Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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*wipes brow*
The Practice War [Complete]
- Thread starter Snowfire
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- Original Sci-Fi
*wipes brow*
So even in the long run, it's impossible to do something like create a Practiced FTL Drive that does NOT use the First Secret?
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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I mean, that's certainly one way too look at it.
Realtalk though, you have no idea. Project Insight has never seen another form of FTL being used, by anyone, and they've been active for quite a while. If Practice can create some different means of breaching the light barrier, or take First Secret FTL even further than the Shiplords have with War Fleet drives are the sort of questions that you'd have to dedicate some serious work to to get answers. The former would be the epitome of blue skies research.
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Ah thank you for the clarification. Love the quest by the way.
Goal of that question was considering the possibility that Practice can create FTL drives that are subject to a completely different set of limitations than the ones that First Secret drives are subject to.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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As much as I dislike replying to questions this way, the answer to any question of that sort is a 404 error right now. Exactly what you'd use as a baseline to create a hypothetical FTL drive is something I'd be interested to know, but putting together an experimental process to try wouldn't be beyond humanity at the current point in time.
The real danger is that the success chance would be firmly in the ??? bracket, and all the work in the world could easily result in nothing but frustration. Thinking about it, it would probably function as something similar to Amanda's current personal development actions,in that your yearly results would fold into a rolling tally of effort until you either worked out that it was completely impossible or that there was some ability to move forward.
...I hope this is making sense >.>
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- Mars
That's a very interesting idea. Personally I saw the Secrets as being more diverse than that, but that's a cool option. I'd say that matter manipulation is a Secret, allowing us to maybe make synthetic materials or elements. In addition it has been hinted at that AI creation is a Secret though which one I don't know.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
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- Dublin
If the idea is to create FTL drives based on (semi-)plausible, real-world physics, then there are a couple of options you might find interesting. That goes for most people here, I guess, so I'll do a quick writeup.
- Alcubierre fields / Alcubierre metrics
These, you've probably heard of. They're your basic warp drive, but you can look the real-world version up under the Alcubierre name. The principle is easy: Warp space around your ship, positively in front and negatively behind, such that your ship doesn't move but the space it is in does. Since the lightspeed limit only applies to quantum fields, not to space itself, it should in principle (= it's a valid solution of Einstein's equations) be possible to move that space at higher than light-speed relative to the co-moving frame of reference.
It has a lot of problems in practice. For starters, the metric violates the weak energy condition -- it is impossible, physicists assume, to create space with negative curvature. They may be wrong about this, but even if they're not, there's also no obvious known mechanism for doing so.
As it happens the Practice War universe does include gravity-manipulation technology, which is to say that we do apparently have such a mechanism. Unfortunately that isn't enough; there are further problems. Two of them for starters:
- The curvature needs to be strong enough to create an event horizon. This means that the outside of the drive field will be causally de-linked from the ship itself, meaning there would be no way to control it from inside the ship. It isn't completely clear that it would be impossible to control by setting the parameters up in advance, but we have no clue how you could possibly do that. Even if you could, ships will be blind and unable to steer while inside warp.
- The estimated negative and positive-energy requirements are (separately) at about a solar mass's worth. It does add up to zero, but even if you could somehow split vacuum to create those crazy amounts of energy, one has to assume it'd be hard. People have suggested (not Alcubierr, but related) metrics that'd need far less energy, but which require fractal boundaries instead of the quite simple Alcubierre field; hard to say which is more difficult. On the bright side you could probably plow through the core of a star without noticing, though the star certainly would.
Alcubierre fields aren't practical. Let's leave it at that.
- Krasnikov tubes
Now we're talking. This is a proposal by a (Russian) physicist for what is, essentially, interstellar highways. They're pretty large -- if you want to build one, you should start by building a Dyson sphere and go from there, because it'd be a physical structure stretching from one star to the next -- but in contrast to Alcubierre fields they seem almost plausible. There are no event horizons, no infinities of any kind, and the overall energy cost is fairly reasonable.
The basic Krasnikov tube concept has been (sort-of) validated in a lab, though only by analogy, in a medium where photons are greatly slowed. They still may not be physically possible, as they still violate the weak energy condition by requiring negative energy as part of their construction.
They're more complex in use than warp drives, so you'll need an example.
Let's say we want to put a colony at Alpha Centauri, which is five lightyears off, and we send a construction ship off at very close to lightspeed in the year 2100. Thanks to time dilation, the construction ship takes one month (in its personal frame of reference) to reach Alpha Centauri, and to save time on the return trip it constructs a Krasnikov tube while flying there.
It's important that it does the construction while flying at high C-fractional velocities. I'll leave the mechanics of constructing a stationary highway from that state up to the engineers, but what Krasnikov tubes do is pretty simple.
It took the ship one month to traverse the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri.
The inside of the tube will therefore be one light-month long.
It is, therefore, possible to travel back to Earth -- through the tube -- in one month, and if you leave Earth in January 2100, you will return in March 2100.
...however, in a co-moving frame of reference, you are by doing so also travelling five years back in time. Your trip took you from Jan 2100, Earth -- to Feb 2105, Alpha Centauri -- and back to Mar 2100, Earth. Extend the network further out, to more stars, and you'll be going further and further into the future of the universe. If you then happen to meet aliens... they'd then be able to visit what they might see as the past, going through your network.
So wouldn't this allow for time travel? Well... no. No single tube supports causality violations, since a signal from Earth to Alpha Centauri not going through the tube would take five years to get there. You can go to the past, as measured by the co-moving frame, but you can't go to your own past.
...unless you put two Krasnikov tubes side-by-side, pointed in different directions in time.
The chronology protection conjecture posits that this is impossible, and quantum mechanics provides a plausible mechanism by way of virtual particles. You can try to create a time loop, but just before you succeed you'll find it blows itself up.
Krasnikov tubes are fairly promising. Since our universe is in a metastable vacuum state, not an absolute zero, it may even be possible to build one -- though there's a marginal risk that such technology might trigger a vacuum collapse.
I wouldn't worry too much.
- Wormholes
Doesn't everyone already know about these? You create a wormhole (somehow! There's no known method), then keep one end at Earth and transport the other to Alpha Centauri. The transport can be slow, and you'll be able to step from Earth-at-2100AD to Alpha Centauri-at-2100AD, with no temporal shenanigans implied. Nice and clean.
Well...
Turns out, if you're in a hurry and put the moving end on a fast spaceship, you'll find that time once again starts slipping. If your transport takes only one year (in its own frame of reference) to get to Alpha Centauri, then your wormhole will take you from 2101AD on Earth to 2105AD at Alpha Centauri, and you can create causal loops by the exact same method as with Krasnikov tubes. It buys you nothing, except that you're no building gigastructures in deep space, but wormholes may actually be harder to stabilize than the gigastructure would have been.
For instance, you need to balance all quantum fields you push through it. If you push one kg of mass in one direction, then that end of the wormhole gets 1kg heavier -- and the other gets 1kg lighter, even if that puts it into negative weight. It's a complete mess. It also means you need, at an absolute minimum, -1kg of (negative) mass inside the wormhole to act as structural support.
The better sort of hard sci-fi will therefore put all wormholes in hard vacuum, and surrounded by 'balancing stations'.
In any case we have less of a clue on how to build these, than we do the tubes. Chances are that FTL just isn't possible.
One final word. Relativity, causality, FTL: Pick any two, but if you refuse to fully give up any of them, there are still some options. If the chronology protection conjecture works, and if wormholes are possible, then it's largely up to the builders how much clock skew they would like -- they just can't take any loops into negative time.
This has implications, for instance that all FTL-capable species will meet at roughly the same time. Regardless of when they evolved.
More on that at Traversable Wormholes.
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EDIT:
In the Practice War universe, I would say that Krasnikov tubes are definitely possible. They don't require anything special, only the sort of gravity-manipulation technology we've already seen used for weapons.
Wormholes? Warp drives? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
Given what's in deep space, Krasnikov tubes are definitely not superior to the First Secret for actual movement, but they have other uses. You could, for example, use them to build a larger computer, allowing components to communicate at higher than lightspeed. They should be reasonably cheap to construct, and even cheaper to maintain. If you want a nice result from the research, then that'd be a good start.
(It isn't an exotic theory. They may not have put all the pieces in place yet, but they should be aware of the possibility.)
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Baughn
Healing-type writer
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Mostly true. But also see the edit I just made, above.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Of course, active research into the First Secret may just happen to put you directly in the line of fire for a War Fleet, given the current Directives. But y'know, nothing special
@Baughn that write-up of potential (har-har, this is never getting old) FTL methods is great, many thanks! My point was more in regards to what a Potential would use as a baseline to try and move towards a non-First Secret FTL drive, but this is still both interesting and possibly quite useful.
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Hmm, now I wonder, breaking the directives aside (was the 6th secret among the directives?), how would the Shiplords react to a self replican nanomachin?
And what about one that uses practice to turn any matter into the components needed for more nanomachins?
Would they freak out?
And what about one that uses practice to turn any matter into the components needed for more nanomachins?
Would they freak out?
Snowfire
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The Cycle of Loss interlude should answer some of those questions.
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It does, thanks.
I knew that they had it, but not that they tried to weaponice it.
That means that even if we somehow manage to hit them with a proyectiles of self-reliant nanomachines to make more and more until they eat the ship away they would have defences against that, though we maybe could bypass them with really developed practice...
We were talking about how they would react in means of defences against that and not if they would react violently or not, right?
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Indeed so, yes
inb4 someone gets a "Transportation" or "Movement" Focus and munchkins it enough to get FTL
Denied :|
You'll see. Nothing bad, just defining where a success landed on a chart. I have a horrible feeling some people are going to be salty about not getting some of these results sooner >.<
That is all.
Oh, keep in mind that everything in that quote beyond the first bullet point is completely speculative; all I'm saying is that it makes narrative sense for Secrets Three through Five to be Gravity, Electroweak, Strong force manipulation, in particular since we already know that Gravity manipulation is possible. There's a certain kind of symmetry there, with a three-member gap in Secrets and a three-member group of forces/pseudo-forces. Now, normally that would mean basically nothing: after all, in the real universe narrative logic is considered "magical thinking" and is rightly ignored by people attempting to do real science. The thing is, the Practice War universe is much more likely to run on narrative logic than our is, both because of the Secrets and because of the implication of the existence of Practice that sapient creatures have souls with inherent value.
One thing we do know is that these Secrets all have a definitive ordinal number, and in fact have an ordinal number that apparently is discovered as an early stage of understanding the Secret itself. This implies a deep level of intelligent design to the fundamental laws of physics in the Practice War universe, as it is entirely infeasible for something like this to arise spontaneously. Since the universe has been intelligently designed, it is therefore reasonable to believe that narrative logic holds sway here.
Further, the fact that Practice can exist, that beings can sacrifice their existence and have that sacrifice be valued by the universe itself in a way that validates their sacrifice, implies that souls exist, that sapient life has value to the universe beyond the atoms that make it up. In fact, I conjecture that the Secrets themselves exist through some ancient race using the process of sacrifice to bring each Secret into being, which would explain the ordinal numbers and the deep and powerful ways in which they alter the fabric of the universe. That may in fact be what the Shiplords are attempting to do: pressure alien species to sacrifice themselves to create more Secrets for them to exploit. My point here is that Three==Gravity, Four==Electroweak, Five==Strong Nuclear would fit the same sort of logical progression that you'd expect a sapient race to figure would lead to the most useful manipulations of normal physics, and therefore be the kind of thing we'd expect to happen in a universe apparently designed to look favorably on the sacrifice of sapient souls for a cause.
What's more, we also don't know if there are more than six Secrets; in fact there probably are. On the other hand, the Matter Manipulation you are talking about as a proposed Secret actually seems a bit wasteful, since the Sixth can do 99% of what such a Secret would accomplish, and more besides, while Strong Force manipulation could do the other 1% and would itself have far more uses otherwise. (Ensouled) AI creation does sound like a Secret that can exist; Matter/Energy creation could well be another. Practice itself is either the Zeroth Secret or a Secret of rather high number, given that it seems to create items that go beyond what normal matter and physics say should be possible and don't seem to get that way by breaking a single law of physics in a logical, repeatable way the way the lower-numbered Secrets do; we'll have to see.
The only ones we know, that is, the ones we know enough to have the ordinal numbers for, are:
- First - Teleportation-like FTL travel
- Second - Infeasible-level genetic/biological manipulation
- Sixth - Nanoscale technology / Gray Goo-level nanites
- Gravity manipulation - as seen in Shiplord "gravitic shear" weapon systems that we have copied through Practice
- Practice - because it's definitely not normal physics, so it's either a Secret itself or the font through which all other Secrets flow.
- AI creation - this one's more speculative, but Iris seems to have come into existence not through actual Practice, nor from intentional coding techniques that one would expect to produce an AI, but through a series of coincidences along with some sort of catalyst. That spells "special sauce" AI-creation Secret to me.
Shard
One and Many
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- Malaysia
Quantum Magic is probably there somewhere. The Secret of Light, possibly as well. Machines/Cybernetics/AI, split up or together sonewhere. There might be a secret for information control, or perhaps control of things as Thernodynamics, Materials, or even the Mind.
