- cross-posted to:
- futurism@lemmy.ca
- startrek@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- futurism@lemmy.ca
- startrek@lemmy.world
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As long as we aren’t trying to fuck with the transporter technology that kills you and makes another you somewhere else, I’m fine.
But if the another you is undistinguishable at the quantum level… then it’s still you (as seen by external observers, and honestly, I could use a break).
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A transporter that can recreate you with all your memories can also recreate you with new Transporter Corp ® approved ones. I think I’ll pass.
not necessarily. having the transporter means we have figured out how to make exact one to one copy of an object on a molecular level. that doesn’t mean we understand how the informations in human brain are organized and that we can change them.
If another perfect copy of you existed, you be okay with being killed? That’s fucking weird.
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The “Ship of Theseus” example is how our bodies work normally, the transporter makes a new you out of separate matter in another place. Nothing implies a transfer of consciousness, just an exact copy of you is there. Of course, I realize that for the purposes of the shows and movies, none of this is a concern, but a real version of this would be ethically fucked up.
In practical terms, the transporter in order to preserve quantum identity, would need to be reproducing you at the same time as it destroys the old you. To be widely accepted by society, it would need to preserve consciousness continuity, so you’d briefly feel being in two places at the same time, then just at the destination.
Now, a power failure mid transfer… wouldn’t be pretty.
I suggest to you https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991
This. Watching this is why I’d never use a Star Trek transporter.
i think while it is interesting philosophical question, in reality we would get used to it quite quickly. every time you get in a car you place lot of trust in people driving in the opposite direction. everyone of them can be drunk or just a moron and every car ride can be your last. and in spite of that we don’t really give it a second thought and it usually works out just fine.
Not even close to the same thing. If you create an exact copy of me at a destination, that doesn’t make me okay with being disintegrated because another me is at the other end.
are you ok with closing your eyes when you go to sleep? how do you know you weren’t replaced during sleep? 😆
Are you suggesting my consciousness can be transferred to another body? Do you think that if an exact copy of you were made in another place, that shooting the first version of you in the face would cause you to suddenly wake up in the other body? I’m not understanding how you think this works.
I’ll one up you here
There’s also a Family Guy episode that touches on this issue… but it’s less philosophical since neither version realizes the other exists. That and some doubles/originals die in convenient ways.
I believe I have read that it’s literally impossible to copy an object’s quantum state without destroying it, so in a real sense a transporter that’s indistinguishable at a quantum level would be moving you rather than creating a copy and killing the original.
Both are true. Copying a quantum state means moving it from one object to another, which turns the target into the source, and the source into… something else. If we managed to do that at a full body scale, a “you” would appear at a target location, while a bunch of “something else” would be left at the source location.
An external observer would say “you moved”, turning a pile of target “something else” into you, and leaving a pile of “something else” at the source. You yourself… well, as long as you don’t worry too much, you would also perceive having just moved from source to target.
Still, there remains that pile of “something else” that used to be you at the source location… but as long as everyone, including you, don’t decide to call it “a corpse” or “your previous you’s remains”, everything would be fine.
To my surprise and delight, the article itself confirms Betteridge’s Law of Headlines by starting off with:
A provisional answer is “no.”
Personally, I’ve never really seen the need for such a thing. There’s no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we’ve barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards. We can go right up to a Kardashev II civilization without having to travel more than a few light hours away.
Don’t need to go light years, it’s the speed that’s important.
If you can hop to Mars in 8 seconds instead of 8 months we can explore our backyard a lot better.
There’s no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we’ve barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards
None of those are habitable
It’s not particularly likely that any of the planets or moons around other stars are habitable either. At least not “step out of the ship and take a nice deep breath of the fresh air, picking an apple off of a nearby tree and making some kind of comment about how it’s like Eden” habitable like is so common on TV. It’s likely that if there’s a native biosphere then that planet is going to be incredibly hostile to alien life like us.
Build habitats. If you’ve got the tech to build a starship then you’ve got the tech to build a habitat, it’s way easier. Habitats will give you exactly the environment you want, not whatever you happen to find.
As long as the atmosphere is roughly similar, the native biosphere would have very little defense against us. Sure, some of the defenses that local plants and animals developed against each other might cause issues, or they might not.
We would be an invasive species on the grandest scale. A completely foreign biology would maybe have useful nutrients, or maybe not. That would be the key, but the periodic table will be the same everywhere, and chemistry being what it is, we’d probably see similar molecules, at least the simple stuff. Basic hydrocarbons and such.
The complex biochemistry would be vastly different. That could trip up human explorers.
the native biosphere would have very little defense against us.
Why is it that way around, instead of “we would have very little defense against the native biosphere?” Especially considering the native biosphere has the home court advantage, it’s already well adapted to the environment it’s in and has a planet’s worth of diversity to draw on when dealing with new competitors.
A new biosphere often has zero resistance against an invasive species.
All those tricks that the local biosphere have are targeted against other parts of the biosphere. It’s called the co-evolutionary arms race. Prey species get better at defending themselves, and predators get better at targeting weak points in their prey. Predators can become super specialized. And in this specific case, herbivores can be considered predators to plant species.
An invasive species slips in when there is no local predator to eat them. Often because no predator can adapt to the new invasive species.
To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.
The only way an alien biosphere could defend itself against us is if the planet it was on had an excess of heavy metals or other poisonous elements like arsenic that became a part of the biosphere itself.
We would be the “new biosphere”, though.
“Invasive” species here on Earth are invasive because they turn out to be more highly adapted to the new environment they find themselves in than the existing “native” species. That’s only possible because Earth has a lot of similar habitats, allowing species in different areas to try out a variety of different adaptations that can potentially end up being very useful in the new environments they get plopped down into. They happen to have hit on some strategy that’s better than what the natives have come up with yet.
In the case of a completely alien planet with its own well-established biosphere that’s likely not going to be the case. The habitats and niches available there are going to be different from whatever we’ve got on Earth, so the life we bring from Earth isn’t going to have any ready-made superior strategies to deal with them. The local native life, on the other hand, has had billions of years to come up with ways to make a living there.
Again, you’re ignoring the fact that the entire biosphere experiences co-evolution, This is why an invasive species is a problem. It was not part of the evolutionary arms race in that environment. It means that the highly specialized attacks that the plants and animals have against each other, might not work at all against the invader.
The billions of years of coming up with ways to make a living there, is actually billions of years of coming up with attacks specialized to exploit weaknesses in each other.
Take viruses as an example. They are often highly specialized to attack specific protein clusters on the outside of cells. Now, sometimes, through some random mutation, they can attack a slightly different protein structure and jump to a different host species, where they run rampant.
That said, alien viruses would likely not be an issue to either side. They’re too specialized. Bacteria, on the other hand, that might pose a problem. But can be compensated for.
But other than that. Humans are very good at being an invasive species. We cheat. If there is anything edible on the planet, we’ll find it. And the planet wouldn’t know what hit it.
Again, the only way the planet’s biosphere could keep us out, is if it was fundamentally incompatible. Like if it had an atmosphere without oxygen, or if every plant and animal had lead or arsenic in their biochemistry.
To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.
You’re assuming this is the norm rather than something being transported and not able to survive in the new environment. Kudzu, as an example, is an invasive plant from Japan that has taken over the Southern US due to lack of insects and animals that eat it. But if Kudzu was brought to the Amazon instead, it likely wouldn’t survive due to the high acidity of the soil. The plants there are specialized and it’s unlikely for a plant without this specialization being able to widely spread.
Technology to make a planet habitable is far more likely and within our grasp, than to travel faster than light. To add to that, you’ll likely experience time-dilation with most methods of FTL travel. It’s also doubtful that warp technology is possible to compress space without any ill effects with the space being compressed. Subspace doesn’t exist.
Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement. I’m sure if we had the technology it would see a ton of use. Could we survive without it? Sure, but that goes for most useful technologies.
Warp drive, replicator, holodeck, transporters… So many technologies in ST that would change everything if they existed.
Particularly replicator and transporter. It would completely pancake down the entirety of the manufacturing and transport industries.
I’d not trust transporters, but replicators would be great. If I had replicators, I’d open a replicator restaurant, then hire a few chefs to just cook random stuff all day to scan and then give out to the guests.
Maybe I’d travel around the world, scanning the best and freshest ingredients. But I’d travel by shuttle, not transporter.
Orbiting Habitats are
It takes years of traveling to go to any of them
It takes years of traveling at or near the speed of light to go to any of them. It takes tens of thousands of years at the speeds we currently reach.
Edit: Oops, read this wrong. I thought they were implying exploring close stars. They were discussing only our solar system, which is still large so takes a long time, but there aren’t any naturally habitable places, and nothing that’d be easy to terraform.
With something like an Alcubierre drive you can still travel between planets fairly fast. (Though this concept needs basically dark matter or some type of negative energy)
Even missions to Jupiter and Saturn take 5+ years in travel time one way with normal Hohman transfers and gravity assists that still allow for orbaital capture.
Even if you could simply find some type of fuel that would allow something like the Epstein drive (from the Expanse) where you can accelerate at 1g for 1/2 the trip and decel at 1g for the second half that would cut the travel time down to something on the order of like 9 days to Saturn or so.
Using a warp drive for that purpose would be like using a suborbital rocket to pop down to the local mall for some groceries.
9 days is too long to spend on a trip to Saturn? That’s quite the first-world problem, there. Especially given that by the time we’ve got drives like that we’ll likely have life extension and/or hibernation technologies to make the trip’s duration irrelevant.
In any case, as the article says, warp drives are probably not possible anyway.
Don’t agree. Play a little Elite Dangerous or any game that can simulate scale of our solar system. Moving around it, even at multiple times the speed of light can be useful.
Imagine making a trip to Ganymede within a day. It would allow for civilizations expansion while maintaining supply chains and not require each place to be wholly independent.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice to go fast. I’m saying it isn’t necessary.
Or possible, which makes the debate somewhat moot. We’ll get by with sublight speeds.
The biggest problem is sustaining 1g for 9 days straight. It might not sound like much, but it’s a huge amount of delta-v.
Using an Alcubierre drive, would not only reduce the time for the trip, but also the normal space delta-v required, so the amount of fuel, efficiency, and so on.
warp drives are probably not possible anyway
That’s not what it says, and for good reason.
Right now, the work on the math for a warp bubble, done over the last 30 years, has reduced the energy requirements by some dozen orders of magnitude. A form of negative energy is already being used in experiments like LIGO, and a few years ago, what could be considered as “negative mass” was discovered in phonons.
As long as either the theory, or the math, leading to Alcubierre’s calculations doesn’t get disproven, warp drives are “possible”, we just don’t know “how”… and so far, all related experiments are rather going in the direction of getting to the how, not in the direction of disproving it.
Even if it was somehow possible to scrape together enough negative mass to create a warp bubble and even if it was possible to exit that warp bubble at the destination, none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem. Any method of travelling between two points faster than the speed of light is literally equivalent to a method of travelling through time into your own local past and violating causality. There’s no way around that, it’s independent of the actual mechanism used to go FTL.
I think it’s safe to say that warp drives are probably not possible. It’s an extremely extraordinary claim. It’s fine if the physicists want to keep tinkering away at it, but making any significant future plans or projections based on the assumption that they’ll succeed is not a particularly good bet.
because, much like the show the warp drive is from, it’s not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people and going new places
There won’t be any new people there until our colonies get there in the first place, so it’s a self-solving problem. Tourists can travel as fast as the colonists can.
That’s a fantastic assumption
Got any evidence to the contrary?
I’m not the one that made a supposition 😉
You said:
it’s not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people
What new people?
Any that are out there :)
You have to assume we are uniquely special to think no one’s out there, do you have any evidence that that’s the case?
Tl;dr: we dunno. 🤷♂️
If there is a way to make it happen, it’ll be interesting to find out how the universe resolves the resulting causal paradoxes. What happens if the cause of an event is able to observe the event before causing it? What happens if the cause of the event responds by not causing the event?
I think the best we can hope for if we get very very lucky with future laws of physics is a cheap way to travel near but slightly below lightspeed. Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
It’s much more likely there will be no immediate application of whatever the full laws are, because new physics only appears in very extreme circumstances we can’t easily replicate.
Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
Now that you mention it, what if we can create a region of space in which c is greater than normal? Is that possible? Would living things be able to continue living inside it?
Like some sort of… sub-space?
Even if so, it doesn’t matter how you do it, moving faster than c does bad things to causality. You’d be one Lorentz boost away from a grandfather’s paradox. I think that would hold for a region of space with lower c too, weirdly enough, because it itself could also be boosted in a way discordant with everything else.
You could just abandon relativity entirely, I guess, but that’s kind of a key ingredient in how the universe works. Making a theory like that, I’d imagine, is like baking chocolate chip cookies without the chips.
I like to think the best we can hope for is that the speed of light limit is somehow naturally localized and the border to that localization is nearby enough for us to discover before we make ourselves extinct.
It’s not too likely, since there would probably be solid evidence of it already in the light at can see.
Oh well.
It’s not too likely, since there would probably be solid evidence of it already in the light at can see.
This. And even if it wasn’t, it would have to be far enough away to defeat the point. I think a faster speed of light in the milky way would be very obvious.
Yes, you can try to change time-space before and after the space aircraft. Basically manipulating space around you. So instead you moving through space… You move the space around you. Allowing you to accelerate at to speeds within seconds without causing harm to yourself.
No, but on the brightside you got a much better chance of it having a 10 Forward.
