Oh well, I think we are diverging from the original point of the discussion
Edit: what about planetary rings?
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.
but what if the bioships are created from a setient species?
Edit: they could mix biological components with mechanical ones
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.
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.
What about a photosynthetic bioship with a light-sail? This makes sense to me, as it already needs a lot of light to propel it, so there wouldn’t be a problem with energy, and the matter could be kept in the body with an airtight sheath, with it being constantly recycled over the journey
Some problems, which were discussed before: how did they appear, where will they take H2O and CO2 for photosynthesis, how do they maneuver (and why do they need this?) how should they move? On asteroids not enough material to do alive creature. Ok, some prions, possibly, viruses can take enough material from it, but they will can’t appear, because on asteroids no any liquid water, which could help in creating lifeforms by movement of particles. In “dead” environment without any movement under radiation they will not appear.
How will they maneuver? If to explore the movement in space, you will understand, that the constant acceleration is harmful. It will can’t rebore to restart, they can’t learn all information we have. So they can’t plan their movement, it’s a big problem.
Space is vacuum. You will not take anything from environment. H2O and CO2 are not exceptions.
These would have to be bioengineered, but once made, they could likely survive by endlessly recycling its waste with the energy it absorps through photosynthesis
In sells are many different processes in cell, which need a lot of not only glucose. Different proteins, lipids, nucleotides, sugars.
If in future humans will can create the completely artificial cell, we can continue those dialogues about synthetic life.
And you will not have SO much water, oxygen and carbon dioxide for alive creature with giant (i suppose, minimum 2-9 km² they should be) “wings”. A lot of energy you move them - billions of ATP molecules, remember about the reaction control system (if i wrote right). Stabilization of so big creature will need a lot of air, which is so important, because for your normal cycle (which is impossible, because much part of glucose goes away for other processes in organism. I didn’t tell about details in biochemistry) needed 100+ % efficiency.
Simply think: cells will die under giant constant radiation. To create new cells you need more material. Biological reserves will end through couple of months with best luck. Flights to other planets need near to 100 days (Earth-Venus, if remember right. For others usually more).
Remember, you can’t simply create the infinity machine on biological processes. All of them are not perfect. Ok, couple can be perfect, but you will can’t use them…