slight chance FTL communication could be possible.

Duck wrote:Then when you get to your destination everyone is dead because on the outside is took like 100 years for you to get there while you only experienced a fraction of that time.

Or you could take the Halo route and fold space in half and then pierce through it somehow.

Grey wrote:

Duck wrote:Then when you get to your destination everyone is dead because on the outside is took like 100 years for you to get there while you only experienced a fraction of that time.

Or you could take the Halo route and fold space in half and then pierce through it somehow.

Actually. In theory. Space and time run together like me and you through a patch of flowers. So when you screw with space, you do the same to time.

Spoiler:

Ante wrote:The part I'm worried about when it comes to FTL travel is hitting the tiniest piece of space debris with your ship and getting obliterated.

The Adli Corporation wrote:

Ante wrote:The part I'm worried about when it comes to FTL travel is hitting the tiniest piece of space debris with your ship and getting obliterated.

if you are bending space, the ship doesn't actually travel FTL itself (more like takes a whole ton of 'shortcuts' through the time-space continuum) so hitting space debris wouldn't obliterate the ship.

think of it like folded up paper, because it is folded a lot, the surface area is reduced greatly compared to a flat sheet, thus anything travelling over it will get from A to B much much faster without having to change speed.

Pariah wrote:This is pretty old stuff. The it's akin to the Ansible in Ender's Game. Which is interesting, but not world changing.

However, seeing as we as a race have managed to make a computer that can prove "2+3=5" by only using a couple molecules, I think we can do it.

Zillah wrote:Whats more likely to happen in the near future is the development of quantum computers. I read an interesting nytimes articl on it a couple weeks ago

"Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer."

interesting

Zillah wrote:Whats more likely to happen in the near future is the development of quantum computers. I read an interesting nytimes articl on it a couple weeks ago

"Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer."

interesting

Pariah wrote:

Zillah wrote:Whats more likely to happen in the near future is the development of quantum computers. I read an interesting nytimes articl on it a couple weeks ago

"Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer."

interesting

old news as well, and very problematic on its own.

the problem of the qubit is that it's very unstable, and unlike a bit will shift it's position independantly and spontaneously. this means that while it can exist for a while as 1/0, it quickly transforms to either 1 or 0.

And also, they're almost impossible to code for. ALL of computer linguistics is based on the idea of true/false (1/0). As soon as you add in true-false as a third condition, everything that we currently use goes out the window.

Chewy wrote:

I believe it would be machine level shit, most programmers wouldn't have to worry about it once it's established.

I'm still a little confused by it but it seems like it's a way to turn base 2 into base 3 from my current understanding, which is probably wrong. Not sure how that would work with data storage such as CD's and the likes, and HDD's.

Duck wrote:How exactly does using trinary make everything a trillion times faster?

Duck wrote:We don't exactly measure binary as something and not something though. If you wanted to you could declare 0 volts as 0, 2.5volts as 0/1 and 5 volts as 1. I guess that would be more of analog though.

Duck wrote:Not every device works on 0volts and then some positive number of volts. what's defined as one and zero changes between devices. On some devices 0 is represented by negative voltage, no voltage, or a voltage lower than high voltage.

Pariah wrote:looking around, quantum computers already exist. though they're nowhere near practicality.

a 32-qubit quantum processor can be compared to a traditional processor. the standard equivalent of the 32 qubit processor is about 10 teraflops.