But nothing physical is actually traveling transwarp here. Certainly, "you" are not traveling faster than light. And I strongly suspect that nothing is being "communicated" at all. The paired particle experiment (thought experiment, more accurately) has more to do with mathematics than it does with transmitting information. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with particles having opposite spins, I believe. This has more to do with the universe functioning as an organic, multidimensional, mathematical whole than it does with one part of it talking to another. You're talking 4+ dimensional interaction here. In any event, you are certainly still not getting a free lunch. You're not going to go from here to Alpha Centauri in under an hour.
The final question in discussing all of these Quantum Mechanical work-arounds to Relativity is whether, when you get there and look back, you're going to see the universe as you left it. Or are there going to be subtle differences due to the fact that you haven't really traveled purely in space but have skewed your coordinate system in such away that you have traveled in space at the expense of your location in time and higher dimensions. That may not be of concern, unless when you get back your girl friend has vanished.
All your technical workarounds ignore the fundamental reason for the necessity of Relativity. Light in Einstein's theory is really just a physical stand-in for communication. What Einstein is really saying is that you can't know what's going to happen before it happens. THAT foundation of relativity is not physical. It's logical. It goes to the heart of the logical system upon which science is based. It simply says that things must make sense. If things don't make sense, then science is a chimera and you might as well learn spells and pray to the corn god.
Having read a bit of Einstein in my youth, I would suspect that what he meant by "fair" was "within the confines of physical law" and not "without cheating." How does one go about cheating in this regard? A coherent answer to THAT truly would be a major scientific advancement.
They actually did, but that's not the point. The point is that some article in some scientific journal is not the same as a theory whose implications are born out by reality. If there were no fossils, evolution would never have been accepted. If there were easy ways to travel interstellar distances, we would be eating lunch at the Ganymedian equivalent of McDonalds.
And as I also suggested, there ARE other explanations: habitable planets a dime a dozen, Earth-based life being at the early stages of development of life in the cosmos, etc. In the latter case, the American Native analogy is even more important.
The whole point of Special Relativity is that you need infinite energy to even GET to the speed of light. Positing some theory that only requires "insane" amounts of energy is hardly a solution.
As for your second point, the answer is economic. There's a big difference between building a bunch of wooden boats and manufacturing a fleet of intra-galactic star cruisers, even those of the common sublight variety. That kind of effort would require a relatively slow development of infrastructure along the colonized pathways. Unfortunately, there are no islands in deep space, no assurance that there will be habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, no friendly natives willing to teach the explorers how to plant corn, no equatorial currents pointed directly toward habitable areas, and most importantly, no recopied maps left over from Phoenician/Greek times with grid systems centered on Alexandria, Egypt.
And above all else, unlike Earth (and Star Trek), any intelligent beings encountered along the way will most likely not be human, and possibly not even humanoid. The fact is that exploration is one of those endeavors that just doesn't scale very well.
"exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here."
I'll just run down to my local discount store and buy a quart of exotic matter. Oh, sorry, I'd expect exotic matter would be sold by the liter.;-)
Ya gotta read the posting as a whole! My point was that the lack of aliens on our doorstep tends to reinforce Einstein. Given that such fabulous (the real definition thereof) theories as the one you reference allow anybody anywhere to travel at unlimited speeds, my point is only reinforced further, that since there are no aliens on our doorstep, there must not be any practical way to impliment them.
Oh wait, a UFO just landed in my backyard. Nevermind.;-)
Let me clarify by making a simple analogy. An American Native of the mid-15th Century hypothesizes that earthwide teleportation should be possible using "exotic beads." These consist of a particular variation on the pattern of beads woven into a beaver shirt. All that is necessary is that the proper pattern be found. One can imagine that a discussion develops about whether such a thing is really possible. I won't get into the various arguments that could be presented. Suffice to say that a few years later the Europeans show up in wooden sail boats. Draw your own conclusions.
The simple answer is relativity. Despite worm holes, warp drive, hyper drive, tachyon fields, and all the other SF solutions, nobody has ever come up with a mathematically viable solution to Einstein's limitation on travel speeds in the universe. To put it country simple, if they could have gotten here, we'd be living on a reservation already. The only other obvious answer is that habitable water covered planets are a dime a dozen in the cosmos.
Does this mean the recording industry can be prosecuted under the new anti-terrorism acts?
Some of this idiocy should begin mitigating when campaign finance reform kicks in next election cycle. I just hope it's not too late. Does anyone want to take odds on whether there ARE elections in 2004?
Film cameras use expensive film and expensive processing. My CD1000 uses mini CDs at $0.005 a shot and I don't have to archive them. They already are. I can copy the data to a regular sized CD for backup and I can print or not print as I like. And I don't have to carry a laptop around with me. The one advantage of film is it gives you high definition with a small storage format (the roll of negatives). That's where digital still hasn't quite caught up. The bigger the file, the more portable data storage you need.
It ain't about legal. It's about ethical. Civilized human beings do not do things simply because they CAN under a flawed legal system. What keeps society functioning at all is that most people follow their own lights and do what they consider to be right, not what the idiot legal system tells them they are allowed to do. In short, your attitude is barbaric.
I have to agree with the guy. The whole moderation system is based on a bunch of yodels who don't even bother to read the directions. And metamoderating them doesn't seem to do anything but waste my time. Time to go back to reading the stories and ignoring the comments.
One begins to wonder if this nimrod started the fish business so he could sue people. He's obviously not doing much for his business by broadcasting the fact that certain folks don't like his service. If he were really concerned about his reputation he'd keep his mouth shut. Bottom Line: Whacko.
Mentor, the CAD program, has been using this sort of technology for years. Various letters are traced on the screen while holding the main button and the functions for which the letters stand are activated. This is deinitely, as you suggest, NOT an invention of Opera.
Since neither Australia nor Puerto Rico is at the pole, there is a considerable amount of overlap between the two locations in terms of the part of the sky that is visible at some time during the year. The ideal spot would be on the equator, but both locations are close enough to make the comparison far less than mutually exclusive.
As for subjective viewings of the sky, I fail to see what this has to do with anything, since it has more to do with local conditions than latitude. I would suspect that the best place to search the sky would be in the mountains of Equador. Might even be a better place to bump into aliens, considering its distance from the beaten path.;-)
As for star densities, I would imagine that the type of stars would be much more suggestive than their density. And on a purely statistical level, the significance of the visible density of the Milky Way at any particular spot on Earth pales in comparison to the star density close to Earth, since even most of the Milky Way is too far away to be of much interest. In this particular instance, "closer" doesn't mean the same thing as "close."
I would suggest that the most practical approach to this type of exploration would be to concentrate the limited resources on a few nearby stars, beginning with Alpha Centauri, and forgetting about stars whose current condition won't be visible to us until our civilization has long since died or migrated. There's also a purely practical reason for this approach. An inhabited planet orbiting in the binary Alpha Centauri system could conceivably be a real threat to us at some point. The farther away, the less there is to worry about. The greatest threat would be someone inhabiting the outer reaches of our own solar system.
Considering Bill Gates had his greedy little paw in it, I am far from sad. Does anyone here really want to see worldwide broadband in the hands of this same ethically challenged crew?
"...in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials."
I haven't been following the UFO press lately. Has there been a spate of sightings in the Outback?
On a more serious note, are these characters saying that there are more advanced stellar civilizations in the southern sky than the northern sky? One shudders at the contorted logic and statistical analysis that could have led to such a conclusion.
"(once you get past 10, calling it OS X is kind of odd)."
Yeah, but then they could call it OS Xi, and make all kinds of neat puns about how it's an Xi-book. Hey, Pentium means five, and last time I looked Intel's way beyond the 586 architecture. Just what exactly DOES "Pentium 4" mean? Not to mention the jump from Roman to Arabic numerals, the opposite of what Apple did. Could it be they were afraid nobody would know what IV meant? Or were they afraid somebody would quip that Intel was now on IV life support? There's a point when it becomes a trademark and ceases to mean very much at all.
The big hurdle, I would surmise, is figuring out a good reason for attaching your toaster to your digital camera. Now if the camera had AI, it could look at the toaster and then send an infrared signal to your smart alarm clock that would synthesize a real loud Kachung! sound like the old toasters make and give you an incentive for getting up.
Your bathroom scale could be linked to the refrigerator door lock to help you lose weight.
Your reading lamp could be linked to the kid's stereo--one one, one off.
Seriously, it would be nice to hook things together easily, but as someone already pointed out, you still need drivers. Of course you turn the mobile OS in say your PDA into bloatware like Windows by including every driver under the sun, it might work, after somebody invents the super battery. Maybe just add a USB port to all electrical outlets. That way you could just plug the hardware into the main power supply.
In a closed system, DISORDER increases all of the time, no "pretty much" about it. ENTROPY is the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that defines that increase.
Slashdot Mirror
I excitedly await your patent application.
Yeah, you might end up in gaol.
But nothing physical is actually traveling transwarp here. Certainly, "you" are not traveling faster than light. And I strongly suspect that nothing is being "communicated" at all. The paired particle experiment (thought experiment, more accurately) has more to do with mathematics than it does with transmitting information. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with particles having opposite spins, I believe. This has more to do with the universe functioning as an organic, multidimensional, mathematical whole than it does with one part of it talking to another. You're talking 4+ dimensional interaction here. In any event, you are certainly still not getting a free lunch. You're not going to go from here to Alpha Centauri in under an hour.
The final question in discussing all of these Quantum Mechanical work-arounds to Relativity is whether, when you get there and look back, you're going to see the universe as you left it. Or are there going to be subtle differences due to the fact that you haven't really traveled purely in space but have skewed your coordinate system in such away that you have traveled in space at the expense of your location in time and higher dimensions. That may not be of concern, unless when you get back your girl friend has vanished.
All your technical workarounds ignore the fundamental reason for the necessity of Relativity. Light in Einstein's theory is really just a physical stand-in for communication. What Einstein is really saying is that you can't know what's going to happen before it happens. THAT foundation of relativity is not physical. It's logical. It goes to the heart of the logical system upon which science is based. It simply says that things must make sense. If things don't make sense, then science is a chimera and you might as well learn spells and pray to the corn god.
Having read a bit of Einstein in my youth, I would suspect that what he meant by "fair" was "within the confines of physical law" and not "without cheating." How does one go about cheating in this regard? A coherent answer to THAT truly would be a major scientific advancement.
They actually did, but that's not the point. The point is that some article in some scientific journal is not the same as a theory whose implications are born out by reality. If there were no fossils, evolution would never have been accepted. If there were easy ways to travel interstellar distances, we would be eating lunch at the Ganymedian equivalent of McDonalds.
And as I also suggested, there ARE other explanations: habitable planets a dime a dozen, Earth-based life being at the early stages of development of life in the cosmos, etc. In the latter case, the American Native analogy is even more important.
The whole point of Special Relativity is that you need infinite energy to even GET to the speed of light. Positing some theory that only requires "insane" amounts of energy is hardly a solution.
As for your second point, the answer is economic. There's a big difference between building a bunch of wooden boats and manufacturing a fleet of intra-galactic star cruisers, even those of the common sublight variety. That kind of effort would require a relatively slow development of infrastructure along the colonized pathways. Unfortunately, there are no islands in deep space, no assurance that there will be habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, no friendly natives willing to teach the explorers how to plant corn, no equatorial currents pointed directly toward habitable areas, and most importantly, no recopied maps left over from Phoenician/Greek times with grid systems centered on Alexandria, Egypt.
And above all else, unlike Earth (and Star Trek), any intelligent beings encountered along the way will most likely not be human, and possibly not even humanoid. The fact is that exploration is one of those endeavors that just doesn't scale very well.
"exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here."
;-)
;-)
I'll just run down to my local discount store and buy a quart of exotic matter. Oh, sorry, I'd expect exotic matter would be sold by the liter.
Ya gotta read the posting as a whole! My point was that the lack of aliens on our doorstep tends to reinforce Einstein. Given that such fabulous (the real definition thereof) theories as the one you reference allow anybody anywhere to travel at unlimited speeds, my point is only reinforced further, that since there are no aliens on our doorstep, there must not be any practical way to impliment them.
Oh wait, a UFO just landed in my backyard. Nevermind.
Let me clarify by making a simple analogy. An American Native of the mid-15th Century hypothesizes that earthwide teleportation should be possible using "exotic beads." These consist of a particular variation on the pattern of beads woven into a beaver shirt. All that is necessary is that the proper pattern be found. One can imagine that a discussion develops about whether such a thing is really possible. I won't get into the various arguments that could be presented. Suffice to say that a few years later the Europeans show up in wooden sail boats. Draw your own conclusions.
The simple answer is relativity. Despite worm holes, warp drive, hyper drive, tachyon fields, and all the other SF solutions, nobody has ever come up with a mathematically viable solution to Einstein's limitation on travel speeds in the universe. To put it country simple, if they could have gotten here, we'd be living on a reservation already. The only other obvious answer is that habitable water covered planets are a dime a dozen in the cosmos.
Does this mean the recording industry can be prosecuted under the new anti-terrorism acts?
Some of this idiocy should begin mitigating when campaign finance reform kicks in next election cycle. I just hope it's not too late. Does anyone want to take odds on whether there ARE elections in 2004?
Film cameras use expensive film and expensive processing. My CD1000 uses mini CDs at $0.005 a shot and I don't have to archive them. They already are. I can copy the data to a regular sized CD for backup and I can print or not print as I like. And I don't have to carry a laptop around with me. The one advantage of film is it gives you high definition with a small storage format (the roll of negatives). That's where digital still hasn't quite caught up. The bigger the file, the more portable data storage you need.
But it's not a GOOD camera.
Son,
It ain't about legal. It's about ethical. Civilized human beings do not do things simply because they CAN under a flawed legal system. What keeps society functioning at all is that most people follow their own lights and do what they consider to be right, not what the idiot legal system tells them they are allowed to do. In short, your attitude is barbaric.
[signed]
Not anonymous and not a coward.
And why exactly are you posting, if I may be allowed to ask the all too obvious question?
Go recide the pledge of allegiance.
I have to agree with the guy. The whole moderation system is based on a bunch of yodels who don't even bother to read the directions. And metamoderating them doesn't seem to do anything but waste my time. Time to go back to reading the stories and ignoring the comments.
One begins to wonder if this nimrod started the fish business so he could sue people. He's obviously not doing much for his business by broadcasting the fact that certain folks don't like his service. If he were really concerned about his reputation he'd keep his mouth shut. Bottom Line: Whacko.
Clarence Thomas.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Mentor, the CAD program, has been using this sort of technology for years. Various letters are traced on the screen while holding the main button and the functions for which the letters stand are activated. This is deinitely, as you suggest, NOT an invention of Opera.
Since neither Australia nor Puerto Rico is at the pole, there is a considerable amount of overlap between the two locations in terms of the part of the sky that is visible at some time during the year. The ideal spot would be on the equator, but both locations are close enough to make the comparison far less than mutually exclusive.
;-)
As for subjective viewings of the sky, I fail to see what this has to do with anything, since it has more to do with local conditions than latitude. I would suspect that the best place to search the sky would be in the mountains of Equador. Might even be a better place to bump into aliens, considering its distance from the beaten path.
As for star densities, I would imagine that the type of stars would be much more suggestive than their density. And on a purely statistical level, the significance of the visible density of the Milky Way at any particular spot on Earth pales in comparison to the star density close to Earth, since even most of the Milky Way is too far away to be of much interest. In this particular instance, "closer" doesn't mean the same thing as "close."
I would suggest that the most practical approach to this type of exploration would be to concentrate the limited resources on a few nearby stars, beginning with Alpha Centauri, and forgetting about stars whose current condition won't be visible to us until our civilization has long since died or migrated. There's also a purely practical reason for this approach. An inhabited planet orbiting in the binary Alpha Centauri system could conceivably be a real threat to us at some point. The farther away, the less there is to worry about. The greatest threat would be someone inhabiting the outer reaches of our own solar system.
"I am sad to see this happen"
Considering Bill Gates had his greedy little paw in it, I am far from sad. Does anyone here really want to see worldwide broadband in the hands of this same ethically challenged crew?
"...in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials."
I haven't been following the UFO press lately. Has there been a spate of sightings in the Outback?
On a more serious note, are these characters saying that there are more advanced stellar civilizations in the southern sky than the northern sky? One shudders at the contorted logic and statistical analysis that could have led to such a conclusion.
"(once you get past 10, calling it OS X is kind of odd)."
Yeah, but then they could call it OS Xi, and make all kinds of neat puns about how it's an Xi-book. Hey, Pentium means five, and last time I looked Intel's way beyond the 586 architecture. Just what exactly DOES "Pentium 4" mean? Not to mention the jump from Roman to Arabic numerals, the opposite of what Apple did. Could it be they were afraid nobody would know what IV meant? Or were they afraid somebody would quip that Intel was now on IV life support? There's a point when it becomes a trademark and ceases to mean very much at all.
Except the OS, which is demonic.
The big hurdle, I would surmise, is figuring out a good reason for attaching your toaster to your digital camera. Now if the camera had AI, it could look at the toaster and then send an infrared signal to your smart alarm clock that would synthesize a real loud Kachung! sound like the old toasters make and give you an incentive for getting up.
Your bathroom scale could be linked to the refrigerator door lock to help you lose weight.
Your reading lamp could be linked to the kid's stereo--one one, one off.
Seriously, it would be nice to hook things together easily, but as someone already pointed out, you still need drivers. Of course you turn the mobile OS in say your PDA into bloatware like Windows by including every driver under the sun, it might work, after somebody invents the super battery. Maybe just add a USB port to all electrical outlets. That way you could just plug the hardware into the main power supply.
There is such a thing as taking modular too far.
"entropy increases all of the time"
In a closed system, DISORDER increases all of the time, no "pretty much" about it. ENTROPY is the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that defines that increase.
The article says they're shooting for a factor of 1.5 versus the price of a 2D flat panel.