slyrat

First, you have the problem of receiving the signals from the brain. There is no way to do that from outside the head, at least not now. Implanting some sensors would bring its own set of problems. Just how would you implant them without opening up the skull? Finally, even if we could somehow put something in someones head, with or without them knowing, we could not translate the signals into anything. Allow me to put it into terms your sister might accept: For hundreds of years, archaeologists pored and puzzled over egyptian hieroglyphs, with absolutely no success. Once the rosetta stone was found, allowing us to compare the ancient egyptian languages written on it to the greek language written on it, a greek language we did understand, it still took nearly a hundred years before archaeologists were confident they could really translate the egyptian languages( there were two- coptic, the common language, and hieroglyphics, the language of the educated classes.) We would have the same problem here, and without a rosetta stone. There simply is no way to decipher the signals you would get into anything that could be useful. And all the information in the brain was filtered through the subjective filters of that individual person. Smells, touches, tastes, that one person likes, another would feel differently about. So you would need to decipher each individual person. There really would not be one key to all brains. Each brain would have to have its output translated individually. So far, we don't have any of these abilities, It looks good on t.v., but in reality it is impossible for us today.

Romron, check out this link, written for non-astronomers by a NASA astrophysicist. It describes stable binary star systems with planets. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980122c.html

perhaps things just need to sit and ferment a bit. We have just begun to explore some interesting new advances in the materials sciences and we may have to get more familiar with them before an idea sparks in someone's brain and they come up with the next mind-boggling idea. I recently read an editorial about how big business and the government are severely tightening up the research dollars on projects that aren't seen to be immediately applicable to a problem they can relate to. As an example of how this is damaging to research, the editorial spotlighted polymerase chain reaction, developed in the '80s. According to the editorial, Kary Mullis, developer of PCR, credits a research paper published 15 years earlier. The paper mentioned an effect that was interesting but only loosely related to the focus of their research, which was not focused on any marketable goal but strictly for pure research. ( the editorial did not mention what this effect was.) Muller thought this might be useful in his own research and eventually produced PCR. I looked up borophene and the articles I read about it looked like chemistry written by engineers, or vice-versa.

I understand now. I wouldn't worry about it. There is a hypothesis I heard once that I like. I was told about it by a friend in college, and I will try to remember enough about it to look it up, if you wish. Basically, it says that the future does exist, but as potential. Every random quantum event has it's own potential future. You can't travel to them because they don't exist in reality, they are just possible futures extending from random events. You will never know which future becomes relevant until the random event happens. This is basically an extension of the Shrodingers Cat thought experiment, which Shrodinger ironically put forth as a protest against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.

I am not sure the laws of physics allow us to travel back in time. Especially not in any feasible or useful way. As for life being a program, how would we tell? You could also say we are all the dream of a higher being. Either one would be (as far as I know) impossible to prove from inside the program or dream. You could probably get some mileage out of this topic in General Philosophy. Especially if you propose life as a dream by a higher being, capable of dreaming each of billions of lives. Jesus could be a part of that being that became a lucid dreamer, and realized the nature of the dream and the dreamer. I'm curious what made you connect time travel with life being a program.

I agree totally, especially with that last statement. The low resolution prevents a real study of the film. any small discrepancies are smeared out. your picture comparisons are interesting, but not helpful. You are using them to compare a smear to a relatively high resolution image and asking if they are similar or dissimilar. I have no problem believing that a society of large hominids can exist and thrive in forested areas. I also believe that they could never do that in an area as heavily populated as our nation and leave not one verifiable trace of themselves. even lightly populated areas, such as the pacific northwest forests, have enormous amounts of visitors tramping all through them. Any large hominid shy enough to stay hidden at all costs must surely have died of a nervous condition by now! fuzzy movies and footprints are all the proof that exists, and both can be and have been faked. Any hair claimed to be "sasquatch" and submitted for testing has tested out to be plain animal hair- goat, dog, bear, etc. We have found not one bone, carcass, or tooth that belongs to a non-human hominid living in North America. People have always had human shaped bogeymen they tell stories about- fairies, elves,rakshas,djinn,tokoloshe, etc. We do it today when people "encounter" aliens, all of whom are humanoid. The idea that any "special" and intelligent creature must be humanoid appears to be rooted deeply in us. If I were you, I would just file the film under "wishful thinking" and move on. It can't be used to prove or disprove anything.

Airbrush, I realized that I didn't answer your actual question. The scenario you describe doesn't sound very realistic. First reason is one I have stated before. Any resources the aliens might want are more easily available in the asteroids or the oort cloud. Metals would be common in the asteroids, and the oort cloud would hold liquid and frozen gasses, not to mention water. If their ships didn't radiate much in the visible or infrared spectrum, we would never even know they were there. The only reason i could see for coming to earth is if they wanted living creatures for some reason, and then they are unlikely to try to exterminate us. They might use emp weapons to reduce our ability to respond collectively, just as the show proposed. I doubt that the borehole shotgun would be effective. The mothership would likely be parked in a distant orbit, but even if they were parked in one of the stable Lagrange points, they would be able to see the shrapnel coming towards them and either deploy countermeasures or move to evade the missiles. Likely, they would have some kind of shield, physical or otherwise, they would be able to use to protect themselves. Don't forget, they just traveled light years to get here, so their ships would have to be pretty robust to shrug off the scouring they would experience moving at any realistic speed useful for traveling between stars. A micrometeorite could be devastating without protection. Our spacecraft are barely moving compared to the speeds needed to cross interstellar distances in any useful time frame, and micrometeorites are a terrible danger to our spacecraft. A .45 caliber bullet travels about 850 feet per second, and can crack an engine block. Imagine if the combined velocities of you and the meteorite were 850 miles per second (over 5000 times as fast). A spaceship wold have to travel at least 10 times that fast to make a trip worthwhile. And the show proposes shooting a few bits of detritus at a paltry 42 miles per second, straight up out of a gravity well, and through an atmosphere? Sounds like any science in that program was hijacked by hollywood screenwriters.

I looked up invariant mass and came across a few descriptions that, frankly, made my eyes glaze. I yelled at my dog, who was totally innocent, just to give me a reason to look away from the screen. Can you recommend a resource useful to an intelligent person who just happens to be a noob to that concept? Edit: just to let everyone know, my dog forgave me. I gave her a treat in apology and we went and killed a couple of squeak toys.

That clears up a few things for me. Thanks.

thank you. I truly believe that if we ever break out of our solar system into the greater universe, we will find that our hopes, desires, dreams, needs, and our very lives will not matter one bit to the rest of creation. We are fly specks in the universe. One big rock could take out our whole race. That reminds me, Airbrush. If aliens did invade and were bent on eradicating humans, I assume because they prefer mining for minerals in a gravity well, then they would be more likely to just put an engine on an asteroid, aim it, and let it go. One big rock would do us all in very nicely. You wouldn't even need a mother ship then, just a freighter with robotic mining equipment. You could drop your mining package and go on to the next star system, while another ship comes around later to pick up your processed ore.

Actually, you might be wrong in assuming they would want to invade. It is likely that an alien might have motives for coming here that we just would not be able to comprehend. or they might want to put a Hyperspace Bypass nearby and want us to build an intergalactic diner to service the traffic. They might want titan instead of earth. All those hydrocarbons just lying around might be very attractive. They might just show up, squirt a short stream of water at our sun, and fly on, leaving us mystified.(in case you are curious, they are completing a holy mission, counting coup on every star in our galaxy to appease the great gxxxyz*w$p). What I'm trying to say is that any motives we can conceive of for an alien would be motives we feel and understand, leaving an enormous number of possible motives we haven't even conceived of because we haven't been birthed in a cold hydrocarbon sea, or a cold watery ball enclosed in ice, or even possibly a particularly dense nebulae floating in space.

hey, I like the diagram. I plan on using it as the screen saver for my phone. If anyone asks what it represents, I'll say something like "modern politics".

We think we have free will, and that is enough for now. The only way to really prove that we have free will would be to examine every variable affecting us, no matter how tiny or remote in space or time, and create a simulation based on that and see if we match the simulation. If we do, then we are just reacting to our environment in complicated but mathematically precise ways that can be accurately predicted into the far future. If we deviate from the simulation, then we are exhibiting free will. Or the simulation is insufficiently comprehensive. free will would be hard to prove to everyone's satisfaction. I believe I have free will, therefore I will continue acting as if I do. As for your other question....The machine was not wrong because It predicted your choice up to the minute of its prediction. It did not carry on its prediction into the future to see how its conclusion would affect your choice. Had you not looked at its prediction, you may have chosen the red ball. You only chose blue after seeing it's conclusion.

as the traveler, you would not notice the change in mass outright, just as you would not notice that time had slowed down for you, from the perspective of an outside observer. You could notice the mass change in the greater proportion of energy required to maintain acceleration for every unit of distance traveled. And you are right, my mass could never be greater than that of the universe. It may have been "equal to the mass of the universe", but either way, it illustrates why speed of light travel would be impossible for anything with mass.

I admit I could easily be wrong and that my understanding could be faulty, but here goes.... A black hole does not have a magic effect on time, nor does it manipulate it in any way, so we cannot cause the black hole to change the way it affects time. Its effect on time is the same one we all have. The more your mass, the slower your time relative to an outside observer. Therefore, to us, as outside observers, events in the event horizon of a black hole may move at a glacial pace, to an observer inside a black holes event horizon, they would be moving at a normal speed. You could possibly remove some of the effect that mass and energy have on the flow of time, but you could not reverse it. This is a basic answer and leaves out tons of math and physics, but I believe that the final answer is correct. I would like to believe that time travel is possible, and our current understanding of time is this: there seems to be something called time. And things seem to happen in a specific order, such as cause preceeding effect. Everything else is theory and observation, which is the first step to understanding something. We are babies playing with blocks when it comes to understanding time. If time travel were possible, and in the way that popular television presents it, It would be devastating. Imagine 3 guys from New York building a time machine in their basement and travelling to, say 800 c.e. to observe the mound builder cultures around St. Louis. They pop back to ancient N.Y. and travel to the MIssissippi. Every person they meet along the way is suddenly at risk of catching a disease that could become a plague! Your body is full of viruses and bacteria that may be harmless to you and your own personal....ecosystem, I guess, but those same bacteria and viruses could devastate entire cultures that have no defense against them. And god forbid you travel back to some of the cities from the dark ages. European cities were festering disease factories in the dark ages. You could not return home for fear of spreading the next plague in your own time.