5 ms·

"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. Y

"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).
- stcredzero 8y ago
  > If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent. Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually Consistent. It's simply consistent. What's really going on, is that some programmers don't understand relativity. Relativity doesn't actually say that everyone gets their own reality. There is a consistent consensual reality. Spacetime intervals are consistent between all observers. The time ordering of events changes depending on the observer's POV and relative motion, but there is an underlying consistent reality that's the same for everybody. 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 thing I've seen, flat out, for understanding relativity. > Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only database This is correct. Relativity just says that different users get different results, depending on how they query. The underlying database is the same for everybody. (Some parts of it are forbidden access, of course.) Programmers have been causing physicists to facepalm since at least the USENET days. I should know. I was one of them!
  - rlpb 8y ago
    > Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually Consistent. It's simply consistent. We agree except for what we mean by "eventually" which is just semantics. What I mean by "eventually" is that eventually all the information arrives for my (or anyone's) model of the universe to match reality, analogous to eventually consistent distributed databases. Like an eventually consistent database however we can never catch up completely, since new events are happening in the universe all the time. It takes time for this information to "replicate", but there is no inconsistency. I was following lkrubner's analogy.
mc32 8y ago
Isn't that a similar problem to what seafaring empires had ~500 years ago and earlier? Perhaps the time delay wasn't as long, but news could take months or years to get back to "HQ" about what was happening in far flung lands. Give them freedom to take action and eventually independence to act completely on their own.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  No, because on Earth one can reconcile time. If Vikings go to Newfoundland, fight a battle, and return to Norway 10 years after they left, both the people in Norway, and also the warriors who went to Newfoundland, will agree that 10 years passed. You don't end up with one group feeling that 1 year passed and another group feeling 10 years passed, and perhaps a different group that feels 100 years have passed.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    It doesn't matter whether 10 or 100 years have passed, the only thing that matters is causal order. After all, the King only needs to assign punishments and rewards, and those are based on what happened and why. "What happened and why" is the same in every reference frame. Even things like 10-year jail sentences will still work, because you clearly are asking for 10 years from the perspective of the convict.
mat4magic 8y ago
Kind of sounds like the libertarian dream coming true. The vast distance give lots of freedom and makes central authoritarian control impossible

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).

stcredzero 8y ago
> If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent. Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually Consistent. It's simply consistent. What's really going on, is that some programmers don't understand relativity. Relativity doesn't actually say that everyone gets their own reality. There is a consistent consensual reality. Spacetime intervals are consistent between all observers. The time ordering of events changes depending on the observer's POV and relative motion, but there is an underlying consistent reality that's the same for everybody. 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 thing I've seen, flat out, for understanding relativity. > Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only database This is correct. Relativity just says that different users get different results, depending on how they query. The underlying database is the same for everybody. (Some parts of it are forbidden access, of course.) Programmers have been causing physicists to facepalm since at least the USENET days. I should know. I was one of them!
- rlpb 8y ago
  > Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually Consistent. It's simply consistent. We agree except for what we mean by "eventually" which is just semantics. What I mean by "eventually" is that eventually all the information arrives for my (or anyone's) model of the universe to match reality, analogous to eventually consistent distributed databases. Like an eventually consistent database however we can never catch up completely, since new events are happening in the universe all the time. It takes time for this information to "replicate", but there is no inconsistency. I was following lkrubner's analogy.

mc32 8y ago

Isn't that a similar problem to what seafaring empires had ~500 years ago and earlier? Perhaps the time delay wasn't as long, but news could take months or years to get back to "HQ" about what was happening in far flung lands. Give them freedom to take action and eventually independence to act completely on their own.

lkrubner 8y ago
No, because on Earth one can reconcile time. If Vikings go to Newfoundland, fight a battle, and return to Norway 10 years after they left, both the people in Norway, and also the warriors who went to Newfoundland, will agree that 10 years passed. You don't end up with one group feeling that 1 year passed and another group feeling 10 years passed, and perhaps a different group that feels 100 years have passed.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  It doesn't matter whether 10 or 100 years have passed, the only thing that matters is causal order. After all, the King only needs to assign punishments and rewards, and those are based on what happened and why. "What happened and why" is the same in every reference frame. Even things like 10-year jail sentences will still work, because you clearly are asking for 10 years from the perspective of the convict.

mat4magic 8y ago

Kind of sounds like the libertarian dream coming true. The vast distance give lots of freedom and makes central authoritarian control impossible