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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

When you pray to the sun god it won't hear for 8 minutes, and then you need to wait for another 8 minutes for the response. Just basic physics. If it's an emergency the sun can't help you, better luck praying to the moon.

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This makes me think of a concept for a story: It’s the end of a dark age and science is becoming popular again. They’re in a constant battle between the religious forces but at least they have unity and political power of some kind for the first in known human history. However, they keep coming up with solutions to problems that seem to line up perfectly with the strange little details of religious superstition in a way that just doesn’t make any sense. Things exactly like “it takes 8 minutes for the sun god to hear you.” As the battle between the religious forces begins to get worse and worse, they realize the obvious conclusion: there used to be scientists that discovered all this before, but they all “died out.” In fact, this cycle has happened many many times over

A Canticle for Lebowitz has many of the themes you mentioned.

Huh seems kinda interesting

This is actually similar to the lore in Raised By Wolves — there's a war between the Mithraic (dominant religion on their planet) and the atheist faction, and the Mithraic are actually far more technologically advanced because their scriptures mysteriously contain precise instructions for wildly advanced technology. Of course that only makes the Mithraic more advanced in the few areas their scriptures happen to talk about, and far less advanced in other areas, because they don't understand the principles and so can't apply them elsewhere, and they don't even know how their own tech works really, so it's an interesting conflict. The whole show is extremely interesting — I really should finish it sometime.

> The whole show is extremely interesting — I really should finish it sometime.

Unfortunately, even the show won't be finishing the show. Every episode kept adding more "mysteries" and ending on increasingly ridiculous cliffhangers until it got cancelled without explaining anything.

It definitely had promise, but I'm disappointed in Ridley Scott for not putting together a coherent, self-contained narrative, and I'm a fan of all his previous works. I guess he (wrongly) gambled that if he left enough unanswered, they wouldn't dare cancel it.

> Every episode kept adding more "mysteries" and ending on increasingly ridiculous cliffhangers until it got cancelled without explaining anything.

While also getting more and more slow and labored. That's why I stopped, yeah. But I'm also a completionist.

Something similar happens in Larry Niven's "Footfall", though I won't say what to avoid spoilers.

In addition to the other comments, "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov also covers a similar topic, especially in the full-length novel (though I prefer the short story).

You mean, in your story religion is based on objective science, but people have forgotten the scientific reasons behind the beliefs?

Near-death experiencers almost always describe a bright light. The sun is a bright light. The math checks out. Sun is God.

Rookie move. My prayers with the sun are entangled.

Entanglement happens at the speed of light though.

Thow of little faith. But yeah, relevant discussion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-real-r...

that doesn't sound plausible?

Because the version of entanglement in general knowledge is a fantasy popularized by sci-fi.

High Frequency Theology

sun-moon carry trade is an old theorbitrageur trick, nothing new here.

Given current understanding of physics, which has evolved over time. My favorite idea is that to travel faster than light one could, theoretically, bring the other side closer and then "step over". Food for thought.

The only problem with the wormhole (Kerr metric) travel thing that scifi seems to ignore is that once you go in, the only theoretical path out is to traverse around the end of time and emerge through a white hole into a completely separate universe. So although you could theoretically enjoin information across vast, perhaps casually disconnected distances in a wormhole, you can't take the result back to your original origin. You became causally disconnected from your original universe as soon as you crossed the event horizon of the wormhole.

Could you create another wormhole to come back?

There’s no “through” a wormhole in the sense that you might immediately assume. The entrances are event horizons just as with a black hole; in fact it may be useful to think of a wormhole as more or less a black hole that appears in more than one place in the universe. To the extent that black holes and wormholes have an “exit” it would always be though another event horizon into another new causally disconnected space. As to if you could come “back” presumably no, or at least we lack the math to describe how going “through the looking glass” so to speak is anything other than a one way trip.

He won’t see for 8 minutes, he will never hear because the sound doesn’t travel through vacuum. Even if it did, it would take nearly 14 years:

> The speed of sound is 767 miles per hour, and that the distance to the Sun is 92,960,000 miles away. Divide 121,199.478 by 24 to get the number in days to the Sun. The answer is 5,049.98 Days to the Sun.

what if praying uses spooky action at a distance and isn't bound by the speed of light?

It still can't communicate information faster than light and the sun god can't know your prayers earlier than 8min after you made them

What if it's obvious ahead of time what the prayers will be? I know a thrown ball will return to the ground before it happens. So it can just "answer" them 8 minutes ahead of time.

Note that if this particular "theory" pans out to be true, any response will require a round-trip, thus making it more like 16 minutes to even matter. Any prayer during an emergency had best take that delay into account.

If the particles we are made of came from the sun, perhaps we are quantum entangled with it as well.

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