6 ms·
> when we get faster than light travel FTL requires numerous things to be true about our universe, that all signs say are not.
by vermilingua 7y ago
> when we get faster than light travel
FTL requires numerous things to be true about our universe, that all signs say are not.
- glup 7y ago...crushing all my dreams of being a starship captain, thanks.
- ddingus 7y agoI am reading big space operas right now. What we know of this reality is so limiting compared to what we can imagine. Good dreams. Many of us have them. I also like to dream the knowable remains much larger than the currently understood too.
- SRTP 7y agoAny book in particular you'd recommend?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Jorge1o1 7y agoThe Baen Free CD has always been a great source of free sci fi books for me
- vermilingua 7y agoAnything in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks; The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey; The Commonwealth and Void trilogies by Peter F. Hamilton, and the Night’s Dawn trilogy also by Peter F. Hamilton; The Dune saga by Frank Herbert.
- ddeck 7y agoI'll add the Ancillary (Imperial Radch) series by Ann Leckie to these good suggestions.
- SirHound 7y agoHamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction was the stupidest book I’ve ever read and took hundreds of pages to expose itself. Are his others any more grounded (like your other suggestions)?
- vermilingua 7y agoYeah the Night’s dawn series was a bit out there compared to the genre average. The Commonwealth series is considerably closer to baseline, and his best books IMO. The void trilogy (and the newer trilogy whose name escapes me) follow on from the Commonwealth books, and while good, don’t hold up to the first three.
- SirHound 7y agoThanks for the heads up! I liked his writing style so I’ll put them on the list.
- boznz 7y agodid you read the same book as me.. it was pretty awesome
- 7y ago
- arethuza 7y ago"reality is so limiting compared to what we can imagine" This is actually a central theme of the Zones of Thought novels by Vernon Vinge where a character in the far future describes our current time as the "Age of Failed Dreams" (GAI, nanotech etc.) - turns out that he is wrong but for rather neat reasons.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
- de_watcher 7y agoFunny thing is that the imaginary worlds in books are way less weirder compared to what reality has to offer. Apparently because it's harder to develop the story.
- TomMarius 7y agoIMHO we will still get a space opera-esque future, just within the Solar system, not outside of it. There is plenty of space, energy and material around for potentially trillions of people on billions of space stations and space ships.
- bakuninsbart 7y agoAnd we can still spread out from there. It is a well-thought out element of the Hyperion Cantos (occult SciFi): They do have some kind of Stargate to insta-travel, but building those Stargates requires people to travel for decades if not hundreds of years. These guys are put into stasis for the duration of the trip, and get to go home every couple of decades to talk to their grandchildren/distant descendants. Leaving SciFi aside, our communication technology will be up to the task of relaying information comparatively quickly (light speed or faster), and parallel societies could be built in neighboring solar systems.
- gisely 7y agoThe speed of light is just a compute constraint imposed on the physics simulation that is our universe. If we can just get the gods who are running that simulation to give us a little extra compute time in our neck of to woods then we can all be galactic explorers.
- vermilingua 7y agoJust for the sake of argument, let's run with that. If we're in a physics simulation, we don't experience at the rate that the simulation is processed. One "tick" of the simulation could be processed in one second of the host universe, or one hour: and we wouldn't feel the difference. We are processed at the same tickrate as the rest of the universe, so we experience the passage of time at the same rate that the simulation flows. The speed of light isn't just the speed of light, it's the speed of causality. It just so happens that light moves pretty well at that "speed limit" (in a vacuum). We could ask our computational hosts to increase or decrease c, and we still wouldn't be able to travel any faster than it.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoThe short story “Dust” (1992) by Greg Egan explores these ideas in a pretty entertaining way. Here, I found a copy: https://emperybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Greg-Egan-Dust.pdf https://emperybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Greg-Egan...
- username90 7y agoWe could ask the host to update their algorithm to let c be a property of objects and then just do spaceship.c = 1000 * c. Would probably be a heck of a refactor to get it working without bugs though.
- dkersten 7y agoJust leave the bugs in for the speedrunners to use.
- 7y ago