May the Force be with you
Posted on 07/08/2005 10:47:06 AM PDT by demlosers
No way in Hades I'm gettin' in that machine! A copy of me is not me. If they need my talents (lol) on Planet X so blamed badly, they'd better darn well figure out how to send a copy without skinning the original, excruciating nano-layer by excruciating nano-layer, alive.
I'm quite serious. Setting aside the moral dilemmas created be technology, unless we are willing to totally discount the possibility of a "technoclysm", we must be prepared to regulate emerging technologies and possibly even supress the more dangerous ones. An agency like the ARM could become the only thing standing between us and a fate not unlike Drexler's "Grey goo".
Niven's early work was sometimes uncomfortably prescient.
I recently picked up his second autobiography since Asimov is undiscovered territory nowadays! When I watch CSPAN Booknotes and they speak to a "prolific author of 20 books, I laugh to myself since Asimov wrote more than that in a single year!!!
Good luck with your renewed efforts!
YW
One of my favorite movies.
That is why only material objects will utilize 'teleportation', instead allowing living beings to undergo it. The advantage being that not only can you teleport one object, you will also be able to create unlimited replicas of them once they have been scanned into 'memory'.
Living beings will travel through what is commonly referred to today as a 'wormhole'; bending the spacetime continuum so that one moment you are at one defined point, and the next you are in another. Hollywood special effects notwithstanding, scientists and engineers already have some understanding of how to accomplish this, which is actually easier from a technical standpoint than the requirements for teleportation. Teleportation is currently not-ready-for-primetime because of technical difficulties, while 'wormhole' travel is not because of energy demands.
LOL. I love that movie (although they could have picked someone better than Sigourney Weaver to play Gwen).
Instantaneously. The limitation of the 'speed of light' is not a limitation for every particle or subparticle in the universe. Instead of attempting to surpass the speed of ligh, think of sidestepping that by travelling in a different manner.
I thought it was because they were theoretical. Didn't Hawking recently retract a lot of his ideas about wormholes, which makes the Einstein-Rosen Bridge idea non-operational, so to speak?
As to my rediscovery, something interesting has happened--I've found the old stuff much more palatable. With the notable exceptions of Greg Benford (with whom I've corresponded briefly, what a cool guy), John Varley (liberal as they come) and Ted Chiang, most of the new stuff just leaves me cold. I am much more interested in character-oriented stuff than technical stuff, and Clarke, Heinlein and Simak are giving me what I want from SF. I can't get enough of these three.
Yes. In an earlier experiment by John Bell (not teleportation, but related), two particles were sent in opposite directions, and then something was done to one of them. The other reacted faster than the distance between them / the speed of light.
There is a loophole that prevents this from being an interesting case of time travel, however: you can force the coupled particles to "communicate" faster than light, but you can't tell them what to say. So you can't transfer information of your choosing faster than light--the information that you exchange is essentially random.
Speaking very loosely, teleportation will involve a similar loophole that prevents its use for time travel: the "jump" itself will be instantaneous, but setting up the jump will involve exchanging information no faster than the speed of light.
No, the difficulty exists because currently the only way they have to achieve it (at least publicly) is by the brute-force method. While it would not be adviseable for Me to even hint on a public forum about the possibility of any personal knowledge that there exist ongoing experiments into the betterment of howto refine and use such technology lest a visit from certain governmental agencies occur to determine if any unauthorized information had come about **public disclaimer: I have *NO* knowledge of any such unauthorized release(s)** , take it as an article of faith that observations have occured and are occurring due to some unexpected results of certain experiments that could only be explained by the 'wormhole' effect, and resources are being brought to bear in that area.
I'm still sticking by my "Find a really TALL guy and just have him THROW someone across the galaxy...I mean really, REALLY tall, as in artificial growth hormones by the tanker tall" idea. Oh, damn, did I patent that...?
Sometimes science has to scurry to present explanations after observed effects, instead of the other way about.
That depends on your conception of the quantum-state of your soul. Mind you, the conversion of a person ENTIRELY into energy, the transmission of that energy, and re-configuration of that energy into its' original mass form is TECHNICALLY a possibility. . .transmission losses make it a chancy proposition.
OTOH, ANOTHER tack at teleportation is this: the particles which make up the atoms and molecules of your body have a overwhelmingly most probable location, where you are right now. But, potentially, each of those particles have a small possibility of being somewhere else. IF you could shift the most probable location WITHOUT losing structural coherency, you have workable teleportation.
The details, of course, are left for students with an especially alert mind to solve. . .
I dunno. I examined some of these ideas in an (unpublished) story I wrote and one of the things I came up with was the whole idea of the soul being in another dimension but being rooted in the here and now because of the structural integrity, so to speak, of the body. If one's structure is reduced to charged particles, yer dead. I mean, a corpse has structural integrity but the "soul" (I'm an agnostic so make of that what you will) is no longer present; so what's it got to hold on to in the spacial dimension? I think when the body is converted to energy, that's it--to me it's like saying you can reverse an electrical charge and return it to a transformer while holding its "form", for want of a term.
I know it's unfashionable to say anything is impossible, like FTL, but...
Once we all become interchangeable, what difference will that make?
"You're next!"--Invasion of the Body Snatchers
di-lithium?
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