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[Bauglir]

You monster.

Science also told us that this was true. Also, that red is a lower energy state than blue, and therefore fire is cooler than water.

[Bohandas]

You monster.

Science also told us that this was true. Also, that red is a lower energy state than blue, and therefore fire is cooler than water.

If you heat a fire hot enough it'll turn blue.

[Bauglir]

Quiet, you. Or I will share with you these cool, refreshing embers I have here. In your face.

I've gotten a bit too silly haven't I?

[Bohandas]

Quiet, you. Or I will share with you these cool, refreshing embers I have here. In your face.

I've gotten a bit too silly haven't I?

Yes, the whole premise is silly and it's very badly written. I'm the senior officer here and I haven't had a funny line yet. So I'm stopping it.

[Il Palazzo]

If the universe itself is expanding, how can we tell? It is not like there is anything to which we might compare it.

It works like this:
Hey, look!  All the galaxies are receeding from us with speeds proportional to their distance!(1)

What could that mean!? Either we're at the centre of the universe(but most of us are not arrogant enough to suggest that), or maybe the space is expanding.

Hmmm, I wonder how would the universe need to look like if the space were to be expanding? - By extrapolation, expanding universe should once have been smaller(meaning less space, same amount of mass) - this suggesting a very dense, hot universe some time ago. In such an universe, there would be a time when matter would be opaque to light and then, as the space expands, would cool enough to allow photons to escape constant interactions with matter and propagate in all directions. As the universe expands, this light would get gradually redshifted(loose energy).(2)

1 is the observation that gave birth to the idea
2 is the prediction derived from the hypothesis that explained the observation 1.

Predictions of 2 have been measured(the discovery of microwave bacground radiation) and found to be almost exactly like what the theory(no longer a hypotheis) predicted.

As the crackpot conspiracy "theorists" say: Coincidence?

[G-Flex]

There's a difference between "the universe is expanding" and "the observable universe is expanding", although in practice they mean the same thing.

[Eagleon]

On a serious note though, the laws of physics as currently understood do not actually forbid objects from moving faster than lightspeed, they mearly forbid things from accelerating past lightspeed; an object can move at superluminal velocities provided that it starts out that way;

Ok, but... The reason lightspeed is a barrier at all is that a particle's kinetic energy approaches infinity as it gets closer to c, regardless of its acceleration, yes? You're blowing conservation of momentum out of the water with an FTL particle with mass, and if you could trap one of these in a ring and collide it with some chicken soup, you're getting free hot soup, no? Problem, entropy indeed. I think it's much more likely that they've teleported one, not counting the even more likely possibility that it's an error.

Still, this has got the sci-fi author in me stirring again. So long, productivity.

[Starver]

Communication potential is nothing next to computation. Set up a 32- or 64-channel transmitter on Earth and somewhere else far away, hook it up to a computer (required speed depends on how much of a gap you have), use it to pass steps in an equation back and forth until finished. Instant answers to everything. Problem, entropy?

What are you actually suggesting here?

If you're bouncing signals back and forth between us and a point 4ly distant, then normally you'd be getting a 8 year delay between the question and the answer.  Say we exploit the fact that we can send the signals so they get back a week (or any arbitrary amount of time) earlier than they would have done...  I'm not sure how much use that would be.


(Reminds me a bit of the whole "I want of those James Bond cars that can be invisible, I could get through traffic jams with it" thing that everyone was going on about when the one with the godawful Madonna song came out.  How?  By driving on the pavement/other side of the road, dodging the pedestrians/oncoming cars who don't know you're trying to use that space?  Because otherwise you've still got a traffic jam that you're stuck behind, with the added disadvantage of the car behind you not knowing that the Aston Martin-length space in front of him is not actually empty and shunting into you.  An intangible car might be good, for avoiding jams.  Invisible ones are not so useful in this circumstance.)

[Bauglir]

It'd work if you could get something up past 2c, which I guess could be theoretically possible if c is no longer a hard limit? It'd become an engineering problem, I suppose; this alone wouldn't do it, just establish the possibility. You'd get a higher gain on the degree to which you get your answers before you ask the question the further away you had your transmitters though. I think. I kind of suck at any sort of intuitive understanding of anyphysics that isn't Newtonian.

[RedKing]

It'd work if you could get something up past 2c, which I guess could be theoretically possible if c is no longer a hard limit? It'd become an engineering problem, I suppose; this alone wouldn't do it, just establish the possibility. You'd get a higher gain on the degree to which you get your answers before you ask the question the further away you had your transmitters though. I think. I kind of suck at any sort of intuitive understanding of anyphysics that isn't Newtonian.

Yeah, but the increased gain doesn't eventually start working into negative time territory. It's like saying "A 1% savings account can earn you a MILLION dollars a year! (If you have a billion dollars to put into savings...)".

And to borrow your example, if it were an effect operating at 2c you'd still get better aggregate performance from lots of tiny distances rather than long ones. Just like with current electronics.

[Virex]

We're also talking about neutrinos here, which interact with about 1 in every 10³⁶ atoms they meet...

[Starver]

Ninjaed, probably

It'd work if you could get something up past 2c, [...]

I still don't get it.  (Either me or thee, but right now I'll go with it being me.)

If you can send your signals on a nominally 8 year round trip at twice the speed they should, you get your echoed signal back in four years.  You send "Hello!" and you wait for years to hear... "Hello!"  Can't see it rivalling Cleverbot, it's just an echo chamber.

Are you confusing this with the speed increase point beyond which communication is instantaneous?  Even then, getting the echo before you sent it can only tell you what you are about to shout, and is only useful if you can hear what you were about to shout[1], modify what you're about to do and then shout out something different[2], thus doing an effectively parallel calculation.  Assuming you can do that, which may be considered a similar magnitude of speculation to the whole negative time-delay itself (if not completely linked in the first place).


[1] e.g. "I tried this particular travelling salesman route, and it was the shortest so far, at 5 hours travelling!"

[2] e.g. "I have now tried the first fifty possible routes, and the 14th was the shortest at 4 hours, so, you now need to have checked the 51st and tell us if this changes things in the next iteration"

[Bauglir]

Yeah, I definitely misunderstood.

[Eagleon]

Ninjaed, probably

It'd work if you could get something up past 2c, [...]

I still don't get it.  (Either me or thee, but right now I'll go with it being me.)

If you can send your signals on a nominally 8 year round trip at twice the speed they should, you get your echoed signal back in four years.  You send "Hello!" and you wait for years to hear... "Hello!"  Can't see it rivalling Cleverbot, it's just an echo chamber.

Are you confusing this with the speed increase point beyond which communication is instantaneous?  Even then, getting the echo before you sent it can only tell you what you are about to shout, and is only useful if you can hear what you were about to shout[1], modify what you're about to do and then shout out something different[2], thus doing an effectively parallel calculation.  Assuming you can do that, which may be considered a similar magnitude of speculation to the whole negative time-delay itself (if not completely linked in the first place).


[1] e.g. "I tried this particular travelling salesman route, and it was the shortest so far, at 5 hours travelling!"

[2] e.g. "I have now tried the first fifty possible routes, and the 14th was the shortest at 4 hours, so, you now need to have checked the 51st and tell us if this changes things in the next iteration"

This is exactly what I'm saying, and it's the reason why I included the clauses I did - you'd have to have a very large gap between each transmitter. Even at 2c, you'd still have to have a significant gap, but we're also talking on the timescale of computers, remember, so you could work pretty close to the absolute boundry it would require, which helps some.

Say you had the equation 2(256/(8 * 16)). Solving it step by step inside a computer, you have to first pass 8 and 16 to an operator, and the operator has to process it and send it back. But to begin with, with conventional computers, in your program memory you know that it's 8 and 16 that you have to pass for the first step, and you know where in the CPU you're passing it.

Now say you have an input stream (the transmitters) that operate on your memory and instructions directly. This is done with things like Cheat Engine all the time. You come to the step in your program that you're going to solve (time A), you solve it (time B), and then you send the next step in the program through your transmitter to the other side (time C). The other side receives the answer to the step at a speed not greater than half the time period it takes from A to C, and sends it back to be queued by the home computer at or before time A occurred, ready to inject as the answer so that the next step (4/128) can begin immediately. Rinse, repeat.

With this solution you're limited by memory access speed. I don't know if there's something faster, but it still jacks your processing capability waaaay the hell above normal physical limitations, if I understand those correctly. Of course, it's blatant violation of causality, which may or may not be an issue

[Starver]

But so far we've only got something getting somewhere slightly earlier than it should normally have arrived, not slightly earlier than it set off.  And while there are indeed problems in working out how the first might have happened, there's very little reason to believe that the second is going to be possible.

So signals travelling at 2c, 3c, 10,000c... doesn't matter, it's not going to do much more than shorten the delay you're introduciing by putting a huge loop in your system.  And, what was it?  1.000000034c or something?  Hardly useful.

Or, again, it might be me not t understanding.