abstract alien
Member
That's the weird "time travel" aspect though. If I'm understanding it correctly, once it's aware of being observed, it creates an entire history of movement, including a past, right?
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Star exhibits strange light patterns which could be a sign of alien activity
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If they are aliens, then...
-There's a very high probability that they know we are here. Ability to build such large structures means they can build massive telescopes as well.
-The high technological level indicates a post-singularity civilization. We could even be looking at the remnants of an ancient civilization that didn't survive its technological singularity.
-There's a very high probability that they know we are here. Ability to build such large structures means they can build massive telescopes as well.
-The high technological level indicates a post-singularity civilization. We could even be looking at the remnants of an ancient civilization that didn't survive its technological singularity.
If they looked back at us they would see the world as it was 1500 years ago. Barely any lights in any city or radio waves coming from us at that point. They would've looked here a long time ago and went to search elsewhere.
also second point. being extremely advanced doesn't necessary mean singularity is imminent. We love to think to the extremes in everything, but do we actually know what it entails or when it happens...how far in the future of science? I mean only 400 years ago they thought in 2015 there would be flying firemen in the sky.
You'd think a singularity AI would be intelligent enough not to dim its start by 22% randomly.
No, I think uneven usage patterns indicates competitive species. I volunteer to go. Cryostasis me and shoot me off.
Chuck Norris
Banned
Wouldn't the light we are seeing from that star be millenniums old anyway?
Well, larger telescopes doesn't really mean anything if there is nothing to see in the first place. We are also 1480 lightyears from them, so at best they can only see Earth as it was in the year 535 or so. That was centuries before Earth began to broadcast radio waves or produce significant light pollution. Heck, Earth still had most of its forests back then. There would be very little evidence to an outsider that there was an intelligent species on our planet, unless they landed a spaceship on the planet. It will be over a thousand years from now before human civilization will become more evident to them.
Second, what exactly do you mean by a civilization that "didn't survive it's technological singularity"?
It is 1480 light years away, so the light from the star is exactly 1480 years old.
I'm confused about something. I get that if, say, a message was sent to us and it took that message 1,000 years to get here, then we'd be listening to a 1,000 year old message. What I don't get is how are we seeing this place as it was all those years ago? It's not taking us thousands of years just to view it, right? They're seeing it right now. So why is that what is being seen isn't what it is right now rather what it was 1500 years ago?
water has volume of mass, mass slows down light, because it has to go through the mass, but once you take out the mass the speeds re-accelerate to vacuum light speeds.
We're seeing it 1500 years ago, because it's 1500 light years away. That is to say 1500 years light takes to travel from there to here. By the time it reaches here, to us that is our present. We don't know what it's like in the present, we will know in 3515 what the conditions were like in 2015.
The universe is so vast, even light takes time to travel. The reason why we're seeing that star as it was 1500 years ago is because it takes 1500 years for that light to travel to us.
Think of it this way:
If I was able to take a picture of me every second, but I physically had to mail you my photos, by the time you would receive them, those photos would have been me several days ago. You're still receiving my photos every second, but there's a delay because there's a limit on transportation speed.
You're just seeing photons that have traveled through space and are just now reaching us.
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
The light you see (or lack of it) is what happened 1400 years ago, it just took that long to travel here.
Chuck Norris
Banned
Some more relative sizeFor perspective, here is 20% covering a disk:
The star in question has something blocking 22% of its light.
Covering 22% of a sun would be an absolutely massive structure
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
Some more relative size
Covering 22% of a sun would be an absolutely massive structure
Like a quarter of the sun, gawd damn.
That's not how quantum works. You are confusing being measured with "knowing being watched". Measurement in the definition includes contact with light and other objects. Secondly you can't say thermo doesn't work in quantum because thermo is a statistical phenomena due to the average motion of many particles. And while the quantum nature of objects can have effect, especially at very low temperatures or very dense objects, they don't violate any fundamental thermo laws. Nor do quantum objects violate energy conservation, despite the time/energy uncertainty.
You are right that time travel forward is actually possible. You just have to go really close to the speed of light, or stand in a really high gravity field, which does slow time for you in relation to another object. As for time travel backwards, there are certain mechanisms in relativity that allow for that, but the conditions needed for that to happen are dubious in terms of possibility at best, and you would have to tackle the subject of causality and well, that is one heck of a thing to tackle.
Think of time,speed, distance, mass, energy, gravity, position, all as different parameters of the same system, known as reality. Different subsystems interact and perceive each other based on these parameters. That's relativity.
Consider one massless particle. It has 0 mass. It has 0 gravity. Particle A. It does not experience aging while traveling through space at c.
Now, consider any particle/system with mass. A person. A planet. Etc. It has mass. It has gravity. Particle B.
Proportionally, B has infinite mass relative to A. And gravity. The aging B experiences while observing A is proportional to the distance and separation of A and B. That proportion is defined by c.
As the universe expands and objects move away from each other at rates greater than c, they eventually become incapable of interacting or observing each other
A person traveling 10 light years away, then 10 light years back to earth, at c, would age, due to the existence of mass and gravity, but less than 20 years, while the people on earth, with mass, would age much much more. This relation is also defined mathematically, with proportions, involving c. But the sequence of events can be defined, since all reference frames can say the person left earth before they arrived, and aged. That holds true for speeds less than C as well.
But what if someone made the trip at speeds exceeding C?
They would age. But from the perspective of people on earth, they might arrive before they left. They might become younger. Or they might even never leave at all, arriving and leaving unnoticed. And to the traveler, earth would be younger, not older, even though that would logically mean he hasn't left yet, and indeed, he might not have The events that take place and the entire order of events becomes thrown into chaos based on your frame of reference. Our models and concepts of reality don't work anymore because the passage of time flows in different directions for different reference frames with objects that interact at speeds greater than c.
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When something is 20 light years away, that means that it takes 20 years for light to cross that distance. Since our sight is dependent on light, we can't see anything that we don't have light from. As such, all we can see of distant objects is the light they gave off thousands, millions, or billions of years ago.
An advantage to this is that it lets us see a timeline of the universe just by looking at more distant objects. We can look at nearby galaxies to see them as they were in the recent history of the universe, or we can look at very distant places to see galaxies as they were way back when they first formed. However, our total ability to see the universe also has a hard limit thanks to this. If you look far enough away, your vision will eventually be blocked, as you look back at the time before space itself became transparent. Past there, space is opaque, blocking all sight.
ZoltanXerxes
Member
Thanks for the great explanation! I thought entanglement meant that if someone changes the spin of the particle, the other particle (or half particle) would change spin at exactly the same time, no matter how far that other particle is in the universe.
That's if this star is the size of our sun. Our sun is a yellow dwarf (G-type) star. There's stars in our galaxy much larger than ours.
Some more relative size
Covering 22% of a sun would be an absolutely massive structure
That really makes me question the megastructures. I mean, damn, you forget just how big area you have to map on a star size of our sun. It really has to come from a civilization that has been around millions of years, if not colonized a galaxy. And I don't see any aliens around.
Chuck Norris
Banned
I always thought the cool thing about how time relativity works is that maybe we won't ever contact an alien civilization but if we build powerful enough examination tools we can see everything they do and possibly mess up
Chuck Norris
Banned
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
I'm sure that they have ruled out a lot of stuff already.
I don't think it's likely they would know about us. Huge telescopes don't change the fact that it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
LookAtMeGo
Member
That's what I gathered as well. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".
When you measure the spin of 1 particle, you dictate the spin of the other particle no matter how far apart they are, instantaneously. I think Einstein argued that you are not actually dictating anything but that the particles spins were determined before any measurement was done... Or something like that. Confusing ass shit.
When Betelgeuse goes supernova, it's going to be a sight to see.
Vault Dweller 111
Member
We found the Death Star.
Yes, light can slow down in different medium. But nothing can go faster than light at a vacuum. Nothing. And not only can nothing go faster than light at a vacuum, space time itself will change so that light will always seem the same speed in vacuum no matter how fast you go relative to another object, and such that you can't go faster than speed of light at a vacuum in the perspective of that other object.
~Devil Trigger~
In favor of setting Muslim women on fire
Astronomical interferometry with a massive light gathering surface. They could watch the Great Wall of China being built.
I don't know if you could really call it time travel to collapse a set of possibilities into a single, defined phenomenon, since it doesn't actually cause any new interactions in the past.
The trouble with quantum physics is that people hear the word "observation" and think of something that is somehow aware it is being observed. Wikipedia uses much more precise language to define observations in this context. They describe an observation as "thermodynamically irreversible interaction with a classical environment." Once the interaction occurs, the wavefunction collapses and the phenomenon's state is decided in order to resolve the interaction.
Not a physicist. Perhaps a physicist will correct me.
Undergrad physics major here. You got it.
I mean the instability that potentially comes with a massively accelerated rate of progress. An arms race that is measured in seconds, not years.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Nope, this is what's been disproven. Now we're getting out of my depth, but basically its been shown repeatedly that the decision between which particle is "left handed" and "right handed" is not assigned at the time of entanglement and just unknown to us until we measure. It really is that the state of both particles is undefined up until the point of measurement but that measuring one means you know the measurement of the other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
I'm still skeptical of the very idea of the singularity. It seems predicated on a blind belief that intelligence and computational power are capable of infinite growth, which I am doubtful of. No matter what, any computer is dependent on being built in the physical world, and thus has to deal with physical limitations. Eventually people are going to hit the limits of what is physically possible with computers.
Yeah, Einstein was very skeptical of Quantum Mechanics, and it took him a long to accept that there were phenomena that people could only understand in terms of probabilities and chance. So you have to understand that most of Einstein's statements on Quantum Mechanics were from the position of an opponent, and he was ultimately proven wrong. Not that I can fully blame him, since we have yet to actually reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics with each other.
So what we are observing is 1480 years ago, or the year 535
I just found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 which states that there was extreme weather events across the globe, possibly caused by space debris.
Coincidence? I think not.
I just found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 which states that there was extreme weather events across the globe, possibly caused by space debris.
Coincidence? I think not.
How does that make any sense? You can't just extrapolate current rate of growth and apply it a gazillion years into the future.
More Fun To Compute
Member
You can't see love through an alien telescope!
sans_pants
avec_pénis
until we turn atoms into transitors
I think you meant to go to KIC 8462852's Wikipedia site if you want to know what was happening in 535.
Napoleonthechimp
Member
You're assuming that an advanced AI is reliant on more and more transistors being packed into ever a decreasing physical space. Radically different approaches in the use of existing hardware and software could very give rise to such an entity.
PrivateWHudson
Member
But what about using the off/on state as a form of ftl communication? I thought the biggest oddity was that when the Left Hand was observed, the Right Hand was resolved instantly regardless of distance. Is it possible to "kind of" observe? Like peek just enough that you know the other guy hasn't "observed" his particle yet?
LookAtMeGo
Member
Cool thanks for the link, I'll read up on it. I find it all very fascinating but it makes my brain hurt.
Telescopes were not designed to see things that transcend time, space and dimensions.
Quantum entanglement is absolutetly not FTL comm. The other person has to know what state the other guy saw in the entanglement experiment, and that requires light speed comm.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Nope, because any meaningful observation initiates the particle committing to one state. You can't "see" that it's still fuzzy, when you look at it it stops.
Also that you can't "make" it collapse into one state. You can't make it so that of ten entangled particles 3 become "left" and 7 become "right"
Sun is actually barely offwhite. I wonder why these comparison charts keep using the wrong color.
As for the story, pretty cool. I wonder how they would harvest energy. Based on our limited understanding of everything. I would assume some sort of Graphene like netting in clusters because carbon is everywhere and it would be an efficient way to handle electricity, though this is based on 21st century Earth Science so no probably not.
Also radio waves for straight up broadcast detection wouldn't be a thing for this level of advancement.
Yup, pretty much. It's all probabilistic.
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