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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Everyone always talks about FTL travel for spacecraft, but there's also an interesting perspective from weapons side (and this a reason to be a bit careful and think about some ethics as we move along). A FTL kinetic weapon would be devastating. If it comes with a collapsing warp bubble then there's basically a gamma ray "gun" that travels right in front of your mass that is traveling at tremendous speeds. You look at impacts on the ISS and you can see how much damage a small object does[0]. This is also especially important when trying to develop such a device for travel as you'll probably be sending small objects before a spaceship, or rather a "bullet". Where that object ends up may be in serious danger.

Edit: And as others are pointing out, communication. There's a whole slew of technologies that could be improved/invented if you can move things/information FTL.

[0] https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Hyperveloci...

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If you can twist the mass of jupiter into a bubble and accelerate it to lightspeed, you probably already have the means to destroy an earth-like planet.

This is like a medieval person cautioning against the development of jet engines due to how fast they could make a catapult swing.

> the mass of jupiter ... means to destroy an earth-like planet.

What? That's a bit overkill, don't you think? I got a this pebble that'll do the job just fine.

If we're talking surprising applications of FTL, what about reducing latencies within CPUs?

This is a good one. The limits on the mass needed to construct the system are quite large, but perhaps you can get a weaker effect much more easily.

This would also be neat. And of course any information communication. While Ansibles[0] are typically used to verbally communicate with someone why not any information?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

That was sort of a primary plot point of the Ender's Game series.

I wouldn't say primary plot of Ender's Game. I'd say it was a higher focus in Speaker for the Dead. Still, the device is used in a lot of Sci-Fis. Card wasn't even the first to use the term Ansible, though he did use that exact word.

It was most definitely one of if not the most central plot point of the series. Not sure how far you got, but the entire series including the prequels is worth a read imho.

Dropped by to see what was up, only a drive-by downvote so let me explain since you didn't.

Its becomes clear by the end that the ansibles being used were creating philotic threads throughout the universe. So the very thing they had been using for FTL communication was building a huge network. This allowed them to not only save the trees by uploading them, it akso allowed Ender to be brought to no-space where he was able to subconsciously create young Peter and Valentine.

So, they ended up being central to the entire story.

You're welcome.

Here's why I believe you are being downvoted:

1. The original topic was about Ender's Game only, not the entire series, so you basically shifted the goalposts. 2. More importantly, I think you are using the wrong literary terminology and you and the others are talking over each other. Where you say "plot point" I believe you meant "plot device."

The Ansible is definitely the primary plot device that makes so much of the story and how it flows possible, but the ansible is not the point of the plot itself.

Throughout Ender's Game the plot point is reinforced that the rules of civilization will be broken when a credible threat shows itself. That is shown with the various physical conflicts Ender has with the other children at the individual level, it is shown with the tolerance the military has in order to shape Ender at the organizational level, and it is shown with the vilification of Ender so society at large does not have to grapple with just how badly it broke its own rules - so it can be done again if necessary for survival.

FWIW I explicitly said "Ender's Game series". I think you're also redefining "plot point" to just be "plot". A plot point is simply an event that impacts what happens next. The reveal of FTL data happens late in the book but it is definitely both a plot point and a plot device.

For the greater series though, it's basically the core concept of the story arc's plot.

Appreciated, I wasn't meaning to be rude, just love talking about this series in particular.

You don't even need FTL for that, just move quicker than your cpu!

I assume that in theory this would also work the other way around ... find a way to make your CPU move (spatially) a lot slower than you and perform millenias worth of computation in your coffeebreak.

"I will slow myself down relativistically and declare that the universe has sped up." seems like the equivalent of the mathematical joke of "I build the fence around myself and declare that I am outside it."

I highly approve.

Funnily enough, the writers of ST:TNG had this idea too. The main computer of the Enterprise-D was huge (9 decks tall) and generated a subspace field so that optical processing ran faster than light.

Star Trek's tech vision is astounding. How many things in it have actually been built? I count:

• Tablets (the padds)

• VR "holodecks"

• Computers that you can talk to and ask questions

• "Tricorders" (smartphones?)

• Turbolifts (https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-world...)

Maybe we'll get to add a warp drive to the list by the time I die.

What else?

The navigation was done by whales.

Communicators would be something like Bluetooth earpieces.

You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.

> You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.

In fairness, a tricorder would probably need to be a device capable of gathering data about quantum fields within an extremely local region of space and then analyzing based on known frames of reference and data models, so we're probably a ways off on that one.

The harder part of that challenge is building a device capable of analyzing quantum fields in the most abstract sense. But once that's done, even if it's in the form of a massive machine that can only analyze spacetime in a small chamber, even if that machine is rooms-big, the race to the first tricorder begins.

(I could be completely off-base with my comment on analyzing quantum fields. I'm not at all an expert.)

I literally bought a Bluetooth enabled TNG-style comm badge for my partner for Christmas.

TOS-style communicators are basically flip-phones with absurd range.

Given that WiFi signals can be used as wall-penetrating radars capable of pose, breathing, and pulse determination, that could be added without too much difficulty.

Likewise broad range IR and UV cameras (which I assume will become standard when phone manufacturers can no longer differentiate by zoom, just as they added zoom when everyone had enough megapixels).

Geiger counter would probably just upset people when they realise even organic bananas contain radioactive potassium, but could be done.

Carbon monoxide and other air quality sensors are fairly plausible IMO. Not sure how many you could put in a phone (zero? Just CO? Whole mass spectrometer?), but I can see the desire.

Make an atomic clock good enough and small enough, and you could detect temporal anomalies caused by the nearby football stadium filling up (no, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161)

My head-cannon is the small cylinder prop used in the medical tricorder is supposed to be a miniature MRI or CT scanner. I suspect either would be a mistake to add to a consumer product.

Is it so wrong? My phone can:

- Identify places and objects with the camera and give me data about them (Google Lens)

- Plot graphs of the local geomagnetic fields, my exact position on earth (the built in compass and GPS)

- Plot graphs of local radio traffic, signal strengths etc (wifi scanners)

- Control other devices

- Diagnose medical conditions

Smartphones can do a lot already just with the sensors they already have.

"Computers that you can talk to and ask questions"

Pity the answers are so often rubbish and the "side-effects" so obnoxious. ST (and most other SF) seems not to have predicted that.

"The Game" episode of TNG predicted addictive viral mobile games

Walking around with the sum total of human knowledge. That featured heavily in a lot of episodes where the ship carried around a library of everything and and could communicate back to the network on Earth for everything squared. Often problems were solved by database search algorithm.

And the VR Holodeck is spot on actually. I was having moments where I was questioning how much better the experience really would be with a matter-energy converter. It already works pretty well using stupid human perceptual tricks.

We used to have the sum total of human knowledge, or at least a good facsimile of it. Unfortunately, with the Internet as we know it transformed into a handful of walled gardens, finding detailed knowledge is increasingly difficult.

Wikipedia is excellent, as usual. But it is an encyclopaedia, not a definitive source of original knowledge, and it remains the case that I can browse my modest (physical) bookshelves and find a book on, say, Russian modern history that will give me far more in-depth information in the first ten pages than I can find online. Same applies for almost any genre, except perhaps fiction. Seven Years In Tibet taught me more about Tibetan geography and culture than any amount of Googling could do.

The idea of an infinite knowledge bank is appealing and I think the Internet could have made it - imagine a suite of applications that complement Wikipedia - but commercialism has ruined the utopia, as it is designed to do.

Technically, all the books are online now thanks to Google's book scanning programme and Kindle. You might have to buy it to see the pages but that's OK. Of course Star Trek didn't have money, so ...

If you ever try to follow what a holodeck can and can't do, you easily see that few of our technology predictions can even hold a candle to it. There's some finger-waggling in-universe to explain away the discrepancy, but the ‘fact’ is that a holodeck would create matter with which you can interact, out of thin air, and expand this volume of matter seemingly for kilometers around, while purportedly being located in a room. VR is but a feeble emulation of holodeck's glory.

In fact, if you consider the in-universe explanation of ‘holodeck creates fake matter that can't actually exist and function outside of the holodeck’, then things may possibly be even more impressive. So, presumably people discovered some kind of a different matter, with which we could interact, but which exists only temporarily on the holodeck thing. Since it flips in and out of existence when the holodeck activates or deactivates, it sounds like some kind of energy that masquerades and works as matter. But how much regular energy would you need to expend to hold this matter-energy in place and make it work? All discussion of teleportation and ‘transporter’ devices comes to conclusions that disassembling and assembling human-scale objects would require huge amounts of energy, like on levels of Kardashev Type II. But a holodeck pretty much does about the same kind of thing continuously, all the time while it's in use. Imagine, at the vague minimum, running a present-day country's worth of energy supply to power your VR box.

Yes I know how the holodeck was hypothesised to work, but the actual goal of the deck was VR entertainment and we have that.

Interestingly, most of those ideas were far earlier than ST:TNG was. Roddenberry had written a lot of them down based on 1960s science fiction during the time he was working on the original series.

He wanted to do the holodeck already back then, but there was no way to do it reasonably convincingly given the technology of the time.

There's at least three sci-fi universes I know of that used ubiquitous nanoscale wormholes to speed up their processors.

If you are willing to assume CTC: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html

There's more than one way for the Fourth World War to be fought with stones.

FTL Sneakernet would be cool!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

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