Où suis-je?

“Où suis-je?”  thought the patient.                                                                         

"Sure went sideways didn't it?" replied the General.

“Where is Marie?” 

“She got out on the latest ship, she is still in stasis and will be for another few days.  We got the printer working again.  It’s hard to get the right materials in this backwater. “ 

 “How long have I been out?”

“About one local orbit, or ‘year’ as these locals call it.” 

“So what went wrong exactly?” the patient asked.

“Well, the social scientists are working on it.  Consensus is that local technology development has shifted the ability of our Psy Ops to control the locals.  Their ability to get information to wider audiences has greatly improved these last couple hundred years.”

“You got that right!” 

“Well, in this case, these new ideas being spread around got a little ahead of us.  We are still assessing the consequences.”  the General stated.

“Has this been reported to High Command?” the patient intoned.   

“Yes, but as you know, the signal won’t reach them for another hundred years.  And then we won’t hear the response for another hundred after that.  That’s why High Command commissioned this study in the first place a decllenium ago.  We have to learn as we go along.  The paradigm was working for quite awhile now, but now there is something interesting happening here.  From this experiment, High Command hopes to learn better ways to administer the Dominion.” 

“So what now?”

“No need to worry,  Psy Ops is coming  up with something.  The admiral running that outfit has some clever ideas.  She has a theory that instead of fighting the technological development of the locals, we should co-opt it and seek to control that way and other ways.  She thinks we can play one nation off another but on a massive scale.  We will control critical thought by creating fear of an outsider bogeyman in order to maintain our infiltrated leadership cadres.  A clever fellow under her, an economist, I believe, has a few other ideas to try.  Something about replacing silver coins with paper currency and thereby creating unwitting debt-serfs.”

“Is that what happened to me?  There was no outside bogeyman to pin the blame on for the population’s anger?” the patient inquired.

“More or less.  Good thing we got there in time to recover your remains.  Otherwise, you may have wound up pickled in a jar somewhere.  That information-theoretic death is no joke.   We had to get you in stasis quick.  Finding the right materials took time which is why we had you in stasis for so long.”  

“Sure could use a glass of wine right about now.  I miss that, it was the best down there.” the patient wondered.

“Soon enough, but you have to wait a few more days.  The medics are still printing out your new body as we speak.  Once we reattach your head, then we can have a drink.” 

“Yeah, I hate having to go through the process.  It is so ‘incorporeal’ if you may pardon the pun.  Being awake for these pre-surgery diagnostics is just plain weird.”

“Well, we all go through it.  It’s just part of life.”

"Do I have a new assignment yet?”

 “Yes, that is all being worked out.  You’ll be good as new in a few days.  But rest a bit before we get into details.  You’ll need to get a new language implant, English, I believe.   You will test this new theory by ‘fighting’ against our agent already in place.  A good fellow, name is Napoleon” the General said. 

“I’ll have the medics call you when I’m ready for that drink.  Thanks for getting me outta there.  It was my first decapitation.  I don’t think I want to go through that again.” said the patient.

“Yeah, had a couple of those myself going back a couple hundred years.  Back in my operator days.    Definitely an unforgettable experience.  Lou,  by the way, how was Versailles?”

Copyright © 2014

3D Printing in Space and Patents

Currently, there is no overarching intellectual property law that is enforceable in space.  Or strike that, it is sort of in flux.  As far as US patent law, there is some enforce-ability if a patent is infringed on a US controlled (35 U.S.C. § 105) objects.  But even that has exceptions.  Here is a paper on the subject and a more "layman-accessible" article (by same author) on the subject of patents in space.  As space gets more commercialized, this area would get more interesting situations for technology development in space.
An area which is being actively researched is 3D printing in space.  It used to be that the argument could be made that patent infringement could be alleged for making a component on the ground in a country where the part was made.  Now with 3D printing in space, with existing patent law, actors will most likely be able to infringe because there would be no existing "space patent" to infringe.  Patents are territorial in which one holding the patent can bar someone else from making, using or selling that infringing component within the territory wherein the patent is issued.  With actors in space, there would be no "territory" except the ships or equipment that would be registered under a flag of a country.  But as in commercial shipping, most ships that sail on Earth's seas aren't flagged under G-8 nations, but under less "restrictive" flags.  The same thing could happen in space.  Another matter is for colonization of the Moon and Mars and other celestial objects.  Territory definitely does not extend to these objects (Outer Space Treaty).  Thus someone printing out objects on the Moon would not be infringing any patents.
As colonizing the Moon and outer space just might be a technologically intensive activity (in which new and useful inventions would be made in situ to solve local problems), some sort of patent regime is needed for space (orbit and cislunar) and outer space.
On one hand, "space patents" would incentivize invention for outer space problem solving, but on the other having no enforceable patents lets those in space make use or sell any invention, which also might be desirable by not disincentiviziing space commercialization.  Imagine floating around in your spacesuit and getting a  demand-letter from a space-patent troll.  :)  
I imagine some sort of space patent treaty as part of new space agreements would come into place.  It might be another "country" that is designated under a PCT patent filing.
But in the future when the Moon and other colonies get functioning governments, then they would come up with their own territorial patent law such as Lunar Republic patent law, etc.

Frankenstein on Kepler-22b

One if the challenges of human travel to other stars is the amount of time needed to travel.  Even at near luminal speed, travel-time would be years, at least from the point of view of an outside observer.  One solution as put forth in many science fiction is development of hypersleep or suspended animation of the travelers.  Such ability to suspend animation has yet to be proven practicable.  Much research has been done in the field of cryonics, mainly to freeze people that have died of terminal diseases with the hope of reanimating them at some future time when their lives can be extended with future medical advances.  Cryonically freezing interstellar travelers may offer a way to get to the stars, especially since interstellar space is already cold (2.7 Kelvin) so one would not need to maintain cryogenic fluids.  Assuming shielding can be developed to mitigate cosmic and gamma radiation, then the time to travel can be expanded to some maximal amount.  As entropy increases over time in the travelers' bodies and brains over a certain threshold the ability to reanimate would decrease.  The extreme cold would slow this entropy perhaps enough to keep the travelers viable for reanimation for several millennia.

Another technology which may have applications for interstellar travel is biological tissue and organ 3D printing.  

Ongoing research in this area will eventually obviate the need for organ donation, or that is the hope.  Scientists are researching the possibility of using a patient's own stem-cells to grow or print out spare organs.  Extrapolating this, one may speculate that one day, whole bodies can be "printed out."  Such printing out sidesteps many ethical issues of human cloning for spare parts.  

Speculating even further, one can envision a future where people getting on in age would have a new body from the neck down printed out and have a head transplant to switch their heads to younger (stem cell-wise) bodies.  Would an ostensibly young body rejuvenate an old head?  A 10 out of 10 on the Frankenstein creepiness scale no doubt.    

So back to implications for interstellar travel.  Logistically, freezing just the heads of the travelers would make travel to stars faster given less mass would accelerate a ship faster per thrust.  Thus after a long journey, the ship would use a sample of the traveler's stem cells to grow and print out a body from molecules taken from planets orbiting other stars.  

Discover of 700+ new Exoplanets

Yesterday, NASA announced discovery of over 700 more planets orbiting other stars. In the far, far future, humanity won't have any lack of places to explore. 

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.