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Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
- kordless 10y agoYesterday, I watched Bruno Vassel fly his glider in the Rocky Mountains for nearly 2 hours on Youtube. I hypothesize someday we will be able to extract energy from the Ether to power our own spaceships in a similar way to gliding. That's not to say we won't need to add our own energy to get somewhere specific!
- losteric 10y agoWell, our space crafts do "glide" on gravity.
- wlesieutre 10y agoAlso see the Interplanetary Transport Network, a network of routes through the solar system that take the lowest energy paths, using Lagrange points to change direction. They aren't the fastest routes, but if you want to glide around the solar system this is where you travel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Net...
- WalterBright 10y agoI suspect one of the best ways to travel around the solar system is to find an asteroid with a very eccentric orbit. Land on the asteroid, and while it won't save energy, the asteroid will offer a radiation shield and raw materials to use on the journey. The asteroid can be slowly transformed into a "cruise ship" for the journey and subsequent ones.
- _audakel 10y agoYou could say that is what happened to earth.
- jackhack 10y agoHow curious you mention Bruno Vassel... I watched a number of his videos this week (and yes, @ fullscreen HD 1080 video it is mesmerizing!!). My goal was preparation for taking a new R/C model plane out for a maiden flight (a 3 meter ASW28). My hope was to glean some slope soaring tips. While I learned a lot and it helped me with my soaring, let me just say, he is highly skilled and makes it all look very easy and relaxing. Soaring 100 miles without engine power is impressive. Doing so while literally feet away from a craggy mountain slope without freaking out, and taking the time to share some of the most beautiful scenery and sky one's ever likely to see with us is a real gift. The part where he does loops to entertain some boy scout troops hiking along a mountain was joyful.
- joshvm 10y agoEither this a really bizarre coincidence, or YouTube is promoting his videos. I too discovered his channel this week, it's surprisingly relaxing watching him mess around for hours. Especially if you've had any experience soaring, it's interesting to watch his technique and hear him talk through his thought process as he's flying. Helps that the thermals where he is are so good you can blast up to 13k feet from a 2k aerotow.
- wyldfire 10y ago> The movie-makers were giving Christopher raw data, just like in real life, and he was trying to analyze it. ... > In the final movie, the screen visuals are a mixture of ones Christopher created, ones derived from what he created, and ones that were put in separately. I wonder -- did he synthesize the handwriting samples under analysis or was that from the film's conventional creative team? I read Chiang's story after having seen "The Arrival" and IIRC the descriptions weren't anywhere near as clear about the circular nature of the sentences.
- dghughes 10y agoIt always seems to involve mastering gravity yet gravity is so incredibly weak compared to magnetism. Plus "alien spacecraft" aka UFOs always seem to output a huge amount of light so maybe gravity and light are linked in the process or mechanism for whatever makes the thing operate. I like the article how it mentions getting the science believable or at least not terrible wrong. But what I dislike as much as that is whenever the science parts are dismissed. Usually a scientist in a movie or TV show tries to explain something the lead character rolls their eyes as if it were boring everyone laughs. How can we encourage kids that science is interesting if it's treated as a bore or a joke and ridiculed? I know it's meant as a writing method to make the lead person seem dumb compared to the smart scientist but it sends a bad message that science is boring.
- foota 10y agoPerhaps it's because gravity is relatively less well understood than is magnetism?
- jandrese 10y agoUsing gravity as a propulsive force may be silly given its relative strength, but having a way of blocking gravity would make a tremendous difference in getting out of our gravity well. It's not so much help for achieving orbit, but if you want to go beyond the Earth or even beyond the Solar System it would be a whole new game.
- avar 10y agoIf you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in orbit. Similarly with going outside the solar system, you could just jump on the planet Earth and press the "anti-grav" button, and in a few hundred thousand years you'd be outside the solar system.
- jws 10y agoI think you can dispense with the "jump". Just press the "gravity off" switch at midnight. You will be on the far side of the earth from the sun, as the earth is pulled to the sun in its orbit, you will drift away on a tangent line at 30km/s relative to the sun. Google says "9 billion miles divided by 30km/s" is a little over 15 years and you are out of the solar system. (I'm ignoring the milky way here, The sun is whizzing around the milky way at 230km/s, but it isn't very near the center so the "chord near the center is simplified to radius" which I snuck by you in the previous paragraph isn't valid. But you should definitely work this out before flicking the switch. Depending on the relative gravity/velocity magnitudes and the time of year, you could drive yourself through the sun on your way out of the solar system, which voids your warrantee.)
- pmontra 10y agoThere have been a number of posts about this movie on HN, many of them interesting https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=fal... Some of them address the linguistic side of the movie.
- viach 10y agoInfinite Improbability Drive, of course!
- xenophonf 10y agoThis is a duplicate of Wolfram's original blog post: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-a... The previous discussion (about two months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364
- ansible 10y agoThe problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical. The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method. All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination. I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.
- sandworm101 10y agoThere is plenty of hope, even with standard physics. "Faster than light" has lots of wiggle room. Sleeper ships are certainly an option. So too are near-lighspeed ships that, from the perspective of those on board, could get between stars in reasonable times. Even then, what is "reasonable" is a function of human lifespan, a number that could easily grow exponentially without breaking any physical laws.
- drhayes9 10y agoI just recently learned the term "Bracewell probe" for this kind of device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe Instead of sending radio signals or etching words or pictures in matter, you send a software agent that is reasonably intelligent in a hardware device into space seeking ETIs. The intelligence aboard the probe can have a conversation with the ETIs and communicate back to home the results.
- euyyn 10y agoWe can't even make bots have a reasonable conversation with us in our own language :)
- twic 10y ago> Gauss suggested back around 1820 that one could carve a picture of the standard visual for the Pythagorean theorem out of the Siberian forest, for aliens to see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_triangle_proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_tria... Radio waves? Golden discs? Nah son, colossal geometric wheatfields and a few big hedges is what you want!
- mynegation 10y agoAsking someone with better understanding of physics. Wolfram talks about space as a network. But would not that mean that there is an absolute reference frame? Relativity theory does not need it (not sure if it disproves that there is no such thing), and from what I know no such frame was found. How does that reconcile?
- jackhack 10y agoI like the blog post's window title better than the article caption: "I had one night to invent interstellar travel".
- swayvil 10y agoDirect reality manipulation. A chorus of magicians dictating the next millisecond, then the next and so on. As with any technology there are easy ways and hard ways. Thus the spaceship.
- firefoxd 10y agoHas anyone looked at the CIA declassified documents that appeared a few days ago? https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20photo https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20ph... It does have pictures of UFO for reference Edit: added details
- devoply 10y agoCIA does not want the CIA or former CIA talking about UFOs to the public. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP68-00046R000200090003-6.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP68-00046... The CIA wants to keep UFOs out of public discussions, to not cause people to panic. Or alternatively, there is a conspiracy or collusion with the aliens to keep the government from panicking the public about UFOs ;) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565....
- Grazester 10y agoWhy not create worm holes to travel through? How it does this? Old God knows.
- tomelders 10y agoWell this article kills my pet theory, but I'll inflict it on the world anyway because this sort of stuff is fun to think about. Before I go on, a couple of key points. Also, spoilers ahead. 1. We don't see the space craft arrive. 2. Their choice of locations on Earth goes unexplained. 3. We don't actually see them leave. They just disappear. I posit that the "aliens" aren't actually from "outer space". They're higher dimensional beings that exist in our 3D space (or 4D if you count time), but we simply cant perceive them in the same way a two dimensional being would not be able to perceive anything in the third dimension. The "ships" aren't ships. They're something the "aliens" have created to project themselves into a 3D dimensional space so that we can perceive them. They're basically windows. When Amy Adams' character goes behind the "window", she can do this because her brain has acquired the capacity to perceive the higher dimension, and she no longer needs the window. Their locations on Earth may mean nothing to us, but they are convenient places for them as they perceive the universe. A 2D being would not be able to fathom the reason 3D being makes marks on a 2d plane unless they could perceive the 2D plane form a 3D perspective. Anyway, that was my theory. This article blows pretty much destroys it, but I like it anyway.