Should private citizens be allowed to own Warp Drives, Fusion Cores, Antimatter Drives...

Should private citizens be allowed to own Warp Drives, Fusion Cores, Antimatter Drives, or other potentially devestating technology on their spaceships?

Lets face it, the founding fathers didn't forsee our technology and people being able to own automatic weapons that could singlehandedly defeat entire musket armies.
Who is to say the same thing won't happen to us? Nobody disagrees with people being able to own cars, it's essentially a requirement. But what about the next few hundred years when a commute could be to orbit, or another part of the solar system, or even another star?
The energy involved in these kind of tecnologies would be immense. Something with the power to transport a ship across the solar system, or go FTL using some kind of exotic physics would be able to output some serious energy. Probably the simplest and most provable is antimatter engines. They are entirely possible today, the only problem is antimatter is currently way too expensive to be used as a fuel. However, if you filled up a bottle of anttimatter in your spaceship, if you misued that, you would have a weapon that would make a 50 Megatonne bomb look like a firecracker. You could singlehandedly wipe out an entire city with millions of people in it.
Nobody could even really predict how destructive those kinds of technologies could end up when misused.
So Veeky Forums, in the future, should technology like that be able to be owned by civilians, where anyone could kill millions of people as easily as crashing a ship into a city?

sci ded?

Depends entirely on how easy it is to procure. And how big and powerful private organizations are. In other words, a meaningless question

And I'm sure "should we allow every citizen to own a rifle that can shoot 10 rounds per second and be reloaded in 2 seconds" never seemed like a meaningful question to the founders either.

We are talking hypotheticals of future tech here. We are assuming the modern car basically becomes the future personal transport with FTL capability. E.g having the energy quivalence of a few nukes.

(OP)
IF and when such technology becomes available, I assume it'll be restricted and limited to authorized, qualified, and tested personnel. We don't allow people to drive cars or operate nuclear reactors without being scrutinized.

Doesn't mean there won't be crazy people who slip through. Besides the 9/11 hijackers, there was the German pilot who committed suicide (and took an entire planeload of passengers with him.)
Unless you're willing to ban entire technologies, you do the best you can and you revise procedures whenever loopholes are found.

Advancing technology has always meant increased potential for destruction. Your auto has the power of an entire herd of horses. There's a Ray Bradbury story wherein someone in ancient China invents a flying machine. He presents it to the Emperor. The Emperor orders the machine destroyed and the inventor executed. Nothing personal. The inventor meant no harm. But the Emperor can envision invaders soaring over the Great Wall and dropping rocks and fire arrows on people. Suppression is essential to protect the State.

We accept the risks. No one is going to ban airplanes. No one is going to ban private ownership of cars even though there have been terror attacks where people deliberately drive through crowds. Maybe they'll be prevented in the future by cars which won't LET themselves be used a weapons; a AI will over-ride the commands of the driver.

Private citizens kill far fewer people than the government has ever done.

So yeah, I'd allow it.

Antimatter engines will never be a thing because it always requires more energy to make than it generates by a LARGE margin. This isn’t something we will get a lot better at, it a problem of how the universe works. If we can make large quantities of antimatter, we already have access to absurd amounts of energy that make antimatter look like burning garbage.

depends a lot on how things scale down, and how cheap it gets
i suspect there's a minimum size and cost for most of those technologies

antimatter is easy to make in huge amounts using some kind of sun powered system

just use sails

Go ahead and describe how that would work. You clearly have no idea how antimatter is made.

Private property shouldn't be allowed in any advanced society so questions about whether anyone should be allowed to "own" a warp drive are silly.

Forget Star Trek. We will never even achieve a future like that envisioned in The Expanse.

>And I'm sure "should we allow every citizen to own a rifle that can shoot 10 rounds per second and be reloaded in 2 seconds" never seemed like a meaningful question to the founders either.
The idea was always that private citizens should be allowed to bear military arms with the express purpose of keeping the government in check. Up to and including things like battleships and canon. This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, however.

I feel like the thread is missing the point. If we will have self driving cars, then we will have self driving spaceships. Humans might as well be locked out and never even have the opportunity top wipe cities out

Most of the world doesn't follow that stupid idea and they are doing fine. Plenty of countries not only don't worry about governments oppressing their disarmed citizens, but are actually a lot more progressive and prosperous than the USA. And they don't have to deal with daily school shootings as a side bonus.

Americans can buy guns with their Big Mac.If you allow this, nothing can be forbidden.

The allowance of weaponry to the public was to guarantee them a relative defence from the state. So with regards to destructive drives we can assume the state will have appropriate technological defences from ships used maliciously. Always about balance.

Im British and deeply wish we had civilian armament, we have no freedom of speech anymore and unforgivable encroachments on civil liberty and peace with no way of pressuring the government to account.

Hold on, lad, you wrote about the founding fathers and their ideas. Stop moving the goalposts.

You're right that antimatter engines will never be used to generate electricity. I think you are missing the point however. People don't use batteries to generate electricity, they use them the store energy and then use that energy in situations where generation is not feasible. Antimatter engines have a 100% conversion of mass into energy and would be incredibly useful for a wide range of applications including space flight.

>Antimatter engines have a 100% conversion of mass into energy
Yes, however, making antimatter requires a lot more energy than you will get out of it. Not to mention you have to build the shit quark by quark in a particle accelerator. As I mentioned this is not due to us not understanding enough, its how it has to be done according to the laws of physics. This means that a gram of antimatter will always cost as much as a small country. Its also extremely difficult to store, requirements being a near perfect vacuum and a very strong magnetic field. Antimatter will never replace batteries or fuel storage because compact net positive fusion generators are actually more likely to be achieved than antimatter in large quantities. Right now, using our best equipment for days on end and a figurative pile of burning cash the best we can do is make a single atom of anti hydrogen. Again, not for lack of understanding, but because the laws of physics prohibit us from making it any other way.

>be chicken space transportation
>literally drive chickens from planet to planet
>they raise chicken space transport taxes
>can no longer make a living
>really mad
>put chicken transport on autopilot
>set course to build up speed
>should hit Washington DC at 0.21 c.

This.

/thread.

>will have appropriate technological defences from ships used maliciously.

How the fuck are you going to defend yourself from a mass going at a good portion of c or a few grams of smuggled antimatter?

>>>
>?????
>FEATHERS!

with a partial dyson swarm, or possibly a ring of powered satellites which maintain position around the sun with EM fields that interact with the sun's, transferring power between them to a series of smaller supercolliders at specific locations around the perimeter. There you just continuously smash ejected hydrogen from the sun's atmosphere into antimatter which you collect magnetically. With all that energy you can constantly do this and generate pretty decent amounts, then ship it around the solar system

suffice to say this is late K1 early K2 days and will require a lot of automated manufacturing, use mercury for raw materials

and some very, very, very reflective materials

ultimately if corporations can make more money off selling it than they lose by people fucking it up or using them as weapons, then it'll happen.

i seriously doubt it'll be available to anyone but the most rich, though, because warp drives and all that are kind of useless without things like life support, conventional propulsion, etc, and combined they are costly

>Why'd the chicken cross the solar system?
[spoiler]To blow up the other side![/spoiler]

>just continuously smash ejected hydrogen from the sun's atmosphere into antimatter
Again you have no idea how difficult this specific part is. Absurd amounts of energy will help but that specific part is the reason antimatter will never be used as fuel. Ever.

>Yes, however, making antimatter requires a lot more energy than you will get out of it.
Sure, now, but the physical limitation is that it requires more than what you will get out of it. There's no law saying we can't improve the efficiency. It's not inconceivable that somebody could figure out how to build a particle accelerator in which most of the energy used goes into the particles themselves. Fire that at a target and make antimatter. Then there's the matter of figuring out a highly efficient way of collecting the antimatter produced. It's not going to be easy, but there's no law saying it can't be done.

FUCK NO
The energies involved are on the same tier as nuclear weapons.

Also you might need a way to recycle the kinetic energy of the collision products. The efficient particle accelerator part is the big hurdle, though.

The whole affair would be unlikely to be worthwhile for anything other than space propulsion, where reducing the mass of the fuel is critical.

How are you going to make a ship go the speed of light? You don't know so by the same virtue we dont know what corresponding technologies will exist. For example people might have thought with central banking and cashless society there would be no avenue to use money without the government's knowledge - then blockchain technologies developed. Alternatively the government has huge capacity to obtain all communications and spy universally, however quantum computing may provide a new way to operate with encryption.

If you posited to a stone age man that one person in the future could own a weapon that would kill anyone from a distance with just one press they would think that person would be an omnipotent god. However other technologies developed meaning things are in balance.

Who knows, in the future we may be able to predict all people's actions via deterministic analysis of all particles. We may be able to remotely disable any engine predicted to be en route to earth. There are a myriad of potential technologies and your lazy scenario only works as if one great technology is developed in isolation.

SHALL

>Lets face it, the founding fathers didn't forsee our technology and people being able to own automatic weapons that could singlehandedly defeat entire musket armies.
Pffthaha.

Anyways, I think it's a moot question. Spaceships won't be "owned" privately by anyone except absurdly rich individuals, it's much better if they're all in the hands of corporations who have a vested interest in their profits.