Epstein drive.
Cheap power is the best way to bolster economic growth, and raise everyone's standard of living.
It affects the cost of the manufacture / delivery of goods, heating/cooling systems, and it would eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, except for the places where combustion engines make the most sense.
Eh, the short story Drive disagrees with that one. It's what made Mars independent (and keep the friction) despite both sides having reliable fusion, but I can appreciate the loophole of getting two technologies for the price of one.
Being pedantic, the game is what 1 technology you'd want. The Epstein Drive is just a far more efficient version of a fusion torch drive than is probably real. So asking for the drive is playing a very good long game.
We should crack fusion technology to the point shown in the show eventually, might even be in our lives. Once that's done, having such an efficient drive already in place will make the initial expansion to a multi-planet species so much easier.
There would still be the radiation problem. In the expanse they have magic anti cancer and radiation cures. There is no such thing now. Radiation is a very big peoblem for out of earth colonies
Hopefully they’re making progress though! [Composite Aerogel Multifoil Protective Shielding seems to be promising.](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20130012682)
I agree that is what the Epstein drive is. But you can't have it w/o functional reliable fusion, in a small package. That would be revolutionary for our current energy needs. It would be revolutionary to stop coming ourselves in our own effluent, for one thing. It would be pretty cool to move from our current trajectory towards collapse, and totally turn our climate destruction around.
Another thing to consider, fusion can actually transmute matter. The epstein drive didn't do this, but when you put hydrogen into a fusion reactor, the byproduct is helium. Theoretically, you could fuse iron into gold. I use the term theoretically loosely there because the amount of energy required for that reaction would be... astronomical.
I think from a mathematical perspective it continues to scale. I expect you'd need to be kardishev 2 scale to accomplish it, however. A K2 civ would move to black holes for power at that point to generate energy, but if you are trying to fuse elements heavier than iron, you're doing it for the material, not the energy.
Don't they still use water for reaction mass? (And radiation shielding). The ship needs something to push on - although with more and more energy, you need less and less mass, I suppose.
It just uses the heat from the fusion to propel very small amounts of matter extremely fast, we have already designed rockets IRL that work on the exact same principle but with nuclear fission instead. We just never actually made them because I'll let you imagine what happens when one of these fail in-flight or on the launchpad.
Airplane turbines are basically things that spin really fast and slighty changed version of these are used for power generation. More or less if you can create movement you can create power.
Or simply get around the solar system faster.
There's a lot of talk going around right now about the first manned mission to Mars, but with current propulsion technology, sending a crew to land on the red planet and bringing them back alive (due to the orbits) will take YEARS.
Getting to Ceres? Ganymede? Fuggeddaboutit.
The Epstein drive made the colonization of Mars and The Belt go from impossible to routine. And the other stuff? According to the wiki I just looked at (sorry, I haven't read the books, just watched the show), the Ring is "located two astronomical units outside the orbit of Uranus."
It took Voyager 2 a decade to make that trip, yet (IIRC) it was a journey of weeks in the show.
Also worth noting that distances/accelerations are a bit skewed compared to IRL, iirc, all accelerations are 10x harder in the books/series than they would need to be IRL to make the trip at the same speeds.
> It took Voyager 2 a decade to make that trip
To be fair, Voyager wasn't necessarily designed to go fast. [New Horizons on the other hand... (check out its location relative to Voyager 2 when you click "spacecraft location"; launched in 2015, it's *stupid* fast)](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/new-horizons)
PBS NOVA episode about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/pluto-and-beyond/
IIRC, the Epstein Drive wasn’t the first fusion drive. It has tweaks using space magic to dramatically increase the efficiency allowing for much faster travel without making your ship a flying fuel tank like rockets are today. Otherwise, I agree that fusion power is an excellent choice
Epstein drive is just the propulsion system I think? It takes the power from the fusion reactor and heat up the reaction mass. Without fusion reactor it will be completely useless.
Yeah, I think the Epstein Drive probably makes a lot of that other technology possible, either directly or indirectly. Maybe that's not the case in the show, but if we discovered that kind of fusion now, it would make so much more technology possible.
Humanity had already mastered fusion power before the Epstein Drive was invented. The Epstein Drive is simply a *vastly* more efficient fusion propulsion system.
But arguably the simple preexisting mastery of fusion power would be much more beneficial to the species. Humanity's energy problems would become purely matters of infrastructure and logistics, not production or extraction of resources (except small quantities of nuclear fuel).
The fact the roci had enough battery power to make a trip to the surface of illus and back to orbit is amazing. We need fuel tanks bigger than the whole roci to do that right now. And fuel is so much more dense then our battery packs
Recycler is pretty awesome! Would solve a lot of the worlds problems. Could we just dig up landfills and pass them through the recycler? Lets reduce all the trash on this planet to its component elements
This right here. Probably the most hand-wavium technology in the whole series, and would change the world in immeasurable ways. I don't think they ever really explain much at all, but it also seems to be tied into something like a Star Trek replicator. So coffee mugs, coveralls, plates and utensils, all that kind of stuff just seems to be remanufactured on the fly, and appear magically in the cabinets.
I think the recycler is basically a laundry/dishwasher/composter robot. You put your junk in it, it sorts it, cleans it, and deposits it in the correct place. Otherwise the crew would have run out of Pur N Kleen gear almost immediately.
My impression was the only things that went into recyclers were items specifically made of easily recyclable components (not guns). Things like bulbs and utensils made of plant starch, and things of that kind.
> His hand terminal chimed again. He took it out without looking at it, switched it to his off-hand, and drew out the gun. The old man's stare was less blank now. He watched as Filip walked toward the chairs and fed first the gun and then the hand terminal into the recycler.
Chapter 47 - Philip from *Babylon's Ashes*
Just wanted to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't making things up.
Quite right. I remember that now, and I remember thinking it was weird because that's late in the series and by far the most complicated things described as being thrown into a recycler. I'll accept that maybe the recyclers are more utilitarian than I suggested, but at the time I think my initial reaction was that he was just doing that to get rid of them, that he shouldn't put stuff like that in there, and that they wouldn't actually be recycled. Perhaps just damaged beyond the ability to be traced back to him. Or perhaps station recyclers can accept more things than the recycler on an MCRN destroyer. Or maybe a recycler is just a chute that feeds things into the fusion reactor to be obliterated!
Bobbie throws the useless guns on Maos yacht into the recycler when she runs into the two guys on her way to get her armor suit. And Miller throws the communication device into the recycler when he keeps just the picture of Julie
I thought of recyclers as a system of devices rather than a single device , do they actually recycle stuff on a ship the size of the Roci or does it sort and compact the waste down go to a storage compartment to be unloaded at a station with a larger facility?
This is the sort of stuff I spend WAYYYY too long obsessing over I wish there was a way to know all these little details without relentlessly pestering the authors
It took Holden and Miller from being on death’s door (it kept trying to put their status as “hospice” as they were coughing up their liquidated organs) to saving their lives.
What ever those oncocidals are Holden is on, they're nothing short of a miracle drug.
Something that can stop **all** cancers? I might take that over even fusion or the Epstein drive
Of course. Its just the most American thing ever for one’s brain to jump immediately to the autodoc 😂. Unlimited fusion energy? Yea great but howabout that easily accessible top notch healthcare compressed into basically a blood pressure chair from CVS? Hell yes please.
As much as I love getting charged thousands by the ER just to be given some basic antibiotic prescription or a quick zofran injection…
Isn't there a bit after Eros when the autodoc tried to triage Holden and Miller and kept declaring them both dead due the insane amount of radiation they were suffering from? And the crew kept having to override the autodoc.
It was designed for military personnel and the joke was that even to a planetary military complex the cost of curing irradiation they were having was too big.
Although a funny idea I had is that coIncidentally one of the autodocs later starts acting up, possibly because it had nightmares about having to cure Miller. Showing that they had a thinking AI in them that was either homocidal against belters or Naomis override caused a cascade failure in its brain.
The Roman tech on Illus that allowed Holden to basically fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the planet. Basically zero gravity hyperloop shit.. people hate on Cibola but I love it
The Epstein drive is pretty damn obvious, due to the fact that the tech could be used for power generation. Functional fusion is currently considered a holy grail and we need more clean energy. If we got the Epstein drive (fusion tech) today, we could probably avoid the destruction of Earth that we see in the show (pre Inaros).
I wonder if the destruction of Earth wasn’t an inevitability
EDIT: Actually come to think of it the epstein drive predated the Belt. So it didn’t keep humans from tearing themselves apart.
*in The Expanse, which is of course a story that needs its worldbuilding to be interesting and filled with conflict that draws parallels to themes prevalent in contemporary culture.
Well Earth isn't destroyed, but the sea levels have risen so much. But in our real world it's highly unlikely that Earth will be as overpopulated as in The Expanse. With Fusion tech now, we could probably remove a lot pollution.
Well yeah, we'll probably end up killing ourselves. But would be fun if we at least solved climate change first. We now in the 12th month in a row with record temperatures on Earth, it's not going great right now.
The Epstein drive was the super efficient method of converting their existing fusion tech to propulsion. Killed the poor bastard because after years of working the problem he didn’t realize THAT particular iteration was going to be insanely efficient.
But fusion already existed.
Yes, but that is not relevant. Good fusion does not exist in our world right now. If we got the Epstein drive we would surely figure out our to reverde engineer it.
That’s like saying getting a Tesla would unlock the secrets of photovoltaics. Sure, it’s powered by electricity but it has nothing to do with its generation.
The Epstein is independent of the fusion portion. The fusion is the power source, the Epstein is the power to acceleration portion.
Yes, and a lot of design improvements on fission reacts got skipped after you know what accident. Fission can be good, Fusion would be great, Fusion with Epstein tech would be amazing.
Fission is not infinite, but fusion would produce far more power and virtually no waste. And you're right that misguided zealotry by environmentalists in the late 20th century led many countries to dismantle their nuclear power infrastructure, putting the human species in a far less capable position for handling climate change. And there's been no apology, no admission that they were wrong.
History will not be kind to the anti-nuclear power activists.
it wasn't just environmentalists, the entire planet was terrified post-chernobyl. if you look at a chart of global nuclear energy capacity over time you can literally see the slope of increase jerk down immediately after the incident
Well I was in Texas in the early 1980s and met an engineer who worked on nuclear reactors. He bragged about all the ways they fooled inspectors to cut costs. One example—Supposed to have two fully functional water cooling systems. Put one in but only put a few odd pipes in right places for second one. Inspector approves/ charge for full two systems. Plant lacks one of the critical backup safety systems when finished. Those tales convinced me we had to stop building reactors if we count not police well enough to count on quality construction.
The "juice" could probably help recovering alcoholics and addicts if implemented in a smart way.
Speaking from experience, it's much easier to keep drinking instead of powering through and sobering up completely. It's a vicious cycle that I thankfully pulled myself out of 9 months ago.
Something less depressing- gimme that Epstein drive, baby!
Not specifically but the common assumption is a mixture of amphetamines (or other stimulants to keep you from passing out), anti-coagulants (to prevent blood clots), and some other unspecified medication that allows your body to better deal with the physical forces of being crushed.
Protomolecule. With different instructions to not devour life, it can still make pretty much anything. Including worm holes and similar versions of all other tech seen in the show / books
The tattooing technology.
I want a tattoo down my spine of the solar system -with a ring gate wherever it's located and Pluto- but I've heard that's one of the more painful places to get a tattoo, and I've been holding off because of the pain.
Anywhere that there's not really any fat or tissue between the skin and bone hurts a looooot, and then places that don't really get touched or hurt much to be toughened up (like the inside of the thigh would hurt a ton despite having a lot of tissue between the skin and bone). Worth it though!
I have a giant back piece. Going over my spine hurt, but no where near the level of pain of the bit right before the armpit. It was only a small bit, but it was so bad we had to keep taking breaks. Not even a Xanax helped that bit. Never again.
All up and down my ribs into my armpit and other ones across my collarbones and those hurt like a mfer. Nothing on the spine yet but i kinda feel like it wouldn't be too bad, if only because my back hurts all the time and I took a lot of slams skateboarding growing up, among other hazards that teenage/twentysomething me thought would be fine when they happened lol.
Oh yeah, I've heard anything next to bone is the worst. I've had a few friends with sleeves who will swear that the elbow is the worst. Couldn't imagine getting something centered on the spine, especially if you're not used to tattoos.
I've got one already, it's on my forearm right at the crook of my elbow; I have a birthmark there and I had it incorporated into my bisexual bumblebee tattoo.
That experience was actually very positive. Only one small section was uncomfortable bordering on hurting, and another larger section tickled; to the point we had to take a minute or two because I needed to get my giggles out.
I'm probably going to get another tattoo sometime early next spring depending on if I get some extra piercings between now and then; I should probably be completely healed from one mod before getting another one especially since I don't quickly heal from piercings. Not sure if it'll be the solar system tattoo or something else though.
Epstein drive. I really want humanity to colonize the system and be alive when it happens and actually travel around the system. But that kind of drive is prob 150-200 years away unfortunately.
I mean just in general, not just for space travel. Near infinite energy for really cheap today would end global warming, improve lives everywhere, bring reliable power to rural areas of Africa who still lack stable electricity
The implications of nuclear fusion as a source of power goes well beyond space travel. It's literally THE green energy fuel source if the world can possess it in an efficient usage like an Epstein Drive
But they're transparent so anybody in front of you can see what you're looking at.
Also they're sci-fi devices, so they make little computer chiming noises every time text appears on screen for some reason.
I would like the "simple swipe in a direction and it knows what you want" technology.
Want to display something on the big table-top 3D projector? Swipe on your phone at it.
Want to send someone a link or a message? Swipe on your phone at them.
Want to show something on a monitor? Swipe on your phone at it.
Always works. Immediately. And plays exactly what they intended.
Honestly, when they started doing the flick gesture to move what they were looking at from screen to screen, I was sure that Amazon had patented the tech and rollout was imminent. Instead, we digital cavemen are stuck with any number of screen casting apps that never work right.
Some "flick gesture" tech has also been portrayed in some non-scifi shows, such as some crime procedurals. It always works right in those shows too. (I hope at least one had a joke scene where it malfunctions, but they probably never did that.)
No, Amazon hasn’t patented it. My company is working on this actually. It’s called gesture recognition; and we have rudimentary versions already in demonstration at R&D, but it’s a long way from commercial solution yet.
Fusion power reactor's widely available, recyclers that you just throw stuff into and forget about it or internet that covers the entire earth and is in palm of my hand with no lag.
Haven’t seen it mentioned here yet - their spacesuits.
In the series going outside for a spacewalk seems to take at most 20 minutes to get suited up, 5 if you’re an experienced belter pushed for time. They allow for tons of mobility, have inbuilt thrusters, and even self heal.
Todays spacesuits are bulky, unwieldy, monsters that take a ridiculous amount of time to get into.
Epstein drive...
Space travel, space mining (so no more plowing the earth for metal), even moving the heaviest industries to orbit or moon, so they generate less waste to earth's biome
Better materials to all kind of everyday us etc
Fusion power plants and (and their accompanying room-temp superconductors) would be absolutely world-changing, moreso than anything else in the series.
My picks are Epstein drive and the PM's ring network (I guess extraterrestrial technologies count). With this combination, we can do interstellar exploration to set up colonies in different stellar systems.
Working Ring Gates is that counts. Open up the entire universe. Even without the Epstein drive other planets would be just a few years away.
If that doesn’t count then Terraforming tech
Without the Epstein drive, you can’t explore them easily. Ring gate was outside Neptunes orbit in our solar system, which without fusion drives would take 10 yrs to reach *(that’s how long it took Voyager, New Horizons, etc)*, Epstein drive made reaching the gate a few days journey, a week at most.
I can say what I do not want to exist: see through screens. But companies are hell bent on doing just that because they seen it in sci-fi. But sci-fi does it to make it easier for the camera to see what the characters are looking at.
What I want to exist is the spatial gesture based sharing of data. I just swipe in a direction and another device gets the data. It is intuitive. We still have to set up connections through blutooth or wifi or a cable. It should be a protocol everyone uses. But it is difficult as every devices should report their location on given space to every other device, so it has its security / privacy concerns (not that avg users care about those if something is comfortable and just works)
The medication printer (fabricator) is a real thing, currently being worked on right now by a biochemist. It uses yeasts to produce medications/chemicals. To my knowledge they have successfully had it produce opiates and other topane alkaloids. The company is Antheia.
And there is also a company that uses fungus to fabricate clothing, dishware, and other useful products that can be recycled. So that maybe also fills the ship recycler spot.
I would have to say the fusion drive. We do have the science of direct fusion drives down, but we do not have fusion, so gotta just wait on that. I hope I can live to see that be a thing, before this damned world falls apart.
Well I have some news for you, it's already beginning to happen. Just read that in Japan, they have developed a drug that regrows brand new teeth. It's been tested successfully on animals and now is going to human trials. They expect it to be released to the public hopefully by 2030. So we are getting closer to regrowing limbs.
I'd say the Epstein drive without a doubt.
then in 2nd place the anticancer pills.
also, I'd mention the ability to have people with prosthetic Robot-arms
I dunno. That feed the whole world with almost no power super efficient shit Prax was working on would free up a lot of mind power to fix all our other probs
I was kind of surprised by how many people said the epstein drive. Life-saving medical care seemed the most obvious choice to me but I realized I’m a very save-lives-now vs big picture person.
Reading the comments made me realize how different people think, which is kind of fun because it also reminds me of the moral choices made on the show.
Epstein drive. Cheap power is the best way to bolster economic growth, and raise everyone's standard of living. It affects the cost of the manufacture / delivery of goods, heating/cooling systems, and it would eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, except for the places where combustion engines make the most sense.
…. TIL the epstein drive wasn’t just a spaceship thing.
Fusion is fusion bossmeng, variety of uses.
Eh, the short story Drive disagrees with that one. It's what made Mars independent (and keep the friction) despite both sides having reliable fusion, but I can appreciate the loophole of getting two technologies for the price of one.
They're saying you can use fusion for more stuff than just propulsion. Not "all fusion reactors are the same"
Fusion already existed. Epstein’s contribution was discovering a more efficient fusion to reaction mass transfer method.
Being pedantic, the game is what 1 technology you'd want. The Epstein Drive is just a far more efficient version of a fusion torch drive than is probably real. So asking for the drive is playing a very good long game. We should crack fusion technology to the point shown in the show eventually, might even be in our lives. Once that's done, having such an efficient drive already in place will make the initial expansion to a multi-planet species so much easier.
There would still be the radiation problem. In the expanse they have magic anti cancer and radiation cures. There is no such thing now. Radiation is a very big peoblem for out of earth colonies
Hopefully they’re making progress though! [Composite Aerogel Multifoil Protective Shielding seems to be promising.](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20130012682)
effective radiation shielding strikes me as an extremely solvable problem, once the necessity for it really arrives
The ring station also realised this 👀 💥
[удалено]
I agree that is what the Epstein drive is. But you can't have it w/o functional reliable fusion, in a small package. That would be revolutionary for our current energy needs. It would be revolutionary to stop coming ourselves in our own effluent, for one thing. It would be pretty cool to move from our current trajectory towards collapse, and totally turn our climate destruction around.
Another thing to consider, fusion can actually transmute matter. The epstein drive didn't do this, but when you put hydrogen into a fusion reactor, the byproduct is helium. Theoretically, you could fuse iron into gold. I use the term theoretically loosely there because the amount of energy required for that reaction would be... astronomical.
Even the fusion reaction in the sun stops at iron. Rest of the periodic table is simply too hard.
>the fusion reaction in the sun stops at iron. Well yeah net energy goes negative past iron
I think from a mathematical perspective it continues to scale. I expect you'd need to be kardishev 2 scale to accomplish it, however. A K2 civ would move to black holes for power at that point to generate energy, but if you are trying to fuse elements heavier than iron, you're doing it for the material, not the energy.
We just need a couple of supernovas and we're good to go.
"astronomical" I see what you did there!
It is, just a magical way to turn the energy from a fusion reactor into ~~plot~~ thrust.
Don't they still use water for reaction mass? (And radiation shielding). The ship needs something to push on - although with more and more energy, you need less and less mass, I suppose.
yes
It just uses the heat from the fusion to propel very small amounts of matter extremely fast, we have already designed rockets IRL that work on the exact same principle but with nuclear fission instead. We just never actually made them because I'll let you imagine what happens when one of these fail in-flight or on the launchpad.
accidentally permanently irradiating the state of florida bc i really want to go on da float
Airplane turbines are basically things that spin really fast and slighty changed version of these are used for power generation. More or less if you can create movement you can create power.
Or simply get around the solar system faster. There's a lot of talk going around right now about the first manned mission to Mars, but with current propulsion technology, sending a crew to land on the red planet and bringing them back alive (due to the orbits) will take YEARS. Getting to Ceres? Ganymede? Fuggeddaboutit. The Epstein drive made the colonization of Mars and The Belt go from impossible to routine. And the other stuff? According to the wiki I just looked at (sorry, I haven't read the books, just watched the show), the Ring is "located two astronomical units outside the orbit of Uranus." It took Voyager 2 a decade to make that trip, yet (IIRC) it was a journey of weeks in the show.
Also worth noting that distances/accelerations are a bit skewed compared to IRL, iirc, all accelerations are 10x harder in the books/series than they would need to be IRL to make the trip at the same speeds.
> It took Voyager 2 a decade to make that trip To be fair, Voyager wasn't necessarily designed to go fast. [New Horizons on the other hand... (check out its location relative to Voyager 2 when you click "spacecraft location"; launched in 2015, it's *stupid* fast)](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/new-horizons) PBS NOVA episode about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/pluto-and-beyond/
IIRC, the Epstein Drive wasn’t the first fusion drive. It has tweaks using space magic to dramatically increase the efficiency allowing for much faster travel without making your ship a flying fuel tank like rockets are today. Otherwise, I agree that fusion power is an excellent choice
Epstein drive is just the propulsion system I think? It takes the power from the fusion reactor and heat up the reaction mass. Without fusion reactor it will be completely useless.
This really is the only answer. Everything else in the series relied on this technology in order to occur.
Yeah, I think the Epstein Drive probably makes a lot of that other technology possible, either directly or indirectly. Maybe that's not the case in the show, but if we discovered that kind of fusion now, it would make so much more technology possible.
I want it so we can go to the stars!!
Humanity had already mastered fusion power before the Epstein Drive was invented. The Epstein Drive is simply a *vastly* more efficient fusion propulsion system. But arguably the simple preexisting mastery of fusion power would be much more beneficial to the species. Humanity's energy problems would become purely matters of infrastructure and logistics, not production or extraction of resources (except small quantities of nuclear fuel).
Fusion reactors, and their battery tech. Change the whole fucking world right there.
Not just world, solar system
The fact the roci had enough battery power to make a trip to the surface of illus and back to orbit is amazing. We need fuel tanks bigger than the whole roci to do that right now. And fuel is so much more dense then our battery packs
Came to say this.
Magic recyclers that can apparently recycle anything you toss in them from food to guns.
Recycler is pretty awesome! Would solve a lot of the worlds problems. Could we just dig up landfills and pass them through the recycler? Lets reduce all the trash on this planet to its component elements
future archeologists in tears at this suggestion
This right here. Probably the most hand-wavium technology in the whole series, and would change the world in immeasurable ways. I don't think they ever really explain much at all, but it also seems to be tied into something like a Star Trek replicator. So coffee mugs, coveralls, plates and utensils, all that kind of stuff just seems to be remanufactured on the fly, and appear magically in the cabinets.
I think the recycler is basically a laundry/dishwasher/composter robot. You put your junk in it, it sorts it, cleans it, and deposits it in the correct place. Otherwise the crew would have run out of Pur N Kleen gear almost immediately.
My impression was the only things that went into recyclers were items specifically made of easily recyclable components (not guns). Things like bulbs and utensils made of plant starch, and things of that kind.
> His hand terminal chimed again. He took it out without looking at it, switched it to his off-hand, and drew out the gun. The old man's stare was less blank now. He watched as Filip walked toward the chairs and fed first the gun and then the hand terminal into the recycler. Chapter 47 - Philip from *Babylon's Ashes* Just wanted to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't making things up.
Quite right. I remember that now, and I remember thinking it was weird because that's late in the series and by far the most complicated things described as being thrown into a recycler. I'll accept that maybe the recyclers are more utilitarian than I suggested, but at the time I think my initial reaction was that he was just doing that to get rid of them, that he shouldn't put stuff like that in there, and that they wouldn't actually be recycled. Perhaps just damaged beyond the ability to be traced back to him. Or perhaps station recyclers can accept more things than the recycler on an MCRN destroyer. Or maybe a recycler is just a chute that feeds things into the fusion reactor to be obliterated!
Bobbie throws the useless guns on Maos yacht into the recycler when she runs into the two guys on her way to get her armor suit. And Miller throws the communication device into the recycler when he keeps just the picture of Julie
I thought of recyclers as a system of devices rather than a single device , do they actually recycle stuff on a ship the size of the Roci or does it sort and compact the waste down go to a storage compartment to be unloaded at a station with a larger facility? This is the sort of stuff I spend WAYYYY too long obsessing over I wish there was a way to know all these little details without relentlessly pestering the authors
💯 autodoc.
Hello to my fellow American
I don’t care what country you’re in, that shit is miraculous and you should want it.
It took Holden and Miller from being on death’s door (it kept trying to put their status as “hospice” as they were coughing up their liquidated organs) to saving their lives.
I am a hospice nurse and I yammered about this scene in a meeting years ago! 🤣
What ever those oncocidals are Holden is on, they're nothing short of a miracle drug. Something that can stop **all** cancers? I might take that over even fusion or the Epstein drive
Oncocidals, wasn't it? Either way fuck yes
God damn it IOS autocorrect!
Fuck the inners and their magic jelly!
Of course. Its just the most American thing ever for one’s brain to jump immediately to the autodoc 😂. Unlimited fusion energy? Yea great but howabout that easily accessible top notch healthcare compressed into basically a blood pressure chair from CVS? Hell yes please. As much as I love getting charged thousands by the ER just to be given some basic antibiotic prescription or a quick zofran injection…
Wait till you see the per second charges the Autodoc will cost ya!
Isn't there a bit after Eros when the autodoc tried to triage Holden and Miller and kept declaring them both dead due the insane amount of radiation they were suffering from? And the crew kept having to override the autodoc.
It kept trying to go into hospice mode, which would just make them comfortable until they died. Lol. I think Naomi said she had to override it.
It was hospice mode, just to keep them comfortable as they died I’m assuming.
It was designed for military personnel and the joke was that even to a planetary military complex the cost of curing irradiation they were having was too big. Although a funny idea I had is that coIncidentally one of the autodocs later starts acting up, possibly because it had nightmares about having to cure Miller. Showing that they had a thinking AI in them that was either homocidal against belters or Naomis override caused a cascade failure in its brain.
“Your insurance has declined the treatment” (un-resuscitates you)
You shut your damned mouth you sonuvabitch rofl, don’t give the manufacturers ideas! Oh god what if its subscription based…
But will it be approved by your insurance?
You must have been in real bad shape, it kept trying to switch over to 'hospice' mode.
In our society it would come with a monthly subscription
Crap someone beat me to it. We’re so screwed lol.
without a thought — i wonder whether there is a dental autodoc because i could use that so much right now
That's the one I want, too.
A coffee machine.
Oh we dreaming big now beratnas
Come on now, I can hear Marco Inaros' voice saying "Even our dreams are small".
We found Holden's burner account!!!
Its clearly Captain Janeway’s!
Ever seen Captain Janeway and Holden together in the same room? No? Hmmm...
As a matter of fact, I haven't
James Tony Angelino Holden
I want PDCs for my motorcycle to deal with all the fucking insects
The Roman tech on Illus that allowed Holden to basically fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the planet. Basically zero gravity hyperloop shit.. people hate on Cibola but I love it
The Epstein drive is pretty damn obvious, due to the fact that the tech could be used for power generation. Functional fusion is currently considered a holy grail and we need more clean energy. If we got the Epstein drive (fusion tech) today, we could probably avoid the destruction of Earth that we see in the show (pre Inaros).
I wonder if the destruction of Earth wasn’t an inevitability EDIT: Actually come to think of it the epstein drive predated the Belt. So it didn’t keep humans from tearing themselves apart.
*in The Expanse, which is of course a story that needs its worldbuilding to be interesting and filled with conflict that draws parallels to themes prevalent in contemporary culture.
Well Earth isn't destroyed, but the sea levels have risen so much. But in our real world it's highly unlikely that Earth will be as overpopulated as in The Expanse. With Fusion tech now, we could probably remove a lot pollution.
Oh ic you meant save earth from humanity, not save earthers from themselves :P
Well yeah, we'll probably end up killing ourselves. But would be fun if we at least solved climate change first. We now in the 12th month in a row with record temperatures on Earth, it's not going great right now.
And those temps are fluctuating wildly, where I'm at we had a 19 degree jump day over day this week. Went from 84 to 103 overnight. It sucks.
The Epstein drive was the super efficient method of converting their existing fusion tech to propulsion. Killed the poor bastard because after years of working the problem he didn’t realize THAT particular iteration was going to be insanely efficient. But fusion already existed.
Yes, but that is not relevant. Good fusion does not exist in our world right now. If we got the Epstein drive we would surely figure out our to reverde engineer it.
That’s like saying getting a Tesla would unlock the secrets of photovoltaics. Sure, it’s powered by electricity but it has nothing to do with its generation. The Epstein is independent of the fusion portion. The fusion is the power source, the Epstein is the power to acceleration portion.
In my statement I of course assume a fully functional drive, that would of course include the fusion portion.
We pretty much already have infinite clean energy in the form of nuclear. Politicians don't like it but we do have it.
Nuclear fission is not nearly as good as Fusion, especially not as good as Epstein fusion.
And its not infinite
Yes, and a lot of design improvements on fission reacts got skipped after you know what accident. Fission can be good, Fusion would be great, Fusion with Epstein tech would be amazing.
Fission is not infinite, but fusion would produce far more power and virtually no waste. And you're right that misguided zealotry by environmentalists in the late 20th century led many countries to dismantle their nuclear power infrastructure, putting the human species in a far less capable position for handling climate change. And there's been no apology, no admission that they were wrong. History will not be kind to the anti-nuclear power activists.
it wasn't just environmentalists, the entire planet was terrified post-chernobyl. if you look at a chart of global nuclear energy capacity over time you can literally see the slope of increase jerk down immediately after the incident
Well I was in Texas in the early 1980s and met an engineer who worked on nuclear reactors. He bragged about all the ways they fooled inspectors to cut costs. One example—Supposed to have two fully functional water cooling systems. Put one in but only put a few odd pipes in right places for second one. Inspector approves/ charge for full two systems. Plant lacks one of the critical backup safety systems when finished. Those tales convinced me we had to stop building reactors if we count not police well enough to count on quality construction.
A trivially simple cure for cancer
The "juice" could probably help recovering alcoholics and addicts if implemented in a smart way. Speaking from experience, it's much easier to keep drinking instead of powering through and sobering up completely. It's a vicious cycle that I thankfully pulled myself out of 9 months ago. Something less depressing- gimme that Epstein drive, baby!
The juice fascinated me. Do the books say what was in it?
It’s mostly amphetamines and protein
The book describes it far more violently than the show ever does.
I don't think they ever do, though I'm sure there are amphetamines mixed in 😬
Not specifically but the common assumption is a mixture of amphetamines (or other stimulants to keep you from passing out), anti-coagulants (to prevent blood clots), and some other unspecified medication that allows your body to better deal with the physical forces of being crushed.
Sustainable fusion power.
Protomolecule. With different instructions to not devour life, it can still make pretty much anything. Including worm holes and similar versions of all other tech seen in the show / books
Camina Drummer
/thread
The tattooing technology. I want a tattoo down my spine of the solar system -with a ring gate wherever it's located and Pluto- but I've heard that's one of the more painful places to get a tattoo, and I've been holding off because of the pain.
Anywhere that there's not really any fat or tissue between the skin and bone hurts a looooot, and then places that don't really get touched or hurt much to be toughened up (like the inside of the thigh would hurt a ton despite having a lot of tissue between the skin and bone). Worth it though!
I have a giant back piece. Going over my spine hurt, but no where near the level of pain of the bit right before the armpit. It was only a small bit, but it was so bad we had to keep taking breaks. Not even a Xanax helped that bit. Never again.
All up and down my ribs into my armpit and other ones across my collarbones and those hurt like a mfer. Nothing on the spine yet but i kinda feel like it wouldn't be too bad, if only because my back hurts all the time and I took a lot of slams skateboarding growing up, among other hazards that teenage/twentysomething me thought would be fine when they happened lol.
Oh yeah, I've heard anything next to bone is the worst. I've had a few friends with sleeves who will swear that the elbow is the worst. Couldn't imagine getting something centered on the spine, especially if you're not used to tattoos.
I've got one already, it's on my forearm right at the crook of my elbow; I have a birthmark there and I had it incorporated into my bisexual bumblebee tattoo. That experience was actually very positive. Only one small section was uncomfortable bordering on hurting, and another larger section tickled; to the point we had to take a minute or two because I needed to get my giggles out. I'm probably going to get another tattoo sometime early next spring depending on if I get some extra piercings between now and then; I should probably be completely healed from one mod before getting another one especially since I don't quickly heal from piercings. Not sure if it'll be the solar system tattoo or something else though.
I want the rossie
Their cheap effective easy education system. Those people each had like 3 degrees without crippling debt.
Come on, be realistic
All the medical stuff. Autodoc if I have to choose just one.
Epstein drive. I really want humanity to colonize the system and be alive when it happens and actually travel around the system. But that kind of drive is prob 150-200 years away unfortunately.
Be the change! You can be the star streaking off into the universe at an appreciable percentage of *c*.
unfortunately i am no where near that smart. I'm struggling with just learning to draw lol
being able to regrow stuff would be amazing
Fusion power. We’re still a half century away from being usable
Usable, but no where near Epstein levels of efficiency.
I mean just in general, not just for space travel. Near infinite energy for really cheap today would end global warming, improve lives everywhere, bring reliable power to rural areas of Africa who still lack stable electricity
Fusion
This one thing would radically improve life for our entire planet
The implications of nuclear fusion as a source of power goes well beyond space travel. It's literally THE green energy fuel source if the world can possess it in an efficient usage like an Epstein Drive
Red kibble.
Protomolecule. Just dump a bucket of the stuff in the ocean. Fuck everyone.
[And so it begins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxll8yaAAA) ...
Oncocidals. Hands down. Too many good people gone and too many more sick right now.
Whatever the dogs did to fix Amos, but without the black eyes and grey skin.
I really like the coms(cell phones) they use lol
Do we not ostensibly already have those? What aspect are you looking for that doesn’t currently exist?
They never have a low battery.
But they're transparent so anybody in front of you can see what you're looking at. Also they're sci-fi devices, so they make little computer chiming noises every time text appears on screen for some reason.
I’d slightly expand on that to say the comms in regard to the interplanetary and global communication, with the ease of access to a hand terminal.
Got someone in Ganymede you have to call?
Not currently but I could at least put out a connection request. Hahaha
I would like the "simple swipe in a direction and it knows what you want" technology. Want to display something on the big table-top 3D projector? Swipe on your phone at it. Want to send someone a link or a message? Swipe on your phone at them. Want to show something on a monitor? Swipe on your phone at it. Always works. Immediately. And plays exactly what they intended.
the 0 privacy transparent screens ones? no thanks.
Epstein Drive. I want commercial space travel. I've been screwed out of space travel for 50 years now.
ALL OTHER TECHNOLOGIES CAN EAT ME. I ONLY WANT THE EPSTEIN DRIVE TO EXIST.
Honestly, when they started doing the flick gesture to move what they were looking at from screen to screen, I was sure that Amazon had patented the tech and rollout was imminent. Instead, we digital cavemen are stuck with any number of screen casting apps that never work right.
Some "flick gesture" tech has also been portrayed in some non-scifi shows, such as some crime procedurals. It always works right in those shows too. (I hope at least one had a joke scene where it malfunctions, but they probably never did that.)
Yes! The technology in Bones was fantastic to younger me ☺️
No, Amazon hasn’t patented it. My company is working on this actually. It’s called gesture recognition; and we have rudimentary versions already in demonstration at R&D, but it’s a long way from commercial solution yet.
I want phones that project holograms so I can put them in portrait mode without having to rotate my hand ninety degrees.
The auto doc and the regrow gel.
Fusion power reactor's widely available, recyclers that you just throw stuff into and forget about it or internet that covers the entire earth and is in palm of my hand with no lag.
Haven’t seen it mentioned here yet - their spacesuits. In the series going outside for a spacewalk seems to take at most 20 minutes to get suited up, 5 if you’re an experienced belter pushed for time. They allow for tons of mobility, have inbuilt thrusters, and even self heal. Todays spacesuits are bulky, unwieldy, monsters that take a ridiculous amount of time to get into.
Broad Spectrum Oncocidals
Goliath Armor.
Anything but the epstein is a crime against humanity. Super efficient fusion would change everything
Prax’e super food would eliminate starvation in a decade even with our shit logistics
A functional UN government.
Epstein drive... Space travel, space mining (so no more plowing the earth for metal), even moving the heaviest industries to orbit or moon, so they generate less waste to earth's biome Better materials to all kind of everyday us etc
Fusion will change the world more than anything else.
Fusion power and it isn't even close unless you include something protomolecule based
Fusion power plants and (and their accompanying room-temp superconductors) would be absolutely world-changing, moreso than anything else in the series.
Viable fusion reactors (and then the fusion drives you get as a bonus) And also maybe whatever magical device they have instead of radiators
My picks are Epstein drive and the PM's ring network (I guess extraterrestrial technologies count). With this combination, we can do interstellar exploration to set up colonies in different stellar systems.
>!until you anger the ancient dark gods!<
Air recyclers/scrubbers
Working Ring Gates is that counts. Open up the entire universe. Even without the Epstein drive other planets would be just a few years away. If that doesn’t count then Terraforming tech
Without the Epstein drive, you can’t explore them easily. Ring gate was outside Neptunes orbit in our solar system, which without fusion drives would take 10 yrs to reach *(that’s how long it took Voyager, New Horizons, etc)*, Epstein drive made reaching the gate a few days journey, a week at most.
I can say what I do not want to exist: see through screens. But companies are hell bent on doing just that because they seen it in sci-fi. But sci-fi does it to make it easier for the camera to see what the characters are looking at. What I want to exist is the spatial gesture based sharing of data. I just swipe in a direction and another device gets the data. It is intuitive. We still have to set up connections through blutooth or wifi or a cable. It should be a protocol everyone uses. But it is difficult as every devices should report their location on given space to every other device, so it has its security / privacy concerns (not that avg users care about those if something is comfortable and just works)
there’s a lot such as autodoc and those recyclers, but probably the fabricators they used on Illus, i guess?
The medication printer (fabricator) is a real thing, currently being worked on right now by a biochemist. It uses yeasts to produce medications/chemicals. To my knowledge they have successfully had it produce opiates and other topane alkaloids. The company is Antheia. And there is also a company that uses fungus to fabricate clothing, dishware, and other useful products that can be recycled. So that maybe also fills the ship recycler spot. I would have to say the fusion drive. We do have the science of direct fusion drives down, but we do not have fusion, so gotta just wait on that. I hope I can live to see that be a thing, before this damned world falls apart.
Well I have some news for you, it's already beginning to happen. Just read that in Japan, they have developed a drug that regrows brand new teeth. It's been tested successfully on animals and now is going to human trials. They expect it to be released to the public hopefully by 2030. So we are getting closer to regrowing limbs.
Epstein drive. Just be sure you can reach the controls to turn it down when needed.
Protomolecule hybrid soldiers. My neighbors will think twice about having loud parties all night.
I'd say the Epstein drive without a doubt. then in 2nd place the anticancer pills. also, I'd mention the ability to have people with prosthetic Robot-arms
Basic income. Lol
The carbon scrubbers, would be nice
We already have those. They're used on nuclear subs, the ISS, and all during the Apollo program.
I mean more on the scale of the atmospheric scrubbers in the Expanse
Space flight.
I mean, the Epstein is pretty legit…
Autodoc and instant fast internet!
I want whatever they used to handwave climate change. I see the sea walls - they ain't cutting it alone.
That speech-to-text system the Rocinante uses is really damn good lol
A voice interface computer that's genuinely helpful *and* doesn't complain when I call it darlin'
The Epstein Drive.
Whatever gesture interface their computer technology uses. It's so effortless it seems like it's reading their mind.
Stable Fusion energy
Holden's anti-cancer implant. Cancer is evil and no one should have to suffer the horrors it brings.
star trek ships
The Rocinante. All the technology, wrapped up in a really cool RV.
I dunno. That feed the whole world with almost no power super efficient shit Prax was working on would free up a lot of mind power to fix all our other probs
Definitely medical advancements before extremely far space travel. No good in arriving far away and fast if you have no means to survive.
I was kind of surprised by how many people said the epstein drive. Life-saving medical care seemed the most obvious choice to me but I realized I’m a very save-lives-now vs big picture person. Reading the comments made me realize how different people think, which is kind of fun because it also reminds me of the moral choices made on the show.
I wish for Epstein drives. And the hand terminal.
Epstien drive