In a single asteroid there isn’t enough mass to support a biosphere, then what about an asteroid belt?
umm, for that to work, the contents of the asteroids need to be able to come into contact with other asteroids. Basically you need to have space surviving and moving around organisms before you can consider multiple asteroids as a single biosphere.
See. I was right when I said that this is becoming like the underwater civs discussion where solutions that only work after the thing they try to solve is already there.
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A plant like organism could release gametes in space (like corals) wich could land on other asteroids, and an animal like organism could evolve jumping specialised limbs to jump from an asteroid to another (it wouldn’t need a lot of strenght to go to an asteroid to another)
Except from what I’ve gathered the asteroids in our solar system are so spread out that you can’t actually see another asteroid when you stand on one with the naked eye. Only in science fiction / badly scienced movies, are there literal clouds of asteroids hanging close together.
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Oh well, I think we are diverging from the original point of the discussion
Edit: what about planetary rings?
Exactly.
My earlier post mentioned that some moons of gas giants have geysers with the strength to blast a life form into space. Those moons also happen to be theorized to have liquid water oceans for mantels. These oceans may have life, and that which lives in the crust may be quite resilient. Think water bears. And protists. A geyser could send them into space. The water around them would freeze and then
melt in the sun. When it was a slush mix like a evaporating comet they would reproduce. Eventually their dormant forms might be mobile. Think a preprogrammed solar sail that lands on an iceberg in the rings each month to shed it’s skin, mate and eat a space plant. If a animal wound up on the surface of the moon it may venture into geyser vents to glean oxygen from the lingering water, and it’s metabolism would be so slow it could live on the surface for hours. If one un(or very)fortunate critter was blasted into space by the geysers they might have evolved to not really breathe. They could become bioships either way.
Works the same as any space ship, Newton’s third law. Some ships even account with the ability of fuel refinement and combustion as well. The ones that don’t do usually secrete a sort of mucus, but I would imagine they go dormant after that acceleration period and cruise until they reach their destination. Their fuel would have to come from something like asteroids or planets and they would have to synthesize it themselves. Honestly I can see this as a possibility, but probably ot added in thrive, especially with how the life focuses more on earth-like development. Their respiration would be tricky since they would be in the vaccum of space for some time. Them going dormant would help preserve any oxygen they collect up though.
I mean how do you get from some place where life can evolve, to space. You need some serious thrust to get off a planet or a sizable moon that could support life. It’s all good and fine if you can have a biological thruster that is enough to get you around in space in reasonable time, but if you can’t takeoff from a planet (and let’s not even start discussing life evolving floating in space) then you aren’t going to be a spaceship.
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but what if the bioships are created from a setient species?
Edit: they could mix biological components with mechanical ones
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If to watch life like the cellular life I’m agreed with hyyrylainen (i wrote this right at first time without watching nickname! Yoho). But! If the non cellular life is possible (life on clear electricity) without any intermediaries (like ATP/glucose /other sugar), in space could appear something like void cloud frim stellaris. Of course, it cannot be used like bioship, but it is ALIVE! Giant clouds of different elements, ions to create lightnings (for communication, for example)… They can have many different interesting things, which can be discussed in other threads.
About bioships… Alone known and well working method of exiting atmosphere and with this flying in space - Jet propulsion) or simply reactive movement… Translator can tell wrong things). For it are needed Oxidizer and fuel. But no one known creature can survive at temperatures, which are in nozzle of rocket, when it goes up. Ok… Where will it store all the reagents? Right, nowhere. Most part of time it will be useless, sooo… We so go to third main problem - how did they get everything this. As it was written a lot of times by all-knowing Hyyrylainen, how did it evolve? Problems are solvable, but solvings are useless before result. If something is useless, it dissappear. Rules are simple.
About biomechanical ships. What for did somebody need them? Mechanic parts should be expensive, every needed creature need individual pearts.
And for what? For ships, which we can do a lot by similar price. Bio parts need food, when usual ships don’t.
So, there are no any reasons to do biomech space ship.
I think, question is closed.
If you have any suggestions, we are open to discuss
Edit: As alway, sorry for my English, but thoughts should be clear
As I have said just evolve on enceledus and ride a geyser
They could use biological parts because those parts would need less maintenance making possible to create big ships that need less crew, for the food problem, the species could make “Food stations” where chambers of the ship is filled with an high nutrient substance (and this problem doesn’t make much sense because normal spaceships would require fuel too)
In my opinion a bioship ought to have it’s metabolism be overhauled to work on either a common or energy dense resource. Say, radiation, or, if you can pull it off, water. For a high energy source I recommend anti-mater or radioisotopes. This may seem like something odd for a bishop to eat but some fungi eat radiation, I think.
To me it seems completely opposite: if you need to make a rocket engine from metals anyway, why not also make the ship structure from metal, which is more durable (probably) per weight unit and doesn’t need constant energy to maintain.
Yes, but if it breaks you need to go and repair it yourself, instead with a biological structure you wouldn’t need to go and repair it, because it repairs itself.
Edit: I’m aware now
But you need to constantly feed the biological mass to keep it alive, and for it to repair itself, it needs also biological matter to consume. So in addition to feeding your astronauts you need to budget extra weight for food for the biological ship. I’m very much not convinced that a biological ship really has any other advantage than that you could save manpower that would go into constructing a ship out of metal.
My conclusion is still: this is basically an underwater civs discussion where no one wants to actually put in the work to make their cool feature an actually realistic design.
They could make it so that the bioship has a slow metabolism and they could feed the bioship a really high nutrient liquid wich would make the bioship require a little bit of this liquid in intervals of great times (Thing wich you cant do with a normal spaceship neither)
Again, in Stellaris is interesting thing, i want to tell about.
Regenerating sheathing.
It works by special bacterias, which have the product of vital activity, similar with sheathing. It is possible with xenobiology. Maybe.
Against bioships i can tell next things: it should be much more expensive, than it would need to usual spaceships. You should firstly do this creature (a lot of time of biologists’ work), grow it up (in special conditions, somebody should watch after them), after modernise them with specially projected parts, which needs a lot of time to.
And another thing: how will this creature survive and laser? Under explosions? Why do you want whole creature, if you need only his skin?
Anyway, much easier to take special bacterias. They can be frozen when they are not needed, it’s hard to kill them all, when for animal in space it is the easiest way to kill whole command.
New argument: animal has only one outer cover, when for spaceships needed minimum 2. And even if animal has 2 or more outer covers, they are mutually depended. For spaceships it is Unacceptable.
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Here’s an idea: make a normal metal ship that regenerates just like a living thing. It may be expensive but a ship could be made to have redundant parts that the ship could make itself. If a bishop could be taken down by shooting it’s heart this actually makes it harder to kill. This healing ship could have mining (and probably repair and agriculture) bots to gather materials to repair the ship. This ship could repair like a bioship without losing anything, including cost effectiveness. My dad’s favorite arguement against space wars is that no one would have the budget to make trillion dollar space ships just have them blown up. As long as no one actually obliterated the enemy’s ships this would be a manageable cost to defend your territory. My other arguments against this cost argument is the idea of a K2 civilization, and the fact of the United States. The States have a truly insane military budget. Even with half of the USA’s percentile spending on the military a K2 civ has the budget for a space navy the size of the empire’s in Star Wars, just maybe without the hyperdrives. Sorry I got of topic, but the points are self repairing ships can exist without being biological, and that SFIA has videos on all of these topics please look up SFIA on YouTube Isaac is my muse. Anywho thanks for listening.
I think most designs of these ships account against most consceptualizations for how geoidal life came to be such as special cases of evolving on asteroids or being made through genetic engineering. Take for example the Banu Defender ship in star citizen. The ship design resembles that of a crab.
One might say on the alien world this vessel was developed on, it originated from a crab-like convergent life form that has been modified to fit the needs of a pilot for a more personally applicapable intelligence and ship regeneration. There is also the case that this life is an artificially synthesized life form entirely and is more like a machine, biological in the fact that it has the qualities of eating and processing and growing and replicating and regenerating itself. There is the chance this life form is outside the scope of geoidal life entirely and developed on far more alien conditions. To even begin to fathom what this life would look and behave like would require lots of work. Assuming this life develops on some small minor moon or asteroid which would be devoid of water or atmosphere is probably first assumption, but would set many requirements that may not even be possible to achieve. There are cases of microbes hitching rides with us to space and being the extremophiles that they are, able to survive the vacuum of no pressure at all, the cold, and the radiation. The question depends on whether such life can start on its own on an tiny empty celestial body stripped of an atmosphere, or maybe in the vacuum itself. How ever, it makes more sense for such life to evolve on an asteroid than in a vacuum simple because it is easier to sustain your mass in such a case as you could latch to the ground and move there. This excludes the vacuum life for the most part (at least in probabilities of which environment is more favoured for such a thing happening). Obtaining matter and energy would be a struggle since all there is on a small rock is… Well… Rock. No water to flow and dissolve ionic compounds, no air to respirate the way most geoidal lifeforms do. I was thinking perhaps of silicon based life in a situation like this, relying on diffusion and electron based aerobic respiration at first, and later evolving a more powered system. Such life may adapt to the conditions of machines here and converge with them (as crazy as that sounds). Perhaps they metamorphasize to construct biological fans that grow from a solid form, possibly kind of like keratin in our fingernails, and as the body grows these blades would detach. The ideas of such life including mine are all very hypothetical and speculative and probably on the very edge of what is actually possible. I personally think that if this type of life is possible at all, it would take the benefits and design of both biological forms and mechanical forms, starting from a more biological base, and motorized industrial integrations into the body as these creatures grow and evolve. Such life is more likely to evolve within patches of asteroid fields, and I am not sure if asteroids can appear in spots like gas clouds, but of any hope of these things being aerodynamic and possibly for them to even be able to exist, their homes might have to exist in one. Flying would be a strategy in this hypothetical world as it would enable you to search for important chemicals and other creatures on other asteroids. This life would also need to adapt to the changes in pressure as the gas cloud dissipates and moves along at different pressure and depth gradients I would imagine. This life would probably form some rotary components and may eat food far different than most earth life. Keep in mind this is a take with little knowledge on gas clouds and asteroids and what physics actually allows. The most probable case is this life is synthesized or is from contamination from other life forms accidentally sending life to space which would adapt to it. We must also keep open minded about the size and complexity such life would have to be, as a microbe would have a far better time existing in a vacuum than more complex forms. Then again, we can also say that for even an earthly environment.
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