
Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? - D_Guidi
https://backchannel.com/i-had-one-night-to-invent-interstellar-travel-b2466882ef5c#.ie10oyemi
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xenophonf
This is a duplicate of Wolfram's original blog post:

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-
the-a...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-
spacecraft-work/)

The previous discussion (about two months ago):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364)

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ansible
The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in
terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3
civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.

The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't
so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling"
from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that
means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular
nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in
(compute on) at the destination.

I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical
is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter /
energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit
around the universe faster than light.

~~~
jeff_petersen
> The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and
> aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness,
> "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical
> method.

Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in
a "place" is probably completely unimportant.

There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to
want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every
possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.

~~~
jbpetersen
Once you've maxed out your abilities with the resources available in one
place, then you'd probably start specializing for different abilities in
different places to the extent you can gain additional value through
comparative advantage. With that in mind sharing the unique results of the
different specializations means location is still important in the absence of
instantaneous communication over arbitrary distance.

P.S. Your name seems strangely familiar. /s

~~~
jeff_petersen
I'm the evolved-into-a-software-being version of you, of course

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dghughes
It always seems to involve mastering gravity yet gravity is so incredibly weak
compared to magnetism. Plus "alien spacecraft" aka UFOs always seem to output
a huge amount of light so maybe gravity and light are linked in the process or
mechanism for whatever makes the thing operate.

I like the article how it mentions getting the science believable or at least
not terrible wrong. But what I dislike as much as that is whenever the science
parts are dismissed. Usually a scientist in a movie or TV show tries to
explain something the lead character rolls their eyes as if it were boring
everyone laughs.

How can we encourage kids that science is interesting if it's treated as a
bore or a joke and ridiculed? I know it's meant as a writing method to make
the lead person seem dumb compared to the smart scientist but it sends a bad
message that science is boring.

~~~
jandrese
Using gravity as a propulsive force may be silly given its relative strength,
but having a way of blocking gravity would make a tremendous difference in
getting out of our gravity well. It's not so much help for achieving orbit,
but if you want to go beyond the Earth or even beyond the Solar System it
would be a whole new game.

~~~
avar
If you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn
of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in
orbit.

Similarly with going outside the solar system, you could just jump on the
planet Earth and press the "anti-grav" button, and in a few hundred thousand
years you'd be outside the solar system.

~~~
jws
I think you can dispense with the "jump". Just press the "gravity off" switch
at midnight. You will be on the far side of the earth from the sun, as the
earth is pulled to the sun in its orbit, you will drift away on a tangent line
at 30km/s relative to the sun.

Google says "9 billion miles divided by 30km/s" is a little over 15 years and
you are out of the solar system.

(I'm ignoring the milky way here, The sun is whizzing around the milky way at
230km/s, but it isn't very near the center so the "chord near the center is
simplified to radius" which I snuck by you in the previous paragraph isn't
valid. But you should definitely work this out before flicking the switch.
Depending on the relative gravity/velocity magnitudes and the time of year,
you could drive yourself through the sun on your way out of the solar system,
which voids your warrantee.)

~~~
avar
Thanks, I didn't do any of the math, but I should have remembered better from
this counteractive fact: You're already at 30km/s, it takes more energy to
fall into the Sun than escape the Solar System.

Even if you press the "gravity off" button at some random time during the day
the odds of you hitting anything are _tiny_ , even if you fly towards the sun
most of the time you'll just fly right past it and be no worse off. Except for
the part where there's no oxygen and you can't breathe of course.

~~~
spynxic
"gravity off" is a lofty term to toss around so freely. Consider an
omnipresent force or curvature vanishing one spot. I can't imagine gravity but
the effects in an ocean would obviously be to fill the hole with massive
force.

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kordless
Yesterday, I watched Bruno Vassel fly his glider in the Rocky Mountains for
nearly 2 hours on Youtube. I hypothesize someday we will be able to extract
energy from the Ether to power our own spaceships in a similar way to gliding.
That's not to say we won't need to add our own energy to get somewhere
specific!

~~~
losteric
Well, our space crafts do "glide" on gravity.

~~~
wlesieutre
Also see the Interplanetary Transport Network, a network of routes through the
solar system that take the lowest energy paths, using Lagrange points to
change direction. They aren't the fastest routes, but if you want to glide
around the solar system this is where you travel.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Net...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)

~~~
WalterBright
I suspect one of the best ways to travel around the solar system is to find an
asteroid with a very eccentric orbit. Land on the asteroid, and while it won't
save energy, the asteroid will offer a radiation shield and raw materials to
use on the journey. The asteroid can be slowly transformed into a "cruise
ship" for the journey and subsequent ones.

~~~
_audakel
You could say that is what happened to earth.

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tomelders
Well this article kills my pet theory, but I'll inflict it on the world anyway
because this sort of stuff is fun to think about.

Before I go on, a couple of key points.

Also, spoilers ahead.

1\. We don't see the space craft arrive. 2\. Their choice of locations on
Earth goes unexplained. 3\. We don't actually see them leave. They just
disappear.

I posit that the "aliens" aren't actually from "outer space". They're higher
dimensional beings that exist in our 3D space (or 4D if you count time), but
we simply cant perceive them in the same way a two dimensional being would not
be able to perceive anything in the third dimension.

The "ships" aren't ships. They're something the "aliens" have created to
project themselves into a 3D dimensional space so that we can perceive them.
They're basically windows. When Amy Adams' character goes behind the "window",
she can do this because her brain has acquired the capacity to perceive the
higher dimension, and she no longer needs the window.

Their locations on Earth may mean nothing to us, but they are convenient
places for them as they perceive the universe. A 2D being would not be able to
fathom the reason 3D being makes marks on a 2d plane unless they could
perceive the 2D plane form a 3D perspective.

Anyway, that was my theory. This article blows pretty much destroys it, but I
like it anyway.

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mynegation
Asking someone with better understanding of physics. Wolfram talks about space
as a network. But would not that mean that there is an absolute reference
frame? Relativity theory does not need it (not sure if it disproves that there
is no such thing), and from what I know no such frame was found. How does that
reconcile?

~~~
solipsism
Until some people for whom theoretical physics is more than just a hobby start
to take seriously Wolfram's crazy theories, you and I would be well served to
ignore them.

~~~
db48x
They mostly ignore them too.

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wyldfire
> The movie-makers were giving Christopher raw data, just like in real life,
> and he was trying to analyze it. ... > In the final movie, the screen
> visuals are a mixture of ones Christopher created, ones derived from what he
> created, and ones that were put in separately.

I wonder -- did he synthesize the handwriting samples under analysis or was
that from the film's conventional creative team? I read Chiang's story after
having seen "The Arrival" and IIRC the descriptions weren't anywhere near as
clear about the circular nature of the sentences.

------
twic
> Gauss suggested back around 1820 that one could carve a picture of the
> standard visual for the Pythagorean theorem out of the Siberian forest, for
> aliens to see.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_tria...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_triangle_proposal)

Radio waves? Golden discs? Nah son, colossal geometric wheatfields and a few
big hedges is what you want!

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pmontra
There have been a number of posts about this movie on HN, many of them
interesting
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=fal...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Some of them address the linguistic side of the movie.

------
jackhack
I like the blog post's window title better than the article caption: "I had
one night to invent interstellar travel".

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firefoxd
Has anyone looked at the CIA declassified documents that appeared a few days
ago?

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20ph...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20photo)

It does have pictures of UFO for reference

Edit: added details

~~~
devoply
CIA does not want the CIA or former CIA talking about UFOs to the public.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP68-00046...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP68-00046R000200090003-6.pdf)

The CIA wants to keep UFOs out of public discussions, to not cause people to
panic. Or alternatively, there is a conspiracy or collusion with the aliens to
keep the government from panicking the public about UFOs ;)

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565....](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565.pdf)

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viach
Infinite Improbability Drive, of course!

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swayvil
Direct reality manipulation. A chorus of magicians dictating the next
millisecond, then the next and so on.

As with any technology there are easy ways and hard ways. Thus the spaceship.

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Grazester
Why not create worm holes to travel through? How it does this? Old God knows.

