9 ms·

I love how they've said "constrained to C space". Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is,

I love how they've said "constrained to C space". Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is, which is easily proven by physics. But the physics we know of applies to what we know. There might be something completely different to what we're seeing/observing/theoritising with our smartest people and best equipment. I'm not saying we can just go faster than C by advancing technology: I know it's limited by relativity and is not a matter of advancing tech. What I'm saying is that there will probably be advancements in physics and technology so that C limit will of course stay the same, but it will be the physics inside the box whereas a complete new understanding of reality outside the box would be discovered, where things can travel "faster" than C using other dimensions or something that we even haven't thought of yet "outside the box", while still being perfectly compatible with the "regular" "inside the box" physics we love and use today, without violating and relativity rules of our classical physics. Then they'll probably look back and just laugh at the people who thought C was the absolute limit to everything.

cpill 4y ago
hey, but we'd have to escape the meat first
firecall 4y ago
I've always thought something like this! When people talk about Aliens, and how long it would take them to get here, I think they miss the point! Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. So for Aliens to visit us they most probably have a way to travel unconstrained by what we know as 3D space and time. I am not physicist, I have no idea LOL
- bluGill 4y ago
  Unless those aliens are close. There are a few stars within 5 light years, it seems reasonable that a sufficiently advanced civilization could reach us from that close in a reasonable amount of time. if they are really long lived 100 light years seems like the outside edge of reasonable travel distance.
  - names_are_hard 4y ago
    Why do you think 100 light years is the edge of "reasonable travel distance"? I put to you that you are imposing your human standards on other species, assuming that what seems to you to be a long time would also be a long time to another species. Maybe the aliens have an average livespan of 200k Earth-years. Maybe much more. Maybe they experience time differently, and for them a 100 year journey feels to them like a walk around the block.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      100 light years is arbitrary, but even for long lives things it seems like too far - few things on earth are that long lived, and bodies do break down over time, as do spaceships. Until we know the entire universe (because of the way the universe is expanding this is impossible) we cannot do more than apply our best guess, but I think I hit a good upper limit. Even if I'm off I seems unlikely it is by much.
- vl 4y ago
  >Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. It’s even worse than that. Since universe is expanding, there is limited area that is possible to reach with the speed of light. In 200 billion years other galaxies are not going to be visible anymore.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Yup. There was a famous talk with a astrophysicst (forgot who and the name of the talk) where he was demonstrating this in an ELI5 manner which made perfect sense. He was saying in the future even with the greatest advancements of technology and telescopes if they look at the sky they won't ever see anything and there will be no clue of there were other galaxies (or clusters, not sure) ever, because of expansion and redshift.
    - LadyCailin 4y ago
      It’s depressing. All this stuff that we will never ever be able to explore, and won’t even know exists at some point. I’m not even remotely religious, but sometimes I like to think that after death, we still continue to exist, but free from the constraints of physics, so we can explore the whole universe, through all of space and time.
- can16358p 4y ago
  To be fair about what has been in progress, we have the theoretical possibility of traveling through wormholes, which would allow "traveling" faster than light (well not really going faster than C but simply distorting spacetime itself to reach a point that would require traveling faster than C if we were to travel without distortion) yet there are many practical problems around it. Of course this doesn't mean that some advanced civilization haven't figured out how to practically use it, which I'm sure we'll also discover (in distant future) if we aren't killed by something else (most likely ourselves).
- PeterisP 4y ago
  > Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. If we're talking about traveling within our galaxy; the distances and thus sub-light travel times involved are huge, however the time spans available are even huger. On the timescale of planets, a million years is not "forever" but actually a quite trivial amount of time - if there was an almost perfect clone of Earth on the other side of Milky Way where the evolution of multicellular life happened 1% faster than it did here, then they would be tens of millions of years ahead of us, and that is not only enough to reach us at speeds much lower than c but also enough to colonize the whole galaxy while doing so, spending multiple millenia at each planet before moving on.
witheld 4y ago
It’s a pipe dream, we’ve never done anything that isn’t pretty much observed in nature. Electricity is observable in lightning bolts, nuclear fission is in the stars, birds fly without all the extra fuss. There’s not a single hint that we’ll ever do anything extraordinary.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  There are hints that some things exist in more than four dimensions, but that's it. There is no hint that we could apply it to any technology.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Definitely not now or anywhere in near future. But just imagine that there might be something out that even the smartests of the smartests couldn't have imagined until now. While I don't remotely know what it would be like, I definitely know that there's so much we don't know and have not discovered yet. Having not even found out secrets about our own planet's oceans, Fermi Paradox, or origin of consciousness/life/death, I'd say there's still much to be discovered in physics.
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      For what it's worth, I agree with you that something may be discovered some day. But we currently have absolutely no evidence nor hints that might happen. We actually have more indication that an almighty creator exists than we have indication that humans may someday achieve FTL travel. At least the former has eye-witness testimony spanning hundreds of documented cases across centuries and cultures. FTL travel? Just speculation and Gene Roddenberry.
      - jotm 4y ago
        > more indication that an almighty creator exists Has that ever not been the case? God has been the goto explanation of anything modern humans didn't understand. The most brilliant minds at various points couldn't have thought "aye, if we cut a tiny thing inside a metal heavier than lead or glue these tiny things inside air it can create more energy than lighting/gunpowder/dynamite". Or that wireless communication is possible and sending a manmade moon out around the Earth is also possible, and you can do both for instantly sending light signals, nay, whole books around the globe. Or virtual worlds that are not bound by any physics (maybe we're dumped into one at birth which can make any observations rather pointless heh). I can't imagine FTL (although far out theories exist), but our current method of choice is chemical explosions, so there's some massive improvements to be made there.
vl 4y ago
You either accept scientific method, and then there will be no advancements to go faster than speed of light, or you don’t and then all bets are off and discussion is pointless.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  "No genius ever transcends his own epoch or is much aware of advances possible only a half-century in his future." -- Erich Fromm Perhaps an exception is Da Vinci. Generally though, there's a separate class of those with rich, intuitive imaginations, but without the ability to fill in the details. They have the odd ability to be right more than half the time. Early computer "sci-fi" thinkers, and I'd include visionaries like Ada Lovelace there, have interpreted our internet hundreds of years in advance. At that time there was nothing comparable in nature to take as an analogy.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Everything discovered until now has been the low hanging fruit. The pattern is that it's only getting harder to discover new secrets of nature. Today it requires decades of education, rare genius, and a massive amount of work and luck. There will likely come a point at which reaching new discoveries requires more energy, resources, and time than any human(s) can afford. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but accept that diminishing returns will kick in at some point. We live on a finite planet as a precarious existence. Learning to first live sustainably is probably a better bet than burning the earth to send few people to another planet for a while.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but accept that diminishing returns will kick in at some point. You're most probably right Paul. I agree with Thiel and Graeber (in their now famous conversation) that this began 20 or 30 years ago. > The pattern is that it's only getting harder to discover new secrets of nature. Not sure about that. What pattern do you mean? There have been stalls, hiatus and centuries of dark-age. That "past performance is no guarantee of future success" swings both ways. No strong epistemological statements can be made. Maybe the patterns we see have more to do with power dynamics than opportunity. > Everything discovered until now has been the low hanging fruit. We cannot know that. Imagine the discovery of a new force that connects electrodynamics and gravity, or an extraordinary development in mathematics that changes the way we see data and statistics. These could seed a 100 year run of paradigm shifts. > Today it requires decades of education, I've been on this line of thought too. I did a talk at Kings College on the problem of the "pulled up ladder", the resilience of innovation and the possibility of reconstructing a post-calamity society due to lost knowledge and the apparently insurmountable demands of education. But as I think more on it, hasn't every epoch faced the same challenge. It's terrifying when viewed as an individual prospect, but on a collective scale we always advance. > There will likely come a point at which reaching new discoveries requires more energy, resources, and time than any human(s) can afford. This might be a bit Malthusian. Let's hold out hope for genius and luck too. > We live on a finite planet as a precarious existence. Learning to first live sustainable is probably a better bet than burning the earth to send few people to another planet for a while. That's an interesting debate. I also have reservations on the expansive/exploratory mind-set. It's a cliche to say it, but very few people understand the scales, energy and likely opporunity from space. A period of sustainable consolidation might be what we need. On the other hand some will wish to push on regardless and I don't think anyone ought to discourage them or that they need to "burn the planet" to do so.
anonymous_sorry 4y ago
>Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is, which is easily proven by physics. I remember reading that special relativity does not prevent faster-than-light travel, but does prevent accelerating a mass to the speed of light. That doesn't preclude things existing that have always had a faster-than-light velocity. How such things could originate would be an interesting question for sci-fi.
- simonh 4y ago
  Right, relativity doesn't say anything about technology or non-relativistic physical processes. It just provides equations, into which you plug in distributions of matter and energy, from which you can calculate a spacetime geometry.
yafinder 4y ago
The problem is, faster than light travel violates causality in some reference frames [1]. This is a big problem. Forget grandpa-killing travellers; even several bits of time travelling information allows one to easily solve NP-complete problems (it's an even more powerful mode of computation, actually) [2] Any new physics that allows for FTL must be very weird, even in a logical sense. [1]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-faster-than-light-travel-violate-causality https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-f... [2]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html
- residualmind 4y ago
  I guess then causality will be broken if some external force introduces FTL/time travel to our handful of dimensions. Looking at our 4D hypercube of space time, any point in that x|y|z|t space becomes mutable, whats the problem? ;) (I know you need at least one new "time" dimension then to have mutability, this is difficult to talk about. And then somebody in 6D will find that very cute..)
  - simonh 4y ago
    Except that 6D mathematics, and even physics, is routine. Mathematicians and physicists solve problems in more dimensions that that without breaking step these days, and in fact have done for generations at this point. A lot of things like that, which non-specialists think are spooky and weird and unknown, are actually old hat.
    - residualmind 4y ago
      And? Exactly my point, nothing spooky about it. At first you look at it in 4d, then 5, then 6..
      - simonh 4y ago
        Right, it's boring and routine maths, but there's no evidence that sort of mathematics will somehow bypass the rest of mathematics and physics. It's like suggesting that long division might solve quantum non-locality.
the_gipsy 4y ago
> Then they'll probably look back and just laugh at the people who thought C was the absolute limit to everything. We don't look back to Australopithecus and laugh at them.
- can16358p 4y ago
  They didn't make bold claims though (at least in a way that we humans can understand). However, "c will never be able to be passed" is a very bold claim. IMO we can leave room for exploration by saying "c can't be passed with our current model of physics due to relativity, in the context of what we refer to as spacetime", which would still be correct, yet leave the door open for any future discoveries.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  We do laughat alchemists and astrologists though. We don't know what Australopithecus thoyght they knew.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    That's my point, when we pass those barriers it won't be "us" anymore. It won't be like looking back at essentially a dumber version of ourselves, but like a distinct species.
simonh 4y ago
>What I'm saying is that there will probably be That doesn't follow. We can always say there's things we don't know, sure, but it's not reasonable to take that as a justification for saying "Therefore maybe X", with the implication that X is somehow likely, or therefore even possible in reality. Maybe fairies. Maybe whatever. It's not a technique that can lead you to any particular conclusion. It certainly can't tell you anything about the probability of something.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It seems awfully parochial to assume the aliens have to be far away. There could be plenty right nearby, or right here. We don't even know what is on the sea floor, or not even very deep underground. If trees are thinking, we do not know it. Something that lives a thousand times our speed would be invisible. If they don't interact with E-M fields, we could walk right through them, or they us. Our ground wouldn't hold them up against gravity, but they could have ground of their own, with a surface a thousand miles up, or down.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I'm not assuming anything, and I'm not the one assigning high probabilities to things conjured entirely from the imagination. That looks a lot more like making assumptions to me. I enjoy science fiction, science fantasy and even outright fantasy too. It's fun to imagine other worlds, or how our world might have been, or might once be. Imagination is an important part of our lives; but reality consists of what is, and it doesn't care about our preferences and dreams.
    - ConstantVigil 4y ago
    - simonh 4y ago
      In reply to ConstantVigil, who's reply got flagged/dead almost instantly. >The basis of all creation in regards to humanities progress all starts with the beginnings of a hope or dream... I agree, this is absolutely true, that's why I said it's so important. The fact is though that only a minuscule tiny fraction of the things ever imagined actually turn out to be true. In fact most of the time we have to be smacked repeatedly in the face by reality before we get it through our skulls that the way we imagine things are isn't the case. I'm all for keeping an open mind. However imagining things we'd like to be true, and then constructing spurious justifications for think they are probable in the absence of any reason or evidence, is not keeping an open mind. It's the exact opposite.
draw_down 4y ago
partomniscient 4y ago
What happens if we work out how to make 'C' bigger? Then the constraints still hold true, but possibility space expands.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FredPret 4y ago
The speed of light is the speed at which events propagate. Let’s say something happens 8 light-minutes away, for instance the sun explodes. For the first 8 minutes, we’d live in a world where the sun hasn’t exploded yet. Then the event reaches us, and for the first time, we can get information about this event. Perhaps a theoretical physicist can weigh in about whether bent space or a high-dimensional shortcut could change this.
willcipriano 4y ago
I have the same feeling. Objects may be flying past our planet at many times the speed of light and we would be oblivious to them. I suspect the speed of light is the maximum speed an object can reach whilst still being detectable by conventional means. Once you surpass it things cease to be conventional.
ajuc 4y ago
"Algebraist" by Ian Banks is about human exploring a civilization that lives orders of magnitude slower than us. For them universe is easy to colonize because they live so slow that interstellar travel is fast. We have things on Earth that live very slowly or pause metabolism altogether for long periods of time. It's not a big stretch to imagine a civilization that can do this (and started very early in universe age) that colonized a lot of universe despite speed of light constraint.
xwdv 4y ago
I’ve always wondered but if we were blind would we be able to ever know anything about “speed of light” or photons?
stakkur 4y ago
It’s…fiction. Made up. Not real. No actual science involved, just grammar.

cpill 4y ago

hey, but we'd have to escape the meat first

firecall 4y ago

I've always thought something like this! When people talk about Aliens, and how long it would take them to get here, I think they miss the point! Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. So for Aliens to visit us they most probably have a way to travel unconstrained by what we know as 3D space and time. I am not physicist, I have no idea LOL

bluGill 4y ago
Unless those aliens are close. There are a few stars within 5 light years, it seems reasonable that a sufficiently advanced civilization could reach us from that close in a reasonable amount of time. if they are really long lived 100 light years seems like the outside edge of reasonable travel distance.
- names_are_hard 4y ago
  Why do you think 100 light years is the edge of "reasonable travel distance"? I put to you that you are imposing your human standards on other species, assuming that what seems to you to be a long time would also be a long time to another species. Maybe the aliens have an average livespan of 200k Earth-years. Maybe much more. Maybe they experience time differently, and for them a 100 year journey feels to them like a walk around the block.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    100 light years is arbitrary, but even for long lives things it seems like too far - few things on earth are that long lived, and bodies do break down over time, as do spaceships. Until we know the entire universe (because of the way the universe is expanding this is impossible) we cannot do more than apply our best guess, but I think I hit a good upper limit. Even if I'm off I seems unlikely it is by much.
vl 4y ago
>Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. It’s even worse than that. Since universe is expanding, there is limited area that is possible to reach with the speed of light. In 200 billion years other galaxies are not going to be visible anymore.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Yup. There was a famous talk with a astrophysicst (forgot who and the name of the talk) where he was demonstrating this in an ELI5 manner which made perfect sense. He was saying in the future even with the greatest advancements of technology and telescopes if they look at the sky they won't ever see anything and there will be no clue of there were other galaxies (or clusters, not sure) ever, because of expansion and redshift.
  - LadyCailin 4y ago
    It’s depressing. All this stuff that we will never ever be able to explore, and won’t even know exists at some point. I’m not even remotely religious, but sometimes I like to think that after death, we still continue to exist, but free from the constraints of physics, so we can explore the whole universe, through all of space and time.
can16358p 4y ago
To be fair about what has been in progress, we have the theoretical possibility of traveling through wormholes, which would allow "traveling" faster than light (well not really going faster than C but simply distorting spacetime itself to reach a point that would require traveling faster than C if we were to travel without distortion) yet there are many practical problems around it. Of course this doesn't mean that some advanced civilization haven't figured out how to practically use it, which I'm sure we'll also discover (in distant future) if we aren't killed by something else (most likely ourselves).
PeterisP 4y ago
> Travelling around the Universe would take forever even at the speed of light. If we're talking about traveling within our galaxy; the distances and thus sub-light travel times involved are huge, however the time spans available are even huger. On the timescale of planets, a million years is not "forever" but actually a quite trivial amount of time - if there was an almost perfect clone of Earth on the other side of Milky Way where the evolution of multicellular life happened 1% faster than it did here, then they would be tens of millions of years ahead of us, and that is not only enough to reach us at speeds much lower than c but also enough to colonize the whole galaxy while doing so, spending multiple millenia at each planet before moving on.

witheld 4y ago

It’s a pipe dream, we’ve never done anything that isn’t pretty much observed in nature. Electricity is observable in lightning bolts, nuclear fission is in the stars, birds fly without all the extra fuss. There’s not a single hint that we’ll ever do anything extraordinary.

dotancohen 4y ago
There are hints that some things exist in more than four dimensions, but that's it. There is no hint that we could apply it to any technology.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Definitely not now or anywhere in near future. But just imagine that there might be something out that even the smartests of the smartests couldn't have imagined until now. While I don't remotely know what it would be like, I definitely know that there's so much we don't know and have not discovered yet. Having not even found out secrets about our own planet's oceans, Fermi Paradox, or origin of consciousness/life/death, I'd say there's still much to be discovered in physics.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I agree with you that something may be discovered some day. But we currently have absolutely no evidence nor hints that might happen. We actually have more indication that an almighty creator exists than we have indication that humans may someday achieve FTL travel. At least the former has eye-witness testimony spanning hundreds of documented cases across centuries and cultures. FTL travel? Just speculation and Gene Roddenberry.
    - jotm 4y ago
      > more indication that an almighty creator exists Has that ever not been the case? God has been the goto explanation of anything modern humans didn't understand. The most brilliant minds at various points couldn't have thought "aye, if we cut a tiny thing inside a metal heavier than lead or glue these tiny things inside air it can create more energy than lighting/gunpowder/dynamite". Or that wireless communication is possible and sending a manmade moon out around the Earth is also possible, and you can do both for instantly sending light signals, nay, whole books around the globe. Or virtual worlds that are not bound by any physics (maybe we're dumped into one at birth which can make any observations rather pointless heh). I can't imagine FTL (although far out theories exist), but our current method of choice is chemical explosions, so there's some massive improvements to be made there.

vl 4y ago

You either accept scientific method, and then there will be no advancements to go faster than speed of light, or you don’t and then all bets are off and discussion is pointless.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
"No genius ever transcends his own epoch or is much aware of advances possible only a half-century in his future." -- Erich Fromm Perhaps an exception is Da Vinci. Generally though, there's a separate class of those with rich, intuitive imaginations, but without the ability to fill in the details. They have the odd ability to be right more than half the time. Early computer "sci-fi" thinkers, and I'd include visionaries like Ada Lovelace there, have interpreted our internet hundreds of years in advance. At that time there was nothing comparable in nature to take as an analogy.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Everything discovered until now has been the low hanging fruit. The pattern is that it's only getting harder to discover new secrets of nature. Today it requires decades of education, rare genius, and a massive amount of work and luck. There will likely come a point at which reaching new discoveries requires more energy, resources, and time than any human(s) can afford. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but accept that diminishing returns will kick in at some point. We live on a finite planet as a precarious existence. Learning to first live sustainably is probably a better bet than burning the earth to send few people to another planet for a while.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but accept that diminishing returns will kick in at some point. You're most probably right Paul. I agree with Thiel and Graeber (in their now famous conversation) that this began 20 or 30 years ago. > The pattern is that it's only getting harder to discover new secrets of nature. Not sure about that. What pattern do you mean? There have been stalls, hiatus and centuries of dark-age. That "past performance is no guarantee of future success" swings both ways. No strong epistemological statements can be made. Maybe the patterns we see have more to do with power dynamics than opportunity. > Everything discovered until now has been the low hanging fruit. We cannot know that. Imagine the discovery of a new force that connects electrodynamics and gravity, or an extraordinary development in mathematics that changes the way we see data and statistics. These could seed a 100 year run of paradigm shifts. > Today it requires decades of education, I've been on this line of thought too. I did a talk at Kings College on the problem of the "pulled up ladder", the resilience of innovation and the possibility of reconstructing a post-calamity society due to lost knowledge and the apparently insurmountable demands of education. But as I think more on it, hasn't every epoch faced the same challenge. It's terrifying when viewed as an individual prospect, but on a collective scale we always advance. > There will likely come a point at which reaching new discoveries requires more energy, resources, and time than any human(s) can afford. This might be a bit Malthusian. Let's hold out hope for genius and luck too. > We live on a finite planet as a precarious existence. Learning to first live sustainable is probably a better bet than burning the earth to send few people to another planet for a while. That's an interesting debate. I also have reservations on the expansive/exploratory mind-set. It's a cliche to say it, but very few people understand the scales, energy and likely opporunity from space. A period of sustainable consolidation might be what we need. On the other hand some will wish to push on regardless and I don't think anyone ought to discourage them or that they need to "burn the planet" to do so.

anonymous_sorry 4y ago

>Many people say speed of light is the absolute speed limit of anything or information can travel. Sure it is, which is easily proven by physics. I remember reading that special relativity does not prevent faster-than-light travel, but does prevent accelerating a mass to the speed of light. That doesn't preclude things existing that have always had a faster-than-light velocity. How such things could originate would be an interesting question for sci-fi.

simonh 4y ago
Right, relativity doesn't say anything about technology or non-relativistic physical processes. It just provides equations, into which you plug in distributions of matter and energy, from which you can calculate a spacetime geometry.

yafinder 4y ago

The problem is, faster than light travel violates causality in some reference frames [1]. This is a big problem. Forget grandpa-killing travellers; even several bits of time travelling information allows one to easily solve NP-complete problems (it's an even more powerful mode of computation, actually) [2] Any new physics that allows for FTL must be very weird, even in a logical sense. [1]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-faster-than-light-travel-violate-causality https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-f... [2]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html

residualmind 4y ago
I guess then causality will be broken if some external force introduces FTL/time travel to our handful of dimensions. Looking at our 4D hypercube of space time, any point in that x|y|z|t space becomes mutable, whats the problem? ;) (I know you need at least one new "time" dimension then to have mutability, this is difficult to talk about. And then somebody in 6D will find that very cute..)
- simonh 4y ago
  Except that 6D mathematics, and even physics, is routine. Mathematicians and physicists solve problems in more dimensions that that without breaking step these days, and in fact have done for generations at this point. A lot of things like that, which non-specialists think are spooky and weird and unknown, are actually old hat.
  - residualmind 4y ago
    And? Exactly my point, nothing spooky about it. At first you look at it in 4d, then 5, then 6..
    - simonh 4y ago
      Right, it's boring and routine maths, but there's no evidence that sort of mathematics will somehow bypass the rest of mathematics and physics. It's like suggesting that long division might solve quantum non-locality.

the_gipsy 4y ago

> Then they'll probably look back and just laugh at the people who thought C was the absolute limit to everything. We don't look back to Australopithecus and laugh at them.

can16358p 4y ago
They didn't make bold claims though (at least in a way that we humans can understand). However, "c will never be able to be passed" is a very bold claim. IMO we can leave room for exploration by saying "c can't be passed with our current model of physics due to relativity, in the context of what we refer to as spacetime", which would still be correct, yet leave the door open for any future discoveries.
guerrilla 4y ago
We do laughat alchemists and astrologists though. We don't know what Australopithecus thoyght they knew.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  That's my point, when we pass those barriers it won't be "us" anymore. It won't be like looking back at essentially a dumber version of ourselves, but like a distinct species.

simonh 4y ago

>What I'm saying is that there will probably be That doesn't follow. We can always say there's things we don't know, sure, but it's not reasonable to take that as a justification for saying "Therefore maybe X", with the implication that X is somehow likely, or therefore even possible in reality. Maybe fairies. Maybe whatever. It's not a technique that can lead you to any particular conclusion. It certainly can't tell you anything about the probability of something.

ncmncm 4y ago
It seems awfully parochial to assume the aliens have to be far away. There could be plenty right nearby, or right here. We don't even know what is on the sea floor, or not even very deep underground. If trees are thinking, we do not know it. Something that lives a thousand times our speed would be invisible. If they don't interact with E-M fields, we could walk right through them, or they us. Our ground wouldn't hold them up against gravity, but they could have ground of their own, with a surface a thousand miles up, or down.
- simonh 4y ago
  I'm not assuming anything, and I'm not the one assigning high probabilities to things conjured entirely from the imagination. That looks a lot more like making assumptions to me. I enjoy science fiction, science fantasy and even outright fantasy too. It's fun to imagine other worlds, or how our world might have been, or might once be. Imagination is an important part of our lives; but reality consists of what is, and it doesn't care about our preferences and dreams.
  - ConstantVigil 4y ago
  - simonh 4y ago
    In reply to ConstantVigil, who's reply got flagged/dead almost instantly. >The basis of all creation in regards to humanities progress all starts with the beginnings of a hope or dream... I agree, this is absolutely true, that's why I said it's so important. The fact is though that only a minuscule tiny fraction of the things ever imagined actually turn out to be true. In fact most of the time we have to be smacked repeatedly in the face by reality before we get it through our skulls that the way we imagine things are isn't the case. I'm all for keeping an open mind. However imagining things we'd like to be true, and then constructing spurious justifications for think they are probable in the absence of any reason or evidence, is not keeping an open mind. It's the exact opposite.

draw_down 4y ago

partomniscient 4y ago

What happens if we work out how to make 'C' bigger? Then the constraints still hold true, but possibility space expands.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

FredPret 4y ago

The speed of light is the speed at which events propagate. Let’s say something happens 8 light-minutes away, for instance the sun explodes. For the first 8 minutes, we’d live in a world where the sun hasn’t exploded yet. Then the event reaches us, and for the first time, we can get information about this event. Perhaps a theoretical physicist can weigh in about whether bent space or a high-dimensional shortcut could change this.

willcipriano 4y ago

I have the same feeling. Objects may be flying past our planet at many times the speed of light and we would be oblivious to them. I suspect the speed of light is the maximum speed an object can reach whilst still being detectable by conventional means. Once you surpass it things cease to be conventional.

ajuc 4y ago

"Algebraist" by Ian Banks is about human exploring a civilization that lives orders of magnitude slower than us. For them universe is easy to colonize because they live so slow that interstellar travel is fast. We have things on Earth that live very slowly or pause metabolism altogether for long periods of time. It's not a big stretch to imagine a civilization that can do this (and started very early in universe age) that colonized a lot of universe despite speed of light constraint.

xwdv 4y ago

I’ve always wondered but if we were blind would we be able to ever know anything about “speed of light” or photons?

stakkur 4y ago

It’s…fiction. Made up. Not real. No actual science involved, just grammar.