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Maximum77
2017-05-03, 07:59 PM
This is the timeline of the future of my rpg world.
Era 1: Post-Information Age (circa 2020-2060)
-the immediate future
Era 2: Fusion Age (2060-2100)
--the advent of fusion power eliminates the need for fossil fuels and ushers in an age of unlimited energy
Era 3: Interplanetary Age (2100-2200)
--Humanity explores the solar system and establishes bases on the moon and Mars
Era 4 Interstellar Age (2200-2300)
--The invention of Faster than light travel allows humanity to explore the galaxy
Era 5: Age of Abundance (2300-2400)
--Humanity colonizes the galaxy
Era 6: Transcendent Era (2400+)
--Humanity uploads their minds into computers and live in their own immortal designer universes

I need 5 future inventions/techs/discoveries/ideas for each era? Thanks

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-06-07, 04:55 PM
The amount of time it takes to colonize the galaxy seems rather short if you mean that literally. Even if its roughly100.000 lightyear diameter can be traversed in an hour, that's still a pretty huge amount of places to settle. Faster than light van Neumann machines? Maybe. Human colonies? I'm assuming we'd be settling just a few systems or something.

Also, a question: is there a role for AI in this timeline? Even if it's just a short AI war demonstrating why it was a bad idea?

NRSASD
2017-06-08, 07:09 AM
All of this really depends on what kind of vibe you're looking to create. Something hopeful like StarTrek? Nihilistic like Rimworld? Dystopian like 1984 or Deus Ex?

Also, the Age of Abundance is waaaaaaaaaaay too short. We might spend the next hundred years colonizing our next door celestial neighbors like Alpha Centauri or TRAPPIST, but the entire galaxy? As of 2013, the best guess on habitable planets in the Milky Way put that number at around 40 billion.

With the discovery of FTL, how fast is it compared to light? x10? x10,000? x10^12? Is flying to Andromeda an impossibility, or just a brief stroll? Do we discover FTL communications, or are ships the only form of communication?

That being said, here's a couple of ideas:

Era 2: Small, portable fusion generators make laser weapons a reality. Plasma's still hard to use as anything besides a fire hose of molten gas.
Small, portable, high-capacity batteries make cybernetics a possibility. Even if they are of the rather crude, prosthetic-thats-better-than-the-original variety rather than a fully integrated neural interface.

Era 3: Cellular extraterrestrial life is discovered on Europa.
Honest-to-goodness effective and lightweight radiation shielding for spacecraft.
Giant Laser Satellite Arrays/Solar Sails provide a cheap and effective replacement for chemical rockets as intrastellar transport

Era 4: Many new diseases. Smallpox-introduced-to-North-America level epidemics occur several times, but we always survive.
Extraterrestrial multicellular life is discovered.

Era 5: Terraforming. If we don't figure this out before then, we do by now.
Dyson Spheres. We'll need the power.

Era 6: Transcendence? Are we talking digitization of human consciousness or something more esoteric? Either way, technology/inventions/discoveries no longer apply cause we've rejected reality and substituted our own in the most literal sense.

Shamash
2017-06-08, 11:18 AM
You mean nuclear fusion? That would never work. The amount of radioactive trash is huge and besides some countries have too much of other resources to waste making energy with nuclear fusion. The world is slowly moving towards green energy that would make more sense.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-06-08, 11:21 AM
You mean nuclear fusion? That would never work. The amount of radioactive trash is huge

Radiation maybe, but at least if you do it well you're not getting any radioactive substances out of it, are you?

Shamash
2017-06-08, 11:25 AM
Radiation maybe, but at least if you do it well you're not getting any radioactive substances out of it, are you?

As far as I know Radioactive waste will always be a by-product of nuclear power generation, did they develop a way to do it without making it when I wasn't looking?

NRSASD
2017-06-08, 11:30 AM
Fusion is pretty darn clean, just producing tons of energy and radiation, but the physical byproducts are generally quite safe. Most fusion reactions are just combining hydrogen to form helium (so far as I know).

Nuclear fission, which is the type of nuclear reaction we use today to generate power, does generate lots of dangerous radioactive waste.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-06-08, 11:34 AM
As far as I know Radioactive waste will always be a by-product of nuclear power generation, did they develop a way to do it without making it when I wasn't looking?

Not in practice no. But:

1 This is fusion, not fission.

2 This is a future timeline.

The sun manages to end up with mostly stable isotopes again, so there is some proof of concept out there. There's even different methods you could try far enough in the future. Start from (radioactive) tritium and make (stable) helium, start at just normal hydrogen, use the CNO cycle. I'm not a physicist, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable.

A big question is of course: will it be worth it? Or is it better (for most applications) to just use the giant gravity powered nuclear fusion reactor at 1 AU from our planet?

For instance: a spaceship: should it have an on board fusion reactor, should it run on antimatter cells or can you power it with lasers shining in from the nearest star system?