By comparison, the Pathfinder was originally reported post-Jump to have traveled five parsecs. You can read the Pathfinder short story to learn more…
And it appears I have been nominated for a 2015 Joe Shuster Award! Woo hoo!!
By comparison, the Pathfinder was originally reported post-Jump to have traveled five parsecs. You can read the Pathfinder short story to learn more…
And it appears I have been nominated for a 2015 Joe Shuster Award! Woo hoo!!
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Erm… about how far from Earth have people traveled, up till now?
Cause they’re now around seventy light-years away… and they still don’t entirely understand how the Jump Engine got them there.
21.5 parsecs is pretty damn far. How would they know it’s their Earth from that distance? I am pretty sure scientists would be hard pressed to say anything that detailed beyond a light-hour.
Of course they could approach Earth and find they are in another universe. Those damn Sliders are messing everything up!
Spectrography of stars.
Yep. They’ll have enough data catalogued on the stars they know of to be able to pinpoint exactly where – relative to Sol system – in the Orion Arm they are right “now”. Think x-hundred years past the data gleaned from Hubble, HIPPARCOS, GAIA, and other space-based and ground-bound ‘scopes, not only in Sol system, but in the systems they regularly visit or have colonized as well.
Plus, they’re close enough that they could probably pick up some 70-year-old radio traffic from Sol – that might account for the ‘earth that makes sense’ comment.
I’m fine with the pinpoint accuracy of their location. What I’m suggesting is that their readings do not mean they know the Earth they are looking at is THEIR Earth. They found the Hiawatha on an alternative Earth. Same location, same orbit, same continents, same everything except for the population (and other *small* details). 21 parsecs is over 60 light-years. We have trouble tracking planets at that distance and we have decades of observations. I’ll take the fiction, but this just gnaws at my jaw for such a detail.
Old radio signals might work. Even in 2015, 60 light years puts you in 1955. Signal strength might be pretty low at that point, but I’m willing to do a little hand-waving at that point. It’s set in the far-flung future of XX69 after all, who knows how strong radio traffic was is XX09, and maybe Galaxion-Earth can signal with gravity somehow.
I saw something in Science yesterday about gravity wave detection becoming a more reliable technological thing-to-do.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/woohoo-email-stokes-rumor-gravitational-waves-have-been-spotted
Improved technology! The failures are MUCH more impressive now!
Your avatar is eminently suitable for this comment.
Well, since he’s Dave, it would have to be.
Indeed. I even own the original art to the strip where Shaenon included me.
BTW, an Earth that makes sense? Clearly not OUR Earth.
Hm… is it galactic-drift perhaps? They return at the same spot but everything else has moved?!
About seventy light-years away from Earth. Galaxies don’t move faster than light.
I’m more inclined to think general lack of control on the return jump. They know how to send something from one continuum to another, but aiming is another story. “I shoot an arrow into the air…”
Figuring out how to navigate through interdimensional jumps will be a tricky task, requiring many test jumps, but not impossible.
Now, if I remember correctly, Tara mentioned that the volume of explored space was roughly 6-7 parsecs in radius, with a travel time of 3 months via conventional FTL. So, they’re now well outside explored space, and looking at roughly 9-10 months return trip.
Hey– That mean’s they’ve boldly gone where no man has gone before! They can seek out new worlds…… obviously, it’s time for a spin-off!
Where no human (of any gender identity) has gone before!
And that 9-10 months assumes that everyone in the engineering crew gets back to health PDQ!
“On the plus side, NO EVIL PSYCHIC BUTTERFLIES!”
Are you sure about that?
Not that I want to see it come to pass BUT (just to play devils advocate) what about the possibility that they’re now 14 parsecs deeper into the EVIL PSYCHIC BUTTERFLIES home space continum?
70 light-years out? Sounds like they may have to fix the jump drive and use it again.
” Now, if I remember correctly, Tara mentioned that the volume of explored space was roughly 6-7 parsecs in radius, with a travel time of 3 months via conventional FTL… ”
They already have FTL? And the jump engine is just an improvement over their usual propulsion? Wow! I thought they were stuck a sub-light speeds…
” 21.5 parsecs is pretty damn far. How would they know it’s their Earth from that distance? I am pretty sure scientists would be hard pressed to say anything that detailed beyond a light-hour. ”
Even if a space-faring civilization lacks a means of faster-than-light space travel, this does not preclude the possibility of having a means of faster-than-light communications.
By all accounts, our civilization is far from achieving faster-than-light space travel. Assuming it’s even possible, according to our most promising theories it would take a tremendous amount of energy and “exotic matter” (which is purely theoretical – we don’t know if such material exists).
But current theories and research does suggest that it should be possible to achieve FTL communications via quantum entanglement or ‘spooky action at a distance’. According to the Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to achieve faster-than-light communication between entangled systems. At least, the articles I’ve read makes it sound MUCH more feasible than FTL space travel.
” Yep. They’ll have enough data catalogued on the stars they know of to be able to pinpoint exactly where – relative to Sol system – in the Orion Arm they are right “now”. ”
Even if they can pinpoint where they are and are able to identify stars and star systems, that does not prove they’re back in the same reality from which they originated. They could merely be in another universe with practically identical star systems.
The alternate Earth reality they just left seemed almost identical to the Earth they’re familiar with… except that Earth experienced a nuclear apocalypse. That’s just a slight deviation from history. The ‘Butterfly Effect’ could account for that much. As Mentyl in ‘The Barbarian Princess’ put it, “A butterfly farts and you get hurricanes.”
” Plus, they’re close enough that they could probably pick up some 70-year-old radio traffic from Sol – that might account for the ‘earth that makes sense’ comment. ”
That’s a good point.
>But current theories and research does suggest that it should be possible to achieve FTL communications via quantum entanglement or ‘spooky action at a distance’. According to the Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to achieve faster-than-light communication between entangled systems. At least, the articles I’ve read makes it sound MUCH more feasible than FTL space travel.
Um, no.
“Entanglement” just means that two quanta produced by a common event remain “correlated” until one of them interacts with something else, as first noted by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. However, a careful analysis has shown that such “EPR correlations” are useless for sending information, because quantum phenomena are inherently probabilistic, and it is impossible to control which way any given wave-function “collapses.” Thus, the “EPR correlations” are just “random noise” when they are viewed from either end of an “entangled pair” without knowledge of what happened at the other end, and therefore the only way to detect that such “EPR correlations” once existed is via a post-hoc comparison that requires sending the data back from one observer to the other via a lightspeed-or-lower “classical channel” and then tallying up the results. Thus, “EPR correlations” are utterly useless for sending “messages.”
Also, one frequently sees nonsense claims in the popular accounts of “entanglement” such as “the effects of entanglement are instantaneous.” Such writers have failed to understand the single most important lesson of Special Relativity, which is that “There is No Such Thing as Simultaneity over distance,” and therefore no such thing as “Instantaneous” over distance.” In SR, ‘instantaneous” is a concept that can only apply at a single “point-event” in Spacetime — and NEVER over a distance.
I refer to the Wikipedia page for Quantum entanglement, and the subsection on ‘Special Theory of Relativity’, which states:
” Another theory explains quantum entanglement using special relativity.[35] According to this theory, faster-than-light communication between entangled systems can be achieved because the time dilation of special relativity allows time to stand still in light’s point of view. ”
This section references a technical paper, “EPR Paradox Solved by Special Theory of Relativity”, published November 7, 2013 with the University of Warsaw, interdisciplinary center for mathematical and computational modelling.
I would also point out that some physicists claim that time itself is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement. Speed is a function of distance over time. If time is a side effect of quantum entanglement, then why would it violate the laws of physics for an effect to be measurable simultaneously over distance?
There have been a variety of experiments and lots of theories published recently and it seems like it’d be difficult for any one person to keep up with this field of research. The “no cloning theorem” and “no-communication theorem” claim it is impossible to achieve superluminal communication via quantum cloning. However, so far, these are still theorems among various other proposed theorems.
Even if proven correct, these do not prevent superluminal communication because there are other proposed methods which do not rely on entanglement. (For instance, there is research into the possibility of using tachyons.)
If (not-related) events A and B happen instanteneous in one reference frame, in another frame A happens before B and in yet another frame B happens before A.
Now, if quantum entanglement can create a relation between A and B, then – as a consequence – you also obtain time travel (at least in some reference frames).
>I refer to the Wikipedia page for Quantum entanglement, and the subsection on ‘Special Theory of Relativity’, which states:
” Another theory explains quantum entanglement using special relativity.[35] According to this theory, faster-than-light communication between entangled systems can be achieved because the time dilation of special relativity allows time to stand still in light’s point of view. ”
Beware sections of Wikipedia that only cite one single primary paper in an obscure journal, rather than several articles including at least one review article — especially if, when one clicks through to the paper, one finds that the journal’s Editor has added an afterword expressing skepticism that the paper is actually valid! There is a reason why Wikipedia editorial standards deprecate citing primary sources unless they are backed up by secondary sources: Citing only a “Primary source” is often a sneaky way for an author to smuggle in their own unverified “Original Research.” As the “Talk” section on the “Quantum Entanglement” article notes, the “Special Relativity” section of the “Quantum Entanglement” article does not meet Wikipedia editorial standards, the “theory” that it espouses is not generally accepted by physicists, and the claims within this section have most definitely not been tested by experiment!
The reason why it would “violates the laws of physics for an effect to be measurable simultaneously over distance” is that within Special Relativity, the word “Simultaneously” is impossible to define over a distance. The non-existence of any objective definition of “Distant Simultaneity” is the primary result of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity: “Now” only means something at a single point-event is Spacetime, “The Future” (AKA “Forward Lightcone”) of that single point-event consists of the set of point-events that can be reached by lightspeed-or-slower signals, while “The Past” (AKA “Backward Lightcone”) of that point-event consists of the point-events that can make contact with it via lightspeed-or-slower signals. The region that is neither “Past” nor “Future” is not “The Present” — it is instead “The Elsewhere”: The set of points that have no objective causal relationship at all with the specified point-event. Any assignment of “Distant Simultaneity” to point-events within “The Elsewhere” is purely a matter of arbitrary observer-assigned convention, and will necessarily will depend on the observer and the observer’s state of motion; such utterly arbitrary and observer/convention-dependent assignments therefore cannot be physical, and thus cannot play any role within physics. (The diagram in the Wikipedia article on “Light Cones” is an epic fail on the preceding point, because it falsely indicates a hyperplane that is falsely labeled “The Present” without clearly indicating that “The Present” is dependent on the selected observer and that observer’s state of motion, not to mention the observer’s arbitrary “Measurement Conventions.” The text, by contrast, more or less gets the Relativistic concept of “The Elsewhere” across correctly.)
Put another way, if someone did develop a way of objectively measuring that two events were “simultaneous,” and if every observer could perform that same measurement and get the same result, independent of their reference frame and state of motion, so that every observer everywhere with any arbitrary state of motion could mutually agree that those two events were indeed “simultaneous,” then it would be equivalent to proving that Special Relativity is false, and that a “Luminiferous Aether” and an “Absolute Time” (the two main concepts that Einstein destroyed!), actually do exist — thereby scrapping the last 100 years of experimental and theoretical physics.
The “No Cloning” theorem goes a long way beyond being a mere “Theorem among other proposed theorems”: Finding a way to “perfectly clone” a quantum state would constitute an experimental disproof of Quantum Mechanics — specifically, it would constitute a violation of Unitarity, and therefore a violation of the conservation of probability (which is one of the fundamental axioms of Quantum Mechanics), which in turn would lead to the violation of the Conservation of Energy — once again scrapping over 100 years of experimental and theoretical physics.
“Tachyons” are a dead concept outside of Star Trek(tm): They cannot be quantized consistently, they lead to violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and they lead to causal paradoxes such as “The Tachyonic Anti-Telephone” in which sending a signal causes one to not send that very same signal, while not sending the signal will cause one to send the signal that one didn’t send, etc., etc., etc. — it’s essentially the same problem as the “Can I Go Back In Time and Shoot My Grandfather before my Father was Conceived?” paradox. Virtually no physicist takes tachyons seriously any more; the word “tachyon” is now just a code word for “The Ground-State of the Theory is Unstable, meaning that the theory is either fatally diseased, or else must undergo some sort of spontaneous phase transition to a stable state that eliminates the unphysical tachyon state.”
I’m assuming an evil-butterfly or two stowed away. Or what if the sting also implanted LARVA in Patty?
Leading to a relatively(!) cuter-looking(?) variant on the “chest-burster” moment from Alien?
21.5 parsecs, or 21.5 DOZEN parsecs?
…I’m not actually sure how much of a difference it makes at that point.
A few years?
That would be 840 light years… I think IP wants that drive even more than before…
You know it’s bad when your worse-case-scenario joke falls flat on account of not being bad enough.
They were able to determine that they were in an alternate universe not only because Earth was different, but because certain astronomical objects, such as the Horsehead nebula, were also different. Since they are aware of those differences, they know what to look for to confirm what universe they are in.
Oh, yes. The “some other end of a horse” moment.
By the the way, if galactic drift was involved, then the Galaxion would (likely) have ended up the same distance from Earth as the Pathfinder did.
That “half” was just more salt on the wound. By the time the Galaxion returned to known space the ship would have at least held one generation, if not two. I think that is the scale by which the crew is faced with.
Then again I thought the Oort Cloud ringed our system much closer to the sun.
Andrew Crisper’s comment indicates they’ve got mildly-FTL capability. No idea if they’d run out of fuel or food before they’d make it back though.
… considering how I was thinking this was going to go, this isn’t nearly as bad. I was expecting them to have gone further than the Pathfinder, but I feared it may have been a correlation with time spent in the other dimension- meaning they could have been on the other side of the galaxy with how long they spent compared to the Pathfinder.
Glad that theory didn’t pan out at all, and it’s probably based on the energy efficiency, which makes a lot more sense. I mean, I knew it was a crazy notion, but it still taunted me.