I don't know what all the fuss is about. I'm a Turing test.
Turing police: You're under arrest!
They're Made out of Meat
71–80 of 176 posts
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#72Could any life travel faster than the speed of light? (Including digital life.) Do we know much about dark matter yet? Could it travel faster than light, or is it bound by the same rules as normal matter?
Seems the emerging refinement is that information cannot travel faster than C. (Ergo "digital life" can't move FTL.) If anything can more FTL, the information associated cannot keep up, and the notion of "it" breaks down as what you know about "it" can't keep up with where "it" is.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#73Brilliant
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#74It's quite a fun read but I don't understand why the author chose the word "meat". I mean, if for those aliens human biology is so weird and foreign, how could they have a concept of meat? Or meat flaps? That seems to imply that they're familiar with non-sentient meat, but what would that be? And if those aliens are so different from us they probably don't have the same concept of food as we have, so it wouldn't make…
The aliens don't speak English. I imagine the author chose the word meat in the translation into English for effect.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea I had, before the end of the story, was that the aliens were electronic (robots with AI). Perhaps their far back robot ancestors made by an ancient "meat" civilization, but them having forgotten all of that after millions of years... > Meat is a term used to denote food, not a life form type. Actually meat just means meat. It's not just a word for a food, it's a specific kind of organic "substance".
> Actually meat just means meat. It's not just a word for a food, it's a specific kind of organic "substance". Unless it refers to food, you'd usually see the word "flesh" instead of "meat". Or, depending on how specific you were being "muscle tissue", or "fatty tissue".
Unless their language makes no distinction between flesh and meat. It's all a matter of semantics anyways, the story might as well have been "They're Made Out of Carbon" and remained technically correct, but would have lost much of its charm.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think if we found any talking thing/being other than ourselves we'd be all over it. poo included
Well, keep in mind - in the story, sentient beings are fairly common - they run into them all the time (the Galaxy being pretty big, that's not surprising, particularly if you can move through C space (whatever that is)). So, in this scenario, pretend we've just run into Sentient Race 36,000. But, this time, instead of being the usual flora and fauna and machine intelligence, it's just... poo. I can see some jaded ex…
We can travel through C space. From context (and the fact that C often represents the speed of light), I assume C space is the 3d topology we observe where it is impossible to travel faster than C.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Barring significant new physics, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And that's really a very probably no - although you see popular science stuff written like it can solve the problem, it doesn't, and we have no real expectation that anything will. Dark matter, if it is matter (and there are good but not totally confirmed reasons to think it is) is just that...matter. It would really be not that speci…
Well, other than space itself, hence the whole inflation idea when the whole universe expanded faster than the speed of light.
The universe initially expanded very quickly but not at the speed of light.
A university professor of mine[0] who was (perhaps still is) involved directly in international scientific efforts to examine the expansion of the universe once explained the speed of expansion of the universe to me in a way that made perfect sense.
Unfortunately I can't remember the precise details but the concept relates to a change in scale of the distance between bodies.
My best approximation is this: the measurable distance between two points can increase without either point moving if the nature of what is between the points changes.
You can pseudo-simulate the concept as follows:
1. Open Google maps at a reasonable "normal" scale
2. Affix two dots to your screen and take a guess as to the distance between them as if the dots were actually on the map
3. Zoom out the map quickly as far as it will go
4. Guess again the distance between the dots
The ground distance between the dots increases dramatically. One could argue that the dots moved apart at a great speed, possibly greater than the speed of light if the change in distance is sufficient.
Clearly we know that the dots did not move. The scale of what was between them moved.
During the initial stages of the universe things behaved very oddly.
[0] http://www.brunel.ac.uk/cedps/electronic-computer-engineerin...
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#78Could any life travel faster than the speed of light? (Including digital life.) Do we know much about dark matter yet? Could it travel faster than light, or is it bound by the same rules as normal matter?
Barring significant new physics, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And that's really a very probably no - although you see popular science stuff written like it can solve the problem, it doesn't, and we have no real expectation that anything will. Dark matter, if it is matter (and there are good but not totally confirmed reasons to think it is) is just that...matter. It would really be not that speci…
Given that we know very little about gravity and other effects that distort space-time, it's conceivable that faster than light travel may be possible without violating the relativity limit, by distorting space. We don't think that it is possible without producing the ability to travel back in time -- which is considered impossible --, but we also know very little about the subject.
We're nowhere near it, but clearly at the stage of: we know that we know next to nothing about it. Just have a look at the discussion around the Alcubierre Drive and you'll get the feeling that it is pie-in-the-sky science.
So, I'd wager it's not a "very probably no". It's a "we have no clue".
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wanna know the real reason? C is just the maximum floating point value of the computer that our universe's simulation is running on. Similarly, the Planck length is the value closest to zero.
More likely, it is the maximum speed the physics engine can handle per tick.
That's exactly my point. If the speed (= distance / tick) is represented by a float, then we can travel no faster than the max float value.
Re: They're Made out of Meat
#80Not sure how appropriate or relevant this is, but both me and a friend read this and were reminded slightly of the stuff "written" by Matthew Holness' "Garth Marenghi" character. Sharing a couple of choice excerpts in case anyone is curious, but the real gold is in "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" - a series set in 1980s hospital in Romford. Dead Centre - http://www.garthmarenghi.com/books/deadcentre.htm - "This near-leg…
Me it reminded of Stanisław Lem. He often wrote stuff with an astronaut from the future, who meets other civilisations and often they are a little bit like the world now. So this guy goes there and is like "how crazy those aliens are, doing this and that" and the reader feels is like "well... he is totally right but that's how it's here in real life right now!!"
There was a marvelous episode of some "golden age" radio show that was giving "live updates" to a massive archeological find: the ancient island of Man Hat An was excavated, revealing wondrous finds... The Great Tomb of May Seas was opened, revealing all the treasures he needed for the afterlife such as huge rooms full of beds, clothing, entertainment, and even glass panels which magically showed events far away. Other such finds were noted, but it ended with clearing the great monument to their own doom, a stone-inscribed wall fearing the impending onslaught of the Post Men, whom "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds", whose ways younger documents noted "going Postal" being something to be feared.