Cliches about tech and travel

Begone you worshippers of Satan! Everyone knows that God created man in his image. Everything revolves around our planet, burn ye heathen speaking otherwise. Fall off the ends of the Earth!

I always find it incredibly funny when people talk about things that are impossible. So let's take the thousands of years of human history and fast forward... I don't know... a few million years. Wonder if what we use to believe as fact changes at all? Nah, that's never happened before. Especially not in incredibly lesser amounts of time.

Found it funny when someone asked what FTL was. I thought FTL was about time loops until a few posts in.

Science Fiction does not need to be 100% scientifically accurate. You scientists and your constant disagreement, impossible to please all of you. Even if it was accurate at the time it could be disproved later. So... ya, I'll buy into a simply plausible explanation. Suspension of disbelief is pretty accurate, but hey... I would of believed in the possibility that the Earth was round.

FTL was more popular with the whole space race back in the day. No interesting tidbits on space now-a-days. I do think there should be more books that contain planet/species building. Good use of the creative juices. Nanobots, A.I., and virtual immersion have gotten more popular lately.

 

@ToBeInspired Aye, aye Cap'n, I got my oars. Let's row the old girl to the heavens and beyond.We set sail at dawn, spaceward ho!

 

I see a lot of conversation going on, and I didn't see any notifications...oh well. So what I wanted to add or reiterate is this.

I dont think that we will break the speed of light, even if there would be a need in order to leave our solar system and reach another one. Humanity is and has always been about money and power. Yes, I'm in a dark place, but being disabled without money and any source of income will do that. I would so give up my mind just to be able to run or walk more than 10 paces. I'd be happy with the IQ of a rock, but anyway, back to the point.

The physics currently taught falls under the mentality of never question, never try. Just memorize and learn. Oh, and let's invent dark matter to balance out an equation so we don't change any of our current textbooks. That sums it up.

I wish sci-fi pushed more, but instead the current trend is "Gravity" and "Interstellar" ie this "believable" sci-fi with less sci and more BS. I liked those films but (and lets me honest here) films are what drive our society. Nobody reads anymore. They portray everything in a "lets just stay here, space in dangerous. But we have Iphones!" kind of way.

 

If we relate the trend of current human society we have a fixation on entertainment and other forms of distraction. We are currently working on more realistic CGI to produce cheaper and more flexible movies. We're building cars that can drive themselves.

Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality immersion are potential advancements in human society.

With your disability, would you be willing to accept an A.I. run program that allowed you to experience past sensations?

Our current progress for A.I. is through usage and memorization (see Syri). It has a vast memory for remembering past questions and adding those to its data base. It's a work in progress, but think of discussing this a hundred years ago.

If an A.I, program was able to run a virtual immersion reality that allowed you to function as you did previously, or even at a higher function, would you be fully supportive of it? It's a tricky subject with giving birth to a superior race and being subjected to slavery. Then the other side is that if an A.I. had intelligence and we forced it to follow the lines of any other program, would we not be commiting in a form of cyber slavery?

Sorry, just into A.I. technology currently. Had a long discussion over self-driving cars tonight.

 

The whole idea of self driving cars just does not appeal to me. Perhaps the first and foremost being the loss of control. Secondly for whatever reason the powers that be can take away your ability to travel at a whim, without having to tell you why. As well as hackers could seize control of the computer brain and wreak all kinds of havoc, from flat out remote controlling your car in a theft or into an accident, or simply take it for a virtual joy ride with you present or not until it runs out of fuel. So no thanks on self driving cars. Besides what are cops going to do with out the need to hand out traffic citations.

 

There is an extensive research on planets around other stars. In the last decades we all were told that stars with planets are rare. Now we know that this is not true and with the next generation of space based telescopes we may find ones that are interesting enough (like surface temperature and oxygen in the atmosphere) to consider visiting them. This will bring some interest to FTL research so there is still hope

Personally I think FTL is impossible. The sound barrier is "just a speed", something that can be exceeded, but lightspeed is different. As @newjerseyrunner pointed out this is a fundamental limit of our universe and can not be exceeded. Not because some "overmind" says so but because the geometry of spacetime itself.

Interestingly for the traveler there's no limit, you can reach infinite speed (eg "get there instantly"), but for others this will look like you travel at the speed of light. How is this possible?

If you sit still and hold two timer clocks in your hand both you and the clocks move in time with a constant speed forward, but not in space. If you start both timers and put one on a spaceship that accelerate to high speed, it will move in space (eg. spatial direction) and -due to how space and time is interconnected- it also moves in the time direction so it moves in time a bit faster than you who is still sitting there, without moving. That means the traveling clock sees part of it's movement in time as a spatial movement and therefore "feels" less time passing.
If it reaches a distant point and comes back it traveled a significant amount of space and time resulting in the "travelling clock" showing less time than the one you hold. That's "time-dilation" and it is a real effect not just theory.

GPS satellites rely heavily on having the satellites' and the receiver's (eg navigation unit) clocks in sync but the sats are orbiting around Earth 20,000 km high (12,500 miles) at 14,000 km/hour (8750 miles/h) and their clocks tick differently.
Due to the fast speed their clocks tick slower than the GPS unit in your car (7 microseconds per day) and due to another effect, the gravitational time-dilation their clocks tick faster (45 microseconds per day) so these sum up to being faster 38 microseconds per day.
That is a more than 10 km (~6.25 miles) error in just one day so they really need to counteract this effect otherwise the whole system will become unusable in just a few minutes.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

Back to the lightspeed limit : time dilation have a stronger effect at higher speeds and at the speed of light it goes to infinity. That means that if someone could travel with the speed of light he does not experience any "time passing" and the trip becomes instant (for him it seems like he "jumped" to the destination) while others measure some time between departure and arrival. This time is proportional to the distance and this proportion is the value we mark with "c".

Yes, I know about the research on warp drives but these would break causality so I think they are impossible to build.

Sorry for the long text.

 

I'm not disabled, but I've often thought I'd be happier that way, too. If I were too dumb to know how nuts the world has become... you get the idea.

A lot of people seem to think this way. It used to be that what separated scientists from the rest of us was open-mindedness. Not so much any more. I was watching a video the other day in which Neil Degrass Tyson discussed the nature of reality with a bunch of other scientists and was appalled at how he shot down some of the ideas that were presented. And these weren't religious nuts he was shooting down; they were scientists every bit as qualified to observe the universe as he is. (And I came away thinking they're more qualified, to be honest.)

I blame the franchises (along with TV in general, of course). Everyone wants to be a part of their favourite franchise and I believe it stifles imagination.

Which is why some of the best advice I've ever read, if a person wants to be a writer, is to turn off the TV.

 

You do realize where all this is leading, don't you? AI, self-driving cars, machines that can respond to our needs, robots that work...

Once it's all in place, the trillionaires won't need us any more. That's when advances in germ warfare will come into play.

 

Not that I disagree with you on the whole self-driving car thing, hackers and joyriding and all that, but...

I haven't seen a cop hand out a traffic ticket in almost twenty years unless he/she was at the scene of an accident, even when someone blatantly steps out of line and runs a red light or risks pedestrian lives right in full view of a peace officer.

 

I wouldn't use FTL unless the actual use of FTL was an integral part of the story. E.g. the use of FTL was accidentally destroying planets. It'd be the point of making it meaningful and not just a standard of the universe you'd write about.

 

@Sack-a-Doo! Interesting. I know they still do hand out tickets here, but then again it is the middle of nowhere AZ. But I kinda know what you mean, though I think they still hand them out. Just not as often as they use too. IDK. Granted out here in the middle of nowhere they have to do something, otherwise they would have very little to do outside of the occasional domestic disturbance calls. Though even those are a joke around here cause the people are ridiculously overly nice to each other. The big thing around here is DUIs and DWIs, this one is mainly people who are not apart of the massive Mormon Community. So basically if we had automated cars (at least here) there would only be a need for a handful of police in about 100 mile square area, along with the sheriffs department. (Wow I don't think I could make this place sound any more lame).

 

Actually, it sounds wonderful.

When I was reading your description of how peaceful it is, I was thinking it either had to be Mormoms or you'd had a big influx of Canadians.

 

So you'd go with some kind of space-folding thing for long-distance travel? Something like what NASA is supposedly working on now?

I once came up with an idea for a story wherein humans had invented a kind of Stargate/beam-me-up-Scotty transport to get from planet to planet, but we all had to sit around waiting while it was shipped to the other planet. Haven't done anything with that one yet.

 

Let's just agree to disagree.

1.2 million car accident fatalities a year.
Over 1 million miles logged in the self-driving Google car.
1 accident (low speed bus fender bender.
17 accident resulting from human-driven cars (stopped car, etc.)

Uber has invested over a billion and Ford/Google at least 1.5 billion. Taxi-fare would go down a LOT.
Less cars would be owned eventually (projection of non-driving future generations).
Economic routing resulting in less eco footprints.


I say, yes. Still having problems with snow and cyber-security, but it'll work out eventually.

1950s = push on A.I. technology. Not ready. Ignore it.
2005 = Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) sponsored a program led by Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, which rekindled research into A.I. technology.
"Deep learning" is the breakthrough that reimagined perspectives on A.I.

Mmh, I like this topic too much. Derailed off light speed, sorry. Though to be far, was not the topic of the thread but rather the first point of discussion.

 

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I was referring to the part of Arizona where @Cave Troll lives. I don't think Uber, self-driving cars and 1.2 million accidents/year are a big problem there.

 

Space folding is awesome, so I probably would use that if I ever chose to have ftl in my stories. But the point I was trying to make is that it would just feel like pretense if I used Ftl in my story so often that it wasn't just world building, but also didn't lead anywhere. The OP talked about it as in raising awareness of it, so it would need to be a main point that's referenced fairly regularly. So unless it's also a plot device in itself it's fairly pointless to use.

 

It might be a problem in say Phoenix, but not here in the White Mountains of North Eastern AZ. Though people in Phoenix drive like maniacs anyways, and the cops carry M-4s, so yeah. It would be a good Idea to have some restrained traffic in the 3rd largest city in the country. But I can not even begin to imagine what the nightmare of traffic is like in either New York or L.A.

 

Um... no? Dark matter fits the data best. The theory of gravity has been tested out to something like twelve decimal places, it's right. Galaxies don't spin at the right rate, physicists looked at every way to solve this problem and they only thing that fit all of the data was that there is something producing gravity that isn't interacting with light. If you know how the Standard Model of particle physics works, invisible matter is not as weird as you think, there are several types of matter that does not interact with light already known.

Great post, but you never actually named the concept you're describing. If someone wants to learn more about this on wikipedia or something, it's called "special relativity."

They are not. I read the literature out of JPL on a regular basis, they test a lot of weird stuff, but I've never heard of this. It doesn't agree with relativity: that concept that spacetime is like a fabric is heuristic. You can curve it, wiggle it, drag it, compress it, and even twist it, but it won't ever fold.

 

Good point, I forgot to mention that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

 

"Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me
You got the power to turn on the light "

I guess the American Breed was ahead of its time!
Just couldn't resist, it was a great song.

 

I started a graphic novel and it was based on real science (Hard sci-fi).

 

The problem is IRL FTL is shit. For whoever said they want to have FTL for real and "reach for the stars", read up on time dilation.
A 3 year trip in FTL could mean you and your ship aging 3 years but Earth 60,000 years.
Not fun.

Anyway, the world I'd written was set in 4000 AD. Roads had dissapeared, being replaced by fusion powered underground trains to not disfigure what's above ground.
AI has not achieved sentience (nor do I think it ever will).
The maximum speed of a ship is 20% the speed of light.

 

Sorry, but this is not correct. There is no valid solution to the Lorenz transformation for v > c. Your scale factor is computer by 1 / sqrt( 1 - ( v^2 / c^2 )). When v > c, you end up with an imaginary number.

Time dilation is only a problem near the speed of light, even at 80% that, the effects are almost negligible (20%.) At 80% light speed, you could send astronauts Alpha Centauri and back in 20 years Earth time, 14 years spaceship time (don't forget length contraction.)

Time dilation would actually probably be a benefit. If you could get to 90% the speed of light, the trip would be 18 earth years, but only about 6 years on the ship.

 

Meaning your son could be older than you, theoretically.

How is that beneficial exactly?

It's still fiction. Seeing that would be a total turn-off to me.

Besides, my number was quite obviously hyperbole.

 

Re that space can't fold: I don't see why not.

Plenty of stuff can't be explained by relativity. It's why we have other branches like quantum physics which to me (admittedly only a novice in science) seem to be direct contradictions to Poincaré's theory of GR.

Besides, GR proves the existence of white holes... except they don't exist. Why should it not be the same with dark matter?


Another trope I dealt with was the fact there's no sound in space. All spaceships in my world have captors that detect waves and trabslate them to sound, so effectively while you're in the spaceship you hear what's around you if you turn the capters on (useful in a dogfight in space, and can be relaxing since planets make pretty relaxing "sounds").
Not sure how realistic it is.