Time Travel Query

[Kharakov]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It's quite the opposite, actually. Any sufficiently advanced magic which imposes a metaphysical order upon events in the physical world is indistinguishable from technology, at least to those who hold pseudoscientific beliefs about the supremacy of lower order natural laws.

 

[Davka]

I don't think I can pretend we have ships that can do .99c in a ScientiFiction-y type story. It would need to be pure fantasy.

Or Hollywood.

Make it an accident, then. Some experiment where they tinker with the building blocks of the universe and hope to increase ship's speed by 10%, they turn it on and FWOOSH! It's a year later and there are all sorts of people trying to explain what happened (and each one is sure they'll be vindicted when the ship is recovered). Is it crucial to the story that the pilot KNOW what happened to his ship, or do you just want to throw him a year into the future?

I want to offer the opportunity to leap 100 years into the future, as a commercial enterprise. Naturally the prohibitive energy costs will restrict the customer base to the very rich. The idea is to explore the implications of a significant number of the 1% deciding to skip forward. What does that do to society today? How will they be received 100 years from now?

Honestly I can use psuedoscience to get the job done, it's not crucial to the story. I just know that when I'm reading a story and the author has injected fake science, it's jolting and grating. It throws me out of the story and into "that's total crap, physics doesn't work like that!' mode.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It's quite the opposite, actually. Any sufficiently advanced magic which imposes a metaphysical order upon events in the physical world is indistinguishable from technology, at least to those who hold pseudoscientific beliefs about the supremacy of lower order natural laws.

You're only saying that because your chakras are misaligned and your DNA needs debugging.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I want to offer the opportunity to leap 100 years into the future, as a commercial enterprise. Naturally the prohibitive energy costs will restrict the customer base to the very rich. The idea is to explore the implications of a significant number of the 1% deciding to skip forward. What does that do to society today? How will they be received 100 years from now?

Oh.
That's the time travel from 'Gate of Ivrel.'
Essentially, it's a system of portals like Stargate. They can travel between gates on this planet or on other planets. An alien race spread a whole system through the galaxy.

They can also travel through time. You program the gate for when you want to come out. There was a rule, no travel backwards, only forwards. But you could step in and come out a hundred years later.

In the story, someone had broken the rule and fucked all sorts of things up by traveling back in time. When the story opens, the heroine is the last member of a task force that's been going from gate to gate and setting them to self-destruct. Destroying the system so it can't be abused again.

So, any matter transmission system would work, if it could be interrupted and had sufficient memory. Scotty did something like that in a ST:NG episode. One of the Stargate episodes, they held Worf Dargo T'ielc in suspended transit while they tried to bypass the technobabble that would have killed him.

 

[Wiploc]

Honestly I can use psuedoscience to get the job done, it's not crucial to the story. I just know that when I'm reading a story and the author has injected fake science, it's jolting and grating. It throws me out of the story and into "that's total crap, physics doesn't work like that!' mode.

I'm reminded of terrible bit from a uniformly terrible Highlander movie.
It went something like:

"If you blow into this secret decoder ring, it will call me to your from anywhere, even from beyond the grave."

"So it's magic."

"No, not magic. It's science. But it's hard to explain, so you can think of it as magic."

 

[dystopian]

I want to offer the opportunity to leap 100 years into the future, as a commercial enterprise. Naturally the prohibitive energy costs will restrict the customer base to the very rich. The idea is to explore the implications of a significant number of the 1% deciding to skip forward. What does that do to society today? How will they be received 100 years from now?

Interesting premise.

If I were writing that story I could see the painless removal of much of the 1% going one of two ways for the sake of story:

In the first scenario, their removal demolishes artificial barriers towards achieving greater equality. With the power of the ultra-rich no longer as strong, the rest of us have a chance at influencing government to a greater extent *before* the 1% is replenished with fresh faces (It might be a tad more realistic for such efforts to stall and for people to quickly fill the position of the 1 percenters that left, but that just leads to a status quo which isn't as interesting from a story perspective). As a result, reforms take place that limit the unbalanced distribution of wealth and power. Automatization and AI development lead to a 'Have and no have not's' society; everybody gets a slice of the pie. As a result, when the 1% emerges into the future, they find that all of their wealth and power is now obsolete; although the conditions they find themselves in might well be better than what they have today.

In the second scenario, technology develops along essentially the same path. However, those of the 1% that remain behind use the sudden decrease in competition to strengthen their own powerbase; which then becomes great enough for them to dictate the path along which society develops. When the 1% emerges into the future, they find themselves in a dystopian situation where only a handful of people have any actual power. Naturally, the 1% will find that its assets are either pitiful in comparison; now in the hands of the 0.001%; or obsolete in the new system.

In either case, there could be good story conflict for a 1% protagonist; especially since their choice to go into the future would be exactly what caused that future to exist in the first place.

Honestly I can use psuedoscience to get the job done, it's not crucial to the story. I just know that when I'm reading a story and the author has injected fake science, it's jolting and grating. It throws me out of the story and into "that's total crap, physics doesn't work like that!' mode.

That's why hard sci-fi should really only be written by scientists who know enough of the science to get it right while at the same time having enough chops to make the science entertaining to read. I've written some sci-fi and I've done a *lot* of research into various scientific subjects to make it more plausible and 'real'; but I know better than to try to throw in some technobabble to explain the details of how some stuff works; my knowledgebase just isn't up to that task.

Plus, most of the time it just isn't necessary to be particularly accurate or technical. I think it's perfectly okay to have FTL in a story for instance; but you don't need the characters to be all; "Well Bob, as you know our trip to Zeti Reticuli uses the ultradrive system, which as you learned in physics involves blah blah and the bluh of the thingy as blah blah."; some infodumps are necessary (and can be fun to read) to build a setting, but if you need the reader to know your setting has FTL drives, it shouldn't be too hard to write a more plausible scene where it's simply mentioned in passing. "Bob, how are our systems looking?" "Everything okay Captain, the FTL drive is operating at peak efficiency." "Excellent, well shall we get on with actual plot now?"

 

[bilby]

If you want to have someone in your story go 'away' for a small amount of subjective time, and 'return' to find that a large amount of time has elapsed while they were 'gone', why not just put them to sleep?

Save an awful lot of fuel; running a freezer has got to be cheaper than accelerating to a sizable fraction of c.

Sean McMullen made a bloody good show of using this device in 'The Centurions Empire', in which a Roman travels to the 21st century from 71AD by means of a carefully planned collection of cold-storage opportunities and some undisclosed herbal concoction that made being frozen and re-thawed a survivable experience.

The idea of human stasis is problematic - how do we prevent cell deterioration? Even if an object is essentially lifeless (and thus not aging in the sense of living things), there is still aging going on. A chair that is 300 years old is far more fragile than one which is new. I suppose we could build a huge lead-lined underground chamber or something, but entropy is a bitch.

I think I prefer the portable black hole, as posited in the classic film Yellow Submarine.

Oh, I don't imagine that there are no problems with the freezer approach; But those problems are several orders of magnitude smaller than the ones you face with travelling at a sizeable fraction of light speed.

The second law applies regardless - it is tricky to get to the future in perfect condition even for those of us who travel there at the boring old-fashioned rate of one year per annum.

 

[Underseer]

If you want to have someone in your story go 'away' for a small amount of subjective time, and 'return' to find that a large amount of time has elapsed while they were 'gone', why not just put them to sleep?

Save an awful lot of fuel; running a freezer has got to be cheaper than accelerating to a sizable fraction of c.

Sean McMullen made a bloody good show of using this device in 'The Centurions Empire', in which a Roman travels to the 21st century from 71AD by means of a carefully planned collection of cold-storage opportunities and some undisclosed herbal concoction that made being frozen and re-thawed a survivable experience.

The idea of human stasis is problematic - how do we prevent cell deterioration? Even if an object is essentially lifeless (and thus not aging in the sense of living things), there is still aging going on. A chair that is 300 years old is far more fragile than one which is new. I suppose we could build a huge lead-lined underground chamber or something, but entropy is a bitch.

I think I prefer the portable black hole, as posited in the classic film Yellow Submarine.

Wait. You don't want to use stasis because it's not believable, so you're going with a portable black hole instead?

*boggle*

Please tell me you were being funny and I completely missed it due to general cluelessness.

 

[Davka]

The idea of human stasis is problematic - how do we prevent cell deterioration? Even if an object is essentially lifeless (and thus not aging in the sense of living things), there is still aging going on. A chair that is 300 years old is far more fragile than one which is new. I suppose we could build a huge lead-lined underground chamber or something, but entropy is a bitch.

I think I prefer the portable black hole, as posited in the classic film Yellow Submarine.

Wait. You don't want to use stasis because it's not believable, so you're going with a portable black hole instead?

*boggle*

Please tell me you were being funny and I completely missed it due to general cluelessness.

You're a douchenozzle, it was fucking FUNNY godamit!!!!!

(yellow Submarine was a Beatles cartoon movie, in which Ringo picks up a hole (from the Sea of Holes) and puts it in his pocket, then says "I've got a hole in me pocket!")

 

[bilby]

Wait. You don't want to use stasis because it's not believable, so you're going with a portable black hole instead?

*boggle*

Please tell me you were being funny and I completely missed it due to general cluelessness.

You're a douchenozzle, it was fucking FUNNY godamit!!!!!

(yellow Submarine was a Beatles cartoon movie, in which Ringo picks up a hole (from the Sea of Holes) and puts it in his pocket, then says "I've got a hole in me pocket!")

I suspect the reference was lost on anyone who has spent more of their life in the 21st century than the 20th.

Speaking as someone who still has to cross out '19' each time he writes the date on a document, I did find it fairly humorous.

 

[Underseer]

You're a douchenozzle, it was fucking FUNNY godamit!!!!!

(yellow Submarine was a Beatles cartoon movie, in which Ringo picks up a hole (from the Sea of Holes) and puts it in his pocket, then says "I've got a hole in me pocket!")

I suspect the reference was lost on anyone who has spent more of their life in the 21st century than the 20th.

Speaking as someone who still has to cross out '19' each time he writes the date on a document, I did find it fairly humorous.

I'm gen X. I was born around the time the Beatles were a big deal. By the time I became a teen in the 80s, Beatles was "boring old people stuff."

 

[Emily Lake]

It's been a really long time and all.. but doesn't time dilation require an element of acceleration? Not just constant velocity. Or maybe it just gets made more extreme if there's acceleration involved... Mind you it was over 20 years ago that I last studied modern physics, and that only briefly.

 

[fromderinside]

It's been a really long time and all.. but doesn't time dilation require an element of acceleration? Not just constant velocity. Or maybe it just gets made more extreme if there's acceleration involved... Mind you it was over 20 years ago that I last studied modern physics, and that only briefly.

 Time dilation

time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two  event (relativity) as measured by  observer (special relativity) either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses.

If I part from you here on earth and travel moving near the speed of light first moving toward a nearby star and then again when returning from that star and you are the whole time on earth I will have not aged nearly as much as you would have aged so I will appear young and you will appear very old when again we meet. Something  Intersteller (film) got right.

 

[Underseer]

It's been a really long time and all.. but doesn't time dilation require an element of acceleration? Not just constant velocity. Or maybe it just gets made more extreme if there's acceleration involved... Mind you it was over 20 years ago that I last studied modern physics, and that only briefly.

No, acceleration was involved in the resolution of the  Twin Paradox.

The problem comes from the lack of a universe reference frame. If there is no universal frame of reference, how do you know which observer will experience time more slowly than the other if from his perspective the other observer is the one that's moving fast? The answer turned out to involve acceleration.

 

[Wiploc]

It's been a really long time and all.. but doesn't time dilation require an element of acceleration?

No.

Not just constant velocity.

Take any two observers/people/rocks/frames-of-reference that are not at the same speed as each other. Each will see the other as physically distorted, chronologically slow, and abnormally heavy.

Acceleration is not needed for any of that.

The problem comes from the lack of a univers[al] reference frame. If there is no universal frame of reference, how do you know which observer will experience time more slowly than the other if from his perspective the other observer is the one that's moving fast? The answer turned out to involve acceleration.

Each sees himself as stopped, and the other as moving. Each sees the other's watch as running slowly. One of them (who doesn't accelerate) may see that for a longer time than the other.

 

[Davka]

Take any two observers/people/rocks/frames-of-reference that are not at the same speed as each other. Each will see the other as physically distorted, chronologically slow, and abnormally heavy.

This happens a lot at parties.

 

[Wiploc]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well that kinda sucks! You have to be moving like a quantum bat out of multidimensional hell just to get 2 Earth days for every one of yours - looks like around .8c or so - which sort of defeats the whole purpose. I don't think I can pretend we have ships that can do .99c in a ScientiFiction-y type story. It would need to be pure fantasy.

Well, there is the hidden ultra-fast computer under the surface of the moon. A string of processors lies a mere 30 meters below the surface of the moon, encircling the whole moon. These processors were accelerated to close to the speed of light, using technology that makes CERN's LHC look like the work of children.

Information can be programmed into the processors at various points, as the processors whip around at .999999762c. I could get into more details, but I have a roof to patch.

The point is this: 2^16 bit encryption takes a certain amount of time to crack: one must send the information to Alice at the Moon, who sends it to one of the Bobs (there are many Bobs encircling the Moon) to crack, who then sends it back to Alice, who sends it to Ralph on Earth. There is sometimes a backlog, but generally one can crack a 2^16 bit key in under 8 minutes.

Keep that in mind when you believe your communications are secure. They are, unless Ralph sends them to the Moon.

Pushing the computers to relativistic velocity will not help you here. They'll calculate slower, not faster.

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Well that kinda sucks! You have to be moving like a quantum bat out of multidimensional hell just to get 2 Earth days for every one of yours - looks like around .8c or so - which sort of defeats the whole purpose. I don't think I can pretend we have ships that can do .99c in a ScientiFiction-y type story. It would need to be pure fantasy.

Or Hollywood.

A difference in gravity can also cause time dilation (general relativity), but one of the observers would pretty much have to be orbiting a black hole to have any noticeable effect.

It depends on how well you notice.

Your GPS device must take this into consideration or it will get the wrong answer. (It also must consider the slowing of the clocks due to their orbital speed.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If you want to have someone in your story go 'away' for a small amount of subjective time, and 'return' to find that a large amount of time has elapsed while they were 'gone', why not just put them to sleep?

Save an awful lot of fuel; running a freezer has got to be cheaper than accelerating to a sizable fraction of c.

Sean McMullen made a bloody good show of using this device in 'The Centurions Empire', in which a Roman travels to the 21st century from 71AD by means of a carefully planned collection of cold-storage opportunities and some undisclosed herbal concoction that made being frozen and re-thawed a survivable experience.

The idea of human stasis is problematic - how do we prevent cell deterioration? Even if an object is essentially lifeless (and thus not aging in the sense of living things), there is still aging going on. A chair that is 300 years old is far more fragile than one which is new. I suppose we could build a huge lead-lined underground chamber or something, but entropy is a bitch.

I think I prefer the portable black hole, as posited in the classic film Yellow Submarine.

Even if you can overcome this there's another problem:

Spend 500 years in some form of suspended animation and you'll wake up to die. You'll have gotten a lethal radiation dose from your own body. (The normal repair mechanisms won't work while you're out of it, it will be like the dose hit all at once rather than spread over 500 years.)

 

[Kharakov]

Well, there is the hidden ultra-fast computer under the surface of the moon. A string of processors lies a mere 30 meters below the surface of the moon, encircling the whole moon. These processors were accelerated to close to the speed of light, using technology that makes CERN's LHC look like the work of children.

Information can be programmed into the processors at various points, as the processors whip around at .999999762c. I could get into more details, but I have a roof to patch.

The point is this: 2^16 bit encryption takes a certain amount of time to crack: one must send the information to Alice at the Moon, who sends it to one of the Bobs (there are many Bobs encircling the Moon) to crack, who then sends it back to Alice, who sends it to Ralph on Earth. There is sometimes a backlog, but generally one can crack a 2^16 bit key in under 8 minutes.

Keep that in mind when you believe your communications are secure. They are, unless Ralph sends them to the Moon.

Pushing the computers to relativistic velocity will not help you here. They'll calculate slower, not faster.

Whoops. lol...

 

[bilby]

The idea of human stasis is problematic - how do we prevent cell deterioration? Even if an object is essentially lifeless (and thus not aging in the sense of living things), there is still aging going on. A chair that is 300 years old is far more fragile than one which is new. I suppose we could build a huge lead-lined underground chamber or something, but entropy is a bitch.

I think I prefer the portable black hole, as posited in the classic film Yellow Submarine.

Even if you can overcome this there's another problem:

Spend 500 years in some form of suspended animation and you'll wake up to die. You'll have gotten a lethal radiation dose from your own body. (The normal repair mechanisms won't work while you're out of it, it will be like the dose hit all at once rather than spread over 500 years.)

Whether or not the normal repair mechanisms work 'while you are out of it' is entirely at the discretion of the author.