July 4th, 2011 (04:39 am)
reminisce
In my previous post, where I was collecting data to remember) I noted a bit about light-speed while still being sub-light-speed...
I read a nice premise/treatise on this several years ago (before I met 
rowenablue is all I remember, so before January 2005... I may have still been with Miss Indiana at the time. I may have mentioned it in my journal, but all of the LJ backup tools fail when backing up my LJ and LJ support fails miserably when trying to find the problem in my journal, and the LJ admins say it's the lj backup tools faults (multiple tools, multiple faults), even though I've tried multiple tools and have received the same error. Basically there's a character encoding issue somewhere in my LJ, and the stupid backup programs will error. However, rather than just running the SQL necessary to change the character encoding on my all of the subject lines where USER=fyre and all of the body where USER=fyre and any other freeform line (music and mood), they say screw it. Honestly, I know you'll probably have to ask me not to touch my LJ for 24 hours or so while the SQL runs and DB changes propagate. *snort* Like that's going to be a problem. With 1 working computer that barely runs in the house right now, no problem. Since Joni was using it, I'm having to use a LiveCD on the laptop that's got yet another failed hard drive (I suspect it's the motherboard's IDE0 channel... 2nd time a MB has had this issue on this laptop). But no, they'd rather say fuckit and not do something that - in theory - should be rather simple.
Noooow.....
Onto the whole premise of this thing....
Basically the premise was that one could build a ship where the "crew" was a silicon or silica-based computer system (or possibly some other form of computer system for longer duration) designed to work in higher-level radiation and colder environments and designed for virtually unlimited life with power cells that charged in varied ways. The ship would be launched and the launch vehicle would drop off. The ship would rendezvous with a high-velocity long-duration vehicle that would already be pointed in the right direction. Using a long burn, the vehicle would get the ship (which is quite small) up to as close to light speed as it could manage (the premise called it "near-light speed"... I'll call it "as close as the technology could manage") over a period of a few years. The push vehicle would drop off, and the ship would continue on, deploying its power needs, and a very large antenna or three. After a check in, and update about what all data its collected, it would shut down except for a very small navigation system that would do little more than recognize the possibility of imminent (which could potentially means within a few million miles) collision and wake up the other systems. Then, every n cycles (or every x days, months, or years) the system would wake up, and report on its location and the data it's receiving.
Other options would be to keep low-resource, standby/power-bypass systems in place to gather data, or to have low-resource systems that powered up more often than the main systems to gather and store data, and then the main systems powered up to do whatever to the data and send it back.
Hopefully we'll have found a much better way or transmitting data by then. That was the only caveat, because technically, we could most likely do all of the above with today's technology. Although the burn to near-light speed would take probably a decade or more, and it would take us a very very long time to get data to and from the unit. Doing it now would be receive-only. Doing it in the future would depend on the communications technology of the time.
It was a very, very interesting premise. The entire thing stemmed from a premise - I _think_ - about time travel. We covered the basics of time travel in a paragraph or so, and then got into light speed and near-light speed as a means of time travel. After that, suspended animation as as means of time travel. Next, machine suspended animation at sub-E velocities. Obviously, the combination of machine-based suspended animation and near-E velocities would be a logical next step.
The NEXT step was interesting though. AI-based (computer, not human-like) suspened animation at sub-E and near-E velocities. Fortunately since most of the ground work had been laid previously, one we had gotten to talking about the suspended animation bit, we were able to concentrate on how that would affect things rather than how near-E time travel works. However, the differences between sub-E and near-E travel on suspended animation (whether human, machine, or AI) are interesting in the treatise. I was quite interested in the AI-based sub-E travel premise. The near-E wasn't bad either, but the sub-E was very interesting. Especially when I found an essay by another author expanding on it by using the premise that the AI had instructions to piece together the data it gathered during each "wake" cycle into a cogent, understandable stream. i.e. make it seem like this was the normal lifespan trip, as if it had been looking out the window idly the entire time, so to speak. The orig. author touched on this, but I don't recall if (s)he elaborated or not.
So... that's the gist. I really wish I could find that treatise again. It was mind opening. Something to read again and then expand my mind over.
