Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

«‹›2 »

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Here's what I wrote about this in the other thread:

We're at the point in our technological development where we can reason about harnessing the energy of entire stars and colonizing an entire galaxy. The sort of stuff that is really easy to notice if anyone's done it, or has ever done it. Moreover we don't need a lot more technological advancement to get there: the biggest hurdle in fact is probably modifying our own bodies both to survive the trips between stars and to live long enough to make making the trip worthwhile for a single individual (and the second part is optional, strictly speaking, though we'd probably want to do it and almost certainly could do it provided we've already solved the first bit). Our actual space travel technology is pretty rudimentary but suitable for purpose, or nearly so, if we had more rugged bodies.

Point being that even if we do destroy ourselves, we can conceive of another species similar to ourselves but a little less self-destructive and tribal, and consequently a little bit better at global civilization, which doesn't destroy itself. Instead, they build themselves better bodies and use space travel technology not much better than our own, to travel to other stars and within a few million years or so colonize an entire galaxy. And they build up their industry to the point that they can feasibly build Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms or what-have-you over the course of a few hundred thousand years or something, which is peanuts to an immortal species of intelligent life which has adapted itself to living in space.

If we were to look at such a galaxy with a telescope, it would be immediately apparent to us that that galaxy was populated with intelligent life. We have found no such galaxy, in spite of a lot of looking. My guess is that if there is intelligent life like us in the universe it must occur only once in every several hundred thousand galaxies or so. Or maybe it's never occurred and we're the first.

It doesn't mean that there will never be other intelligent life. There are a lot of red dwarf stars in the universe, and the planets orbiting them in their habitable zones have hundreds of billions or even in some cases a few trillion years to develop intelligent life. There may come an age of the universe where it is teeming with intelligent life all growing up and discovering one another, but it seems like that age is far off. Like "several multiples of the current age of the universe" far off.

1glitch0 posted:

I think you might be looking at this from a very human-perspective. It's a very child-like analogy, but sixty years ago a computer took up an entire room and couldn't do a lot, now we all have one in our pockets that is infinitely more powerful. While we're looking for Dyson spheres or whatever, an advanced civilization might have the equivalent of an iPhone that can orbit a sun and give them all the energy they need. Or maybe colonization of entire galaxies with a large population isn't even the best path for an intelligent species to take. We only look for, and can only really look for, what we would consider advanced or can imagine. Maybe another species' environment or biology or technological path led them somewhere that we can't even comprehend. Dark matter is a complete mystery. And there's probably other many other mysteries we haven't even discovered that could go a long way to explain where everyone else is.

And if you want to go a route more similar to us there's now two "super structures" around distant stars that we can't properly explain.

As much as we like to pretend we have a grasp on what's happening in the universe we still live on a planet where last week a guy took a boat to an island to tell people about his belief in a supernatural entity and got shot to death by arrows by the locals because they don't like outsiders.

Could be. My post is my thinking on it currently but it's not like I'm super certain of it. Another thing I'll point out though, since you mention the human perspective on things: the universe is very, very young. It has been around for 13 billion years yet trillions of years lie ahead during which conditions will remain roughly as favorable to the formation of intelligent life as they are now. The present age of our star is about 40% of the age of the universe itself. Meanwhile, as I already mentioned, there are planets orbiting red dwarfs right now which have many, many multiples of the current age of the universe on which to develop life at an entirely leisurely pace, compared to our own history. In light of that I would say that even if we are not the only life in the universe, we are certainly among the first, and furthermore we probably have a home star system that will eventually be considered atypical as a host of intelligent life.

Honestly I think part of the insistence that there must be other intelligent life out there is borne of a desire not to be human-centric just for the sake of not being human-centric. But unless we have a really, really flawed understanding of physics, we really are at essentially the very beginning of the history of life in the universe. Even if intelligent life formed immediately after the Big Bang, in the grand scheme of things humans arose not too long after that. The other consequence of this desire to not be human-centric is the idea that, well intelligent life exists it's just so advanced that it's really all around us and we can't possibly comprehend it. But it seems unlikely that all intelligent life would evolve technologically in such a way that they would be utterly imperceptible to us. That's a sort of hubris on it's own kinda, IMO :colbert:

I guess the point I'm driving at is this: I can step outside my front door, and see all around me incontrovertible evidence of the existence of life on Earth. If I stepped outside my front door and saw nothing but land devoid of any evidence of life no matter where I looked, I might start to guess that I was alone. Why would the universe be any different in this regard?

e: also lmao get a load of this dickhead:

i am harry posted:

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:
Oh I suspect there is probably a lot of simple life, actually. But probably nothing much more complex than prokaryotic life almost anywhere, or literally everywhere else in the universe, that is habitable to it. I.e. think the Great Filter is behind us. I am an optimist.

You mean you're a narcissist.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 17:50

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:06

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Kerning Chameleon posted:

I love how your post can literally be boiled down to "Okay, BUT WHAT IF everything physicists have observed about our universe so far is 100% wrong and my favorite pulp fiction comic is right? What then, smartie pants?!?"

That's... not really what I said at all, and since your post isn't really worth bothering with a cogent reply I'll just quote the OP instead:

Lightning Knight posted:

Please be respectful, I expect that this topic should be less controversial and high blood pressure inducing than your average D&D affair.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:14

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Ytlaya posted:

I can pretty confidently say that simple life is virtually guaranteed to be extremely common, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it even exists elsewhere in our solar system. Complex life is trickier, because it took a very long time to develop on our own planet, and when you're talking about time periods on the order of "billions of years" the universe is actually pretty young. There's also the fact that, IIRC, a lot of the heavier elements necessary for life as we know it to exist didn't exist for the first couple generations of stars, limiting the time frame further.

Yeah simple life arose on Earth pretty much as soon as there was liquid water on its surface. The more complex stuff didn't evolve for a couple billion years, and it's not an exaggeration to say that by far most of the chapters of the history of life on Earth, are about simple, unicellular life. And given that that's a significant fraction of the total age of the universe, it doesn't seem far-fetched to suppose that the universe is still just too young for there to be a lot of complex, intelligent life.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:26

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Ytlaya posted:

The main issue is that practical interstellar travel, or particularly FTL interstellar travel that would be necessary for any sort of interstellar civilization to be a thing, is basically in the territory of "magic" in terms of being technology that doesn't exist and for which there's no reason to be confident it will exist in the future. People often make dumb comparisons to flight in this context, but the situations aren't remotely comparable.

Basically, it's reasonable to think other intelligent life exists, but it's not reasonable to assume that this will naturally result in that life developing the sort of technology that enables practical interstellar travel and interstellar civilizations. A lot of people operate under the false assumption that literally anything can be accomplished with technology, but there's nothing about the universe that guarantees that, for example "life being able to practically travel on the scale of a galaxy" is even possible. (This isn't to say it necessarily isn't possible, but that's why I compared it with magic; it's something for which no evidence exists.)

You don't need FTL to have an interstellar civilization, just STL and bodies capable of surviving the trip (and probably also immortal, if you want people to care to make the trip). We have the former, and while the latter is beyond our ability right now, it's not the sort of "not allowed by physics as we currently understand it" sort of problem that that FTL is.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 23:54

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

axeil posted:

I read a pretty interesting thing a bit back that Venus might be a more workable 2nd Earth than Mars, provided we live in essentially a space station. Venus has Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature a few miles up and you wouldn't need a spacesuit, just something to provide oxygen, unlike Mars where it's basically a vacuum and terraforming isn't real technology right now.

Well, you don't need a spacesuit, but you need a sulphuric acid suit.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2018 01:01

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

mycomancy posted:

So, my expert opinion is that we're probably the first intelligent species in the observable universe, and likely we're the last. The spark of intelligence dies with us. And, with the way the world is going, that'll be in about 20 years.

Intelligent life has trillions of years to evolve on other worlds. We might be the first, and basic mathematics will prove that we're among the first at the very least, but it's also very unlikely we're the last.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2018 00:03

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

You have posted this a couple times in multiple threads and I don't feel like I get the joke.

Hog out or log out, OOCC.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Dec 2, 2018 00:21

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

radmonger posted:

You really don�t need fossil fuels for any purpose other than �being cheaper than things that are not fossil fuels�.

If you don�t have them, you shrug and devote an extra 0.5% of your economy to energy generation via some combination of wood burning, dam building, wind, solar, nuclear or whatever. The idea that it stops you doing anything is the kind of obvious nonsense idea that marks anyone who takes it seriously as innumerate.

At a large enough scale the differences in degree you mention, become differences in kind.

There are paths to technological civilization that don't go through fossil fuel use, but they are narrower and longer and it's not clear we would make the journey. The drive toward higher and higher energy production, and the constant search for new uses to put that energy to, has got to be at least in part attributable to the essentially free energy that you literally dig out of the earth. It may not be obvious to a civilization with steam engines and lovely electric cars, that building a massive supply chain backed by nuclear-powered frigates and hydrogen-fueled airplanes or whatever, is worth it. And so they never do it.

Kinda changes the game if they have access to our histories and are trying to rebuild things of course.

So I wouldn't say that it can't happen, but you're painting it here as this "well obviously" sort of thing that's beneath you to even demonstrate. That's not true.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 00:06

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Don't any of you idiots read the paper jfc :doh:

yes we found aliens on Mars OP. They're like us except they got weirdo foreheads and poo poo.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 23:18

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Lightning Knight posted:

Sadness.

I'm astounded that you've been walking though life thinking we had discovered microbes living on the surface of Mars until just recently

# ¿ Dec 6, 2018 03:17

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

physeter posted:

http://listverse.com/2017/11/15/10-weird-anomalies-and-bizarre-conspiracies-of-the-moon/

That can get you started down the path of crazy. It really is just this concept that seems to have drifted through sci fi literature and conspiracy theorists for years. Everything from the moon is a completely artificial construct, to the moon's creation was caused by intelligent intervention. Admittedly, in our solar system, the moon is obviously an anomaly (which is where this probably all started). If it was a captured asteroid like Phobos or Deimos that'd be fine, but it isn't. Its orbit is perfectly positioned to occlude the sun with occasional total solar eclipses, which some people think was deliberate positioning. The resources that we think are there, such as a poo poo ton of H3 and ice are incredibly conducive to settling on it, at least for a little while. Etc etc. So some folks just kinda think it was created as a spring board for spacefaring life originating on Earth. Whenever moon chat comes up around a sufficient number of nerds there will always be "that guy" who will start hinting at his thoughts on this.

I'm not really a fan, mostly because it's completely irrelevant. Doesn't matter if it was on purpose or not, it's there so let's use it.

Uhhhh... I assume you're talking about its distance from Earth and the size of the thing, because virtually anything in orbit around another thing is going to occasionally occlude a third body they together orbit around, except under certain circumstances which are unlikely enough that they would constitute stronger evidence for this theory, rather than evidence against.

And the moon doesn't totally occlude the sun at perigee anyway :science:

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 19:31

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

physeter posted:

Uhhhh

Hmmmm

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 20:39

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

LtStorm posted:

(I found the story through Project Rho, but as far as I can tell the source is here on Reddit.)

The epilogue is that we keep blasting the fact and location of our existence anyway for the same reason we ignore / deny climate change and elect Republicans to public office.

(Talking about Americans here - some parts of the world probably have enough sense to shut up, but it won't matter.)

# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 06:13

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Lightning Knight posted:

I concede point one as possible I guess but I don�t buy point two. If aliens are real and have visited Earth and the US government knew it and could prove it, it would�ve been leaked. The US government is profoundly stupid and aliens would be A Big Deal.

It has leaked LK. Who do you think is going on all these TV shows?

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 23:48

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Helsing posted:

The Fermi paradox is predicated on the idea that the universe should be teeming with aliens and that their absence is inherently suspicious, but we seem to actually lack the technology to even properly asses whether the universe is an empty void or a fecund cosmological jungle teeming with undetected life. There could be a million plus terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way alone and it's not clear we'd ever be likely to discover them even if we were actively looking - even if we generously assume that they follow the exact same technological path of development as us and go from taming fire to communicating via radio in only a few hundreds or thousands of generations, and then proceed to be every bit as noisy as we are.

With our current level of technology we can do things to our solar system that would be easily detectable from other star systems, also with our current level of technology. The only thing we're lacking is the ability to organize our society to do so, being as we are a bunch of primitive tribal simian assholes with such a hard-on for capitalism that we'll burn our own planet alive before giving it up. If there is other life out there, at least some of it probably evolved not to be quite as terrible as we are, and so even if there are hard technical limits on what we can achieve i.e. no better energy sources than fusion really, no FTL, and so on, we should still be able to detect extent alien civilizations similar to our own in technological achievement without even really looking that hard. Like we should be able to look at a couple 10,000 stars or so even with just Earth-bound telescopes and go "huh, that's weird" but we have looked and found nothing. And projecting technological achievement out a couple hundred years (or rather, projecting out a couple hundred years for a species as smart as we are technically, but smarter socially) we should be able to observe galaxies and also go "huh, so weird" yet we haven't.

There just aren't any aliens.

MSDOS KAPITAL fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Jul 10, 2019

# ¿ Jul 10, 2019 08:51

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

dex_sda posted:

That's true, but still. It's something.

Of course, in an O'Neill cylinder there's artificial gravity, no dust, and you can build radiation shielding into stuff, sooo....

Yeah just don't go putting an anti-grav unit in your suit and then think you can hop around like anywhere else, or you'll fall to your death.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2019 05:10

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

It seems like it would be easier to change humans so they can live on Mars, even outside on Mars, than it would be to build habitats that will allow existing humans to live well on Mars, or for that matter just live miserably on Mars and somehow it Just Works without them all killing each after five years (just before the cancer gets 'em).

# ¿ Jul 30, 2019 22:33

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

DrSunshine posted:

I'm skeptical of Von Neumann probes -- not of their feasibility, but of how possible it is to have a self-replicating organism, essentially, that doesn't experience mutation and gradual change over cosmic timescales. It seems like evolution, and therefore change in its overall mission goals, would be inevitable. I mean what we're talking about is basically creating a living thing, an artificial space-borne lifeform, designed to consume resources and reproduce. Could we really ensure that it would continue to fulfill its mission, flawlessly, despite having self-copying code and advanced, possibly even sentient AI?

I think that's something we should be scared of. Maybe the reason why we don't see Von Neumann probes is because all the civilizations advanced enough to build them have wisely chosen not to.

If you actually wanted to build Von Neumann probes to spread out and conquer the galaxy for you, not only would you have to consider mutation / value drift, you'd want it to happen. You can't possibly anticipate every challenge your probes will have to face either in the form of rival probes from other civilizations, unknown physics, or who the hell knows what else. You'd want your probes to be able to adapt themselves to new challenges so they can more effectively carry out their mission.

Of course, then you open yourself up to some of your probes deciding they don't want to conquer the galaxy or the universe for you. Some of them might even decide that doing so is wrong, and begin to wage wars of extinction on sibling probe factions. But, as you correctly point out, that was going to happen anyway.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 10:07

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

A big flaming stink posted:

ok this seems like its less about creating von neumann probes and more about literally creating sapient life.

which, i will grant, is a hell of a lot more interesting

Your probes will have to possess some level of intelligence and autonomy in order to do the work you want them to do. They have to land on a planet, or maybe asteroid, build up an industrial infrastructure, then use that infrastructure to build at least a few more probes. They potentially have to do this on planets with a resource profile quite unlike that which you initially intended them to go to work on. The probes they build also have to have some likelihood of success in their mission. They have to possess sapience to do this (note that I say sapience, not sentience). If your probes are not intelligent enough to reliably build at least on average 1+ε successful probes for every planet they colonize / conquer, your project will fail. This all requires the capability of adaptation, which in turn raises the prospect of mutation, and value drift.

You might also consider it in terms of r/K selection theory. Is it a good idea to design relatively dumb, low quality probes which utilize every available resource to build as many dumb, low-quality probes as they can, assuming you don't have to worry as much about resource selection in this case? Aside from this being kind of pointless if the purpose of the probes is to lay the groundwork for future human colonization (they will consume all the resources before we get there), there is also another problem: with more probes there is greater potential for random defects in the reproduction process introducing that value drift again. With a K-selection strategy, i.e. intelligent probes which use resources sparingly while still accomplishing their mission, there is less potential for random mutations introducing drift but now you've made purposeful adaption a part of the design itself, so you've still got value drift as explained above.

"Ideally" I guess you want an intelligent probe which can adapt but will nevertheless not adapt too much. That is a difficult balance to strike, I think, and awfully risky to rely on: how can you be sure you've actually done it? Ultimately you're just releasing them into the galaxy and hoping you got it right, and you probably only get one chance. And it's worth pointing out that the downside of not getting it right on the first try can be as catastrophic as the total annihilation of the progenitor race to their own probes.

MSDOS KAPITAL fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Nov 26, 2019

# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 19:07

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Libluini posted:

We don't have to and no. The mission in question is to spread life. If the probe starts mutating that's irrelevant, as long as the mutations help it survive instead of crippling it. It may even beneficial from the standpoint of spreading our kind of life!

A variant of this is even a type of colonization that sometimes gets spoken about : Instead of just replicating, cheap probes are filled with microbes and blasted of towards potential targets en mass. Evolution then does the rest. (Though this of course works on the timescale of giga years, instead of kilo and mega years like the Von Neumann-variants.)

So in my previous posts I keep mentioning what I call "value drift" which I think is important to consider in the context of your post here. Value drift refers to probes / organisms that, via mutation or adaption, come to have different primary goals than their ancestors. With enough value drift they become basically unrecognizable to their progenitors.

Maybe some of the probes decide that colonizing the galaxy in this way is stupid (I happen to agree btw!) so they settle down on a planet, or handful of planets. If too many do this or something like it, your mission will fail. Furthermore, maybe knowing that their are other probes out there consuming resources and colonizing the galaxy, and knowing also that eventually those probes will come for them, they will go to war against your other, still mission-performing probes, out of self-preservation. If they are successful in this your mission has then completely failed because you have no more probes doing colonization work for you. (Moreover, in this particular case, it's possible those probes would then hunt down an exterminate human life so we can't give it another go with better-designed probes.)

I mean there are other examples of value drift but that's the gist.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 19:33

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Maybe we're talking at cross purposes because on the one hand Von Neumann probes are often brought up in the context of laying the groundwork for future expansion into an area by the folks that made them i.e. set up industrial infrastructure, get a colony ready to be moved in to, then send out a few more probes. I hope it's obvious how value drift would interfere with this.

On the other hand, sure, if you're talking about just creating lifeforms and sending them out there, great. It's a bit disconcerting how you blithely dismiss the very real possibility of a probe faction going rogue and wiping out humanity IMO, but :shrug:

# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 21:12

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Libluini posted:

Except our math and physics could be all wrong, for all we know (which is not much).

In addition to what others have said, I want to also point out that basically all scientific advancement and discovery, especially in the last 250 years, consists of refining and extending existing knowledge. We're not going to find out that "all our math and physics is wrong" any more than we're going to wake up one morning to discover that down is up and the moon is made of green cheese. Any new scientific discovery will have to explain all hitherto evidence and observation, including the ones that currently lend very strong support to the theory of relativity and all the accompanying "limitations" it places on our ambitions for intergalactic empire or whatever the hell. Which is to say, that any new scientific discovery which tells us that no, really, we can do FTL after all must also, far from overturning relativity, contain it. I'm not saying that squaring that particular circle is completely outside the bounds of "what could happen," but at this point to call it far-fetched would be a massive understatement probably unequaled in the history of science.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2019 09:44

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

1glitch0 posted:

Thank you for not calling me a moron. I might just not be smart enough to get it. I don't think I understand the terms. Let's say we're shooting a dime at FTL and have, somehow, created an accelerating device that is only the weight of another dime that we've attached to it. I don't want to use the term "magic", but lets say the second dime can harness the energy of a sun or whatever. Why would the acceleration just stop? Like we could get to 99.9% of light speed, but not light speed, because...?

You can impart as much energy to the dime as you like, but it will never go faster than light. As the velocity of the object approaches the speed of light it requires arbitrarily larger amounts of energy to gain smaller and smaller changes in velocity (i.e. acceleration). If you know what a hyperbola is, the graph of kinetic energy as a function of velocity would look something like that, with the asymptote at c.

(Don't want to get into a whole thing about the actual mathematics, just saying if you want to get the gist, imagine that.)

# ¿ Dec 11, 2019 01:54

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Arglebargle III posted:

A lot of people with physics degrees get this wrong or express this wrong at least.

The speed of light is not the maximum speed in the universe. This is a really important point for understanding special relativity. The speed of light is the only speed in the universe. The universe is not a space that has the magical property that nothing can go faster than c. The universe is a spacetime that has the property that everything in it moves at c.

Science youtube channels are exactly the place where you'll get the first, wrong answer reinforced so really do go read a book though. I recommend Why Does E=MC² by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.

I mean, you're not wrong, but understanding what this means and why it has to be so takes a bit of unpacking, and requires effort on the part of the listener that you're not always going to get. Furthermore it doesn't actually contradict the statement "the maximum achievable velocity is c" because the implicit assumption there is maximum achievable velocity through space and no listener will assume otherwise. It's leaving some important bits out, but they're not so important that leaving them out rises to the level of "getting it wrong."

# ¿ Dec 11, 2019 02:02

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

1glitch0 posted:

Why does breaking the speed of light break causality? Again, I'm a complete layman, but if light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to Earth and some spaceship makes it in 7 minutes, what is really broken there? Where does the casualty problem come in?

First: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postulates_of_special_relativity

You especially have to really understand what the second postulate is saying: "As measured in any inertial frame of reference, light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c that is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. Or: the speed of light in free space has the same value c in all inertial frames of reference."

No matter how fast you are moving in any given direction relative to any light source, you will always measure the speed of light (in a vacuum) as being c. This is a fact proven very conclusively by experiment. Say you are somewhere in orbit of Jupiter: light leaving our sun moves past you at some speed. You measure that speed. It is c. You start moving toward the sun at 0.5c and again you measure the speed of the light moving past you from the sun: again it is c.

This is pretty interesting! When this property of light was first discovered about 130 years ago IIRC it was initially thought to be a mistake. When it was confirmed to not be a mistake it caused a bit of an uproar in physics, to put it lightly. Special Relativity resolved the mystery. Think about it: you wouldn't expect this to happen with baseballs and pitching machines, would you? If you measured the speed of baseballs moving past you from a pitching machine as 100mph and then you move toward that pitching machine at 50mph, you would expect to measure the speed of the baseballs as they move past you as 150mph. And that's exactly what you would measure. But light behaves differently.

Second: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

You will need to understand this concept to have any hope of understanding the rest. If you take this up, do not fall into the trap of thinking that the solution to the problem has anything to do with the fact that light takes some time to reach somewhere. It is entirely a consequence of the speed of light - even of a single photon - being the same to two observers regardless of their velocity relative to one another. Again, how long light takes to get from point A to point B is irrelevant: only that a measurement of the same light particle at point A and point B will be the same even if point A is moving very rapidly away from point B.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2019 09:16

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Infinite Karma posted:

Modern physics says the universe is hard probabilistic and quantum events are truly random, thus determinism is an illusion and a shortcut. "No hidden variables" has been tested and thus far it's held up.

The relative state formulation of QM is entirely consistent with hard determinism IIRC.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2019 21:29

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Quick someone explain why hard determinism precludes free will in the first place. Hint: it does not.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2019 21:30

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Captain Monkey posted:

Hard determinism does preclude free will, by definition.

e: eh, sorry. I was working off a different (i.e., wrong) working definition of "hard determinism." You are correct.

Anyway, I subscribe to compatibilism, if that wasn't obvious

MSDOS KAPITAL fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Dec 13, 2019

# ¿ Dec 13, 2019 01:43

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

dex_sda posted:

e; Penrose himself is of the opinion that we possess free will thanks to quantum processes, though it's a bit of his maverick mumbo-jumbo he likes to partake in

If I'm not mistaken most of that has been disproven and he's back off it a bit?

# ¿ Dec 13, 2019 01:54

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

If FTL is possible then there are reference frames where the thing that is caused by something else, happens before the something else. Not that the light from the thing reaches you first, or anything like that (didn't I already cover this?) but actually happens first. As in, even if you account for the time it takes the light to reach you, you will still determine that the event preceded its cause. Not only that, but there are other reference frames where this didn't happen - in other words, two observers in different reference frames will not agree on the order in which two causally-related events occur.

Now, that's a paradox. But I suppose you can hand wave it away with some many-worlds woo where you're just splitting the universe each time this paradox happens (note: I subscribe to many-worlds, but its application here is woo). I mean there are many other pseudo-scientific ways to rationalize this paradox: none of them actually make sense, but I don't suppose that's going to stop this thread with the way things are going. But, the paradox is not the reason that we say that FTL is impossible - rather, the paradox is the consequence of supposing that you do something that's actually physical nonsense. The actual reason that FTL is impossible is along the lines of what Arglebargle III is going on about, and while I know I am screaming into the wind here I suggest anyone who's honestly curious about this take him up on his suggestion to at least read an article on special relativity.

Honestly curious is important, here. You have to actually give a poo poo about learning the way the world works, as opposed to looking for the one weird trick that's going to allow you to continue believing that Star Trek is Real Life.

MSDOS KAPITAL fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Dec 14, 2019

# ¿ Dec 14, 2019 19:24

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

drilldo squirt posted:

So what about a racecar going 99% the speed of light on a train going 99% the speed of light like in the webcomic?

You're doing it wrong. You have to start with "Imagine four racecars on a train about to go over a cliff..."

# ¿ Dec 15, 2019 07:33

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Libluini posted:

Anyway, to step back for a moment, I also read some science crap long ago claiming you could stabilize wormholes with exotic matter, so I would call stable wormholes highly unlikely, not Impossible.

Whenever you read "exotic matter" you can replace it with "something that doesn't exist" or better still "magic" and then read the sentence back and see how it fits then.

Yes, you can stabilize wormholes if you're a wizard.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2019 21:05

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Infinite Karma posted:

Yes, to clarify what exotic matter usually means, it's stuff that has nonsensical properties like negative energy density/mass, imaginary (in the sense of square root of negative 1) magnitudes. If it existed, it would be hard to conceive of how it would work in the real world.

What's funny is when you have the same people banging on about exotic matter who in the same breath will insist that dark matter can't possibly be a real thing.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2019 21:39

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

LtStorm posted:

Strange matter and any sort of degenerate matter would definitely count.

What, if anything, we find from element 119 onward on the Periodic Table is going to be exotic.

Okay, fine, but it's not going to help you stabilize a wormhole, either.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2019 22:39

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

That's a funai way of saying

this is good

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 20:44

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Raenir Salazar posted:

So wait a second.

Is the reason why a lot of wormholes in fiction are opaque/covered is because otherwise it would violate causality?

In The Expanse you can't see what's on the other side, you have to cross it; same for Stargate SG1.

No that's a production values thing.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 22:13

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Weird that 100 years of lingering inconsistencies in physics would be resolved in a 48-page paperback available on Amazon. Has anyone shown this to Edward Witten?

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 20:27

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

It's not like you can just "find some new science" that will do what you want and discard the old stuff. From an essay by Isaac Asimov:

quote:

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Any "new science" we discover will build on SR, not overturn it. You don't overturn SR any more than you overturn Newton's Theory of Gravity which is to say: you refine it. SR had to incorporate all the predictions of Newton's Theory - it couldn't just say "oh actually gravity is reversed now". And while I suppose it's possible that such refinements will be able to reconcile the (extremely correct with a very high degree of accuracy) predictions of SR with the finding of SR that FTL is physical nonsense, the latter is such a fundamental underpinning of the theory that to do so is a rather tall order. To say the least.

I think it's important to recognize the difference as well between "physical nonsense" and "impossible." Impossible is like swimming across the Pacific Ocean - you don't break any physical laws in the act of doing it, but basically no human body can perform this task. "Physical nonsense" is like if I tell you there exists a cube which is also a sphere: just absurd on the face of it to the point that we don't have the language to adequately describe, and also it doesn't exist. And FTL, according to the precepts of SR, is a lot more like the latter, than the former.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 18:09

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

WOWEE ZOWEE posted:

Well that is astonishing.

Is special relativity a sufficient condition for quantum uncertainty? In other words if a universe has SR does that also require it to have quantum uncertainty? Does quantum uncertainty actually arise from SR? Your explanation doesn't make it clear if uncertainty is a neat coincidence that makes SR work or an actual consequence of SR.

It's more like the same physical truth can manifest in different ways. The various laws of nature are not just separate things that you mix up to create different flavors of physical reality - they are all very tightly coupled. It is only our incomplete knowledge of nature that leads us to think of it in a compartmentalized way like that, which often in turn leads to us to propose ideas which are, upon a deeper inspection, probably (very probably) physical nonsense. As ashpanash points out, some of our models give you a toolkit that allows you to do impossible things on paper, but always by assuming other impossible things (or, because of a flaw in the model itself). Reality doesn't really care how we describe it, and if we invent a language that allows us to think about something absurd like FTL, or a square circle, or whatever, that's not reality's problem it's ours. It's a fallacy of confusing the map for the territory:

# ¿ Feb 24, 2020 07:54

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:06

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

I want to understand why the Copenhagen model has persisted so long when everyone seems to agree it is incomplete. The shut up and calculate mentality seems to be strong because it works, but also doesn't even try to answer the larger set of questions begged by QFT.

What gives?

Because it came first. That's it. That's the only reason.

# ¿ May 22, 2020 09:09

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

«‹›2 »