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I find it sort of ironic that everyone here thinks this would be awesome, but are completely opposed to hovering predator drones observing our every action 24/7
by andr3w321 14y ago
I find it sort of ironic that everyone here thinks this would be awesome, but are completely opposed to hovering predator drones observing our every action 24/7. Obviously it's all a matter of who has access to the data, but essentially the data would be the same.
- ebildsten 14y agoThe data is not the same - they vary greatly on spatial resolution and latency. Better than 10cm resolution with effectively 0s latency (in the drone case), and ~5,000-12,000km resolution (assuming you can get back only a couple of pixels from a MACHO) with yrs of latency are two very very different things.
- potatolicious 14y agoEven disregarding the resolution problems as brought up by ebilsten, and assuming we have some magical tech that would allow us spy-satellite-like capabilities with this... we'd still be looking at Earth decades in the past. I for one could not care less if historians centuries in the future want to observe me through a black hole. Its effects on freedom and civil rights is basically nil, unlike predator drones.
- teamonkey 14y agoAzimov explored this idea in his short story The Dead Past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
- ComputerGuru 14y agoIn Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" (awesome book, btw! I don't think he's planning on writing the remaining 2 in the trilogy, though :() they have machines that do exactly this, letting them monitor ancient history up to a decade ago: anyone, anywhere on the planet. The catch is that the builders of the machine actually have access to real-time monitoring, but pretend this isn't the case to avoid public outrage.