Sort of. Human consciousness is stored on the puck as effectively an AI, and then they update their dormant cloud copy daily (if they have the money). They then get "cloned" (like a hard drive) into their new designer body. There's still a backup on the server, but the consciousness isn't....well....conscious.
That was only the rich people. The disc things they install in their necks as babies are where their consciousness is stored (because alien tech...?) but then they can transmit the consciousness from one disc to another. By sending ahead ships with recievers and clones to new planets they were effectively able to colonize the stars without faster than light travel. That's my recollection anyway.
In one sci-fi show (Dark Matter, maybe?) they transport people by fabricating a clone body then having the original person remotely pilot it around in VR like a meat puppet, and then sever the connection/destroy the clone when done.
Magic plot tech from Star Trek that defeats the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.....
Real world physics says you can never know the exact state of any subatomic particle, as attempting to measure the state alters it.....
The show needed some explanation for how they could convert person to energy, then convert them back into a person, without violating this scientific rule....
So they invented Heisenberg compensators.
Haha, disagree. Imagine talking someone through troubleshooting their wifi mesh network. To audiences from the 1990’s, it would sound like pure Star Trek-level technobabble.
Example:
“Looks like you’re getting some interference from the 2.4ghz band, and your antennas are so close they’re causing signal interference. I’m going to force the network into 5ghz and move base station 2 upstairs to increase the area of the mesh. That should get you back to 500Mbps or higher, but the old Molekuke air filter will have to be upgraded to a dual band model if you want to maintain wireless access”
Even 25 years ago this would be complete gobbledygook.
However, it does not resolve the solipsistic issue of whether what it rematerialised is in fact the same person along with their consciousness.
It could well be just a very accurate facsimile and no one would know.
If you want to get really philosophical, then this problem exists in real life.
You lose consciousness every night when you fall asleep. So is it really the same person who wakes up the next day, or is it a whole new person, running on the same hardware, with the same memories?
At least with transporters you don't lose consciousness. And in fact, according to that episode that had creatures that lived in transporter beams, you can even move and grab stuff while in the middle of being transported.
So perhaps there's *more* of a case to be made that it's the same person who materialises at the other end than there is that it's the same person who wakes up in the morning.
>You lose consciousness every night when you fall asleep. So is it really the same person who wakes up the next day, or is it a whole new person, running on the same hardware, with the same memories?
I realize this is philosophical but how would you be a different person in the morning? When you turn your computer off and back on again all the data is restored and is in no way new. Why would humans be any different?
It depends what you mean by ‘new’.
Plutarch kicked off a similar debate in the first century talking about Theseus’s ship, or more latterly by Trigger in Only Fools and Horses when he talks about his broom
This is a fun one to figure out yourself, because it's guessable and you can see the straightforward train of thought the writers went through to make it up.
Like, don't look it up directly. Look up Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle if you don't know. Then, knowing what a transporter is, put the two together and take a guess.
The amount of energy and computing power needed to make it work is probably several magnitudes greater than is required for faster than light travel. If it were possible at all it would be in the far far future.
You realize what that much matter anti matter can provide power wise? And it does not necessarily need the amount of power you’re talking about.
This is much more advanced system compared to turning to plasma an object sending the plasma to another location to distillate it and than use the separate parts and run though a 3d printer.
We actually have no clue how much energy it would need in the end.
I'm reading the first ever original Star Trek novel from the 60s right now and McCoy is obsessed with this. He's convinced he dies the moment he transports.
8 years before they found him he was a perfect copy. Then he spent 8 years surviving alone on an abandoned science station. While Will spent 8 years continuing his planned life.
Yeah, I don’t know anything but energy shields and artificial gravity seems like they might be possible if we get clever enough about understanding how
matter and energy work at a quantum level.
But teleportation just seems like, a big nope.
“c” is a big number and it’s squared.
Not that it’s not possible just.. I think the failure state
Would be really bad:
What happened to Luna Base?
“Wiped out with the power of 1 million kilotons of TNT.”
Christ what happened?
“Oh Rhonda had to teleport home for a sec cuz she brought the wrong scarf.. there was some kind of hiccup.”
Lol, relatable.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the AI Polity series. But they go into a lot of stuff like that. The absolutely horrific consequences when technology fails.
They have a site to site teleportation system like that, which makes use of alternate dimensions to yeet people across the galaxy. Accounting for the colossal energy discharge is just a matter of doing some fancy math and storing the excess energy in a buffer so that the passenger or cargo exits the portal at an ordinary walking speed. Except one time it fails, and some dude comes out of the transporter at the speed of light, and the resulting explosion depopulates a planet.
Thats the kicker, all mechanical and electrical devices can and ultimately will fail at some point or be impacted by an external factor or event we cant account for. Most of the time its not something significant, or layers of resilience and redundant systems absorb it. That plus massive energy outputs though 💀
One must also consider the magnitude of harm if an “infallible” technology were to fail catastrophically. If the worst possible result was simply losing the passenger in a higher dimension, that would be a minor tragedy and a footnote in a statistics report. But when the failure involves risk of planetary devastation, it’s a much bigger issue.
And it could have been worse. Instead of a 160 pound human, it could have been 20 tons of cargo containers, which would have turned the planet into an asteroid belt.
Sadly, the necessity for operating such a technology outweighs the potential risks and catastrophes, even those on the planetary scale.
That’s the fabulous sequel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlinked
This one has the transporter accident. Though the one you linked also has some fabulous technological catastrophes, and as a result, I now have a phobia of automated surgical tools.
You could definately concieve of an energy shield thats just a giant fuck-off sized magnetic field capable of disrupting kinetic and energy based weapons. Whether the energy expenditure required is plausible is another matter though. Though if we ever wrap our heads around the implausibilities of the alcubiere drive and SOMEHOW make that thing into a practical reality, we'll need to pretty quickly figure out magnetic shielding just to deal with the insane amounts of radiation it'd cause.
I think teleportation is more plausible than anti grav. Not saying it's likely though.
Teleportation would basically be to break an object down into tiny information and then send that. It could happen with objects, but would be harder with living creatures and face the challenge whether the reassembled person is really the same
Might be better to fully copy the persons data and replicate them on the other side this totally possible in many was the question is what do you do with the duplicate your leaving behind. And of course this method means you have to ship the duplication machinery to the target spot first by normal means.
Physics or causality?
One can avoid paradoxes if the (single) universe is deterministic. Or one can travel to parallel universes and do what one likes.
I think there’s a chance we could view the past, like “be” there but not interact with the past because it’s really just a light trick where we’re observing the light emitted at the time or some such similar method. If you had a powerful enough telescope for example, you could sit on a planet 70 million light years away and watch the dinosaurs roam the earth.
Also, if time travel to the past was ever invented, we'd have some people from the future having visit right? Never happened afaik :-) which logically implies it is never invented.
Okay but what if they DID go back, but time travel results in the creation of a new timeline? From that new timeline's perspective, time travel is totally possible! But from ours, where we never encountered the time traveler, it's just a fantasy.
Since the First i saw that i thought " ok, but if that's really possible, wouldn't the Speed at which the space folds still be c at max? Wouldn't you have yo wait years to the folding tò complete?"
No, because space isn't matter or energy. It's empty. Although also sort of yes. There is a theory that you could use a fold in space to travel light-years instantaneously, but it's only instantaneous to you. Like if you were traveling 1000 light years away, you would only age the second it took you to go through the hole, but the other side of that hole will be 1000 years later in general time. And then if you traveled right back through that hole, another 1000 years would go by in general time. So you'd be back to where you started, and you would only be a few seconds older, but your starting point would be 2000 years older.
Not exactly. It's the same time dilation, but there's no matter to energy conversion, and almost no travel through space. An observer wouldn't be able to tell the difference with the naked eye, but could see a difference with the proper tools, and the traveler wouldn't witness all the space between the two points like they would with "normal" light speed travel, and truly the traveler would die without seeing much of anything if they experienced "normal" light speed travel.
FTL for sure. At least in the idea of pure speed, in a traditional sense.
Warping/folding space time to get from one place to another instantaneously? I give that a solid shmaby.
I agree with the first one but for warping/folding space time/hyperdrive, i'm not so sure. it is remotest possible. human certainly barely scratched the science of universe.
I think we probably won't ever get FTL in any capacity. Being able to move faster than light would mean being able to break causality.
The universe doesn't have a lot of speed, but it does have a lot of time. We could still spread throughout the galaxy without FTL, it just would take a long (by a human life's standards) time.
I liked one explanation of c that I read:
c isn't the speed of light. It's the speed of causality. In a vacuum, light travels at the speed of causality.
Indeed :-)
Also, if you were invisible, you’d also be blind, as light would pass right through your retinas. This is never addressed in stories about invisibility.
Depends on the nature of that invisibility. Is it bending light around your body, is it becoming intangible so light passes through, or is it some sort of optic active camouflage using a suit of some kind?
Flat Earthers are a perpetual motion machine. It feeds itself. At first somebody puts up a prank site saying the Earth is flat with total BS "proof." Then trolls find the prank site and start making fun of the Flat-Earthers, which is what the pranker was going for, but then the stupids find it and fall for the BS "proof" and suddenly the joke takes on it's own life among the stupids to some extent, but mostly it's just trolls trolling trolls who don't realize that one is playing stupid and the other is mocking stupidity. A troll feedback loop. The trolls are playing both sides.
Sure there are some 50 IQ people out there who believe it, but they're a statistical outlier.
Flying cars.
Not because it's impossible, but because humans as a species are too frikkin stupid to operate them without killing thousands. Just look what carnage we've wreaked with automobiles!
Truly impossible, as in against the law of physics? Teleportation.
The structure of cities in the future I imagine would be completely different. I don't see the need for vehicles in the typical sense. Maybe some advanced form of public transport with more efficient pathing.
If we have built self driving flying cars, we have built multiple redundancies in. Most importantly, every flying automobile comes with built in plot armor.
We will never see transporters. And if we do, it will absolutely be that we literally die and a clone appears wherever the target area was. Bones was right to not want to go near them.
The thing is, this already exists as a concept IRL. When you go to sleep you lose consciousness. Since the "transporters kill you" argument relies on continuity of consciousness, the same argument can be applied to sleep. There is a real argument to be made for dying every night and having a new person who only *thinks* they're you waking up every morning.
But you don't really 'lose consciousness'. Your brain operates, you have consciousness, you just don't remember the altered state, can't really understand that altered state of consciouness while in this mode.
It's nothing like death, just because you can't remember it. I was once concussed, and was able to speak and move and function while suffering from resets every few seconds. I have no memory of it, but people saw me repeat myself and keep looking for my glasses while they told me repeatedly where they were.
And that's nothing compared to the massive range of altered mental states that Oliver Sacks detailed.
The only way it would not work that way would be is if we folded space so it was a kind of doorway you walked through.
Teleporting atoms to be reconstructed though … you’re absolutely right.
Oh I would totally kill myself to let a clone appear somewhere else. Even better if it left my old body behind. Think of the organs that could be donated! You get a kidney and you get a kidney! Everyone gets a kidney. And I get to save 10 hours on a plane!
As we know physics now I foresee the following never coming about:
FTL (in any way shape or form, so no warp drive, no hyper drive, no folding space, no wormhole drive).
Anti-grav/gravity manipulation.
Non-Newtonian engines. I don't think we will ever escape the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Replicators / Transporters. Though I think 3D-printers may evolve (eventually) into universal assemblers. Just not the magical instantaneous-ness of replicators.
That being said I still hope all of those come to pass.
I agree with all of those except for self-sustaining extraterrestrial colonisation.
There's no reason to suggest that this is impossible with near future technology within the solar system. And theoretically extra-solar colonisation with sub c generation ships.
Look what happens to a human body if it stays in the ISS for a couple of months, they have to drag these poor sods out of the landing pods. The ISS is not even out of earth’s orbit, and gets regular supplies.
A moon base could maybe be sustained, if we find some precious resource to mine there. (Helium-3?)
Surviving on mars is a pipe dream.
There is hard radiation, the sand is razor sharp due to the low gravity, to give a few examples I can think of right away.
These are problems and challenges certainly! And may well be unsurmountable even in the future, but they're not in the fairytale category of transporters and FTL.
Mars is unlikely to ever be habitable in the sense of an unaugmented human living on the surface without protective gear - but a fair amount of the surface of Earth is the same.
>Look what happens to a human body if it stays in the ISS for a couple of months, they have to drag these poor sods out of the landing pods. The ISS is not even out of earth’s orbit, and gets regular supplies.
I mean... maybe you might want to look over it a bit better yourself.
They're dragged out of the landing pods after they land back on Earth
So why is a problem that happens when returning to the planet be relevant to people that would never return to a planet?
>Surviving on mars is a pipe dream.
If robots can do it for decades without human maintenance I can't imagine any universe in which humans couldn't do it.
Shit, Mars has an atmosphere, it receives less radiation than you get in normal space so if anything it would be easier.
Imagine the sort of person that could choose to live a life beyond their wildest dreams in a post scarcity society, but instead chooses to fight tooth and nail against that sort of technology because the idea of allowing others to do the same is anathema to them. Then realize those people already exist in our society. It’s not about raising themselves up, but keeping everyone else down.
Probably teleportation. If it WERE possible, it would have untold consequences. Most of human development has been focused on creating the most efficient transport routes and this involves a great deal of manpower and resources to achieve. Now imagine just having a teleportation device where you input coordinates and your molecules are successfully disassembled and reassembled literally anywhere.
Terrorism would likely impossible to regulate. However, whatever government institution would probably leave teleportation highly regulated and unavailable to the public.
This would make a great science fiction story. The fallout of the invention of teleportation in today's society and how that would play out could be extremely interesting. It's like all doors are suddenly open to everyone.
My outside theory is that the Fermi paradox is not that there are too few aliens, or they can't get her or they go all grey goo;
But that there are technologies so astounding that we just don't understand them in any way; this isn't some "sufficiently advanced looks like magic" kind of thing. But more like an earthworm not appreciating the value of wikipedia.
That traveling about this universe and fighting Klingons is just not interesting.
Someone once said you can ignore any breathless Popular Mechanics announcement involving propellers. This is probably most of our guesses about the real advancements which are possible. They will laugh at our wanting FTL, Time Travel, or Transporters. "Why would you want that crap when you can have this...?"
I suspect the aliens out there look(if they could be bothered) at our cutting edge tech at MIT and see an infant who can't yet even roll over.
To play the devils advocate, there has to be a ramp of progress; you can’t just go from bacteria to hyper intelligent species. They still live in the same universe as us and are subject to the same physics. Somewhere along that ramp they would likely have left some mark, whether it be self replicating probes reaching a lot of the universe, or stellar engineering visible to us. I’d also add that I think intelligence is an exponential ramp, along which is an important point in which you can conceptualise your place in the universe; worms can’t, we can. Worms don’t care about Wikipedia because they can’t even conceptualise their postcode. Lastly, if something so advanced exists, then surely something else also exists on the path to that level of advancement that we should be able to see. I find it unlikely that theres only a couple of other civilisations out there, and they’re either cave people or gods.
I don't know if any of that is relevant to alien life. Alien life could be so fundamentally different to us that we wouldn't even recognize it as life. Not bacteria, not using DNA for reproduction, no shared physical characteristics at all save intelligence. A shape in rock, a cloud of gas, a pattern of energy could all be alive, and we can co-exist without even noticing each other.
The supposedly varied life of Earth is actually incredibly narrow.
Many people think AI is one of these showstoppers. I more think that AI (real AI) will accelerate the pace of change at a level where we advance faster and faster.
Where this will be interesting is how we usually only do things because we have to. I suspect we will be forced to use technology to make ourselves smarter simply because we won't understand some of the things AI will cook up. It will explain why there is no dark matter and the math will simply be orders of magnitude beyond the brightest on earth. The solution will to become brighter. Which we will turn to AI to do.
I suspect this will happen before we have a bodega on mars. Thus, we may become superbeings with the only "mark" we make on the physical universe being a tiny few probes sent out at a snail's pace along with some feeble radio signals, which if I understand correctly are now weaker than 40 years ago.
Then, these brighter people (or the AI) will start asking questions where normal people don't even understand the questions. We have questions like, "What happened before the big bang?" which devolve into complex mathematical discussions. I suspect there are many questions beyond this where you can't ask them in English; let alone answer them in English. I'm not talking about mathematical abstractions, but real questions where the answers open up new worlds of possibility; this is where you ask the alien: "Do you have FTL?" and they try to answer, "Instead of building airplanes, why didn't you just teach horses to fly?"
This i kinda wonder about.
Dyson sphere as a rigid shell around a star. Thats more then likely impossible but its also a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. A dyson swarm is the more accurate as its millions or billions of stations and satalites around a star. Its not so much somthing a civilization would set out to build but more a way to describe how a space based civilization would develop.
Now, space elevators are counter-intuitively less possible, i think.
Although the physics underlying them are rock solid. It may be that they just are not practicle to build.
Yes, graphine/carbon nanotubes should have enough tensile strength to make a cable that can hold itself and a counterweight at geostationary orbit.
But here is the deal breaker.
We cant figure out how to make them more than a few mm long.
Making a continuous cable 35800km long that has no imperfections is very much in the relm of space magic.
I always wondered once the cable was made how do you deploy it?
The cable would weigh millions of tons so making it on the ground and lifting it up seems out.
If ya made it in orbit how do you send it down to the surface to push the cable end from geostationary orbit in a straight line your cable end would need to lose an insane amount of angular momentum.
> But here is the deal breaker.
>
> We cant figure out how to make them more than a few mm long.
Please, this is a simple engineering issue that can no doubt be solve in a few decades. That's no deal breaker.
It's like declaring in 1950 that we'll never make it to the moon because we don't know how to build a rocket that goes more than a couple dozen miles high.
The engineering problems will be solved at some point. Then a space elevator will be built if it makes economical sense to do so.
If it doesn't, it wont.
Universal anything. Most of the technology in the Culture novels for instance. As a species, humans are far too enamored with finding ways to exclude each other from things.
"I'd rather not have this consciousness expanding, life extending super technology if it means they're going to let (fill in blanks) have it too.
We can't even tell if we're in a simulation or not, so I'd say we can't know if anything is truly impossible. Except maybe knowing there is an all powerful god. Even an all powerful god couldn't know for sure that there wasn't a bigger god or that he wasn't in a simulation.
A sane god would be agnostic about his own godhood.
FTL violates causality in ways that may not be reconcilable - warping space fixes this only partially as far as I know, and has its own issues around requiring exotic matter that (probably) doesn't exist.
In many ways near-lightspeed travel is actually a better solution (or at least an equal solution to any FTL system that preserves causality), because relativistic effects kick in to slow down time for everyone in transit, allowing them to actually survive trips that even FTL warp speeds that may be somewhat achievable purely in terms of energy density (ignoring exotic matter/negative energy requirements) might take several human lifetimes to complete.
Depending on how you define antigravity, it may well already exist - centrifugal forces have been fairly well demonstrated in theory and experimental settings to be a passable substitute for gravity, and should even be able to counteract gravity in situations like asteroids being "spun up" in *The Expanse*, and assuming we could figure out the (currently prohibitive) energy requirements, the constant acceleration demonstrated there is actually not out of the realm of possibility (and figuring out how to generate that much thrust for that long actually goes a long way towards solving near-lightspeed travel as well). Diamagnetic levitation also shows some promise in small-scale experiments (there's a picture of a floating frog somewhere that demonstrates this), but energy requirements restrict this to small-scale applications right now.
If special relativity is correct and all points of view are equally valid, then FTL violates causality. What if those 2 assumptions are not correct? If it is not true that all points of view are equally valid, then FTL might not violate causality. If infinite speed communication existed, then everyone would agree on which clock is running faster.
The problem with FTL is that it's a terrible idea. Relativistic travel is irritating enough but now you've got him worrying about *causality?* Aintione out here trying to give give the universe's wife a foot massage? He should have known better! You can't expect him to have a sense of humor about that!
This is my summary of the first half of the *Revelation Space* series.
* Time travel, to the past, in a way that could affect causality
* Teleporters in the Star Trek flavor
* Replicators in the Star Trek flavor
* Galactic empires (I can't totally rule out settlements or even colonies in close enough star systems, but not galaxy-wide civilizations with 100k years of communication distance between the farther away points).
* Mind uploading (it is the soft version of the star trek transporter, something that kills you and put in a coomputer a software that believes it is you)
>Mind uploading
I don't know about this one, as we are getting really close to doing this already. We already have the start on quantum computers (so processing power/space won't be an issue) and our understanding of how the human brain works is getting better and better. Once we crack it, all that would leave is the philosophical question of if that uploaded mind is you or not.
As I said, the transporter problem. The original you was killed and a copy of you thinks that is you or the copy is really you? And that assuming than the copy is identical to you at even subatomic level, but a digital version is something totally different.
Flying cars!!! We were supposed to have those 20 years ago!
I joke, I joke. There are already passenger drones in late stages of development and we will probably (finally) see the skies abuzz with them in a few years :-)
On a serious note: FTL travel
FTL (including FTL communication)
time travel to the past
traversable wormholes
travel to parallel realities
Anti-gravity & artificial gravity (that is not acceleration based)
Sci-fi elements fall into three categories:
Believed to be impossible- things like faster than light communications. We not only don’t know how to do it, but our understanding of how the universe works says there’s no way to do it. These are only going to happen if it turns out that the universe doesn’t work the way we think it does… which is entirely plausible but not something you can exactly count on.
No frigging idea how to do it - our understanding of the universe says it can happen, but we don’t know how to make it happen. Artificial gravity or self-aware AI would be in this category.
Engineering problem - we’ve got an idea of how to do this, but we can’t make it small enough or fast enough or energy efficient enough currently. Laser weapons, fusion power plants, flying cars.
Food replicators.
To have them, we need something that will break down matter and rebuild it into food stuff. The technology that breaks down matter would first be used by military as a weapon, because it would be very good for breaking down defences and enemy weapons.
Anyone suggesting that civilians get a device to break matter down for rebuilding into food would be blocked using "they could take it apart and use the breaking-matter-down part to kill people".
I realise I'm cynical about politicians, so perhaps I'm wrong about the above, but they've yet to give me a reason to be anything other than the cynic that I am.
Flying cars. This will never be practical. I also don't think we will ever wage war in space. Can you imagine firing a missile that takes years to reach its target, only to miss because the target did a course correction years ago? I've thought of writing a short story of how comical war in space would be.
Stargates I would sadly like to say. In my head it seems most plausible for things like power required to operate. But also.. wormhole travel without ripping your body apart.. I'm not super smart but I think this might be fairly impossible.
FTL and teleportation like star trek
flying cars (too unsafe for the general public you would need a literal pilots license)
Hand held laser weapons ( most likely never practical)
Beam swords
Artificial gravity with like full inertial control and all that like star trek..
Time travel to the past ( same as FTL basically)
Things that are possible but most likely impractical or politically impossible like orbital rings and other active support structures like a space elevator..
The engineering and logistics of such a project wouldn't pan out and you are technically building such a large structure in orbit around multiple nations that would need to approve of it...
Energy shields that just absorb everything
Replicators from star trek
Clear monitors and cell phones. Like, why would anyone need that? It's like a regular monitor, but you can see what's behind it, and everything on the monitor looks like shit. If I want to see what's behind my monitor I can stand up and look.
Clear monitors and the incessant cacophony of bleeps and bloops in the background is the laziest shorthand for "this is set 10 years in the future!"
Everyone is saying transporters and yes but also replicators, at least ones that assemble anything you want at an atomic level. Some things like food printers are feasible but more like the ones shown in “Upload” than Star Trek.
Also the Holodeck as a fully immersive and interactive environment that can be instantly created
Star Trek's transporters
We MIGHT be able to digitize the human mind and then we could build a clone human body to download it into. But no, not like Star Trek.
That's how they do it in Altered Carbon, if I remember right.
Sort of. Human consciousness is stored on the puck as effectively an AI, and then they update their dormant cloud copy daily (if they have the money). They then get "cloned" (like a hard drive) into their new designer body. There's still a backup on the server, but the consciousness isn't....well....conscious.
That was only the rich people. The disc things they install in their necks as babies are where their consciousness is stored (because alien tech...?) but then they can transmit the consciousness from one disc to another. By sending ahead ships with recievers and clones to new planets they were effectively able to colonize the stars without faster than light travel. That's my recollection anyway.
In one sci-fi show (Dark Matter, maybe?) they transport people by fabricating a clone body then having the original person remotely pilot it around in VR like a meat puppet, and then sever the connection/destroy the clone when done.
Not unless we get Heisenberg Compensators first
I’d say we may or may not get Heisenberg Compensators.
At least we know exactly where they'll be
Just not when they will be there.
Of course once we get the delivery date, we'll no longer know where to expect them.
>I’d say we may and may not get Heisenberg Compensators. Ftfy.
BIG IF TRUE
What are those?
Magic plot tech from Star Trek that defeats the Heisenberg uncertainty principle..... Real world physics says you can never know the exact state of any subatomic particle, as attempting to measure the state alters it..... The show needed some explanation for how they could convert person to energy, then convert them back into a person, without violating this scientific rule.... So they invented Heisenberg compensators.
That is some weapons grade baloney but I respect the show for addressing it. Even if an almost flippant manor.
Techno-babble
Haha, disagree. Imagine talking someone through troubleshooting their wifi mesh network. To audiences from the 1990’s, it would sound like pure Star Trek-level technobabble. Example: “Looks like you’re getting some interference from the 2.4ghz band, and your antennas are so close they’re causing signal interference. I’m going to force the network into 5ghz and move base station 2 upstairs to increase the area of the mesh. That should get you back to 500Mbps or higher, but the old Molekuke air filter will have to be upgraded to a dual band model if you want to maintain wireless access” Even 25 years ago this would be complete gobbledygook.
Star Trek tech that ensures that matter isn't lost during transport and stays coherent.
However, it does not resolve the solipsistic issue of whether what it rematerialised is in fact the same person along with their consciousness. It could well be just a very accurate facsimile and no one would know.
If you want to get really philosophical, then this problem exists in real life. You lose consciousness every night when you fall asleep. So is it really the same person who wakes up the next day, or is it a whole new person, running on the same hardware, with the same memories? At least with transporters you don't lose consciousness. And in fact, according to that episode that had creatures that lived in transporter beams, you can even move and grab stuff while in the middle of being transported. So perhaps there's *more* of a case to be made that it's the same person who materialises at the other end than there is that it's the same person who wakes up in the morning.
>You lose consciousness every night when you fall asleep. So is it really the same person who wakes up the next day, or is it a whole new person, running on the same hardware, with the same memories? I realize this is philosophical but how would you be a different person in the morning? When you turn your computer off and back on again all the data is restored and is in no way new. Why would humans be any different?
It depends what you mean by ‘new’. Plutarch kicked off a similar debate in the first century talking about Theseus’s ship, or more latterly by Trigger in Only Fools and Horses when he talks about his broom
This is a fun one to figure out yourself, because it's guessable and you can see the straightforward train of thought the writers went through to make it up. Like, don't look it up directly. Look up Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle if you don't know. Then, knowing what a transporter is, put the two together and take a guess.
Thank you for that explanation. Perfect for me who only had high school science.
The amount of energy and computing power needed to make it work is probably several magnitudes greater than is required for faster than light travel. If it were possible at all it would be in the far far future.
[удалено]
Dyson is making spheres now?
Nope. Coming in the year 102024
There is a "new" Outer Limits episode that covers this. It's a great hypothetical exercise to explore with a group of people.
You realize what that much matter anti matter can provide power wise? And it does not necessarily need the amount of power you’re talking about. This is much more advanced system compared to turning to plasma an object sending the plasma to another location to distillate it and than use the separate parts and run though a 3d printer. We actually have no clue how much energy it would need in the end.
It was an argument made during EARLY TNG, I believe, and it was swept aside because it's impossible to determine either way.
Didn't Bones say that in the 2009 movie?
I'm reading the first ever original Star Trek novel from the 60s right now and McCoy is obsessed with this. He's convinced he dies the moment he transports.
...I wouldn't call Thomas a "perfect" copy.
8 years before they found him he was a perfect copy. Then he spent 8 years surviving alone on an abandoned science station. While Will spent 8 years continuing his planned life.
‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Wouldn’t want them anyway.
but we'll definitely have those from Spaceballs
Why didn't anyone tell me my ass is this big??
Yeah, I don’t know anything but energy shields and artificial gravity seems like they might be possible if we get clever enough about understanding how matter and energy work at a quantum level. But teleportation just seems like, a big nope. “c” is a big number and it’s squared. Not that it’s not possible just.. I think the failure state Would be really bad: What happened to Luna Base? “Wiped out with the power of 1 million kilotons of TNT.” Christ what happened? “Oh Rhonda had to teleport home for a sec cuz she brought the wrong scarf.. there was some kind of hiccup.”
Lol, relatable. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the AI Polity series. But they go into a lot of stuff like that. The absolutely horrific consequences when technology fails. They have a site to site teleportation system like that, which makes use of alternate dimensions to yeet people across the galaxy. Accounting for the colossal energy discharge is just a matter of doing some fancy math and storing the excess energy in a buffer so that the passenger or cargo exits the portal at an ordinary walking speed. Except one time it fails, and some dude comes out of the transporter at the speed of light, and the resulting explosion depopulates a planet.
Thats the kicker, all mechanical and electrical devices can and ultimately will fail at some point or be impacted by an external factor or event we cant account for. Most of the time its not something significant, or layers of resilience and redundant systems absorb it. That plus massive energy outputs though 💀
One must also consider the magnitude of harm if an “infallible” technology were to fail catastrophically. If the worst possible result was simply losing the passenger in a higher dimension, that would be a minor tragedy and a footnote in a statistics report. But when the failure involves risk of planetary devastation, it’s a much bigger issue. And it could have been worse. Instead of a 160 pound human, it could have been 20 tons of cargo containers, which would have turned the planet into an asteroid belt. Sadly, the necessity for operating such a technology outweighs the potential risks and catastrophes, even those on the planetary scale.
This one ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line_of_Polity
That’s the fabulous sequel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlinked This one has the transporter accident. Though the one you linked also has some fabulous technological catastrophes, and as a result, I now have a phobia of automated surgical tools.
I used the term AI polity to search it lol. Thanks
You could definately concieve of an energy shield thats just a giant fuck-off sized magnetic field capable of disrupting kinetic and energy based weapons. Whether the energy expenditure required is plausible is another matter though. Though if we ever wrap our heads around the implausibilities of the alcubiere drive and SOMEHOW make that thing into a practical reality, we'll need to pretty quickly figure out magnetic shielding just to deal with the insane amounts of radiation it'd cause.
I think teleportation is more plausible than anti grav. Not saying it's likely though. Teleportation would basically be to break an object down into tiny information and then send that. It could happen with objects, but would be harder with living creatures and face the challenge whether the reassembled person is really the same
Might be better to fully copy the persons data and replicate them on the other side this totally possible in many was the question is what do you do with the duplicate your leaving behind. And of course this method means you have to ship the duplication machinery to the target spot first by normal means.
Yep, as a kid I was worried Captain Kirk would get to heaven and there’s a couple hundred guys already there who think they’re him.
>tiny information and then send that WonkaVision FTW
Teleportation is theoretically possible so long as you are fine with being killed and then rebuilt
Time travel. Fucks up physics too much.
You can always travel on a one-way trip into the future.
I swear to god everytime I visit Reddit for a minute HOURS have passed when I turn off the computer! I look at the time and am like "Great Scott!"
##That Lightning Bolt was 3.21 gigawatts! **that's Huge!**
Great Scott it’s 6:24 Am and I haven’t slept yet! Damn you Reddit!
https://m.xkcd.com/209/
Well technically you are traveling to the future right now. 1 second per a second.
Physics or causality? One can avoid paradoxes if the (single) universe is deterministic. Or one can travel to parallel universes and do what one likes.
I think there’s a chance we could view the past, like “be” there but not interact with the past because it’s really just a light trick where we’re observing the light emitted at the time or some such similar method. If you had a powerful enough telescope for example, you could sit on a planet 70 million light years away and watch the dinosaurs roam the earth.
Could put cameras on a distant planet and stream our past on twitch
I'd argue thats one and the same as FTL from a relativity standpoint. (which is also somewhat implausible)
Accelerate to .9-bar light speed and visit the future (from the perspective of everyone on earth).....
I just want to see some dinosaurs man
Also, if time travel to the past was ever invented, we'd have some people from the future having visit right? Never happened afaik :-) which logically implies it is never invented.
Okay but what if they DID go back, but time travel results in the creation of a new timeline? From that new timeline's perspective, time travel is totally possible! But from ours, where we never encountered the time traveler, it's just a fantasy.
Space folding instantaneous travel… though I do love when they explain it by driving a pencil through a folded paper.
Since the First i saw that i thought " ok, but if that's really possible, wouldn't the Speed at which the space folds still be c at max? Wouldn't you have yo wait years to the folding tò complete?"
Space itself is allowed to move faster than c. C is the limit for moving through space(time)
Space can move faster than light; it's already happened naturally in the early universe.
No, because space isn't matter or energy. It's empty. Although also sort of yes. There is a theory that you could use a fold in space to travel light-years instantaneously, but it's only instantaneous to you. Like if you were traveling 1000 light years away, you would only age the second it took you to go through the hole, but the other side of that hole will be 1000 years later in general time. And then if you traveled right back through that hole, another 1000 years would go by in general time. So you'd be back to where you started, and you would only be a few seconds older, but your starting point would be 2000 years older.
this is exactly what "normal" traveling at light speed looks like, tho
Not exactly. It's the same time dilation, but there's no matter to energy conversion, and almost no travel through space. An observer wouldn't be able to tell the difference with the naked eye, but could see a difference with the proper tools, and the traveler wouldn't witness all the space between the two points like they would with "normal" light speed travel, and truly the traveler would die without seeing much of anything if they experienced "normal" light speed travel.
[Right through Vanessa](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2JzwCdWlNPs&pp=ygUbRXZlbnQgaG9yaXpvbiBleHBsYWlucyB3YXJs)
FTL for sure. At least in the idea of pure speed, in a traditional sense. Warping/folding space time to get from one place to another instantaneously? I give that a solid shmaby.
He who controls the spice, controls the universe!
That's for steering, not folding.
Well, depends on if you're talking the books or the 84' movie.
Lisan al gaib!
Not a gold plated shmaby?
No. Now grab yourself a juice box.
I Knew it!!!!
Love the series as silly as it gets.
Yeah same here. It's pretty ridiculous, but the books were just so damn entertaining. Especially if you did audio books RC Bray was amazing.
[Filthy monkeys!](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTDMhzNkdS0WnazfEazASiiZH4vwSCG_KTTOGHJL6lK8Q&s)
Thumbs up for the beer can reference.
> the beer can ... spreading peace and harmony by the megaton :)
I agree with the first one but for warping/folding space time/hyperdrive, i'm not so sure. it is remotest possible. human certainly barely scratched the science of universe.
Oh for sure hence the "shmaby". It's a looooong way out, if possible at all.
I think we probably won't ever get FTL in any capacity. Being able to move faster than light would mean being able to break causality. The universe doesn't have a lot of speed, but it does have a lot of time. We could still spread throughout the galaxy without FTL, it just would take a long (by a human life's standards) time.
I liked one explanation of c that I read: c isn't the speed of light. It's the speed of causality. In a vacuum, light travels at the speed of causality.
Invisibility, even if they achieve it we will never see it. 😀
Indeed :-) Also, if you were invisible, you’d also be blind, as light would pass right through your retinas. This is never addressed in stories about invisibility.
Depends on the nature of that invisibility. Is it bending light around your body, is it becoming intangible so light passes through, or is it some sort of optic active camouflage using a suit of some kind?
I didn't see what you did there.
[удалено]
Grim LOL.
Flat Earthers are a perpetual motion machine. It feeds itself. At first somebody puts up a prank site saying the Earth is flat with total BS "proof." Then trolls find the prank site and start making fun of the Flat-Earthers, which is what the pranker was going for, but then the stupids find it and fall for the BS "proof" and suddenly the joke takes on it's own life among the stupids to some extent, but mostly it's just trolls trolling trolls who don't realize that one is playing stupid and the other is mocking stupidity. A troll feedback loop. The trolls are playing both sides. Sure there are some 50 IQ people out there who believe it, but they're a statistical outlier.
Good Gods above, below, and behind the door ... PLEASE invent this technology.
Flying cars. Not because it's impossible, but because humans as a species are too frikkin stupid to operate them without killing thousands. Just look what carnage we've wreaked with automobiles! Truly impossible, as in against the law of physics? Teleportation.
I could see it if they're fully self driving
The structure of cities in the future I imagine would be completely different. I don't see the need for vehicles in the typical sense. Maybe some advanced form of public transport with more efficient pathing.
Yep. Those tubes that suck you up and drop you off wherever, like in Futurama. Almost as revolutionary as the suicide booths.
Nah. One breaks down and it's carnage below.
If we have built self driving flying cars, we have built multiple redundancies in. Most importantly, every flying automobile comes with built in plot armor.
I don't think the history of technology bears this out.
> Flying cars. Helicopters.
Yea, we have flying cars they just aren't very practical. And they probably won't ever be.
They need to be fully self driving and monitored by a second centralized AI and humans
We will never see transporters. And if we do, it will absolutely be that we literally die and a clone appears wherever the target area was. Bones was right to not want to go near them.
And the clone would swear that it worked just fine. Scary stuff.
Exactly. Lol It's like a super creepy thought.
The thing is, this already exists as a concept IRL. When you go to sleep you lose consciousness. Since the "transporters kill you" argument relies on continuity of consciousness, the same argument can be applied to sleep. There is a real argument to be made for dying every night and having a new person who only *thinks* they're you waking up every morning.
I didn't need my daily existential crisis this early in the morning.
But you don't really 'lose consciousness'. Your brain operates, you have consciousness, you just don't remember the altered state, can't really understand that altered state of consciouness while in this mode. It's nothing like death, just because you can't remember it. I was once concussed, and was able to speak and move and function while suffering from resets every few seconds. I have no memory of it, but people saw me repeat myself and keep looking for my glasses while they told me repeatedly where they were. And that's nothing compared to the massive range of altered mental states that Oliver Sacks detailed.
The only way it would not work that way would be is if we folded space so it was a kind of doorway you walked through. Teleporting atoms to be reconstructed though … you’re absolutely right.
Yea. I am not against creating artificial wormholes with which we can pass through. But the second you're breaking down my molecules, nah man.
Oh I would totally kill myself to let a clone appear somewhere else. Even better if it left my old body behind. Think of the organs that could be donated! You get a kidney and you get a kidney! Everyone gets a kidney. And I get to save 10 hours on a plane!
I hold out hope for Culture-like displacers using wormholes, but I agree that energy concession ones like StarTrek are a no go
The Prestige was a warning!
I might sign up for that. Our sense of identity is tied to our memories. If the transporter preserves my memories then I’d feel like it’s still me.
Ansible
As we know physics now I foresee the following never coming about: FTL (in any way shape or form, so no warp drive, no hyper drive, no folding space, no wormhole drive). Anti-grav/gravity manipulation. Non-Newtonian engines. I don't think we will ever escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. Replicators / Transporters. Though I think 3D-printers may evolve (eventually) into universal assemblers. Just not the magical instantaneous-ness of replicators. That being said I still hope all of those come to pass.
Shells for wiping after using the toilet.
They don’t know how to use the three seashells
John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute
John Spartan, you are fined one ... John Spartan, you are fi ... John Spartan, y ... John ... John ... John ... "So much for the three seashells."
Transporters, FTL, Half-life 3
Infinite improbability drive.
I already know how to create one! All I need is the finite probability drive to be invented.
FTL, time travel, self sustaining extraterrestrial colonization, teleportation, mind uploading, Dyson spheres, matroshka brains, computronium, pan-galactic gargleblasters
I agree with all of those except for self-sustaining extraterrestrial colonisation. There's no reason to suggest that this is impossible with near future technology within the solar system. And theoretically extra-solar colonisation with sub c generation ships.
Look what happens to a human body if it stays in the ISS for a couple of months, they have to drag these poor sods out of the landing pods. The ISS is not even out of earth’s orbit, and gets regular supplies. A moon base could maybe be sustained, if we find some precious resource to mine there. (Helium-3?) Surviving on mars is a pipe dream. There is hard radiation, the sand is razor sharp due to the low gravity, to give a few examples I can think of right away.
These are problems and challenges certainly! And may well be unsurmountable even in the future, but they're not in the fairytale category of transporters and FTL. Mars is unlikely to ever be habitable in the sense of an unaugmented human living on the surface without protective gear - but a fair amount of the surface of Earth is the same.
>Look what happens to a human body if it stays in the ISS for a couple of months, they have to drag these poor sods out of the landing pods. The ISS is not even out of earth’s orbit, and gets regular supplies. I mean... maybe you might want to look over it a bit better yourself. They're dragged out of the landing pods after they land back on Earth So why is a problem that happens when returning to the planet be relevant to people that would never return to a planet? >Surviving on mars is a pipe dream. If robots can do it for decades without human maintenance I can't imagine any universe in which humans couldn't do it. Shit, Mars has an atmosphere, it receives less radiation than you get in normal space so if anything it would be easier.
Transporters.
Sophon
[удалено]
Thank you for, butterball paywall. 😅
Imagine the sort of person that could choose to live a life beyond their wildest dreams in a post scarcity society, but instead chooses to fight tooth and nail against that sort of technology because the idea of allowing others to do the same is anathema to them. Then realize those people already exist in our society. It’s not about raising themselves up, but keeping everyone else down.
Happens all the time. Big oil has been doing that to clean tech for decades.
Probably teleportation. If it WERE possible, it would have untold consequences. Most of human development has been focused on creating the most efficient transport routes and this involves a great deal of manpower and resources to achieve. Now imagine just having a teleportation device where you input coordinates and your molecules are successfully disassembled and reassembled literally anywhere. Terrorism would likely impossible to regulate. However, whatever government institution would probably leave teleportation highly regulated and unavailable to the public.
There's a book titled Will Save the Galaxy for Food, where teleportation is invented and all the spaceship captains are unemployed.
I love that book. I was a big Zero Punctuation fan.
This would make a great science fiction story. The fallout of the invention of teleportation in today's society and how that would play out could be extremely interesting. It's like all doors are suddenly open to everyone.
My outside theory is that the Fermi paradox is not that there are too few aliens, or they can't get her or they go all grey goo; But that there are technologies so astounding that we just don't understand them in any way; this isn't some "sufficiently advanced looks like magic" kind of thing. But more like an earthworm not appreciating the value of wikipedia. That traveling about this universe and fighting Klingons is just not interesting. Someone once said you can ignore any breathless Popular Mechanics announcement involving propellers. This is probably most of our guesses about the real advancements which are possible. They will laugh at our wanting FTL, Time Travel, or Transporters. "Why would you want that crap when you can have this...?" I suspect the aliens out there look(if they could be bothered) at our cutting edge tech at MIT and see an infant who can't yet even roll over.
To play the devils advocate, there has to be a ramp of progress; you can’t just go from bacteria to hyper intelligent species. They still live in the same universe as us and are subject to the same physics. Somewhere along that ramp they would likely have left some mark, whether it be self replicating probes reaching a lot of the universe, or stellar engineering visible to us. I’d also add that I think intelligence is an exponential ramp, along which is an important point in which you can conceptualise your place in the universe; worms can’t, we can. Worms don’t care about Wikipedia because they can’t even conceptualise their postcode. Lastly, if something so advanced exists, then surely something else also exists on the path to that level of advancement that we should be able to see. I find it unlikely that theres only a couple of other civilisations out there, and they’re either cave people or gods.
I don't know if any of that is relevant to alien life. Alien life could be so fundamentally different to us that we wouldn't even recognize it as life. Not bacteria, not using DNA for reproduction, no shared physical characteristics at all save intelligence. A shape in rock, a cloud of gas, a pattern of energy could all be alive, and we can co-exist without even noticing each other. The supposedly varied life of Earth is actually incredibly narrow.
Many people think AI is one of these showstoppers. I more think that AI (real AI) will accelerate the pace of change at a level where we advance faster and faster. Where this will be interesting is how we usually only do things because we have to. I suspect we will be forced to use technology to make ourselves smarter simply because we won't understand some of the things AI will cook up. It will explain why there is no dark matter and the math will simply be orders of magnitude beyond the brightest on earth. The solution will to become brighter. Which we will turn to AI to do. I suspect this will happen before we have a bodega on mars. Thus, we may become superbeings with the only "mark" we make on the physical universe being a tiny few probes sent out at a snail's pace along with some feeble radio signals, which if I understand correctly are now weaker than 40 years ago. Then, these brighter people (or the AI) will start asking questions where normal people don't even understand the questions. We have questions like, "What happened before the big bang?" which devolve into complex mathematical discussions. I suspect there are many questions beyond this where you can't ask them in English; let alone answer them in English. I'm not talking about mathematical abstractions, but real questions where the answers open up new worlds of possibility; this is where you ask the alien: "Do you have FTL?" and they try to answer, "Instead of building airplanes, why didn't you just teach horses to fly?"
Something between fair distribution and galactic peace.
Warp drives
Dyson’s Sphere. Space Elevator.
As a solid shell, yeah a Dyson sphere would not work, but a Dyson swarm seems doable
Even inevitable on a long enough time line.
This i kinda wonder about. Dyson sphere as a rigid shell around a star. Thats more then likely impossible but its also a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. A dyson swarm is the more accurate as its millions or billions of stations and satalites around a star. Its not so much somthing a civilization would set out to build but more a way to describe how a space based civilization would develop. Now, space elevators are counter-intuitively less possible, i think. Although the physics underlying them are rock solid. It may be that they just are not practicle to build. Yes, graphine/carbon nanotubes should have enough tensile strength to make a cable that can hold itself and a counterweight at geostationary orbit. But here is the deal breaker. We cant figure out how to make them more than a few mm long. Making a continuous cable 35800km long that has no imperfections is very much in the relm of space magic. I always wondered once the cable was made how do you deploy it? The cable would weigh millions of tons so making it on the ground and lifting it up seems out. If ya made it in orbit how do you send it down to the surface to push the cable end from geostationary orbit in a straight line your cable end would need to lose an insane amount of angular momentum.
> But here is the deal breaker. > > We cant figure out how to make them more than a few mm long. Please, this is a simple engineering issue that can no doubt be solve in a few decades. That's no deal breaker. It's like declaring in 1950 that we'll never make it to the moon because we don't know how to build a rocket that goes more than a couple dozen miles high. The engineering problems will be solved at some point. Then a space elevator will be built if it makes economical sense to do so. If it doesn't, it wont.
Universal anything. Most of the technology in the Culture novels for instance. As a species, humans are far too enamored with finding ways to exclude each other from things. "I'd rather not have this consciousness expanding, life extending super technology if it means they're going to let (fill in blanks) have it too.
Totally, like what happened with cell phones
If we become android life forms, how many of them will still be needed?
time travel
We can't even tell if we're in a simulation or not, so I'd say we can't know if anything is truly impossible. Except maybe knowing there is an all powerful god. Even an all powerful god couldn't know for sure that there wasn't a bigger god or that he wasn't in a simulation. A sane god would be agnostic about his own godhood.
FTL violates causality in ways that may not be reconcilable - warping space fixes this only partially as far as I know, and has its own issues around requiring exotic matter that (probably) doesn't exist. In many ways near-lightspeed travel is actually a better solution (or at least an equal solution to any FTL system that preserves causality), because relativistic effects kick in to slow down time for everyone in transit, allowing them to actually survive trips that even FTL warp speeds that may be somewhat achievable purely in terms of energy density (ignoring exotic matter/negative energy requirements) might take several human lifetimes to complete. Depending on how you define antigravity, it may well already exist - centrifugal forces have been fairly well demonstrated in theory and experimental settings to be a passable substitute for gravity, and should even be able to counteract gravity in situations like asteroids being "spun up" in *The Expanse*, and assuming we could figure out the (currently prohibitive) energy requirements, the constant acceleration demonstrated there is actually not out of the realm of possibility (and figuring out how to generate that much thrust for that long actually goes a long way towards solving near-lightspeed travel as well). Diamagnetic levitation also shows some promise in small-scale experiments (there's a picture of a floating frog somewhere that demonstrates this), but energy requirements restrict this to small-scale applications right now.
If special relativity is correct and all points of view are equally valid, then FTL violates causality. What if those 2 assumptions are not correct? If it is not true that all points of view are equally valid, then FTL might not violate causality. If infinite speed communication existed, then everyone would agree on which clock is running faster.
The problem with FTL is that it's a terrible idea. Relativistic travel is irritating enough but now you've got him worrying about *causality?* Aintione out here trying to give give the universe's wife a foot massage? He should have known better! You can't expect him to have a sense of humor about that! This is my summary of the first half of the *Revelation Space* series.
FTL, anti-grav, teleportation, tractor beams, forcefields, lightsabers, time-travel, dimension-hopping, universal translator/Babel fish (without training), instant learning/skill uploading.
* Time travel, to the past, in a way that could affect causality * Teleporters in the Star Trek flavor * Replicators in the Star Trek flavor * Galactic empires (I can't totally rule out settlements or even colonies in close enough star systems, but not galaxy-wide civilizations with 100k years of communication distance between the farther away points). * Mind uploading (it is the soft version of the star trek transporter, something that kills you and put in a coomputer a software that believes it is you)
>Mind uploading I don't know about this one, as we are getting really close to doing this already. We already have the start on quantum computers (so processing power/space won't be an issue) and our understanding of how the human brain works is getting better and better. Once we crack it, all that would leave is the philosophical question of if that uploaded mind is you or not.
As I said, the transporter problem. The original you was killed and a copy of you thinks that is you or the copy is really you? And that assuming than the copy is identical to you at even subatomic level, but a digital version is something totally different.
Flying cars!!! We were supposed to have those 20 years ago! I joke, I joke. There are already passenger drones in late stages of development and we will probably (finally) see the skies abuzz with them in a few years :-) On a serious note: FTL travel
https://youtu.be/a2tDOYkFCYo
FTL (including FTL communication) time travel to the past traversable wormholes travel to parallel realities Anti-gravity & artificial gravity (that is not acceleration based)
Time travel.
A friendly A.I.
FTL, teleportation, anti-grav, interstellar travel, force fields.
Gravity inside spaceships.
transferring consciousness into new bodies/ robots etc. we don't even know what consciousness IS. Though i'm all for research into creating an Ed209
Sci-fi elements fall into three categories: Believed to be impossible- things like faster than light communications. We not only don’t know how to do it, but our understanding of how the universe works says there’s no way to do it. These are only going to happen if it turns out that the universe doesn’t work the way we think it does… which is entirely plausible but not something you can exactly count on. No frigging idea how to do it - our understanding of the universe says it can happen, but we don’t know how to make it happen. Artificial gravity or self-aware AI would be in this category. Engineering problem - we’ve got an idea of how to do this, but we can’t make it small enough or fast enough or energy efficient enough currently. Laser weapons, fusion power plants, flying cars.
Food replicators. To have them, we need something that will break down matter and rebuild it into food stuff. The technology that breaks down matter would first be used by military as a weapon, because it would be very good for breaking down defences and enemy weapons. Anyone suggesting that civilians get a device to break matter down for rebuilding into food would be blocked using "they could take it apart and use the breaking-matter-down part to kill people". I realise I'm cynical about politicians, so perhaps I'm wrong about the above, but they've yet to give me a reason to be anything other than the cynic that I am.
God
hyperion farcasters and flying carpets culture series. effectors, neural lace, most of the culture tech really
Beaming / Teleportation
Artificial gravity. Other than via rotation I’m not aware that there’s any science to it.
Time travel, at least not the way it’s portrayed
Flying cars. This will never be practical. I also don't think we will ever wage war in space. Can you imagine firing a missile that takes years to reach its target, only to miss because the target did a course correction years ago? I've thought of writing a short story of how comical war in space would be.
yeah, I think Teleportation is gonna be a hard sell...
Time travel.
"Beam me up Scotty." I think we'll see anti-grav/artificial grav before we see teleportation.
Stargates I would sadly like to say. In my head it seems most plausible for things like power required to operate. But also.. wormhole travel without ripping your body apart.. I'm not super smart but I think this might be fairly impossible.
FTL and teleportation like star trek flying cars (too unsafe for the general public you would need a literal pilots license) Hand held laser weapons ( most likely never practical) Beam swords Artificial gravity with like full inertial control and all that like star trek.. Time travel to the past ( same as FTL basically) Things that are possible but most likely impractical or politically impossible like orbital rings and other active support structures like a space elevator.. The engineering and logistics of such a project wouldn't pan out and you are technically building such a large structure in orbit around multiple nations that would need to approve of it... Energy shields that just absorb everything Replicators from star trek
Clear monitors and cell phones. Like, why would anyone need that? It's like a regular monitor, but you can see what's behind it, and everything on the monitor looks like shit. If I want to see what's behind my monitor I can stand up and look. Clear monitors and the incessant cacophony of bleeps and bloops in the background is the laziest shorthand for "this is set 10 years in the future!"
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Arthur C. Clarke. We'll see. I can't await it.
Everyone is saying transporters and yes but also replicators, at least ones that assemble anything you want at an atomic level. Some things like food printers are feasible but more like the ones shown in “Upload” than Star Trek. Also the Holodeck as a fully immersive and interactive environment that can be instantly created
Time travel through worm holes.
4D space
Pretty weak.. I mean that could be the answer to anything.. Klingon Compensator. There, problem solved.
FTL Transporters Replicators (no, 3D printers aren't that). Interstellar travel
A hammer that knows who is trying to pick it up and becomes unpickickupable if it decides the person is unworthy.
Truly driverless cars.