Science fiction pet hate

[ProtoAvatar]

stj

I agree that resources (as in mineral resources and the like) are abundant throughout the cosmos. Interstellar wars won't be fought over them.
However, these are not the only reasons one can start wars over.
Wars can be fought over ideological or religious reasons.
For example, an alien species might attack another, less advanced one, in order to eliminate a potential adversary before it becomes a threat, while it's still weak.

Way back, I explicitly said it would be insane to make space war. The above are the insane reasons. In human culture, ideology and religion are justifications, not the real reasons. The crazy ideas often mislead instead of just motivate, which is why I have to wonder: Is it really possible for a species to develop and keep the ability to engage in genuinely nonrationally motivated actions, without it being selected out?

stj, you do realise there's no such thing as 'logical' motivations, yes? Well, apparently not:

Human beings are motivated by emotions - the desire to affirm oneself, greed, morals, love, hate, religion, ideology, etc. Try to logically justify one of these motivators without appealing to another emotion, stj.
Logic is merely the instrument to make these objectives come true. Someone who doesn't have emotions to motivate him would be catatonic, would have no objective to strive for.

So, FAR from being "selected out", in order for a species to continue existing, it has to have 'non-rational motivations'. They are the equivalent of axioms, stj.
Which, of course, means that ideology, religion or just fear are valid motivators for any species.

As for the difficulty of interstellar travel, as of today, we only know the general principles of building a relativistic ship travelling at about 10% speed of light.
But our knowledge of the physical laws is far from complete or accurate.

And even now we could speculate on exotic interstellar travel methods:

For example, by using Heisenberg's uncertainty:
By measuring exactly the impuse (of a quantum particle - a ship) on an axis, its position becomes indeterminate on that axis - beyond normal light-speed limits (aka it's superluminal travel). Of course, in order for this to work, you would need to put the whole ship in a single quantum state and then choose the position the wave function will collapse to (hey, if it was easy, anyone could do it).

My point is - "There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Or mine.
We just are not in a position to tell what will be possible/feasible in those matters. Maybe, when we will figure out quantum gravity we'll be able to make an educated guess of some substance. Before - not so much.

As for the possibility some unimagined development can produce a star drive, well, yes, that's the reed supporting mountains of SF.

You little blue sky proposal is a lot of fun. I would think that a way to impose a single quantum state on a macroscopic composite object would give us teleportation and replicators. This is basically the method used in teleportation of photons nows, if I understand the reports correctly. And if you impose a quantum state for roast beef on a hunk of rock, you get roast beef, no? Of course, if we have that, we no longer have a need to go get resources.

Cute - I already gave you the reasons why my proposal won't work and you actually think you're telling me something new with your commentary here?
Apropos that, stj - making the ship be in a single quantum state is the easiest of the two problems:

Ever heard of Bose-Einstein condensates?
Did you know these macroscopic superatoms have a single quantum state?
And, before you ask, stj, being able to create a superatom with a single quantum state does NOT mean you can turn it into roast beef or whatever - where did you get that, anyway?

What is non-feasible is collapsing the wave-fuction of such a ship where you want it to collapse - at your destination and not in some other location before or behind the ship, determined only by probability.



Not to mention that, by hiding behind your tired condescendence, you failed to adress the actual point of my post:
"My point is - "There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Or mine.
We just are not in a position to tell what will be possible/feasible in those matters. Maybe, when we will figure out quantum gravity we'll be able to make an educated guess of some substance. Before - not so much."

 

[stj]

sojourner: The studies finding that tit for tat altruism was the best solution concluded this by playing games and tabulating results. It's an experimental finding, and outside observers have nothing to do with it. Another finding was that responding to an aggressive move with a pacific move was often a successful strategy. The turn the other cheek strategy is often assumed to be foolish on ideological grounds but I don't expect mere experimental findings to change that opinion.

The Fermi paradox, inasmuch as paradoxes do not really exist, shows us that a resolution must exist. The possible resolutions are that star travel is an impossibility (either principled or practical will do); that technical civilizations do last long enough to leave traces; that intelligence (or possibly life itself) is rare or nonexistent; the atomic rocket hypothesis, that aliens are hiding from each other because they don't want to be conquered or annihilated. The last possible resolution is the only one that requires multiple assumptions thus far unsupported by current knowledge.
Atomic rocket's reasoning is by far the weakest.

hyzmarca: The reasons given for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraw have been proven false. The invasions have also failed (and if it's so difficult to conquer another country right here, conquering another planet is an inconceivably more difficult task!) but the reluctance to launch weapons of mass destruction here on Earth are arguments against sneak attacks by alien civilizations. Presumably whatever goal was supposed to accomplished would be prevented or destroyed by WMDs. By the same token, WMDs by space aliens would seem to be unlikely. Again, no space war.

Basically, you've supported my position but it sounds as if you disagree, somehow. Curious.

ProtoAvatar: I'm sorry you felt condescended to, and I don't know how I justified such a response.

I did apparently misread your speculation. If a macroscopic composite object like a starship had a single quantum state, I think we would be able to detect quantum effects. Certainly, the Copenhagen interpretation, the standard interpretation, rules out quantum states for "classical" objects, as Copenhagen calls it.

Therefore, when you spoke of the vessel's quantum state, I read it as creating it. If you can create a quantum state for a starship's position, you can create one for roast beef, I should think, and if you have the energy equivalent mass to satisfy conservation of energy, you have a replicator.

Bose-Einstein condensates, because of condensation, are no longer composite objects in the sense of discrete elementary particles.

The remarks about emotions are very confused however. Governments do not have emotions. Emotions are very logical as motivators for life and reproduction, and quite amenable to explanation as outcomes of Darwinian processes. (Caution: It is common to imagine individual or group differences unjustified by the evidence.) Religion is a social institution, not an emotion, however, as are other ideologies. Not only is it uncertain how much of a motivator they really are, it is entirely uncertain what their consequences are. Sometimes the evening news makes you wonder if believing in religion won't kill us all.

Lastly, I do not believe that further discoveries will reveal everything we think we have learned to be so much moonshine. Copernicus didn't make Ptolemy's predictions wrong. Einstein didn't show all Newton's calculations were nonsense. However new discoveries might rearrange our understanding of what we have learned, the bulk of it will remain.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

stj

About emotions:
They are, indeed an ability we have because they proved to be an evolutionary advantage.

This range of emotions we have (love, hate, rage, fear, etc) have a few very interesting effects: they make it possible to believe in something without proof - religion, they enable morals, etc.

If there existed a species such as vulcans which lacked emotions, they would also lack anything resembling religion, etc. Using logic alone, you will never be able to obtain these effects.

And emotions (and their effects) are what ultimately motivates human behaviour.
You may take any act a human does - the objctives for it, what motivates it will always be emotion-related (starting with self-preservation, self-affirmation, etc). Logic comes into play only as the instrument used to find ways to achieve these objectives.
Let's say you try to derive human motivations by using only logic; at one point or another, you will have to invoke an emotion (self-preservation, greed, love, morals, etc) as the fundament of this objective.

To maintain the vulcan comparison - if a species without emotions existed, it would be catatonic, simply because it would have no motivations, no objective to work toward. Logic alone cannot define such objectives.

For example, governments work logically to achieve a specific objective; but this objective, in the end, was defined by using emotions. Individuals work rationally in order to achieve their objectives; but these motivations are ultimately derived from their emotions.


If there are aliens, their motivations will be similarly built - they will not think completely logically; in order to function they need, ultimately, a set of axioms (assumed true) that can be, practically, anything - provided to them either by mature or whomever built them.

Which means that ideology, religion, will be a part of their phychology.

About my FTL speculation:
When I mentioned 'single quantum state', I assumed I made myself clear in that I was referring to a...well, single quantum state (NOT many identical ones) corresponding to a Bose-Einstein superatom.

About science:
Newton's calculations became a special case under Einstein's theories - any many new effects were predicted.
The same can be said about any other major breakthrough that superceded anterior theories.

Today, holes start to appear in relativity (Pioneer anomaly, dard matter, dark energy); phenomena the theory cannot explain; our understanding of the quantum world is empirical, we don't know the whys.
A new, more complete theory may very well predict effects that allow for efficient near-light-speed or even FTL.

In any case, as of today, us saying FTL is impossible is like the ancient greeks saying travel to the moon is impossible.

 

[Deckerd]

I think it's fairly safe to say FTL travel is impossible. Nobody is ever going to prove me wrong. None of you are, for sure.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

I think it's fairly safe to say FTL travel is impossible. Nobody is ever going to prove me wrong. None of you are, for sure.

Neither will you ever be able to prove you are right, Deckerd; not by using our current level of knowledge about the physical world, in any case.

 

[B.J.]

A little late to the party, but a couple of things I wanted to address...

Besides the fact that they have "gravity plating" (whatever that is), we have no idea how artificial gravity works in Trek.

Yeah, but it's still silly to see something like "Minefield" where the characters are standing right on top of the hull and are not feeling the gravity that they'd be feeling if they were just three meters further down.

I rationalized it in one of my novels by saying that ST gravity generators produce virtual gravitons that are calibrated to decay after several meters so as not to interfere with the warp field and such. But it's an overcomplicated handwave for a silly conceit.

My own rationalization (if I were to invent a sci-fi universe) is that gravity plating requires two plates to generate the field, one in the floor and the other in the ceiling, and the artificial gravity field only exists between them. Vaguely like a magnet always has a north and south pole, never just one or the other. This *might* work for Star Trek, since I can't think of any scenes offhand that have artificial gravity where they weren't inside something.

Whereas any real missile would have reflective coating if lasers are a significant threat. Anytime anyone talks about the use of lasers for weapons you have to suspect fraud.

In a word, no. (And the way you put that is rather insulting to those engineers who have put long hours into this technology.) No mirror is 100% efficient, and at these power levels, the fraction that leaks through is more than enough to vaporize the mirror armor.

 

[Deckerd]

I think it's fairly safe to say FTL travel is impossible. Nobody is ever going to prove me wrong. None of you are, for sure.

Neither will you ever be able to prove you are right, Deckerd; not by using our current level of knowledge about the physical world, in any case.

Oh I can prove that, using our current level of knowledge about the physical world, FTL travel is impossible.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

^Point to where I said missile defense was %100?

So, in the future it will be easy enough to evacuate entire planets to avoid attack?

It has to be 100% to be a viable way to defend planets.

In addition, it would only be effective against an enemy attack that attempted to use drone nukes or something like that - something where hitting the target makes a difference.

Against a kinetic attack - some object accelerated to relativistic speed and pointed at your planet - it would have no impact at all. Because it doesn't matter if you hit the object with lasers or blow it to smithereens - if the mass keeps coming and hits the planet, it still destroys your planet.

And you wouldn't have to evacuate your entire planet. You'd just have to have viable and sustainable forces located off-planet. That means that even if your planet is hit in return, you still win.

What doesn't work is conquest and occupation, because once you occupy the fixed point you're attacking, you're in the same crappy defensive situation as the guy you just conquered.

And finally, it's possible to posit ftl drives but not ftl sensors?

Actually, yes.

Sensors passively receive information. Information moves at the speed of light.

If you are sending probes out at FTL speeds and then bringing those probes back to you [full of information] at FTL speeds, those aren't sensors, that's just an innovative use of your FTL drive. But that only helps you acquire information from fixed locations. If you fly to where the enemy is planning his mass drone attack, you can gather information about it and [you hope] fly back. That doesn't, and can't, help you observe an attacking force coming towards you at FTL speeds from an unknown location or direction.

 

[sojourner]

^Ok, you're still positing that ftl drives are possible but inventing ftl sensors are not.

 

[hyzmarca]

And finally, it's possible to posit ftl drives but not ftl sensors?

Actually, yes.

Sensors passively receive information. Information moves at the speed of light.

If you are sending probes out at FTL speeds and then bringing those probes back to you [full of information] at FTL speeds, those aren't sensors, that's just an innovative use of your FTL drive. But that only helps you acquire information from fixed locations. If you fly to where the enemy is planning his mass drone attack, you can gather information about it and [you hope] fly back. That doesn't, and can't, help you observe an attacking force coming towards you at FTL speeds from an unknown location or direction.

You're treating information like it is somehow separate from its medium. Light travels at the speed of light. Information is limited to the speed of light because as far as we know no particcle can exceed it. If there were a way to accelerate particles faster than light, then it stands to reason that one could use those particles to gather information.

 

[Christopher]

I think his point is that positing FTL drive doesn't require FTL sensors as well. If you're positing some kind of magical tachyon drive or something, sure, you can have FTL comms and sensors. But if you're going with something more scientifically grounded, it doesn't necessarily follow. If you're postulating that an FTL ship requires some special type of space-warping drive, particularly one that requires complex mechanisms and great amounts of energy, that doesn't even remotely allow for sending out beams that propagate FTL, or for the existence of some kind of naturally occurring FTL radiation that passive sensors can detect. After all, a warp drive or wormhole isn't "a way to accelerate particles faster than light" at all. Only the topology of spacetime is altered; the particles themselves still travel no greater than c relative to the spacetime they travel through.

There can also be story reasons for setting up a universe with FTL drive but no FTL comms or sensors. Look at Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, where this was a deliberate choice to avoid the cliches of the Trek universe. Limiting the ships' sensors to lightspeed introduced time-lag issues that created a distinctive approach to space combat. Depriving the characters of FTL comms created new challenges and limitations that the writers had to find imaginative solutions to.

The Galactica/Caprica universe is also one that, I believe, has FTL jump drive but no FTL communication or sensors. Which also creates interesting plot complications like ships not being able to find each other, or needing to send in Raptor scout ships as the only way to know in advance what they're jumping into.

 

[stj]

In a word, no. (And the way you put that is rather insulting to those engineers who have put long hours into this technology.) No mirror is 100% efficient, and at these power levels, the fraction that leaks through is more than enough to vaporize the mirror armor.

Every week I read What's New, a physics blog by Bob Park. I don't feel abashed, much less apologetic, about being unkind to aerospace companies and their employees.

So, military lasers can vaporize mirrors? Is there still enough energy delivered to destroy the target? How do they do in rain/fog/snow? Is it possible to produce a mirror armor designed to vaporize and propel the rocket away instead of destroying it?

Also, the artificial distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is misleading people into forgetting that such powerful laser could be superbly useful weapons. You needn't solve the rather difficult tracking problems. They could mount genuine precision attacks on hardened targets. And never forget the uses as an antipersonnel weapon. These are antisatellite weapons, which would be a huge strategic leap forward in offensive weaponry. If airborne was stretched to include LEO, these could be feasible counterforce first strike weapons.

However has this news been suppressed?

 

[sojourner]

^It hasn't? We are just talking about it's defensive application's.

However did you miss this?

Edit: Wow, just read about half of this past year's blogs by Bob Park. If he is your sole source of information, you are sadly misguided. What is his obsession with cellphones?

 

[Mysterion]

You know, there were wars, embedded journalists and propaganda long before 9/11. It's just that it didn't happen to catch your attention. Obviously it caught Verhoeven's attention, otherwise he wouldn't have done it.

Not with live video feeds occurring as part of a 24hr 'wartainment' news cycle there weren't. And that's what was in Starship Troopers in 1997 and on FOX News in 2003.

Desert Storm 1991
Somolia 1992
Bosnia 1994

In fact in the case of Somolia, I remember watching as that bimbo Amanpour from CNN had her crew turning their kleig lights on the Marines who were trying to land the beach under cover of darkness. There was a USMC major who she tried to interview who looked like he wanted to feed her a grenade (I would get pay-per-view to see that happen, BTW).

My peve is mvoies based on classic SF novels that bear little or no resemblence to the the novel being adapted except for maybe the title and a couple of character names. Starship Troopers and I, Robot come immediately to mind. I absolutely loathe what Vehoven did to Heinlein's book, a true classic and a personal favorite of mine. If you want to do an adaptation, THEN DO THAT, otherwise just make whatever movie you want to make and change the fucking title already.

I live in the futile hope that some will a) make a proper movie version of Starship Troopers and/or b) film Harlan ellison's script for I, Robot. I'm reasonable sure at this point that I will die a very disappointed person, however.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

You're treating information like it is somehow separate from its medium. Light travels at the speed of light. Information is limited to the speed of light because as far as we know no particcle can exceed it. If there were a way to accelerate particles faster than light, then it stands to reason that one could use those particles to gather information.

It doesn't matter if YOU can accelerate particles faster than the speed of light.

The information you're waiting for is only willing to come TO YOU at the speed of light.

Unless you have a way to go to the place where the information you want happens to be, and then force that information to travel at faster than the speed of light using whatever magic technology you've developed.

Even if you find a way to overcome the C limit, the default state for the rest of the universe is still C.

So that still would only help you against an enemy whose location is already known.

 

[Silvercrest]

My peve is mvoies based on classic SF novels that bear little or no resemblence to the the novel being adapted except for maybe the title and a couple of character names. Starship Troopers and I, Robot come immediately to mind. I absolutely loathe what Vehoven did to Heinlein's book, a true classic and a personal favorite of mine. If you want to do an adaptation, THEN DO THAT, otherwise just make whatever movie you want to make and change the fucking title already.

QFT. On top of that, the hoops they jump through to tie the original novel in to the movie -- re-releasing it with a still from the movie on the cover, etc. And I, Robot -- they rewrote the description on the back cover, too. But they used general language that practically described nothing at all, just to cover up the fact that it's not the same story. Did they do that for Starship Troopers?

Is it even possible to release a novelization of a movie, when the movie is (inaccurately) based on an existing book? I suppose that would be bad marketing. Advertising their movie's flaws and so on.

 

[Harvey]

Didn't the Planet of the Apes remake have a novelization, in addition to the original novel being re-published with a new cover?

Personally, I have no problem with Paul Verhoeven turning his adaptation of Starship Troopers into a satire and critique of the original novel, given its content, but I admit I may feel differently if the same treatment was given to a book I was more attached to.

 

[hyzmarca]

The Galactica/Caprica universe is also one that, I believe, has FTL jump drive but no FTL communication or sensors. Which also creates interesting plot complications like ships not being able to find each other, or needing to send in Raptor scout ships as the only way to know in advance what they're jumping into.

The Cylons had FTL communications (a necessity for the ressurrection system). The Colonials did not.

 

[Christopher]

Is it even possible to release a novelization of a movie, when the movie is (inaccurately) based on an existing book? I suppose that would be bad marketing. Advertising their movie's flaws and so on.

It's been done. The film Enemy Mine, based on a novella of that name by Barry B. Longyear, had a book-length novelization credited to Longyear and David Gerrold.

And no, it's not bad marketing. The audience for a book, whether a novelization or a reissue of the original on which a film was based, is minuscule compared to the audience for a feature film. So if readers of the book are dissatisfied with the film, that isn't going to have any significant negative impact on the box office returns for the film. Conversely, since a movie's audience is so much huger than a book's audience, the small percentage of the film's audience that seeks out the book will hugely increase the book's sales, even if the film is a flop at the box office. So a film tie-in is always going to be good marketing for the book, no matter how bad the film is.

 

[hyzmarca]

You're treating information like it is somehow separate from its medium. Light travels at the speed of light. Information is limited to the speed of light because as far as we know no particcle can exceed it. If there were a way to accelerate particles faster than light, then it stands to reason that one could use those particles to gather information.

It doesn't matter if YOU can accelerate particles faster than the speed of light.

The information you're waiting for is only willing to come TO YOU at the speed of light.

Unless you have a way to go to the place where the information you want happens to be, and then force that information to travel at faster than the speed of light using whatever magic technology you've developed.

Even if you find a way to overcome the C limit, the default state for the rest of the universe is still C.

So that still would only help you against an enemy whose location is already known.

Information does not work that way.

Actually, there is no such thing as information in the physical sense. Information of an emergent or imposed property of organized matter.

But lets not get hung up on technicalities and intricacies of language. I'll just give you an example.

One of the most common modern technological sensors in use these days is radar. You send a bunch of RF waves/photons out and eventually they hit something and bounce back. You can determine what they hit by measuring how long it takes them to return, how many of them return, at what angles, and so forth.

If you have, say, tachyons or some other FTL particle you can do exactly the same thing. A tachyon will bounce off an object much like a photon will and you can measure the return. Tachyons, however, are FTL. They will propagate at FTL velocities and come back at FTL velocities.

If you have FTL particles, then you have FTL sensors. It's just a matter of throwing them out and watching them bounce off things.