austenandrews

Re: The Singularity? Sure, but unless you think it's going to crank out terminators using car parts, it's still pretty limited in its capabilities. Heck, the chances of it even cranking out better cars without major upgrades are pretty slim.

Re: The Singularity? For me it boils down to the fact that, despite any sort of algorithmic evolution, great advances in processing are going to require physical artifacts to facilitate them. I suppose you could posit scenarios like a machine that uses electrical inductance to connect itself to an adjacent, unattached machine, or invents a time machine that appears from the future, or some other SFy handwave. But these are pretty farfetched ideas. In reality, no matter what software it's running, a machine is a pretty limited thing.

Re: The Singularity? Why would it be able to do whatever it wants?

Re: The Singularity? But they're LED arrays now!

Re: The Singularity? These kind of ad absurdum scenarios are what Douglas Adams thrived on. It's weird to hear people taking them seriously.

Re: The Singularity? Or rather, as I read it, only those with enhanced superhuman intelligence will be able to comprehend the world. I don't buy it though, because widespread tech change takes investment and money doesn't work that way. You just described my general experience with modern social tech. I've never sent a text message. I can't fathom that video games involve talking. What some people call the Singularity is my daily existence.

Re: Stylish Supercomputer Awesome. Those cables look like the back of my desk.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? I love this stuff.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Yeah, I think I worked it out on the drive home. Because the wormhole loops space, the emission of the two beams of light is no longer simultaneous with itself. Weird!

Re: The Singularity?

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: The Singularity? Yeah, it's a pretty naive notion. We'll certainly get big jumps in technology as we go, but "infinitely accelerating" would appear to make presumptions on engineering, logistics, politics, et al. that are unlikely to all make big leaps simultaneously.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Cute, but it's an honest question.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? From the frame of reference of the train car, the two beams meet at the wormhole itself, right? (Assuming the interior of the wormhole is a trivial length.) Because in that frame of reference, the two beams strike the ends of the car simultaneously, and the wormhole mouths are at the ends. From the platform, though, the rear-facing beam hits its wormhole mouth before the front-facing beam. Do the beams therefore collide somewhere in the front half of the car?

Re: The Singularity? Right, but that's been accepted by SF for decades. Is the gist simply that, due to graphs, it's going to happen this century instead of some future century? Or is the point that people actually believe it as opposed to accepting the possibility?

Re: The Singularity? I was never clear on the purpose of the concept. Does it boil down to a bundle of tropes?

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority That's kind of what I figured all along. If someone had said the majority were like ours, I would have been surprised.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Here's a question for the group: Make a wormhole. Put one mouth at one end of the train car and the other mouth at the other end. Run the experiment. Where do the two beams of light meet?

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... That's very cool.

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... Another angle to consider is the various methods of placing characters in different times. You've got the standard "dial in a year" time machines. You've got "time gates" of all kinds - man-made wormhole machines, natural wormholes in space, transient "cracks" like in Time Bandits, etc. For future-only travel, you've got suspended animation and relativistic time dilation. You've also got non-material, mental/information-only time travel, like Quantum Leaping back into other organisms, or transmitting a signal through time that assembles a robot/clone which can receive a mind from elsewhen. You've also got immortality as a way to have an NPC span multiple eras - imagine a villain who encounters the PCs throughout his thousand-year lifetime, piecing together the nonlinear PC timeline as he goes. Reincarnation would work similarly. You could have a machine mind that spans eras, or a hive mind with a long racial memory. I think a time-hopping campaign that used all of them at different times would be fascinating.

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly...

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... Incidentally, this old thread about precognition might have applications in some time travel setups.

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... I've done it the way sinanju described, which in practice is less like time travel than gates to different "worlds." My favorite time travel stories deal mostly with information passed through time, like Hogan's Thrice Upon a Time or the Doctor Who episode "Blink."

Re: Carl Sagan's Apple Pie Recipe Sagan said "billions" a lot in his distinctive way, certainly. It was Carson who exaggerated it to "billions and billions" as a catch phrase.