Space Pirates

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There are an uncomfortable amount of opportunities for piracy, more than I thought possible. Great job!

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/MiamisLastCapitalist 📅︎︎ Dec 19 2019 🗫︎ replies

I also really enjoyed the deeper look at stealth in space.

There is no stealth in space. *
*=If you have a surveillance web big enough.**
**=If everyone agrees on the same surveillance web and no one has shared incentive to poke holes in it.***
***= The Space Whales are looking into this.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/MiamisLastCapitalist 📅︎︎ Dec 19 2019 🗫︎ replies

You didn't take alien pirates into account!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Ratstail91 📅︎︎ Dec 19 2019 🗫︎ replies
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This episode is sponsored by Audible. In the future vast space freighters might trade between worlds, attracting pirates, and in space, no one can hear you ‘arrr’ Humanity has a history of romanticizing piracy and science fiction is no exception, so I reckoned today we’d go ahead and ask how realistic space pirates are and how they might ply their trade. Like most things in the future, there’s not going to be a set answer since it will vary a lot by the time frames, technology, and level of colonization involved. While real Piracy is a pretty nasty affair, given that we’re coming up on the darkest day of the year and the holidays season is upon us, I figured we’d keep things pretty light-hearted this Ar-Thursday and have some fun with the topic, so grab a drink and snack. In some ways, space is ideal for piracy. It’s far easier to raid and plunder when you’re dealing with isolated small communities separated by huge gulfs of distance and time, and even a fully developed Dyson Swarm with a billion, trillion people is less densely populated than those Caribbean islands and the trade routes so famous for pirate ships in the Age of Sail. A classic Space Opera setting of maybe a few million sparsely inhabited planets in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars would seem like an ideal place for piracy, so big and empty. On the other hand, space is so big and empty. It’s very hard to hide in, which makes it easier to find prey to attack, but it’s very hard to hide from those folks looking to hunt pirates down too. Ships also have to move very fast to get from place to place and that makes them hard to rendezvous with, as they are not constantly running their engines to maintain speed, like you do on Earth, but instead burn almost all their fuel initially speeding up or slowing down. Though for ultra-fast ships they actually would run their engine constantly to fight the drag of the not-quite-vacuum of space, and we’ll come back to that. You also need a reason to attack a ship and plunder it, which usually means its cargo is worth more than the risk of acquiring it. That’s not always the case but where it is, you presumably aren’t attacking some bulk freighter hauling ice to some in-system terraforming project. Raw materials generally aren’t super valuable. If our manufacturing gets good enough, that might be the only real trade item as every small colony can print whatever they want so long as they have the raw materials. On the other hand you might have massive luxury markets in unique items. For instance, two places might exchange museum displays and if those two are fully developed Dyson Swarms, they might literally be shipping billions of masterpieces back and forth regularly, simply because they have billions of times more people than we do. Such civilizations are just so immense that they might need to send a ship the size of the Smithsonian Museum just to contain all the prized masterworks being lent to a neighbor for a display, yet regard that as only a tiny fraction of their treasures, as we might regard one museum lending another a single Van Gogh or Michelangelo work. To such massive civilizations, even if the idea of buying a bottle of... rum made under an alien sun, rather than one perfectly replicated closer to home might be considered so crazy-wasteful than only one in a billion people would do it, but you could still stuff a massive freighter ship full of such bottles and find billions of buyers at your destination. The space between such systems is almost beyond imagining, even just the relatively thin column of space connecting those systems, and yet they might easily have billions of ships running back and forth between them, just carrying such exotic booty. And of course, there’s always data. Stealing data is a huge market already, and data is likely to be the main item of trade in between worlds in the future. That might be beamed out, at the speed of light, or it might be physically shipped too. So, to look at this notion of space piracy we’ll have to look at some specific cases and naturally we can’t be exhaustive. I figure we may as well start near the beginning and ask what is most likely to be the first act of piracy committed in space in the future. On Earth, pirates are considered Hostis Humani Generis, enemies of all mankind, and while we’ll be treating the topic fairly humorously today I should add that in my opinion that designation is very proper. There are a handful of historical examples of pirates that weren’t all bad, but even among those, usually the best that could be said was that they were operating against some factions that were themselves fit for Davy Jones’ locker! They sometimes were basically just naval units of some country operating unofficially or as a proxy in some combat, privateering - where they act as pirates but hold a commission from a government, preying on an enemy’s shipping. And that’s also an example where they need not turn a profit in their mission as their mission was often just crippling someone else’s shipping. So, too, they could also often benefit from support from whoever they were working with. Such support could involve concealment or even outright financing, supply, and repair. They might also just have a working relationship for fencing stolen goods, some country or corporation might be only too happy to see a competitor take a hit and hide the booty as one of their own exports. An example might be an oil company that sponsors pirates to steal tankers from a rival then resold that oil themselves, which is apparently a current practice in some areas. Tankers often hold a value in oil similar to the cost of the ship itself, so even if you can’t repurpose the ship or cannibalize it for parts, you got that oil your rival lost and the ship, and even just scuttling their ship and denying them its use might alter your respective profit margins enough to beat them out. Of course that’s why there’s insurance and also insurance investigators, and it’s kind of hard to hide a million barrels of oil in surplus production, let alone a new ship, even assuming anyone could run a chop shop for oil tankers. They and standard law enforcement don’t need to be too clever to even just notice that you’re not buying as many replacement parts as your shipping should require or as your oil pumping and refining operations should require for that much extra oil to have been produced. I mention that because a big part of space piracy tends to revolve around whether or not stealth in space is possible, either in a practical sense of just being hard to detect or full-blown cloaking. On this channel we take the standpoint that under known science no cloaking of ships is possible which tends to put a dent in the viability of classic piracy adapted to space operations, but it’s worth noting that even if someone does invent some way of hiding against a given mode of detection, there’s plenty of forensic ways to track the culprits down. Which is nothing new either, and why piracy tends to flourish where there’s conflict or instability or corruption in a region either aiding them or simply running unintentional interference against investigation or enforcement by being unable or unwilling to assist. That is a factor that really does not relate to a civilization’s technological advancement too much, as even a very advanced civilization might still harbor pirates simply because they aren’t organized for dealing with them. That’s not necessarily a corruption or incapacity issue either, a civilization that is very opposed to governments being able to look at private files or track and regulate such things might feel some piracy was an acceptable cost for increased personal privacy. So nobody can track space yachts being used as pirate vessels even though they have massive radar arrays that can easily see them because they can’t share or store ship identities, or ships can dock at ports without being inspected to see what their cargo was or if that freshly painted ship used to be under a different name and recently got stolen. One can easily imagine an industrialized orbital space over Earth full of hundreds of thousands of orbital factories, refineries, docks, space habitats, farms, hotels, defensive batteries, and ships. Many of those ships might never leave orbit, simply slowly moving between elements of that swarm, and potentially through regions this or that Earth nation might consider their space and jurisdiction. It’s not hard to imagine some problems with piracy popping up, simply from the massive and confused tangle. This could be even worse if we started adding orbital rings and space towers and elevators into the mix, since ships might be getting raided while docked at any of those rather than in transit. But I’d not expect that to be the first place for space piracy. We often talk about things that might kickstart space industry on the show and a popular one is asteroid mining for rare elements like gold or platinum. Or anything where you can mine it out there and give it a shove back to Earth’s space for less cost and fuel than mining it on Earth and dragging it up to space. Ironically it will often be cheaper to drag iron ore a couple hundred million kilometers through space than to push them just a couple hundred kilometers through air and into orbit. So long as you’re in no hurry to deliver them so they can make a low fuel transit over a few years to get there. Needless to say iron is not too hard to find and grab, though doing so might cost you more fuel, in the near-term, than the stuff was worth. But for stuff like Gold and Platinum, where we would likely be shipping it down to Earth itself, the story is quite different. Even at modern launch costs, a pile of gold bars sitting on the Moon is absolutely worth going and retrieving, and a big unmanned pod full of gold headed from the Asteroid Belt to Earth is too. Now, you can’t hide spaceships well, a rocket flame isn’t even a little bit covert, and you can see the Space Warfare episode for some more discussion of this ‘no stealth in space’ issue, but it relies on the assumption that you are able to look at a given spot and look well enough to see it, and neither detection gear, operation and maintenance costs, nor all the associated data gathering and analysis are free. We’ve got mountain sized rocks floating around the Belt we’ve never actually seen, there’s around a million of them, and even those we have seen we’ve really only looked at briefly and seen as little blurs. We have telescopes right now that if they were pointed at one would notice a spaceship lighting off its engine there, but barely and maybe, so when we say you can’t hide a ship moving around the Belt from detection, what we mean is against local detection or a massively upscaled planetary detection grid. For now, if someone was getting attacked, they’d have to send a signal back letting us know it was happening and their current location and trajectory so we could swing a telescope their way and about all we might detect is that yes, there was a ship there with its engines on. Or a blob with a bright tail, maybe two of them or maybe the resolution wouldn’t be good enough and it would just be one blob but too bright a blob for that single ship to produce. They definitely aren’t going to be running a radar that’s going to spot another ship approaching until it’s already close enough to be shooting at them and they may already be getting boarded by the time their message gets back to Earth. Currently they might be able to pillage that ship and just fly off without us being able to see who or what did it or where they’re going next, but even with decently better detection systems, they probably only need to plot a course to pass behind another asteroid relative to Earth and burn hard on a new trajectory while there, then coast as they leave that shadow. We could see a big spike in radiation around that object, but have a hard time determining which way it was pointed. They might bounce a few times, to help shake tracking, fly toward one, burn on a new trajectory to another, rinse and repeat until they’re confident we lost them and they can return to their base. Now that is easily defeatable, you just need to build bigger telescopes or scatter scopes out in the belt or the shipping lanes, but that costs money and a lot of money right now. I don’t think most countries would feel like dumping tens of billions of dollars into a big detection grid just to protect a bunch of probably unmanned pods carrying gold or platinum, at least not until the quantities involved massively exceeded the cost of building and maintaining that detection grid. Even if the cost was being paid in whole or part by the asteroid miners, that simply lowers their own profit margins by spiking their operating costs and there’s likely to be cheaper ways, since that gold has to be brought home and sold. Of course some nation or spacedock of dubious morality might be only too happy to let them funnel their stolen merchandise through them. Also, the miners might have less savory motives for not wanting to pay for such a grid too. It’s hard to guess how mining will go in terms of the legalities but I’d tilt to assuming they’d be buying the rights off either some Earth nation for an asteroid they had claim on or some multinational oversight body like the UN. They probably are getting stung pretty hard for those rights too, after all its money we’re talking about and governments and taxpayers are fond of money, so the licensing cost is likely to be a pretty big chunk of whatever the difference is between raw operating costs and revenue generated on each sale, so operations will probably be marginally profitable in many cases, and more so as people are increasingly competing to ship precious metals home, particularly as the price for those metals will probably start to drop as the supply rises. If your competitors are getting raided, you profit. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to sneak in and plunder an asteroid of raw materials instead of paying for a license if there isn’t some massive detection grid in place, and you just claim the one you did license had a lot more gold than you thought it did. So a lot of miners might not be too sanguine about such a detection grid even if they weren’t expected to pay for it. And there’s the more directed type of piracy too, sneaking up on a mining base, jamming its signals, and going in with space marines to seize the place. Now you’ve got its loot, its equipment, and an operating base, at least temporarily. And gold has no provenance, so as long as you have a means of selling lots of gold without raising eyebrows, nobody knows where you got it or how you got it. You might not necessarily be doing this with big ships and crews either. A lot of times these sort of cargoes will be an unmanned pod with just a beacon and a little maneuvering thrusters and guidance gear falling toward Earth to be scooped up. You might only need a ship the size of pirate’s parrot to swoop in, attach to that pod, sever its guidance computer and beacon and replace them with the parrot’s, then detour that package to a pickup spot. Now this all has any number of possible countermeasures, there’s many ways you might foil that space parrot for instance with tamper proof or encrypted gear and controls, but those cost money and take time to develop and implement. They doubtless would get implemented eventually but we might easily see a period of space piracy like this, during early space colonization. As the Belt develops, as more mining bases turn into permanent communities and trade and refining hubs develop out there, as we discussed in Colonizing Ceres, that period will come to a close the same as it did for piracy in the Caribbean. That’s not the only type of piracy though. For instance, as we get more developed in space, people will be moving around and probably on dedicated passenger liners. You could obviously classically kidnap and ransom those folks but that’s a lot harder to do and get away with than it sounds, and you’re dealing with lots of people now not some unmanned cargo pod or even a lightly manned ship or asteroid mining base. If you attempt such a thing, every hand will be turned against you, and hunt you even at great cost, except for those hands so stained dark that you’d be a fool to clasp them with any trust. But just because the ship is manned and has passengers, doesn’t mean the pirate ship has to be. That parrot-puppet approach we mentioned a moment ago for hijacking pods can be modified to just be a bomb that can sneak up and latch on a ship and threaten to blow it up if money is not paid. It’s rather likely that the future will have means of moving money around anonymously, cryptocurrency being the most likely method, and it would be very hard to track some pencil thin communication beam from the parrot-bomb to its controller, which could also be rigged as a dead man switch to explode if the beam got blocked for too long. You could use this same approach to demand bribes on unmanned cargo pods too, threatening to detonate the cargo pod and scatter its precious gold to the solar winds. Doesn’t take much to make such a thing and you might litter a space lane with them. Now it’s worth remembering that space is huge and patrolling, detecting, or mining it all is rather tricky, but at the same time, there are paths things would tend to follow. They’re a lot broader than some road or sealane, and they’re mobile and changing as stuff orbits around, but they are predictable and detouring much from them can get a bit expensive in time and fuel. The more you detour, the more your operating costs rise and your profits sink as you deliver slower, and also the less protection you’re likely to have from any patrols, space forts, or detection systems on that path. As we widen our sphere to include the outer planets, you’d also have to deal with shipping between the moons of those various gas giants, who likely would all be separate nations or entities, possibly part or separate from some nation back here on Earth. Places like Jupiter with dozens of moons, or Saturn, with its own flock of moons and planetary ring of icy bodies, might be very vulnerable to hijacking and ransom issues. Once we go further out to the Kuiper Belt, while there is far more material and bodies there than in the Asteroid Belt, they are quite far apart, where even if every mountain-sized place had an outpost you might still have an hour of signal lag time between many of your close neighbors. This gets worse in the Oort Cloud where it might be days before a signal even reached any sizable outposts and months to get a response force there. It’s also a huge volume to patrol and detect inside. So you might get a second period of space piracy like we predict for the Asteroid Belt out in the Kuiper Belt and a Third in the Oort Cloud, though they won’t have too much more beside ice to sell. Still, if folks are pushing ice in-system for terraforming Mars or similar, that can be hijacked or ransomed. But it also starts giving us options for Interstellar Piracy, because folks can hide bases out in those distant Oort Bodies. It’s also, as we mentioned in Colonizing the Oort Cloud, a great place for folks to settle and build colonies who just want to be alone and isolated. You can never really expect to just colonize a new star system and stay isolated, for all that they’re further away, because they just contain so many assets and are so densely packed, relatively speaking, that you’d expect others to arrive or for your own numbers to grow and diversify. If your goal is a community of a million or so folks living in some small isolated community, some religion or ideology’s private utopia, the Oort Cloud is your best bet for long term isolation. Such places would be rather vulnerable to quiet annexation by some pirate fleet as they’d be quiet and private by nature. So too, they might host such pirates freely but quietly, to discourage neighbors arriving. In many ways a big icy rock a few dozen kilometers across floating in the Oort Cloud just light weeks from Earth is more isolated than some star system hundreds of light years from Earth. And again, part of that is the time and growth factor, which we’ll discuss a bit more next week, because something as big as a star system hosting a dozen major planets and untold minor planets is going to grow in numbers and develop with time. Probably into a Dyson Swarm. One that probably has huge interstellar laser highways connecting it to all its near neighbors and maybe even some fairly distant ones that serve as hub-systems in the galaxy. See the Interstellar Laser Highways episode for details, but those are likely to be rather thin columns, again relatively speaking, that traffic moves down. Depending on setup you might have massive pushing laser relay bases along the way every light day or so. Now those relays would be Star Fortresses of devastating power and detection ability, they do after all have those huge pushing lasers which can obviously be altered to be weapons or great big spot lights and detection beams, and indeed need that capacity for detecting and clearing debris on the highway. Still they’re likely to have a big lag time and they’re likely to have lots of ships moving around them that could attack each other. Stealth comes in many forms and a well-placed bribe might let you get a false identity for your ship, then you just alter course a little to come alongside a fellow traveler and board them. That Star Fort Relay can absolutely see you and vaporize you but it has a huge lag time for detection and targeting and can’t be firing off at random down that crowded space lane. But you do either have to leave it or continue down it. If you do the latter, the next relay-fortress is going to have gotten word and will deal with you easily. If you jump the highway and flee, you are doing so under your own power and fuel, while that fortress can send out waves of laser-propelled ships, drones, detectors, relativistic kill missiles and so on to hunt you down, as can all its sister fortresses. Now, I mentioned leaving the track and having to do it under your own power and that’s a big issue in ship-to-ship engagements in space. Unless you have some infinite power source or external one, like the laser-propulsion relays, you have a speed based on your available fuel to accelerate, maneuver, and decelerate with. Anybody you’re hijacking is probably already at their cruising speed with their engines off, because it’s a vacuum and they don’t need to run their engines to keep moving at that speed. You need more speed and fuel to vector in, match trajectories, and then alter course since you probably don’t want to go to their original destination after you rob them. Same as things change a bit if someone develops some bit of Stealth Clarketech, they change if someone develops an effective infinite fuel engine. Now a ship’s cruising speed is whatever its engines can keep pushing against in terms of drag, as at high enough speeds ships in the not-quite-vacuum of space begin experiencing the same resistance as objects in air or water do. This happens at speeds so fast time is running much slower on board and objects move toward or away from places about as fast as their signal move, so it alters the game quite a bit. There is nothing like stealth involved here, as the sorts of power involved in those engines is going to be gigantic enough to be spotted by detection arrays in neighboring systems, especially considering the implied power generation capability of those ships would make for breathtakingly powerful radar systems using those same reactors, but it does permit that more classic pursuit, boarding, and getaway method of terrestrial piracy and space opera. Faster than light travel also brings its own special considerations into play, including ambushing people via time travel and we’ll be looking at those concepts more in the upcoming months. Of course any such method will have its own unique approaches and characteristics and that’s something of our limit for today. We can hypothesize some clever method of concealment or stealth for instance, but each method would have its own unique concepts for adapting it to piracy or trade or warfare. That’s always a challenge for a science fiction writer too, especially if they leave known physics. They come up with some physics-breaking technology and don’t really think about the full impact on things like trade, warfare, society, and so on. Some fan writes asking why they don’t seem to use some really obvious application like ramming the enemy with FTL drones or such and some handwave has to be cobbled together. Indeed this is generally inevitable no matter how good a writer is with any science fiction technologies, or for that matter, magic systems in fantasy. I have a special fondness for authors who do their research and try to put together their setting to consider all the impacts on strategy that might result, and one of my favorites for that is David Weber, who has a book series following the protagonist Honor Harrington, a naval commander of the Manticorian Star Kingdom. Weber really tries to look at how the naval strategies would adapt to three dimensions, the propulsion technologies this setting has, and the scale of the civilizations involved. While fundamentally still space opera, it’s a cut above most in its devotion to realism inside the permitted technologies, and the storylines and characters are excellent. It also spends a lot of time looking at space piracy in later novels, particularly Honor Among Enemies, though I do suggest starting with the first novel, On Basilisk Station. If you’d like to grab a copy of either book to listen to, or any of the others in the series, they’re all available on Audible, just use my link Audible.com/Isaac or text Isaac to 500-500. Audible offers a 30 day free trial, but each month you’re a member you now get a free audiobook and 2 audible originals, and those credits rollover to the next month or year and stay yours, along with any books you got, even if you later discontinue your membership. And with their convenient app, you can listen on any of your devices and seamlessly pick up where you left off, whether you’re commuting, at the gym, or during your holiday travels. And speaking of holidays, how about giving yourself the gift of an Audible membership? Now is the best time to do it with a special offer of 53% off your first 3 months. Right now, for a limited time, you can get 3 months of Audible for just $6.95 a month. That’s more than half off the regular price. Give yourself the gift of listening, go to Audible.com/Isaac. Next week we’ll be looking at another dilemma that will trouble future spacefaring civilizations even more than piracy, Time itself, as we examine the myriad issues of how time complicates things. From calendars needing different days and years to how time distortion from relativity can throw of timekeeping. But we’ll also contemplate the impact that ultra-long lives, century long voyages, and million year megaegineering projects will have, in Interstellar Civilizations and Time. That will close us out for the year, but not for the topic, as we’ll start 2020 off by looking at Time Travel, both why this is thought to be impossible and what it would mean if it turned out not to be. For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to support the channel, you can visit our website to donate, or just share the video with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, Happy Holidays, and have a great week!
Info
Channel: Isaac Arthur
Views: 165,973
Rating: 4.9264398 out of 5
Keywords: space, pirate, piracy, science, fiction, future, interstellar, asteroid mining, void, spaceships, galaxy
Id: pzlaLJIhh5I
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 19 2019
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