41–50 of 88 posts
> That’s all there is, Detective. Clearly, there’s been no murder. Inconvenience, probably, but has he actually said so? Is he pressing charges? I didn’t think so. This seems like the kind of "clever" legal defense that I expect judges in the real world would probably shoot down real quick though. Even without a black hole or stasis tech, you could attempt, a similar situation occurs e.g. with people in coma. Someone…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don’t get it. So in this fictional universe, has the legal system regressed to the point where kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades is no longer a crime with a life sentence? Or alternatively, is the point that you can’t be punished for kidnapping if you might also have murdered the person, but that part can’t be proven? None of that makes sense.
> kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades Presume Alice was 'kidnapped' in the ball for XX years. You trial Bob and sentence him for 20 years. 20 years passes, Bob serves his sentence and some time later it occurs what Alice were dead all these years, but Bob not only left the country but served his sentence. Or you sentence Bob for the murder of Alice (even better - execute him), yet Alice is alive, though 20 ye…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don’t get it. So in this fictional universe, has the legal system regressed to the point where kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades is no longer a crime with a life sentence? Or alternatively, is the point that you can’t be punished for kidnapping if you might also have murdered the person, but that part can’t be proven? None of that makes sense.
> kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades Presume Alice was 'kidnapped' in the ball for XX years. You trial Bob and sentence him for 20 years. 20 years passes, Bob serves his sentence and some time later it occurs what Alice were dead all these years, but Bob not only left the country but served his sentence. Or you sentence Bob for the murder of Alice (even better - execute him), yet Alice is alive, though 20 ye…
By all means, sentence Bob for kidnapping, stick him in jail, have him get out, put a tracker on him and forbid him to leave the country. Then, when Alice pops out and is dead, you just trial him again. It's a different crime! What's more, even if it was the same crime, it'd be material new information!
(Quoth the ECHR: "The provisions of the preceding paragraph shall not prevent the reopening of the case in accordance with the law and penal procedure of the State concerned, if there is evidence of new or newly discovered facts")
Vernor Vinge’s Peace War has balls of stasis, which you can’t see in to tell if the person trapped is alive or dead. So when they figured out how to calculate the lifetime of the bubble, they started putting the guilty party into a bubble timed so they both popped at the same time, which would quickly be followed by your court date if it turned out to be murder.
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I thought this too until the most recent xkcd book taught me that if a black hole is big enough it's actually possible to pass through the event horizon without getting torn apart. It's a question about soup. Good stuff.
I saw a very interesting lecture on YouTube about what you'd see as you fall through an event horizon. Basically you catch up to everything that has ever fallen into the black hole before you. My guess is that it would look like another big bang. https://youtu.be/BdYtfYkdGDk?t=4126
>Basically you catch up to everything that has ever fallen into the black hole before you.
In our neck of the multiverse we call this death.
Who's to say it's not a fact?
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I saw a very interesting lecture on YouTube about what you'd see as you fall through an event horizon. Basically you catch up to everything that has ever fallen into the black hole before you. My guess is that it would look like another big bang. https://youtu.be/BdYtfYkdGDk?t=4126
Not quite. A fixed observer far away from a black hole sees that objects falling into the black hole become more and more faint, and move towards horizon ever so slower. In a classical situation with a good enough detector you can see the images of ALL the objects that fell into the black hole. But this is merely an optical illusion. Objects that fall into the black hole emit only a fixed amount of energy before they…
I smiled as I read this and recalled that old saw attributed to someone's high school coach: "Nothing good happens after midnight."
This is also the premise of the novel Gateway by Fredrik Pohl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_(novel)
There is a huge mistake in this reasoning! Time dilation goes to infinity at the center of the black hole - at the singularity, not at the event horizon! The event horizon could be millions of miles (many AUs) away from the singularity. Near the event horizon, her husband is likely to be falling rapidly into the black hole and is not going to be stuck indefinitely. So, it's Murder 1, immediately.
> Time dilation goes to infinity at the center of the black hole - at the singularity, not at the event horizon That is incorrect. The inside and outside of the black hole are causally disconnected. For someone who passes the event horizon the entire future history of the universe plays out above them as the universe warps down into a single beam of light as the black-ness engulfs you. From the perspective of someone…
I believe this is only true if you have found a way of lingering with zero speed at the event horizon. If you are entering it at near light speed, as you likely would, you will be ingested as a part of "treadmill" containing yourself as well as all the light and will not see much of the future history.