MadScientist

I just thought I'd throw this out. We can all visualise ourselves falling down an incredibly deep chasm, the feeling of falling to a certain death when we hit the rock hard floor that's waiting at the bottom of the chasm. But we're all falling down a deep chasm all the time, aren't we?? There's no way of stopping the fall and once we hit the bottom we're going to be dead. I tried to do something clever with it to help visualise time dilation. You can mark off every foot in the hole in the ground so you can work out your feet per seconds. We have clocks and watches that we can use to work out our speed through the hole called time too but that gives us our seconds per feet. And it's not just each of us that's individually falling through the hole called time, the entire universe is falling down it too. The effects of time dilation mean you can either overtake the rest of the universe or let it rush on ahead. Maybe someone else can add something to it or use it for something or..

All this talk about life coming to Earth on comets or metorites... I have to ask - why couldn't life on Earth have started on Earth?? All the necessaries were available so there's no reason why it couldn't have.

We're all robots, when we're born we know nothing about anything, everything we know is given to us by outside sources. Even the things we figure out for ourselves are based upon information given to us in the past from outside sources. We have all been in hypnotic states all our lives. You're in one right now, therefore I'm programming you in some way by giving you these facts. I can't tell you to run around like a chicken because I can't get you into a deep enough hypnotic state but I can tell you not to think about a purple cat and you will think about a purple cat because you're in a weak hypnotic state. The world around us is constantly suggesting new things for our minds to absorb. Things need to be balanced out though. Children playing violent video games don't become violent unless there's not enough information provided to suggest that they don't become violent. Put another way - if they aren't exposed to enough peaceful data they probably will become violent. It's the same with music, if a vicar listens to some "evil" music s/he's not going to turn into a violent God hating SOB, they've been programmed to be peaceful more than violent.

Let's do a hypothetical experiment. We'll synchronise our watches, I'll go and stand on the Sun and at 9pm we'll both throw a ball into the air. After throwing your ball you look through a telescope and wait 8 minutes to see me throwing my ball into the air. We both threw our balls into the air at 9pm though. Time is split though but for different reasons than you've used, time dilation. The faster something moves through space the slower it moves through time, so a planet or solar system that's travelling really slowly and was born at the same time as ours will have aged more than ours. At least that's the way I think things work, maybe one of the more knowledgable members could elaborate...

This might be my insanity creeping out, I haven't taken my pills for a few weeks. What if the universe isn't expanding or never has expanded?? Say it remained at its original pinpoint size but everything inside it shrunk. I mentioned a few posts back about magically putting a 12 inch ruler in a black hole and it becoming miniscule in size but if you jumped in beside the ruler it would still be 12 inches. Someone mentioned that gravity could possibly be a push effect instead of a pull effect, how would that fit in with my theory?? If every fundamental particle in the universe is shrinking in size as time passes then something must be applying a squashing force to them, could that be gravity??

When I think about things like this I like to think what we'd do if we were the aliens exploring the galaxy. One thing we could do with any newly formed solar systems or systems with simple life forming we find is leave messages in bottles, scatter a few beacons about with collision avoidance routines so they stand a better chance of surviving. I suppose at that level of technology we could leave the beacons waiting for radio signals of a certain type which home in on the source and drop off the message.

Not with distinctly recognisable patterns though. If they stopped spending billions researching new ways for us to kill each other we could easily afford to send a few signalling devices into space. And you're right, after thinking about it I don't see what any alien civilisation that had developed worm hole, close to light speed or any other kind of superfast transport or even self sustainiing "generation ships" could teach us.

The only thing I can think of that might be helpful is going back to a 3D video game analogy. You'd need to find a fixed constant, like the speed of light, find out how long it takes for light to travel from one intersection to another then divide each particles xd, yd and zy by that fixed constant or something like that anyway. But that's more to do with counting frames per second and how to keep the frame rate at a constant speed. Dunno if this'll help.. http://www.allegro.cc/forums/view_thread.php?_id=159670 Travelling backwards in time would be pretty simple, just turn the fixed constant into a negative and hope the laws of physics modelled in the game work in reverse too.

Well the X, Y and Z points of the 3D mesh that intersect at the step size of 1 (your increment size of 1 ) is for the location of the object but the 0.01 to 0.99 between those intersections are the size for the largest fundamental particles/energy that need to exist in the mesh. What's this got to do with time travelling in reality though...

That just about sums it up. The gory details are just algorithms. http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/gsl-ref_17.html#SEC271 Scroll down a little and you should see some of the formulas they use. Also try googling random number generator source code.

I just read that the fastest meteorites can travel up to 160,000mph which is a significant difference to the 67,000mph the Earth travels around the sun at. I was just wondering if the meteorite hunters take time dilation into account when dating a meteor rock. If a chunk got blown off Mars 2 billion years ago because of time dilation when they carbon dated it they found it to be 1.999 billion years old. The process that affects the carbon allowing it to be dated would be slowed down by the time dilation, wouldn't it??

I don't suppose anyone has a link for info on this "strange barrier force" thing?? All I can find are too many references to Star Trek Voyager. I'm going to assume a solar sailed powered vehicle can escape this STB. Some have asked about how effective the photons would be once it reached deep space. I don't think it needs to be effective at all. Once it's free of our systems gravity it'll continue travelling until it hits something. I don't think it even needs to keep moving... Plot a course out of our system to a point outside our system that another system will pass over. A bit like throwing a rock off our planet, waiting 365 days then picking it up again. Another thing that I can't help wondering about. How fast are these solar sail vehicles likely to travel?? I'm just curious as to whether they'll eventually overtake Voyager itself.

I just had a crazy idea that makes perfect sense to me. I was watching the new'ish TV series called Lost, a few episodes ago they used rockets to signal to between 3 groups of people each a distance away. If our Milky Way galaxy is fairly flat, then if we sent a huge rocket like an incredibly powerful nuclear bomb. Instead of sending the rocket towards the closest star send it vertically out of our galaxy. Then any alien civilisations looking to the stars would see it more visibly. Even if the thickness of the galaxy between our system and the top/bottom edge would take 50,000 years sending it out perpendicular (I think that's the right word ) to our system would make it more visible to other sytems. As they looked at our sun they'd see a huge burst of energy many miles above it. Any comments?? The only problem I can see is what type of signalling device to send. I think a nuclear explosion would be too quick, they'd have to be looking towards our system at the right moment. So it'd need to hang about for a while. Maybe a series of nuclear explosions, maybe we could put all those old warheads to good use.

Just let me tell you what God thinks about aliens and their sh!t for a minute... Only jokin.. This is where I get stuck, using that same 3D video game "virtual cube" model of mine... We create (well I program in C++ so I create) C++ objects with 3 variables, X, Y, Z plus an extra varibable for each XD, YD and ZD for direction, obviously more for acelleration or whatever.. So a sphere C++ object would have those 3 locations in space variables but it would still be a virtual sphere in virtual space. Obviously the sphere itself is drawn by the clever DirectX code but in the real universe the sphere itself is "drawn" by the atoms or more precicesly the photons bouncing off the atoms that make the sphere up... So if I wanted to model a virtual sphere in my virtual cube I would have to create objects for enough virtual particles so when they were drawn to the screen there'd be enough pixels to show that virtual sphere. Basically I reckon every particle in the universe needs to have its own X, Y and Z but because they're bonded together they all have the same XD, YD and ZD's with variations determined by speed of rotation. I THINK what you're getting at though is that my C++ objects representing the individual fundamental particles would be 0 in size but you're saying in the real universe each fundamental particle has a certain size?? And reckon things go wild cos where those that extra size fit?? Sounds cool to me. The only thing I can think of is each individual fundamental particle (given that it has some size) must leave gaps for its neighbours. The "fabric" of the universe would have to act like a 3 dimensional mesh and particles can only sit on the intersections with their extra bits existing in the gaps of the mesh. Is that the kind of feedback you're looking for??

Yup. I was hoping to find out if there'd be any more ways of ending that joke but...

I think it just depends which planetary body we send the right equipment to first. If they send a Lada (no offence intended ) to Mars it's obviously not going to detect life even though it may exist there. If we send a proper probe to Venus we might detect it there... So IMO it's down to the tech-heads at Nasa and whichever body they get the right equipment to first. As for Europa, AFAIKnow I don't think they've actually proved that it's only the surface that's frozen water with liquid water beneath it. They're only theorising that the gravitational pull is causing enough friction inside to heat it up. Or am I wrong?? And as for water being a prerequisite for life, correct me if I'm wrong but... Life on Earth started with amino acids in the water getting heated up by the release of thermal energy from the oceans floor. Wasn't that just a chemical reaction that fused the correct elements together to form proteins which later formed microbes?? So other liquids or perhaps even gasses could be used for the same process, couldn't they?? And silicon based life, doesn't cellular life just need several unique qualities. Like elements to form cells or elements to conduct electric currents for thinking with or using as a nervous system??

LOL I know exactly what you mean but I struggle to describe the thing that didn't exist before the big bang.. What's the conventional terminology for it?? I had lots of fun once trying to explain the concept to a friend. He tried telling me there was this nothingness before the big bang which also surrounds our universe. I kept trying to explain to him that there was no nothingness there because in accordance with our perception of things - even nothing is something, it's like an empty place where things can exist but the "nothingness" I refer to there's nothing that could ever move into it. The only way I could express it was by calling it a dimension before dimensions which never even existed... I think that blew his mind and he just accepted it to end the debate. Yup agreed!!! I like the idea of black holes sucking matter in to make miniverses but I think that's all it is, an idea... I see black holes more as matter to energy convertors of some kind. As for parrallel universes where every possibility is played out, I can't accept those either.

I've got to agree with astromark but 1veedo and Severian left me behind ages and ages ago in another time dimention. The only extra dimensions of time I can grasp are 2 sorts. #1 At the quantum level in string theory where strings can do crazy things like exist in two places at one time. So strings can move forwards (maybe backwards??) and sideways, which I don't think is a really accurate description because when they move to the other place in space as well as time they're moving sideways... Then again we can't see what's going on yet. #2 Is the multiverse theory where there have been multiple big bangs forming seperate universes in the original nothingness that our universe hovers about in. If these seperate big bangs happened at different times each universe could have a different number of seconds since creation variable. These aren't really extra dimensions of time because it's just the seperate universes that exist in other dimensions with time flowing like it does in our universe. Those are the (mem)branes you two guys are talking about, right?? If there are any more theories for how there could be time could be different I think we'd all like to know about them... Those of us who don't know about them yet anyway.

Since YT2095's opened the door to pretty silly riddles I'm going to put one even dafter to you.. One of my fellow patients at this fine asylum I currently reside at told me how he came to be in the neighbouring cell to me. " I used to be a foreman on various types of construction sites, there was this one stupid idiotic guy who worked for me, everything I told him to do he did it wrong, no matter how clearly I explained the simplest of jobs he screwed them up. So finally I gave him one simple task to do but he even messed that up. I'd told him to dig a hole 1 foot square, 2 feet deep and to dispose of the dirt from the hole once he'd dug it, what could be simpler?? When I returned the hole was there 1 foot square and 2 feet deep but there was still a pile of dirt close by the hole!! By this time I was close to being finally driven insane by this guy so I asked him why the hole was there but the dirt from it hadn't been cleared away. So when he gave me his answer I just lost the plot completely and they carted me off to this funny farm we're in now. " What did the stupid idiotic hole digger say that finally drove this foreman into the padded cell next to mine??

In the dictionary?? Yesterday would appear listed AFTER Tomorrow.