Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I didn't say anything about human enhancement. There are plenty of examples of cranked up humans through one means or another in space opera.

Sorry, I meant to add that sufficiently upgraded humans aren't significantly different from highly competent robots.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Sorry, I meant to add that sufficiently upgraded humans aren't significantly different from highly competent robots.

"Relatively" means that the better the people are, the better the robots can be. Or contrariwise, the better the robots are, the more you have to improve the people in order to make them any use. What you can't do is just pop people with brilliant missiles or teleoperated drones from miles away

[JCurwen3]

Prophecy can be possible in a hard sci-fi setting, if you allow for the possibility of retrocausality (ie, causes in the relative future can result in effects in the relative past). This is almost going to be inevitable if CTCs (closed timelike curves) exist, which are definitely possible within various formulations of modern physical theories.

Certainly if the past contains the effects of events that occur in the future, then one can attempt to trace back what future causes could have been in play; or, the cheap way is you actually physically visit or probe the future.

Any sci-fi setting that allows a means of working around the speed of light (via loopholes like wormholes, warp drives, or hyperspace... or just outright cheating via true FTL) will inevitably and plausibly lead to temporal strangeness, including CTCs, accidental time travel, retrocausality, messages from the future, etc. To my mind, current physics seems to suggest that it'd be more implausible if such things didn't happen in such a setting, at least from time to time.

Relativity as we understand it seems to lead to that conclusion inescapably. There is no absolute reference frame / universal time. Interstellar or larger fictional empires may gradually create an ever-expanding sphere of artificial pseudo-absolute time, but it'd be an illusion and really whenever any FTL or pseudo-FTL is in play will of necessity involve wibbly wobbly timey wimey confusions... and some of that will include retrocausality and messages from the future. And as far as the human brain being able to take advantage of such phenomena, do its pattern recognition magic behind the scenes and float these "intuitions" to our conscious as prophecies, well, we honestly don't know enough about the brain (especially when exposed to such conditions) to know whether it wouldn't be capable of such feats.

Where there are ways around the light speed barrier, it'll at least flirt with totally ditching hard science as we know it. I'm personally hoping that some future real world physics never ends up creating such methods, and that we're forced to travel at subluminal speeds, using time dilation or stasis to perhaps individually or in smallish groups travel the vast gulfs, but totally making impossible the rather gruesome and unpalatable idea of society following and continuing to corrupt the individual human spirit into space, growing to the frightening size of a "galactic empire" or "federation". I've always wanted to run a sci-fi game like that, but most people can't conceive how it could work without FTL or FTL-like travel, even when I explain it and how awesome it would be. Shame...

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

Any sci-fi setting that allows a means of working around the speed of light (via loopholes like wormholes, warp drives, or hyperspace... or just outright cheating via true FTL) will inevitably and plausibly lead to temporal strangeness, including CTCs, accidental time travel, retrocausality, messages from the future, etc. To my mind, current physics seems to suggest that it'd be more implausible if such things didn't happen in such a setting, at least from time to time.

I've yet to hear of a mechanism for FTL travel (including wormholes and the like) that didn't require either improbably huge energy levels (on the order of a Type III civilization per trip), or exotic matter that we have no evidence can or does exist (matter with negative mass, for example). That's not to say it's impossible of course, but I think it generally qualifies as superscience.

I've always wanted to run a sci-fi game like that, but most people can't conceive how it could work without FTL or FTL-like travel, even when I explain it and how awesome it would be. Shame...

I do actually like the sound of that setting. Interstellar travel wouldn't be a casual hop-skip-and-lightjump, but instead a migration event taking hundreds of years. Not sure how it would play out, but it is interesting. And there have been some popular sci-fi novels that included this hard science travel - Ender's Game and its sequels are the obvious example, though the travel was still probably cinematically fast, and the rest of the tech wasn't nearly as Hard.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

I'm personally hoping that some future real world physics never ends up creating such methods, and that we're forced to travel at subluminal speeds, using time dilation or stasis to perhaps individually or in smallish groups travel the vast gulfs,

Why would we do that?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I said usually handwaved away - not always!

Still, I think Tolkien did a far, far better job than most fantasy authors. Rowling makes me cringe!

As popular as they are, I simply can't watch or read the Potter series for all the plot holes and stupid naming conventions.

But genre conventions almost by definition require ignoring "sensible" actions.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why would we do that?

Especially since the presently accepted realistic way is not practical at all. It would take massive amounts of antimatter, and centuries to shove even a few meat bags across interstellar distances.
FTL would make human travel possible.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why would we do that?

Because humans never seem to be satisfied just sending their probes to look at something. =P

More seriously though, if humanity is to survive in the long-term it will need to expand off of Earth, and eventually out of the solar system. Can't have all our eggs in one basket, y'know. I rather doubt we'll ever get that far, though; to my mind, settings like Transhuman Space (which has humans spread throughout the inner solar system) are highly optimistic about our prospects.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why would we do that?

To see and experience the universe of course! Out of curiosity. To homestead, to stake a mobile piece of space and time just for you, away from an oppressive society with its obligations, responsibilities, the "ties-that-bind", to be genuinely free and independent of all that nonsense.

The best part is that when you come back home, it won't really be home anymore. Depending on the actual travel time as opposed to your subjective time, home may be vaporized, or a cold cinder, or just so vastly different, in terms of new technologies and / or life forms, that it'd just be fun.

If we cure aging or even get to mind uploads and you don't spend too many (like hundreds of millions) years away, you might even visit your old family, friends, and acquaintances, being able to watch how they've grown and changed as people, with all the fun of catching up that that entails.

If people still age and die (even if not from aging but just from statistics "getting them" in the end via accidents), then everyone you knew will be dead... and that's pretty darn liberating too. Ideally the ones you'd actually devastatingly miss (as opposed to just sulking about for a few days and claiming you miss) will come with you on your travels.

"Home" will be a bizarre mish-mash of effective "time travellers", some people coming back from a 100 light year trip, others from 1000s, even hundreds of thousands of light years, each coming from a staggered time period, with eras fusing and colliding, a glorious melting pot formed from various cross-sections of culture and human / transhuman / other experience.

This lifestyle won't be for everyone. But although it seems like there are more people that need people and society, occasionally you get a Philip J. Fry that finds after a 1000 year sleep that everyone he ever knew is dead and thinks that's just the bee's knees, overall. People like that will want to make such long subluminal voyages, for sure. I know I would.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Because humans never seem to be satisfied just sending their probes to look at something. =P

More seriously though, if humanity is to survive in the long-term it will need to expand off of Earth, and eventually out of the solar system. Can't have all our eggs in one basket, y'know. I rather doubt we'll ever get that far, though; to my mind, settings like Transhuman Space (which has humans spread throughout the inner solar system) are highly optimistic about our prospects.

To risk sounding condescending, may I state how cute it is of you to think our species has a shot in hell of surviving the over 1 billion years it would take for the earth to start becoming uninhabitable?

As to the first, yeah, that's why our space budget is so huge?
Not until the voters themselves feel the life slipping from their grasps will they vote to spend the astronomic amounts of money it would take to research interstellar flight let alone the actual project.