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If you ever try to follow what a holodeck can and can't do, you easily see that few of our technology predictions can even hold a candle to it. There's some fin
by aasasd 5y ago
If you ever try to follow what a holodeck can and can't do, you easily see that few of our technology predictions can even hold a candle to it. There's some finger-waggling in-universe to explain away the discrepancy, but the ‘fact’ is that a holodeck would create matter with which you can interact, out of thin air, and expand this volume of matter seemingly for kilometers around, while purportedly being located in a room. VR is but a feeble emulation of holodeck's glory.
- aasasd 5y agoIn fact, if you consider the in-universe explanation of ‘holodeck creates fake matter that can't actually exist and function outside of the holodeck’, then things may possibly be even more impressive. So, presumably people discovered some kind of a different matter, with which we could interact, but which exists only temporarily on the holodeck thing. Since it flips in and out of existence when the holodeck activates or deactivates, it sounds like some kind of energy that masquerades and works as matter. But how much regular energy would you need to expend to hold this matter-energy in place and make it work? All discussion of teleportation and ‘transporter’ devices comes to conclusions that disassembling and assembling human-scale objects would require huge amounts of energy, like on levels of Kardashev Type II. But a holodeck pretty much does about the same kind of thing continuously, all the time while it's in use. Imagine, at the vague minimum, running a present-day country's worth of energy supply to power your VR box.
- native_samples 5y agoYes I know how the holodeck was hypothesised to work, but the actual goal of the deck was VR entertainment and we have that.