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[Neruz]

I reckon most systems have way less resources than Sol.

Wat.

Where the hell do you get off 'reckoning' that?


And DJ; as i've already said, if you're relying on slower than light travel, anything beyond your immediate local cluster is pretty much unreachable, and you're sure as hell never going to meet any aliens.

[Grakelin]

I reckon most systems have way less resources than Sol.

That's true, except for the PS3, which is incredibly powerful. Blows the 360, the Wii, AND Sol right out of the water. I don't know why people even waste time on that Sol shit. The PS3 is the way to go. Sol doesn't even have any games, why bother?

[DJ]

Well, sure, younger stars are going to have more mineral wealth, but I sure hope you like molten planets and crazy levels of radiation.

And if you're already breaking physics with FTL, why not go full-fledged space wizard and break conservation of mass/energy as well? Oh, and time travel, since obviously space/time doesn't have much of a grip on you.

[Neruz]

You are aware that FTL doesn't require breaking physics at all, merely bending them. Breaking conservation of mass is a much worse crime.


As for Time Travel; nothing special about that. What possible reason do you have to be so sure that time is linear and irreversible? None of the other dimensions are, why does Time get to be special?

[DJ]

Well, you could bend it instead of breaking it and just pull mass out of the future or something (since you can already bend space-time).

And time travel is impossible because nobody has assassinated Hitler yet.

[Neruz]

Well, you could bend it instead of breaking it and just pull mass out of the future or something (since you can already bend space-time).

You could, but then you're skirting some pretty frigging dangerous ground. Be safer to pull mass out of an alternate timeline.

But you might have FTL without true time travel; Wormholes for example provide instantainious travel from point to point, which breaks light cones and provides a sort of technical time travel in the strictest sense of the word, but not really practical time travel.

And time travel is impossible because nobody has assassinated Hitler yet.

Every part of that sentance is wrong.

[DJ]

Just a simplified way of saying time travel breaks causality, which breaks a lot of other important stuff. More reality breaking than violation of conservation of mass/energy, I'd say.

[Neruz]

Pff, not really. Causality only gets it's knickers in a knot if you have one single linear timeline. If you consider at least two, or more likely three dimensions of time, it's not a problem at all.


Wormholes for example, would allow you to go 'backwards' in time by outpacing your own light cone, witnessing events twice as your light cone overtakes you. While an interesting mental excersize, it doesn't actually provide any tangible benefit except that you get to watch something happen twice. As causality violations go, it's pretty minor, since you can only change things that havn't yet been affected; you're still stuck unable to change anything that has already been encompassed by your light cone.

[DJ]

And mass and energy just popping into existence (from an alternate universe, but that's irrelevant) doesn't break conservation of mass and energy?

[Neruz]

Technically no. The mass and energy is 'popping' into existence from a 3 dimensional perspective, but from a 6, or maybe 9, i think you need 9 dimensions to do alternate Universes, it's just moving around. Thus conversvation of energy remains unharmed; the net energy in the entire universe (that is; everything) is unchanged, it's only in our particular corner that it's increasing or decreasing.

[DJ]

So technically, for us 3D creatures, conservation of mass and energy is completely irrelevant and we can break it (from our subjective viewpoint) any way we want to? Why don't we observe it being broken a bit more often?

Oh, and I thought the whole alternate universes thing is *very* fuzzy science.

[Neruz]

No, conservation of mass is very important, it's just a Universal law, not a 3 dimensional law.

Why don't we observe it being broken? It's entirely possible we do observe it being broken, we just don't know what to look for. Who knows.

Oh, and I thought the whole alternate universes thing is *very* fuzzy science.

It is, i could be completely and totally wrong. And we could be the only living creatures in the entire Universe; both hypothesis (and many more besides) are entirely possible.

It does, however, make logical sense that there are at least 10 dimensions (or 9 and a bit dimensions depending on how you look at it), based on extrapolating upwards from the 3 we work with. That doesn't really mean a whole lot, but it counts for something.



Also; Quantum Entanglement gleefully breaks causality in half, and while it's not quite as solid a theory as, say Gravity, as theories go Quantum Entanglement is pretty good and it has a rather surprising amount of evidence backing it up, with more accrueing each day. You wouldn't believe the hoops some people are jumping through to try and prove that Quatum Entanglement doesn't violate causality after all. Retrocausality is my favorite

It's probably also pertinent to point out that what appears to be breaking causality from a 3 dimensional standpoint may not neccessarily be breaking causality from a 9 dimensional one. In this respect, causality is a theory that requires 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension, if you have more than 1 linear temporal dimension, causality becomes kind of, well not moot, but complicated.

[DJ]

Isn't the whole 10 dimensions thing (wait, wasn't it 11/27?) based on string theory, which a lot of serious physicists believe to be a load of aether-grade garbage?

[Neruz]

Well it depends on if you count 'point' as a dimension. Usually 'point' is concieved as dimension 0, so you have dimensions 0 - 10, or 11 dimensions.

That's one way of looking at the world, and follows logical extrapolation. Other (often more convoluted) ways involve more dimensions, with i think the record being somewhere around 36 or something.


String theory requires higher dimensions, and depending on the string theory depends on how many dimensions are needed, but the 0 - 10 dimensions hypothesis doesn't need String theory and quite happily exists independantly of it.

You may or may not have heard of Imaginging the Tenth Dimension, neat book, well worth a read. The page in the link is a short movie that goes through the logical steps required to get dimensions 0 to 10, and while it does mention that in some forms of String theory, superstrings vibrating in the 10th dimension do everything, the superstrings are not required for the 11 dimensions.



The book certainly isn't perfect, and like i said it could be completely wrong, but it does at least make logical sense.

[DJ]

String theory is still a purely mathematical theory, with no real physics to back it up. You can construct all sorts of exotic theories out of pure mathematics, but that doesn't make them all true. The theoretical dimensions beyond our 3 also don't have much backing in actual, testable physics, AFAIK. If we're going to treat pure conjecture as solid basis for making predictions, we might as well invoke magic.