timberwindart.bsky.social

for those considering jumping ship, I'm active on: bluesky - timberwind.bsky.social (timberwindart.bsky.social for just the art) tumblr - timberwind.tumblr.com

@AxiomVerge You ever read repligate's "Simulators" or nostalgebraist's "The Void"? They describe LLMs as 'policies' - which are kind of cognate to DMs here - that simulate world-models made of text from the prefill that can instantiate personas as sort of narrative tulpas. Fun stuff!

AI reminds me of a dungeon master playing NPCs, only the DM has no sense of self. The AI can say all kinds of stuff to remain in character, and you can nudge it into playing a lawful good or a chaotic evil character, but it's not personally invested in what it's doing.

@SOPHONTSIMP Also the paper everyone cites for this states that the requirement for full terraformation is *one whole bar of CO2 liberated from the surface*, which is simultaneously huge overkill for partial terraforming and a gasping death for baseline humans.

“Impossible” is a very different statement from “not possible with present day technology”

@mikusingularity @Willspacefolio oh damn, is this a Celestia model?

@Willspacefolio They have orbital hotels and research facilities.

It's not the GEACPS, it's the Mutual East Asian Cooperation Union. But Hatsunia and other Asian countries have lunar and Mars bases, and millions go into space each year using the "Mikumaru" and other reusable rockets. (inspired by Japanese Y2K space plans like the Kankoh-maru)

@SOPHONTSIMP @7384254b it would be exceptionally surprising if it did not, given that we know it has a rocky crust that has experienced at least episodic periods of contact with liquid water.

@cazillustration @7384254b Do we even know that mars has ore veins

Asteroid belt only contains 3-4% of the mass of say the moon.

@7384254b @SOPHONTSIMP Which like, don't get me wrong, isn't a showstopper for asteroid mining if you have self replicating industry and/or very cheap bulk space freight to ship rubble to massive zone refiners. But it does make the asteroids less obviously superior than they are often portrayed.

@7384254b @SOPHONTSIMP no fluvially altered minerals (except on Ceres and maybe at the centers of the really big rubble piles like 87 Sylvia) means no aqueously formed ores though - sifting gigatonnes of asteroid for useful stuff is going to be far more energy intensive than mining Martian ore veins.

@SOPHONTSIMP RAIRs probably work though, and if those turn out unworkable then the pre-seeded 'bussard buzz-bomb' and its less-nuclear cousin the wind-pellet velocity shear sail seems like they would Almost Definitely work. Ramscoops aren't fully out for the count, is what I'm saying.

It’s a shame that these can’t work because of drag and p-p fusion being nonviable, real proof that god doesn’t want us to travel the stars by physically shipping around bodies.

in reference to this: x.com/cazillustratio…

tumblr ask: relativity and IDs

@beanhowitzer oooh this is fantastic

ohh los alamos was cooking with their logo in the late 70s

@SOPHONTSIMP back in the 00s a few pieces of transhumanism-focused SF (notably Accelerando) speculated that the extremely simple - just thirty neurons - lobster stomatogastric ganglion would be the first meaningfully uploaded piece of neurology.

@cazillustration what is that.

Something fun to think about is that we’ll probably get answers on whether a WBE for us is possible long before we’ve mapped out a full human connectome.

@APOAPSlS @beanhowitzer Gymnopedie No.1 orion vs Cyan Hardcore daedalus

Bombridin'

born-on-board spacer

@pi198721 Specifically time elapsed in local years (about fifty million seconds) since first landing here, yeah! This star system has a few other calendars in use - in practice metric seconds and a slightly revised gregorian calendar are used a lot for interplanetary/stellar affairs.

@cazillustration Is M.Y. counting from the landing/entry to the system?

high Mangala orbit, 7998 A.D. (M.Y. 399)

@FFuzzywing More info on the space critters will be forthcoming in the near future :0)

@cazillustration Who's the squad? Are they on good terms with the Lord of Trade?

@BigSkwigg secret lore also: there's a version of this painting with a more conventional z-pinch torchship because I couldn't decide if I actually wanted to go with the beamrider here lol

@BigSkwigg Yeah! A beamriding clipper, good for moon-to-moon hops or interplanetary voyages.

@dan_gaffa It's a kind of magnetic sail called a "plasma magnet"!

@cazillustration what's the funky wire icosahedron

@register_shift I don't think fusion will ever be useful for spacelift, with the possible exception of thermonuclear orion for the edge case of needing kilotonnes of prompt emergency launch. it just doesn't scale down well, especially not if you want high thrust - specific power takes a huge hit

@cazillustration Maybe, but fusion becoming cheaper and easier might tip the scales. Sure, an intercontinental railway system would be cheaper than cargo ships, but that's likely never going to happen. It's just so expensive.

A selection of historical small-world (~0.05-0.3 Earth masses) SSTOs of the far future.

@register_shift yeah, most fusion rockets are centigee or so z-pinch or laser or heavy-ion-beam deals. military ships use magorions and medusas, high thrust high specific impulse

@cazillustration Does your setting have ships with more powerful engines? Fusion drives and such? Like the expanse or the hibour-verse?