4 ms·

By your argument, shouldn’t we assume that it’s possible by <literally any means you can imagine> that we just don’t know about?

• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Not necessarily. We have no reason to assume gravity waves couldn't be produced artificially. This wouldn't really break any existing understandings of physics, it would merely require adding to them. The question is just how. We do have reason to think that information can't travel faster than the speed of light, as this would make it possible to send information to the future and then back to the past via a closed time-like curve, which would have all manner of effects that contradict what we've observed about how the universe works, and in fact are self-contradictory as well. This doesn't go to say this isn't possible, after all the Alcubierre drive seems hypothetically possible (it "only" hinges upon the ability to create negative energy density), it's just much more implausible.
  • misnome 4y ago
    But you don’t know that to be the case, so shouldn’t we assume it’s possible? It’s not the possibility of communication with gravity waves that people are disputing, it’s that without as much science fiction as FTL the energy requirements are so massive that you completely negate the arguments against light for the same purpose. Without this SF leap, you could just pour the energy into making a light as bright as e.g. a supernova and it would be multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and less difficult to generate the energy. This is completely ignoring the case where you know the direction you want to communicate with and build a laser. Yes, you can come up with plausible sounding SF ideas about why you might want to do this but please don’t pretend that it’s grounded in anything tangible.