot be credited," that is, "impossible to believe.

So your words are more true than you might have guessed. It is in fact "incredible" that you could grow thick layers of exoskeleton tougher than vanadium steel or titanium.

You see, when we need to make armor, we can choose what materials to make it from. The more options we have, the better, because that gives us a better chance of picking better materials.

Thing is, mechanical technology gives us a LOT of options for armor. We can make armor out of materials that can only be formed by melting down rocks and metals. We can make armor out of organic compounds made from oil (like Kevlar). We are not restricted by the need to find materials that a living creature can create without poisoning itself or baking itself to death.

Biotechnology is limited in those ways. Therefore, it is "incredible" (hard to believe) that biotechnology could produce better armor than can be made using blast furnaces, machine presses, and cemented carbide tools.
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It has been done with silk (from silkworms) to make working bullet proof vests. It's just incredibly expensive and heavy so it never took off and was eventually replaced with kevlar.Exactly. And Kevlar (it's a brand name, technically) is made using machine technology. This is a good example of how machine technology and biotech can make the same physical type of thing (aramid polymer fibers with high tensile strength), with the machine technology still winning out in terms of cost and usefulness. Which is yet another problem with biotech.
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A turtle's shell is designed to protect a small creature and is less than an inch thick. A tank's armour is several inches thick (or maybe not, I'm no expert), has other tricks like ablative armour and needs incredibly powerful engines and massive ammounts of fuel just to move.The key is that we need to think about what would happen if we replaced the material a tank's armor is made of with the material a turtle's armor is made of. We'd have to use a LOT more turtleshell to get the same amount of protection for our armored combat unit. The armor would weigh more and require more power and fuel to move.
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This isn't necessarily true if you achieved complete control over organic life.
Life if us humans had complete control over our bodies using our minds we could make our bodies absorb metal and use it to protect ourselves or we could grow to infinitely large sizes by removing our natural growth limits. If we could completely control our bodies down to a cellular/atomic level we'd be the equivalent of living machines. We'd have minds that can adapt infinitely better than machines and the ability to understand social nuances machines can't while being able to shoot lasers out of our eyes.Wait, what?

My problem here is that you're assuming things ought to be possible when there's no reason to expect them to be possible. It's not clear why I should be able to gain conscious control over biochemical reactions inside my own body. It's not clear how you could make an organism capable of doing that. It's not clear how we can control biology with that level of precision.

To make a living creature as capable as a tank (let alone more capable than a tank) we would have to be able to do things that we have no idea how to do. As I understand it, we would have to do some things that would violate actual laws of nature. We have to ignore or find a way around stuff about how chemicals work that we really do know and use all the time.

It just doesn't make sense to me. And I've never heard an explanation for how it could work. All I hear is these marvelous claims about organic technology: Invincible protein armor! Growth ten times faster than anything found in nature! Conscious self-control over biochemical reactions at the cell level!

But no one ever provides anything that explains how such a thing could be made to work. And without such an explanation, I don't believe the marvelous claims. Because those claims violate things that we know to be true about the universe.
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An organic being would be able to make adaptations faster and easier than a machine because an organic being can try to instinctively or consciously adapt to things while a machine has to be told to either by entering commands for it or by giving it a program to base decisions on.Why are organic things automatically faster at adapting than a machine thing? The fact that something happens "instinctively" doesn't mean that it happens fast. And since the turnaround time for a decision in a computer can be measured in microseconds, the machines have a very big advantage in speed here. Hardware works faster than wetware, even if it can't always do all the things wetware can do.
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You're thinking about how a body needs an adequate blood supply to sustain a body. People with gigantism merely die because they grow beyond the ability of the heart to sustain, and the heart just gives out.

But that has nothing to do with the theoretical limits of what life is capable of. You just need a bigger heart for a bigger body.No, there's another problem.

When you make a creature twice as big (twice as tall, long, and wide) it becomes eight times as heavy. But it only has four times as much area in its feet, legs, base, or whatever is supporting it.

So every square inch of the support base is carrying twice as much weight, which is hard on it. Make them tall enough, and their muscles and bones won't be up to the task of carrying them around. Physical feats that would be easy for a human would be impossible for a giant human.

Also, the size of the heart you need grows faster than the size of the organism the heart supplies blood to. Someone suffering from giantism will grow a bigger heart over time, but the scaling factor kills them because it takes more than 10% more heart size to keep you going when your body size increases by 10%.
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Your brain does math when calculating how and when to throw a ball. It calculates things like wind resistance, the sweat between the ball and your hand and the position of the target. Just because we don't express these things as numbers doesn't mean we aren't doing math.Sure we're doing the math. A computer can in fact do the math faster, though.


If you could fully control your body in all ways you would be able to basically evolve yourself. This shouldn't be so hard to understand. What I'm saying should be common sense.

Your body has built in limitations. Guess what, if you could control your body the way you can a machine you could override those limitations.But how could you control your body that way? You can't just sit down and think "I want new enzymes to build me stronger bones" and make it so.

You'd have to sit down, figure out what needs doing (a complex exercise in biochemistry; we have no idea how to do it today), and rewrite your own DNA to make it happen. And you'd have to do this without disturbing any other part of your body's chemical balance in such a way as to injure or kill yourself.

I can't imagine how such a thing would be possible, and I do not understand why you are so certain that it can be done.

Designing a stronger machine is much easier because machines are simple. Organisms are complex. It takes hundreds of chemical reactions for your body to do anything, and if even a few of those reactions fail to happen you will be crippled or dead.
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That's how we got to being what we are today. Imagine if you could control your body to the degree you could a machine. You'd be able to create adaptations in yourself that take millions of years normally.Thing is, we don't control machines on the atomic level. We can't make the chemistry inside a machine work differently just by wanting it to. We have to put the right chemicals in to make the right results come out. Which is why putting sugar in someone's gas tank fries their engine. It makes the wrong things happen inside the car's engine.

You seem to expect us to be able to make chemistry work the way we desire inside a machine just by willing it to happen. And I don't see how that could be possible. There's no precedent for it in the universe that we know.
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Actually those things could work but nice try. If people simply can't grow larger without dying the way we currently are why is it not possible we could develop stronger bones/organs/other ways of gaining heat/whatever you'd like to complain about some time in the future?I don't know why it's not possible. What I do know is that I don't know why I should expect it to be possible. It doesn't get a free pass.

Faster than light travel and artificial gravity don't, either. But those things could exist without violating known facts about how the universe works, as an add-on to the known facts. Bioengineering that creates giants with strong enough muscles and bones to walk around despite being twenty feet tall could exist without violating known facts about how the universe works, too.

Bioengineering that creates something as strong as a modern tank cheaply and easily could not.


You people are arguing in a really narrow minded sounding fashion through the restraints on the knowledge of things we know today.I don't think you understand how my thought process is working here.

First of all, there are a (short) list of things that are known. There are laws of physics that actually work to describe things. There are physical properties of materials we use every day to design things that work. Those facts are in fact known. They are not predictions, guesses, hunches, or hypotheses. They have testable consequences, and when we apply the tests we find them to work.

These are not things where the verdict is going to be reversed tomorrow. We aren't going to wake up in the morning and find out that iron melts when you put it in boiling water, or that heat flows on its own from cold objects to hot objects, or that electromagnetic waves are twice as long as we thought they were.

Changing those things would require an act of God- something that could literally hack into the laws of how the universe works and change the laws.
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But those known facts have consequences. For example, they mean that you can't make a chemical reaction happen by thinking happy thoughts at it. You can't think "Hmm, I would like my muscles to be twice as strong" and make them twice as strong by force of will, any more than you can think "Hmm, I would like my car to be invulnerable so it never gets damage in a crash" and have it become invulnerable.

To make such a thing happen, you have to work for it. You have to fool around with the chemistry and the mechanics of what's going on. You have to find a better way. And there are limits on how good a way you can find. There are limits on how tough your car can be imposed by the strength of steel, by the need to burn gasoline, and so on.

Working with biological systems is complicated and hard. There are limits imposed by the fact that biological stuff is made out of carbon and water, by the fact that chemical reactions don't have 100% efficiency, and so on.

To get the kind of results you're implying, we'd have to pass those limits. But we can't pass those limits any more than we can make iron stronger by wishing at it. Those limits are in fact laws of nature, not just arbitrary random crap that happens to be in our way.
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Next you're going to say it's impossible for an organism not to be able to theoretically live forever even if it has unlimited resources to do so.No, I won't. Don't make up stuff about what I think is possible.

The problem here is that you're proposing things without proposing a way to make them happen. "Conscious control over your own biology" is not a method, it's a goal. How do we create an organism we can consciously control on the atomic level? I can't think of a way to do it, and I know more about chemistry, physics, and science in general than most people I know. Can you think of a way? If so, talk to us about it.


"No one will ever create a typewriter that types what we want to say without us physically touching the keys!!!"

Uh, voice dictation software and the computer? That's how you people sound.No, that's how we sound to you. There's a difference. Some of us here really do know what we're talking about. We are not making this up. Ask people who actually worry about biology and chemistry for a living. Get a second opinion. Do not take our word for it.

But (and this is important) get that second opinion from people with credentials. People who have spent years studying what meat, bone, and nerves can and cannot do. Those are the people you're depending on to make all these wonderful breakthroughs in biology, after all.


You think a turtle will NEVER be able to grow a shell that's basically made of steel regardless of how much time passes? Wow, get an imagination to go along with whatever scientific education you have. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will.I can imagine quite a bit. What I can't imagine is that all this will happen by the power of positive thinking. And if it won't happen by the power of positive thinking, there have to be ways to make it happen, physically. There have to be mechanisms within the laws of nature that allow it to happen.

Voice dictation software has a way to happen. You can design machines sensitive to speech. You can design machines that will analyze speech into digital data patterns, that can manipulate patterns, and that can assemble data patterns that we interpret as text. If you told me the basics about how such a machine works, I would believe it. I would have believed it long before such machines actually existed, because it doesn't violate any laws of physics for such a machine to exist.

There's a difference between things that violate laws of physics and things that don't. Things that don't... we could build those, maybe, if we were clever enough. Things that do just aren't in the cards.

So throw me a bone here. Give me some information on how to make a turtle with a steel shell. I'm not asking for specifics. Just something that gives me a clue as to how to go about finding specifics. Something that could be used as a launching point for further research.

[LurkerInPlayground]

No, there's another problem.

When you make a creature twice as big (twice as tall, long, and wide) it becomes eight times as heavy. But it only has four times as much area in its feet, legs, base, or whatever is supporting it.

So every square inch of the support base is carrying twice as much weight, which is hard on it. Make them tall enough, and their muscles and bones won't be up to the task of carrying them around. Physical feats that would be easy for a human would be impossible for a giant human.

Also, the size of the heart you need grows faster than the size of the organism the heart supplies blood to. Someone suffering from giantism will grow a bigger heart over time, but the scaling factor kills them because it takes more than 10% more heart size to keep you going when your body size increases by 10%.
Yes, yes, you raise a valid point and all that. Although I was thinking of something more conventional . . . like elephants really.

[Arakune]

Limitation due to how the machines are constructed: not the materials in construction. Parallel processing is a limitation of machines for now. It probably won’t be in a few decades. Like vacuum tubes were a limitation a few decades ago.

Some functions a processor perform needs to be preprocessed before going to the next stage of processing, making it necessary to "pause" the processing in a few clock cicles wasting precious time even with parallel processing.

Not only that but one of the biggest barrier of a processor are not only the size of the resistor, but the clock frequency. There is a limit a quartz cristal can achieve and you need better tecnologies just for that.

There are many problems with metal tecnology that the biological version are much better. If you can make a dedicated biological brain it would be a very good thing, and in fact there are research in that vein to finaly get to that point.

[Tar Palantir]

I don't think that either tech is inherently superior, it's just a matter of how much you know. You can do the same things with either if that path had been your specie's shtick. Humans use mostly metaltech. Ergo, we are better with metaltech. Duh. That doesn't mean that if we had started out with biotech, we couldn't have done the same things. We'd just have gone a different path to achieve them. Some things would have come faster, some slower. Interchangeable parts? Make the ship/gun/whatever out of several symbiotic creatures that can be removed/replaced easily. Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. The point is that while they have different advantages and disadvantages at low-tech levels, at higher tech levels they function equally, given an equal level of advancement.

[Dervag]

There are many problems with metal tecnology that the biological version are much better. If you can make a dedicated biological brain it would be a very good thing, and in fact there are research in that vein to finaly get to that point.Thing is, there are also many problems with biological technology that the metal version handles much better. And some of those problems are really big.


I don't think that either tech is inherently superior, it's just a matter of how much you know. You can do the same things with either if that path had been your specie's shtick. Humans use mostly metaltech. Ergo, we are better with metaltech. Duh. That doesn't mean that if we had started out with biotech, we couldn't have done the same things.But humans have been working with biotech for thousands of years. Dogs, for example, are biotech. At some point in the Stone Age, human beings tamed a pack of wolves and started subjecting them to selective breeding. Horses are biotech- same thing. Corn is biotech, and always has been. And so on.

Early biotech is stuff we're very familiar with, because it takes the form of finding creatures in nature and using them for our own ends, and maybe modifying them a little using protoscientific methods.
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The problem is that this kind of biotech starts running into walls at a certain point. The "Iron Age" techniques for making useful biotech don't lead naturally to further advances. The ancients didn't know why some horses were stronger than others, so all they could do was try to breed for strength. They couldn't have engineered horses for any capabilities beyond what they could achieve by selective breeding.
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To move beyond that, you have to understand how organisms work on the chemical and physical levels. And that kind of knowledge comes from working with "metaltech." For instance, we found out how DNA works by doing X-ray diffraction studies to deduce its molecular structure.

If we'd been using biotech for everything, how would we have found out how DNA works? We couldn't have done it using X-ray diffraction, because there's no way in hell we could create a life form that generates X-rays without using genetic engineering. Which we couldn't have done without knowing how DNA works.

Maybe we could have done it some other way, but it's hard to imagine what that way could be. And I don't just mean "we don't know how to build it." I mean "we don't have a clue how, while obeying the laws of physics, we could have such a beast work."

Until we found that other way by luck, immense effort, or deus ex machina, our biotech would not be able to move on. We'd be stuck relying on nature to provide us the tools we needed, with effectively no ability to design the tools we needed.
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The problem with biotech is that the fantastic capabilities of "advanced" biotech aren't logically connected to the mundane capabilities of the everyday biotech we find in the real world. Before we could use our extensive knowledge of metaltech to build and control machines that can study and modify organisms, our ability to manipulate living creatures was very limited. So how could we have mastered biotech without first mastering metaltech? And how could aliens have done the same?

[Fri]

I think one of Michael Crichton's novel (forgot which one) addressed this a bit, as a minor chat or something. Basically, alien civilization is alien, and they might evolve their technology differently. There might be an alien civilization where biotech flourished instead of mechanical technology like us, or alien civilization that never got physical technology that far and using mental technology/psychology/psychic whatever instead.

For them, our steel and gear technology would be as alien and maybe looks as advanced as their technology to us.

We see, holy ****, they use living snake as gun!
They see, holy ****, they use steel rod as gun!

[Halna LeGavilk]

I think it depends on what becomes possible in the future. Yes, a bike wheel is easier to fix than a horse's leg, but what would happen if you shear off the leg and replace it with a new one? I'm not saying it's possible now, or even int the future, but we're talking complete speculation on both sides anyway.

[Battleship789]

Wow, this thread has been moving along since I went to sleep last night...

In response to questions on my horse vs. particle accelerator statement: I did revise my questioning at the bottom of page 2 to a horse vs. motorbike argument after reading some counterpoints. Please feel free to redirect your statements/arguments to that comparison, as it is a much better approximation.

To those saying it is impossible to grow a capital ship-sized ship due to the physical laws of nature: yes, it is impossible for a single organism to be that large. However, symbiotic relationships between hundreds of thousands of smaller animals would work, each type of creature fufilling a seprate role (I believe this is where the "purpose grown organism" comes into play.) I.e. one type of creature can survive in vacuum and has a very tough shell so it becomes the hull, while another organism controls communication between each of the other animals, etc.. Though this is incredibly complicated, it is not much more complicated than trying to construct a ship capable of fighting in space.


The problem with biotech is that the fantastic capabilities of "advanced" biotech aren't logically connected to the mundane capabilities of the everyday biotech we find in the real world. Before we could use our extensive knowledge of metaltech to build and control machines that can study and modify organisms, our ability to manipulate living creatures was very limited. So how could we have mastered biotech without first mastering metaltech? And how could aliens have done the same?

I think the phrase we are missing from this discussion is: alien. Perhaps the alien race discovered metal tech, advanced enough to duplicate their metal tech with organisms and made a complete switch for some reason (be it religious, technological (i.e. this works better), or natural (out of metallic resouces)).

We cannot assume that a species from a different planet, with different organisms, has the limitations in the field of biology that we do. We obviously don't have the same metaltech capabilities as a space-faring species, so why should we assume that someone's biotech isn't above ours? Just because we have not figured out how to do it doesn't mean it cannot be done. Though, this does it explicitly state that it can be done. I am merely brining these points up to further the discussion as my opinion on this argument has already been stated.


So throw me a bone here. Give me some information on how to make a turtle with a steel shell. I'm not asking for specifics. Just something that gives me a clue as to how to go about finding specifics. Something that could be used as a launching point for further research.

Just for fun, I will throw an idea out. Feel free to rip it apart as you see fit: By following the laws of natural selection we could say that a turtle's shell (on the average) would become more durable, over long amounts of time, if they were subjected to a force that would break some shells, and not others. This would cause the turtles with harder shells to survive and reproduce, meaning that the next generation's shells would be even tougher (on average), with each subsequent generation having tougher and tougher shells. Though there is probably a physical limit to this, it is a good starting point.

[MeklorIlavator]

I think it depends on what becomes possible in the future. Yes, a bike wheel is easier to fix than a horse's leg, but what would happen if you shear off the leg and replace it with a new one? I'm not saying it's possible now, or even int the future, but we're talking complete speculation on both sides anyway.

But that doesn't mean anything. You forget that you don't need to feed a bike. Nor do you need to keep exercising a bike, and what you do have to do is on an order of magnitude less. And that's not even considering the fact that cars are much better, and there's nothing out there that would suggest that a biological construct could do better.

[Battleship789]

But that doesn't mean anything. You forget that you don't need to feed a bike. Nor do you need to keep exercising a bike, and what you do have to do is on an order of magnitude less. And that's not even considering the fact that cars are much better, and there's nothing out there that would suggest that a biological construct could do better.

But you do have to feed/water the person using the bike. Without a person riding the bike, it cannot go anywhere. A bike is better said to be a tool rather than a machine. This is why I believe that a motorcycle is the better example, after reexamining the facts after a good night's sleep. A motor cycle only needs fuel and maintainence to actually move (assuming we don't need to steer it or correct it's balance), much like a horse.

Edit: Also, a horse can be told what to do (within its intelligence), while a motorcycle must be led through everything that may cause it a problem, which increases the amount of energy it takes to use a motorcycle.

[Lamech]

Because those claims violate things that we know to be true about the universe.
Erm... wasn't this about sci-fi stuff at the start? Like say star-wars and species 8472? 'Cause in star-wars I think bio-tech wins by force and species 8472 (if I recall correctly) has a SEVERAL LIGHT YEAR long fleet of smallish tightly packed ships, which a few ships of can blow up planets. Those really shouldn't have real science involved. There both probably magic (force/psychic) or some such.


Now on to the real world. Okay biotech horse vs. metaltech motorcycle: I assume all living creatures and there dead parts are bio-tech? The horse wins 'cause the motorcycle can't go ANYWHERE. Unless we're feeding it dead lizards which are bio-tech. Now the horse is pretty crappy too. Feeding it food that is hand grown will be expensive. And good luck fixing a broken bone with out proper surgical tools. But it is better than the non-moving motorcycle.
The point of that little exercise was to show separating them is a bad idea. Use both. Maybe computers are better at aiming guns, but brains are better at strategizing. So take a genetically engineered brain have it strategize, and let the comps run the turrets. Limiting yourself to one or the other is pointless...

[LurkerInPlayground]

Just for fun, I will throw an idea out. Feel free to rip it apart as you see fit: By following the laws of natural selection we could say that a turtle's shell (on the average) would become more durable, over long amounts of time, if they were subjected to a force that would break some shells, and not others. This would cause the turtles with harder shells to survive and reproduce, meaning that the next generation's shells would be even tougher (on average), with each subsequent generation having tougher and tougher shells. Though there is probably a physical limit to this, it is a good starting point.
That would probably just create a turtle with a shell that was just hard enough to keep enough turtles alive to reproduce. Or the turtles might hypothetically develop a strategy for avoiding that force alltogether.

Finally, maybe the turtle just goes extinct because nothing was "quite good enough."

If it created a turtle with a metallic shell, that'd be kinda weird.

[Battleship789]

That would probably just create a turtle with a shell that was just hard enough to keep enough turtles alive to reproduce. Or the turtles might hypothetically develop a strategy for avoiding that force alltogether.

Finally, maybe the turtle just goes extinct because nothing was "quite good enough."

If it created a turtle with a metallic shell, that'd be kinda weird.

Oops, didn't specifiy. The force would increase slightly each generation, as to keep the bar going higher.

This is a very possible outcome, that is why it is a starting point. Running multiple tests at the same time, with different turtles/forces, would be necessary (it is an experiment).

I don't think I clarified the shell either. It would just be as strong as steel, not necessary steel itself.

[warty goblin]

On the topic of biotech in general, as I said earlier, it could be incredibly useful, depending on what you want to do with it. Food,to go off of Dervag's example. I'll hazard that organisms will remain the most efficient way to fabricate energy for people for a very long time, because we were designed by evolution to eat the sorts of things that other organisms are evolutionarily designed to make. The processes for making living tissue are enormously complex, complex enough that it would be highly difficult to design a machine to do the same thing.

On the use of biotech as weaponry. Definitely yes, but not in the way people think. Hordes of super-bugs overrunning armored divisions simply isn't a reasonable thing to hypothesize, nor is bat-winged horrors dogfighting with aircraft, leviathans moving between stars instead of hulks of steel and plastic, or anything of that nature. Pathogens, destabilizing ecosystems and things of that nature however are reasonable things to hypothesize for any interstellar scale conflict, and could be really quite devastating if used intelligently. Why bother to bomb or conquer a planet when you can drop fifteen or twenty pathogens and insect-sized life forms, which either destroy primary food crops directly, or else kill off the natural predators of the main pests of food crops. Its actually a better attack than invading or bombing the planet, there's no infastructure damage, the enemy now has a planet-sized humanitarian crisis, and it cost you a couple hundred vats of bacteria. Plus it gives you an excellent opportunity to win some love from the population should you be able to occupy the planet- just give them microbes that prey on the ones you set lose to begin with.

This is also an effect that it would be damn hard to get from machinery. Non-organic nanotech won't do it, foodstuffs won't have the raw materials to allow them to self-replicate. As previously pointed out, bombing the planet is a poor solution if you want things intact, and tends to piss people off.

[Midnighter1021]

I probably didn't read this while I was skimming throught the whole forum post but what about the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis. I mean their entire technological base is organic and a Hive ship seems pretty powerful. Or even the hive ship from the season finally which not only crippled the Deadelus, the Apollo, and the new unknown about ship the Sun Tzu, and took on Altantis, for weak organic technology it really took it to those ships.

[Talkkno]

I probably didn't read this while I was skimming throught the whole forum post but what about the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis. I mean their entire technological base is organic and a Hive ship seems pretty powerful. Or even the hive ship from the season finally which not only crippled the Deadelus, the Apollo, and the new unknown about ship the Sun Tzu, and took on Altantis, for weak organic technology it really took it to those ships.
Since when Pop sci fi has any base in reality?

[Kane]

Oraganic technology tends to mean life. You create life forms to do the things that mean doing.

Which means, in effect, a rigorously enforced caste system. (Your tank has to be a tank, your ship has to be a ship, nobody has any choice; that's all they can do.)

Which reeks of dirty reds!, or possibly fascism, and is an affront to freedom-loving societies in general, which, as it happens, tend to make the most games.

Whoops. Almost forgot: If human technology was better, humans would be winning.

Humans are not winning, the game/book/movie is about our glorious triumph over the vicious, in human aliens and impossible odds. (And if you make them have better technology, that means they might be better than us, to counter act the fact that we are special, (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreSpecial) that is, until the protagonist shows up. (In which case we win.)

And, as another reason, living things on average tend to be much, MUCH more efficient than mechanical things. (Though that's just because we can't engineer something with the detail of a cell, I understand.)

[Gavin Sage]

I probably didn't read this while I was skimming throught the whole forum post but what about the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis. I mean their entire technological base is organic and a Hive ship seems pretty powerful. Or even the hive ship from the season finally which not only crippled the Deadelus, the Apollo, and the new unknown about ship the Sun Tzu, and took on Altantis, for weak organic technology it really took it to those ships.

Given that the whole point of this thread is arguing over the plausiblity of things like that your example isn't terribly meaningful.

To be superior the technology has to out preform without relying on heavier amounts of ad-hoc plot device. Its possible to see mechanical energy weapons for example because we already have lasers, but how would you even begin to go about doing that biologically?

[Midnighter1021]

Yeah I sort of forgot about the energy weapons that they use. my mistake.

[Talya]

Carbon does not mean Organic. There are plastics made out of carbon.

Yes, plastics are made out of petroleum products. Petroleum is organic.
Plastics are organic. As are diamonds.


Organic matter (or organic material) is matter that has come from a once-living organism; is capable of decay, or the product of decay; or is composed of organic compounds. The definition of organic matter varies upon the subject it is being used for.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Actually, pure Carbon (e.g. diamonds, coal, graphite) is not organic. Not all Carbon-containing molecules are considered Organic for a variety of poorly-defined reasons, but that's chemists for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound


An organic compound is any member of a large class of chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon. For historical reasons discussed below, a few types of compounds such as carbonates, simple oxides of carbon and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon, are considered inorganic. The division between "organic" and "inorganic" carbon compounds while "useful in organizing the vast subject of chemistry...is somewhat arbitrary"[1].

However, I think arguing over the semantics of "organic" isn't all that productive to the subject of this thread, which was clearly originally intended to refer to Organisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism) used in a technological capacity.

[Talya]

Actually, pure Carbon (e.g. diamonds, coal, graphite) is not organic. Not all Carbon-containing molecules are considered Organic for a variety of poorly-defined reasons, but that's chemists for you.

Using the definition above of organic: "matter that has come from a once-living organism," diamonds would still generally qualify, since I'm basically wearing prehistoric plants and dinosaur soft tissue on my ring finger.

[Kane]

[snip]
but how would you even begin to go about doing that biologically?
Pretty simple, I think; any eye is proof that organics can created lenses, and it's also possible for organics to create gasses. And electricity. (Electric eel, anyone?)

Charge a gas, generate light. Focus light through proper lens, or series of lenses. Presto.
Vastly simplified, partially because, more specifically than that, I wouldn't know where to begin, but I believe that's more than possible.

Damn near impossible to evolve by itself, though. (Gas chamber, charger, and lenses seem to be useless without each other.)

[Talya]

Damn near impossible to evolve by itself, though. (Gas chamber, charger, and lenses seem to be useless without each other.)

Ah. "Irreducible complexity." That whole line of limitations on evolution has mostly been debunked, though there's still an issue with bats.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Using the definition above of organic: "matter that has come from a once-living organism," diamonds would still generally qualify, since I'm basically wearing prehistoric plants and dinosaur soft tissue on my ring finger.But that's still not the definition of organic that we're using here. The semantics of it are irrelevant; we mean technology-purposed organisms. This is just a point where the word is poorly defined between different scientific disciplines.

[Talya]

But that's still not the definition of organic that we're using here. The semantics of it are irrelevant; we mean technology-purposed organisms. This is just a point where the word is poorly defined between different scientific disciplines.

At that point you run into the issue of what constitutes an "organism" or "life."

Familiar Carbon-based life is not likely the only type that has evolved. You're talking about sci-fi. Life that may have evolved under the swirling winds and horrific pressure of a gas giant, for example, may be hardier than anything we can easily create mechanically. For instance, a being with a carapace made of aggregated diamond nanorods...

And what really is the difference between life and mechanical? We are basically nothing more than electro-chemical based machinery.

[KnightDisciple]

Ah. "Irreducible complexity." That whole line of limitations on evolution has mostly been debunked, though there's still an issue with bats.

A.) So why aren't there critters with lasers? :smallwink:
B.) If there's still "an issue", that might mean it's not completely "debunked":smallwink:
C.) The lenses needed would seem to be impossible to occur naturally. For one thing, wouldn't they need to stand up to at least decent heat? For another, the amount of energy needed would seem hard for an organism to generate. I mean, eels don't really put out that much current, it just hurts (well, that plus our hearts can get messed up by shocks like that), right? Lasers, to really do anything, need loads of power. We're still working on getting them into something smaller than a jumbo jet, between the gasses, mechanism/lenses for focusing, and the power requirements.
And you expect me to believe this could just kind of happen naturally? :smallconfused:

[Innis Cabal]

There are medical laser that are rather small, and certianly smaller then the ones on jets. As for those lasers, we are trying to put them on attack planes, not jumbo jets.


If an organism can evolve to the point where the len's they have operate in such a manner to produce lasers the likelyhood of their bioelectricity would be far more evolved then a simple electric eel.

[Talya]

A.) So why aren't there critters with lasers? :smallwink:

Maybe there are! I am still hoping for sharks with fricken laser beams attached to their heads. My cycloptic colleague informs me though that this is not possible...


B.) If there's still "an issue", that might mean it's not completely "debunked":smallwink:

That's why I said "mostly," not "completely." :)



C.) The lenses needed would seem to be impossible to occur naturally. For one thing, wouldn't they need to stand up to at least decent heat? For another, the amount of energy needed would seem hard for an organism to generate. I mean, eels don't really put out that much current, it just hurts (well, that plus our hearts can get messed up by shocks like that), right? Lasers, to really do anything, need loads of power. We're still working on getting them into something smaller than a jumbo jet, between the gasses, mechanism/lenses for focusing, and the power requirements.
And you expect me to believe this could just kind of happen naturally? :smallconfused:


You're assuming earth-norms for evolved life. And a laser is just highly focused light. Many animals are already bioluminescent. Now it's just a matter of amplifying that...


Familiar Carbon-based life is not likely the only type that has evolved. You're talking about sci-fi. Life that may have evolved under the swirling winds and horrific pressure of a gas giant, for example, may be hardier than anything we can easily create mechanically. For instance, a being with a carapace made of aggregated diamond nanorods...

[Dervag]

I think it depends on what becomes possible in the future. Yes, a bike wheel is easier to fix than a horse's leg, but what would happen if you shear off the leg and replace it with a new one? I'm not saying it's possible now, or even int the future, but we're talking complete speculation on both sides anyway.It may well become possible, but it will never become easier than repairing a bicycle. Bicycle wheels can be repaired quickly using unskilled labor and hand tools. Horse legs cannot; there's too much microscopic-scale alignment to do. And growing a horse a new leg will assuredly require something more complicated than what it takes to make new bicycle wheels. If it didn't, we'd already be able to do it.

God knows the incentive has been there for thousands of years. We've had horses with wounded legs for a long time now.
_______


To those saying it is impossible to grow a capital ship-sized ship due to the physical laws of nature: yes, it is impossible for a single organism to be that large. However, symbiotic relationships between hundreds of thousands of smaller animals would work, each type of creature fufilling a seprate role (I believe this is where the "purpose grown organism" comes into play.) I.e. one type of creature can survive in vacuum and has a very tough shell so it becomes the hull, while another organism controls communication between each of the other animals, etc.. Though this is incredibly complicated, it is not much more complicated than trying to construct a ship capable of fighting in space.The problem is that each organism is liable to do more things that can go wrong with it than a hunk of metal and circuits designed to do the same job. It has to do its job and stay alive, which is more difficult than just doing the job. Machines, which aren't alive, don't have to do the extra work of staying alive. This makes them simpler. Which is why a motorbike, which only has to carry you, is simpler than a horse, which has to stay alive while carrying you.


I think the phrase we are missing from this discussion is: alien. Perhaps the alien race discovered metal tech, advanced enough to duplicate their metal tech with organisms and made a complete switch for some reason (be it religious, technological (i.e. this works better), or natural (out of metallic resouces)).It's at least plausible as a handwave. What's absent is a reason to expect it to happen. Or to take it on faith that it will happen, that the future of technology is organic, or that the organic technology will be superior to the users of metal technology. Or, for that matter, that the organic technology will be equal to metal technology.

Which, as you may have noticed on this thread, some people do.
______


Just for fun, I will throw an idea out. Feel free to rip it apart as you see fit: By following the laws of natural selection we could say that a turtle's shell (on the average) would become more durable, over long amounts of time, if they were subjected to a force that would break some shells, and not others. This would cause the turtles with harder shells to survive and reproduce, meaning that the next generation's shells would be even tougher (on average), with each subsequent generation having tougher and tougher shells. Though there is probably a physical limit to this, it is a good starting point.There's a catch. First of all, making a harder shell takes resources that could otherwise be spent building stronger turtle muscles or surviving longer between batches of turtle food. Turtles that put more resources into shell growing might well be at a disadvantage compared to slightly softer but otherwise more capable turtles.

Second, this process only keeps working as long as genetics can keep supplying the DNA for stronger turtle shells. At some point, this process stops. If we're talking earthly biology, there's no way for turtles to stop making shells out of turtleshell and start making them out of reinforced titanium. Or to make shells that can withstand 300 degree temperatures without baking the turtle alive. Or to do any number of other things along those lines. DNA codes for certain kinds of chemistry, and those kinds of chemical processes can't grow thick layers of metal.

Evolution, be it by natural or artificial selection, is limited to working on the available genes: whatever is around plus whatever new stuff trickles in by mutation. And it stops once it reaches a "good enough" solution. It doesn't just keep going until you have the ultimate being you can dream of. Which is why lions aren't bulletproof and birds don't break the sound barrier.

Also, this won't give you turtles with a shell like tank armor. The only reason for a turtle to grow a shell like tank armor is if people are shooting cannons at it. And if you try to evolve tougher turtles by firing cannons at them and breeding the ones who survive, you're in for a disappointment. None of the naturally evolved turtles will survive cannons, because artillery strikes don't happen in the wild.
______


But you do have to feed/water the person using the bike. Without a person riding the bike, it cannot go anywhere. A bike is better said to be a tool rather than a machine. This is why I believe that a motorcycle is the better example, after reexamining the facts after a good night's sleep. A motor cycle only needs fuel and maintainence to actually move (assuming we don't need to steer it or correct it's balance), much like a horse.

Edit: Also, a horse can be told what to do (within its intelligence), while a motorcycle must be led through everything that may cause it a problem, which increases the amount of energy it takes to use a motorcycle.A horse is better at figuring out what it needs to do than a motorcycle, but a motorcycle is better at getting you where you want to go. A car is better still.

Cars and motorcycles replaced horses for a reason. People who were intimately familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of horses and cars made an informed decision to drive cars rather than ride horses. I think they were right to do so, under the circumstances.
______


Erm... wasn't this about sci-fi stuff at the start? Like say star-wars and species 8472?In good science fiction, there's a presumption that the basic laws of physics normally work. General relativity may get tied into knots, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't. There are good reasons for doing it this way. I tend to extend the assumption that the science fiction I'm talking about is good. That means that I can use the known laws of physics except when they are specifically overruled by laws established within the setting.


Now on to the real world. Okay biotech horse vs. metaltech motorcycle: I assume all living creatures and there dead parts are bio-tech? The horse wins 'cause the motorcycle can't go ANYWHERE. Unless we're feeding it dead lizards which are bio-tech. Now the horse is pretty crappy too. Feeding it food that is hand grown will be expensive. And good luck fixing a broken bone with out proper surgical tools. But it is better than the non-moving motorcycle.Wait, what? I'm not sure I understand how the motorcycle ceased to move.

My point all along was that a motorcycle is a better tool than a horse. You can use a motorcycle better than a horse for the things that both are used to do. The motorcycle takes less effort to maintain, goes faster, and is less temperamental and easier to fix. It has some drawbacks (a horse won't crash into a tree because its rider is drunk), but the drawbacks aren't big enough to cancel out the advantages. Which is why modern people, who have a choice, choose motorcycles and not horses.

I would argue that this is true in general, with maybe a few specific exceptions (like making judgement calls in complex situations). Thus, a species which uses organic technology for almost everything is crippling itself to a much greater degree than one that uses metal technology for almost everything.
________


Oops, didn't specifiy. The force would increase slightly each generation, as to keep the bar going higher.

This is a very possible outcome, that is why it is a starting point. Running multiple tests at the same time, with different turtles/forces, would be necessary (it is an experiment).

I don't think I clarified the shell either. It would just be as strong as steel, not necessary steel itself.This is gonna take way longer than designing the steel shell yourself and strapping it to the turtle's back. Which is a metaltech solution to the problem of "we need a steel-shelled turtle."
______


And, as another reason, living things on average tend to be much, MUCH more efficient than mechanical things. (Though that's just because we can't engineer something with the detail of a cell, I understand.)Efficient in what way? I'm not sure what you mean. Could you give an example?
______


Using the definition above of organic: "matter that has come from a once-living organism," diamonds would still generally qualify, since I'm basically wearing prehistoric plants and dinosaur soft tissue on my ring finger.Aside from the observation that there's probably one very lucky fella out there...:smallsmile:

You have a point. Although that diamond was probably formed long before the dinosaurs. Or, for that matter, multicelled life, if Wikipedia is to believed about where organic-origin diamonds come from.

Thing is, diamonds also form by inorganic processes. So I think it's a little disingenous to talk about diamond as "organic." Sure, it can be formed from the remains of living creatures, but it can also be formed when a meteor hits some barren carbonaceous rock out in space.

Moreover, the conditions under which diamond can form are very unfriendly to puppies, small children, and other living things. It's hard for me to imagine an organism capable of growing diamond on or inside its own body.
______


Pretty simple, I think; any eye is proof that organics can created lenses, and it's also possible for organics to create gasses. And electricity. (Electric eel, anyone?)

Charge a gas, generate light. Focus light through proper lens, or series of lenses. Presto.That gets you a flashlight, not a laser. Moreover, a weapons-grade laser will burn up the kinds of materials that known eyeballs are made from, which is why using high power lasers creates the risk of going blind. Even with lasers that are conspicuously unable to burn holes in armor plate, people can go blind from accidents, because even modest amounts of laser light can really eff up the lenses of your eyes.

Glass is more durable.

That said, it's at least remotely possible that you could make a laser from organic parts. I'd never expect it to happen in a million years, even if people were trying to create it knowing exactly how lasers work. Which pretty much requires them to have reached our level of metaltech, in which case why are they screwing around making organic lasers instead of metaltech ones?

But I'll admit that I think it could happen, maybe kinda sorta. It doesn't actively break any known rules. Until you start talking about lasers intense enough to be useful for industrial cutting applications and things like that, at least.

But creatures with built-in laser ranging? I can imagine it... barely. I won't tell anyone it's impossible.
_____


Ah. "Irreducible complexity." That whole line of limitations on evolution has mostly been debunked, though there's still an issue with bats.Not quite.

The way we debunk the "irreducible complexity" objection is by showing that the system is reducibly complex. Knock out a piece and the system will still work for something, just not as well.

But a laser isn't going to work with the lasing medium knocked out, or with the focusing lenses missing. Lasers require a very specific and special configuration of mirrors and lenses to work at all, which is why no one managed to build one until the 1960s. Eyeballs will work if their lenses aren't in the right place; I should know. But lasers don't work if their mirrors aren't evolved into the right alignment yet. And until the laser eyes start working, there's no reason for the organism to have proto-laser eye capabilities.

I'd expect natural infrared vision or something like that to be far more likely than natural laser vision. I can imagine genetically engineered laser vision, though.
_____


Maybe there are! I am still hoping for sharks with fricken laser beams attached to their heads. My cycloptic colleague informs me though that this is not possible...Oh, you could do it. You could attach metaltech lasers to the head of a shark. Maybe not powerful enough to kill Austin Powers, but genuine honest-to-God "you could put someone's eye out with that thing" lasers.

You could probably even wire the lasers into the shark's nervous system somehow, so that it would fire a laser beam whenever it blinked. Well, if sharks blink. I don't think they do, actually. But you get the idea...


You're assuming earth-norms for evolved life. And a laser is just highly focused light. Many animals are already bioluminescent. Now it's just a matter of amplifying that...Not quite. There are some really nasty tricks you have to figure out before you can generate a beam of coherent laser light. It's more complicated than just running a flashlight beam through a lens.
______

[Nerd-o-rama]

At that point you run into the issue of what constitutes an "organism" or "life."

Familiar Carbon-based life is not likely the only type that has evolved. You're talking about sci-fi. Life that may have evolved under the swirling winds and horrific pressure of a gas giant, for example, may be hardier than anything we can easily create mechanically. For instance, a being with a carapace made of aggregated diamond nanorods...

And what really is the difference between life and mechanical? We are basically nothing more than electro-chemical based machinery.Very true, and a valid point. In fact, now that we're back on topic, I agree completely. There's not a solid line between technology and organisms, and I think that most feats are doable from either end of the spectrum; just some are easier to do with some components than others, and vice versa. My answer to this topic as presented is "no, they're equal, and not really that different in the first place."

Computers and machines evolving naturally...I read a Clarke short story like that once. It started off on a planet trapped between galaxies, with temperatures near absolute-zero...naturally, life evolved there in the form of superconducting crystalline structures. When it eventually discovered other intelligent beings made of superheated mostly-water that claimed to have created silicon intelligences and was using them as tools, well...the title of the story was "Crusade", I believe.

[KnightDisciple]

Very true, and a valid point. In fact, now that we're back on topic, I agree completely. There's not a solid line between technology and organisms, and I think that most feats are doable from either end of the spectrum; just some are easier to do with some components than others, and vice versa. My answer to this topic as presented is "no, they're equal, and not really that different in the first place."

Computers and machines evolving naturally...I read a Clarke short story like that once. It started off on a planet trapped between galaxies, with temperatures near absolute-zero...naturally, life evolved there in the form of superconducting crystalline structures. When it eventually discovered other intelligent beings made of superheated mostly-water that claimed to have created silicon intelligences and was using them as tools, well...the title of the story was "Crusade", I believe.

Alternatively known as "HK-47's paradise".

[Yulian]

Conversely...we could postulate that future technology will use both, as needed: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/14/robot-with-rat-brain-robo_n_119057.html

"The robot's biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain's output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain."

Obviously someone thinks using neurons has some advantages.

- Yulian

[Myrmex]

I've been lurking here for awhile (love the comic!) and decided to join cause of this thread. It's very fascinating!

I don't think you guys are giving enough credit to biotechnology, and I think it's because you can think of the proper analogues for technological things, but not biological.

Life on earth has evolved under a set of conditions very different than the ones you see in typical sci-fi stuff, like Star Wars. Sure, you could vaporize a horse with a plasma gun, but that's sort of missing the point.

A horse has undergone millions of years of evolution to be extremely good at being a horse, followed by thousands of years of domestication. If you want to get around in the sort of terrain a horse does, you know the best way to do it? Ride the horse. The horse, unlike your land rover, won't run out of gas. It can eat along the way. A broken part on the horse will fix itself, unlike a broken land rover. And the best part- your horse will make more horses.

As for hardness of biological weapons vs. technological ones, for current conditions, technological ones are clearly superior. But what if we designed the biologicals to compete with the metal-ships?

Hardened carapaces of durasteel or adamantium, with plasma weapons and all that jazz. It would be exactly like a metal ship in regards of shooting and getting shot, but it would be able to a) reproduce b) self-repair c) adapt.

I've seen mentioned that:
organics can't shoot plasma because that would be dumb
spider silk is flammable; all carbon is; therefore organics would melt
metal is better, and horses aren't made out of metal

Metal in the ovipositors of hymenoptera:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120802235/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Note that it is manganese, an element we harden our steel drill bits with. Which isn't surprising; many hymenoptera, such as the ichneumonid wasp, drills through wood with its ovipositor to lay eggs on larvae inside.

The bombadier beetle sprays boiling liquids at enemies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombadier_Beetle

The whip scorpion can spray enemies with concentrated acetic acid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_scorpion

The pistol shrimp uses a cooler version of bubble fusion to kill and stun prey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKPrGxB1Kzc

By cooler, I mean 9900C.


As you can see, there already exists in nature things that spray acid, have sonic lances, or cuticles hardened with metal. It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine a sufficiently advanced technology that can have entire organisms encased in metal or shooting plasma.

Let's look at some advantages that biological systems have over the sort of ones we use currently:

Enzymes are millions of times faster at creating things than our current methods. Smelting steel is incredibly inefficient compared to a wasp impregnating its ovipositor with manganese. The synthesis of DNA, for instance, occurs at room temperature with concentrations of materials measured in micromolars. By comparison, a typical PCR requires concentrations a 100x higher, or more, and 3x as much heat. Not to mention that a PCR is using cannibalized enzymes, anyway.

Repair systems. Every piece of an organism was assembled by the organism, while it still had to function! No machine can boast this. A frog egg, since the moment of conception, had to construct everything while still being functional. It had to breathe before it had lungs, develop a heart before it had a circulatory system, grow a brain before it could think. Imagine a tank that could assemble itself after you put it in a puddle.

Reproduction: biologicals multiply. What's better than a bad ass space ship? A bad ass space ship that makes more bad ass space ships.

Material & energy assimilation. Biologicals can consume things from the environment to repair, grow, or reproduce.


Alright, let's build a biological ship. (spoilered for length)
First, it needs a hull. It will be metal, of course, or whatever the non-biological ships are using, and it will be just as good, if not better. The biological ship will have constructed the hull on the molecular level, laying down layer upon layer of steel or whatever in the perfect lattice to give maximum strength, thanks to enzymes designed especially for the task.

Beneath the hull, there would be a large layer of insulation and fluids that would move from one area to another, so as too keep heat in any one place from becoming too high. In case enemy plasma beams were really cooking the ship, the fluid could be dumped to get rid of the heat. The heat would also be used to run biological systems, by turning on motor proteins that generate proton gradients which can be used to synthesize energy molecules.

Serious hull breaches would be oriented away from the enemy, so as to minimize repeated damage, and they would scab over to prevent loss of fluids and insides to the vacuum of space. A replacement hull section could then be put into place, perhaps a sort of softer alloy that would be kept at a liquid, but rapidly solidify, much like the way our blood clots. It wouldn't be as durable as the regular hull, but it would at least serve as some protection.

Within the inner layer of the hull, nerve tendrils and vasculature, which would be too small to reduce structural integrity, could monitor damage and lay down emergency layers of carapace, like reactive armor. Later, when the armor wasn't needed, it could be recycled elsewhere, as energy or material, or both.

Weapons can be projectile or plasma. Projectile weapons can by fired using rapidly expanding material, such as gases or gelatin, or something that expands rapidly when mixed with another catalyst. These chemicals can easily be synthesized by the ship.

If mass drivers are in play, the ship could construct one of its own, though it would function in much the same way as a normal mass driver would (magnets make something go pew pew).

Plasma could be generated in compartments separate from ones that would get damaged by the gas. Lens could be grown and light generated by chemical reaction to run the laser that would strip gas of its electrons.

Everything in the ship would be compartmentalized, and materials would be moved through the ship to where they needed to be. While specialized organs would synthesize ammunition, replacement parts, or fuel, any piece of the ship could, albeit less efficiently, make its own replacement or ammo, since it has all the required info and building blocks.

Organs that are lost of destroyed could be regrown in other areas. Ones that aren't being used could be recycled into organs that are needed. If the ship needs to go fast, it could recycle the guns & ammo producing organs into whatever Magicum makes ships go FTL.

The ship wouldn't need a crew, as it would BE the crew. For planetary side stuff, whether exploration or invasion, it could grow its own custom soldiers and drop them down to deal with a magma planet or a dead moon or a hostile jungle. These little pieces of the ship would have all the advantages of a biological, being able to repair itself, etc.

And of course, the ship could make more of itself. Potentially, given the right conditions, any piece that broke off could grow into another ship. The ship would land on a planet with the right conditions, leave behind as much of itself as it thought safe, and take off. The left behind ship bits would be able to use the environment to become larger and eventually acquire the necessary stuff to become a space ship. It would be much the same to how an egg laid in a puddle of water on the forest floor hatches into a swimming tadpole, and then metamorphoses into an adult frog that can travel into the tree tops. At every stage in the frogs development, given its environment, the frog had all the necessary tools to live.

Whew! Long post.

[bosssmiley]

Has anyone mentioned Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" yet*? (link to pdf (http://www.kk.org/books/ooc-mf.pdf))

Mr Kelly suggests that as our technology matures it will gradually take on more quasi-organic qualities, simply because these are the most efficient solutions to many of the problems posed by the world. I can see his reasoning. I mean, we've had a science of machines for - what? - 300 years or so; biology has been tinkering and rejecting failures for 100s of millions of years...

* I did run a search for the phrase in the thread, but found no matches.

[Myrmex]

That's one of the costs to losses of biodiversity- novel molecules disappearing forever. Many of our drugs are derivative of something we found in a plant, and virtually all of them came from the biological world. There are very few drugs or treatments that we synthesized de novo.

[Dervag]

A horse has undergone millions of years of evolution to be extremely good at being a horse, followed by thousands of years of domestication. If you want to get around in the sort of terrain a horse does, you know the best way to do it? Ride the horse. The horse, unlike your land rover, won't run out of gas. It can eat along the way. A broken part on the horse will fix itself, unlike a broken land rover. And the best part- your horse will make more horses.Except that some of the broken parts on the horse won't fix themselves and can't be replaced except by elaborate use of technological solutions. Like the horse's nerves and tendons. If a horse falls and gets a serious knee injury, you can't just swap in a new knee. Whereas any part of a broken land rover can be exchanged for a replacement using a relatively simple toolkit and skill set.

Likewise, the horse will grow exhausted (the land rover won't). The horse's carrying capacity is limited to something on the order of 100-200 kilograms (the land rover's carrying capacity isn't).

Moreover, land rovers can be made quickly, at will, once the tools to make them exist at all. With a horse, you have to sit around and wait for it to be conceived, be born, and mature before you can ride it. Manufacturing a land rover takes a lot less time, once land rovers are available for manufacture.

All these advantages are intrinsic to the nature of non-biological technology. And for a lot of purposes, they cancel out the advantages built into the nature of biotechnology.
________


As for hardness of biological weapons vs. technological ones, for current conditions, technological ones are clearly superior. But what if we designed the biologicals to compete with the metal-ships?

Hardened carapaces of durasteel or adamantium, with plasma weapons and all that jazz. It would be exactly like a metal ship in regards of shooting and getting shot, but it would be able to a) reproduce b) self-repair c) adapt.But that requires that we be physically able to make "durasteel" or "adamantium" grow on the back of a creature's carapace. Nobody knows how to do that in a way that makes it cost-effective compared to making large slabs of metal in a steel mill. Oh, and those aren't real metals by the way.

Likewise, with plasma weapons, we have nothing that suggests that biotechnological solutions exist. It's the same problem. You can't just posit "biotechnology designed to do what metal technology does will work just as well." That's like saying "A building made of wood designed to survive a fire will be just as fireproof as a building made of stone." It isn't true, because it ignores the differences between wood and stone that make stone better than wood at being fireproof. You cannot design a fireproof wooden building, because wood is not immune to fire. If you wish to design a fireproof building, you must use materials that are in fact fireproof. Most of which are inorganic (like rocks and steel).

Something similar applies to your long spoilered argument about an organic ship. Essentially, you're saying that an organic ship can do whatever you desire it to do, without addressing the limits it operates under. For instance, does the ship require some kind of egg or womb to grow inside? What provides the materials for this growth chamber? Or does it just grow from random spores?

What happens if the ship starts to suffer from a vitamin deficiency?

Real organisms contain parts they cannot replace. As I developed from an embryo I grew a pair of hands, but if I lost them they wouldn't grow back. Can your ship grow back severed body parts? Why is it obvious that it should be able to do that? Remember, organic ships need that ability to make up for the fact that organic technology doesn't reliably give you interchangeable parts. If a bolt breaks, I can replace it with any of a million other bolts. If a tendon in my organic ship breaks, I have a bit more of a difficulty.

If every part of your ship has the potential to grow into every other part, how do you tell a part of your ship what you want it to be? What stops your ship from accidentally growing teeth all over the place or something?

_____


I've seen mentioned that:
organics can't shoot plasma because that would be dumb
spider silk is flammable; all carbon is; therefore organics would melt
metal is better, and horses aren't made out of metalThat's not how our arguments are structured. "Because that would be dumb" isn't much of an argument. "Because that would violate the laws of physics" is something different.


Enzymes are millions of times faster at creating things than our current methods. Smelting steel is incredibly inefficient compared to a wasp impregnating its ovipositor with manganese.Hang on; who did that study? That doesn't sound to me like something obvious enough that it can be assumed without proof.

[Innis Cabal]

Yes but one thing you didn't factor in is cost. It takes money and resources to build. None to grow if the creature used produces or feeds off things readily avalible in its enviornment, such as light waves.

[ZeroNumerous]

Repulsor systems to mimic force telekinesis, multiple analytical systems to “predict” the future, mass network to replicate the “sense each other” in the Force... considering that under ideal circumstances (resources, mass production line) such a legion could be raised and replaced faster than normal Jedi, they’d quickly outnumber them.

Already done with the Force Unleashed. Specifically the droid PROXY.

[Myrmex]

Except that some of the broken parts on the horse won't fix themselves and can't be replaced except by elaborate use of technological solutions. Like the horse's nerves and tendons. If a horse falls and gets a serious knee injury, you can't just swap in a new knee. Whereas any part of a broken land rover can be exchanged for a replacement using a relatively simple toolkit and skill set.

Broken legs mend. Certainly, certain levels of damage mean you need a new horse. Certain levels of damage mean you need a new land rover. I'm not mechanically inclined, so I don't really know what level of damage to a vehicle counts as a broken leg.


Likewise, the horse will grow exhausted (the land rover won't). The horse's carrying capacity is limited to something on the order of 100-200 kilograms (the land rover's carrying capacity isn't).

Land Rovers run out of gas.


Moreover, land rovers can be made quickly, at will, once the tools to make them exist at all. With a horse, you have to sit around and wait for it to be conceived, be born, and mature before you can ride it. Manufacturing a land rover takes a lot less time, once land rovers are available for manufacture.

But the energy/unit is lower, and land rovers don't make themselves.


All these advantages are intrinsic to the nature of non-biological technology. And for a lot of purposes, they cancel out the advantages built into the nature of biotechnology.

Did you know that the fastest way to manufacture many drugs is by inserting plasmids into E. Coli, and letting them build insulin? I don't think you're thinking on the right level of biotech here.


But that requires that we be physically able to make "durasteel" or "adamantium" grow on the back of a creature's carapace. Nobody knows how to do that in a way that makes it cost-effective compared to making large slabs of metal in a steel mill. Oh, and those aren't real metals by the way.

...
And no one knows how to make the Starship Enterprise. I'm not sure that is a very strong argument in a discussion of sci-fi.

Biosynthesis is usually more cost effective than industrial methods. Methanol & ethanol, for instance, are typically synthesized by bacteria.

Here are bacteria that biosynthesize magnetite without the extreme heat we use to make magnets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotactic_bacteria


Likewise, with plasma weapons, we have nothing that suggests that biotechnological solutions exist. It's the same problem. You can't just posit "biotechnology designed to do what metal technology does will work just as well." That's like saying "A building made of wood designed to survive a fire will be just as fireproof as a building made of stone." It isn't true, because it ignores the differences between wood and stone that make stone better than wood at being fireproof. You cannot design a fireproof wooden building, because wood is not immune to fire. If you wish to design a fireproof building, you must use materials that are in fact fireproof. Most of which are inorganic (like rocks and steel).

That's not at all what I'm saying. You're saying you can't make a house fire proof; we should all live in caves. I'm suggesting we build houses differently.


Something similar applies to your long spoilered argument about an organic ship. Essentially, you're saying that an organic ship can do whatever you desire it to do, without addressing the limits it operates under. For instance, does the ship require some kind of egg or womb to grow inside? What provides the materials for this growth chamber? Or does it just grow from random spores?

It would probably be constructed in a nutrient rich vat in orbit, where low gravity and high levels of necessary resources would be made readily available. A lot of structures would probably also be grown and just grafted together, to save time.


What happens if the ship starts to suffer from a vitamin deficiency?

It would eat, a major advantage it would have over a ship that couldn't. Vitamins are actually so common in the environment, that we don't synthesize them due to evolutionary reasons- it'd be a waste of energy.


Real organisms contain parts they cannot replace. As I developed from an embryo I grew a pair of hands, but if I lost them they wouldn't grow back. Can your ship grow back severed body parts? Why is it obvious that it should be able to do that? Remember, organic ships need that ability to make up for the fact that organic technology doesn't reliably give you interchangeable parts. If a bolt breaks, I can replace it with any of a million other bolts. If a tendon in my organic ship breaks, I have a bit more of a difficulty.

Some real organisms. Salamanders can regrow just about everything you cut off, as do many amphibians. The regeneratory power of plants are extraordinary. You are limiting your thinking to narrowly to vertebrates. just because an animal lacks the ability to regenerate something doesn't mean it can't be given that ability. It's only a matter of time before we figure out how to turn on developmental genes that don't cause really awful cancer.

A tendon in an organic ship wouldn't be analogous to a bolt. A bolt would be analogous to something more like a cell or a small amount of tissue.


If every part of your ship has the potential to grow into every other part, how do you tell a part of your ship what you want it to be? What stops your ship from accidentally growing teeth all over the place or something?

The answer to this question could fill a career. A definitive answer would probably when you the Nobel Prize. Nobel Prizes have been awarded in this field before, for modest discoveries in fruit flies and nematode worms.

Did you know that virtually every cell in your body contains the information to construct a brand new human? The DNA housed in the nucleus of (almost) every somatic cells is identical, save for mutations due to replication & the environment. All the information is there, yet somehow cells differentiate into heart and lung, skin and in intestine.

During development, cells slowly become more and more specified to doing a specific task by exposure to certain chemicals An early human embryo is composed of stem cells- cells that will give rise to every single adult cell. In fact, you can take a 4 cell mammalian embryo, break it into 4 separate cells, and get 4 identical quadruplets. This is how twinning occurs. This is unique to mammals. Divide a frog embryo about its equator, and you'll get the tail end of a tadpole and the head end of a tadpole.

Later in life, if a cell loses its identity, and accidentally reverts to having stem cell like properties, you get cancer. Cancer is something of developmental biology problem.

You can also see the problem in tumors, where there will be feat and teeth and hair, where cells lose identity and get confused about what they're doing.

The major way this occurs is methylation of DNA. Vast amount of the genome has small units of carbon attached to it that make it unavailable for transcription. Cloning somatic cells is difficult due to the methylation of DNA, since all those developmental genes have been shut off. That's why fewer than 1 out of 200 or so cloned embryos are viable, and likely why the adult animal has so many problems (as well as the likelihood that adult somatic cells are more likely than germ cells to have genomic damage).

Genetic control also happens on the transcriptional and translational level, as well, but that's complicated and you can read wikipedia about it, or PM me.


That's not how our arguments are structured. "Because that would be dumb" isn't much of an argument. "Because that would violate the laws of physics" is something different.

There are very few laws of life, though. Just because on is ignorant of what is possible doesn't mean the laws of physics are being violated. Take limb regeneration- there doesn't seem to be any physical reason why us humans can't regrow limbs. The genes for limb development are all there, many animals regenerate limbs. There have even been a few cases of humans regrowing lost pieces. The answer more likely lies in evolutionary selection, and the increased chance of cancer related to having active stem cells.

The genetic code, by the way, is in no way perfect. It's full of mistakes and left overs and ancestral relics. Evolution doesn't take the best way, it makes the best with what its got. The human eye, for example, is vastly inferior to the bird eye (which has 4 cones instead of 3, can see ultraviolet light, and even magnetic fields), due to our ancestors becoming nocturnal and losing the ability to see color. We had to re-evolve color vision from three cones, which led to one cone having to spread over a wider range of colors. This means that we see fewer colors, since that cone is stimulated on a larger electromagnetic band. Stimulation is interpreted in this case, by our brain, as binary. If that cone with the wider sensitivity is fired, we automatically add that color to whatever we're looking at.


Hang on; who did that study? That doesn't sound to me like something obvious enough that it can be assumed without proof.

Compare the energy required to heat manganese to alloy it with iron and the few drops of sugar and room temp that it takes the wasp to put it there.



[edit]
Backing up my "we haven't done it, but it could be done" statement:
Transgenics. Many of you have likely heard of this.
A gene for a glow-in-the-dark protein in jellyfish has been successfully put into the genomes of mice, fish, frogs, monkeys, cats, rabbits and dogs.

Genes are put into e coli (bacterium) all the time, which produce functional products. Crops have genes in them that both have the plant produce pesticides, as well as resist high levels of pesticide.

Homeotic mutations in fruit flies have created new phenotypes, with legs, mouth parts, eyes, and wings in weird places, or with extras of them.

The genetic code is rapidly being unraveled, and it won't be too long before humans begin constructing novel organisms based on that knowledge.

Secretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street.

Now this former computer scientist at Columbia University turned tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history. Not to make a killing on the stock market, but to solve some of the trickiest problems in biology: How the molecules that comprise "life" function and interact at the most basic level.

It may seem like a James Bond movie: mysterious billionaire-genius designs megacomputer to probe life's secrets. Will he perhaps tinker with them, too, in a nefarious scheme to dominate the world by creating enhanced life forms or bio-silicon superbeings? (http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/natural-selection/2008/07/30/DE-Shaws-Supercomputer)

Transgenics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenics

Homeotic mutations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeotic_mutation#Homeotic_mutations

[Thiel]

Yes but one thing you didn't factor in is cost. It takes money and resources to build. None to grow if the creature used produces or feeds off things readily avalible in its enviornment, such as light waves.

But you can't build anything out of light waves. You'd still need to supply it with the necessary elements.

[Myrmex]

But you can't build anything out of light waves. You'd still need to supply it with the necessary elements.

While true, the price of raw material is notably cheaper than the cost of finished material, as well as easier to obtain.

[Thiel]

While true, the price of raw material is notably cheaper than the cost of finished material, as well as easier to obtain.

But they also take up a whole lot more space when stored. That means that an organic space ship will have less range than a metaltech space ship of the same size.

[Myrmex]

Why would either ship, biological or metal, want to to store raw materials? That doesn't make any sense.

I can't think of any animals, or plants, that store raw materials for the purpose of later use. Virtually everything converts extra material into something that can be stored and then used for a wide range of things. I guess some animals will bury food for later, in times of scarcity, but that's not really the same as a camel's hump.

Fat, sugar, and protein can be used for carbon or energy, depending on what the organism needs and has available.

I'd think that a bioship would have an easier time converting one thing into another. It could just carry a cargo organ full of gray goop of amino acids and dissolved metals to later be turned into needed structures. Photosynthetic production of energy and synthesis of specialized enzymes would let it convert structures back into gray goop as needed.

Animals do that sort of thing all the time. Fatty bodies are used up in times of hunger, muscles are broken down. Osteoblasts deposit bone, and osteoclasts dissolve it, depending on the levels of calcium phosphate.

[Lamech]

Wait, what? I'm not sure I understand how the motorcycle ceased to move.
Because it needs fuel. All of which has come from a living creature. Same problem with all of its petroleum based parts. (Like the tires for example.) And no we can't just take it from the ground endlessly. Especially if we end up branching out to planets with out a long history of life. We need some form of bio-tech to build the motor-cycle, and to power it.


My point all along was that a motorcycle is a better tool than a horse. You can use a motorcycle better than a horse for the things that both are used to do. The motorcycle takes less effort to maintain, goes faster, and is less temperamental and easier to fix. It has some drawbacks (a horse won't crash into a tree because its rider is drunk), but the drawbacks aren't big enough to cancel out the advantages. Which is why modern people, who have a choice, choose motorcycles and not horses.
True, except your kidding yourself if you think the motorcylce is built, and powered with out using the help of "biotech". It needs petroleum.


I would argue that this is true in general, with maybe a few specific exceptions (like making judgement calls in complex situations). Thus, a species which uses organic technology for almost everything is crippling itself to a much greater degree than one that uses metal technology for almost everything.
There are a lot of exceptions right now. Fuel, rubber, plastics will need raw components produced by bio-tech. Judgement calls. Detecting many kinds of chemicals. Really, really freaking important things need bio-tech. Same with "metal-tech" Limiting one self to one or the other is just silly.

Also if it the bio-tech pans out the way sci-fi shows it might, and we have living ships, I think they will probably be like Wraith cruisers, with artificial looking stuff running all over. (Like ports for the residents hacker to hook up to, or the warp core, or blaster cannons.)

[Gavin Sage]

True, except your kidding yourself if you think the motorcylce is built, and powered with out using the help of "biotech". It needs petroleum.

This isn't strictly true, the utlization of fossil fuels is a results of out limited technological development in the past. It is possible today to replace petroleum as a fuel source. All ya really need for tech is electricty, which we can generate from the enviroment and solar panels.


There are a lot of exceptions right now. Fuel, rubber, plastics will need raw components produced by bio-tech. Judgement calls. Detecting many kinds of chemicals. Really, really freaking important things need bio-tech. Same with "metal-tech" Limiting one self to one or the other is just silly.

Also if it the bio-tech pans out the way sci-fi shows it might, and we have living ships, I think they will probably be like Wraith cruisers, with artificial looking stuff running all over. (Like ports for the residents hacker to hook up to, or the warp core, or blaster cannons.)

Well here's a question? Does a robotic factory that uses metal vats full of bacteria because they produce a useful waste product rank as sufficient to fit the trope Organic Technology (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrganicTechnology) Because the way it is most commonly presented is not that you use organics, but that you use only organics.

Which is silly. Especially since the more more sci-fi you get, since the gap between mechanism and organisms only widens as you get more advanced. Quite aside from whichever might be cheaper, a horse can't run as fast as a cheetah for five hours. Even a cheetah can only sprint its top speed for short distances. Your average car can not only move faster but do it for hours. And that's just the sort of difference you run into on the ground. Trying to match a jet engine, or a rocket....

Now its not that this is all utterly impossible especially for the sake of a story, but its hard to see how it is more plausible. Meaning you need more ad-hoc plot device to makes something work. And if you have to rely on the unknown to match technology its not superior.

[Myrmex]

Rockets & cars go zoom zoom because humans have found out how to circumvent energy limitations. I don't see why you couldn't have enormously energy intensive biological systems that perform as well as mechanical one, simply because they're biological.


As per the "organics are always better"- the Zerg from Starcraft didn't have superior anything. Except maybe tarrasques.

[MeklorIlavator]

Rockets & cars go zoom zoom because humans have found out how to circumvent energy limitations. I don't see why you couldn't have enormously energy intensive biological systems that perform as well as mechanical one, simply because they're biological.
Because high temperatures tend to kill things, and internal combustion engines get very hot. I've yet to see complex organisms survive at such temperatures.



As per the "organics are always better"- the Zerg from Starcraft didn't have superior anything. Except maybe tarrasques.

Really? Where do you live that sees lions/other animals rip through the armor of tanks? Or concrete/metal bunkers?

[warty goblin]

Rockets & cars go zoom zoom because humans have found out how to circumvent energy limitations. I don't see why you couldn't have enormously energy intensive biological systems that perform as well as mechanical one, simply because they're biological.

But the machinery we have used to concentrate energy sufficiently for us to be able to do so is really quite large, complicated and tends to use processes inimical to pretty much all complex life. This is I think one of the huge advantages of metaloid technology, namely that you can do things like create a refinery or a nuclear power plant which would fry any multi-cellular organism into the world's largest carcinoma, then use this as a centralized energy source.

Look at it like this. A horse has a digestive system, which allows it to process energy, and batteries (fat) to store excess. My car just has batteries (well, a gas tank). The 'digestion'- the processing of materials into usable energy is done in a centralized location. Right there you have a huge savings on bulk. The horse needs to eat and digest its fuel, all of which takes energy, and reduces its on site efficiency. All I need to do with my car is to pour pre-processed energy right into the tank. If the horse runs out of food, it dies. If the car runs out of fuel, it stops working until I get some more.



As per the "organics are always better"- the Zerg from Starcraft didn't have superior anything. Except maybe tarrasques.
They may not be better per say, but they work. There is not any way that I know of for macroscopic life forms to have a significant chance of defeating even a modern army, or even inflicting casualties in notable numbers. Sure maybe a few at first, but then people figure out to engage from range, that armor has literally nothing to fear, and they have no answer to artillery or air support*, and it's all over.

*Yes the Zerg have air support. My whole point however is that there is no way for a biological creature to be able to challenge all but the most primitive aircraft.

[Myrmex]

Because high temperatures tend to kill things, and internal combustion engines get very hot. I've yet to see complex organisms survive at such temperatures.

That's the beauty of complex organisms though- they work at room temperature.

Did you know cheetahs can only sprint for short before their internal temperature begins to cook their brain?

What if you could circumvent this; like if the cheetah was sweating dichloromethane or something.


Really? Where do you live that sees lions/other animals rip through the armor of tanks? Or concrete/metal bunkers?

I meant that a zerg mutalisk gets shredded by any other air unit, that they're ground units are all pretty weak vs. another ground unit. Zealots clean up both hydralisks and zerglings, for instance.


But the machinery we have used to concentrate energy sufficiently for us to be able to do so is really quite large, complicated and tends to use processes inimical to pretty much all complex life. This is I think one of the huge advantages of metaloid technology, namely that you can do things like create a refinery or a nuclear power plant which would fry any multi-cellular organism into the world's largest carcinoma, then use this as a centralized energy source.

Look at it like this. A horse has a digestive system, which allows it to process energy, and batteries (fat) to store excess. My car just has batteries (well, a gas tank). The 'digestion'- the processing of materials into usable energy is done in a centralized location. Right there you have a huge savings on bulk. The horse needs to eat and digest its fuel, all of which takes energy, and reduces its on site efficiency. All I need to do with my car is to pour pre-processed energy right into the tank. If the horse runs out of food, it dies. If the car runs out of fuel, it stops working until I get some more.

You're looking at it wrong. Stop thinking horses, start thinking chimeras

1. Some fungus uses radiation as an energy source, presumably in a manner similar to how plants photosynthesize. The pigment is a melanin, a pigment we use in protecting ourselves from harmful radiation.

Also; extremophiles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophiles)


Note that this is all with carbon based, water needing earth life. There's no rule that biologicals have to be using carbon and water.

2. Cryptobiosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis), Hibernation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation), Dormancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormancy)


I don't see any sort of reason why a suitably advanced technology, if it could go faster than the speed of light, couldn't also engineer these sort of creatures. How does the Spice work in Dune? A drug that makes your life longer? Herbert never outlined the biological pathways for that, but we took his word for it. Holtzmann fields? More like Handwaviium. Or how about how Star Trek uses Beryllium for everything? If it's a purple crystal, there's a chance it'll fix something; otherwise they'll modify the phase variance or something.

I'd like to go back to your first paragraph about concentrating energy. Compared to biological systems, the methods we generate energy are extremely simple. Virtually all of them involve expanding a liquid by converting it to a gas with heat, and using that expansion to drive a piston.

Biological systems are far more elegant, and don't need to be so brute force about it. in fact, burning up huge amounts of energy is detrimental to current biological systems, since none of them are designed to be war machines. There's about 3 billion years of evolution that needs to be tinkered with to get biologicals to be as hardy current machinery.


They may not be better per say, but they work. There is not any way that I know of for macroscopic life forms to have a significant chance of defeating even a modern army, or even inflicting casualties in notable numbers. Sure maybe a few at first, but then people figure out to engage from range, that armor has literally nothing to fear, and they have no answer to artillery or air support*, and it's all over.

*Yes the Zerg have air support. My whole point however is that there is no way for a biological creature to be able to challenge all but the most primitive aircraft.

I was pointing out an exception to the trope.
Also, bugs. More personnel time was lost to insect born disease in Vietnam, WWII, and WWI than to bombs, bullets, and gas. Napoleon's heavy losses invading Russia were due to an awful typhus epidemic. The Brits' defeat during the American Revolution was due, in part, to mosquito born malaria.

If that doesn't work for you, imagine a mosquito that's engineered to kill someone when it bites them because it's full of toxins or something. Same results, different method.

[warty goblin]

You're looking at it wrong. Stop thinking horses, start thinking chimeras

1. Some fungus uses radiation as an energy source, presumably in a manner similar to how plants photosynthesize. The pigment is a melanin, a pigment we use in protecting ourselves from harmful radiation.

Also; extremophiles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophiles)

Extremophiles get you up to about what- a few hundred degrees? The machinery for making fires much hotter than that has existed for a very long time. As has been said, there exists no reason to believe that it is plausible to create an organism capable of smelting iron. In fact pretty much 100% of the available evidence (life on earth) says you can't do it, because let's face it, the advantages of an organism being able to work metal are fairly massive.



Note that this is all with carbon based, water needing earth life. There's no rule that biologicals have to be using carbon and water.
I am told, by people I know in various bio departments, that silicon based life, the usual alternative, has a variety of really quite major problems. Unfortunately, being a math major, I really am unable to elaborate, so take this as you will.


2. Cryptobiosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis), Hibernation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation), Dormancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormancy)

Fair points, I retract that portion of my argument.


I don't see any sort of reason why a suitably advanced technology, if it could go faster than the speed of light, couldn't also engineer these sort of creatures. How does the Spice work in Dune? A drug that makes your life longer? Herbert never outlined the biological pathways for that, but we took his word for it. Holtzmann fields? More like Handwaviium. Or how about how Star Trek uses Beryllium for everything? If it's a purple crystal, there's a chance it'll fix something; otherwise they'll modify the phase variance or something.
So what? Statements based on Handwaviumaren't even arguments, they are statements of world-building faith, and boils down to "it is this way because I think it is without evidence for its plausibility." There's nothing wrong with this from a fiction-writing perspective, people do it all the time. It is not relevant to the question at hand however.


I'd like to go back to your first paragraph about concentrating energy. Compared to biological systems, the methods we generate energy are extremely simple. Virtually all of them involve expanding a liquid by converting it to a gas with heat, and using that expansion to drive a piston.
No, that's the way we release energy. We generate energy, for the most part, by removing impurities in carbon based chemicals that undergo exothermic reactions in the presence of oxygen. We get this stuff from bits of dead plants. The mere fact that there is that much energy left over in them should indicate something about their ability to efficiently use the energy they collect.


Biological systems are far more elegant, and don't need to be so brute force about it. in fact, burning up huge amounts of energy is detrimental to current biological systems, since none of them are designed to be war machines. There's about 3 billion years of evolution that needs to be tinkered with to get biologicals to be as hardy current machinery.
True enough, but a lot of technology today releases lots of energy and isn't a war machine. Once again, my car. A species of gazelle or deer that could run as fast and long as my car can would have a huge advantage over pretty much every predator currently in existence, yet no animal can do this.



I was pointing out an exception to the trope.
Also, bugs. More personnel time was lost to insect born disease in Vietnam, WWII, and WWI than to bombs, bullets, and gas. Napoleon's heavy losses invading Russia were due to an awful typhus epidemic. The Brits' defeat during the American Revolution was due, in part, to mosquito born malaria.
Small bugs killing with pathogens. That's completely different from overgrown cockroaches shredding tanks. As you point out, there's a lot of precedent for the first, but I can't think of any evidence to suggest that the second is at all likely.



If that doesn't work for you, imagine a mosquito that's engineered to kill someone when it bites them because it's full of toxins or something. Same results, different method.
If you read some of my earlier posts, you will find that this is more or less the exact form of biotech I found plausible and useful. Again, it is catagorically different than really big insects capable of outfighting a conventional military with conventional methods.

[Myrmex]

Warty,
If you look at some of my earlier posts, you'll see that organisms have no need to smelt iron, as they can synthesize many things at room temperature with enzymatic activity. Wasps have zinc & manganese in their cuticle for instance, despite the wasps' relatively low burning point. Spiders produce polymers at lower temperatures that are stronger and lighter than kevlar, for instance. Creation of high molecular weight polymers, for us humans, requires high temperatures, near or above boiling. Bugs can do it on a cold day.

As for animals shredding tanks-
I think dinosaurs would have been pretty awesome. You'd have to put some plates on them, to keep the bullets and rockets off, but dear god, they would be brutal, wouldn't they? 'Course, they wouldn't stand up to modern armor, but with a little tinkering, some grafts, a bigger brain, and shoulder mounted rocket pods, they would slaughter. A t-rex is probably nimbler than a tank, too.

Or what about a D&D dragon?
Let's take away the flight, since that wouldn't work without a lighter-than-air gas bladder. The scales would be layered, the outer layer would be dead. As scales aged, more and more alloyed steel would be deposited in the scales until they died. This way, scales, after they finished growing, would be strong, and mostly metal. Connective tissues would have to be strong and nonflammable, or at least heat resistant. Heat resistant is easy enough; as long as they don't oxidize, they won't go anywhere.

Beneath the steel cuticle (or hell, DU), with its specially oriented layers to deflect bullets and other projectiles, like modern tank armor is, there would be a layer of padding. Maybe that elastic stuff in insect cuticles that has like 80% or 90% elasticity. This would protect from concussive blasts. A set of large wings that were more of the padding and plate could be used to deflect incoming rockets or what have you, or hunker down under heavy fire.

6 legs would probably be good, since then you would have back ups. Weak points at joints would have vasculature that would pinch itself off from bleeding out.

It's breath weapon could be acid, basically spewing HCl everywhere. Another option would be disease or a swarm of poisonous insects it grows in it's chest. There's evidence that the HIV-like virus some parasitoid wasps inject into hosts to compromise its immune system actually evolved from the wasp's own genome, rather than having evolved into a symbiote. Poisonous gas could be another option. Chlorine gas, for instance, is Cl2, while salt is NaCl.

The breath weapon could also be used for the required levels of oxidation and panting. It could sweat some small molecule that evaporates rapidly. Hell, it could breathe ethylene, and have a blowtorch for a weapon. With a good counter-current exchange mechanism, and insulation, it could do it.

The tail would be used both as weapon, to help climb, and also for dispersing heat.

It'd probably be under horse size. Maybe two different sets of legs- one pair for running, and another pair for fighting/climbing. Running legs would be longer and more vulnerable, but faster. Slow twitch muscle fibers in one pair, fast twitch in the other.

As for regenerating, it would of course need access to lots of energy and the like, but a battlefield would have corpses and metal a plenty.

Of course, you'd want to put a big fat smart brain in it, and arm it with some weapons. If you could give it a way to make its own RPGs, that would be ideal. However, I don't think there's anyway for something that small to capture enough energy to make such a high energy device in the field.

You could always arm them with internal nuclear power plants. Maybe have uranium somewhere that it uses to power an internal, photosynthetic process.

[KnightDisciple]

Here's one thing that comes to my mind: problem with regeneration.
More specifically, "rapid regeneration". That is to say, you cut an arm off, and it grows back in a minute (substitue "wing", "engine pod", whatever for this supposed bioship). If I lose an arm, I'll need 1 major thing to regrow it, regardless of timescale: more stuff. As in, more materials to grow it with. That, or my body cannabalizes (as it were) from the rest of me, weakening all of my body. Yeah, I've got my arm back, but now my strength is down 30% (or somesuch). So these ships would either have to reduce large parts of their functionality, or carry enough extra biomatter foodstuffs to not only keep alive in normal travel and combat, but to also regenerate stuff.
Another point, on biological part swappin/regen. If something blows up my heart, how will it regen? My blood's not really flowing, which would presumably carry the regen cells, and the necessary "food" to do so. Meanwhile, my brain is dying. 6 minutes, and you're almost guaranteed brain death. I suppose we could add another heart, but that adds a whole host of system variables we need to factor in
As for animals adding metal...Well, okay, so they can take simple metals, and mix them in with cuticles and whatnot. But they won't be able to make refined alloys themselves. Those need high temps to blend. I mean, maybe-kinda-sorta some internal chemical pot to try mixing stuff in, but I don't know if chemistry works that way. And your hypothetical dragon uses "alloyed steel" plates. Where's he getting the alloyed steel? And good luck working with titanium.
You mention uses corpses as energy/mass to regenerate. That'll take time. It needs to digest, which is, ultimately, a chemical process. There's only so much you can do to speed that up. I'd been even with superfast digestion (which itself would likely have problems), it'd still take it an hour or two to digest. I mean, it is larger than an insect and such.
Also, on tanks being less nimble than a T-Rex...I dunno. The T-Rex doesn't look that nimble, and modern battle tanks have fair amounts of get-up-and-go, combined with nicely reactive steering. I'd say they can turn better than a car, due to the mechanism for steering (reversing direction on one whole tread, pulling the tank to that side). The T-Rex has to worry about a much higher center of gravity, and a much smaller (both relatively to its size, and overall) area of contact with the ground. This hypothetical multi-legged dragon thing might do better, but good luck there.

[Lagrange]

Warty,
As for animals shredding tanks-
I think dinosaurs would have been pretty awesome. You'd have to put some plates on them, to keep the bullets and rockets off, but dear god, they would be brutal, wouldn't they? 'Course, they wouldn't stand up to modern armor, but with a little tinkering, some grafts, a bigger brain, and shoulder mounted rocket pods, they would slaughter. A t-rex is probably nimbler than a tank, too.


Actually, recent biophysical analysis have the t-rex being fairly slow because of the large weight of the animal. That is one of the greatest problems that you have to deal with, large heavy animals are not particularly good at moving fast. Many current researchers believe that a t-rex could not run because of the danger of breaking its legs from its own body weight.


Warty,
You could always arm them with internal nuclear power plants. Maybe have uranium somewhere that it uses to power an internal, photosynthetic process.

Internal nuclear power plants? How could it withstand the radiation effects? Nuclear power releases a fair amount of ionizing radiation, and having it internal just complicates the issue even more since the alpha radiation has a significantly higher change of damaging the genome from an internal sore because it has a low penetrating ability. The uranium would also need to be purified for a reaction to happen, something that I cannot see happening in a biological manner because chemically the different isotopes are equivalent (technically there are slightly different because of the increased mass but we can only tell the chemical difference with deuteron because percentage wise it is a large difference). You also have a lot of heat to remove from any sort of centralized nuclear reactor.

Photosynthetic processes are nice and all, but it is not a good way to produce a large amount of energy to use at a single time. From what I remember, it is recommended that a human consumes about 2000 Calories a day...now 1 calories is the amount of energy needed to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree C... therefore 2000 Calories is the amount of energy needed to heat 2 000 000 grams of water 1 degree (since 1 food Calorie is 1 Kcal or 1000 calories). A larger organism, like the ones suggested, would need to consume even more energy, this would create a population limit because the energy has to come from somewhere. Sunlight is not enough to produce it, but it needs to get the energy from somewhere. Just wondering how the energy flow of the organism would work.

Same with the idea of a metal coating, to create one it would have to have a large intake of metal into its diet that is not common in food. All of the elements that would be used in it have to come from someplace natural, since it is definitely beyond the ability for an organism to synthesis elements.

One thing to think about, it was mentioned that a weapon could be Cl2 as salt is NaCl. One problem with this is that NaCl is a stable compound and it operates at an energy loss to produce Cl2 gas from the salt, also solid sodium would be produced. Sodium reacts very well with water, and this would create a strong base inside of the organism as a byproduct as long as the sodium could be in contact with water. But the chlorine is easiest to separate when the salt is in water because an electrical current could be used, still creating a strong base in the end with the possibility of creating a strong acid as well since the reason that Chlorine gas is toxic is because it reacts with water (and cells) to form acids.

I would like to have this issue addressed, even if the energy point is conceded, an organism still needs to be able to get the elements needed to build itself.


I just had to join after seeing the comment about an 'internal nuclear reactor' since I am a physics/math double major and have spent a bit of time working in a nuclear physics lab.

Edit: Well, I was beat to on a couple of points

[Myrmex]

Actually, recent biophysical analysis have the t-rex being fairly slow because of the large weight of the animal. That is one of the greatest problems that you have to deal with, large heavy animals are not particularly good at moving fast. Many current researchers believe that a t-rex could not run because of the danger of breaking its legs from its own body weight.

Dinosaurs aren't really my thing; don't follow them. I think I remember that- something about their design probably made them large scavengers/opportunists than runners. Give em metal bones, see how they fare, in that case.

But then, you physicists concluded that bumble bees can't fly (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1076/is-it-aerodynamically-impossible-for-bumblebees-to-fly). For those of you who didn't follow the link; it's actually something of an urban legend. The relevance here is that how bees generated enough lift, by flapping (actually spinning) their wings fast enough, was unknown. Turns out they vibrate their flight muscles like a rubber band, rather than flap like a bird.


Internal nuclear power plants? How could it withstand the radiation effects? Nuclear power releases a fair amount of ionizing radiation, and having it internal just complicates the issue even more since the alpha radiation has a significantly higher change of damaging the genome from an internal sore because it has a low penetrating ability. The uranium would also need to be purified for a reaction to happen, something that I cannot see happening in a biological manner because chemically the different isotopes are equivalent (technically there are slightly different because of the increased mass but we can only tell the chemical difference with deuteron because percentage wise it is a large difference). You also have a lot of heat to remove from any sort of centralized nuclear reactor.

Heh, I probably misspoke. I meant there would be a piece of a radioactive isotope contained within the organism. As it decayed, particles would run into layers of pigment that absorbed and converted the energy into something usable, like ATP. Everything would be absorbed before it could get near DNA that wasn't packaged well enough (you can reduce the damage from radiation by how you condense chromatin).

There's a fungus they discovered in and around the Chernobyl plant that has a melanin which is presumably converting ionizing radiation into usable energy. Radiotrophs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus)


Photosynthetic processes are nice and all, but it is not a good way to produce a large amount of energy to use at a single time. From what I remember, it is recommended that a human consumes about 2000 Calories a day...now 1 calories is the amount of energy needed to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree C... therefore 2000 Calories is the amount of energy needed to heat 2 000 000 grams of water 1 degree (since 1 food Calorie is 1 Kcal or 1000 calories). A larger organism, like the ones suggested, would need to consume even more energy, this would create a population limit because the energy has to come from somewhere. Sunlight is not enough to produce it, but it needs to get the energy from somewhere. Just wondering how the energy flow of the organism would work.

Photosynthesis is horribly inefficient. Wikipedia has it at 6%, muscles at 27% and some diesel engines at 50% usable heat produced.

Plants use photons to generate membrane potential, and then use the potential to synthesize ATP. There's also some reduction in there of NADP to NADPH, which is also used to generate ATP. It's been awhile since I took botany. I believe this is similar to the way photovoltaic cells hooked up to a battery would work- electrons are bumped up into a higher energy potential by photons, then stored in a chemical medium. Photosynthesis, currently, certainly doesn't have the means to generate enough energy to run some sort of pseudo-dragon indefinitely.

That, and being coated in metal would make photosynthesis impossible. I think using something radioactive, internally, would be the real solution.


Same with the idea of a metal coating, to create one it would have to have a large intake of metal into its diet that is not common in food. All of the elements that would be used in it have to come from someplace natural, since it is definitely beyond the ability for an organism to synthesis elements.

Ehhh, there's metal everywhere. Cars, tanks, guns, knives, blood. And it's not like this thing is evolving on its own, you grow them in the lab. In the case of some sort of super ship, it should be able to locate mineral deposits and just eat dirt for awhile.

If it is going to need metal armor, it will be fighting opponents that will supply the requisite armor for repairing itself or replacing damaged scales.


One thing to think about, it was mentioned that a weapon could be Cl2 as salt is NaCl. One problem with this is that NaCl is a stable compound and it operates at an energy loss to produce Cl2 gas from the salt, also solid sodium would be produced. Sodium reacts very well with water, and this would create a strong base inside of the organism as a byproduct as long as the sodium could be in contact with water. But the chlorine is easiest to separate when the salt is in water because an electrical current could be used, still creating a strong base in the end with the possibility of creating a strong acid as well since the reason that Chlorine gas is toxic is because it reacts with water (and cells) to form acids.

Our guts are full of a strong acid- HCl. One man has such strong acid in his gut, he could eat airplanes. No joke. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito)

Cl2 could be generated across a membrane, while the Na+ would be used as a reducing agent for other biogical processes. There's no reason why the pathway has to go directly from 2NaCl to to 2Na+ and Cl2; most biological systems don't do that sort of thing. As for animals that produce poisonous gases: centipedes release hydrogen cyanide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millipede#Defense_mechanisms) when disturbed.


I would like to have this issue addressed, even if the energy point is conceded, an organism still needs to be able to get the elements needed to build itself.

This is a synthetic organism, who would be grown in a lab. All the resources would be there. In the field, the creature would be able to scavenge metal from vehicles, power lines, wherever it could get it. If the scenario was such that there was no readily available sources of anthropogenic metal, then it would have to sniff it out and eat dirt or ore. It would be very slow. These creatures would have difficulty living in the wild; likely, competing amongst themselves, they would lose many of the traits you gave them because, frankly, they're stupid to have on an organism intended to be an organism and not some sort of warhulk. Of course, you'd want to give the thing a really, really kick ass molecular repair kit, so mutations would be very, very low.

Re: regeneration
Regeneration is simply not going to happen the way you see it in movies. It'd probably take a day, given good conditions, to regrow a limb. However, this greatly reduces the importance of logistics- who needs a supply line when the fallen are the supplies?

At the very least, you're going to need an equal amount of materials nearby to make it. I imagine cuticles, even super high tech ones, are going to need time to harden. You could always just reattach a lost limb, if enough of it was there to pick up. Spare limbs could be helpful, too.

As for nimble tanks, I get the feeling a large biped could run circles around it, evading that turret while lining up a good shot. Take out the guy on top in the .50 MG turret, then hit the treads, exhaust, and so forth, crippling it. Don't know, though, never seen a t-rex or a tank go into maneuvers. :smalltongue:

[KnightDisciple]

Regeneration is simply not going to happen the way you see it in movies. It'd probably take a day, given good conditions, to regrow a limb. However, this greatly reduces the importance of logistics- who needs a supply line when the fallen are the supplies?

At the very least, you're going to need an equal amount of materials nearby to make it. I imagine cuticles, even super high tech ones, are going to need time to harden. You could always just reattach a lost limb, if enough of it was there to pick up. Spare limbs could be helpful, too.

As for nimble tanks, I get the feeling a large biped could run circles around it, evading that turret while lining up a good shot. Take out the guy on top in the .50 MG turret, then hit the treads, exhaust, and so forth, crippling it. Don't know, though, never seen a t-rex or a tank go into maneuvers. :smalltongue:

...Okay, let me say this a different way. How nimble is an elephant? Now, add mass onto that, and subtract stability, since you're going from 4 legs to 2. Now raise the center of gravity a few feet. And you expect me to believe something like that will be very nimble at all?
Now look cars; they can reverse direction instantly. A tank is less maneuverable, sure. But it's a much smaller gap. Again, they have a large area of traction with their treads, and they turn by switching 1 tread into reverse. At worst, I'd expect them to be even. But, oh, wait! the turrent can track while driving (well, the Abrams can. don't know about Ruskie tanks). And no idiot will be exposed up top during combat maneuvers. They've got scopes and such for that. What's the T-Rex going to "hit" it with, anyways? It's head?

[Lagrange]

I am not sure that spare limbs is a feasible solution. I do not know my neural biology, but I do not think that the neural network works like a circuit board where cutting a connection would channel it to a spare part. It would have to take a conscious effort to move the spare limbs if they were not normally used. I also think that nerves decay a bit fast for limbs to be just reattached without medical equipment.
The problem with cannibalization is that cannot be the only energy source. It would be a great one, for the day or two after a large battle if half the force is destroyed, but what about the month after that? An organism like this would take time to mature, and an energy source has to be found that lasts during periods of peace, otherwise it would not be a great weapons.

I personally would put this as a point against organic tech, it is more of a pain to maintain outside of war because not only does it still need energy input that is basically the same as it needs for active duty during times of peace, it would also need to be culled more so that the population does not grow too large and destroy an ecosystem.

[KnightDisciple]

I am not sure that spare limbs is a feasible solution. I do not know my neural biology, but I do not think that the neural network works like a circuit board where cutting a connection would channel it to a spare part. It would have to take a conscious effort to move the spare limbs if they were not normally used. I also think that nerves decay a bit fast for limbs to be just reattached without medical equipment.
The problem with cannibalization is that cannot be the only energy source. It would be a great one, for the day or two after a large battle if half the force is destroyed, but what about the month after that? An organism like this would take time to mature, and an energy source has to be found that lasts during periods of peace, otherwise it would not be a great weapons.

I personally would put this as a point against organic tech, it is more of a pain to maintain outside of war because not only does it still need energy input that is basically the same as it needs for active duty during times of peace, it would also need to be culled more so that the population does not grow too large and destroy an ecosystem.

Oh, yeah, this is a very good point. Mechanical tech can be mothballed pretty easily. If we take this to the level of spaceships, just vent the atmo and park it away from an asteroid field, and you're golden. Not so simple with bioships.

[Dervag]

But then, you physicists concluded that bumble bees can't fly (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1076/is-it-aerodynamically-impossible-for-bumblebees-to-fly). For those of you who didn't follow the link; it's actually something of an urban legend. The relevance here is that how bees generated enough lift, by flapping (actually spinning) their wings fast enough, was unknown. Turns out they vibrate their flight muscles like a rubber band, rather than flap like a bird.Yeah. That was because we didn't know how something worked and did the calculations based on a false assumption.

Where's the false assumption here?
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And no one knows how to make the Starship Enterprise. I'm not sure that is a very strong argument in a discussion of sci-fi.Hang on a minute. That suggests a thought experiment.

Imagine that tomorrow we commission two spaceships, one metaltech and one organic. They're supposed to go fly to Mars (something we can plausibly do), with enough cargo capacity to carry a large expedition, with the intent of setting up a permanent base.

We can't build the starship Enterprise out of metal or biotech. But we can build a spacecraft to fly to Mars with a large cargo capacity. The basic scientific discoveries we need to make in order to do that already exist. We understand metallurgy, nuclear power, and electronics. We can build chemical or nuclear rocket engines, and indeed have already done so. We can build life support systems for long-term habitation in space using machines and gas storage tanks, and have already done so.

Are there unsolved problems involved? Yes. But they are all engineering problems. A Mars ship is different in degree from other things we already know how to do, but not different in kind. There are already concept designs for such a thing. We can make some shrewd estimates about how much it would cost and how long it would take to build, given the budget. The general consensus among the informed community is that if we had the money and the backing, we could do it in ten or twenty years.
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Now, contrast that to the bioship. We don't even know where to begin in terms of building a bioship that can fly to Mars. We don't just have engineering problems to solve such as "given that a nuclear rocket engine works, how do we build one and throw it into orbit safely?" We have fundamental scientific questions to answer before we can even begin to think about the design and construction of the bioship. Questions that will probably provide fruitful research for the next generation of Nobel laureates. Maybe the one after that, too.

Those questions might all be answered in ten or twenty years, but I'm not betting on it. We've got a long way to do before we can move from modifying existing organisms (mostly very simple ones like E. Coli and fruit flies) to creating new organisms out of whole cloth, to boldly do what nothing based on Earthly biology has done before.

And depending on the answers to those scientific questions, biotech simply not be able to buy us a ticket to Mars. Can we build an organic rocket engine with high specific impulse, so that the ship doesn't have to be 99.9% fuel by mass? Can we build an organic communications suite for the ship so that we can talk to our astronauts? Can we make sure that the ship won't get some kind of malignant cancer?

Maybe. Maybe. But those are all questions that we already have a metaltech answer to. Nuclear electric propulsion works. Radios and lasers work. Steel hulls don't get cancer.

It's those unanswered questions that haunt me when I think about biotechnology. We don't know enough to say that we can build massive biotech constructs of capability anywhere near the massive metaltech constructs our civilization depends on.
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Yes but one thing you didn't factor in is cost. It takes money and resources to build. None to grow if the creature used produces or feeds off things readily avalible in its enviornment, such as light waves.Soo... you're proposing to grow a spacegoing battleship with a "carapace" made of exotic materials, enough brain tissue to do the work of a supercomputer, some kind of super space drive, et cetera... out of pure light?

I really can't see it. If nothing else, the thing is made out of atoms. Atoms are in short supply in the vacuum of space.

Biologically speaking, this thing is a lot bigger and more complex than a human. It's going to need more support structure than a human growing up, and growing a human being from a zygote involves a lot of support structure.
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Broken legs mend. Certainly, certain levels of damage mean you need a new horse. Certain levels of damage mean you need a new land rover. I'm not mechanically inclined, so I don't really know what level of damage to a vehicle counts as a broken leg.Hit a vehicle hard enough to break a horse's leg. That's the amount of damage in question. Most likely, it will be repairable.

Damage that will destroy a Land Rover beyond the possibility of repair will reduce a horse to a pile of dead meat and bone splinters. And the horse takes longer to replace.


Land Rovers run out of gas.Horses get sleeping sickness


But the energy/unit is lower, and land rovers don't make themselves.Land rovers don't have to be broken in for riding, either.

We can bicker about this for days. However, there's still a very basic point I would like to make. There was a time when horses were available widely and motor vehicles were available widely. They had plenty of access to either. Why did people choose motor vehicles like cars and tractors over horses if horses are better or more economical?

Likewise, an ox and a tractor are engineered for the same purpose. Why did farmers switch to tractors as soon as they got the chance? Carrier pigeons and radios are engineered for the same purpose. Same question. Or we could compare locomotives and draft horses (rather than cars and riding horses).

Was this just random chance? Or did intelligent people sit down, look at the costs and benefits of each, and make an informed decision about whether plowing a field with a tractor was better than plowing it with a team of oxen?

If it's the second one, what do you think they did wrong?
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Did you know that the fastest way to manufacture many drugs is by inserting plasmids into E. Coli, and letting them build insulin? I don't think you're thinking on the right level of biotech here.Oh, that works like a charm. Sure. Synthesis of specialized chemicals in small quantity is a specialty of biotech. A big vat of plasmid-modified bacteria may well be a better way to make medicine than a chemical plant.

That doesn't mean that it's a smart choice to use the biotech equivalent of a car in place of a car.
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Biosynthesis is usually more cost effective than industrial methods. Methanol & ethanol, for instance, are typically synthesized by bacteria.Steel, on the other hand, isn't.

Synthesizing organic chemicals is a different ball game from producing steel girders. You can't automatically guarantee that because brewer's yeast makes ethanol efficiently, some hypothetical E. coli johnhenry can make steel beams more efficiently than a steel mill.
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That's not at all what I'm saying. You're saying you can't make a house fire proof; we should all live in caves. I'm suggesting we build houses differently.No, I'm saying you can't make a wood house fireproof. If it's fireproofing you want, the easy, cost-effective solution is to build a house out of some fireproof material... probably an inorganic one.

There are a lot of problems for which the inorganic solution is simpler than the organic solution. It's easier to figure out, easier to implement, and more effective in practice. That doesn't mean that a metaltech solution is best for all problems, but it does mean that they're best for a lot of problems.
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[A bioship] would eat, a major advantage it would have over a ship that couldn't.It would also not be easy to take apart and repair if something went wrong in its guts, a major disadvantage it would have compared to a ship that can.

Also, if a bioship eats, a bioship can starve- another disadvantage. If you park a metaltech spacecraft in orbit with a sunshade and pump the insides full of nitrogen or something, it will still be there in a decade and will still work. Hopefully, the bioship will, but making that happen imposes further complexity on the system to match the metaltech ship's capability.
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Some real organisms. Salamanders can regrow just about everything you cut off, as do many amphibians. The regeneratory power of plants are extraordinary. You are limiting your thinking to narrowly to vertebrates. just because an animal lacks the ability to regenerate something doesn't mean it can't be given that ability. It's only a matter of time before we figure out how to turn on developmental genes that don't cause really awful cancer.I sure hope so. The problem is that this is a fundamental question of science that we don't have an answer to yet, and without an answer we can't guarantee that the bioship will have the kind of regenerative abilities it needs to make up for the fact that we can't just fabricate spare parts and swap them in with a wrench.


Did you know that virtually every cell in your body contains the information to construct a brand new human? The DNA housed in the nucleus of (almost) every somatic cells is identical, save for mutations due to replication & the environment. All the information is there, yet somehow cells differentiate into heart and lung, skin and in intestine.Yes, and we have yet to figure out how to control that process. Hopefully we will, but will we ever be able to invent whole new organisms and reliably control their development? Beats me. I don't know. And because of that barrier... well, see my comments at the top of the post.

[DrakebloodIV]

:vaarsuvius: "Greater Wall Of Text!"

Okay, first thing I'm going to do is define Organic and Metallic Technology

Organic Technology - Any form of technology in which a living organism (or a technically non-living machine derived from a living organism) provides the primary means for achieving a task.

Ex- E. Coli providing the raw materials for producing an antibiotic, thats like saying that a vein of ore is the technology behind steel. The science that maniplates and refines a raw material is what gets the credit here.

Metallic technology- Any form of technology in which a mechanical object physically produced acts as the primary means for achieving a task

Ex- Organic technology being fueled by an inorganic machine is also not exclusive. A man who grows roses with heat lamps wouldn't be complemented on his amazing heat lams, now would he?

Note: This isnt to say that an organic could use steel armor or an inorganic could use biological weaponry. Those both count as PRIMARY means for achieving their goals. But, an organic spaceship could use a nuclear reactor to power its space ship, as the reactor is merely providing the means not doing the action.

Next step- Create a hypothetical unit designed to the maximum potential for each technology and have it compete with its corresponding double

Lets start simple, Mechanized soldier versus biologically engineered soldier.

Mechanized soldier equpment:

-Body armor consisting of layers of carbon fibre, steel of varying hardness, kevlar and coated in an anti-acidic compound
-Mechanized limbs allowing for increased strength and manuverability
-Stim packs for increased short term reflexes
-Faceplate with AI interface that assists with tactics, suit status, enemy observance etc.
-Submachine gun, flamethrower, shotgun, rocket launcher (mininuke?) etc.
-Rocket boots
-Self-destruct upon Person death

Biomonster equipment

-Redundant organs
-Non-skeletal (dosent have to worry about broken bones or blunt trauma, the whole thing is run on blood pressure, like a giant erection)
-Hypercoagulent fur- Spider silk and serveral other natural substances can cause blood to coagulate at an extrodinary rate. Only minimal blood loss from puncture wounds and internal bleeding, perhaps a coating on the outside of organs also.
-Hummingbird matabolism- Reacts to everything in bullet time
-Enhanced senses- Owl+eagle eyes, bloodhound nose, bat ears
-Grasshopper like tendon springs- A grasshopper coils its legs and puts serious tension into them to make its jumps. Its like snapping your fingers but large scale and deadly
-hundreds of redundant teeth, ejectable at high velocity

[Gavin Sage]

Myrmex you are missing the point with that small scale dragon-taur thing and in general. How is this creature superior for all the work you'd have to put into it. Okay it might be bullet proof, against small arms. But while armor may not be as useless as often shown, there are weapons that can beat it. And this is only the start of technological possiblities.

For one example there isn't an effective biological equivalent to the bullet. Acid, I don't know that I believe in being a weapon against metal, damage sure but eat holes in few seconds nah. But handwave that, there's limits on how far you can spray a fluid. Let's say we put our weapon in some kind of sack though for delievery, how do you deliever it? I still don't buy much in the way of combustion for a biological organism, safety would demand bullets at the least which aside from more bio-metal making would need some sort of assembly process. Utterly throughly and totally impossible, no but its sure a lot of work for centuries old real world technology and still being superior.

The real good example though is communications. Organic tech would be limited to shouting distance, which okay might be pretty long in water if done like whale song but would hardly work in space. No telecomunications, no spy satellites, and extremely slow information transmission. I think there is good reason why 40k resorts to magical powers for Tryannids to communicate, nevermind FTL travel.

[Dervag]

:vaarsuvius: "Greater Wall Of Text!"Sorry. I'll try to keep it under control from now on.

Can you at least read the bit at the top about the task of designing spaceships to fly to Mars using organic vs. metallic technology? That's the really important bit, to my way of thinking.
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We know enough to know we can build a spaceship to fly to Mars using metaltech. We haven't done it (yet), but we can. It's an engineering problem, not a scientific one.

But we don't know enough to know we can build a bioship to fly to Mars. There are too many unanswered questions about how extreme the conditions life can handle are, about how precisely we can control and manipulate the genetic code, about how we would go about growing large, complicated organisms in vitro, and so forth. And these are scientific problems, not engineering ones. We can't predict with all that much confidence what the answers will be.

Many of the dreams about what metaltech would be capable of that people had a hundred years ago didn't pan out. We still don't have flying cars or artificial gravity or easily portable atomic power sources. And it's quite likely that we never will.

My worry is that there are probably similar "failed dreams" lurking in the study of biology, and that we just haven't gotten far enough to separate the truth from the fantasy. That makes me skeptical of the idea that organic technology could efficiently replace all or most of the things we now do with metal technology.

[DrakebloodIV]

The fact that there are failed ideas originating in those times is based significantly on the flawed perceptions of physics in that time. Einsteinian physics had yet to be invented in the early 1920's, not to mention the gross overestimation of the human capacity for invention and the fact that those were mainly established in the entertainment industry. Not to mention the fact that two out of three of those things you mentioned are possible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car_(aircraft))

Also, this thread is supposed to be about the hypothetical abilities of both, not our lack of knowledge in the said field.

[Myrmex]

By the Emperor, every time I go to post one reply, there are 3 more. Glad to see so much interest, though!

Anyway, excuse the text wall:



...Okay, let me say this a different way. How nimble is an elephant? Now, add mass onto that, and subtract stability, since you're going from 4 legs to 2. Now raise the center of gravity a few feet. And you expect me to believe something like that will be very nimble at all?
Now look cars; they can reverse direction instantly. A tank is less maneuverable, sure. But it's a much smaller gap. Again, they have a large area of traction with their treads, and they turn by switching 1 tread into reverse. At worst, I'd expect them to be even. But, oh, wait! the turrent can track while driving (well, the Abrams can. don't know about Ruskie tanks). And no idiot will be exposed up top during combat maneuvers. They've got scopes and such for that. What's the T-Rex going to "hit" it with, anyways? It's head?

A car can't reverse instantly. Cars are clumsy brutes compared to grizzly bears or moose. Have you ever seen a moose display its fighting prowess? It has a head, and four legs- five points of defense, any four of which can be in play at the same time. I've seen them jump up and kick out with three legs and and swing their head. Can any cars do that?

Also, I was suggesting the rex have some weaponry mounted on it. Personally, I was thinking Jurassic Park style action, but in light of what Lagrange said, perhaps it was a poor example.


I am not sure that spare limbs is a feasible solution. I do not know my neural biology, but I do not think that the neural network works like a circuit board where cutting a connection would channel it to a spare part. It would have to take a conscious effort to move the spare limbs if they were not normally used. I also think that nerves decay a bit fast for limbs to be just reattached without medical equipment.
The problem with cannibalization is that cannot be the only energy source. It would be a great one, for the day or two after a large battle if half the force is destroyed, but what about the month after that? An organism like this would take time to mature, and an energy source has to be found that lasts during periods of peace, otherwise it would not be a great weapons.

Spare limbs would work because you're pretty much building this thing's brain from the ground up. An elephant can paint with its nose, a monkey can peel bananas with its tail. As for reattachment, think of it as a battlefield stopgap. The thing is going to have to go crawl into a hole and lie there for a couple days as it reroutes the nerves and stuff.

If you routed your nerves before you could think, breathed before you had lungs, developed a circulatory system before your heart could beat; surly it can be done again.

Energy can be obtained by capturing some sort of radiation as energy, or by breaking high energy bonds. It's not like tanks have low energy requirements. How many calories does your car need every day?


I personally would put this as a point against organic tech, it is more of a pain to maintain outside of war because not only does it still need energy input that is basically the same as it needs for active duty during times of peace, it would also need to be culled more so that the population does not grow too large and destroy an ecosystem.

Mothballing is easy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)

Also see:
Cryptobiosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis), Hibernation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation), Dormancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormancy)



Yeah. That was because we didn't know how something worked and did the calculations based on a false assumption.

Where's the false assumption here?

Archeologists have been going back on forth on whether dinosaurs were giant engines of destruction and death, or lazy, lumbering reptiles of sloth.


Hang on a minute. That suggests a thought experiment.

Imagine that tomorrow we commission two spaceships, one metaltech and one organic. They're supposed to go fly to Mars (something we can plausibly do), with enough cargo capacity to carry a large expedition, with the intent of setting up a permanent base.

We can't build the starship Enterprise out of metal or biotech. But we can build a spacecraft to fly to Mars with a large cargo capacity. The basic scientific discoveries we need to make in order to do that already exist. We understand metallurgy, nuclear power, and electronics. We can build chemical or nuclear rocket engines, and indeed have already done so. We can build life support systems for long-term habitation in space using machines and gas storage tanks, and have already done so.

Are there unsolved problems involved? Yes. But they are all engineering problems. A Mars ship is different in degree from other things we already know how to do, but not different in kind. There are already concept designs for such a thing. We can make some shrewd estimates about how much it would cost and how long it would take to build, given the budget. The general consensus among the informed community is that if we had the money and the backing, we could do it in ten or twenty years.
_________

Now, contrast that to the bioship. We don't even know where to begin in terms of building a bioship that can fly to Mars. We don't just have engineering problems to solve such as "given that a nuclear rocket engine works, how do we build one and throw it into orbit safely?" We have fundamental scientific questions to answer before we can even begin to think about the design and construction of the bioship. Questions that will probably provide fruitful research for the next generation of Nobel laureates. Maybe the one after that, too.

Uhhh.... kay? I'm pointing out the feasibility of bioships in universes with the Q, chainswords, guns that shoot rockets, psychics, and gods of chaos. Also, an intelligent, psychic fungus. Ok, so that was mostly 40k. But really man, we're not talking 2050 here. This stuff is a long way off. It may never be feasible.

But if you want nanomachines, why mess around with robots, when life as we know it is constructed of nanomachines? (Yes, cells measure in microns, but their contents aren't that big)


And depending on the answers to those scientific questions, biotech simply not be able to buy us a ticket to Mars. Can we build an organic rocket engine with high specific impulse, so that the ship doesn't have to be 99.9% fuel by mass? Can we build an organic communications suite for the ship so that we can talk to our astronauts? Can we make sure that the ship won't get some kind of malignant cancer?

Sure, why not? I mean, is there anyway to ensure that our astronauts won't get some sort of malignant cancer, or go into an event horizon and be killed by ghosts?


Maybe. Maybe. But those are all questions that we already have a metaltech answer to. Nuclear electric propulsion works. Radios and lasers work. Steel hulls don't get cancer.

So you're saying maybe I should hold off on proposing this to NASA? Darn....


It's those unanswered questions that haunt me when I think about biotechnology. We don't know enough to say that we can build massive biotech constructs of capability anywhere near the massive metaltech constructs our civilization depends on.

I feel like it'll be possible. It's just going to be a matter of wanting to live in a place where the carpet drools.


We can bicker about this for days.

Let's not.


However, there's still a very basic point I would like to make. There was a time when horses were available widely and motor vehicles were available widely. They had plenty of access to either. Why did people choose motor vehicles like cars and tractors over horses if horses are better or more economical?

Likewise, an ox and a tractor are engineered for the same purpose. Why did farmers switch to tractors as soon as they got the chance? Carrier pigeons and radios are engineered for the same purpose. Same question. Or we could compare locomotives and draft horses (rather than cars and riding horses).

Was this just random chance? Or did intelligent people sit down, look at the costs and benefits of each, and make an informed decision about whether plowing a field with a tractor was better than plowing it with a team of oxen?

If it's the second one, what do you think they did wrong?

Well, he had to radically alter the environment to make all of our cars work. Remove all the forests. Construct an enormous support system to run our little combustion engines. Put half the population to work building things and laying rail, to build other things. Where's all the support going to be in the vast gulf of space? Think you swing by your friendly galactic mechanic and pick up spare parts?

The industrial revolution required a fundamental change in the environment, an the fact that machines are simple enough for us to build. Biotech right now is in its infancy, because it's so complex, there was never ever any way we were going to figure out how it worked without all sorts of special tools. I think the more we master biology, the more we're going to turn to it to solve problems. Why? Because it's so precise and self-regulating. Look at the allure of nanomachines. Life is nanomachines. We just have to figure out how to reprogram it.


Oh, that works like a charm. Sure. Synthesis of specialized chemicals in small quantity is a specialty of biotech. A big vat of plasmid-modified bacteria may well be a better way to make medicine than a chemical plant.

As I said, the technology is in its infancy.


That doesn't mean that it's a smart choice to use the biotech equivalent of a car in place of a car.

It depends, I think. If there aren't roads or petrol stations, I'm going with the caribou or camel. But yes, after you make a bunch of assumptions, a car is superior to an animal.


Synthesizing organic chemicals is a different ball game from producing steel girders. You can't automatically guarantee that because brewer's yeast makes ethanol efficiently, some hypothetical E. coli johnhenry can make steel beams more efficiently than a steel mill.

I'm not talking about steel girders- I'm talking about pre-fab structures building themselves. Though, that makes me wonder what the motive force would be to build an organism that big. Big circulatory system, you know?


There are a lot of problems for which the inorganic solution is simpler than the organic solution. It's easier to figure out, easier to implement, and more effective in practice. That doesn't mean that a metaltech solution is best for all problems, but it does mean that they're best for a lot of problems.

At the moment.
The "simpler" solution to a family history of cancer is to eat whatever foods are in fad and stay out of the sun. A better solution is identification of the oncogenes and retroviral gene therapy.


It would also not be easy to take apart and repair if something went wrong in its guts, a major disadvantage it would have compared to a ship that can.

Ideally, it would be able to fix itself. Of course, the ship would be alive and think, so could help identify problems or open its guts up, etc.


Also, if a bioship eats, a bioship can starve- another disadvantage. If you park a metaltech spacecraft in orbit with a sunshade and pump the insides full of nitrogen or something, it will still be there in a decade and will still work. Hopefully, the bioship will, but making that happen imposes further complexity on the system to match the metaltech ship's capability.

Ideally, you'd be able to turn it's metabolism and put it in suspended animation. There's been discovery of sugars that a certain phylum of arthropods, the Tardigrada, use to package their cellular components during cryptobiosis. They can be revived after something like 100 years of virtually zero metabolism.


I sure hope so. The problem is that this is a fundamental question of science that we don't have an answer to yet, and without an answer we can't guarantee that the bioship will have the kind of regenerative abilities it needs to make up for the fact that we can't just fabricate spare parts and swap them in with a wrench.

There's no reason you couldn't fabricate spare parts and swam them in, it's just, why would you need to? The ship would do it itself, much the way we are constantly repairing ourselves. Thinking of the ship as more of a fungus or Volvox or diatom might be a better way of imagining it, than as an animal.


Yes, and we have yet to figure out how to control that process. Hopefully we will, but will we ever be able to invent whole new organisms and reliably control their development? Beats me. I don't know. And because of that barrier... well, see my comments at the top of the post.

You have trouble grappling with the feasibility of such a big what if. If our biotechnology is ths advanced, what about the metaltech? If current trends hold true, wouldn't such a bioship be something like the equivalent of today's horse?

Good point. I feel that we'll move towards biotech, because it works, and does what we want it to. It'll be a long time off before we're dwelling in buildings that breathe, though.

[Myrmex]

Myrmex you are missing the point with that small scale dragon-taur thing and in general. How is this creature superior for all the work you'd have to put into it. Okay it might be bullet proof, against small arms. But while armor may not be as useless as often shown, there are weapons that can beat it. And this is only the start of technological possiblities.

I was thinking of something that would be dangerous against a tank (like someone with skillz & an RPG7), but serve mostly as infantry. And of course there are weapons that can beat, it everything's got weapons that can beat.

And yeah, a lot of work would have to go into it, as you need something like 500 million years of evolution fused with 6,000 years of human war tech. Of course by the time you have intelligent, 6-legged, wyrms crawling around and cracking over Abrams, no one's fielding second millennium armor.

I was just trying to come up with something that would be kinda like a cockroach cracking a tank open.


For one example there isn't an effective biological equivalent to the bullet. Acid, I don't know that I believe in being a weapon against metal, damage sure but eat holes in few seconds nah. But handwave that, there's limits on how far you can spray a fluid. Let's say we put our weapon in some kind of sack though for delievery, how do you deliever it? I still don't buy much in the way of combustion for a biological organism, safety would demand bullets at the least which aside from more bio-metal making would need some sort of assembly process. Utterly throughly and totally impossible, no but its sure a lot of work for centuries old real world technology and still being superior.

Agreed. There's no reason we can't give the draco-taur (I like the name) a gun! Or three, and some rockets, too. The breath weapon would be for entrenched positions with troops inside. Though, to be honest, if there is a dragon on the loose with rocket pods, there will probably be robots that don't care about poison gas or bee stings.

Projectiles aren't impossible. There are several animals that shoot stuff at prey. The only one that comes to mind right now is the cone shell, a mollusk that shoots a venomous barb at prey, like crabs. Very poisonous, too.


The real good example though is communications. Organic tech would be limited to shouting distance, which okay might be pretty long in water if done like whale song but would hardly work in space. No telecomunications, no spy satellites, and extremely slow information transmission. I think there is good reason why 40k resorts to magical powers for Tryannids to communicate, nevermind FTL travel.

There's no reason why you couldn't communicate with radiowaves. As I understand, it's a pretty simple mechanism. Animals are already full of crystals- the lens of your eye, for instance, is called crystalin, which is a crystalized protein. And, as mentioned before, pigeons can see magnetic fields. It's how they find their way home in the dark (seriously, check out the passenger pigeon). Salmon also have magnetic bits in their nose, presumably used to find their way back to the stream they hatched out in to spawn, after as many as 7 years away.

[Revlid]

BECAUSE TYRANIDS, THAT'S WHY
http://fc79.deviantart.com/fs41/f/2009/007/0/f/Tyranids_by_Jamstar501st.jpg

OM NOM NOM

[Lagrange]

Well, he had to radically alter the environment to make all of our cars work. Remove all the forests. Construct an enormous support system to run our little combustion engines. Put half the population to work building things and laying rail, to build other things. Where's all the support going to be in the vast gulf of space? Think you swing by your friendly galactic mechanic and pick up spare parts?

...

It depends, I think. If there aren't roads or petrol stations, I'm going with the caribou or camel. But yes, after you make a bunch of assumptions, a car is superior to an animal.

...

Ideally, you'd be able to turn it's metabolism and put it in suspended animation. There's been discovery of sugars that a certain phylum of arthropods, the Tardigrada, use to package their cellular components during cryptobiosis. They can be revived after something like 100 years of virtually zero metabolism.


Where in space would you get anything for the organism to survive on? Basically in space you could consider the next eating spot to be the next refueling spot. For interstellar journeys that would be a significant problem.

The nearest star, Alpha Centari and its companions, is about 4 light years away from the earth. The average density of interstellar space is about 1 hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, this is far too low for an organism to use as a food source and does not contain any useful elements such as the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and salts that are needed for life as we know it to survive, and I cannot see an organism that could survive on hydrogen alone.

Currently we have can try nuclear pulse propulsion (Project Orion) this would get speeds of about .1c, it would still take about 40 years to travel to Alpha Centari. This means that your hypothetical bioship would have to be able to either carry 40 years worth of energy supplies or survive basically without food for 40 years. A metal based ship has the advantage when it comes to energy needs because nuclear power has a much higher energy density then food items.

What kind of propulsion system would a bioship use? Life is not designed to travel in outer-space and the velocities needed are much higher than what could be produced by just scaling up organic processes.

I personally do not see a movement towards using biological means to power spaceships and things like that because of the issues already discussed.

As a more entertaining note, since it was mentioned that animals can feed themselves on a journey...it should be noted that from what we currently know it is more likely that a mechanical ship could 'feed' itself better in the universe as a whole. If it is nuclear powered, Hydrogen is common, Uranium can be found on basically any planet as well. While the elements are present everywhere, it is not as common for the complex organic molecules to be around as needed. And since most stars are not G type like the sun, a plant would have to completely change is chlorophyl content for each type of star that it visits with most outputting less energy and in longer wavelength so that it could produced the organic molecules that it needs from the raw elements.

[Talya]

I keep seeing arguments in this thread about what living creatures can and cannot do, and they are always based on the life we see around us. This is a logical fallacy.

Life evolves to match its surrounding. Life that evolves in the deepest reaches of the ocean doesn't resemble life on the surface of our world. And there is nothing to indicate that a planet would need to in any way resemble earth to evolve life...or even BE a planet. Life evolved here in the way that it evolved because Terra is the way she is. Life that were to evolve, say, in the corona of a star, or the horrific pressures of a gas giant, or the frigid far reaches of intergalactic space, would certainly be very different, with different tolerances, than what we see around us. Earth's environment just isn't that varied. Anything that could adapt to the cold, radioactive vaccuum of the void would have, out of necessity, evolved to withstand that. If they encountered predators that exploited them, they would ether evolve defenses or die out. That's darwinian selection at work.

Instead of saying "Life could not develop an aggregated diamond nanorod carapace -- organics can't withstand the conditions required to create them," the question becomes "what environment might produce life that could withstand the conditions required to develop such a thing?"

[Innis Cabal]

I agree with the above, though when the "Are aliens real" debate was going, and such logic was used it was shouted down, which was unfortunate, but its good to see there is at least one other person that agree's on the selfish concept that only earth life is what we're really talking about.

And its fine for people to say "Well we can only use what we know" but...use your imagintion paired with some good ol' fashion science. Heck there are at least 10 programs on the history and discovery channel all about this, and if the scientists they pull from all over the world can chat about it and render computer images for the lulz, then we can do it here to.

What could a living spaceship eat in space? Light rays, heck they could store them in "Fat" cells and use them in their travels, fly near mercury and just soak up for a while. As for how the creature moved? Large fins perhaps, much like a giant space whale. Or giant air sacks that act much like a squid to move them.

For an RP forum....imagination seems dang well tapped out.

[hamishspence]

the Nids, in many cases, more closely resemble organic machines than normal life- no digestive or reproductive systems whatsoever. They are grown, the fight, they die, their biomass is reabsorbed.

[Lagrange]

I keep seeing arguments in this thread about what living creatures can and cannot do, and they are always based on the life we see around us. This is a logical fallacy.


I would contend that it is also a logical fallacy that life can start anywhere. Current theories of evolution work great once life is allowed to start, we currently do not know how life began.



Life evolves to match its surrounding. Life that evolves in the deepest reaches of the ocean doesn't resemble life on the surface of our world. And there is nothing to indicate that a planet would need to in any way resemble earth to evolve life...or even BE a planet. Life evolved here in the way that it evolved because Terra is the way she is. Life that were to evolve, say, in the corona of a star, or the horrific pressures of a gas giant, or the frigid far reaches of intergalactic space, would certainly be very different, with different tolerances, than what we see around us. Earth's environment just isn't that varied. Anything that could adapt to the cold, radioactive vaccuum of the void would have, out of necessity, evolved to withstand that. If they encountered predators that exploited them, they would ether evolve defenses or die out. That's darwinian selection at work.


For Darwinian selection to work life must first be able to exist in the first place.

Life must have chemical reactions to exist, and be made of molecules. For starts this limits it to M-type stars as the higher temperature stars ionize the important elements. Then you need to have a great enough concentration of the elements to allow the possibility of it occurring. Stars are primarily Hydrogen and Helium, and neither of these can form the backbone of complex molecules. For these reasons stars are not expected to have life.
A similar argument can be constructed against interstellar/galactic space. The density of the densest regions that we have detected is about 10^5 molecules per cubic centimeter, this is very low and considering that most of it is Hydrogen gas does not give much of a change for life to develop.

My point is basically that evolution can only happen if life can start in the first place.

From a chemical standpoint Carbon and organic molecules are mostly likely to be the backbone of any life that we find in the universe. I do not say this because life happens to be based on carbon on Terra, but because of the chemical properties of various elements. As can be found in science fiction, Silicone can be an alternative because silicone has many of the same properties as carbon. The difference is that silicone forms weaker bonds and as such is not as stable nor as strong as carbon.






Next topic:
What are the fins going to be pushing against? Space is notably a vacuum, and as such has rather few molecules to be pushing against for that to work well as a mechanism to move the ship. Air sacks, it would require a lot of air to move the ship and that would take up a lot of space (increasing drag) and increase the mass (increasing the amount of air needed to move it faster again).
Light is well and good as an energy source near a star, but interstellar space is significantly larger then stars. Light only provides energy, it does not provide the chemicals needed to do anything and as far as I know there is no organism that exists as a closed system like that. Even plants need to bring in minerals and water and oxygen/CO2 gas from somewhere else.

[Innis Cabal]

Next topic:
What are the fins going to be pushing against? Space is notably a vacuum, and as such has rather few molecules to be pushing against for that to work well as a mechanism to move the ship. Air sacks, it would require a lot of air to move the ship and that would take up a lot of space (increasing drag) and increase the mass (increasing the amount of air needed to move it faster again).
Light is well and good as an energy source near a star, but interstellar space is significantly larger then stars. Light only provides energy, it does not provide the chemicals needed to do anything and as far as I know there is no organism that exists as a closed system like that. Even plants need to bring in minerals and water and oxygen/CO2 gas from somewhere else.

So that means somewhere out there in the universe there are no creatures that might have that?

Or better yet, with all the gene tech we have today, if we pursued that...how long would it take us to build a creature that would fit perfectly with what we need? I for one have no answer, but there is only one way to find out.

As for the plants and such. Those are all -earth- planets. And -earth- creatures. We're not talking abotu just Earth here. Whats to say that there is a plant on Centarui-24342 that uses amonia and breath out helium. We don't know. Again the only way to find out is to luck or try to build it. Alot of money? Ya, but how much have we dumped on our space programs?


As for the Nids, they do reproduce. Some of them at any rate. They are more like one giant space creature, not really machine like at all.

[Talya]

For Darwinian selection to work life must first be able to exist in the first place.

Life must have chemical reactions to exist, and be made of molecules. For starts this limits it to M-type stars as the higher temperature stars ionize the important elements. Then you need to have a great enough concentration of the elements to allow the possibility of it occurring. Stars are primarily Hydrogen and Helium, and neither of these can form the backbone of complex molecules. For these reasons stars are not expected to have life.

No, Life as we know it is limited to M-type stars, requiring complex molecules. There is nothing to indicate that life cannot be formed out of more basic molecules, or submolecular/subatomic particles, or even pure energy. We are a random arrangement of elements that happened to be available on this world. There is nothing particularly special about "life," nor do we have any reason to believe that we are somehow the primary form of it in the universe.

[Oslecamo]

As for the Nids, they do reproduce. Some of them at any rate. They are more like one giant space creature, not really machine like at all.

And they fail miserably at doing their job of bringing down mankind, despite having massive number superiority. This goes a long way showing how innefecient pure organic technology is, when you have billions of troops to your oponent's hudreds and you still can't do your job.

The big problem with space is that, well, it's EMPTY! All life forms we know need a constant supply of of some kind of resource, be it air or water or sulphur or whatever. Kill the supply and the species die.

Dead metal ships don't. They aren't alive, so they don't need to expend energy just to keep themselves togheter. And so can endure looong travels trough space. Like most asteroids do.

Talya: there's one inexpendable ingredient for the formation of life-a stable enviroment where most of the subtances aren't highly reactive.

In our case, water. It's in all known life forms. And life began there. It blocked the outside radiation, kept a stable temperature and doesn't react with most substances, allowing the first organic molecules to form whitout being instantly destroyed.

A star doesnt have life because it's a giant fusion reactor wich releases stupid amounts of energy at every second and there's nowhere to hide from it, so complex structures simply cannot form(they are destroyed), making life impossible.

[Lagrange]

As for the plants and such. Those are all -earth- planets. And -earth- creatures. We're not talking abotu just Earth here. Whats to say that there is a plant on Centarui-24342 that uses amonia and breath out helium. We don't know. Again the only way to find out is to luck or try to build it. Alot of money? Ya, but how much have we dumped on our space programs?


First off helium would not really matter since helium is one of the elements that does not react easily because of a high binding energy with its electrons and no known compound exists with Helium in it.

Second, the space program was an engineering problem, not a research into if it could work, since there was nothing wrong with it working physically.

If you could be kind enough to provide a chemical energy storage system based off of ammonia it would be much appreciated since chemistry, unlike biology, is not subject to such problems as evolution since a chemical reaction occurs because of known physical processes.

[Dervag]

Re: Innis

You'd be surprised what I can imagine. I can imagine liquid helium beings that live happily on the night side of Pluto. I can imagine intelligent starfishlikes drifting around in the oceans under a layer of ammonia ice in orbit around some remote gas giant. I can imagine something with fluorosilicones for DNA that wallows in molten lead to cool off.

But there are things I can't imagine, too. I can't imagine actual violations of the laws of physics. I can't imagine an organism growing (adding mass) on a diet of pure sunlight and interstellar hydrogen, for instance.


The fact that there are failed ideas originating in those times is based significantly on the flawed perceptions of physics in that time. Einsteinian physics had yet to be invented in the early 1920's, not to mention the gross overestimation of the human capacity for invention and the fact that those were mainly established in the entertainment industry.Yes. Exactly. The problem is that biology is still where the physicists were in the 1920s, at the best. That position is:

We've made some fundamental discoveries over the past half-century or so, and they greatly changed the way we saw living organisms, in such a way that we now have much more understanding. But the shift in our understanding isn't over yet, and we are nowhere near ready to convert the new science (quantum mechanics and relativity then, or proteomics and genomics now) into large-scale, reliable engineering.

Which means we're not in a good position to make ambitious predictions about what the new science will be capable of. There are still too many unanswered questions. Flying cars turned out to be harder than most people thought, to the point where they aren't commercially viable even if they can physically be built. I suspect that organic tankbusting monsters will prove the same. Either they can't be built at all, or building them will be a waste of resources compared to other ways of busting a tank.

All we have to go on in predicting that organic technology will be intrinsically more effective than metaltech is the breezy assurance of the entertainment industry and a lot of questionable analogies to situations in nature that may or may not apply.
_______


Energy can be obtained by capturing some sort of radiation as energy, or by breaking high energy bonds. It's not like tanks have low energy requirements. How many calories does your car need every day?Ah, but my car (which runs by breaking high energy bonds) is dependent on fuel produced in a chemical refinery (to produce chemical fuel with high energy bonds). One of the stated advantages of biotech war 'machines' is that they can live off the land. If the thing can't stay alive and active unless it's being fed pure sugar laced with manganese salts, then its advantage in that department goes away.
____


Uhhh.... kay? I'm pointing out the feasibility of bioships in universes with the Q, chainswords, guns that shoot rockets, psychics, and gods of chaos. Also, an intelligent, psychic fungus. Ok, so that was mostly 40k. But really man, we're not talking 2050 here. This stuff is a long way off. It may never be feasible.What I'm trying to illustrate with my thought experiment is that there are many things we know we can do with metaltech that we don't know we can do with organic tech. Like build an interplanetary spacecraft.

So in addition to the suspension of disbelief required to get us to accept faster than light travel, psychic powers, and the like, we have to pile on another layer of "assume the laws of nature let us get away with this" to make the bioship concept viable.

Which we can do- but it undermines the idea that the organic tech is intrinsically superior. We have to suspend disbelief before that becomes a reasonable thing to put into the story.


Let's not.Seconded.
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Well, he had to radically alter the environment to make all of our cars work. Remove all the forests. Construct an enormous support system to run our little combustion engines. Put half the population to work building things and laying rail, to build other things. Where's all the support going to be in the vast gulf of space? Think you swing by your friendly galactic mechanic and pick up spare parts?The farther you go from home, the more of your infrastructure you carry with you in the form of machine shops and such. And there's always a risk, in metal or bio tech ships, that something will go irreparably wrong. My concern is that the stated advantages of biotech sound more like a golden hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hammer) than they do like a reasonable projection of what we can actually do.
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At the moment.
The "simpler" solution to a family history of cancer is to eat whatever foods are in fad and stay out of the sun. A better solution is identification of the oncogenes and retroviral gene therapy.Which is where what I said about "more effective in practice" comes in. Figuring out an organic tech replacement for the drill press that's preferable to the drill press in terms of cost, precision, and ease of use is going to be hard, for instance.
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I keep seeing arguments in this thread about what living creatures can and cannot do, and they are always based on the life we see around us. This is a logical fallacy...

Anything that could adapt to the cold, radioactive vaccuum of the void would have, out of necessity, evolved to withstand that. If they encountered predators that exploited them, they would ether evolve defenses or die out. That's darwinian selection at work.

Instead of saying "Life could not develop an aggregated diamond nanorod carapace -- organics can't withstand the conditions required to create them," the question becomes "what environment might produce life that could withstand the conditions required to develop such a thing?"But immediately after asking that question, we must ask a seocnd question:

"Could the ancestors of life that developed such a thing have survived in that environment long enough to evolve such a thing?"

We don't have a mechanism for how early "life" (self-replicating entities, whatever you want to call them) could exist in the corona of a star, or in the vacuum of space. We can imagine fully formed organisms, with a whole battery of defenses against space conditions, existing in outer space, but where would those organisms come from? The environment is so inhospitable that they would seem very unlikely to evolve naturally there.

Indeed, if we see life in the depths of space, I think it's probably an artifact. The organism must be descended from something else (as in 'brainchild of', if not as in 'biological child of'). Something that inhabited some nicer environment in which life could exist without being supertoughened.

[hamishspence]

I was thinking more of the individual creatures. Though true, ant workers/soldiers are sterile.

the lack of digestion, for anything other than rippers, is a bit of an oddity in the living.

[Innis Cabal]

If you could be kind enough to provide a chemical energy storage system based off of ammonia it would be much appreciated since chemistry, unlike biology, is not subject to such problems as evolution since a chemical reaction occurs because of known physical processes.

Kindly find me a planet that has been formed exactly like earth, has the same basic evolution, that way we can all be certain that we're not a fluke, or that we are the hard and fast scientific rule for the universe.

[Lagrange]

Kindly find me a planet that has been formed exactly like earth, has the same basic evolution, that way we can all be certain that we're not a fluke, or that we are the hard and fast scientific rule for the universe.

I was not asking for a biological formulation of the system but a chemical. In terms of a physical formulation the earth is not odd, Venus is a near twin in a physical formulation. It is a bit hard to detect planets the size of earth, since the earth is a small thing in the scale of the galaxy. We are getting close with our research into exoplanets. From my understand of astronomy the process of the formulation of planets is relatively well understood now. Just look at one of the latest exoplanets that was discovered, it was in the location predicted by an astronomer from her study of planet formulation.

From astronomy we know that the processes of other stars are the same as the sun. This means that our formulation of gravity in non-extreme circumstances, our understanding of nuclear physics, fluids, electromagnetism must be at the worst a good approximation of the rule of the universe.

This is also the point of current research in physics, by only understanding what happens naturally on the Earth we do not know everything. Most of quantum mechanics occurs beyond a limit normally seen in interactions, and the same applies to general relativity.

Now that I have presented why I believe the earth is not an exception in terms of physics processes, by the logic behind Occam's razor the simplest assumption is that the universe in its entirety is governed by the same physical theories that we know. Until evidence is presented that contradicts this assumption, I feel that it is a safe assumption to make.

[Innis Cabal]

So your saying..simply because its easier to simply assume the universe works exactly like our solar system that its fact? And that our initial findings seem to show similar finds of the .000001% of the galaxy we've looked at...that it must be true...

Thats...well you know what they say about assuming.

For a race that knows more about space then our own bloody ocean's...It speaks for itself.

How much do we really know about biology, we don't even fully understand our own body, let alone some other creature.

[Lagrange]

So your saying..simply because its easier to simply assume the universe works exactly like our solar system that its fact? And that our initial findings seem to show similar finds of the .000001% of the galaxy we've looked at...that it must be true...


While you are saying that since we have only looked at a small portion that the rest most be entirely different and follow a different set of rules?

For some more persuasive arguments we have Noether's Theorem. From this theorem we can show some interesting things, such as a nice extension of the conservation of momentum. Since we know that within experimental error (and it is very small) linear momentum is conserved, since linear momentum is conserved the spacial positioning does not matter meaning that the same reaction would occur no matter where it is taking place. From the conservation of rotational momentum we have that being in a reference from that it rotated from the other one does not change the physics of the problem.
This idea was also summed up by Einstein as a postulate of special relativity that the physical laws are the same for all inertial reference frames. Both of these ideas support that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe.

I do not mean to say that there is nothing left to be discovered in physics, but that we do have a good understanding of how some parts work.

Are you suggesting that there is some arbitrary location where anything from the earth would spontaneously break down? Because if the laws of physics do change at some arbitrary point then anything from the earth made will our laws of physics would no longer work.

A specific example of something that is physical in nature that we cannot explain with current theories and that would require a significant change in the theories would help your argument. It is impossible to every explore 100% of the universe, just because it has not been explored yet does not mean that it has to be completely different. I would not expect physics to be different in the Centari system just because we have not been there. I would expect it to be the same and would be very surprised if anything different occurred.

Physics is based on empirical data and it does not just 'change' because your location changed. If you have any proof to the contrary I would love to see it.

[Innis Cabal]

I'm saying just assuming our science has figured out out even a small deal of physics would be foolish, as we don't really have a practical way of proving they work outside of our solar system, since we've never been beyond it.

And no, i'm not saying that everything outside of our solar system has to be 100% different, its simply its probably not going to be even close to 100% the same.

There is nothing stating that life can't be formed out of some other material. Saying "well carbon is important because its important to us" is a pretty narrow and isolated view. That there might be a creature that has the complexc lense system and electrical output to produce eye lasers. There might be giant sized organic creatures that fly around suns using big flippers and air jets.

We have no proof that such isn't possible. Nor do we have proof that they are. But outright selling their existance as impossible is

1. not in the spirit of the discussion
2. denying that our science is fallible, and that there are possibly other solutions in the wide wild universe that we don't have the knowledge to place into said fallible science.

[Caradryan]

1. not in the spirit of the discussion
2. denying that our science is fallible, and that there are possibly other solutions in the wide wild universe that we don't have the knowledge to place into said fallible science.

Two friendly comments in regards to the above comments:

1. What is the spirit of discussion? It's really a non-argument. Lagrange isn't stopping you from giving your opinion, so you could always bring up some solid evidence in support of your point.
2. Given that all science fiction are written by humans, are you saying that human science isn't good enough for this discussion?

Please, bring up ideas or fact or something. Share with us your vision, if you will. Let's not mess around with rhetoric just yet.

On the rest of the matter:

I've noticed an issue with the current topic at hand. As we know, one of the "advantages" given by a biological organism is that it is able to adapt and react to new situations, which would be one thing that an inorganic material cannot.

However, most of the people here seem to be suggesting that we modify an organism to give it all the advantages that have been brought up over the course of this thread. Should that be the case, then I would suggest that we have really contradicted ourselves in this case. A modified organism does not have such a reactionary advantage - this places it on the same level as inorganic technology.

If the definition of organic technology is a form of technology in which a living organism provides the primary means for achieving a task, then we have taken the organism out of the technology.

If we consider the organic technology to be a creature, then, we must consider all the limitations of creatures and life as we know it, since I personally cannot think of anything else we could use.

What makes organic creatures better? Roughly, what advantages does it really confer? It seems to me that between all the trouble of training, producing, feeding, genetic-engineering, brainstorming, and storing this creature, it doesn't seem to be worth it. The creature would have to do an exorbitant amount of self-maintenance in order to maintain homeostasis, which implies that it can only exist under surprisingly strict conditions. It also needs to reproduce - after all, if we take religion and morality out of it, the only purpose of a biological organism is to pass down its genetic material and reproduce.

Etc, etc. I would go on to state that we cannot ignore the criteria for life in this debate. Otherwise, this organic creature might as well be a very intelligent robot.

[Innis Cabal]

Two friendly comments in regards to the above comments:

1. What is the spirit of discussion? It's really a non-argument. Lagrange isn't stopping you from giving your opinion, so you could always bring up some solid evidence in support of your point.
2. Given that all science fiction are written by humans, are you saying that human science isn't good enough for this discussion.

1. For the first, as long as I get some, they are the ones holding it as the ceiling.

2. As above, it may be all we have but it should not be the ceiling for what we are talking about

[Caradryan]

1. For the first, as long as I get some, they are the ones holding it as the ceiling.

2. As above, it may be all we have but it should not be the ceiling for what we are talking about

There's no one here stopping anyone here from discussing the topic.

Furthermore, observe your initial statement.


2. denying that our science is fallible, and that there are possibly other solutions in the wide wild universe that we don't have the knowledge to place into said fallible science.

You seemed to have missed the point. I would contend that first, no one said that our science is infallible. However, if we ignore the limitations of known science, then there's nothing preventing the other side from doing the same thing. It has about as much weight as me bringing Cthulhu into this debate. It eats souls, kills stuff and the known laws of physics don't apply to him. On top of that, action figures have cool tentacle action attacks - imagine the amount of sales in action figures!

Science is science everywhere. For example, just because a Chainsaw-Wielding Laser-Bow using Air-jousting Space Elf comes from Craftworld [insert long gibberish name here] doesn't mean he'll fall upward when he comes to earth. In the same way, if the Space Elves have always fell "up" in their own galaxy/world/whatever, bringing a human there shouldn't mean that the human falls down. The human will fall up in the same manner as the Space Elf. Does this make sense?

[Lagrange]

I do not remember saying that "well carbon is important because its important to us" I remember showing a couple of chemical reasons while carbon is important. It can form long molecular chains that are stable unlike what chemistry has found about other elements. Silicon can form molecular chains like carbon, but it is not as stable as carbon. It could exist, but it is more likely that carbon is used then silicon because it is 1) more stable, and 2) more common, but I do not reject the possibility of silicon based life forms. The same goes for phosphor-nitrogen based life forms. It could happen because phosphorous can form molecular chains and the nitrogen greatly improves their stability.

I have nothing against eye lasers in organisms. It would probably be a designed feature as the evolutionary reasons for it would be rather slim, but it is possible. The hardest part would be having a large enough power source for the organism, relatively weak lasers I can see, but not as strong as the more powerful ones just because of the energy needs (a petaWatt is one of the most energetic and that is on a similar magnitude as the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth).

Flippers probably would not work in space because it needs something to push against. Air jets work if you have a large enough supply of air (it could be a designed feature since it would probably not evolve due to the difficulty in getting the air) and would not work for interstellar journeys because of the large distances involved.



I will never deny that science is fallible, if it was infallible I would have no job prospects. Since my goal is to be a researcher in physics I assume that we do not know everything, it has always been my goal to find something new. But this does not means that what we think we know is wrong.

I would say that it is in the spirit of the discussion to discuss if it is possible for the claims to be true, as far as we know. The argument that the universe is a large place and anything is possible is not a testable argument. I try to avoid saying that something is impossible, only that it is not expected. Just like it is unexpected for a person to spontaneously tunnel to Mars and back. Given enough time it could happen, statistically, but I would not count on it happening during any given person's lifetime.


I seem to have missed an earlier point by Talya. Life as we know it is not limited to M-type stars. It is currently limited to G-type stars as the sun is a G-5 type star. The M-type star would be the best choice for having live develop inside a star because M-type stars are the lowest temperature stars (there are technically lower ones for classifications like Brown dwarfs, but most catalogs are O-M). Since they are the lowest temperature molecular absorption lines can actually be seen in their spectrum.

Life that is pure energy? What is pure energy? From our current understanding of physics all energy is made up of particles (you know, the E^2=m^2*c^4+p^2*c^2 equation from Einstein that is generally reduced to E=mc^2). What kind of structure could a subatomic being have? Subatomic particle do not form large structures. As far as I know, the largest structure made out of subatomic structures are protons and neutron, but I do not know that much about particle physics as it is not something that I have studied.




You have not been given concrete examples? I referenced Noether's Theorem to show that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, yet that was rejected without any evidence to the contrary with the simplistic non argument of "the universe is complex and everything is possible". I referenced a postulate of Special Relativity, "The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of two systems in uniform translatory motion relative to each other." This also supports my claim that physics is the same everywhere in the universe.
For this issue I have made a claim and given a couple of supporting ideas. I have yet to see an argument against any of these ideas that contains a testable hypothesis and as such I have nothing to bring theories or examples against because no specific claims have been made.
A new example, we know basically how nuclear reactions work and how light is absorbed by molecules and atoms. All stars show characteristic patterns that are more formalized as the H-R diagram. The H-R diagram is a formalism of the quantities that we have deduced about stars and is in agreement with our ideas of electromagnetism and nuclear and particle physics as well as our theory of gravity. From this information we know that the composition of the stars are basically the with a good relationship existing because the quantities. This is the idea of the Main Sequence, and while we have not observed the complete path of stellar evolution of a single star, we can make predictions about stars that are consistent with what we see, and they are mostly consistent with exceptions in some detailed specifics that can be accounted for but does not contradict the basic theories.
As someone who is trying to study physics, one of the assumptions of science is that the universe is isotropic and that the laws of physics are invariant around the universe (as I staid earlier this is a feature of both Noether's Theorem and Special Relativity), both of these are accepted theories and until someone gives evidence against them I will accept them as true.



Pardon for having a long post, but I thought it was important to include the information.

[Dervag]

I'm saying just assuming our science has figured out out even a small deal of physics would be foolish, as we don't really have a practical way of proving they work outside of our solar system, since we've never been beyond it.

And no, i'm not saying that everything outside of our solar system has to be 100% different, its simply its probably not going to be even close to 100% the same.We can tell you with ironclad certainty that electricity and magnetism work the same everywhere within ten billion light years of here or more. You know why? Because if electromagnetism works differently in a different place, we won't be able to see it. Light as we know it could not exist in those places. If we can see a place, if light can pass through a place, electricity and magnetism have to work there.

Likewise, we can say that the universe within ten billion light years of us is made out of atoms. Atoms that work the way the ones we find on Earth work. I'm not going to get into the physics of spectral lines here, because it would take me too long to come up with an explanation that couldn't be easily misunderstood to mean some kind of absurd gibberish.

We can say that the universe is made up of objects that get hot and cold the same way objects on Earth do, because the light of those stars breaks down into colors exactly the way hot objects on Earth do. If it weren't because the universe works the same way in Andromeda as it does on Earth, why in Heaven's name would we be able to predict to one part in a million the amount of blue light emitted by a star in Andromeda using laws of physics derived on Earth?
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The point I'm trying to make here is that those things are testable. We can go looking for evidence that tells us, conclusively, whether our ideas about universal laws of physics are true. If they were not true, then the only way we could see what we see in the sky is if the whole universe is constructed deliberately as some kind of elaborate hoax to fool us into thinking the laws of physics are uniform all over the place. It's too unlikely to be coincincidence. It would pretty much have to be God screwing with our heads for the fun of it.
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Now, the laws of physics require some things and do not require others. They require that iron melt if you drop it into a star, because stars are really hot. They do not require that carbon/water chemistry be the only way to make living things.

But if you want to make intelligent statements about the kinds of life that could exist without carbon and water, you have to stick to what the laws of physics allow. For example, the laws of physics do not allow creatures made out of ice to live on a planet with oceans of boiling lead, because the ice will melt. Creatures that live on a diet of pure hydrogen will not be able to grow bones made out of, say, lead, because you can't turn hydrogen into lead with anything less than a supernova. Which kills pretty much anything that is itself consistent with the laws of physics.

This is just a refined form of common sense. It is not complicated.

Being able to fantasize about things that violate the laws of physics might be imaginative, but it isn't based on truth. Most people consider basing their ideas on truth to be a virtue. I imagine you do, too.
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Space whales are an example of something that could maybe work with the laws of physics, somehow, but it's damned hard to imagine how. I'm not sure how exactly you expect flippers to help them, but whatever. Air jets will work for propulsion, but you don't get much thrust by squirting air out of a sack. And where do you get the air from?

For efficient propulsion in space, you need high-velocity material- heated rocket exhaust. It's tricky to visualize an organic system that could produce an exhaust stream like that of a rocket engine without killing itself.

Maybe such a thing could exist, but it's totally reasonable to ask questions about how or whether it could work.

[Myrmex]

A few points I'd like to address:
Eating, as you're familiar with, encompasses two activities: energy acquisition and mass acquisition (for us humans, mostly carbon).

Energy acquisition for the ship would be through absorbing radiation. Radioactive isotopes stored within the creature could decay and provide energy to chlorophyll-like structures, for instance. Capturing solar radiation could also work. There is no reason that, for very long stretches in between stars, most of the ship couldn't hibernate, turning off most non-critical systems. The ship can also store energy, just like any metalship could.

As for mass acquisition, a bioship has the same problems that a metalship does. Any significant loss of parts in the void of space is going to be a bummer, where there is nothing around to make new parts from. The advantage of a bioship is that any one part of the ship could potentially be turned into another, so while a metalship that lost its machine shops might be SOL, a bioship wouldn't have any machine shops to lose. As for acquiring new materials, I see no reason why the bioship would need complex molecules anymore than a metalship would. After all, every complex molecule was built from smaller molecules by life, here on earth. The ship wouldn't need to eat steak or grass, since it would have the ability that producers have to turn raw elements to complex molecules. Something that no machine can do (and, according to some of your arguments, could never do).

Someone said something about how if you design a system to adapt to different circumstances, it's not really adapting to different circumstances because it was designed.

In that case, on board AIs of a ship wouldn't really be able to adapt to situations, because they've been programmed to adapt to different situations. Power converters can't really adapt different currents, because they've been designed to adapt different currents.

Feasibility:
There are many aspects of technology in sci-fi that no one thinks twice about, because they have such familiarity with technology. There are assumptions that somehow you can go faster than the speed of light, run fusion engines, force fields, shoot anti-matter missiles, or teleport. All totally what-if stuff. Yet somehow, you guys think it's feasible. Why do anti-matter missiles inside forcefield seem reasonable to you guys? It seems a bit outlandish to me. What's a force field even made out of?

You guys have trouble imagining bioships that are on par with metal ones, because, frankly, you seem to have very little experience in biology. The idea that an organism could compete with a machine is so far outside your realm of experience, that you have trouble imagining how it could work. In terms of any sufficiently advanced technology looking like magic, why would biological technology be any different from metal technology?

Take Dervag's statement that hydrogen based life wouldn't be able to make bones out of lead, because that violates the laws of physics. There aren't any laws of life, not ones that we've figured out, anyway. We have some rules for earth life. Well, more like guidelines. They're often discovered to be broken. Our bones are largely made out of potassium, yet we're considered
carbon based. How could this be? It seems we are violating the laws of physics. Crabs make their exoskleteons out of calcium. Flies have copper blood. Life picks acquires elements all the time. It wouldn't be preposterous, given hokey shows like Star Trek, that a hydrogen based life form, with a little direction, could have lead bones, or iron bones, or even plutonium bones.


You're also approaching this from an anthrocentric view, looking at the feasibility of humans doing it. I've just been explaining how it could be done, by humans, using examples of earth life. There could be a race of creatures on another planet, that, rather than develop metaltech, went the biological route. Perhaps they had plastic morphologies, or symbiotes, or a caste system where workers & tools were bred for certain purposes. For them, messing around with their genetics would be the logical extension for progressing to the stars. No need to invent the wheel when you're breeding wheelbarrows.

[Caradryan]

Energy acquisition for the ship would be through absorbing radiation. Radioactive isotopes stored within the creature could decay and provide energy to chlorophyll-like structures, for instance. Capturing solar radiation could also work. There is no reason that, for very long stretches in between stars, most of the ship couldn't hibernate, turning off most non-critical systems. The ship can also store energy, just like any metalship could.

Let's not go down the biological issues that such a system would give the organism. Assuming that the organism needs to somehow remain immune to the effects of said radioactive isotopes, have a hibernation system, have a biological mechanism for energy storage that is sufficiently large enough and does not degenerate over long periods of time...the list goes on.

The question is, why would you need a ship like this when a standard space ship running on Whatever Material is used in the first place? What advantages does it offer that a conventional spaceship do not? I've asked this question over and over again, and I have yet to see a developed answer.


As for mass acquisition, a bioship has the same problems that a metalship does. Any significant loss of parts in the void of space is going to be a bummer, where there is nothing around to make new parts from. The advantage of a bioship is that any one part of the ship could potentially be turned into another, so while a metalship that lost its machine shops might be SOL, a bioship wouldn't have any machine shops to lose. As for acquiring new materials, I see no reason why the bioship would need complex molecules anymore than a metalship would. After all, every complex molecule was built from smaller molecules by life, here on earth. The ship wouldn't need to eat steak or grass, since it would have the ability that producers have to turn raw elements to complex molecules. Something that no machine can do (and, according to some of your arguments, could never do).

So we agree on the first part. However, bear in mind that under standard conditions it is easier to break bonds than to form new bounds. The ship would behave in the same manner as a mechanical refinery by your logic, which once again renders the point null. Occam's Razor in this case comes in again, as an inorganic ship would simply skip the biological middleman instead.

The second part of your argument was that a bioship should in theory be able to modify itself to shape whatever it needs to do. You seem to forget about the fact that evolution doesn't work that way - an organism does not "evolve." Rather, it is the next generation that evolves. Unless your organism in question is a swarm of millions and millions of symbiotic critters that live in perfect harmony together, it is technically unfeasible to do such a thing. Unless the creature already have an large array of the "whatever that's needed in the first place."

Which then begs the question of the efficiency of such a creature. In a sense, it is no more efficient than a well-armed spaceship. Except for the fact that again, it is living and suffers from all the disadvantages of living things - breaking down at a faster rate than inorganic materials, ages, technically less reliable, and etc. If it's sentinent, then you need to add in conscious thought and command issues on top of that.

Unless you meant by something along the lines of a starfish in which the organism is capable of self-repair, which would be a different issue.


Feasibility:
There are many aspects of technology in sci-fi that no one thinks twice about, because they have such familiarity with technology. There are assumptions that somehow you can go faster than the speed of light, run fusion engines, force fields, shoot anti-matter missiles, or teleport. All totally what-if stuff. Yet somehow, you guys think it's feasible. Why do anti-matter missiles inside forcefield seem reasonable to you guys? It seems a bit outlandish to me. What's a force field even made out of?

You guys have trouble imagining bioships that are on par with metal ones, because, frankly, you seem to have very little experience in biology. The idea that an organism could compete with a machine is so far outside your realm of experience, that you have trouble imagining how it could work. In terms of any sufficiently advanced technology looking like magic, why would biological technology be any different from metal technology?

I don't seem to recall any one of us mentioning faster than light travel or force fields or anything in that list. We support anti-matter missiles in the same fashion that you would support omnipotent nuke-resisting-eyelaser-firing-matter-devouring creature-Star Gods that have entire ecosystems surrounding itself in its magnificance. If we had no experience in the matter, we wouldn't bother posting here. But come now, this is the Internet. It is only acceptable for such arguments here.

Biological technology doesn't work on the same level as metal technology, as first of all, technology by definition is not naturally occurring. Biological implies something natural. Organic technology plays on this aspect.

I (not speaking for the group) made the comment that biological technology can serve the same function as metal technology, but biological technology offers no solid advantage that warrants its use. It may be cool, but it doesn't do anything that inorganic technology can't do. However, there are several advantages of inorganic technology which has already been brought up by previous posters.

[Myrmex]

Let's not go down the biological issues that such a system would give the organism. Assuming that the organism needs to somehow remain immune to the effects of said radioactive isotopes, have a hibernation system, have a biological mechanism for energy storage that is sufficiently large enough and does not degenerate over long periods of time...the list goes on.

I've addressed all these in previous posts, which are quite long, as I've had to address many perceived shortcomings in a bioship. Any problem facing a biological system in terms of energy is also faced by a technological ship.


The question is, why would you need a ship like this when a standard space ship running on Whatever Material is used in the first place? What advantages does it offer that a conventional spaceship do not? I've asked this question over and over again, and I have yet to see a developed answer.

No, the question was, how could biological ships ever be on par with metal ones, much less superior?


So we agree on the first part. However, bear in mind that under standard conditions it is easier to break bonds than to form new bounds. The ship would behave in the same manner as a mechanical refinery by your logic, which once again renders the point null. Occam's Razor in this case comes in again, as an inorganic ship would simply skip the biological middleman instead.

And have what, robotic middlemen? Plants (and protists, bacteria & archaea) convert loads and loads of raw elements to the food stuff that runs all life on earth. So far, nothing even remotely approaching that ability has been developed with metaltech.


The second part of your argument was that a bioship should in theory be able to modify itself to shape whatever it needs to do. You seem to forget about the fact that evolution doesn't work that way - an organism does not "evolve." Rather, it is the next generation that evolves.

I never once mentioned evolution. Did you know that many organisms change their physiology in response to environmental cues? Oysters grow thicker shells when they can smell crabs, their natural predator. Birch trees, when fed upon, constitutively produce bitter tasting toxins at the site where they're being munched on. No sense in making poisonous branches 30 feet off the ground, where nothing can eat you, until something finds a way up there, in which case, your constitutive defense is ready to go. When in stressful situations, we release adrenaline which speeds up reaction times, increases heart rate and blood flow. When we have to do a lot of physical labor, we grow large muscles. If we have to run long distances, we develop strong muscle fibers and slow twitch muscle. If we live above 5,000 feet, our lung capacity increases and red blood cell production increases. These are all mundane examples of how organisms have the ability to adapt to different environments.


Unless your organism in question is a swarm of millions and millions of symbiotic critters that live in perfect harmony together, it is technically unfeasible to do such a thing.

You mean like all multicellular life?
Look up the origin of mitochondria sometime.


Unless the creature already have an large array of the "whatever that's needed in the first place."

Which it would. Of course, giving the ship a big fat brain that could consciously modify its own genes and adapt would go a long way in meeting unforeseen scenarios.


Which then begs the question of the efficiency of such a creature. In a sense, it is no more efficient than a well-armed spaceship. Except for the fact that again, it is living and suffers from all the disadvantages of living things - breaking down at a faster rate than inorganic materials, ages, technically less reliable, and etc. If it's sentinent, then you need to add in conscious thought and command issues on top of that.

It doesn't have to age. Break down of certain parts would occur faster, but it would also have a much easier time repairing that damage.


Unless you meant by something along the lines of a starfish in which the organism is capable of self-repair, which would be a different issue.

Why wouldn't we give it the ability to repair like a starfish? I'm talking about giving it an ability to self repair better than a starfish. Imagine a starfish that doesn't just regrow legs, but decides that it needs two legs and some arms, later a set of wings, then it turns the arms into a harpoon and the legs into flippers, etc.


We support anti-matter missiles in the same fashion that you would support creatures that have entire ecosystems surrounding itself. If we had no experience in the matter, we wouldn't bother posting here. But come now, this is the Internet. It is only acceptable for such arguments here.

Ha ha ha! That's right, it's serious business.


Biological technology doesn't work on the same level as metal technology, as first of all, technology by definition is not naturally occurring. Biological implies something natural. Organic technology plays on this aspect.

Nothing about this organic monstrosity would be "natural", as in "developed over the course of millions of years by forces of evolution", unless you see what humans do as evolution.


I (not speaking for the group) made the comment that biological technology can serve the same function as metal technology, but biological technology offers no solid advantage that warrants its use. It may be cool, but it doesn't do anything that inorganic technology can't do. However, there are several advantages of inorganic technology which has already been brought up by previous posters.

I can think of several advantages biological tech has over inorganic. The first being that biological tech has every single piece being, at some level, functional. The basic unit of a steel beam doesn't do anything. If it falls down or breaks, it just sits there. It won't repair itself, it won't mend itself, it won't cannibalize itself to be turned into a computer.

Second, is damage to any part of a ship has to be recognized and repaired by little drones released from repair bays or something. Everything is centralized. A bioship offers the ultimate in decentralization. Damage to nerves would be recognized by surrounding tissue, and new nerves could be grown right there. Damage to wiring in a metalship, however, could not be fabricated wherever. It would have to be made in a repair bay and moved there. What happens when the repair bay is damaged, or is too far away? Biological systems allow for a much higher degree of integration between parts than metal ones do.

The only sort of ship that would be like a biological ship in this way would be one composed of nanobots. Though, in that case, I'd argue that a biological ship would actually be a ship made of nanobots. In this case, rather than trying to invent really small machines, really small machines that already exist were modified to serve our purpose.

I'd like to reiterate here, though, my defense is that a biological ship in Sci-Fi has no inherent reason to be worse than a metal ship. An alien race that developed biological ships has no reason to have inferior ships simply because they're biological.


[edit]
I reread this, and the tone is rather curt. I apologize if it seems a little hostile. I was trying to keep this post short.

[Gavin Sage]

Christ almighty posts are getting long, time to simplify!


No, the question was, how could biological ships ever be on par with metal ones, much less superior?

If one system needs ten different phlebotniums to achieve the same results one system can on one phlebotnium its not superior. Its inferior, because by the time you had those ten phlebotniums in place the other system would have moved on to new phlebotniums that put it ahead again.

Assuming that since phlebotnium is inherently unknown all phlebotniums are equal for comparative purposes anyways. Which is a good assumption unless we want to resort to actual plausiblity, thus allowing zero phlebotniums/handwaves/wizards and so forth.... to which I submit that it is only possible today to send a lifeform to Mars with the aid of a machine.

[Lagrange]

Energy acquisition for the ship would be through absorbing radiation. Radioactive isotopes stored within the creature could decay and provide energy to chlorophyll-like structures, for instance. Capturing solar radiation could also work. There is no reason that, for very long stretches in between stars, most of the ship couldn't hibernate, turning off most non-critical systems. The ship can also store energy, just like any metalship could.

...

Feasibility:
There are many aspects of technology in sci-fi that no one thinks twice about, because they have such familiarity with technology. There are assumptions that somehow you can go faster than the speed of light, run fusion engines, force fields, shoot anti-matter missiles, or teleport. All totally what-if stuff. Yet somehow, you guys think it's feasible. Why do anti-matter missiles inside forcefield seem reasonable to you guys? It seems a bit outlandish to me. What's a force field even made out of?

...

Take Dervag's statement that hydrogen based life wouldn't be able to make bones out of lead, because that violates the laws of physics.

Point 1: What Dervag actually said was that if the diet consisted only of Hydrogen that the bones could not be out of lead. This is true, if the only input is hydrogen the only output can be hydrogen. Our diet does not consist only of carbon, and we need to constantly be added calcium to our system for bones to maintain their strength.

Point 2: Anti-matter missiles could work, theoretically since anti-matter does exist but I do not believe that anyone would ever put the effort into making them. In the first place it is rather hard to contain anti-matter, especially the amount needed to weaponize the material.

Point 3: I do not remember anyone claiming that a force field makes sense on this topic, and the focus of this discussion is on the idea of biotechnology. Pointing out failings of science fiction to make your point is irrelevant and not productive on this topic. I will argue against the idea of force fields unless a specific type is mentioned. For instance, a 'force field' is possible in a limited case, such as using a concentrated positive change to shield from positively changed matter by use of electromagnetism. This specifically could work, and could be called a force field, but it is not a general shield and cannot shield from neutral matter which is the majority.

Point 4: Fusion is a physically possible energy resource, and one that we are fairly close to achieving. If you want more specifics look up the OMEGA EP LASER at the University of Rochester for inertial confinement fusion, and ITER for magnetic confinement fusion. Neither are at the point of being commercially usable, but the issues are engineering not physics in nature. While I doubt that the conventional engine is what is used when talking about a fusion engine is science fiction, that is not on of the methods talked about to achieve space-flight. Project Orion was about the use of nuclear pulse projection and should work, and achieve a good speed of about .1c, which is much lower than the speed of light.

Point 5: There are some theoretical methods of going faster than the speed of light, but none of them are ways that would ever be useful. Most involve extremely warping space, and this is not considered a useful way. I always assume the going faster than the speed of light is a plot device, as it is the only way that an interstellar civilization could actually exist in a meaningful way. I do not believe that it is possible at the moment in a theoretical way. But in general the areas where it does pop up in theory either do not allow the transference of information (making it useless), or are in a location that is not fully understood yet. This is because some parts of the universe of still unknown, because we know the General Relativity is a good depiction of the world, and so is quantum mechanics but they are not compatible theories. This is part of what the whole work on String Theory is trying to resolve, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and traveling faster then the speed of light is one of them.

Point 6: Energy storage is a bit easier for a non-biological system because of simple energy per unit mass production. Nuclear fusion is one of the most efficient methods of producing energy, and as can be found with project Orion can work. The energy in chemical bonds is a couple order of magnitudes less.




One of the main issues with part of this discussion is that a couple of us are arguing this from a more physics based argument based on what we know can happen and not allowing for a fundamental breakthrough in biology.

One argument is that genes can just be changed quickly and produce changes quickly. But changing the genes of an organism would make the organisms immune system destroy itself, or reject parts of itself. We know that this is an issue because of rejection during organ transplant. One issue I have with this modification of the genes, is that EVERY CELL would have to be modified at virtually the same time, since you are talking about significant changes to the genome. Genes tend to be modified with retroviruses, but how could an organism manufacture its own retroviruses without trying to reject them and if it does not try to reject retroviruses then the system could easily be destroyed by inserting a couple of different germs with the intent of destruction (like a modified Ebola). Also, if it is the hard materials needed to survive spaceflight as a coating, those are not exactly going to be easy to rearrange on whim, or even rebuild and cannot just be 'scabbed over' without have a rigid internal structure virtually identical to the structure needed for a metal based ship.

I think that I said enough for this one post, and probably too much.

[Myrmex]

Christ almighty posts are getting long, time to simplify!



If one system needs ten different phlebotniums to achieve the same results one system can on one phlebotnium its not superior. Its inferior, because by the time you had those ten phlebotniums in place the other system would have moved on to new phlebotniums that put it ahead again.

Assuming that since phlebotnium is inherently unknown all phlebotniums are equal for comparative purposes anyways. Which is a good assumption unless we want to resort to actual plausiblity, thus allowing zero phlebotniums/handwaves/wizards and so forth.... to which I submit that it is only possible today to send a lifeform to Mars with the aid of a machine.

If phlebotniums are unknown, then you can't say anything about them. For all we know, it might turn out easier to manipulate biological systems after we hit a wall with other technologies. And again; it would be very easy to construe a scenario where biotech would make more sense to be taken further than metaltech. Put your anthropic specs down for a sec.

[Lagrange]

If phlebotniums are unknown, then you can't say anything about them. For all we know, it might turn out easier to manipulate biological systems after we hit a wall with other technologies. And again; it would be very easy to construe a scenario where biotech would make more sense to be taken further than metaltech. Put your anthropic specs down for a sec.

Then let us try to create one, namely the interstellar space flight one.

Let us try are find the solutions to some of the problems (there are many more, but at least this would be a start), naturally I am listing the metal based ships side as that is what I have the best understand of, but if I have ideas for a bio ship I will list them as well.

Propulsion?
Power source?

I submit the following ideas...
Propulsion: solar sails, nuclear pulse, (ION drive for maneuverability, and yes they do exist, at least they have since about 1959 and have been used in a couple of NASA missions.)
Power source: nuclear fusion, since as I have pointed out nuclear fusion is a technology that should be available in a relatively short time scale (decades at the most) since the process is well understood, it just need to be built. If that fails, there is always the option of Nuclear fission, since that does work.

[Gavin Sage]

If phlebotniums are unknown, then you can't say anything about them. For all we know, it might turn out easier to manipulate biological systems after we hit a wall with other technologies. And again; it would be very easy to construe a scenario where biotech would make more sense to be taken further than metaltech. Put your anthropic specs down for a sec.

Actually I made an error, ten versus zero phlebotnium. We can already create things like large scale space colonies using existing technology. O'Neill cylinders are completely viable with enough allocate resources. They can even be largely self contained with solar power. Teleportation has already been done up to the atomic scale using quantum effects. Never mind such every day wonders as the device I'm using right now to have this conversation.

To even begin to get to speculated organisms of remote similar capablity with biotech we'd need one of two things. The first is evolution, meaning millions with not billions of years of trial and error to get things going. Hardly superior. The second would be a massively more perfect understanding of chemistry. Since the only way to speed things up would be via genetic manipulation which would mean knowing how to design whatever was wanted and how to make your organism perform that chemical dance from its genes. Assuming say the ensyme for say cold steel forging even exists to make bullet proof scales. That's phlebotnium.

Speculating on unknowns is a poor way to argue superiority versus hard fact.

Its not that for loose story telling purposes I think organic tech is so impossible, but then I don't see why c as a speed limit shouldn't have a way around it. However when you have to invent whole new branches of chemistry and biology to even begin achieving par with current mechanical technology's effect (nevermind the underlying entropy problem practically garunteeing lesser effiecieny) its asking an disproportionate amount of my suspension of disbelief.

[Dervag]

Energy acquisition for the ship would be through absorbing radiation. Radioactive isotopes stored within the creature could decay and provide energy to chlorophyll-like structures, for instance. Capturing solar radiation could also work. There is no reason that, for very long stretches in between stars, most of the ship couldn't hibernate, turning off most non-critical systems. The ship can also store energy, just like any metalship could.The problem is that solar power is only a high energy density source near stars. For interstellar travel at STL speeds, you need to be able to keep firing the engines well beyond the immediate vicinity of the star system. In which case you'd better have a LOT of stored power.


As for mass acquisition, a bioship has the same problems that a metalship does. Any significant loss of parts in the void of space is going to be a bummer, where there is nothing around to make new parts from. The advantage of a bioship is that any one part of the ship could potentially be turned into another, so while a metalship that lost its machine shops might be SOL, a bioship wouldn't have any machine shops to lose.That assumes that all the parts can be grown outside of a controlled environment. Which is at least plausible, but given that some of these parts necessarily do the work of high-precision machinery and electronics, it's worth noting.

The fact that I can, with suitable genetic tweaks, grow a new leg does not mean I can grow a new leg just anywhere, without suitable infusions of nutrients and a stable, growth-friendly external environment.


Feasibility:
There are many aspects of technology in sci-fi that no one thinks twice about, because they have such familiarity with technology. There are assumptions that somehow you can go faster than the speed of light, run fusion engines, force fields, shoot anti-matter missiles, or teleport. All totally what-if stuff. Yet somehow, you guys think it's feasible. Why do anti-matter missiles inside forcefield seem reasonable to you guys? It seems a bit outlandish to me. What's a force field even made out of?I can believe fusion power. Antimatter missiles are outlandish. FTL travel still more outlandish, and force fields and teleportation more outlandish still, to the point where I'm just as happy to avoid them.

My view on bioships is not that I find them inconcievable. It's that:
-There are several scientific questions that have to be answered before we can even think accurately about designing biotech that can compete with machinery in high energy applications and hostile environments.
-There is no compelling reason to assume that the advantages of biotech will be great enough and easy enough to bring into application to offset the advantages of metaltech.

It's at least plausible, but I object to people who throw out airy assurances about organisms being "more efficient" and so forth without seeming to understand the difficulty involved in "custom designing" organisms that bear no biochemical or physical resemblance to anything that would ever exist naturally.

I don't object to you that way, because you clearly know what the state of the art is in biotech, and you seem to have a reasonably good grasp of the basic parameters of metaltech. But you're probably the most informed biotech-over-metaltech supporter I've ever spoken to.


Take Dervag's statement that hydrogen based life wouldn't be able to make bones out of lead, because that violates the laws of physics. There aren't any laws of life, not ones that we've figured out, anyway. We have some rules for earth life. Well, more like guidelines. They're often discovered to be broken. Our bones are largely made out of potassium, yet we're considered carbon based. How could this be? It seems we are violating the laws of physics. Crabs make their exoskleteons out of calcium. Flies have copper blood. Life picks acquires elements all the time. It wouldn't be preposterous, given hokey shows like Star Trek, that a hydrogen based life form, with a little direction, could have lead bones, or iron bones, or even plutonium bones I wasn't talking about a law of life, I was talking about the much more hard-and-fast laws of physics. Because of the way atomic nuclei work, the evidence suggests that you can't make lead out of hydrogen except under exploding-star conditions. Assuming our bioship is made out of atoms, that restriction will apply to it. If it's going to have lead bones, it needs to by God find some lead to make those bones out of.

So I don't think you understood me. My point was that if the bioship has lead bones, it cannot form them on a pure hydrogen diet, except by somehow tapping into exploding-star conditions. And I really cannot believe that anything made out of atoms can do that. If I'm expected to believe in easy transmutation of elements to accept a story point, I place the story in the same mental category I would a story about leprechauns.

Which is not to say I won't enjoy it, but it isn't set in the same universe as the one I live in anymore.

Note that this is consistent with all known or speculated biology. If you don't get calcium in your diet, your bones start to get brittle and weak, because your body can't synthesize calcium from other chemical elements. The bioship is going to be subject to similar limitations imposed not by "laws of life," but by laws of physics governing the behavior of the very particles it is made of.

Those limitations probably don't make it impossible to build a bioship, in and of themselves.


You're also approaching this from an anthrocentric view, looking at the feasibility of humans doing it. I've just been explaining how it could be done, by humans, using examples of earth life. There could be a race of creatures on another planet, that, rather than develop metaltech, went the biological route. Perhaps they had plastic morphologies, or symbiotes, or a caste system where workers & tools were bred for certain purposes. For them, messing around with their genetics would be the logical extension for progressing to the stars. No need to invent the wheel when you're breeding wheelbarrows.I'm sincerely curious to know how they would go about discovering and understanding their equivalent of DNA without using quite a bit of metaltech. I would really truly like to know.
________


Actually I made an error, ten versus zero phlebotnium. We can already create things like large scale space colonies using existing technology. O'Neill cylinders are completely viable with enough allocate resources. They can even be largely self contained with solar power. Teleportation has already been done up to the atomic scale using quantum effects. Never mind such every day wonders as the device I'm using right now to have this conversation.Minor point; Gavin, you've got something going here about everything but teleportation.

Quantum "teleportation" is not going to allow us to beam down an away team any time soon. Or any time late, either. If teleportation can happen, it won't happen that way.


Its not that for loose story telling purposes I think organic tech is so impossible, but then I don't see why c as a speed limit shouldn't have a way around it. However when you have to invent whole new branches of chemistry and biology to even begin achieving par with current mechanical technology's effect (nevermind the underlying entropy problem practically garunteeing lesser effiecieny) its asking an disproportionate amount of my suspension of disbelief.What he said.

[Myrmex]

Actually I made an error, ten versus zero phlebotnium. We can already create things like large scale space colonies using existing technology. O'Neill cylinders are completely viable with enough allocate resources. They can even be largely self contained with solar power. Teleportation has already been done up to the atomic scale using quantum effects. Never mind such every day wonders as the device I'm using right now to have this conversation.[./quote]

We can't even make a self-contained greenhouse here on earth. We're probably 100 years away from figuring out the ecology of a small, self-supported ecosystem. Probably more like 200, given how little funding goes into ecosystems research. We're not much farther ahead of where we were in the sixties; the biggest advances have been somewhat lateral, in GE crops.

Also, we've teleported singular particles, that don't retain information. Their quantum spn gets messed up. To jump from the teleportation of a single particle to Star Trek style transporter things is a little preposterous.

[quote]To even begin to get to speculated organisms of remote similar capablity with biotech we'd need one of two things. The first is evolution, meaning millions with not billions of years of trial and error to get things going. Hardly superior. The second would be a massively more perfect understanding of chemistry. Since the only way to speed things up would be via genetic manipulation which would mean knowing how to design whatever was wanted and how to make your organism perform that chemical dance from its genes. Assuming say the ensyme for say cold steel forging even exists to make bullet proof scales. That's phlebotnium.

I posted a link in one of my previous posts to a super computer that is beig built to figure out every possible interaction between atoms in complex molecules. The computer is called Anton, after Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the famous developmental biologist. There are predictions that this computer is going to be to molecular biology what Newton was to physics.

Furthermore, I've given numerous examples where millions of years of evolution has produced animals with bizarre traits. Wasps with manganese hardened cuticles, shrimp with sonic weapons, millipedes that secrete cyanide gas, arachnids that spray acid, bacteria that makes magnetite. Life has shown remarkable plasticity, resulting in an incredibly broad array of weird creatures.


Speculating on unknowns is a poor way to argue superiority versus hard fact.

Everything here is speculation. The hard fact, right now, is that biologicals are about 1000 times more advanced than any machines we're running. We're only beginning to figure out how to co-op biosystems to do what we want. If life wasn't so complex, it be easier to manipulate.

It's not like I'm arguing NASA should start growing spaceships tomorrow. It's just that all your assumptions and extrapolations are made on 200 years of industrial progress, while biotech hasn't been much more than advanced techniques in selective breeding. Computer chips double in speed and halve in size at what interval? Wait 'till breakthroughs in biology are happening at that rate (though some would say that's already begun). Biology has a long way to catch up to physics & engineering.


Its not that for loose story telling purposes I think organic tech is so impossible, but then I don't see why c as a speed limit shouldn't have a way around it. However when you have to invent whole new branches of chemistry and biology to even begin achieving par with current mechanical technology's effect (nevermind the underlying entropy problem practically garunteeing lesser effiecieny) its asking an disproportionate amount of my suspension of disbelief.

This analogy informs me that you are rather unfamiliar with how life operates. As far as we know, there aren't any rules. Not like c, anyway. That plasticity already demonstrated in nature, and the results of a century of research, hint at what's possible. You take any system right now, that's done industrially, and nature already figured out how to solve that problem a dozen different ways, hundreds of millions of years ago.


The problem is that solar power is only a high energy density source near stars. For interstellar travel at STL speeds, you need to be able to keep firing the engines well beyond the immediate vicinity of the star system. In which case you'd better have a LOT of stored power.

Note the first bit there on radioactive isotopes. Once source of energy could be radioactive decay of elements within the organism.


That assumes that all the parts can be grown outside of a controlled environment. Which is at least plausible, but given that some of these parts necessarily do the work of high-precision machinery and electronics, it's worth noting.

Heh. I find it funny you consider the inside of an organism as "outside of a controlled environment." Homeostasis is pretty amazing.


The fact that I can, with suitable genetic tweaks, grow a new leg does not mean I can grow a new leg just anywhere, without suitable infusions of nutrients and a stable, growth-friendly external environment.

Nor can you fix your burned out clutch, just anywhere, without suitable parts and a clean work environment. If you get even a little bit of dirt in there when fixing it, it'll shred it all to hell. The same limitations to replacing organs or limbs applies to fabricating new spaceship parts.


My view on bioships is not that I find them inconcievable. It's that:
-There are several scientific questions that have to be answered before we can even think accurately about designing biotech that can compete with machinery in high energy applications and hostile environments.

Absolutely. All this stuff is well and firmly in the realm of fiction. But there is nothing inherent in biology that informs us it isn't impossible.


-There is no compelling reason to assume that the advantages of biotech will be great enough and easy enough to bring into application to offset the advantages of metaltech.

I imagine that we'll see a fusion of the two, honestly. The rate of discoveries for metaltech may level off, for instance.


It's at least plausible, but I object to people who throw out airy assurances about organisms being "more efficient" and so forth without seeming to understand the difficulty involved in "custom designing" organisms that bear no biochemical or physical resemblance to anything that would ever exist naturally.

Anything that has the capability to be building ships from living material will have already circumvented these problems. It's not like life is some sort of mystic, inscrutable force. It's just chemical reactions.

Of course, the question is, if you're so advanced, why not use your super technology to make metal that's REALLY METAL? Like ultrasteel chainswords. This makes the assumption that what he have now is better than what we had yesterday, so tomorrow it will be better. And the day after that, we're not really sure how, but it should also be even better. Do you see the extrapolation from an extrapolation? You can see where metaltech goes from here, but where metaltech goes from there isn't so obvious. It's just presumed that it gets better, somehow. I'm showing how, if we ever figure out how to control the complex chemical reactions of life, where we could go from there. Those reactions all exist, in part, elsewhere. It's a matter of putting them all together in a way that meets our needs.


I don't object to you that way, because you clearly know what the state of the art is in biotech, and you seem to have a reasonably good grasp of the basic parameters of metaltech. But you're probably the most informed biotech-over-metaltech supporter I've ever spoken to.

Ah, thank you. I work in a genetics lab, so I tend to be a little more up to date on this stuff.


So I don't think you understood me.

I did not. I think we're in agreement here.


Note that this is consistent with all known or speculated biology. If you don't get calcium in your diet, your bones start to get brittle and weak, because your body can't synthesize calcium from other chemical elements. The bioship is going to be subject to similar limitations imposed not by "laws of life," but by laws of physics governing the behavior of the very particles it is made of.

Absolutely. A metalship, though, has the exact same limitations, and likely a harder time converting raw material into more spaceship.

Those limitations probably don't make it impossible to build a bioship, in and of themselves.


I'm sincerely curious to know how they would go about discovering and understanding their equivalent of DNA without using quite a bit of metaltech. I would really truly like to know.

We've been using selective breeding for about 10,000 years, though theory of heredity is only 130 or so years old. We've been using fixed wing aircraft for at least 100 years, yet the actual mechanism was widely, and erroneously, attributed entirely to the Bernoulli effect.

What I'm saying is, technologies can be discovered and developed without anything being known how they actually work. So let's take out hypothetical aliens. Let's say by some feature of their evolution, perhaps the nature of life on that planet involves many more symbioses than here on earth, that genetic material can be swapped around, much like plasmids in bacteria. If there are some termites in a termite mounds, rather than using a pair of sticks to fish the termites out, they instead meld with an anteater and use its tongue to get the termites out.

They would begin to cultivate different symbiotes for different purposes- some would have good noses, others would have good sight. As their symbiotes' senses improved, and gained better abilities, so would the aliens. There would be a great deal more pressure on breeding unique strains to do their work, rather than invent better tools. With the symbiotic relationship between all organisms, it would be much easier to breed things with highly specific traits, as lost genetic material or deleterious mutations could be replaced by breeding in from other gene pools.

In time, they would have the tools, albeit biological, to investigate the same things we have. The difference would be that rather than carve the lenses for their optics, they would have grown them.

Who knows if that could really happen, though.

[Brewdude]

I think this article is appropriate for this thread.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6393/is_/ai_n28866050


Bioapocolypse narrowly averted.Woohoo! go go Bioscience!

[Dervag]

We can't even make a self-contained greenhouse here on earth. We're probably 100 years away from figuring out the ecology of a small, self-supported ecosystem. Probably more like 200, given how little funding goes into ecosystems research. We're not much farther ahead of where we were in the sixties; the biggest advances have been somewhat lateral, in GE crops.That said, if we aren't trying to build a complete ecosystem, but only to keep enough stuff running to keep a group of humans alive, we're in better shape. Humans' main requirements for life support are oxygen, food, and water.

Keeping the water supply adequate is something we can do without much difficulty if we have to, though it's best not to think about where the water you're drinking was before it ran through the distiller.

Food is tricky. If you have to grow your own food it means having a lot more complexity in place. But if your spaceship crew is willing to live on the equivalent of MREs, food can be stored in large quantities rather than being grown in place.

Oxygen is perhaps trickiest of all, but that doesn't seem to be an unsolvable problem based on the progress that has been made to date and the long-endurance stays of astronauts in space stations.
______


Furthermore, I've given numerous examples where millions of years of evolution has produced animals with bizarre traits. Wasps with manganese hardened cuticles, shrimp with sonic weapons, millipedes that secrete cyanide gas, arachnids that spray acid, bacteria that makes magnetite. Life has shown remarkable plasticity, resulting in an incredibly broad array of weird creatures.What concerns me is that I'm not sure what happens when we try to combine the enzyme for excreting sheet metal with the proteins that let the ship regenerate like a starfish or salamander, then combine both with the radiation hardening found in nuclear reactor bacteria, then...

You get the picture.

It takes a great deal of experimentation just to make sure that two seemingly unrelated drugs won't react in a way lethal to the patient. Trying to design an organism that contains a very large number of what were once unique and exotic traits is likely to cause some trouble. I'm not sure how much of it you can cram into one package.

It's possible. I'm not saying it's impossible. What I am saying is that I don't see a reason to expect it to be necessarily superior to metaltech given how much bioengineering it will take just to catch up to metaltech in the first place.
_____


This analogy informs me that you are rather unfamiliar with how life operates. As far as we know, there aren't any rules. Not like c, anyway. That plasticity already demonstrated in nature, and the results of a century of research, hint at what's possible. You take any system right now, that's done industrially, and nature already figured out how to solve that problem a dozen different ways, hundreds of millions of years ago.Supersonic flight? :smallconfused:

But trivial questions aside, there are rules for life. The rules for life are the same as the rules for everything else: the laws of physics and (by extension) chemistry. Those laws do in fact place limits on what any hypothetical organism, no matter how well engineered, can do. The plasticity of living creatures is finite, because there are constraints on the things that can happen in the universe.

Do those constraints prevent us from building an organic spaceship? I don't know. I'm not saying they do, though I haven't ruled it out. But the key, for me, is that when we consider the set of all things that are possible within the laws of physics, the things that are possible for a living thing to do are probably going to be a subset of the total. There will exist physically possible things that we cannot engineer an organism to do.

There will be chemical reactions that cannot occur at room temperature even when we get a very clever enzyme to tackle it. Or that do occur, but only with the use of catalysts so expensive that making it at non-room temperature is more efficient.

There will be genes that code for proteins that are mutually incompatible. There will be things we desire to put in our bioship that we can't create a protein to do because of limits on the structure of physical molecules.

All these things cause inconveniences to the bioengineer working on a ship to take us to Mars. Can they be overcome or worked around? Very possibly. Is it worth the effort? Possibly, in my opinion, but less possibly. I'm not ruling it out, but I don't take it as a given.

So it bothers me when people breezily assure me that it is a given, unless I'm reasonably confident they know what they're talking about. You do, by all appearances, but you're an unusual case in your own right.
______


Heh. I find it funny you consider the inside of an organism as "outside of a controlled environment." Homeostasis is pretty amazing.Actually, I'm sure an organism can contain a controlled environment suitable for almost anything (except maybe casting metal or fractional distillation or stuff like that). But that's liable to put another design limit on the organism. Suddenly, the "womb" in which the ship can regrow a severed radar sense-cluster becomes the bioship's equivalent of the machine shop. As you say, lose the machine shop and you destroy the ship's capacity for self-repair.
______


We've been using selective breeding for about 10,000 years, though theory of heredity is only 130 or so years old. We've been using fixed wing aircraft for at least 100 years, yet the actual mechanism was widely, and erroneously, attributed entirely to the Bernoulli effect.To be sure, but there are limits. Fixed-wing aircraft were miserably inefficient until we figured out how the airflow over the wings provided lift. Rotary-wing aircraft were effectively impossible, even though people tried quite hard to create them.

There's only so much you can do with a technology whose operating principles are based on science you don't understand.
______


What I'm saying is, technologies can be discovered and developed without anything being known how they actually work. So let's take out hypothetical aliens. Let's say by some feature of their evolution, perhaps the nature of life on that planet involves many more symbioses than here on earth, that genetic material can be swapped around, much like plasmids in bacteria. If there are some termites in a termite mounds, rather than using a pair of sticks to fish the termites out, they instead meld with an anteater and use its tongue to get the termites out.

They would begin to cultivate different symbiotes for different purposes- some would have good noses, others would have good sight. As their symbiotes' senses improved, and gained better abilities, so would the aliens. There would be a great deal more pressure on breeding unique strains to do their work, rather than invent better tools. With the symbiotic relationship between all organisms, it would be much easier to breed things with highly specific traits, as lost genetic material or deleterious mutations could be replaced by breeding in from other gene pools.

In time, they would have the tools, albeit biological, to investigate the same things we have. The difference would be that rather than carve the lenses for their optics, they would have grown them.

Who knows if that could really happen, though.The problem crops up when they try to work with things outside the range of whatever nature has provided them. Not in terms of quantitative difference- sure, they can breed a better eyeball, one that is more sensitive to light and that can see "microscopic" objects.* But that doesn't mean they can breed an eyeball sensitive to X-rays. Or an electron microscope.

They have to know they need those things, and understand how they work, before they can use them. That's the part where I'm concerned that pure biotech would hit a major plateau, one that would take a lot of good luck to overcome.


*If you breed an eyeball that can do what a microscope does, are the objects it sees "microscopic"? Or does the existence of an eye that can see them promote them to "fully scopic?"

[Caradryan]

EDIT: Ugh. Block of text.

Myrmex, in an attempt to foster discussion instead of outright arguing I have decided not to quote you word for word. Hopefully, this will tone down the debate back to a plausible level. I hope to remain respectful, though certain posters may choose to do so otherwise. I personally come from a molecular biology perspective and have no qualms with the idea of having a bioship, but to proclaim that biotechnology is inherently superior to inorganic technology is an argument that I can't really buy into, which seems to be the purpose of this debate.

First of all, and this bugs me a little bit. I don't think understanding conventional genetics or biology is really relevant in this discussion, as any biological issue can be immediately tossed out with the argument "it's an alien race. They work like ______ so it doesn't have this issue."

It makes me a little sad, but such is how debates on the internet work.

As for the complexity argument, you misunderstood my point, and I apologize for not being clear enough. As you know, most known biological pathways are often a multi-tiered process. Even the simplest forms of photosynthesis requires multiple photosystems and multiple steps, while a chemical reaction in a boiler inside a ship takes only one step before the energy is directly fed into the guns or whatever it is using.

The bioships that you're proposing is capable of doing quite a lot of things that realistic biological creatures cannot do, which includes harnessing energy directly from the source and using it at almost optimal efficiency, conserving its resources, being able to splice, activate and deactivate genes at will while still having some sort of mechanism that is able to control the gene expression, eliminate cancerous growth, carry around an extraordinarily large array of genetic material that remain unused in most cases, have a nearly perfect genetic self-repair mechanism while simultaneously maintaining an extraordinary speed of replication, etc. The list goes on.

Some of the traits the thing needs to have are inherently contradictory (replication speed VS. abundance of genetic material), and to genetically modify an organism for such a thing seems counterintuitive to me when a normal inorganic ship can do the same thing. And that's just to bring it up to par to standard sci-fi fare.

Furthermore, a separate note on adaptation: that is different than from what you're suggesting. Adaptation implies one thing - that the organism already have it. In the same strain of thought, an oyster does not grow spikes or secrete poison when crabs are near - they only make thicker shells. The oyster remain an oyster - however, its descendant may become something else. Which is where evolution comes in.

These adaptations are not as radical as some posters (not you, but at least two others) are suggesting - of normally harmless superorganisms pulling out plasma cannons from their behind when needed (see page 2).

IAgain, you'd be engineering an awful lot of extra stuff and information that the creature probably wouldn't use most of the time. What some posters were suggesting (Unsure if it was you who made the point) was that these bioships go through sci-fiesque "super mutation" and generate new traits spontaneously, which is fairly absurd unless time move slower in said universe.

Let's face it. Say the creature needs to switch to a acidic breath weapon. It would first need to somehow "turn on" those genes through some mechanism. It would then need to transcribe the genes, translate it, generate protein or whatever unit happens to be working in your system, down to enough basic cellular units or equivalent, differentiate the cells...The list goes on.

I fail to see why you can't just flip a simple switch in a ship and get your acid-spewing cannon of doom out.

To say that a creature doesn't age is a nonargument, as well as ignoring the efficiency aspect. Might as well make the claim that it's immortal and unkillable as well.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that with our current understanding of biology, and given the current limitations of life as we know it to exist, a bioship similar to what you're suggesting is unfeasible at best, and totally unrealistic at worst. We can either use concrete science to discuss science fiction, or we could use rule of cool to come up with random things. I much prefer using simply the former or the latter as separate elements, instead of merging the two together. But then it wouldn't be science fiction any more, would it?

P.S. I just read your proposed solution to a race of symbiotic organisms developing organic technology. Ignoring the gazillion amounts of things that probably died on the way, I've got one question: Why didn't these creatures learn to use sticks or whatever the thing is? Why did it choose to go this route, which is more time-consuming, prone to error, and harder? It seems to me that again, it's going through a lot of trouble to form symbiotic relationships with other organisms.

[Gavin Sage]

For something completely different:


I think this article is appropriate for this thread.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6393/is_/ai_n28866050


Bioapocolypse narrowly averted.Woohoo! go go Bioscience!

Amusing article but deeply flawed in actually making an argument.

Clearly an author tract with someone with an axe to grind against a particular company. Note if you will how the company researching the bacteria in question is not the one the author grinds their axe about. Further more according to the article, the system for product testing was employed, worked, and therefore must be flawed. Not to mention the dubious not-logic connecting bacteria and food crops.

[Canadian]

What about an etherial ship?

What about a ship made of pure energy?

What about a ship made of antimatter?

[Lagrange]

What about an etherial ship?

What about a ship made of pure energy?

What about a ship made of antimatter?

Antimatter? You must be joking, it would be easy to destroy the ship, just lob a couple of kilograms of normal matter at it. Since at the moment we believe that there is more matter in the universe and antimatter ship is at a disadvantage just due to the fact that all of the interstellar dust that it runs into (granted there is not much of it) removes part of the mass, and this adds up and antimatter will also be expensive to produce. Due to different conservation laws at least half of the energy used to make antimatter ends up making matter.

How would a ship of pure energy be bound? Photons are 'pure' energy and do not really for structures that could be considered a ship. How would you go about making one?

And what is ethereal? And how could it be used to create a structure like a ship?

Out of these three ideas I would say that an antimatter ship is more likely because it is always possible that there is a part of the universe that is constructed out of what we call antimatter, since there is not much of a reason (as far as I know, and I do not know much about the symmetries of physics so do not take my work for this, I think it is because the decay of certain particles gives more matter than antimatter but I do NOT know) that matter dominates the universe.

I would place the bioship above any of these ships.

[Canadian]

The animated movie Titan A.E. had a race called the Dredge that were made of pure energy. So where their ships. Everything in the universe is made of matter and energy. We all know the laws of thermodynamics. It's plausible that you could make a ship out of energy.

[Innis Cabal]

You'd have to learn how to make the energy able to be stood on, and used by us nonenergy beings.

[Canadian]

Not if the race that builds the energy vessel is made of energy itself - just like in the movie.

[Lagrange]

But how could a being of pure energy exist? Saying that it was in an animated movie is not a good rational for it being true.

I think that so far no one has objected to the idea that life is made of chemical systems. Pure energy would not have atoms therefore it would not have chemical reactions. Unless you are using a slightly more strained definition of pure energy since technically matter is concentrated energy, but that is then an argument of terminology.

What is pure energy? If the answer you give is light (photons) then it should not be able to happen because light moves at the speed of light and this is constant within a material and will disperse over time.

Just knowing the laws of thermodynamics does not mean that we understand everything about energy. Quantum mechanics is still the study of energy, but with the idea that energy is quantized (in a simplistic definition at least). There are many different kinds of energy and as far as I know, please correct me if I am wrong, there is no such thing as 'pure' energy but energy of some form.

[Canadian]

We're talking about future tech here. If it is in Sci-Fi It's fair game for discussion. After all the other stuff people are proposing is all future stuff anyway. An organic ship and a mechanical ship both run on energy. Sure we can't make an energy ship now. We couldn't make a plane in the year 1400. That didn't prevent it's eventual invention. We must first imagine it before we can create it.

[Lagrange]

Neither can we create a god of the universe who can do anything with a thought. Just because we cannot do it now does not mean that it can be done in the future. There are some fundamental issues with an 'energy ship' that have to be addressed before research would be directed at it in a meaningful manner.

First off, how could pure energy have structure? Extended and organized structure is a property of matter, and pure energy would not have any rest mass therefore there could be no structure to it, at least in my understanding.

If you look at the history of this thread a lot of time has been spent arguing back and forth about if the technology could exist, and why the technology would be developed in the first place.

Just stating an idea is not the same as discussing it, expect for it to be analyzed and evaluated by the ideas of what we know currently, do not expect 'future technology' to be the be all end all of a discussion about if something could happen.

[Innis Cabal]

See now, thats a problem with this thread here Canadian, people arn't willing to look beyond what they think can happen with our present level of technology and knowledge. They rather base it around fuzzy logic and the physics of the day to prove their point, which is fine if this was a SRS thread.

All things considered though, whats the pay out of an energy ship? It can't interact with matter in the same way as matter can interact with matter without opening itself up to alot of problems. There really is no point if your not an energy based creature to build an energy based ship

[Guts]

What is pure energy?

[Lagrange]

Innis that is being a bit unfair. I have trouble accepting some of the claim, like an organism that has miraculous regenerative powers or can in a matter of minutes reform a large part of its structure such as growing wings from arms in minutes.

If this had not started out as a metaltech versus organic tech I would maintain that the optimal spaceship would be a combination of the two. The outer frame can more effectively be made with inorganic materials, and the propulsion systems are much easier to imagine getting up to interstellar speeds being inorganic, such as nuclear pulse projection or solar sails. The inside should be basically living, more like a condensed ecosystem than a single organism (at least in my opinion), but I can see it being inhabited by a very well designed organism that uses some inorganic technology to assist itself in surviving the time interval of interstellar travel. In absolute terms inorganic materials or stronger, but they need a living organism to assemble itself and operate the machinery so an inorganic ship can do nothing without a living organism to guide it. That is what technology is, to provide assistance to a living organism, and a non-living hull would be an excellent shield for the much more fragile living organism.

[Innis Cabal]

Its not really being all that unfair, so many versus threads about Science Fiction have people rushing to the tennets of actual science it gets irritating. None of this is clearly possible when written into the confines of reality, but we're not even discussing real world issues, we're talking about Sci-Fi and which is better within it.

I doubt anyone here really beleives we can just simply evolve a bunny rabbit to launch flaming bolts of plasma from its retina, or produce razor sharp blades from its fur from a hiccup.

But what we are discussing here is a space ship made out of flesh, or what would pass as such on such a creature, that can traverse the cold dark space that exists within planets. Already we're in Sci-Fi land, because frankly...we don't have that ability. We probably won't ever. Not to pull another thread in but the most likely thing we will have in the future to fight threats in space (other humans) are nano machines and self automated flight craft. We're a product of our evolution, and we've evolved with science and metal.

If things provided us with the evolution to use other creatures, our own biology then we would probably not be arguing about this, or the reverse.

So its really unfair to bring real science into a sci-fi debate since...no ones even arguing about that. Its all for fun really people. Leave your science for an actual science discussion. Bring your imaginations and your knowledge of sci-fi that have these examples. Thats what we are really here to discuss.

[Lagrange]

So its really unfair to bring real science into a sci-fi debate since...no ones even arguing about that. Its all for fun really people. Leave your science for an actual science discussion. Bring your imaginations and your knowledge of sci-fi that have these examples. Thats what we are really here to discuss.

Actually, if you look at the wording of the first post it was asking why the trend in science fiction to show bioships being superior to metal ships existed. It also asked if it was just "Rule of Cool", the simple answer is that controlling life is much more foreign sounding so by Rule of Cool it is better.

The problem is that there are two fundamentally different methods of looking at science fiction. There is the 'hard' science fiction that tries to follow the current accepted impossibilities for the most part, such as not allowing time travel, these are more of SCIENCE fiction. There is also the so called 'soft' science fiction that takes much more liberty with since, more of science FICTION. They serve two different purposes, and one is not better than the other. I, and probably many of the others following the same argument that I am, are looking at this as a SCIENCE fiction problem by trying to speculate on IF the technology can work in our universe. You seem to be approaching this as more of science FICTION, as I described above, where it is not important for the science to work in OUR universe as we know it.

Naturally, this causes problems in trying to discuss the issue. It all depends on how the issue is approached, but the discussion will not get anywhere since we are analyzing it with two mutually exclusive (in most cases) assumptions.

Approaching this from the viewpoint of science FICTION, I can understand your arguments and it makes much more sense (at least to me from your last post), but that was not how I was originally approaching the question.


EDIT: The capitalization is being used to stress which part of the phrase science fiction is being stressed. I do not believe that one is better than the other, but both are valid approaches to the topic, they just should not be debated against each other because they are aimed at different goals.

[Dervag]

What about an etherial ship?

What about a ship made of pure energy?Those are terms that don't have well defined meanings in physics, so there isn't really anything I can say about what they would be able to do.

If you say that a bar is made of iron, that tells me what it is, how strong it is, and so on. Knowing its properties lets me tell you things about what will happen when you use it, and what it can do.

If you say that a bar is made out of "pure energy," I don't know what its physical properties are. So I can't say what will happen when you use it, or what it can do.


What about a ship made of antimatter?A pure antimatter ship would behave exactly like a pure matter ship, until it hit something made out of normal matter atoms, at which point it would explode. Anti-atoms work just like their opposite numbers among the normal atoms; it's only when the two are together that you start to notice the weirdness.
_______


We're talking about future tech here. If it is in Sci-Fi It's fair game for discussion. After all the other stuff people are proposing is all future stuff anyway. An organic ship and a mechanical ship both run on energy. Sure we can't make an energy ship now. We couldn't make a plane in the year 1400. That didn't prevent it's eventual invention. We must first imagine it before we can create it.The problem is that if we can't even describe it physically, we have no clue whether it could exist or what it could do if it did exist.

"The ship is made of pure energy" doesn't give us enough information to create even a vague description, the way "the ship is made of iron" or "the ship is made of meat" does. You can assign any properties you desire to the energy-ship, but it's arbitrary what they are, because we have no information about what those properties should be.
______


See now, thats a problem with this thread here Canadian, people arn't willing to look beyond what they think can happen with our present level of technology and knowledge. They rather base it around fuzzy logic and the physics of the day to prove their point, which is fine if this was a SRS thread.Innis, the problem isn't imagination. The problem is a lack of data for making educated guesses.

Anything must play by some set of rules. If we know what the rules are, we can make informed guesses about how a thing will play.

For normal matter, light, gravity, electricity, and so forth, we have a lot of evidence indicating that we do know what the rules are. But for "pure energy," we don't. Nothing in the rules we know explains how we could use "pure energy" as a building material. And if we have to take advantage of rules we don't know to build stuff from "pure energy," we don't know what those rules are yet (obviously). Thus, we're in no position to make informed guesses about its capabilities.

You can say that it would be an unstoppable God weapon. Myrmex could say it would suck. I could split the difference. But none of us could ever prove anything, because we have nothing to go on.

[Manga Shoggoth]

The problem is that there are two fundamentally different methods of looking at science fiction. There is the 'hard' science fiction that tries to follow the current accepted impossibilities for the most part, such as not allowing time travel, these are more of SCIENCE fiction. There is also the so called 'soft' science fiction that takes much more liberty with since, more of science FICTION. They serve two different purposes, and one is not better than the other.

For this very reason one of my university friends used to refer to "Science Fiction" as stories with a (reasonable) scientific basis, and "Science Fantasy" for the stories that played fast and loose with the rules.

The real problem is that bookshops tended to lump Fantasy, Science Fiction and Science Fantasy all on the same shelf. Some of them are getting better at it...

[KnightDisciple]

For this very reason one of my university friends used to refer to "Science Fiction" as stories with a (reasonable) scientific basis, and "Science Fantasy" for the stories that played fast and loose with the rules.

The real problem is that bookshops tended to lump Fantasy, Science Fiction and Science Fantasy all on the same shelf. Some of them are getting better at it...

See, when I'm book shopping, I don't mind that. I like both, so for me, it's nice to have a good mix, and not need to go back and forth.

[Canadian]

This is a sci-fi debate not a scientific debate. I just figured since most of us are role players that we'd all have a good collective sense of imagination. Why does a discussion of an energy ship have to be subject to "inside the box thinking?"

There was a time when people thought an atom was the smallest thing ever. Then an "outside the box thinker" took a look at it and discovered even smaller things whizzing around it.

So the world redefines the "box" and starts thinking "inside" the new box. Then somebody takes the atom and splits it (much to the chagrin of the citizens of Hiroshima) and all kinds of other stuff happens that nobody had ever seen before.

The box is redefined again and people crawl back into the comfy little box feeling safe and secure that the "know everything" for the time being.

Is it that hard to imagine how cool an energy ship would be? I'd say the energy ship has to be the best. All new technology trumps all old technology (with the exception of "New Coke and "Crystal Pepsi). I mean it's energy. The stuff that the other two types of ships can't run without.

Matter can be converted to energy and yes energy can be converted to matter. In a loose sense the energy ship is made up of the same stuff as matter just converted to a different form. All we have to do is figure out how to harness the universal stuff. I'm sure one day we will.

I picture the energy ship as being the fastest. After all the speed of light is the speed of a form of energy. If it is the fastest you can't dodge it. It could eat solid ships of all types and convert the mass into more energy. It could change from one energy type to another like from fire to electricity.

It could absorb the energy from all the beam, physical, nuclear attacks sent against it. The more you shoot it the stronger it gets. It could disperse and reform. Like when Dracula turns into mist. Maybe it could even convert itself into matter and become real small - even pocket sized. It could expand to cover and devour entire planets turing their mass into energy.

My energy ship would be shaped like a ninja star because ninjas are cool!

My ship would have no pilot. It would be a barely sentient feeding machine sent to devour the entire universe! Specifically seeking out people who can't imagine and energy ship... It would tickle them before it devours their home world.
:smallsmile:

Peace!

[Arakune]

Thing is, there are also many problems with biological technology that the metal version handles much better. And some of those problems are really big.

It may be a while since you posted, but ...

That's why I said a dedicated bioprocessor. A normal brain have to make various "useless" processings alongside with the desired process, you can't "turn off" these process to gain more processing.

Not only that but a normal brain is just not optimized enough. Remember all those stuff about you only using 10~30% of your brain? Well, even though you use 100% of the phisical brain, most of it probably are wasted with "wait" commnads and redundant informations (not confirmed, but at least a fair assumption).

Not only that but a bioprocessor would be much more smaller than a normal processor, even considering life support mechanism.

[Belphegor]

I
If this had not started out as a metaltech versus organic tech I would maintain that the optimal spaceship would be a combination of the two. The outer frame can more effectively be made with inorganic materials, and the propulsion systems are much easier to imagine getting up to interstellar speeds being inorganic, such as nuclear pulse projection or solar sails. The inside should be basically living, more like a condensed ecosystem than a single organism (at least in my opinion), but I can see it being inhabited by a very well designed organism that uses some inorganic technology to assist itself in surviving the time interval of interstellar travel. In absolute terms inorganic materials or stronger, but they need a living organism to assemble itself and operate the machinery so an inorganic ship can do nothing without a living organism to guide it. That is what technology is, to provide assistance to a living organism, and a non-living hull would be an excellent shield for the much more fragile living organism.
Or and even weirder combination of both.
Best ships that possible can and will be would be organids (half-made, half grown) on nanomechanic (as in can create something out of amorphous mass of stored something) steroids.
Basically its main hull would be metal entwined with the living nanomechanic-circulatory system allowing for the hull to restructure itself or repair when needed.
It should be a centralized system allowing the "brain" to maintain its inner safety. Such brain would be in charge of eating, keeping itself and its passengers alive and reproduction.
With Nano-Phlebotinum (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum?from=Main.Phlebotinum) you could make it absorb any kind of matter. Have propulsion engines. Hell you could even modify it.

"Sir they are attacking us with laZZers"
"Quickly Organid ship!! Turn into a mirror!"
"That won't help, sir"
"At least we'll die pretty!!" *obligatory dramatic face*

Jokes aside if we ever achieve this sort of Phlebotinum it would be best of both worlds and it would have some advantages over pure mechanic ship:
* Can be built on-the-fly
* Can eat other ships or stellar bodies for bonus sustenance and Scary Cool Factor

"Sir the enemy is munching our ship!!"
"Throw all the spices out of airlocks! And spray all people with vinegar"
"But why sir?!"
"We are going to be one sour lunch!*obligatory dramatic face*

Disadvanteges include:
* It catching nanomachine bug/virus
* Ship falling in love with the enemy ship (as in humping it).

[Lagrange]

Canadian, actually the more recent breakthroughs in physics seem to be be people confronting new ideas, not by actually searching for new information but by trying to finish our theories. Quantum mechanics was developed because the experimental data of thermal radiation did not match with theory, but by assuming that energy was quantized a match could be created, and by the examination of the photoelectric effect. Relativity was started by the consideration of Maxwell's Equations and experimental verification that the speed of light was a constant. A theory was constructed to match the experiment. At least this is the start of the theory, the theory can still make predictions about other ideas and that is what research is about.
Scientist being comfortable in there box of knowledge? Just look up what String Theory is and you will find that to not be the case, and some of its constructs (to me at least) make the bioship seem like a near creation. Some people think that we are still hundreds of years from being able to experimentally verify any aspect of String Theory, others say that String Theory will never be verified. I do not know because I do not really know anything about it.

So, how would your energy ship move? For it to be maneuverable it has to have some kind of structure (same with it being intelligent to some extent). If it is moving at the speed of light as you suggest, any communication inside it would have to be done at faster than the speed of light, but it information (ie energy) can be sent faster then the speed of light it loses its advantage. My personal solution to it would be to give it a black hole, since even light cannot escape that. If you are free to just assume the existence of an 'energy ship' than I am free to assume the creation and manipulation of stellar sized back holes as weapons.

[estradling]

This is a sci-fi debate not a scientific debate. I just figured since most of us are role players that we'd all have a good collective sense of imagination. Why does a discussion of an energy ship have to be subject to "inside the box thinking?"



It doesn't... However to come to any kinds of agreement you have agree to the same general set of rules and definitions. So what are the rules and definition of your imagination Canadian? Hard science does have them.

[Canadian]

You could use a black hole as a weapon to destroy any kind of ship. That does not invalidate the energy ship as a competitor to the metal ship or the meat ship.

We don't have to agree to use "hard science" to have a conversation about sci-fi ships that don't exist. I'm sure a few hundred years ago someone had a similar discussion based upon the "fact" that the "sun revolves around the earth." That was the "hard science" of their time.

Our scientific knowledge has time and again been proven wrong and replaced by new ideas which are in turn also proven wrong. I'm sure lots of people agreed that the earth was flat. That didn't prevent other people from imagining that the earth was a globe.

If we all choose to agree to the same things nothing will ever change and we'll never come up with anything new. Worst of all if we have something wrong it's doomed to be wrong forever.

The greatest leaps forward in technology do not come from people looking at an invention and saying "this is perfect." They come from a person who looks at an invention and says "there's got to be something better than this."

[Lagrange]

If you look back at it, the Greeks carried out the first theory that had the earth going around the sun. They also had a fairly good estimate of the size of the earth. Contrary to popular belief (and least this is what I have heard in my history class) Columbus' problem with getting funding for his fleet was not that everyone believed that the world was flat, but that everyone said his estimate of the size of the earth was too small.

Technically scientific knowledge has not ever been proven wrong, but scientific theories have been shown to have flawed premises, or just being completely wrong.

I would also like to mention that the study of science has changed over the past couple hundred years from 'natural philosophy' to the more accurate scientific method (at least I claim it is more accurate).

Great leaps forward in technology might be from someone saything that 'there must be a better way to do this', but what we are needed for any kind of spaceship at the moment except for a limited metal based ship is a great (many of them) leap forwad in science. These leaps happen because of experiments and observations NOT fitting within current theories, not because 'there must be a better way'. That is a different because science and technology.

You also still ignored the point that to have strucuture in a ship traveling at the speed of light it must be bound together by a force that travels faster then the speed of light.

As an extra note, scientists agree to a common ground, that theory must be supported by evidense, and that still allows for radical changes (like the period of time between 1900-1915) when quantum mechanics and relativity started. Those were radically new ideas and were generated by a 'general set of rules and definitions' and were also supported by experiments, and were actually created BECAUSE of previously done experiments.

While I was objecting to a bioship because feasible in THIS universe, I do not object to a bioship in a sci-fi universe because some of the rules ARE different, and thus it IS possible to scale up biological processes that COULD create a bioship.

So, what would be holding the energy ship/organism together? An idea cannot really be discussed if the only rational is 'because I said so' or 'it would be cool'. Both sides earlier had to come up with reasons for or against their idea, with I think the problem being a different goal (science fiction being as factal as possible in my opinion), but arguments were still created for and against the idea.

So far it seems like your argument for an energy ship because useful is because it is 'uber' according to you without describing why it is uber other then because it is.

[Yulian]

We don't have to agree to use "hard science" to have a conversation about sci-fi ships that don't exist. I'm sure a few hundred years ago someone had a similar discussion based upon the "fact" that the "sun revolves around the earth." That was the "hard science" of their time.

Our scientific knowledge has time and again been proven wrong and replaced by new ideas which are in turn also proven wrong. I'm sure lots of people agreed that the earth was flat. That didn't prevent other people from imagining that the earth was a globe.

If we all choose to agree to the same things nothing will ever change and we'll never come up with anything new. Worst of all if we have something wrong it's doomed to be wrong forever.

The greatest leaps forward in technology do not come from people looking at an invention and saying "this is perfect." They come from a person who looks at an invention and says "there's got to be something better than this."

Yes, but you're taking the step to "just making stuff up" as opposed to debating. Saying "energy ship" is pretty much the same as saying "magical ship" because those words don't actually mean anything that can be defined beyond, again "just making stuff up".

I'm also not sure you honestly understand how the scientific process works currently. No offense, but it doesn't seem so. You need a framework to hook your ideas on. No one ever, ever, ever came up with some revolutionary scientific concept from whole cloth. It was always built on observation and building on ideas that came before. In fact, most "technological leaps" result from incremental changes or improvements of existing technology or compositing technologies that have never been composited before, for whatever reason.

Radar didn't come out of nowhere. As early as 1904, Hülsmeyer got a patent for detecting metallic objects at a distance using radio waves. Maxwell's work predicted radio waves in 1865 because he noticed the wavelike properties in light. In 1887, Hertz generated radio waves in his lab using Maxwell's work. There was no "leap" the way you seem to think it happens. That's not how science works. You can't just throw ideas out willy-nilly and expect anything useful to ever come of them. It's far more methodical than that. It almost always has been.

This is why we spent the first few tens of thousands of years as anatomically modern humans with stone-age technology. It took a long time to build up even the basic frameworks.

No one "imagined" the Earth was a globe. What they did was refine observed data and deduced likely facts from it. Then it was tested. The processes were not refined early on, but they were there. Sailors, for example, noticed that, at a great distance, you saw the top of a ship's mast first, then the rest of the ship came up into view. On a flat plane, this would not be the case. The shape best likely to explain this phenomenon is a curved surface. In fact, very few people believed the Earth was flat, but the question of its being spherical as opposed to a dome was raised.

In fact, the heliocentric theory was a good example of something that wasn't "hard science" because it didn't fit the observable data very well. Once serious researchers started examining the data they had regarding the movement of other observable objects in the sky, the conclusions started to become clear.

See, the thing is, you're throwing out terms that don't have meaning outside of whatever you've chosen to give them.

I'll do the same so you can understand.

My magical ship works because it's powered by angels in the engine room with a hull made of Heavenium. Its weapons shoot heavenly fire bound in halo-constructed containment fields. Thus, it's viable and, I think, better than a mere "energy ship".

I can give it literally any properties I want because the terms I am using are unbound by any conventional meaning. Having any discussion, even one about sci-fi, without some sort of agreed-upon limitations is a useless exercise. Thus, the term "energy ship" is utterly without meaning unless we can assign it some properties. Unfortunately, using even the most out-there scientific reasoning, we can't. If we want to go straight past even the most tenuous use of real science, then my Heavenium hulled ship trumps all.

This is why, for example, a Star Trek ship versus Star Wars ship debate can still work, because the properties and actions of each have been codified. It's fictional, but it's been codified. For example, despite its being fictional, no one would likely be able to suggest that the Enterprise A could fly through the heart of a star. It's outside the codified, fictional framework.

Unless that framework exists, discussion is useless and meaningless.

- Yulian

[Lagrange]

In fact, the heliocentric theory was a good example of something that wasn't "hard science" because it didn't fit the observable data very well. Once serious researchers started examining the data they had regarding the movement of other observable objects in the sky, the conclusions started to become clear.


I hope you mean 'geocentric' theory, not heliocentric.

I agree with the rest, as that is basically what I have been arguing (since I moved a bit away from the strong rigid science standpoint).

[estradling]

One thing that Yulian only lightly covers is how we can debate properties of setting like Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galatica and Stargate. These setting all have wildly different techs, and possibly even physics. They are not real-world for sure. But they each provide 'evidence' of how their setting works on their various shows or movie. Are they perfect? By no means but they do provide a framework in which a debate can be had

[Belphegor]

Not if the race that builds the energy vessel is made of energy itself - just like in the movie.
How about candy space-ship?

Candy space-ship it has a special ray that turns anything near it into candy so you can go around turning people and space object into candy :D

Coming Halloween 23201.

[turkishproverb]

This is starting to remind me of those carebears vs the galactic empire threads

[Talkkno]

Personally it seems to the thread is divided by those who use science and those who disregard it.

[Belphegor]

Nah this thread reached culmination once it was said to use both biology and technology to create a ship. Everything else from there is just pure clap-trap.

[Dervag]

We don't have to agree to use "hard science" to have a conversation about sci-fi ships that don't exist. I'm sure a few hundred years ago someone had a similar discussion based upon the "fact" that the "sun revolves around the earth." That was the "hard science" of their time.

Our scientific knowledge has time and again been proven wrong and replaced by new ideas which are in turn also proven wrong. I'm sure lots of people agreed that the earth was flat. That didn't prevent other people from imagining that the earth was a globe.The problem is that when we make stuff up at random, we're likely to wind up in the wrong place.

I can imagine the Earth being flat. Or globe shaped. But if "everyone thinks" that the Earth is flat and I decide to imagine a different shape, and my imagination is all I have to go on...

I'm just as likely to decide that the Earth is shaped like a cube. Or a bowl, with the land around the edge. Or like a taco. Or that it's a hollow ball with the land and oceans on the inside.

Progress doesn't come from dreams alone. It comes from people who dream while doing a reality check.
______

As for this fantastic energy ship, I'm not going "Grr! Nothing new will ever be discovered here!" The problem is that you basically started your argument by saying "Screw the known laws of physics, I'm going to assume something different, allowing me to build an energy ship."

The problem is that you started off by throwing all the rules out the window. If you want anyone to have anything to say to you, you have to tell us what your new rules are. Otherwise, the conversation turns into a game of calvinball (http://calvinball.wikidot.com/), with you as Calvin. You can make up new rules, and so can everyone else, and nobody is ever really right about anything. We're just pulling dreams out of a hat and insisting they'll work.

If that's the kind of discussion you want to be in you can have it, but most of the rest of us won't really want to play.

[Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins]

Every time I see this thread I have a horrible horrible urge to post here with something totally irrelevant.

....

Soundwave: superior. Organics: inferior.

...

http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/c/c4/RollForIt_SoundwavescansChip.jpg

...

I will shut up now.

[Yulian]

I hope you mean 'geocentric' theory, not heliocentric.

I agree with the rest, as that is basically what I have been arguing (since I moved a bit away from the strong rigid science standpoint).

*Sigh*, I was at work and typing quickly. Cut me some slack. ;)

And for the record, Chip Chase can rip a floppy disk into pieces with his bare hands.

http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/f/ff/RollForIt_FloppyDisk_destruction.jpg

- Yulian

[Canadian]

Soundwave is awesome!

If you're going to discuss something utterly pointless why be so rigid about it?

[Belphegor]

http://images.fragland.net/screenshots/3337/14.jpg

Organids. They'll coming to eat you (up).

[Dervag]

Soundwave is awesome!

If you're going to discuss something utterly pointless why be so rigid about it?It's not a question of rigidity; it's a question of having anything to say. If all I have are dreams, there's really not much point in my trying to say "my dreams are tougher than your dreams."

Having some numbers or rules to guide my analysis means that I can make claims and reasoning that make sense outside my head. I can say "we could power the ship with a nuclear reactor." People can read that and think "I know what a nuclear reactor is, and yeah, you could totally power the ship with that."

But if I say "we could power the ship with a ball of pure energy," that doesn't work. People read that and think "I don't know what a ball of pure energy is," because they don't. I pretty much just made up the idea. And because they don't know what it is, there's no way to get a consistent picture of what it can do. We know that a nuclear reactor can do some things (generate electricity) and not others (transmute a mushroom into a gorilla).

But what can a ball of pure energy do? We have no way to tell. Can it generate electricity? Can it transmute a mushroom into a gorilla? Both? Neither? Different people will disagree on that question, and we have no way of putting together an argument on the subject that will sound convincing outside the head of whoever made it up.

If I think balls of pure energy have the power to transmute a mushroom into a gorilla, you may not be able to convince me otherwise. But I can't convince you by just saying over and over "balls of pure energy can do that." It's an assertion, not a line of reasoning.

So we wind up at an impasse. Everyone will decide what the ball of pure energy can do based on whatever ideas exist inside their heads about "pure energy." Nobody can convince anyone. And then Belphegor swoops in and insults us all.

[Canadian]

What do you do when you watch a science fiction movie with your friends? Do you sit there and give a running commentary.

"That would never happen, that's impossible, this movie is so unrealistic, that can't be done, oh what crap, the laws of physics state..."

That about busting the mood.

The transformers could never happen. Still awesome. The force? Jedi mind trick? Unexplainable but still cool. Organic hentai ship? Tentacular!

Unexplained things are staples in science fiction. I don't think that this is an discussion that someone needs to "win."

If you want a hard fact discussion on vehicles you can log onto Consumer Reports and argue Accord vs. Camry or something.

Sci -Fi baby. Make believe!

[Oslecamo]

If you want a hard fact discussion on vehicles you can log onto Consumer Reports and argue Accord vs. Camry or something.

Sci -Fi baby. Make believe!

Excuse me, I couldn't heard you over the sound of mankind creating planes after centuries of dreaming about flying.

Everybody likes dreams. But the best ones are the ones you can actually make come true.

So we look at the Sci-fi stories, and we try to find what parts we actually could make happen in reality, even it if it will take decades or centuries to come true. Rome wasn't built on a day, and if we have stuff that fly today, it's because there were crazy people out there trying new stuff with the dream of one day being able to fly.

[Canadian]

The dream or need always pre dates the invention. That's the point.

[Oslecamo]

The dream or need always pre dates the invention. That's the point.

But the dream won't get anywhere if we don't take it seriously and work to get it done. And this includes separating the possible parts from the ones we still can't make work.

[Lagrange]

What do you do when you watch a science fiction movie with your friends? Do you sit there and give a running commentary.

"That would never happen, that's impossible, this movie is so unrealistic, that can't be done, oh what crap, the laws of physics state..."


Actually, yes we do (most of my friends). But that is besides the point, a movie or book can still be entertaining while not being realistic and commenting on it does not mean that we disapprove of it happening, but of how it is marketed.

As I said earlier, and someone else also said, there is science fiction that focuses on being accurate to some degree, and then there is science fiction (many times called science fantasy) that does not care about accuracy.

I have seen Star Wars generally called science fantasy because it is very loose with science. Science fiction =/= make believe for many people, fantasy = make believe so science fantasy = make believe in a science context. At least that is how I see the subdivision.

There is more to science fiction then having it in space. There is the SCIENCE aspect of it which generally means there is some sort of laws governing the proceedings. These good be very different then what is in our universe but there still is a consistent approach that is at least based in science.

Transformers could be some type of flexible material, say a metal that can be easily shaped when a certain field is applied to it. The force could be some subtle type of electric field, the mind trick could be telepathy through manipulating the electric currents in the brain. Those examples do have explanations that while they probably could not work in this universe could work in a different one with similar laws.

[hamishspence]

Star wars, Warhammer 40000, Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series, all of these can feel more like Fantasy IN SPACE!

[MeklorIlavator]

Canadian, what exactly do you want the discussion to be about? If we go by your method, I can sum it up easily:
Organic Tech is the best because it can do anything.
Metal Tech is the best because it can do anything.
Energy Tech is the best because it can do anything.
and so on and so on.

On the other hand, if we have guidelines on what's allowed/not(for instance, using the laws of physics), we can have in depth discussions(as evidenced by most of this thread). Which one sounds more interesting.

[Canadian]

The lack of guidelines sounds more interesting.

[Oslecamo]

The lack of guidelines sounds more interesting.

Only to you I believe. We have all kind of fascinating discussions on the gaming forum using the RPGs guidelines. In the media forums we use a mixture of wikipedia, real world physicis and famous or obscure works, all of wich are guidelines.

[Canadian]

What you're talking about seems like an exercise in legalism. Kind of like finding loopholes in the tax code if you're an accountant. Or trying to get someone off on a technicality if you're a lawyer.

I'm just not into legalism. It all just ends up in a microscopic examination of the "rules" of the situation with the subject as a backdrop. It turns into the "I know more physics than you contest." As the focus narrows it just gets into nitpicking about the "rules." The actual subject - the relative awesomeness of bioships - gets lost in the background.

I'd rather have a loose discussion with people putting in all kinds of imaginative stuff and posting cool pictures of bio ships. I think bio ships are awsome. So are metal ships. Even old pirate ships.

[Innis Cabal]

Then start your own thread? No ones stopping you from doing that.

As it stands, this is a discussion over is organic technology superior. Not which is cooler.

[Canadian]

Okay. Let me know which one is better when you figure it out.

Peace!