Gerinski wrote: Dean wrote: Gerinski wrote: I am reasonably confident that future scientific and technological developments (not within a couple of decades) will make possible things which as of today we may believe violate the laws of physics as we understand them today. I do not share your confidence simply because whatever theory "wins" will only describe what is, it will not change the nature of the Universe. Do you know what the nature of the Universe really is and what does it allow or does not? In the 15th century nobody would have thought that you could bring a pot of water to boiling without putting it on top of fire or some other hot stuff, or that a woman could get pregnant without having sex nor receiving a visit from the Holy Spirit, yet microwave ovens and artificial insemination are common stuff today.

I addressed this point last night in The Ghost Thread (and cross-quoted you in the process) because Logan is making a similar statement in that thread. You are making an associative fallacy. You are associating something that we could not have imagined back then but know now to something we do imagine now that we will know in the future. That is a fallacious argument.

Finnforest wrote: DS9's Vic Fontaine was a well liked holographic character whose program recreated a Vegas lounge of the 1960s.  But beyond crooning Sinatra style, Vic would become entangled in the problems of the crew and boasted a very high level of self-awareness and perception of others.  Basically if you weren't told he wasn't real, you'd be hard pressed to figure that out by watching the show.  In one episode his program is left running for days on end rather than just an hour or two, and Fontaine begins to notice the difference between being "on demand" for short intervals, and actual "living" that involves sleep, cycles of a day, etc.  He comments on how sweet it is to "live."  So while I'm sure holographic images and computer personality programs are not so far fetched the topic of personal development/learning is kind of cool.  Or is this exactly the same conversation as the Cylon one?  I'm guessing it probably is.  And aren't holo-suites unnecessary in their use of physical space?  Couldn't one just use headgear....remember the film where the guy donned headgear and thus could have all manner of fantasies while wearing it?  Without ever leaving his chair.

Holodeck artificial lifeforms are projections, just as the Doctor is in ST:Voyager (albeit from a portable transmitter, like Rimmer's light-bee in Red Dwarf), and their artificial intelligence is a computer algorithm so they are the same as a robot (Cylon) or self-aware computer (HAL-9000).

Edited by Dean - September 15 2013 at 18:29

Surrogates?

The Cylon's are coming!

Yes, that's it!   Brainstorm.  Thank you. 

A team of scientists invents "the Hat", a brain/computer interface that allows sensations to be recorded from a person's brain and converted to tape so that others can experience them.

Came out in the early 80s.

New Invisibility Cloak Completely Conceals Objects

Dean wrote: New Invisibility Cloak Completely Conceals Objects

A bit misleading but very cool nonetheless.

Ok, I want to ask a question that will highlight my scientific ignorance, but it's worth it to hear Dean's cool explanations....

The universe is continually expanding since the big bang.  So pick a point in space that has come to fruition since the bang, we'll call it point X.  So, what was at this exact point prior to the bang?  Nothing?  It was not a point in space? 

On another note, is it expanding at all?  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/universe-expanding-cosmologist_n_3606136.html




Edited by Finnforest - November 23 2013 at 18:45

Dean, Gerald, Pat, et al.,

Having read some of this thread I am presuming that the majority (if not all of you) will concur with me in regards to the fact that Aliens (or whatever you desire to call them) most definitely have not visited Earth or indeed are not likely to any time soon due to the problem with ftl travel.  Am I correct in saying that if there is intelligent life on other planets then they would have to solve the same problems with physics as humans have had to do and the same laws apply?  If we consider no other intelligent life is present in our Solar System but may exist if not in our own galaxy but others then that would presumably mean the technology required for any intelligent lifeforms to travel to Earth would take many light years.

This is not even considering the likelihood of life forming in the first place on other worlds.  This assumes it is.

Trying to get back to the initial subject matter that Jim started:

If intelligent lifeforms do exist then which of the alien races portrayed in televisual (and film) science fiction is likely to be the closest to a real-life example?  Would they be bipedal and human-like?

Finnforest wrote: Ok, I want to ask a question that will highlight my scientific ignorance, but it's worth it to hear Dean's cool explanations.... The universe is continually expanding since the big bang.  So pick a point in space that has come to fruition since the bang, we'll call it point X.  So, what was at this exact point prior to the bang?  Nothing?  It was not a point in space?  On another note, is it expanding at all?  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/universe-expanding-cosmologist_n_3606136.html

I wanted to expand just a tad on what Dean said. In some sense the question you pose does not make sense within our physical framework. We can only collect observations of things that occurred after the big band. It makes little sense to postulate before this point then.

To answer the question a little better, it would do well to know exactly what you mean by point in space. Do you mean an ideal singular piece of matter? That wouldn't exist before the big bang exactly since it created the matter in our universe. Do you mean an ideal point of space itself? Again, the big bang created space in our universe (although it would make more sense to talk about a point of space-time).

When you ask your question you seem to be assuming that our universe is embedded in some bigger sort of thing where the question you ask might give you something better than nothing. What I mean by embedded is this, imagine you have the surface of a sphere. On the surface of a sphere, all points are identical and none can be distinguished from any others. People living on the surface of a sphere can have their own little local ideas of where points are around them. There might be a point on the sphere that people call X. The people could ask, where was X before our universe (the sphere) was here. It wouldn't make any sense. X was nowhere. The sphere created X.

But you can also imagine the sphere as living in three dimensional space. Three dimensional space has some coordinate system associated with it. So we could say that in the big space X=(x,y,z). Here, if we're asked where was the point X before the sphere came into existence, in some sense maybe we could say it was at (x,y,z) in the bigger space.

I'm being really sloppy here and saying things that in fact don't really make much physical sense. I'm just trying to give you an idea of how maybe your question could have a non-boring answer, but it would depend on our space living inside of  or tangent to some much bigger space. This is something we just don't know at this point.