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TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

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Sat, 2011-04-09 02:04

xanatos

TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

There is something it isn't clear after reading Gatecrashing...

It seems that much of the "alien" technology encountered can be attributed to TITANs... Isn't it poorly believable? If they really can build a space station near a black hole, then they are so much far from us as technological level that we are as cavemen to them.
And all the gates... Wouldn't they need FTL (and probably "fast" FTL, faster than Star Trek TNG for example) to build them? You can "gate" only to a place where there is already a gate. You need FTL to implant a gate (or at least inertialess STL ships and thousand of years. Inertialess because you have to slow when you are near a planet to build the gate/send a probe that will build the gate. With standard drives it would take much more longer). BUT the only "possible" TITAN ship seen (Corse) is STL. And isn't it clear that, if gates must be older than TITANs, and the gates in the Solar System are very similar to the extra-solar gates then they made a first contact with some alien specie and they are following it?
On the gates in the Solar System. If they are new and they have been built by the TITANs (and why should they build so many gates when even for them it's a new technology? In Contact they build TWO "Machines", just to be sure, and it's quite complex because it's new technology... FIVE of them? Are you so much rich?), why there aren't structures around them? If you are in a war and you are building something, wouldn't you build it with a little "protection" around it? Wouldn't you need support structures to build it? Wouldn't you trap it when you use it to leave, especially if you want to kill as many transhumans as you can?
Unless they already trascend "the material plane", shouldn't signs of the TITANs be more prominent on the planets connected to the gates? Wouldn't all the theories that the TITANs retreated and will return to wage war require that they aren't too much far and are building new tanks/weapons/robots as fast as they can to destroy the transhumans, and in the middle thay are studying all the xeno technology they can? Wouldn't technology like the one on Moravec and Penrose be VERY much interesting to them? This especially considering that TITANs should be able to grow exponentially in number by simply stripping some planets of the materials and quickly going gatecrashing around.
And in general the gates. If the planet was inhabitated by xenos, and they knew of the gate (and how couldn't they, considering it's quite visible in the "visible" spectre), wouldn't there be structures around it? They would at least want to study it, or to defend against it. It seems too much Stargate, where the gates are conveniently far from installations/population and not presidiated and one can use them without anyone else noticing it, and only the humans are intelligent enough to defend it (and to create an iris to block the SG).

Sat, 2011-04-09 06:26

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

xanatos wrote:
There is something it isn't clear after reading Gatecrashing... [ul] [li]It seems that much of the "alien" technology encountered can be attributed to TITANs...

Can be... but I wouldn't. I don't think the black hole station is TITAN. I'm not sure the gates are TITAN either. The gates do not necessarily require FTL by even our understanding. At the super-micro level, space is made up of quantum foam. This sees every possible situation played out, including wormholes across macro space. However, a particular wormhole is so 'improbable', so tiny and so short-lived, it has no impact on our current life. If someone could capture one of those, expand it and reinforce it against collapse, one could hypothetically make a long-ranged wormhole (a gate). There are other methods as well, although some of them rely on more or less luck (such as cosmic strings). And these are just the possibilities we (think we) know right now. But again, that's assuming they're TITAN created, which they don't have to be, especially given the suggestion of Bracewell probes.

Quote:
[li]And in general the gates. If the planet was inhabitated by xenos, and they knew of the gate (and how couldn't they, considering it's quite visible in the "visible" spectre), wouldn't there be structures around it? They would at least want to study it, or to defend against it. It seems too much Stargate, where the gates are conveniently far from installations/population and not presidiated and one can use them without anyone else noticing it, and only the humans are intelligent enough to defend it (and to create an iris to block the SG).[/li] [/ul]

We don't know when the gates turned up compared to the cities. There's possibly a gate on Earth now, but humans aren't building any colonies near by :) It's quite possible these gates were built (or appeared) after the cities died, were built in places where it is just inconvenient to build a full-sized city (like Antarctica), or the cities built nearby (like Pathfinder City) have just been washed away by erosion by the time we got there. It doesn't cause me too much stress, there are plenty of reasons. If you're not happy with it, make more cities built around gates!

Sun, 2011-04-10 06:00

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

A lot depends on how hard sf you want to run your game in. Even diamond-hard sf allows advanced technology to accomplish things that seem miraculous or impossible if it is sufficiently advanced. The only thing it cannot do is break is observed facts, and most impossibilities we know of are merely inferences rather than observables.

xanatos wrote:
If they really can build a space station near a black hole, then they are so much far from us as technological level that we are as cavemen to them.

I don't have a problem with that. The rest does contain some spoilers or implies spoilers.

xanatos wrote:
And all the gates... Wouldn't they need FTL (and probably "fast" FTL, faster than Star Trek TNG for example) to build them?

Not necessarily. If you have sufficiently fast ships you can move wormhole mouths so that one end stays here in the present, and the other one ends up far away and far in the future. Yes, this implies the potential for time travel, unless causality protection effects prevent it. For a great look at this, see http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Time/wormholes.html However, EP gates do not behave like the wormholes in physics. In fact, they make very little sense. My preferred model is that they are just matter assemblers/disassemblers giving access to simspaces in the real Mesh (built by the ETI or TITANs). All others introduce serious issues of time travel, causality breaches and handwave physics. Sure, maybe we can hide it under the rug by invoking "sufficiently advanced technology", but I prefer to have somewhat well defined ground rules.

Quote:
Unless they already trascend "the material plane", shouldn't signs of the TITANs be more prominent on the planets connected to the gates?

Assuming they were built by the TITANs. I think a much better model is that the gates are what the ETI spread with Bracewell probes.

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Mon, 2011-04-11 22:56

mack2028

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

The Factors warn transhumanity about the gates, implying that the gates exist before the titans. So even though the titans used the gates and built things on the other side they didnt build the gates and didn't build everything on the other side. As to the "fast" FTL requirement my response is a resounding "so" maybe fast FTL is expensive or difficult and the gates are more convenient. Also all of the time travel problems are solved by simply declaring that there is a previously undiscovered objective time frame. This would mean that FTL travel is easy if you can build an inertial compensator.

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Tue, 2011-04-12 04:35

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

mack2028 wrote:
Also all of the time travel problems are solved by simply declaring that there is a previously undiscovered objective time frame.

It won't save you, since there is also the QE communications. Time dilation effects + QE comms = trans-time communication (as outlined in countless threads). (the only way to get around this is to claim that actually relativity is *completely* wrong, and that experimentally observed effects like time dilation (both due to speed and gravity) are actually caused by something else - a major physics retcon that is about as likely as the discovery that electrical and magnetic fields *aren't* governed by the Maxwell equations).

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Tue, 2011-04-12 06:47

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

I still need to learn more on time dilation effects. Got a link to a resource for it that won't leave me pondering trying out Schrodinger's Me?

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Tue, 2011-04-12 07:26

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
I still need to learn more on time dilation effects. Got a link to a resource for it that won't leave me pondering trying out Schrodinger's Me?

Yes please. I am critically lacking in my knowledge of how trans-time communication would work, specifically how it works going backwards in time. Curse this ape brain of mine.

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Tue, 2011-04-12 07:43

mack2028

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

Bill Bryson a short history of nearly everything has a section that clearly explains relativity and you can (and should) find the audio book of it but let me summarize. According to Einstein if you were to move rapidly away from a clock it would appear to move slower because the light that bounced off of the clock would take longer to get to you. This effect has not only been observed experimentally (through use of atomic clocks and the space shuttle) but happens not just in effect but in reality (the clocks are actually different at the end of the experiment). Now this is the part where people start yelling about time travel. If you mathematically extrapolate the experimental and theoretical data past the light speed point (which is the asymptote of that particular graph) the math declares that the dilation effect would be negative implying that you would go back in time. Of course if it is possible to go faster than light we would need to do it to find out what would happen because if there is an objective time frame time travel is impossable and the graph would need to be adjusted to imply an absolute value.

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Tue, 2011-04-12 07:57

mack2028

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

also http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/relatvty.htm but be warned, my explanation was dumbed down as much as I possibly could and it still hurts my head to read and this has equations and graphs.

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Tue, 2011-04-12 08:05

#10

mack2028

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

It is actually pretty clear to me that time travel in ep is imposable for 2 reasons 1. the factors can go faster than light and do not have time travel 2. we use the gates and if you have gates A B C and D which are all in different parts of the universe and you travel from A to B to C to D to A you get back in the time you took to make the trip not thousands of years ago.

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Tue, 2011-04-12 08:31

#11

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

Maybe we should have a dedicated thread for the course "Relativity and Time Travel 101", where we could share the best tutorials?

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Tue, 2011-04-12 11:07

#12

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: TITANs TL and FTL, and "suspension of incredulity"

No matter what, you're going to have to do some reading (on the order of 30+ pages) to really 'get' it. However, one of the best books I can recommend is: http://www.amazon.com/New-Time-Travelers-Journey-Frontiers/dp/0393060136... GREAT book, really easy and enjoyable to read. I've done a lot of reading on the topic of time travel for a novel I've been sitting on for far too long. I've found that, generally, physicists write the worst books. Even Dr. Kaku, who really simplifies things, never seems to hit the mark, and guys like Kip Thorne and Hawking get so caught up in the numbers that it's painful to get down to the 'practical' applications. Guys like the author above are what you really want to look for, since their mindset is already grounded in the 'real' world, and can explain the important concepts while sidestepping the math and history.

Wed, 2013-01-09 15:46

#13

Prophet710 Prophet710's picture

what about a network of

what about a network of assemblers/disassemblers that are linked via QE comms? it devours you in one end of the spectrum and assembles you across the galaxy, much like an ego cast but with the blue prints of you in the transmission in the stead of just an ego. Or hell, maybe just an ego and it creates you at the other end from whatever.

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"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

Fri, 2013-01-11 16:29

#14

Revinor

Nice thing to read ishttp:/

Nice thing to read is http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html where guy is suggesting 'special provisions' to make FTL travel working without time travel/paradox. Special frame of reference for FTL travel is probably easiest to handwave. To be honest, real problems start only when you start being really close to c from _slow_ end. As long as you everybody is flying either very slow or FTL, you will need a special lab to detect casuality violation - it won't affect the game.

Sat, 2013-01-12 04:59

#15

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Revinor wrote:To be honest,

Revinor wrote:
To be honest, real problems start only when you start being really close to c from _slow_ end. As long as you everybody is flying either very slow or FTL, you will need a special lab to detect casuality violation - it won't affect the game.

But if you can get *any* causality violation, you bet people will be doing plenty in the lab to exploit it. It has tremendous computing potential (get results before you calculate them), not to mention sending messages back in time. Causality violation is a setting-changer even if you cannot use it for spaceships.

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Sat, 2013-01-12 11:45

#16

Decimator

While muddling through this

While muddling through this in my own mind, I came up with the idea that the gates are, in fact, closed timelike curve computers. Since they allow FTL information transfer, they could indeed be used for this. This possibility meshes well with the idea of the ETI inhabiting the gates themselves. Furthermore, if the ETI inhabits the gates, it may have purposely included causality protection. When something passes through the gate, the ETI gets a perfect copy and reassembles the object at the destination no sooner than they would arrive at the other side if relativity did not apply. In this way, the ETI can observe and manipulate species development. The exsurgent virus, in this scenario, is designed to prevent the independent development of CTC devices. Seed AIs are suborned by the virus and forced to construct the gates, which are under the ETI's control.

Sat, 2013-01-12 13:17

#17

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

I like the CTC explanation!

I like the CTC explanation! It fits well with my own take on gates as Planck-tech matter compilers linked to a vast computing system (where exoplants are not necessarily real destinations). Note that competing gate-systems can really mess up causality, so you actually want to keep control over CTC stuff in your lightcone. And stamp down hard on attempts at messing with it - shades of Singularity Sky here.

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Tue, 2013-01-15 10:50

#18

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Decimator wrote:While

Decimator wrote:
While muddling through this in my own mind, I came up with the idea that the gates are, in fact, closed timelike curve computers. ..

You just blew my mind. I love it!

Tue, 2013-01-15 11:26

#19

towo

Since I read about quantum

Since I read about quantum foam at the start of the thread, there's a pretty good chance that spacetime is actually smooth, as shown by [url=http://www.space.com/19202-einstein-space-time-smooth.html]a recent study[/url]. It could be a fluke or just behave that way for a pretty long distance from a gravity well, but it's unlikely.

Wed, 2013-01-16 17:06

#20

OneTrikPony OneTrikPony's picture

Decimator wrote:Furthermore,

Decimator wrote:
Furthermore, if the ETI inhabits the gates, it may have purposely included causality protection. When something passes through the gate, the ETI gets a perfect copy and reassembles the object at the destination no sooner than they would arrive at the other side if relativity did not apply.

I think there's something that I don't understand here. In the first place there's no mention of any perceived delay in arrival by gate travelers. I think that would have been mentioned. In the second place, with QE comms the "causality cat" is already out of the bag. As discussed in the first major [url=http://eclipsephase.com/qubits-and-pandora-gates]Time travel thread[/url] Humanity can violate causality with nothing more than a couple of fast ships and some Q-bits. There's no way for the ETI to control that. So what, exactly, is the point of the CTC? So far the "big alien simulspace universe" is the most plausible and least satisfying solution AFAICS

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Wed, 2013-01-16 20:17

#21

Decimator

OneTrikPony wrote:I think

OneTrikPony wrote:
I think there's something that I don't understand here. In the first place there's no mention of any perceived delay in arrival by gate travelers. I think that would have been mentioned.

That's the point, there would be no perceived delay, because the individuals would "arrive" far earlier than they are reconstructed at the far end.

OneTrikPony wrote:
In the second place, with QE comms the "causality cat" is already out of the bag. As discussed in the first major [url=http://eclipsephase.com/qubits-and-pandora-gates]Time travel thread[/url] Humanity can violate causality with nothing more than a couple of fast ships and some Q-bits. There's no way for the ETI to control that. So what, exactly, is the point of the CTC? So far the "big alien simulspace universe" is the most plausible and least satisfying solution AFAICS

Short answer is, "Quantum entanglement doesn't work that way." To elaborate, quantum entanglement is a real thing that we're playing with now, and we can't get information out of an entangled pair without sending information by classical means. Therefore, no information travels faster than light. Reality contradicts the lore, so I dump the lore. However, if one used a wormhole to send information faster than light, then the information would arrive before it left, and that information can then be sent back, also arriving before it left. In a Closed Timelike Curve computer, the computer uses this trick to send the results back to itself so it never has to actually calculate them in the first place.

Thu, 2013-01-17 02:53

#22

Revinor

Decimator wrote:

Decimator wrote:
That's the point, there would be no perceived delay, because the individuals would "arrive" far earlier than they are reconstructed at the far end.

And what about going there and back through the gate?

Quote:
However, if one used a wormhole to send information faster than light, then the information would arrive before it left, and that information can then be sent back, also arriving before it left. In a Closed Timelike Curve computer, the computer uses this trick to send the results back to itself so it never has to actually calculate them in the first place.

I don't think that this works this way. As far as I understand FTL paradoxes, you need parties to move against each other with relativistic speeds to get interesting effects. If you assume that gates are almost stationary (few km/s due to relative speeds of star systems) and that transfer is not immediate, but takes few milliseconds, I don't think you will get any way to exploit casuality violation. You need to speed up gate to 0.8c or so - then we can talk about real stuff. But there is a good chance, that connected gates will protest against forcing them to too big relative speeds against each other.

Thu, 2013-01-17 10:19

#23

Decimator

Revinor wrote:And what about

Revinor wrote:
And what about going there and back through the gate?

Then your information would arrive even earlier. The key here is that the transfer is controlled by an intelligence. You are reconstructed when it wants you to arrive, not when your information arrives.

Revinor wrote:
I don't think that this works this way. As far as I understand FTL paradoxes, you need parties to move against each other with relativistic speeds to get interesting effects. If you assume that gates are almost stationary (few km/s due to relative speeds of star systems) and that transfer is not immediate, but takes few milliseconds, I don't think you will get any way to exploit casuality violation. You need to speed up gate to 0.8c or so - then we can talk about real stuff. But there is a good chance, that connected gates will protest against forcing them to too big relative speeds against each other.

My knowledge is incomplete. Do you have any reading material for me that supports your statement?

Thu, 2013-01-17 11:49

#24

Revinor

Decimator wrote:

Decimator wrote:
My knowledge is incomplete. Do you have any reading material for me that supports your statement?

http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html I'm barely understading most of these things, but every single example of casuality violation in such articles is saying something to effect "We consider the O system to be our rest system, while the Op observer passes by O at a relativistic speed." Key part here is to have different frames of reference for both parties - and for that you need reasonable speed. In other case, they can be assumed to be in same frame of reference with relativistic effects being probably close to planck time.