Strategic Pause

A strategic pause for posts of random interest. 
Here is a nice music video from Disturbed.  Not music to go to sleep to.  :)

I would've liked it to have a scene of a futuristic space soldier in some engagement, basically speculation on the future. 

Conquering the Galaxy via Dyson Spheres?

Here is an infographic posted on Space.com on the background of the concept of the Dyson Sphere, a way in which VERY advanced civilizations would harness the energy of a whole star.

The organization of a society to achieve such a feat would be hard to imagine, as the more complex the project, seemingly the more chances for things to go horribly wrong.  The time-scale for building such a large object might outlast the civilization which started it.  So, ostensibly some artificial intelligence would be put in charge to run the program.  But it, too, might be swayed by some sort of evolutionary pressure to adapt and do something else before the sphere is complete.  Or various versions of AI would be competing to work on the project and create roving armies of builder-bots which would take materials already built into Dyson sphere and continuously improve them.  The building over time might work like the growth of a biological organism with the building robots operating like cells within the body.  Some AI agents might decide to go rogue (those pesky gamma rays play havoc with electronics!), so an immune function would also be evolved as part of this Dyson "artificial super-organism."  So one can immagine large armies of immunocyte bots waging giant wars against disease bots on the surface and within the structure of the sphere.  Thus, like an organism, if the disease gets out-of-hand, it could spell eventual death to the sphere. 

Baby, it's Hoth Outside!

In a conflict with any alien civilization, the weather will be the main enemy.  As on terrestrial-based wars, weather and operational environments play a key strategic role within the dynamics of the conflict.
So-called "General Winter" was a key reason for the defeats of Napolean's Grande Armée in Russia as well as defeat of the German Wehrmacht more than a century later.   In the 1200s, a Mongol invasion of Japan was wrecked by a Typhoon giving rise to the Japanese term Kamikaze, or "divine wind."  Another armada which was impaired by a storm was the Spanish Armada in the year 1588. Likewise, other environments such as jungle or desert have unique challenges.
In a war between alien civilizations, the party which is fighting in an environment closer to its own "standard conditions" has less strategic impairment than the party which has a greater difference, all other things being equal.  But of course on alien planets and space conditions, one has to contend with added considerations such as gravity and radiation of the battlespace.  oh, and potentially toxic or no atmosphere to breath.  The greater the difference from standard conditions, the more logistics and technology would be needed to just maintain presence (thus it would be mainly fighting against the weather just to survive).  So when planning engagements, the side nearer to fighting in its own standard conditions would have the relative advantage.  In the case of being the weaker or technologically inferior party, the strategy would be to engage the enemy in environments which negate or greatly limit them on what they can do and that are closer to one's own standard environment. One would want to bog them down with logistical problems as much as possible.

 

Strange Alien Life

Came across review of 3 books on alien life in New Scientist.

The gist is that alien life may well be stranger than anybody can imagine.  If that is the case, then it may be that the universe is full of "life" but that it takes on forms which make no sense to us, and thus it may prove difficult to communicate even to relatively intelligent aliens.  Just as a thought experiment, it may be that intelligent species are on planets but make use of totally different senses for communication.  It is known that insects (such as ants) communicate primarilly through chemical-means.   Even if aliens communicated via aural/auditory means, the frequency of speech would be different based on alien atmosphere makeup and pressure differences compared with Earth.  So just getting to the communicating-basic-ideas phase with aliens will be difficult.  And what makes for "basic ideas" may be up for interpretation.  Advanced intelligent aliens may presume that Fermat's Last Theorem to be part of their kindergarten math curriculum.   

Storing Data and Colonizing other Stars

Came across this from Tech Review.  Researchers came up with memory storage method that may last up to a million or more years. 
 
Related to that, if humans are to go to the stars, then methods like these would need to be developed in order to spread our civilization.  If for instance, a ship-probe could be sent to nearby stars to seed human settlers there, one would need a memory storage that would last the journey, which could last millenia at current capabilities.  Such data could be in the form of DNA sequences and the information needed for the probe to clone humans from those sequences.  The probe would also need all the knowledge of earth's civilization and technologies and a way to raise the first generation of these new settlers at which point, they could keep the colony going (hopefully). 

One issue I would wonder about is how cosmic radiation would affect the memory over long-term exposures affecting data stability.  Although the near-zero temperature of interstellar space would keep entropy low which would help counteract this for long periods of time. 

Giving Pledges for NewSpace Development?

On Buzzfeed via Drudge, I saw news about giving pledges most notably of which Bill Gates and  Warren Buffet are pushing billionaires to pledge to give up to half their wealth to charitable causes.   Dubbed the "Giving Pledge", the concept was made public in 2010.
But what if some of these billiionaires were to give some of this wealth to development and commercialization of space?
If the Forbes 10 gave maybe 5%, that would amount to ~$23B for space industry development, more than NASA's annual budget (FY2012= $17.8B).  Throw in the Forbes 100 or 1000, we're talking real money.
If concentrated on one or two concrete objectives, such money may make a difference in commercialization and colonization of cislunar and interplanetary space.  Dennis Tito's planned Inspiration Mars mission to perform a flyby of Mars is projected to cost $1-2B, well within the affordability of just 1 or 2 of the Forbes 10 to fund.
The fund needn't be only for charity either.  Such an initiative may well be organized as a consortium of investors/donors and other organizations.  Technology development and resulting IP and high-tech product spin-out companies can be owned by this fund which would then make returns to its investors.  Commercial projects and infrastructure in space would also be developed and owned by such consortium which would be paid for use of infrastructure by companies and governments wanting to do business in space.