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With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)

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Vaermina said:
Nothing has been mentioned about Zeta radiation, but Lantern FTL at least in this story allows anyone using it to pass through solid matter so it's probably either space warping or dimension skipping.
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The only matter it can pass through is air. He needs to make a vacuum tube for water and he flat out can't transition through the mountain.
The Chosen One said:
IIRC, OL's ring-based FTL involves transit through the Elemental Plane of Avarice, without technically moving through normal space at superluminal velocity.
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OL himself does go through the demiplane of avarice, but the transition does make a construct briefly that travels through the intervening distance faster than light.
The Chosen One said:
It's also worh noting that dolmen gates are not actually teleportation; they use sympathetic magic to cause both ends to occupy the same space. Presumably putting them on separate planets with different orbits would require a lot more magic to smooth over the relativity issues, but it's, you know, magic. So why not?
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Yeah, Dolmen gates are effectively a form of space warping. It's why I didn't mention them.
 
rkyeun said:
It's still perfectly clear. The speed of light isn't a special constant that applies to light in particular. It's a relationship between distances in space and durations of time that affects the shape of the universe. And being able to FTL or instant teleport means you can choose proper reference frames to do it in such that you arrive before you left and shake hands with your pre-trip self. Because once you do perform that transition, reality (ours at least) stops caring how you got there and lets you come back under normal physics. Hopefully this doesn't summon clockwork spiders.
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How FTL teleportation means automatic time never made sense to me.
I would assume time is not ever going backward, only going forward at different speeds.
How does arriving before your light equal time travel?
 
BrambleThorn said:
How FTL teleportation means automatic time never made sense to me.
I would assume time is not ever going backward, only going forward at different speeds.
How does arriving before your light equal time travel?
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Knowing a significant amount less about science than most folks here, it seems to me that the argument is that, usually, nothing can move faster than light, not even molecules, and so, by arriving faster than light, you've moved somewhere faster than your molecules could have moved, so you're briefly existing in two places at once, which only makes sense if you've traveled in time?

It probably has something to do with how relative time slows down the faster you go, or, the closer you get to light speed. Surpassing light speed means you must then be moving backwards in relative time. Bam. Time travel. It seems a bit like insane troll logic to me, but I assume the math checks out.

I might just be flat wrong, though. See my admitted lack of science know-how.

EDIT: Upon looking around online, I found these explanations.
samantha_cs @ arstechnica.com said:
FTL equals time travel? - Ars Technica OpenForum
The classic example used to demonstrate this is the railroad car with a flash bulb in the middle and photon detectors at each end. To an observer standing on the rail car, the two photon detectors will go off simultaneously after a flash. However, to an observer on the ground, the rear detector will go off first, because it is moving to meet the photons emitted by the flash bulb. Additionally, an observer moving on a parallel line going faster will observe the front detector going off first, since in his reference frame the rail car is moving backwards.

What does this have to do with causality? Well, a central tenet of causality is that event A must precede event B in order for event A to cause event B. Since the precise timing of events can shift (as demonstrated above) in relativistic frames, special relativity extends this statement. Event A must precede Event B in all reference frames.

It is at this point that one really must look at the math, but what one finds if one does is that that this last statement breaks down fairly simply. If two events are separated by enough space that light cannot get from one event to the other event, then there is some relativistic frame in which the order of the events changes. If, however, the two events are separated by enough time that light can get from one event to the other event, then one event will precede the other in all reference frames. The first scenario is called a 'spacelike' separation, while the second is called a 'timelike' separation.

How does this relate to time travel? Well, consider two events, A and B separated by a spacelike interval. If Event A can send a message to Event B faster than light, then that message can travel backwards in time, since in some reference frame Event B happens before Event A.
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and
LordFirth @ arstechnica.com said:
The "flashlight on a train" thought experiment - Ars Technica OpenForum
We've actually covered this in some discussions a long while ago, and there are some interesting visualizations of it online. (Although, at the moment, I can't find any real good links that don't simply show the math.)

In a nutshell, the experiment is thus:

Alice and Bob are working on interstellar space travel techniques. Alice makes a spaceship that flies at 99.9% the speed of light, and decides to take off for the far reaches of space (it's only going to take her 66 subjective days to reach a star 4 light-years away, but over 4 years of earth time).

Meanwhile, Bob keeps working. About 3 years after Alice left, Bob suddenly discovers instantaneous travel. Woohoo! So, he teleports over to Alice's ship to laugh at her.

He shows up 45-ish days into Alice's travels. Does his gloating, and then offers to take her back with him. They then teleport back to Earth.

But, here's the problem. According to Alice, Earth's timeframe had only advanced a small fraction of the 45 days -- to her, the Earth was going very slow. In fact, to her, the Earth had only rotated twice around its axis in the time she had left. Therefore, when they teleport back, they would be at 2 days after she left.

This means Bob is now 3 years in his past.

Hence, Faster-than-light made for time travel.

Now, you can be all skeptical of this story, and that's where the math starts to comes into play along with the appropriate diagrams.
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I dunno if that helps at all, though, or whether that supports or refutes what I said above. It's a bit beyond me.
 
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drvash said:
I'm shying away from New York City simply because it's feels like the center of the comic book universe (at least in Marvel comics*) and I want to see something different as a change of pace. Keystone City could be a nice, as it'd get the Flash involved who we haven't seen much of in a while.

*Tourist: "God, I can't throw a rock in New York City without hitting a superhero. Watch this."
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The number of heroes in NY not be higher percentage-wise than most places, but a factor of the large population overall.
 
BrambleThorn said:
How FTL teleportation means automatic time never made sense to me.
I would assume time is not ever going backward, only going forward at different speeds.
How does arriving before your light equal time travel?
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It has something to do with the light cone.

That said FTL doesn't automatically mean Time Travel, it means the FTL could be used to Time Travel.

Mind you there is a good deal of debate on whether attempting to use an FTL system to travel though time would work or not since some mathematical proofs paint it likely that any attempted to actually travel backwards in time with one would cause the FTL system to explode.
 
The_Letter_K said:
I dunno if that helps at all, though, or whether that supports or refutes what I said above. It's a bit beyond me.
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That is a nonsensical explanation.
Like I said, they are both going forward in time, just at different speeds. As Alice approaches the speed of light, she begins to go forward in time at a slower incremental pace than bob. If Bob invents FTL travel 3 years in and goes to offer her a ride yes, it only seemed like it was 45 days for her. So what? That is not time travel, it is time dilation. When they go back to Earth, there is no time travel, there is a travel, and a change in time dilation.

The 6th and 7th passages of the train experiment seem to need "if I did not experience it, then it did not happen" magic to work.
 
BrambleThorn said:
That is a nonsensical explanation.
Like I said, they are both going forward in time, just at different speeds. As Alice approaches the speed of light, she begins to go forward in time at a slower incremental pace than bob. If Bob invents FTL travel 3 years in and goes to offer her a ride yes, it only seemed like it was 45 days for her. So what? That is not time travel, it is time dilation. When they go back to Earth, there is no time travel, there is a travel, and a change in time dilation.

The 6th and 7th passages of the train experiment seem to need "if I did not experience it, then it did not happen" magic to work.
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Well, I think the nonsense is the point of it, after reading over what @Ciber posted. It's pretty consistent with the explanations I found, from my perspective, and that website states it disproves the probability of FTL in our universe.

The rub seems to come from FTL being real and observed on Earth 16, which basically means that that nonsense somehow is possible there, which confuses me, but I think it's supposed to? I dunno, we're getting off topic. I'd say we could move to PM, but you'd be better off asking somebody else if you're still confused about it. I'm unlikely to help.
 
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@BrambleThorn @The_Letter_K @Vaermina

Lex and Paul are working on interstellar space travel techniques. Lex makes a spaceship that flies at 99.9% the speed of light, and decides to take off for the far reaches of space (it's only going to take Lex sixty-six subjective days to reach a star four light-years away, but a little over four years of Earth time).

Meanwhile, Paul keeps working. About three years after Lex left, Paul gets an Orange Power Ring. Woohoo! So, Paul transitions over to Lex's ship to laugh at Lex.

Paul shows up fourty-five-ish days into Lex's travels and in Lex's reference frame. Paul does his gloating, and then offers to take Lex back with him. They then transition back to Earth, and arrive in Earth's reference frame.

But, here's the problem. According to Lex, Earth's timeframe had only advanced a small fraction of the fourty-five days. From this vantage point, the Earth is going very slow. In fact, to Lex, the Earth had only rotated twice around its axis in the time Lex had traveled. For Lex, the Earth in the window is only two days older, because he's been getting further from the Earth at nearly a light-day every day and it's taken this long to add up to two whole days. Therefore, when they transition back instantly by FTL means to that two-day-older Earth, they're still only fourty-seven days after Lex left.

This means Paul is now two years and ten-and-a-half months in his past, before his past self who is still on Earth somewhere ever got his Orange Power Ring. This might present a problem if the timelooped Paul decides that on the day the Orange Power Ring arrives to non-timelooped Paul, timelooped Paul should give his timelooped Orange Power Ring over as well, so that non-timelooped Paul can start his journey with two rings. Thereby ensuring that timelooped Paul will now have two rings to turn over in the next loop... and three in the next...


So how do comic books handle this discrepancy?

Sometimes they don't bother. Superman flew back in time by going around the world at FTL. Canon.

Sometimes they use comic book physics, and declare that relativity only applies to impact and mass but doesn't cause any time distortion. If you travel at near lightspeed on a ship such that it takes five Earth days to reach somewhere, but which IRL would mean you experience subjective seconds due to your irrational velocity, in the comic book world it still takes five days subjective for the spaceship passengers.

Sometimes they throw out relativity entirely, and Earth is a privileged reference frame by which all others are measured, light moves instantly despite the name, and the "speed of light" is just a term used to describe a ship's velocity with no actual relevance to light itself, which is always drawn frozen in panels.

And sometimes Superboy Prime punches time and breaks it, which is even more ridiculous and stupid than FTL even existing in the first place. But hey. Comic books.

The BEST story I've read involving time travel is Greg Egan's "Orthogonal" trilogy. In which he changes the laws of physics such that FTL and time travel is casually possible with clockwork technology. The problem of course, as Greg Egan loves to explore, is that every law of physics is connected at every other law, and flipping a single sign from a minus to a plus to make FTL possible has devastating consequences for the shape of the universe as we know it and every particle we think of as real. And Egan has the math to prove it, laid out with the complexity and depth of a doctoral thesis on his webpages.
 
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Demeanour (part 7)
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    • 20th April
    08:39 GMT -5

    "Okay, turn it off."

    Mars completely fills the front window of the Bio-Ship as I remove my construct, our angle of approach meaning that I can just about see the yellow-gray edge of the Martian horizon near the top. "Construct deactivated."

    M'gann nods. "Setting course for Mel'dilo'rn. ETA, four minutes."

    "Is that them?" Kon points to something through the window, a tiny coloured speck against the rusty grey sands below us. Ring, magnify?

    "Yes. They're going to monitor us as we approach. They're actually getting a bit…"

    Kon looks mildly concerned. "A bit what?"

    "Umm. Pushy? Intrusive? They're not interrogating me exactly, but they're certainly… Not being polite. One thing I definitely haven't missed about Mars is the racism."

    The patrol ship itself is primarily blue in colour. It puts me in mind of a cross between M'gann's Bio-Ship and… Thunderbird 2? Or maybe Moya? Same sort of bulbous body section with trailing, disproportionately short wings. Of course, in the Martian atmosphere those wings can't be generating significant lift. Sensors, maybe? It flies using the same telekinetic system as this Bio-Ship, giving it similar aerial manoeuvrability. An Earth-built jet aircraft of similar size would wallow through the air, but not that thing. No weapons visible on the exterior of the hull, which at least means that they don't consider us to be an immediate threat.

    "What exactly is your official status, anyway?"

    "How do you mean?"

    "Should we expect a truancy patrol to be waiting for us, wanting to know why you've skived off school for a year?"

    Kon smirks. "That would be awkward."

    "No, Uncle J'onn got all that straightened out before I joined the team. Technically, I'm a Manhunter cadet assigned to him for training, but everyone knows that that's only really true on paper."

    "Well, you're a more powerful telepath than he is, and a better shapeshifter, so maybe not training you was the way to go."

    "I'm not a better shapeshifter than he is." I raise my left eyebrow. "I'm really not. There's a lot more to shapeshifting than changing your shape." I frown, then Kon and I exchange puzzled looks. "You know what I mean. I've got a better range but there's a lot of skill involved in instinctively shifting your shape during combat. Uncle J'onn is a lot faster than I am, especially under stress. Ugh."

    "Hey, I'm sorry-."

    "No, not-. You. It's them. They're instructing me to reconfigure the Bio-Ship's hull. Apparently it's 'too militant' for a civilian ship."

    "I thought it was registered as being owned by Mister J'onzz?"

    "It is. But he's not here and they've decided to make an issue of it." She sighs. "Reconfiguring." I hear a slurping noise as the exterior wings retract and the cabin space behind us shrinks. The Sphere warbles in protest as it's nudged closer. "Sorry."

    "Are people gunna be hassling you the whole time?"

    "I-. No. Probably not. But everywhere you go, some people are just.. jerks."

    "You know, if you want to go back to pretending to be green… Your mental defences are probably good enough now to keep casual enquiries out."

    "No."

    I hold up my right hand in surrender. "Okay, I was just-."

    "No, I'm not-. Ugh." She slumps slightly. "I had a talk with Rocket about color prejudice-"

    "Ooooowh."

    "-and she said that pandering to bigots only encourages them."

    "Raquel's got a bit of a thing about that."

    Okay, I'm not going to pretend that modern America or Britain are post-racial utopias or anything, but her habit of interpreting most things in racial terms has become a little wearing. When she brought up the issue of remuneration for the descendants of slaves my asking if she would be willing to pay Americans of European descent for the actions of her own Barbar ancestors was totally a rational argument in no way spurred by my irritation.

    Power ring genetic scans are a little bit cheaty in that sort of debate.

    "No, I started using white skin on missions for a reason. I'm a White Martian and I'm not going to hide it."

    "You shouldn't have to."

    "You know… I've sort of been thinking. It might be possible for me or.. one of the Controllers to reverse whatever it was the Guardians did to your ancestors-."

    "Oh, no. Mars does not need monsters like that back."

    "I'm still not convinced that their nature wasn't the result of how they were socialised, rather than-."

    M'gann stares directly at me. "**No.**" She exhales sharply. "I know you're.. trying to help, but… I don't think I can… Explain just how horrifying that thing was. Not to someone who isn't Martian."

    Kon frowns. "I didn't think it was.. that scary."

    "The molecular disruption technique it was using is something that's unheard of outside a handful of Red Martian mystics. It's supposed to be impossible for anyone else. And it wasn't like them, its mind was.. like… Fire. When I looked at it, I felt the same fear I feel when I look at an open flame. I don't know what would happen to Martian society if their existence became more widely known, but it could totally collapse our government."

    "Wait. Are you saying that.. while you don't regard Whites as being inferior to Green you still regard both as being inferior to Reds?"

    "Um." She cringes slightly. "A little?"

    "M'gann. You know that's ridiculous."

    "Yeah, well, it's not that easy to just change your entire way of thinking."

    "Certainly it is. I managed to achieve complete unity with my desires inside ten minutes, and you're a telepathic shapeshifter."

    "Okay, it's not that easy for me to do it. That part of Martian racism isn't something that I've ever suffered from, so I just don't… I don't have the same resistance to it. Respecting Red Martians is just something that you do."

    "Alright, do you know the name of the Red I'm going to need to talk to while I'm here?"

    "You could probably.. just talk to the Chief Administrator. I'm not sure if it's the same woman as it was when I left, but if it is then she's a Green."

    "No. I want to go to the top, someone who's part of Mars' elite, someone connected to the planetary government."

    "I.. don't know if he'll be willing to talk to you, but Mel'dilo'rn's reigning Prelate is Prince J'emm. Are you really just going to walk up to the government buildings and demand to speak to him?"

    "Of course not. I'm going to insist that whoever I meet send a skivvy to inform him of my arrival. If he won't talk to me, that's fine."

    "Okay, good."

    "I'll just try other cities until I find a Prelate who will."
     
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    • Mr Zoat said:
    "Wait. Are you saying that.. while you don't regard Whites as being inferior to Green you still regard both as being inferior to Reds?"

    "Um." She cringes slightly. "A little?"

    "M'gann. You know that's ridiculous."
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    Well, she's not exactly wrong... They can basically say "fuck you" to their one major weakness and the others can't. That's kind of a superior advantage. Of course that doesn't make them superior as people, but still.
     
    Mr Zoat said:
    "Yeah, well, it's not that easy to just change your entire way of thinking."

    "Certainly it is. I managed to achieve complete unity with my desires inside ten minutes, and you're a telepathic shapeshifter."
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    That's hardly fair ah ah, it was a do or die situation and you were sporting the catalyst of all desires, not to mention you'd been walking that path for quite a while. You'd have to be pretty insane to want to be in that kind of situation to fix an issue you have with your mentality,. Although seeing who's giving the 'solution', we can't really be surprised it'd be proposed.
     
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    Mr Zoat said:
    And it wasn't like them, it's mind was.. like… Fire. When I looked at it, I felt the same fear I feel when I look at an open flame.
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    given that the fear of fire is induced, its quite possible that what she's experiencing is a programed response.


    Mr Zoat said:
    "Of course not. I'm going to insist that whoever I meet send a skivvy to inform him of my arrival. If he won't talk to me, that's fine."

    "Okay, good."

    "I'll just try other cities until I find a Prelate who is."
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    and if they have been paying any attention at all to earth they will know that talking to OL is unlikely to be a waste of time.


    Though I kinda wonder if he's going to ask them why a species of telepathic shapeshifters have color based racism. I mean for god's sake how do they tell? do baby martians not shapeshift? I mean unless the difference is more than skin deep baby martins would probably just change there color if they sensed unhappy thoughts when they went white.
     
    I know that for Doylist reasons, this is just for simplicity/relatibility for readers, but given the way that their bodies work, what evolutionary advantage is there for Martians to possess sexually dimorphic characteristics and/or concepts of gender at all?

    I guess that it might be a vestigial trait in their evolutionary history. That's the only answer I can think of that makes sense. And that they stick with it for cultural reasons simply because of that history.

    I've explained this in other posts elsewhere, but we know that M'gann's voice is the same as Marie Logan's. This means that her voice, including her mental one when telepathically communicated with others, is also an affectation to fit the role of Megan. So... what does M'gann really sound like? Does she have a "female" mental voice? Do Martians have any real expressed genders, and if they do, why?
     
    Is this the first we're hearing that M'gann has been going on missions white instead of green? I don't remember if we've learnt that before.
     
    Mr Zoat said:
    "No, I'm not-. Ugh." She slumps slightly. "I had a talk with Rocket about color prejudice-"

    "Ooooowh."

    "-and she said that pandering to bigots only encourages them."
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    One of the things I find incredibly irritating in SF stories is the idea that modern Earth (or, at least, the right-thinking portions of it) is the pinnacle of enlightened society, and any society that behaves differently from our own can be analogized to some past error in our society that we--as the pinnacle of societies--have moved beyond.

    I would find it much more interesting if it turns out the Martian racial perspective is completely rational and justified.

    Here's a theory: Martians know another Martian's race based on their thoughts (regardless of their physical form), and we know from a Renegade chapter that a Martian becoming red is more about a change in their brain, not their genes.

    So, perhaps the difference between the races all just comes down to what kind of thought patterns you have. Being 'white' is just an expression of having an intrinsic bent toward aggression and violence (or perhaps just toward individualization and away from group cohesion), and no matter how much the Martian is socialized to think 'green', there's still an inherent difference that everyone can sense and which might be influencing how they express their appearance from birth on.

    The rulers being 'red' isn't because there's a caste system based on random genetics, it's a recognition of people who are born with particular intrinsic thought patterns (which might be anything from 'willingness to do whatever it takes for the greater good' to simply a step up from white on the 'desire to cause others to submit to my will', depending on how dystopian you want Mars to be).

    That's lot more interesting than "They're funny unenlightened aliens who discriminate against perfectly nice people on grounds that don't matter".
     
    Mr Zoat said:
    and… Thunderbird 2? Or maybe Moya?
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    First off Zoat thank you for telling me about these things as a side affect of update since they look interesting and plan to look into them.
    Mr Zoat said:
    "I.. don't know if he'll be willing to talk to you, but Mel'dilo'rn's reigning Prelate is Prince J'emm. Are you really just going to walk up to the government buildings and demand to speak to him?"
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    This mean there are colonies of Martians on the moons of Saturn or no?
     
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