| Sysop: | Amessyroom |
|---|---|
| Location: | Fayetteville, NC |
| Users: | 26 |
| Nodes: | 6 (0 / 6) |
| Uptime: | 54:30:39 |
| Calls: | 632 |
| Files: | 1,187 |
| D/L today: |
27 files (19,977K bytes) |
| Messages: | 178,946 |
|The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most
|extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It
|has been built on the fragmented remains of . . . it will be
|built on the fragmented . . . that is to say it will have been
|built by this time, and indeed has been -
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" (1995-09-27) -
Douglas Adams
John Savard wrote:
On Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:45 +0000, John Savard wrote:
On Sun, 04 May 2025 09:26:51 -0400, James Nicoll wrote:
The Continent Makers by L. Sprague de Camp
Star flight allows Earth's vast bounty of confidence agents to bilk the >>>> peoples of other star systems... or attempt to, at least.
If L. Sprague de Camp is going to avoid including faster-than-light
travel in his stories about people casually hopping from one star-system >>> to another, the least he could have done was, say, include the invention >>> of a *longevity drug* in his stories instead, so as to make them not
utterly implausible.
Of course, it seems clear to me that the invention of the Internet has
made interstellar travel an impossibility, except for a few very rare
individuals, unless we do have not merely FTL, but ridiculously fast
FTL. People just won't stand being offline for years; they couldn't
endure the boredom.
I don't feel that I have the talent to write a science-fiction novel that
anyone would want to read.
But if I were to do so... and I were to indulge my own feelings about how
FTL would play out in real life, instead of following genre
conventions...
I might end up with a story in this setting:
Humanity lives underground beneath the surface of Proxima Centauri b.
Both
Sol and Alpha Centauri have long since gone nova, but Proxima Centauri
still has most of its future ahead of it.
Minor nit.-a Neither Sol nor Alpha is going to go nova.-a But both will eventually shed much of their mass as red giants, and become white
dwarfs, giving much the same scenario.
And you are right about Proxima.-a All this will occur before Proxima is more than one percent of the way through it's main sequence period.-a And you definitely want to live underground as Proxima is a flare star.--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
Still, any of our descendants living in this period, five billion years
from now, will be about as closely related to us as we are to
cyanobacteria.
On 8/4/25 10:35, Stefan Ram wrote:
-a It can't cause time paradoxes since we
-a-a can't encode any useful information into it.
-a-a-a-aSo far!
-a-a-a-aBut maybe the future determined the past.
Lots of SpecFic written about people who go back in
time to start Life on the Primeval Earth simply by
going there and dying or even merely excreting.
-a-a-a-aI think there is even a Doctor Who about
the Doctor, Tardis and companion visiting both
the beginning and the end of the Univers and
who is to say that these only represent the
-asame moment.
-a-a-a-aRight now we are ~13+ Billion years from
the beginning and trying to figure out how those
few moments determined the present state of
things. If the present on the other hand sent
information back to the beginning it might have
set up the conditions that resulted in present
conditions.
-a-a-a-aNot that this is of any importance to us
at the present moment.-a We can in no way
change our present to have magic working
because we have a simply logical universe
already and it is better so. IMO of course.
Paul S Person wrote:
If you consider the determination with which scientists hang on to
their current theory in the face of the evidence,
When a theory has been wildly successful in a variety of areas, it is
absurd to drop it in the face of a contrary observation when another explanation has not been ruled out.-a The theory is put in some doubt, to
be sure, but not abandoned.-a Not immediately, anyway.
For example, deviations in the orbit of Uranus put Newton's theory into doubt, but people speculated that the presence of an unknown planet
could be responsible.-a Neptune was discovered, and the theory survived
that test.
On the other hand deviations in the orbit of Mercury could not be solved
in this way.-a A perturbation mass, Vulcan, was hypothesized, but it did
not do us the favour of existing.-a The theory had to be changed, though
it took a while (Einstein figured it out in 1909 but didn't publish for several years).
On 04/08/2025 18:51, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
On 8/4/25 10:35, Stefan Ram wrote:
-a It can't cause time paradoxes since we
-a-a can't encode any useful information into it.
-a-a-a-a-aSo far!
-a-a-a-a-aBut maybe the future determined the past.
Lots of SpecFic written about people who go back in
time to start Life on the Primeval Earth simply by
going there and dying or even merely excreting.
-a-a-a-a-aI think there is even a Doctor Who about
the Doctor, Tardis and companion visiting both
the beginning and the end of the Univers and
who is to say that these only represent the
-a-asame moment.
-a-a-a-a-aRight now we are ~13+ Billion years from
the beginning and trying to figure out how those
few moments determined the present state of
things. If the present on the other hand sent
information back to the beginning it might have
set up the conditions that resulted in present
conditions.
-a-a-a-a-aNot that this is of any importance to us
at the present moment.-a We can in no way
change our present to have magic working
because we have a simply logical universe
already and it is better so. IMO of course.
I think there are at least two Doctor Who stories
which involve a spaceship or asteroid or something
which turns out to back in time and become the
Big Bang though that's rather unlikely in terms of
scale.-a And a very early story where the TARDIS
seems to be in danger of doing that.-a I think
I read that they'd spent most of the series budget
on Daleks, or maybe the next story wasn't ready,
so they did a story where the time machine doesn't
land anywhere and just keeps going and going...
because they already had the studio sets.