381–390 of 410 posts
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Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction was the stupidest book I’ve ever read and took hundreds of pages to expose itself. Are his others any more grounded (like your other suggestions)?
did you read the same book as me.. it was pretty awesome
I think I liked it in the end, though not as much as his other books, but can absolutely understand people would dislike it.
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Here's a quick analogy to help (loosely adapted from Brian Greene): You're on a grass field, sitting on one of those riding lawnmower thingies, with a broken throttle. It's moving at a fixed speed of 1mph. You can't ever change its velocity. But you can steer it. If you are going precisely east-west, then it means you're not going north-south. The more you go north-south, the less you'll be going east-west. If you're…
I like this analogy, but I think an even bigger problem than distance contraction is that in fact the lawnmower can go east-west on one axis, but only towards the north on the other axis, towards the future, at least as far as we have observed in macroscopic systems. This may not be a problem for some definitions of time, but for the notion of time which goes from past to future, I don't think the analogy holds very…
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Anything in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks; The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey; The Commonwealth and Void trilogies by Peter F. Hamilton, and the Night’s Dawn trilogy also by Peter F. Hamilton; The Dune saga by Frank Herbert.
Is Pandoras Star worth the effort?
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Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction was the stupidest book I’ve ever read and took hundreds of pages to expose itself. Are his others any more grounded (like your other suggestions)?
did you read the same book as me.. it was pretty awesome
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Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction was the stupidest book I’ve ever read and took hundreds of pages to expose itself. Are his others any more grounded (like your other suggestions)?
Yeah the Night’s dawn series was a bit out there compared to the genre average. The Commonwealth series is considerably closer to baseline, and his best books IMO. The void trilogy (and the newer trilogy whose name escapes me) follow on from the Commonwealth books, and while good, don’t hold up to the first three.
Some caveats per Marina Koren https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273 1. This planet probably doesn’t have a solid surface 2. Being in the “habitable zone” doesn’t mean a planet is habitable 3. The detection is of water molecules, chances are the water only exists as vapour in the atmosphere of this small gas giant. 4. If you ask 10 astronomers about this you will get 11 opinions
> 2. Being in the “habitable zone” doesn’t mean a planet is habitable Related question: Does "habitable" mean "habitable for humans"? I thought it didn't, but after reading some dictionary definitions, i believe it does. On the other hand looking at the planetary habitability wikipedia page it's clear that it means "life-friendly". No wonder many people are confused. Of course a planet with 8-9 times the mass of eart…
It’s almost entirely arbitrary, but roughly based on luminosity of the star.
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So that's purely for a chemical rocket, right? Is there any combination of tricks that can realistically push the envelope there? For example can we use a space elevator to start higher/faster (or, I don't know, balloons? a catapult or railgun or something?), laser power delivery from the ground, so we don't have to carry all the fuel, and an orbiting way-station for refueling, etc.?
Solar sails might be able to beat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
As a KSP engineer would say, it "needs more boosters" https://i.redd.it/zuymxc5bb7s21.jpg
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I like this analogy, but I think an even bigger problem than distance contraction is that in fact the lawnmower can go east-west on one axis, but only towards the north on the other axis, towards the future, at least as far as we have observed in macroscopic systems. This may not be a problem for some definitions of time, but for the notion of time which goes from past to future, I don't think the analogy holds very…
Actually the analogy is a bit poorer than that, but also more consistent. You can only go one direction on either axis. Any movement in 3D space advances you along the "+space" axis, to the the detriment of your default movement along the "+time" axis. But just as there's no "-time" axis, there's also no "-space" axis.
As far as we have observed, the same is not true with (the common-language definition of) time - I can't go back to the moment I was born, for example.
I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…
Yeah. Well. That's a fun math game and not much more. Other view on "energy growth rate": https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ Energy growth is due to end sooner or later. First, in the real world, any long term exponential growth is actually the upward branch of an S (that plateau at some point) or of a bell curve (that falls down after a peak). Second, with such an energy growth rate we'll boil…
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Can you explain this further? It seems this is relevant more for something other than the Wait Calculation. The original Wait Calculation doesn't factor in mass at all. I'm having trouble understanding what this impacts. Is this more about relativistic time passage, like from the ship traveler versus the observer? Most scenarios I've explored - low velocity growth rate, nearby planets/stars - the Wait Calculation tel…
Honestly, I made that comment without fully thinking through how to implement my suggestion, and now I realize that I've stumped myself. However, let me explain what I meant anyway: First of all, you're right that this won't really impact your answer at insignificant fractions of light speed. You mentioned that using the 4.72% growth rate, the equation tells you to wait until you've passed the speed of light, and I t…
Pouring more energy into acceleration won't make you move faster (even subjectively) but it will shorten the way. (From the outside, it looks like time dilation.)
