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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

I think - it was a very very long time ago when I read this - but a bad person can put someone into a stasis field without their consent. The stasis field is the shape of a perfect bubble or ball. IIRC it's also perfectly reflective. Anything inside the stasis field simply doesn't participate in time.

Once Bob puts Alice into statis, the stasis ball is impenetrable, so the cops don't know if Alice was alive or dead when she was involuntarily put into stasis.

However, they do know that the stasis bubble containing Alice will eventually open up and pop Alice back into the current time. And they know when that will happen. So, the state puts Bob (the guilty party) into stasis too; with Bob's stasis timed to end when Alice's ends.

In this way, both stasis fields pop at roughtly the same time, and Bob can be tried either for murder, or for whatever the name is when you transport someone into the future against their wishes.

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In Altered Carbon, criminal punishment was making that criminal "sleep" (well, destroying his body, keep his memory/conciousness and resleeve him later) for many decades, waking up at a time where he knows no one, and his knowledge was totally outdated. Putting someone into stasis for long would fit into that idea of punishment, and should be a crime by itself, who cares if your wife is alive or dead if she won't be there for the rest of your life anyway?

The bubbles in Vinge's story send people to a future they don't know, and that may be hostile or deserted (I think he wrote a sequel with that idea).

In Marooned in Spacetime we have a set of people who hoped for a better Tomorrow and some rich tourist types who wanted to see what happens in the future come out of stasis to find the Earth deserted. No war, no plague, no apocalypse, just fucked off.

They bubble forward a bit, just in case everyone took a timeout (maybe a toxin was released and there’s a cave full of bubbles waiting for the earth to repair, who knows), but only a few new people show up. Not even enough to repopulate the species. The weird thing is that your status is determined by where you left from not how rich you are. A powerful family skips forward and finds themselves lower status than a group of lower-upper class people with what amounts to top of the line camping gear, which is so much newer than the family’s gear that everything it can do it does better than theirs.

There’s one reclusive person who basically has a space ship. She has been away from humans so long she is barely human (relatable) anymore. She goes out to check other solar systems and finds nothing there either.

The implication is that either we gave up or we ascended somehow, but since they can only travel forward there’s no way to know. They missed the boat.

I think about this book really often, especially the 9,000 year old woman. Really amazing imagery.

> However, they do know that the stasis bubble containing Alice will eventually open up and pop Alice back into the current time.

In the first book, IIRC, they did not know that, and in fact believed the spheres would last forever.

The spheres were used like nukes, in a very indiscriminate way. Whole armies were sphered in a short time.

Many years after, when the first sphere popped, they realized a new way of time travel just opened.

Yes, I definitely remember that. Whole cities were carved out from the ground. And didn’t the bubbles also appear to be weightless? Or massless? And would float? I remember thinking at the time that they kinda reflect everything, including gravity, though the book probably had a better explanation that I don’t remember.

The bobbles retain their mass. There is a scene in the book where a bobble floats aways because it was created during the day, and at night the surrounding air cools enough for the bobble to effectively become a hot air balloon.

As far as I know, the book doesn't cover if the bobble retain their angular momentum or charge.

There's a vivid scene where they create a tiny bobble above a candle to catch the hot air.

I always wondered if creating a bobble around an off-center weight would allow you to kind of spin it by wobbling it.

There were some places where large pieces of land unbobbled without any relative movement, so maybe they were locked in their rotation somehow?

I really liked that book a lot.

> Whole armies were sphered in a short time.

Yes, till it got easy to make the bubbles. All you have to do to prevent being bubbled, was to carry a bubble. Doesn't prevent cutting you in half though, assuming they guessed the right half, so you might want to carry a few.

I still don’t get it. So in this fictional universe, has the legal system regressed to the point where kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades is no longer a crime with a life sentence?

Or alternatively, is the point that you can’t be punished for kidnapping if you might also have murdered the person, but that part can’t be proven? None of that makes sense.

> kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades

Presume Alice was 'kidnapped' in the ball for XX years. You trial Bob and sentence him for 20 years. 20 years passes, Bob serves his sentence and some time later it occurs what Alice were dead all these years, but Bob not only left the country but served his sentence.

Or you sentence Bob for the murder of Alice (even better - execute him), yet Alice is alive, though 20 years later.

Thing is, till the bubble pops you don't know for what exactly you should punish someone and hence - how hard and harsh.

It's a classical dilemma of bringing in/justice with the lack of means to prove anything.

There was a short story in a similar vein with a 'light retarded glass', ie glass what slowed the passage of light through it for times. It were essentially a CCTV/DVR with a years to retrieve 'the record'. The protagonist of the story waited for ~decades waiting to confirm if he sentenced the culprit rightfully for murder or he murdered innocent person with the state authority. Maybe someone would remember what was the name of this story.

What would be the difference between this futuristic case and: - Bob kidnapping Alice - Alice not being found - Bob's guilt of the kidnapping is proven in court

Bob could claim e.g. that she escaped after being kidnapped and he's no longer aware of where she is.

Alice's dead body can still be found at some point, which could prove that Bob killed Alice; or she can be found alive, but because of any reason did not want to be found.

Bob Shaw's 'slow glass': https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/slow_glass

This is not how double jeopardy works.

By all means, sentence Bob for kidnapping, stick him in jail, have him get out, put a tracker on him and forbid him to leave the country. Then, when Alice pops out and is dead, you just trial him again. It's a different crime! What's more, even if it was the same crime, it'd be material new information!

(Quoth the ECHR: "The provisions of the preceding paragraph shall not prevent the reopening of the case in accordance with the law and penal procedure of the State concerned, if there is evidence of new or newly discovered facts")

Thats great, but the ball pops and its not Alice there.

You jailed Bob for years for the crime he didn't commit. Are you happy?

If it's not Alice there, bubbling Bob was also an injustice.

Why regressed? You sure can trial them for either kidnapping or murder. But first do the same thing to them they did to the victim, and then you also know for what to trial them. Sounds fair and makes total sense to me.

No, Bob’s put into stasis until Alice is out of stasis, and then he is tried for the appropriate crime. I suppose you could say that the minimum sentence is losing the same amount of time that Alice lost with her loved ones.

There is also the interesting question, what if Alice was never in the bubble in the first place?

> So in this fictional universe, has the legal system regressed to the point where kidnapping someone for (presumably) decades is no longer a crime with a life sentence?

Vinge posits a technology that is used for good and bad purposes. One of the protagonists is a cop who is bobbled by a criminal and emerges in the distant future, when the Earth is essentially uninhabited except for a handful of humans who have been bobbled (electively or not).

>for whatever the name is

Involuntary time travel VS involuntary murder.

I’m curious how voluntary murder works

I think the legal term voluntary means the assailant willed the action taken. For example, first-degree murder involves forethought and a desire to see the victim dead. Involuntary murder or manslaughter covers accidents without malice.

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