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Bugs In The System

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fraa Jad said:
"No oxygen?" Amy asked.

"No. Which implies the lack of any form of life known to us"

You know that Earth had life before the Great Oxidation Event, right? In fact for most of its history of it being life-bearing there was almost no free, non bound oxygen. It was the first great extinction event "isotope geochemistry data from sulfate minerals have been interpreted to indicate a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%", when oxygen-producing organisms pumped up the level of oxygen in the atmosphere that the ones who could not tolerate the level of oxygen died off. It was quite a while before oxygen-resistant organisms picked up.

My point is -- we know life without oxygen. Most of the history of life on Earth was without non-bound-in-rust oxygen in the atmosphere.

I still like your writing :)
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Just translate it in your head to "any life that's not living around deep ocean vents we can't get to to check out right now".
 
Assembler Maniac said:
If the Hive has conquered FTL travel in a few months, how long before they break the fourth wall, or find a way to travel along the 4th axis, aka time?
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MPpi has already shown that time travel won't happen in his stories (very specifically won't). Bad things happen to time travelers.😶
Mr_Rose said:
In a relativistic universe that means they already can/are time travel(ling).
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That means they have the illusion of time travel to those viewing things from an outside perspective.
This may be what you meant, but I felt it had to be specified, since it can be a confusing subject.
 
PhoebusArtemis said:
MPpi has already shown that time travel won't happen in his stories (very specifically won't). Bad things happen to time travelers.😶

That means they have the illusion of time travel to those viewing things from an outside perspective.
This may be what you meant, but I felt it had to be specified, since it can be a confusing subject.
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No, relativity plus FTL = time travel is not a perspective-dependent illusion, and don't you keep presenting this misrepresentation in this context a lot?

Of course, in context, we can safely assume that this setting actually comprehensively violates relativity up one side and down the other such that there's no time travel to worry about.
 
Mr_Rose said:
They broke the light barrier. In a relativistic universe that means they already can/are time travel(ling). Developing it into arbitrary teleportation along the t-axis should not be too difficult but may be contraindicated by the navigational issues (hard to get home if it's not where you left it, especially if the thing that moved it is the drive you used to leave home in the first place).
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Just because you break the speed of light does not mean you've travelled in time.
Shine light across universe, travel FTL to watch light pass you at some long ass distance away, still means time passed between you leaving and arriving, you just managed to exceed a known speed limit.

Now, shine the same light, travel back in time to watch yourself arrive and shine the light, you're now a an actual time traveler.

Travel into the future is pretty easy. Quantum lock your stasis pod on a timer, wait around for a goodly while, lock turns off, you've now travelled forward.

Going backwards is the only reallyyyy hard part.
 
Standard physics don't work properly at FTL speeds, and the math starts showing temporal regression. Which is why realspace FTL probably isn't possible. But, there might be a dodge if hyperspace or subspace are a thing.
 
One of the "Fun and Interesting" consequences of special relativity is that simultaneity and to some extent the order of events is also relative. As long as two events are more separated in space than they are in time (usually this is referred to as being outside of each others' light cones/having a space-like separation), which one of them happens first (in your reference frame) depends on how fast you are going and your direction of travel. (This also means there are reference frames where they happen at the same time, which is funky since from our point of view they could be separated by billions of years and billions of lightyears.)

Applying this to FTL travel, there will be some reference frames where your point of arrival is farther back in time than your point of departure. You'll need some kind of sublight method of acceleration that truly changes your velocity rather than warping space around you, but then you can use it to switch between two reference frames that do this for travel in opposite directions (switch your sublight velocity back and forth) and sort of zigzag your way back in time. The faster your FTL and the faster your sublight travel, the better this will work.

Does the Hive ship have a way to get their velocity up to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed in a short time? I'm not sure they do, and they probably want to put in precautions to prevent time travel anyway, which leaving this out would help with. These precautions could also keep them from accidentally zigzaging their way into the future too.
 
Aineko said:
No, relativity plus FTL = time travel is not a perspective-dependent illusion, and don't you keep presenting this misrepresentation in this context a lot?
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No, I don't. It would appear to be time travel due to the delay the light has compared to your rate of travel. Light has to bounce off you and then travel to the person with the outside perspective, creating the apparent time travel effect.
That is all I will say on the subject; since the last time it came up, it derailed the thread severely off topic, and I have no wish to accidentally do so again.
No matter what your views on it, at least we agree that no time travel will happen here.
 
PhoebusArtemis said:
No, I don't. It would appear to be time travel due to the delay the light has compared to your rate of travel. Light has to bounce off you and then travel to the person with the outside perspective, creating the apparent time travel effect.
That is all I will say on the subject; since the last time it came up, it derailed the thread severely off topic, and I have no wish to accidentally do so again.
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Well, no, I'm not going to give you that last word. What you are asserting is completely wrong, and you've extended it to be further outright silly. You can't produce an appearance of time travel due to light lag because the observers understand light lag.
Assembler Maniac said:
Just because you break the speed of light does not mean you've travelled in time.
Shine light across universe, travel FTL to watch light pass you at some long ass distance away, still means time passed between you leaving and arriving, you just managed to exceed a known speed limit.

Now, shine the same light, travel back in time to watch yourself arrive and shine the light, you're now a an actual time traveler.

Travel into the future is pretty easy. Quantum lock your stasis pod on a timer, wait around for a goodly while, lock turns off, you've now travelled forward.

Going backwards is the only reallyyyy hard part.
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Unfortunately, it's not, because thanks to relativity 'time passed' just...isn't as simple an idea as you might want.
Sandy River DL said:
Standard physics don't work properly at FTL speeds, and the math starts showing temporal regression. Which is why realspace FTL probably isn't possible. But, there might be a dodge if hyperspace or subspace are a thing.
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Interestingly, they also might conceivably give you a fix for the time travel problem if they effectively impose a privileged reference frame.
 
Aineko said:
Well, no, I'm not going to give you that last word. What you are asserting is completely wrong, and you've extended it to be further outright silly. You can't produce an appearance of time travel due to light lag because the observers understand light lag.
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This is correct, and PhoebusArtemis is not; _any_ way of travelling even a hair faster than light gives you a way, assuming you can also get to high less-than-light speeds, to travel and arrive _inside your own past light cone_. Before you left, from ANYONE'S perspective.

Dave, not an illusion, not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story; it's right there in the math, and if you think otherwise you have clearly not done the math right

ps: source -- PhD, theoretical particle physics. you have to learn this to even get INTO grad school, particle physics uses relativity, special and general, _everywhere_. FTL means you lose causality or locality, or both. Period.
 
On the subject of time travel and relativity with FTL travel:

Going to the equations developed in the study of relativistic conditions, if V>c, then you end up dividing by the square root of a negative number. There's a word for such numbers; they are imaginary.

This means the math produces no valid result at FTL speeds, and EVERY prediction as to the result of achieving said speeds are ultimately pure speculation, and will remain such unless and until we have hard data about such an event.

In other words, until we have a way of achieving FTL, or are otherwise able to observe FTL phenomenon, all we can do is guess what will happen under FTL conditions. Math alone proves nothing.

Now, according to the equations I mentioned earlier, it takes infinite energy for a physical object to reach c. Since any FTL drive in fiction must manage at least that without infinite energy, it stands to reason they must have a way of bypassing the limits of relativity. Ergo, when true FTL pops up in fiction, relativistic effects only play a role if the author so chooses. This author has a firm no-time-travel rule. Ergo, there will be no time travel.
 
Jacen1 said:
On the subject of time travel and relativity with FTL travel:

Going to the equations developed in the study of relativistic conditions, if V>c, then you end up dividing by the square root of a negative number. There's a word for such numbers; they are imaginary.

This means the math produces no valid result at FTL speeds, and EVERY prediction as to the result of achieving said speeds are ultimately pure speculation, and will remain such unless and until we have hard data about such an event.

In other words, until we have a way of achieving FTL, or are otherwise able to observe FTL phenomenon, all we can do is guess what will happen under FTL conditions. Math alone proves nothing.
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As usual...

Yes, the rules say you can't do it. But no, that doesn't mean that the 'what if you could' is nonsense, because the thing is it's not about those imaginary numbers. It's about what FTL movement tracks wind up being when viewed from a perspective that doesn't go FTL.

This is also why it doesn't matter how your FTL looks from the inside or whether it goes faster than light vs. hop out of the universe vs. bend spacetime into a shortcut somehow. What I think does matter is whether your FTL works relative to a variable reference frame or not, since the key to breaking into your own past is to perform FTL travel within two significantly different reference frames.
 
Aineko said:
Interestingly, they also might conceivably give you a fix for the time travel problem if they effectively impose a privileged reference frame.
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Huh. In fact, that's exactly what I have always thought would be the biggest possible breakthrough in physics: a theory that completely matches up with everything relativity says should happen (and remember, folks, relativity is not just a 'theory' in the dismissive sense some people use; GPS works, and it's one of the few real-life situations where you have to use both special and general relativity!) and yet has an objective reference frame. I have no idea what that that would look like, but I bet it would be one hell of a lot of fun!
 
So, how about speculation on what the Hive found in the system from the Entities' last victim?
Maybe a time capsule with information on their culture, and/or some of their population in stasis? From what I can tell, each planet is supposed to be occupied long enough that whatever species could have enough time to reverse engineer tinkertech and make something to last a while.
 
Aineko said:
As usual...

Yes, the rules say you can't do it. But no, that doesn't mean that the 'what if you could' is nonsense, because the thing is it's not about those imaginary numbers. It's about what FTL movement tracks wind up being when viewed from a perspective that doesn't go FTL.

This is also why it doesn't matter how your FTL looks from the inside or whether it goes faster than light vs. hop out of the universe vs. bend spacetime into a shortcut somehow. What I think does matter is whether your FTL works relative to a variable reference frame or not, since the key to breaking into your own past is to perform FTL travel within two significantly different reference frames.
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Here's the thing though; there are two reference frames that dictate you leave and then return; the one you left from and the one you carry with you. Plus, and this is important, time travel within a singular timeline requires the single most fundamental concept in science be ignorable: Causality. Just using different reference frames won't cut it. (Besides, as my old physics teacher put it, a reference frame is only valid so long as it's constant. That is why objects that experience major changes in velocity experience time dilation relative to ones that do not instead of the other way around. Changing reference frames won't let you cheat at time dilation to achieve time travel, it will just compound the problem.)

Look, there's a simple answer to all of this. I forget who stated this, but "no matter how elegant the math looks, if it does not agree with the experimental data, then it is wrong." All that is needed to go from baseless speculation to useful projection is hard data concerning FTL. So, simply design an experiment that lets you produce said data. Of course, since imaginary numbers are involved in speeds greater then c according to the math, it may simply be impossible to travel faster then light without somehow removing relativity and shifting reference frames from the equation...
 
Can we drop the pointless 200th re-enactment of the "GRRR RAR! FTL IS ALWAYS TIME TRAVEL!" argument?

It's been repeated over and over and over with exactly the same terrible math and misunderstandings of physics on both sides every time, and it is literally NEVER actually relevant to the story whose thread it's happening in.

It's a pointless derail. Let's just move on.
 
Jacen1 said:
Here's the thing though; there are two reference frames that dictate you leave and then return; the one you left from and the one you carry with you. Plus, and this is important, time travel within a singular timeline requires the single most fundamental concept in science be ignorable: Causality. Just using different reference frames won't cut it. (Besides, as my old physics teacher put it, a reference frame is only valid so long as it's constant. That is why objects that experience major changes in velocity experience time dilation relative to ones that do not instead of the other way around. Changing reference frames won't let you cheat at time dilation to achieve time travel, it will just compound the problem.)
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The main problem here is you still think this is about 'cheating at time dilation' and getting weird numbers out of the traveler's personal trace, despite being specifically told it's not.

Here's the thing your 'singular timeline' is missing: the 'timeline' is relative. As @Flumpet of Gabe laid out, simultaneity is dependent on reference frame under special relativity. There are classic thought experiments on this, particularly the barn (or garage as I've also seen it) paradox. More generally discussed here. (Note that twisty as this can be to think through, you never have a mixup about whether an event is within the historic or future lightcone of another event - only about the order of events that aren't in the same light cone and thus without FTL cannot have influenced each other.)

This is one of the two (only two!) parts you need to construct the FTL/time travel consequence.

The other is positing that when you use your FTL device the apparent travel speed is consistent from the inertial reference frame of your departure.

(If you're willing to settle for informational time travel rather than getting to personally visit your history, you can even do it with nobody accelerating at all - you just need two FTL travelers moving at significant relative speed meeting and passing a message.)
Jacen1 said:
Look, there's a simple answer to all of this. I forget who stated this, but "no matter how elegant the math looks, if it does not agree with the experimental data, then it is wrong." All that is needed to go from baseless speculation to useful projection is hard data concerning FTL. So, simply design an experiment that lets you produce said data. Of course, since imaginary numbers are involved in speeds greater then c according to the math, it may simply be impossible to travel faster then light without somehow removing relativity and shifting reference frames from the equation...
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Stripped of implication about how we should favor your bellyfeel over well-supported theory, what you're saying is that if we don't have FTL, then we get to keep causality. Which, yes, that's just so! If there's no FTL you can have relativity and causality. The entire argument is that you need that if clause.
 
I like the idea that the previous victims of Scion and Eden managed to trick them and have some of them survive. Thoughts?

[Why is it so difficult to just let the relativity topic end? This is a story. I know when to let an endless (and pointless) argument go. Agree to disagree or go somewhere else, PLEASE!!!!]
 
This is the internet. There is ALWAYS a case of Someone On The Internet Is Wrong going on. Even if both sides are wrong, the other side MUST be made to see The Truth!
 
mp3.1415player said:
One of these whined past him as he though that
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'thought'?
mp3.1415player said:
which stretched out of site
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'sight'?
mp3.1415player said:
And he suspected than when everyone else
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'that'?
mp3.1415player said:
one somewhat larger than Earth rock one very close to the tiny dwarf
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reword? missing word? missing comma?

---

You had to go full-on Skylark of Space (written 1915), didn't you? :)

This deserves a proper QA omake, but, still getting over a recent fortnight+ of illness.

I'd prefer that Scion didn't previously extinct the Thranx... What'd be fun would be personality and DNA (or whatever) archives of at least a potential 'lifeboat' for the extinct'd race, and their ecosystem... Yeah, that'd include at least the core of their culture/technical & scientific knowledge...

EDIT:

I'm beginning to wonder if Fess is Leet's shard incarnated... And, seeing as there're few other properly deployed Thinker shards, is well placed to sit alongside QA when she swallows the Warrior's network, in heading the Thinker's one...
 
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