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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Wait, who said the locals have "faster-than-light space travel"?

We only know that the visitors on the rocket-ship have it.

It could very well be that the visitors have a rocketship (ie. faster-than-light space travel) and "Photography" (since the next-in-command mentioned it), but the locals don't have either.

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I think the parent meant that the visitors think that a photograph can't be manipulated and is thus a perfect record. Today of course editing photos is commonplace.

But they are shown a painting which is pretty obviously just whatever the person creating it wanted it to be, nobody would ever accept it as a perfect record of reality. I don't understand how photography comes into things?

I'm not familiar with the story, but this is what I take from the comment above:

* captain arrives in FTL ship looking for evidence of a thing

* captain isn't satisfied with a painting offered as evidence, because it could be fake

* aide says that photography is unknown to the natives, implying that the production of a photograph would be taken by the captain as having more evidentiary value

=> captain knows about FTL but is unfamiliar with the technology required to produce false but convincing photographic images

Of course if it's a FTL ship photographs themselves can't really have any evidentiary value...

Well, even today that we know Photoshop, a photograph still has more evidentiary value than a painting (which has absolutely none), so there's that...

Ah, makes more sense. Of course, 'captain knows about FTL' is not necessarily a given, much like 'driver knows about internal combustion engine' for cars - he may just be pressing buttons randomly (cf. the Heechee series by Frederick Pohl[0]) for instance.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee

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