Don’t forget that the Astrophage space travels in its natural habitat, so it does make sense in a way for it to be efficiently adapted for space travel.
Eta: @Chronos said the same thing in the very next post.
Exactly, the improbable part is not that the astrophage does those things, but that it can do those things, if those things are in fact possible then a species evolving to do them doesn’t sound that far fetched.
Well, not really, beyond wishful thinking. Grace does seem to think that Erid society is more well-adjusted than humans, but then, all he sees of it is a Potemkin version that his hosts show him, which may or may not be accurate. But we definitely know Earth’s history, and that alone is enough to suspect that large-scale contact wouldn’t be peaceful. War over such long distances, between species with such different environmental needs, wouldn’t make sense, but then, most of the wars on our own planet didn’t make sense, either.
The time interval between: “By co-operation, we and these newly discovered aliens have saved both our planets” and “My friends, I am a peaceful man but ask yourselves, how can we trust these outsiders? Their motivations are opaque, their lifestyle unimaginably different to ours. We cannot wait helplessly until they decide to attack, we owe it to our children to strike first” would be about five minutes.
I prefer to imagine that Earth and Erid cooperate. Perhaps they work together to assist other worlds affected by the astrophage?
Earth on its own can’t create enough astrophage to do anything useful interstellar. They wrecked the planet the first time around, and there’s no reason to think it got easier.
Wouldn’t that suggest that cooperation would be a good thing, since Earth might need to rely on Erid for the astrophage supply?
Statistically it seems likely that intelligent life is pretty common in the universe if two planets within a small number of lightyears have sentient species, so yeah I think it would seem likely that there’s life around some of the other affected worlds that wasn’t in the right stage of development to do soemthing about it. Humans and Eridians could create some kind of Federation and head out to these stars to see if they can help any other species.
It would be a pretty cool sequel, actually. Maybe they eventually discover similar astrophage outbreaks much further out, hinting that Astrophage really was created by an advanced and ancient civilization that used it for space travel before dying out.
Unless they removed the solar farm, I can’t imagine that they would stop the production once they had filled the Hail Mary. Breeding the Astophage is pretty easy, it is charging it with energy that is difficult. One of the problems we have with solar is how difficult it is to store energy for cloudy days or nighttime. Astophage pretty much gives you back 100% of what you put into it. They might not return to the stars right away but I bet they convert large ships and planes into running off of Astrophage. Instead of carrying and burning tons of fuel you can run for months off of a few grams.
It would even make orbital solar farms practical. You can construct an arbitrarily large solar array in space. You need so little volume to store tons of energy that you could build little drone shuttles to deliver fully charged packets of astrophage from the orbital solar array to reactors in every major city on the planet, from where the power can be distributed using a normal power grid.
Except you want to put the reactors in rural areas. Not too far from the cities, but far enough.
Is that the case? Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t think high thermodynamic efficiency was mentioned.
The mechanism the astrophage uses to store and access energy is creating and then reacting matter and anti-matter, and the annihilation would inherently release all of the bound up energy. But I guess the process of producing antimatter may not be perfectly efficient.
Is there a point at which charging the astrophage and using it for interstellar travel would cool the earth enough to cause issues? If the Sahara was truly covered to create enough astrophage to power the Hail Mary, that’s a significant percentage of energy that is no longer warming the earth.
Using the energy from the astrophage on Earth has a net-zero impact, but orbital solar farms seem like the only realistic option for interstellar travel.
If you are using it to absorb energy to power and to cool relativistic rockets, and protect against relativistic interstellar particles, high thermodynamic efficiency is unavoidable otherwise your ship would melt within minutes.
What prevents Earth or Erid harvesting energy-rich astrophages from the Petrova line? I expect I’ll find out when I read the book, but it might be useful information in understanding the movie.
That’s how they got started, of course. But the Petrova line is incredibly sparse. When you hear of a “cloud” or “stream” or the like of something in space, that usually still means a harder vacuum than any man-made vacuum chamber can produce.
But we already know that the astrophages can divert energy harmlessly (probably neutrinos) when incorrectly triggered. It’s possible that even when triggered to release energy usefully that most of it is going elsewhere. That is, with all the useful properties that astrophages have, I don’t think thermodynamic efficiency is a necessary one.
Hmm. Converting waste heat from a relativistic rocket into neutrinos (without boiling the ship) sounds like very nearly 100% efficiency to me. If you only converted 50% of the waste heat from the rocket into neutrinos your ship would just take twice as long to melt.
It doesn’t convert waste heat entirely into neutrino emissions. At least some of it, it stores (which is also conversion into neutrinos, but cold neutrinos).
They do, however, violate the Second Law in that their light emissions are a lot more concentrated than should be possible. You simply can’t get that much emission per area in infrared.