As much as I would like to take credit for it, Prime Universe is not a term I made up. There is almost 45,000 search results in Google for "star trek" +"prime universe". It was likely used to distinguish the main universe from the Mirror Universe. Prime Timeline was only created as a result of Star Trek 2009.
The Prime Universe is a physical location while the Prime Timeline is the sequence of events that were shown in the Star Trek series. Changing the events in a timeline creates a new timeline. However, minor changes to the events might cause the new timeline to reintegrate with the original timeline. So stealing a whale and giving Transparent Aluminum in the 1980s might cause the new timeline to reintegrate with the old timeline while killing 7 million humans would create a new timeline due to the number of differences between having those 7 million people exist and having those 7 million people cease to exist. So the Borg assimilating Earth in the 21st Century or having the USA stay out of World War II would still be in the Prime Universe, but a different timeline since they would create a sequence of events vastly different from the original timeline.
Ah, so it's a meaningless term other people made up you use after an appeal to popularity. That changes my point so much.
So.. Prime Timeline is an actual term that means all the Trek that's not in the timeline were the Kelvin was destroyed (but also used for the main timeline excluding alternate timelines/universes like AGT or Mirror Universe) and Prime Universe is a term made up by persons anonymous.
You're correct that there should be no singular timeline but you don't follow it to its logical conclusion. Warp Drive is a time warp drive as established in The Cage therefore, every single time someone across the galaxy uses warp a new timeline is created as it's time travel. So even singular episodes can't be said to be in the same timeline as their beginning and end are altered as soon as they travel in time.
Not enough? FtL communication? Time Travel. More timelines every time a space phone is used.
Might have been the case with The Cage, but interstellar communication and travel for most of the other episodes of Star Trek is based around subspace. So the USS Enterprise might have created a new timeline every time it used its time warp drive until it was changed back to a standard warp drive. Although there are ways to mess around with time that deals with our perception of time and not changing the past like Voyager's A Blink of an Eye where an alien world experiences thousands of years in just a few days.
When was it established the warp drive in The Cage was not a standard warp drive?
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
It wasn't; there was one excited exclamation from a young lieutenant to one of what they thought were survivors of the Columbia that "we've finally broken the time barrier!", and Pike's order to proceed to Talos IV at "time warp, factor seven", but both of those can be attributed to the fact that this was just a pilot episode - and a failed pilot, at that.
It wasn't; there was one excited exclamation from a young lieutenant to one of what they thought were survivors of the Columbia that "we've finally broken the time barrier!", and Pike's order to proceed to Talos IV at "time warp, factor seven", but both of those can be attributed to the fact that this was just a pilot episode - and a failed pilot, at that.
Dubious canon still trumps starkaos' headcanon.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
It wasn't; there was one excited exclamation from a young lieutenant to one of what they thought were survivors of the Columbia that "we've finally broken the time barrier!", and Pike's order to proceed to Talos IV at "time warp, factor seven", but both of those can be attributed to the fact that this was just a pilot episode - and a failed pilot, at that.
Those same lines were reused in Menagerie, which was played halfway into the first season.
It wasn't; there was one excited exclamation from a young lieutenant to one of what they thought were survivors of the Columbia that "we've finally broken the time barrier!", and Pike's order to proceed to Talos IV at "time warp, factor seven", but both of those can be attributed to the fact that this was just a pilot episode - and a failed pilot, at that.
Dubious canon still trumps starkaos' headcanon.
starkaos' headcanon trumps artan42's headcanon and dubious canon. It is one of the fundamental laws of the multiverse.
It wasn't; there was one excited exclamation from a young lieutenant to one of what they thought were survivors of the Columbia that "we've finally broken the time barrier!", and Pike's order to proceed to Talos IV at "time warp, factor seven", but both of those can be attributed to the fact that this was just a pilot episode - and a failed pilot, at that.
Dubious canon still trumps starkaos' headcanon.
starkaos' headcanon trumps artan42's headcanon and dubious canon. It is one of the fundamental laws of the multiverse.
Your multiverse just got wiped out by some timetravel.
You just got retconned.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
I'm trying to imagine how this could be more stereotypical of this fanbase than two Trekkies arguing about their own head canon...
They need to be slinging insults in rihannsu or th'lingan-Hol, between puffs from their inhalers, in nasal voices while their mothers tell them to quiet down.
THEN it would fit the stereotype as seen by Hollywood.
> @patrickngo said: > They need to be slinging insults in rihannsu or th'lingan-Hol, between puffs from their inhalers, in nasal voices while their mothers tell them to quiet down. > > THEN it would fit the stereotype as seen by Hollywood.
It's Rihan, you barbarian, Rihannsu is the species. #hypocriticalhumor
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
I'm trying to imagine how this could be more stereotypical of this fanbase than two Trekkies arguing about their own head canon...
They need to be slinging insults in rihannsu or th'lingan-Hol, between puffs from their inhalers, in nasal voices while their mothers tell them to quiet down.
THEN it would fit the stereotype as seen by Hollywood.
Point taken.
petaQ!
I'd challenge you to a duel but me mam took my mek'leth away for scaring the cat.
...
Movek .
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
As much as I would like to take credit for it, Prime Universe is not a term I made up. There is almost 45,000 search results in Google for "star trek" +"prime universe". It was likely used to distinguish the main universe from the Mirror Universe. Prime Timeline was only created as a result of Star Trek 2009.
The Prime Universe is a physical location while the Prime Timeline is the sequence of events that were shown in the Star Trek series. Changing the events in a timeline creates a new timeline. However, minor changes to the events might cause the new timeline to reintegrate with the original timeline. So stealing a whale and giving Transparent Aluminum in the 1980s might cause the new timeline to reintegrate with the old timeline while killing 7 million humans would create a new timeline due to the number of differences between having those 7 million people exist and having those 7 million people cease to exist. So the Borg assimilating Earth in the 21st Century or having the USA stay out of World War II would still be in the Prime Universe, but a different timeline since they would create a sequence of events vastly different from the original timeline.
Ah, so it's a meaningless term other people made up you use after an appeal to popularity. That changes my point so much.
So.. Prime Timeline is an actual term that means all the Trek that's not in the timeline were the Kelvin was destroyed (but also used for the main timeline excluding alternate timelines/universes like AGT or Mirror Universe) and Prime Universe is a term made up by persons anonymous.
You're correct that there should be no singular timeline but you don't follow it to its logical conclusion. Warp Drive is a time warp drive as established in The Cage therefore, every single time someone across the galaxy uses warp a new timeline is created as it's time travel. So even singular episodes can't be said to be in the same timeline as their beginning and end are altered as soon as they travel in time.
Not enough? FtL communication? Time Travel. More timelines every time a space phone is used.
Might have been the case with The Cage, but interstellar communication and travel for most of the other episodes of Star Trek is based around subspace. So the USS Enterprise might have created a new timeline every time it used its time warp drive until it was changed back to a standard warp drive. Although there are ways to mess around with time that deals with our perception of time and not changing the past like Voyager's A Blink of an Eye where an alien world experiences thousands of years in just a few days.
When was it established the warp drive in The Cage was not a standard warp drive?
An interesting thing about this... "Time Warp Drive" - I wonder if the name was originally chosen for a good reason.
The problem with FTL is that once you have it, you can break causality. If you got an object moving at relativistic speeds, with FTL travel you can find a way to send a signal and get a response before you send the signal. MAybe they realized FTL wasn't just a problem because it was about some cosmic speed limit or you needed too much (infinite) energy - maybe whoever came up with the name also realized that breaking causality would be a big issue and required its own trick. And thought "warping time" somehow might do it.
If you're not familiar with why any form of FTL - and really, any - causes problem.
At relativistic speeds, you experience time dilation. That means if you look at someone at speed, you find that his clocks are ticking slower than your own. When 10 hours have passed for you, the other guy might have only had 5 hours. Now, if you spend 10 hours watching someone move at this speed and then stop, you would need also 10 hours at that speed to catch up to him. But what's important - everything is relative. If someone is moving at relativistic speed relative to you, you are also moving at relativistic speed towards him. So when he's looking at you, he's also seeing your clocks ticking slower. If you stay at the speed of light below however, the signal will always travel longer than the time difference you detected at the time of sending the signal. SO you can't send a signal from Hour 10 to Hour 5, because the signal will be en route too long for that.
But if you send a signal faster than the speed of light, it might travel only 1 hour, for example. And then your signal at your Level 10 would logically reach the target when you saw it at Hour 6. But at Hour 6, he also only saw you at around Hour 3. if he now sends a signal that also only needs to travel an hour, it will arrive at your Hour 4! So if you run out of toilet paper at Hour 10, you could send the guy a message to remind you to replicate some toilet paper, and you'd hear about needing to replicate toilet paper before you even went to the toilet. That might seem convenient, but a world with broken causality is ... weird. If not outright nonsensical. And all we tried to do was build a damn warp engine, we didn't actually want to travel through time.
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The logical error here is the assumption that the Minkowski diagram applies. However, Minkowski assumes that all of this takes place in a single Einsteinian plenum, while much Treknobabble implies that while ships (and their signals) are in an FTL state they are in fact transiting a separate, non-Einsteinian subspace (with, presumably, a "bubble" of Einsteinian space around the craft in order to ensure that the crew can survive).
Incidentally, that's also why Alcubierre-White warp theory doesn't violate causality - while the craft is in transit, it's causally separated from the rest of the universe.
The logical error here is the assumption that the Minkowski diagram applies. However, Minkowski assumes that all of this takes place in a single Einsteinian plenum, while much Treknobabble implies that while ships (and their signals) are in an FTL state they are in fact transiting a separate, non-Einsteinian subspace (with, presumably, a "bubble" of Einsteinian space around the craft in order to ensure that the crew can survive).
Incidentally, that's also why Alcubierre-White warp theory doesn't violate causality - while the craft is in transit, it's causally separated from the rest of the universe.
I am afraid that doesn't really help, unless I miss something. The important aspect in my example was that you can send a signal at FTL speed. The two ships observing each other don't need to fly at superluminal speed, just relativistic speeds so they experience time dilation. Any trick you use to send a signal at FTL will cause the same problem. So if the two relativistic ships send an Alcubierre-White drive powered courier between each other (disengaging the drive at the partner ship, transmitting the message, and then heading back, disengaging the drive at the first ship and transmitting the response), he could still end up arriving before he left.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Using your example, if you send a signal at your Hour 6, it may arrive at the same time as the light cone of your Hour 4, but in fact it's now Hour 6+ in your frame of reference. You're privileging the transmission of information in the Einsteinian plenum over that in the subspace plenum, assuming that the light cone of your information is intimately related to the superluminal cone of your information, even though they are essentially propagating through two separate universes. What time it looks to your observer like you're experiencing is not necessarily related to what time you are experiencing. (Minkowski's work assumed that your FTL craft occupied the same plenum as your non-FTL observers, so the light cone of information mattered. In the case of warp theory, however, both Trek and Alcubierre-White, the difference between the light cone and the superluminal cone is no more important than the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound in an atmosphere - they propagate through different media.)
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
And this is why I will never debate FTL physics or anything like that with jonsills.
As a sci fi fan I am familiar with various types of FTL drives, which include...
Star Trek's Warp Drive
Star Wars' Hyperdrive
Wing Commander's Jump Drive
Babylon 5's Hyperspace (but TECHNICALLY they aren't actually going FTL because they use their sublight engines IN hyperspace. Hyperspace just allows them to cover interstellar distances at sublight)
Halo's Slipspace Drive (ok not as much)
Battletech's Jump Drive (limited range, long recharge, and chance some people will actually get physically sick from being thrown to another system instantly. Gotta love Jumpshock)
Battlestar Galactica's FTL (seems to be similar to Battletech Jump Drive but without some of the negatives)
Stargate's Hyperdrive (although the Stargate itself can be considered an FTL device I guess)
But I can not in any way beat jonsills in the science behind them.
Using your example, if you send a signal at your Hour 6, it may arrive at the same time as the light cone of your Hour 4, but in fact it's now Hour 6+ in your frame of reference. You're privileging the transmission of information in the Einsteinian plenum over that in the subspace plenum, assuming that the light cone of your information is intimately related to the superluminal cone of your information, even though they are essentially propagating through two separate universes. What time it looks to your observer like you're experiencing is not necessarily related to what time you are experiencing. (Minkowski's work assumed that your FTL craft occupied the same plenum as your non-FTL observers, so the light cone of information mattered. In the case of warp theory, however, both Trek and Alcubierre-White, the difference between the light cone and the superluminal cone is no more important than the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound in an atmosphere - they propagate through different media.)
Let's assume that the other ship is travelling away from me at relativistic speed and I can read its clocks. Before the ship started its movement, we synchronized clocks.
Let's say at 10h, I see the clock on the other ship is now showing 5h. I send my FTL signal. It will reach the other ship within an hour, given the speed I know the signal is travelling and the speed I know the other ship is travelling.
So, what time would the clock on the other ship show when the signal arrives? (Assuming this information is transported back conventionally, without involving FTL.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
And until we create a FTL Drive, we won't know what effect it will have on the rest of the universe. For all we know, future exploration could be based around interdimensional travel like The Long Earth series rather than interstellar travel. It would be easier to travel to parallel Earths where humans never existed compared to travelling a distant star.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
No... I'm pretty sure interstellar would be easier, because at least we'd know how to get BACK home. Interdimensional would probably require MORE power, and no guarantee that it isn't one way or just straight up random like in Sliders.
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
The technology in Sliders wasn't random. The timer was damaged in the first episode so any data on how to get back to their Earth was corrupted. So it is possible that the original timer could have been used to go to any dimension that they previously visited. Quinn traveled to a parallel Earth that had Elvis still alive, global cooling, and Americans trying to cross the border into Mexico and came back to what we assume to be his original Earth. The next parallel Earth was with the Slider crew and their first interdimensional jump was to an Ice Planet that caused the timer to be damaged. So there is no way to know if the timer was originally random or its lost its freedom until later in the series when they had their timer replaced and upgraded with being able to go to locations they have already visited or know the coordinates.
If an interstellar ship loses its navigation data, then they have no way to get back especially if it uses some weird FTL system that doesn't rely on go in this direction for this amount of lightyears until you reach the Solar System. However it is much easier to find a survivable parallel Earth than it is to find a survivable exosolar planet.
As far as the energy requirements are concerned, interdimensional travel requires less distance to travel. So would travelling thousands of lightyears at thousands of times the speed of light be cheaper than jumping to a parallel universe that is only 1 meter away? Considering that we have know way to know how to do either, then there is no way to judge which uses more power.
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,585Community Moderator
As jonsills said... we have PROOF other stars and planets exist. We do NOT have proof that alternate realities exist.
You actually can travel to other stars now, its just not practical at sublight speeds, let alone our current technology.
As far as the energy requirements are concerned, interdimensional travel requires less distance to travel. So would travelling thousands of lightyears at thousands of times the speed of light be cheaper than jumping to a parallel universe that is only 1 meter away? Considering that we have know way to know how to do either, then there is no way to judge which uses more power.
PHYSICAL distance maybe, but we are talking about crossing a barrier, and not only that, depending on the method of travel, generating a rift or something on the other side without anything to act as a reciever. It would be like making our own stargate, then having it generate a wormhole to another location WITHOUT a corresponding stargate to recieve it.
So frankly I don't buy the "less distance to travel" bit on interdimensional travel. Its still going to take a lot of power to do it, especially if we gotta basically rip the universe a new one ON TWO SIDES.
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
Well, if you want to go that route, what proof do you have that anything exists, and that this isn't just some sort of hallucination your lonely, sad mind dreamed up to avoid confronting the fact that you're the only thing in the entire Universe?
At some point, we have to accept that our senses are reporting to us at least a semblance of an external reality, or nothing can be concluded at all. However, there is no evidence, either sensory or circumstantial, that there are alternate universes. It's a fun idea, and personally I kind of hope that one day it can be demonstrated and we can conduct trade across dimensional barriers (as in Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", where Our Hero lives in a world that imported staplers and zippers from the first alternative they discovered), but it hardly makes sense at this point to abandon deep-space travel in the hope that other universes exist and that transiting between them would be easier than crossing interstellar gulfs.
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
Well, if you want to go that route, what proof do you have that anything exists, and that this isn't just some sort of hallucination your lonely, sad mind dreamed up to avoid confronting the fact that you're the only thing in the entire Universe?
At some point, we have to accept that our senses are reporting to us at least a semblance of an external reality, or nothing can be concluded at all.
For some reason, I'm reminded of Schrodinger's Cat.
In-universe, the Enterprise is presumably the same size it's always been. They simply scaled it up (or scaled Discovery down) so that the former wouldn't be dwarfed by the latter in that one shot.
It's like how the Defiant was scaled down in "The Maquis" to better represent it being protected by a Galor-class cruiser, or how the Klingon bird-of-prey varied from 50m corvettes to 700m cruisers depending on what it was doing. It's just visual flair, not meant to be the literal canon truth.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them." -Thomas Marrone
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
Well, if you want to go that route, what proof do you have that anything exists, and that this isn't just some sort of hallucination your lonely, sad mind dreamed up to avoid confronting the fact that you're the only thing in the entire Universe?
At some point, we have to accept that our senses are reporting to us at least a semblance of an external reality, or nothing can be concluded at all. However, there is no evidence, either sensory or circumstantial, that there are alternate universes. It's a fun idea, and personally I kind of hope that one day it can be demonstrated and we can conduct trade across dimensional barriers (as in Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", where Our Hero lives in a world that imported staplers and zippers from the first alternative they discovered), but it hardly makes sense at this point to abandon deep-space travel in the hope that other universes exist and that transiting between them would be easier than crossing interstellar gulfs.
We might all be npcs in an extremely advanced MMO for all we know. It seems to be getting to the point where npcs are getting more and more advanced until they might actually believe they exist instead of just being code.
In order for an interstellar civilization to exist, we need to discover FTL transportation and/or communication. To create a civilization that is on thousands or millions of planets requires the next Einstein to show us how to create a FTL or interdimensional device. Otherwise, it is just different civilizations that originated from Earth with the only interaction through EM signals or anyone making the sublight journey that takes hundreds or thousands of years. Although, I would be curious to see how the Earth would turn out based on different choices being made, it would certainly be safer if we are the only universe with humans.
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
Well, if you want to go that route, what proof do you have that anything exists, and that this isn't just some sort of hallucination your lonely, sad mind dreamed up to avoid confronting the fact that you're the only thing in the entire Universe?
At some point, we have to accept that our senses are reporting to us at least a semblance of an external reality, or nothing can be concluded at all. However, there is no evidence, either sensory or circumstantial, that there are alternate universes. It's a fun idea, and personally I kind of hope that one day it can be demonstrated and we can conduct trade across dimensional barriers (as in Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", where Our Hero lives in a world that imported staplers and zippers from the first alternative they discovered), but it hardly makes sense at this point to abandon deep-space travel in the hope that other universes exist and that transiting between them would be easier than crossing interstellar gulfs.
Perhaps the most annoying side-effect of the popularity of "The Matrix" (the Keanu Reeves movie which proved that even the most outrageously nonsensical story can still be a smash hit if it's stylish enough) was the sudden appearance of teenaged pop culture-spawned pseudo-philosophers across the country, many of whom seem to believe that this film actually makes us ask serious philosophical questions. Some would even argue that it has thrown our conception of knowledge and reality itself into serious doubt.
"Are we in a Matrix-style simulation? How can you know?" asks the newly minted pseudo-philosopher.
Leaving aside the obvious "get a life" jabs and the falsehood of the film's originality (VR, or virtual-reality worlds have been a staple of sci-fi and philosophy 101 for decades), the major problem with this idea is its sheer irrationality. It draws upon certain aspects of solipsism (an extreme form of skepticism, bordering on philosophical über-egotism, in which you do not acknowledge the existence of objects outside your own thoughts because their existence can't be absolutely proven; click here for an online article about solipsism) in order to argue that we might be living in a giant virtual-reality simulation.
The people who promote this point-of-view point triumphantly to the fact that it cannot be absolutely, irrefutably disproven. However, this argument hinges upon the assumption that if something cannot be absolutely, irrefutably disproven, then it is actually a reasonable theory. It is an understatement to say that this is false, because nothing can be absolutely, irrefutably disproven. One might as well ask if we actually a bunch of talking fleas living in Santa Claus' pants and deluding ourselves into thinking we're human.
OK, so how does Occam's Razor relate to this? If I may skip the little equation table to cut to the quick, it's yet another example of a term which cannot be evaluated. What side-effects would this simulation have? We don't know. What characteristics could we test for? We don't know. What we do know is that this giant VR simulation is a term which is not only undefined and therefore incapable of explaining anything, but is also completely unnecessary in order to explain anything, so the theory is irrational. This is the purest essence of the logical principle of parsimony, or Occam's Razor: to show what's wrong with a theory that technically cannot be disproven.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
When was it established the warp drive in The Cage was not a standard warp drive?
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Dubious canon still trumps starkaos' headcanon.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Those same lines were reused in Menagerie, which was played halfway into the first season.
starkaos' headcanon trumps artan42's headcanon and dubious canon. It is one of the fundamental laws of the multiverse.
Your multiverse just got wiped out by some timetravel.
You just got retconned.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
Point taken.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
> They need to be slinging insults in rihannsu or th'lingan-Hol, between puffs from their inhalers, in nasal voices while their mothers tell them to quiet down.
>
> THEN it would fit the stereotype as seen by Hollywood.
It's Rihan, you barbarian, Rihannsu is the species. #hypocriticalhumor
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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Owned. Good one Starsword.
petaQ!
I'd challenge you to a duel but me mam took my mek'leth away for scaring the cat.
...
Movek
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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An interesting thing about this... "Time Warp Drive" - I wonder if the name was originally chosen for a good reason.
The problem with FTL is that once you have it, you can break causality. If you got an object moving at relativistic speeds, with FTL travel you can find a way to send a signal and get a response before you send the signal. MAybe they realized FTL wasn't just a problem because it was about some cosmic speed limit or you needed too much (infinite) energy - maybe whoever came up with the name also realized that breaking causality would be a big issue and required its own trick. And thought "warping time" somehow might do it.
If you're not familiar with why any form of FTL - and really, any - causes problem.
At relativistic speeds, you experience time dilation. That means if you look at someone at speed, you find that his clocks are ticking slower than your own. When 10 hours have passed for you, the other guy might have only had 5 hours. Now, if you spend 10 hours watching someone move at this speed and then stop, you would need also 10 hours at that speed to catch up to him. But what's important - everything is relative. If someone is moving at relativistic speed relative to you, you are also moving at relativistic speed towards him. So when he's looking at you, he's also seeing your clocks ticking slower. If you stay at the speed of light below however, the signal will always travel longer than the time difference you detected at the time of sending the signal. SO you can't send a signal from Hour 10 to Hour 5, because the signal will be en route too long for that.
But if you send a signal faster than the speed of light, it might travel only 1 hour, for example. And then your signal at your Level 10 would logically reach the target when you saw it at Hour 6. But at Hour 6, he also only saw you at around Hour 3. if he now sends a signal that also only needs to travel an hour, it will arrive at your Hour 4! So if you run out of toilet paper at Hour 10, you could send the guy a message to remind you to replicate some toilet paper, and you'd hear about needing to replicate toilet paper before you even went to the toilet. That might seem convenient, but a world with broken causality is ... weird. If not outright nonsensical. And all we tried to do was build a damn warp engine, we didn't actually want to travel through time.
Incidentally, that's also why Alcubierre-White warp theory doesn't violate causality - while the craft is in transit, it's causally separated from the rest of the universe.
And this is why I will never debate FTL physics or anything like that with jonsills.
As a sci fi fan I am familiar with various types of FTL drives, which include...
But I can not in any way beat jonsills in the science behind them.
Let's say at 10h, I see the clock on the other ship is now showing 5h. I send my FTL signal. It will reach the other ship within an hour, given the speed I know the signal is travelling and the speed I know the other ship is travelling.
So, what time would the clock on the other ship show when the signal arrives? (Assuming this information is transported back conventionally, without involving FTL.)
The existence of multiple universes, however, is hypothetical at best. Even the "quantum multiverse" idea (the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics) isn't exactly a widely-supported view.
If an interstellar ship loses its navigation data, then they have no way to get back especially if it uses some weird FTL system that doesn't rely on go in this direction for this amount of lightyears until you reach the Solar System. However it is much easier to find a survivable parallel Earth than it is to find a survivable exosolar planet.
As far as the energy requirements are concerned, interdimensional travel requires less distance to travel. So would travelling thousands of lightyears at thousands of times the speed of light be cheaper than jumping to a parallel universe that is only 1 meter away? Considering that we have know way to know how to do either, then there is no way to judge which uses more power.
Are you certain that they exist and we are not inside a sphere that is 1 lightyear in diameter that has its inner shell full of monitors that displays the various stellar phenomena that we experience? Just because we can see something doesn't mean it exists. All we can prove is that the various planets in our Solar System exist not that any other Star System exists until we visit them.
You actually can travel to other stars now, its just not practical at sublight speeds, let alone our current technology.
PHYSICAL distance maybe, but we are talking about crossing a barrier, and not only that, depending on the method of travel, generating a rift or something on the other side without anything to act as a reciever. It would be like making our own stargate, then having it generate a wormhole to another location WITHOUT a corresponding stargate to recieve it.
So frankly I don't buy the "less distance to travel" bit on interdimensional travel. Its still going to take a lot of power to do it, especially if we gotta basically rip the universe a new one ON TWO SIDES.
At some point, we have to accept that our senses are reporting to us at least a semblance of an external reality, or nothing can be concluded at all. However, there is no evidence, either sensory or circumstantial, that there are alternate universes. It's a fun idea, and personally I kind of hope that one day it can be demonstrated and we can conduct trade across dimensional barriers (as in Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", where Our Hero lives in a world that imported staplers and zippers from the first alternative they discovered), but it hardly makes sense at this point to abandon deep-space travel in the hope that other universes exist and that transiting between them would be easier than crossing interstellar gulfs.
For some reason, I'm reminded of Schrodinger's Cat.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
It's like how the Defiant was scaled down in "The Maquis" to better represent it being protected by a Galor-class cruiser, or how the Klingon bird-of-prey varied from 50m corvettes to 700m cruisers depending on what it was doing. It's just visual flair, not meant to be the literal canon truth.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
We might all be npcs in an extremely advanced MMO for all we know. It seems to be getting to the point where npcs are getting more and more advanced until they might actually believe they exist instead of just being code.
In order for an interstellar civilization to exist, we need to discover FTL transportation and/or communication. To create a civilization that is on thousands or millions of planets requires the next Einstein to show us how to create a FTL or interdimensional device. Otherwise, it is just different civilizations that originated from Earth with the only interaction through EM signals or anyone making the sublight journey that takes hundreds or thousands of years. Although, I would be curious to see how the Earth would turn out based on different choices being made, it would certainly be safer if we are the only universe with humans.
In fact, this is actual meaning of Occam's razor. "Do not unnecessarily multiply terms."
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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