Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Sounds like the human commanders would have their hands full keeping the leash on the A.I.s.

Edited by Belisaurius on May 8th 2021 at 11:39:34 AM

There's no inherent reason that a real-world GAI would do that, but if it's something you want to set up for your story, that's fine.

Why not? Why can't the coffee maker or whatnot be that way? Don't you know bartenders make for the best listeners to people's problems? (Just ask Guinan.) And what better bartender than one that can be on duty all day and night every day and night?

As we see with proto-AI projects like Siri and Alexa, they do more than just run things. (Though perhaps they listen in on a few too many things for all the wrong reasons...)

The only way it could become like that is if someone deliberately programs it to be like that, and only the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would try.

To restart the FTL conversation a new article:

Physicists Give Chances Of Faster Than Light Travel A Boost.

Still using Alcubierre style drives as opposed to anything else like wormholes but now the calculations no longer require literally celestial scale quantities of mass to accomplish.

With how much obsession there is in science to solve whether or not Faster-Than-Light Travel is actually possible, I really believe the idea of us never going anywhere is going to turn into the most massive case of Science Marches On ever.

Lesson #7434 On Why Science By Non-Academic Press Sucks:

The first paper mentioned stipulates that their logic only applies to SUBluminal Alcubierre bubbles. The second one is better - I've seen the "solitons" thing already mentioned in this forum - although I am reserving judgment on a study published only a month or so ago.

The latest I've heard says that while we can mathematically model both sub-light and supra-light Alcubierre warp bubbles, we cannot figure out how to get from one to the other.

Simple. Send it through a wormhole

So a setting I'm working on has budding gravity tech and a alcubierre drive as its main method of transit, it's a bit harder science so the more unusual stuff to come stands out.

What would be a good choice of superluminal communications in a world where the main form of FTL is warp travel. I'm thinking ansibles of sorts with quantum entanglement, with most of the Bandwith taken by local government and military.

Whatever you want. Come up with a few hand waves and make it consistent.

Alcubierre drives and ansibles using entangled quantum particles seem like the best "medium-hard" way to do FTL to me.

Micro-wormholes might also be an option, given that the capability to make working FTL Alcubierre drives would also at least come with the potential for creating wormholes.

Messengers would be another option.

Pretty much all forms of hypothetical FTL that are allowed by General Relativity require sizable distortions in the fabric of spacetime, which in turn require sizable machinery. That means either that messages are transferred via FTL post or as a radio "package" via a wormhole, you can't communicate just by sending a wave out.

Unless I misunderstood something, FTL communication via entanglement flat out violates the quantum mechanics rules ("no communication theorem") so it'll knock down the realism quite a bit if you go for that.

Quantum Entanglement is the most commonly cited idea. But wormholes works, Ansibles that utilize wormhole connections to connect colonized space in a galactic network.

I probably shouldn't worry too much about it, just say "Hyperwave Ansibles" and people should accept that these stations enable superluminal communication.

>What would be a good choice of superluminal communications in a world where the main form of FTL is warp travel. I'm thinking ansibles of sorts with quantum entanglement, with most of the Bandwith taken by local government and military.

I would say that you should stick to that one mode of FTL, and not go with some sort of ansible or other handwave. So the only way to communicate FTL is to send a ship. You could have entirely new types of ships with entirely new types of jobs, all sorts of creative scenarios, and so forth.

Does quantum physics still support tiny wormholes constantly being created and destroyed or did that get disproven?

I'm not sure which specific hypothesis you're referring to, so it's hard to say what was and was not rebutted. I'm fairly sure that quantum tunneling isn't even vaguely related to the general relativity concept of wormholes.

You may be thinking of Virtual Particles, which do indeed appear and disappear. They don't have anything to do with blackholes, though.

Virtual particles are themselves not "real" but an approximation to make the ferociously difficult mathematics easier to understand.

.... aren't they how hawking radiation works though, part of them gets sucked in before they can self anihilate.

Nope. Again, that's a "layman's" approximation that Stephen Hawking himself put forth to make the concept easier to understand. Perhaps it was unfortunate, as a lot of people now firmly believe in the idea.

What is actually happening with Hawking radiation is that the event horizon is cutting off some of the frequency modes of the quantum vacuum. In the absence of real particles, all quantum fields are abuzz with tiny amounts of energy, vibrating constantly at both positive and negative levels due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. These occur on too short a scale to be measured, and the net energy is still zero (except for the Higgs field). They also occur in all possible frequencies of each field.

These vibrational modes also extend from one end of the universe to the other. Black holes cause parts of the universe to lose access to certain frequencies: specifically the frequencies whose wavelength is equal to the diameter of the event horizon. When you cut off a frequency, what is left over looks like a particle with non-zero energy, and thus the event horizon appears to "glow" with black-body radiation whose heat is proportional to the frequency of that radiation. The energy to do so comes from the mass of the black hole itself.

Also, until the black hole shrinks to a tiny size, the radiation is all photons since it lacks the energy to create particles of any other type. A photon has no antimatter counterpart, so if you think about it, the "virtual matter-antimatter pair" idea is false on its face.

Here's a good video by PBS Space Time explaining the concept of virtual particles, and this one specifically on Hawking radiation.

Edited by Fighteer on May 12th 2021 at 8:23:44 AM

Going back to Belisaurius's question, you are talking about quantum foam and as the article notes there isn't any evidence of that existing, yet.

Also, there is a hypothesis that particles of Hawking radiation are entangled with particles inside the event horizon, but there's no way to experimentally test this.

The Space Courier thing might work, would help justify some funner elements such as Space Nobles.

Despite the hilarity of the concept, I'd put great faith in the bandwidth of a star clipper full of hard drives hurtling through space.