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The Schwarzschild Defence

nature.com

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Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#81

Post by doctor_eval »

hinkley wrote: post #70
gmuslera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Altered Carbon, criminal punishment was making that criminal "sleep" (well, destroying his body, keep his memory/conciousness and resleeve him later) for many decades, waking up at a time where he knows no one, and his knowledge was totally outdated. Putting someone into stasis for long would fit into that idea of punishment, and should be a crime by itself, who cares if your wife is alive or dead if she won't be…

In Marooned in Spacetime we have a set of people who hoped for a better Tomorrow and some rich tourist types who wanted to see what happens in the future come out of stasis to find the Earth deserted. No war, no plague, no apocalypse, just fucked off. They bubble forward a bit, just in case everyone took a timeout (maybe a toxin was released and there’s a cave full of bubbles waiting for the earth to repair, who know…

I think about this book really often, especially the 9,000 year old woman. Really amazing imagery.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#82

Post by flying-sheep »

wardedVibe wrote: post #23

neat story, but since when did nature branch out to publishing short stories? roots about the website 2000?? https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&year=200...

It’s a magazine. Many magazines have a readers’ letter section, an opinion column, a short story, … and in case of science magazines, the short stories are traditionally science fiction.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#83

Post by naasking »

defrost wrote: post #4

Sure, it's infinite time, in some framework, until the horizon is reached. But it's finite time (an assertation left as an exercise for the reader) until murder .. when the tidal forces tear the husbands atoms asunder.

Even if it weren't classified as murder, I think they could at least charge with attempted murder.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#84

Post by naasking »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #60
dmurray wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I had the introduction of the Murder chapter in a criminal law textbook explained to me, "Death is inevitable. So what we are really talking about here is acceleration." Since the victim's demise here was decelerated , at least from the point of view of everyone in the trial, it can't be murder. Maybe some kind of kidnapping.

Interesting, but I would say its the victim's POV that matters. In a relatively short amount of time from his perspective, he will be torn apart by tidal forces or smashed to bits by debris impacts (he can't steer). Even if that time is long, then he'll die of starvation or dehydration when his supplies run out. His life span, from his perspective, is greatly shortened. I'd rule out kidnapping, because unlawful detai…

> I'd rule out kidnapping, because unlawful detainment presumes that the person can be released from that detainment. There is no possibility of release for Xavier.

False imprisonment seems to fit:

To prevail under a false imprisonment claim, a plaintiff must prove:

Willful detention in a bounded area

Without consent; and

Without authority of lawful arrest. (Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts)

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#85

Post by sliken »

hinkley wrote: post #71
KineticLensman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major plot point in the stories, that and criminally bobbling someone to get them out of the way.

If you thought your accountant was about to become an informant, bubble him up. Catch your crime boss enemy with his pants down? Bubble him and watch his empire unravel. Someone sleeping with your wife? Bubble.

Thus the habbit of carrying a bubble. You can't bubble a bubble, however if you carry just one someone could cut you in half in spite.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#86

Post by sliken »

ksaxena wrote: post #33

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.

Think of it this way: 1) the closer to the speed of light the bigger difference between your time frame and an external observer's. 2) at the speed of light the universe will age to infinity as you watch 3) inside the event horizon, even the speed of light is not enough to escape.

For an external observer you'll appear to slow down as you approach the event horizon. However feeding blackholes do increase is size obviously (or they would all be the same size), which may well save you from the (from an external perspective) an infinite descent.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#87

Post by sliken »

Shorel wrote: post #73
doctor_eval wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think - it was a very very long time ago when I read this - but a bad person can put someone into a stasis field without their consent. The stasis field is the shape of a perfect bubble or ball. IIRC it's also perfectly reflective. Anything inside the stasis field simply doesn't participate in time. Once Bob puts Alice into statis, the stasis ball is impenetrable, so the cops don't know if Alice was alive or dead w…

> However, they do know that the stasis bubble containing Alice will eventually open up and pop Alice back into the current time. In the first book, IIRC, they did not know that, and in fact believed the spheres would last forever. The spheres were used like nukes, in a very indiscriminate way. Whole armies were sphered in a short time. Many years after, when the first sphere popped, they realized a new way of time t…

> Whole armies were sphered in a short time.

Yes, till it got easy to make the bubbles. All you have to do to prevent being bubbled, was to carry a bubble. Doesn't prevent cutting you in half though, assuming they guessed the right half, so you might want to carry a few.

Re: The Schwarzschild Defence

#88

Post by cyberax »

pontifier wrote: post #18
cyberax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believe there's a directionality component that happens when you fall into a black hole as well. The directions out of the black hole begin to constrict into a point above you, while directions that end at the singularity become more and more spread out, until every direction leads to the singularity as you cross the event horizon. Edit: this Forbes article describes this effect. https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts…

Yup. But if you're a free-falling point-like observer then you won't be able to find this out. You'll only discover this if you try to send a signal out or fire your ship's engines.

And of course, at some point the tidal forces would be so large that any non-point-like observer would be torn into pieces.

The possible directions that you'll see actually become constricted to a line, not a point. It's essentially a projection of the time axis. That's because in a classical theory singularity exists as an infinitely long time-like line. As you fall down, you can influence the location where you hit it a bit if you fire your ship's engines.

But anywhere on this line the gravity (curvature) is still infinite so it's not like you'd be much better off.

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