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At least since Einstein's Theory Of Relativity we've known that normal human narrative will not extend to space. Meh. Human narratives have encompassed charact

At least since Einstein's Theory Of Relativity we've known that normal human narrative will not extend to space. Meh. Human narratives have encompassed characters who live for hundreds of billions of years and who experience time warped in any number of ways. There are even successful mainstream movies that deal with such issues. Multiple ones going back decades. Basically, people don't want their sci-fi stories to be too accurate. And I guess that's fine. Maybe it's all just entertainment. You could totally re-tell the entire Star Wars and Star Trek canon in such a setting. It's not that people don't want it. Most people don't know enough to know they would want it. Heck, half of everyone seems to think "there's no gravity in space." (EDIT: By "such a setting," I mean in just several cubic light years around Sol and Alpha Centauri.)

lkrubner 8y ago
"People lament the light speed barrier, because it seems to preclude vast space empires of Sci-fi." Assume you are the Emperor of a vast interstellar empire. You order your best general to go and attack a star system 10 light years away. Your opponent possibly does the same. 20 years after you give the order, you are told that your general lost the battle (or won the battle). How would you verify that? It's not just that you have to wait another 20 years to verify it, it's that events will pile up in excess of what you can verify. The best way to understand the outcome of this battle is to read what Kyle Kingsbury has written about distributed databases: https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen Because, for all practical purposes, the Universe is a distributed database with a serious network partition. It is not Eventually Consistent, but rather, it is Infinitely Inconsistent. The writes exceed the reads, and will continue to do so infinitely into the future. How do you build an interstellar empire around that reality? As an experiment, it might be fun to create a game that is deliberately inconsistent. That would appeal to a very small niche, because most people crave a consistent narrative experience. But a game designed around a database that is deliberately inconsistent would help people think correctly about the difficulty of building empires in space, or engaging in any other common sci-fi tropes.
- ganzuul 8y ago
  An empire could be a culture. There would need to be a vast reward function to motivate agents to seek consistency. Juxtapose SETI.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Assume you are the Emperor of a vast interstellar empire. Your next few sentences disprove the viability of the sentence above. If you want a vast interstellar space empire, then control a whole bunch of settlements that orbit in the space between Sol and Alpha Centauri. It's certainly vast on human scales. It's also technically interstellar. As an experiment, it might be fun to create a game that is deliberately inconsistent. A friend of mine created such a space combat themed game, including paradoxes and rules for resolving them. I 3D printed pieces for it. It was indeed fun, so the answer to your conjecture is yes.
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    "Your next few sentences disprove the viability of the sentence above." Exactly. Going back to my original comment, why is that many intelligent people continue to act as if such things are possible, when they know better?
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      We like the lazur zaps and the shiny spaceship graphics. Also: awesome theme music!
- rlpb 8y ago
  > It is not Eventually Consistent... If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent. Nobody has ever found a case where it isn't. Relativity was predicted to exist because "eventual consistency" was assumed axiomatic in our universe. Essentially, eventual consistency is exactly why the universal speed limit exists. > but rather, it is Infinitely Inconsistent We will fall behind in knowledge of events, but causal knowledge of an event in our universe, if it exists, is always consistent. Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only database (think git), not data that gets updated (like a key/value database).
lkrubner 8y ago
"You could totally re-tell the entire Star Wars and Star Trek" Both of those are fiction, so they are not relevant. I think we all get why people like fiction -- it's entertaining and some of the better stuff is educational. But why do intelligent people want to believe that any such coherent stories can actually be told in real life? We all know it's impossible. Even basic questions such as "How old are you" become unanswerable. A person gets in a ship and travels at 1 G to another star, then turns around and comes back to Earth, they've aged 20 years, meanwhile on Earth 200 years have passed and all their friends are dead. Which timeline is real? How would any sci-fi tropes play out, in real life, in a universe of such inconsistencies? Consider the issue of law enforcement. How could a central authority enforce its power, if people knew they could commit a crime, live a long life, and die before any forces from the central authority arrived? The notion of a political entity existing at more than solar system scales is ridiculous. Intelligent people know this, yet many of them still seem to want to believe that such a thing is a possible. Why is that?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  But why do intelligent people want to believe that any such coherent stories can actually be told in real life? We all know it's impossible. Even basic questions such as "How old are you" become unanswerable. Really intelligent informed people know the relative scales involved. So if all of Star Wars were re-imagined to occur using reasonable tech within the several cubic light years around Alpha Centauri, no speeds where severe relativistic time dilation effects are necessary for normal transportation. "How old are you" is readily answerable +/- a month for just about everyone, even most spacefarers. Heck, even the prequel trilogy makes more sense. (As Plinkett puts it, why are people on the planet of Naboo dying because they lack, "Space Supplies?" It would make a whole lot more sense if Naboo were an icy ball in the Oort cloud.) A person gets in a ship and travels at 1 G to another star, then turns around and comes back to Earth, they've aged 20 years, meanwhile on Earth 200 years have passed and all their friends are dead. Which timeline is real? How would any sci-fi tropes play out, in real life, in a universe of such inconsistencies? Another thing: I'm not an expert myself, but I can already tell that you don't even understand the big abstractions of relativity that well. The "Twin Paradox" is not actually a paradox. There is a global set of spacetime intervals which is consistent among all observers. It's only each observer's view of the spacetime interval which disagrees between observers. I'm probably saying that wrong, but the gist of that should be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo The "Spacetime Globe" by Minute Physics is the most helpful. It's like you're a 2D flatlander declaring that a cube would be seen as a square by one person and a hexagon by another, so the 3D universe must be an inconsistent database. Uh, no. The universe is totally consistent. You, poor finite human, just have a slim, parochial view of it.

lkrubner 8y ago

"People lament the light speed barrier, because it seems to preclude vast space empires of Sci-fi." Assume you are the Emperor of a vast interstellar empire. You order your best general to go and attack a star system 10 light years away. Your opponent possibly does the same. 20 years after you give the order, you are told that your general lost the battle (or won the battle). How would you verify that? It's not just that you have to wait another 20 years to verify it, it's that events will pile up in excess of what you can verify. The best way to understand the outcome of this battle is to read what Kyle Kingsbury has written about distributed databases: https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen Because, for all practical purposes, the Universe is a distributed database with a serious network partition. It is not Eventually Consistent, but rather, it is Infinitely Inconsistent. The writes exceed the reads, and will continue to do so infinitely into the future. How do you build an interstellar empire around that reality? As an experiment, it might be fun to create a game that is deliberately inconsistent. That would appeal to a very small niche, because most people crave a consistent narrative experience. But a game designed around a database that is deliberately inconsistent would help people think correctly about the difficulty of building empires in space, or engaging in any other common sci-fi tropes.

ganzuul 8y ago
An empire could be a culture. There would need to be a vast reward function to motivate agents to seek consistency. Juxtapose SETI.
stcredzero 8y ago
Assume you are the Emperor of a vast interstellar empire. Your next few sentences disprove the viability of the sentence above. If you want a vast interstellar space empire, then control a whole bunch of settlements that orbit in the space between Sol and Alpha Centauri. It's certainly vast on human scales. It's also technically interstellar. As an experiment, it might be fun to create a game that is deliberately inconsistent. A friend of mine created such a space combat themed game, including paradoxes and rules for resolving them. I 3D printed pieces for it. It was indeed fun, so the answer to your conjecture is yes.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  "Your next few sentences disprove the viability of the sentence above." Exactly. Going back to my original comment, why is that many intelligent people continue to act as if such things are possible, when they know better?
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    We like the lazur zaps and the shiny spaceship graphics. Also: awesome theme music!
rlpb 8y ago
> It is not Eventually Consistent... If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent. Nobody has ever found a case where it isn't. Relativity was predicted to exist because "eventual consistency" was assumed axiomatic in our universe. Essentially, eventual consistency is exactly why the universal speed limit exists. > but rather, it is Infinitely Inconsistent We will fall behind in knowledge of events, but causal knowledge of an event in our universe, if it exists, is always consistent. Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only database (think git), not data that gets updated (like a key/value database).

lkrubner 8y ago

"You could totally re-tell the entire Star Wars and Star Trek" Both of those are fiction, so they are not relevant. I think we all get why people like fiction -- it's entertaining and some of the better stuff is educational. But why do intelligent people want to believe that any such coherent stories can actually be told in real life? We all know it's impossible. Even basic questions such as "How old are you" become unanswerable. A person gets in a ship and travels at 1 G to another star, then turns around and comes back to Earth, they've aged 20 years, meanwhile on Earth 200 years have passed and all their friends are dead. Which timeline is real? How would any sci-fi tropes play out, in real life, in a universe of such inconsistencies? Consider the issue of law enforcement. How could a central authority enforce its power, if people knew they could commit a crime, live a long life, and die before any forces from the central authority arrived? The notion of a political entity existing at more than solar system scales is ridiculous. Intelligent people know this, yet many of them still seem to want to believe that such a thing is a possible. Why is that?

stcredzero 8y ago
But why do intelligent people want to believe that any such coherent stories can actually be told in real life? We all know it's impossible. Even basic questions such as "How old are you" become unanswerable. Really intelligent informed people know the relative scales involved. So if all of Star Wars were re-imagined to occur using reasonable tech within the several cubic light years around Alpha Centauri, no speeds where severe relativistic time dilation effects are necessary for normal transportation. "How old are you" is readily answerable +/- a month for just about everyone, even most spacefarers. Heck, even the prequel trilogy makes more sense. (As Plinkett puts it, why are people on the planet of Naboo dying because they lack, "Space Supplies?" It would make a whole lot more sense if Naboo were an icy ball in the Oort cloud.) A person gets in a ship and travels at 1 G to another star, then turns around and comes back to Earth, they've aged 20 years, meanwhile on Earth 200 years have passed and all their friends are dead. Which timeline is real? How would any sci-fi tropes play out, in real life, in a universe of such inconsistencies? Another thing: I'm not an expert myself, but I can already tell that you don't even understand the big abstractions of relativity that well. The "Twin Paradox" is not actually a paradox. There is a global set of spacetime intervals which is consistent among all observers. It's only each observer's view of the spacetime interval which disagrees between observers. I'm probably saying that wrong, but the gist of that should be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo The "Spacetime Globe" by Minute Physics is the most helpful. It's like you're a 2D flatlander declaring that a cube would be seen as a square by one person and a hexagon by another, so the 3D universe must be an inconsistent database. Uh, no. The universe is totally consistent. You, poor finite human, just have a slim, parochial view of it.