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What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

arxiv.org

51–60 of 118 posts

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moderation on SE is abysmal, but it's the best moderation around for such a large, universally accessible, user-submitted knowledge store.

A better form of moderation exists in the form of whatever they were doing before, when you could ask a question and get an answer. At one point SE was my most used resource. As of now I haven't used SE at all for I think four years. Why would you, when so much of the site's content is outdated and the moderators enforce that situation?

"Marked as a duplicate of an outdated post" has been a common complaint since the 2000s, the only "before" was when the site was brand new.

I even checked to make sure I wasn't misremembering things - here's someone complaining about the same thing in 2011: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cm02a/you_cant...

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so if we detect them we know it's false; that's very significant

It would be, but we still have to keep in mind that P(ETs|warp signatures) != P(warp signatures|ETs) and there's also the issue of the Schelling point of never being the first.

agreed

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better form of moderation exists in the form of whatever they were doing before, when you could ask a question and get an answer. At one point SE was my most used resource. As of now I haven't used SE at all for I think four years. Why would you, when so much of the site's content is outdated and the moderators enforce that situation?

That's for sure. It's been... five, six years? Since last time I visited any of those sites and found relevant information. Not for lack of trying, but it's all outdated or incomplete.

I find that weird, so maybe we're in different spaces. SO often comes up with relevant answers to my queries, and I'll click them if they seem helpful. They aren't always available and when they are they aren't always useful, but I still end up on it at least once or twice a month.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#54

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

> the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts

That reminds of a considerably softer-sci-fi plot device from Earth by David Brin, where (somehow) gravitational waves of the right "tuning" could kill humans (via some kind of Roche-limit or spaghettification phenomenon) but not most other living things.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#55

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

Someone calculated that one of the LIGO detections (of a black hole merger) would have been audible from about 1 AU away. Of course, you would be fried, too. But it's still interesting.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#56
post #2

Funny that the sci-fi got it backwards. It seems rather obvious in hindsight that should it even be possible, we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them.

> Funny that the sci-fi got it backwards.

Sci-fi got it both ways.

Even in the eponymous "warp drive" sci-fi: Star Trek, The Federation's Prime Directive states that uncontacted civilisations are not to be contacted until they are capable of initiating contact themselves.

Usually this is by that civilisation achieving warp drive capabilities (which would allow that species to meet other species) but it can also happen with a species achieving subspace (faster-than-light) communications (which would allow that species to overhear or talk with other species).

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#57
post #28

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

One of the reasons I no longer ask questions on Physics stack exchange: 1. I asked "how powerful" such waves would have to be to be audible. 2. I directly linked to another question whose accepted answer said "these waves can wiggle your ear drum" 3. Got my question closed as a duplicate but the link was to different question that only asked "is it possible" (and accepted the answer "yes") without there being any ans…

It was closed as a duplicate because you asked 3 separate questions in your post, and the most prominent one (the title) was a clear duplicate of the original. I doubt it would have been closed if you had asked only "how powerful would the waves have to be?"

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#58
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about this, sometimes also when one ear suddenly sounds different for a short time.

That's one of the little hairs in your ear dying. You're literally hearing the sound of your hearing deteriorating.

Source? A brief perusal around the internet seems to indicate this is an urban legend.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever consider asking an LLM a question like this though? They just make plausible-sounding things up, even if sometimes they're correct.

If you tell it to use wolframalpha it could probably do some ballpark spherical cow physics.

Amazing comment for two reasons:

The idea of asking an LLM to generate code for a more rigorous but still high-level language is under-explored. This way you can experiment with AI - but at least have an intermediate code artifact that you can review and test before it gets published! Exposing the raw token stream is reckless.

I had never heard of "spherical cow" science before but I love the imagery.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#60
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like spooky stuff there is lots of fun things to think about. Just off the cuff; We are predicting a soul upload technology with Neuralink etc. So an alien technosignature could look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment This one is not rigorous but there are lots of other possibilities of this pattern.

If measurement of the soul's weight gave 21, that can only be half of the answer[0], right? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%...

2 souls united, that's the meaning of life.
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