Population Numbers...

Yes it does. Look at the real world. Compare the world's largest cruise ship, the Oasis of the Seas, to a houseboat. Are you really going to claim that the Oasis is not orders of magnitude more complex than the smaller craft?

I'm not sure if those are the best analogs because those craft are designed with completely different requirements. However, it is a general rule of engineering that complexity is not a scale-invariant. A better example is skyscrapers. You can find skyscrapers with comparable design targets and intents in all respects but scale, and you find invariably that separate from all the complexity issues of every five story building, fifty story buildings have to solve problems unique to their scale. They never gain the ability to ignore the smaller problems in the general case, though. The same thing holds true for things like naval warships, computer data centers, cities, even integrated circuits. Complexity tends to increase usually by some small factor relative to scale.

Its a truism of systems engineering that no one (knowledgeable) disputes.

Understood.

So, boys and girls, how about those awesome CGI-enhanced script proposals for that new film that's entering production? It's called Mass Effect. Looks like it's going to be entertaining.

While I take your point about the skyscrapers, I think those are directly analogous to small spaceships v. large spaceships, specifically Durakken's claim that larger ones aren't any more complex than smaller ones. They have all the same basic components: engine, sleeping quarters, helm, kitchen, deck, bathrooms, windows, propulsion mechanisms and so on. They serve the exact same purpose, as well: as pleasure craft.

But the stove in the houseboat is going to be singular and simpler compared to the hundreds of far-larger professional-quality stoves on the cruise ship. The houseboat probably has two propellers while the Oasis has multiple propellers as well as thrusters similar in design (but vastly larger) to those on jet skis. The houseboat has a single, compact motor while the ship has multiple gigantic engines. The houseboat's deck doesn't need to be as sturdy as ones on the Oasis, and the houseboat only has a single deck on the top with a smaller one on the back while the Oasis has dozens of separate decks. The houseboat has a single type of window, albeit in multiple sizes, but the cruise ship has a great variety of windows of all kinds, shapes and sizes to fulfill different functions. Plus there's getting electricity from the power plant to the rest of the craft -- the cruise ship has multiple generators as well as thousands of junction boxes and thousands of miles of wiring, while the houseboat only has a single junction box and a few hundred feet of wiring, and there aren't any redundant back-up systems on it. The houseboat has an air conditioner and heater, but the Oasis has multiple heaters and air conditioners as well as a couple massive climate-control systems for the public areas of the ship. Then there are the helms of the two ships. Even though they use similar basic components common to all watercraft, there's no question that the Oasis sports a bridge that is so much more complicated than the houseboat's that you might as well be comparing an Apple Macintosh G4 to an abacus.

Why its a bit hazy is that *some* of the added complexity of the cruise ship is inevitable, but some of it is voluntary. The propulsion system of the cruise liner is more complex mostly by necessity, as it has to drive a much larger craft. But things like the computerized bridge is partially voluntary: obviously a hundred years ago large cruise liners didn't have computerized bridges. The cruise liner has a theater not because all big ships have to have theaters, but because the cruise liner's requirements include entertainment facilities for paying customers, something the houseboat doesn't have the same requirements for.

The real question is: if you wanted to make a seven hundred meter houseboat, could you make it just as simple as the small one if you wanted to. And the answer is: probably not, not even if you tried. But you could make a seven hundred meter houseboat that was far simpler than the cruise liner. And that's what makes the cruise liner a blurry example of the complexity scaling.

On the other hand, while there's some of that fluff in a commercial skyscraper, they are usually so focused on efficient usable rentable commercial space that the vast majority of complexity in the structures is mandatory. 70 story elevator systems are not just taller 7 story elevator systems: it just doesn't work that way. 70 story plumbing is not just 7 story plumbing times ten. My guess is that a starship would have similar scaling issues: you couldn't just glue a hundred little ships together and make a functioning ship a hundred times bigger. You'd have to design for that size, and that design would be unavoidably more complex. Power distribution becomes more complex. Thermal regulation becomes more complex. Internal transportation, fire suppression, communications, emergency escape facilities all do not scale linearly and would need to be designed for the target size explicitly.

That's actually why I mentioned warships separate from commercial and pleasure craft. Warships generally have very targeted design requirements, and all of the complexity in them is mandatory, not optional, relative to task, and the tasks for comparable ships is (or can be) similar. An aircraft carrier is far more complex than a battleship, but that's not just due to size: its due to the aircraft carrier having a totally different design direction. But the complexity differences between battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, say, are much more comparable due to their much more similar (but still not identical) design objectives.

You've blinded me...

with science!

[In reference to Dr. Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival...]

General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... *smiles deviously* service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

I was specifically avoiding things added to the Oasis that are designed to entertain people such as the golf course, swimming pools and movie theatre. (Although I suppose one could argue that the movie theatre is just a vastly larger television, upscaled out of necessity to entertain larger crowds.)

Even if I substitute a really big yacht for the Oasis, I think the point still stands. It becomes more complex simply due to its size and the added requirements enforced on it by size. You have more stuff in it, so you need more things to control that stuff, all of which means increased complexity.

That's exactly the same sort of problem faced by a larger ship. A toilet used in a houseboat is relatively simple. Waste facilities in even a medium-sized yacht is tremendously complex. (This I know from first-hand knowledge, asking a lot of questions of the captain of the yacht I was on for a party. People thought I was weird for asking for a tour of the mechanical systems during a party, but I like learning and hate crowds, so... yeah. That's also when I learned large ships used the jet thrusters for fine maneuvers.)

That's what I'm saying!

I don't know if there are warships which do similar enough jobs for direct comparison. Destroyers and cruisers, maybe. But they're close enough to make the point.

The various Treks never went into much detail about the Vulcan sexual imperative. They have to have intimate relations every seven years, but it's never been said that they never do the horizontal monster mash while they're waiting out the seven year itch.

edit: And I would assume that in the crisis situation Vulcans were in at the end of JJTrek, they would start procreating as quickly as physically possible to ensure the survival of their species. And with Spock's accomplishments, they may be more receptive to mating with other species.

When discussing how things scale, it's important to remember that different physical phenemona scale with different dimensions.

Take vibration. Vibration scales mostly linearly -- if an engine is 2x the size, the vibration it produces will be about 2x the strength. Now say you combat vibration with hydraulics, which scale with surface area -- twice the dimensionality. Hydraulics that are 2x the size will be 4x as powerful. So as your ship gets bigger, it becomes easier to use hydraulics to dampen the vibrations of your engine.

Where this becomes a real benefit is on the skin of the ship. Holding back the vaccuum is a surface area problem. But the strength of your ship's skin is a funtion of material volume. So the bigger a ship gets, the easier it becomes to design a hull that holds in the atmosphere. You can use a thicker hull, and if there's a leak the more atmosphere you have the more time you have to fix it.

But not all engineering problems scale to our benefit. Heat is a problem that scales with volume. But dissipating the heat of your engine is a surface area problem. So the bigger the ship, the bigger the internal heat problems. Many other phenomena follow this example. So basically, it's impossible to make a simple statement about whether bigger ships will be easier or more difficult to build. Some functions will become easy, others will become impossible.

As for population numbers in science fiction...well, if you want, go ahead and critique this population timeline for me. It's based on U.N. population predictions through the 21st century, with a dystopian element added to the mix.

As you point out, the physics of the situation is often a wash. But what tends not to be is the simple fact that at some point, the systems you use to solve a problem become so big they generate problems of their own, and that tends to happen as things scale upward. Eventually your cooling systems need cooling systems, your backup hydraulics require backup hydraulics, your engines need engines to start them. The space shuttle main engines use high pressure turbopumps that are themselves basically very powerful jet engines just to pump fuel into the *real* engines.

Why do keep up the fallacy that a larger ship/engine is going to be made of oversized parts? The chances are that the larger ship/engine will be made of parts that are the same size as those used in the smaller examples, just lots and lots more of them. Larger does = More Complex = Easier to Break. Just google 'engines' and 'repair' if you don't believe me

Well, a number of posts have been.... eliminated... So, some of the conversation paths are missing. Really, its the comparison of a collection of people living in many (smaller) vehicles as opposed to two or three enormous ones. These vehicles provide life support, living facilities, etc. A larger vehicle, in this case, is more than simply a larger engine.

I know little regarding engineering, but I think much of the argument on this topic regarded the fact that a convoy has a better chance continuing to operate properly than a single large truck. That is, if the large truck breaks down, then it's stuck there--but if a member of a convoy breaks down, the rest of the vehicles can keep moving or use some of their own parts to help repair.

I'd go by what Memory Alpha says, given that the Trekkies who put it together are anal and only go by stuff that appeared in movies/episodes.

There's been some conjecture regarding what happens to Vulcans who aren't bonded with anyone, but as far as I know it's only been in novels. I remember one (I think it was in the Corps of Engineers novellas) where someone was talking to a gay Vulcan, who said he wasn't bonded with anyone and therefore didn't go through pon farr. It's an interesting idea (and I hope this doesn't start anything, but so is the idea of homosexuality in a culture so bound by logic) but it's not something that's officially part of Trek's loose canon.

edit: The gay Vulcan was in one of the New Frontier books, the brother of Dr. Selar.

The universe in which I am talking there is a material that allows one to alter the mass of an object. The larger amount of this stuff, generally speaking, the more the mass can be altered, but it does have a max...however that max supposedly can be changed with more advanced drives.

Essentially this means that more can be moved with larger drives without any of the rest of the systems being needed to change in size... So you could for example, have a ship where the only difference is that there is a large middle section that is 100 times bigger than a ship which is designed to have exactly the same thing save for that middle section. The only difference would be size of the drive or how advanced the drive is. Every other component would be the same...


thinking back on all that has been said it's a pretty worthless conversation mainly because noone addressed something that is fairly important... What the heck they mean by complex. I don't believe I said it was less complex initially, but rather easier to maintain and such. And i think i switched to more complex because that is what someone kept using, but i don't remember and there is no way to check.

Anyways in the building analogy... I would say that if you made a 10 story building that is 10x10x10... and then you made a building of the exact same design but made it of 100x100x100, if it were possible, by just making all the pieces bigger, it would not be more complex. I would also say that if you made it out of standard material and just added more supports it is also not more complex either, but could see how one could say it is. i would also say ten 10x10x10 buildings of various designs is more complex than that one building.

You haven't been inside a schoolbus in a while, have you?

When an engineer says something is colloquially more or less complex, the meaning of that statement is usually pretty unambiguous.


I can actually feel the pain all the way down to my engineering degree. I would say these statements are impossible, unworkable, and inexplicable, in that order.

A 100x100x100 building would be about 30 times larger than one of the two WTC main towers, by the way, which were considered one of the most complex super skyscrapers ever built at the time of its construction. Some design elements, like the express elevator system, rewrote the textbooks on skyscraper design.

Please tell me you are not pursuing a career in civil or structural engineering.

And for the record, ten 10x10x10 buildings are only 1 percent the volume of a 100x100x100 building. But correcting that numerical error doesn't save the assertion. Not even a thousand 10x10x10 buildings would approach the complexity or maintenance level of a single 100x100x100 building.

Really? My physics degree isn't in pain, it's just gasping for air from laughing so hard.

The problem, Durakken, with making something larger is that physics doesn't scale with you. To have the pieces of a building 100x larger behave the same, you need gravity to be 100x weaker, friction to be 100x stronger, and probably the materials would need to be 10^6 times stronger (100x cubed, because of the three dimensions).

Physics works differently at different scales. Sometimes that helps you, sometimes it hurts you. Scale changes on that magnitude are never simple.

Thank you clarifying that you intend to say nothing with a lot of words.

It is impossible, on Earth, to create a structure that is just super sized for all sorts of reasons, but those reasons do not exist in space because the force that cause all or most of them, gravity, does not act on them or has so little impact that it is more or less a waste of time to account for.

Let's be clear. i asked what the heck you are talking about when you say complex, and your answer was "I'm being vague" and "One of the building of the analogy has more volume than this other one." I mean, come on, I gave you solid things that I think would be considered more and less complex, and you came up with some ******** that has nothing to do with anything. By your answer we have to presume that the most Complex thing in the universe is the thing with the largest volume regardless, of design, shape, structural engineering, material, or any other component and if we go by that, why don't we cut the semantic and say "this is more volumous" in which case you're saying x is more volumous because it is more volumous and i have to say, thanks for the tautology.

Please, read and answer what I wrote and please be sensible like you usually are.