@zxyrra Regarding the "pre-history" edit... The term is usually only used for human history before writing. Stating it back to the dawn of the universe is a mis-definition, IMHO. What do others think?
I don't know much about definitions of history terms, but the Prehistory Wiki has the following link: "For a timeline of events in the early history of the universe and prehistoric Earth, see Timeline of prehistory."
And pre-history seems to be defined along the lines of 'the time before human writing', which means the beginning of the Universe counts?.. As I said, I don't know much about definitions of history terms, but that's what the internet says
Wikipedia, with citations, has this: The term "prehistory" can refer to the vast span of time since the beginning of the Universe or the Earth, but more often it refers to the period since life appeared on Earth, or even more specifically to the time since human-like beings appeared.[2][3]
As a tag, in particular, I don't think it has much utility unless it is limited to pre-writing humans.
Definition of prehistory 1 : the study of prehistoric humankind 2 : a history of the antecedents of an event, situation, or thing 3 : the prehistoric period of human evolution
I think there's a difference between "pre-history" and "prehistory". The latter is actually history before it could be written down. The former is literally before there was history.
History being "his story" (sorry, ladies)
If a tag gets edited, how many people have to approve the edit for it to go live?
Wouldn't it be funny if the Big Crunch depended upon enough sentients NOT studying cosmology so that the universe can repeat? But too many people studying cosmology causes infinite expansion...
"A strange side-effect of the observer principle..." :-)
Yeah, I read a paper once about that possibility of the expansion of the Universe merely being the result of us just making 'weak measurements' of distant galaxies, so observing results beyond what is reasonable as a result of postselection
Yep - in my own words, making a weak measurement [a rather specific type of quantum measurement with postselection] of the number of particles (photons) and then using this to make a weak measurement of the gravitational force can give a repulsive force, akin to that of the cosmological constant
@Zxyrra My apologies... somewhere along the line, I thought you'd referred to yourself as female. I guess i got you confused with someone else. (And now I'm wondering who that person was and whether I've flipped pronouns somewhere else... sigh)
--- What are people's thoughts on doing a "tag of the week" kinda thing? We'd vote in a meta post on obscure tags to highlight and bring attention to, with the goal of encorporating them into questions.
According to its tag wiki, xenobiology is
a form of biology that is not familiar to science and is not found in Earthly life
the wiki and its contrast with the following imply that it is about aliens.
And biology is
For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but addit...
@dot_Sp0T I think the main reason we stopped the fortnightly challenge was that less people were participating, and less people were willing to keep up with posting and updating the challenge on Meta
I know I stopped participating because I became wracked by self-doubt
hmm... wracked... that doesn't feel like a real word...
@dot_Sp0T (cc @Zxyrra) Let me second @DaaaahWhoosh in saying that participation was a major part. Fewer people were writing questions - especially high-quality questions - and I know that I, at least, lost some confidence in whether the challenges were actually helping the site. I was the one responsible for proposing that we bring the challenges to WB, but I'm now an opponent of them.
@DaaaahWhoosh I know a lot of mods who do not like the list at all. It think it mainly benefits smaller beta sites, as opposed to medium- and large- sized graduated sites.
it's like SFF and Movies, if you're asking about the new Star Wars film you could probably ask in either place and get an answer, but that doesn't mean the sites should be merged
though it does seem to me like there's usually a 'best' place for a question.
like the recent worldbuilding question on Writers, it's about how much of the world you explain in your narrative. Which is something we don't really talk about on WB.
@DaaaahWhoosh Also I don't think they really like questions about story elements. It's more about the process of writing, and includes technical writing, writing for school... Worldbuilding and writing don't overlap very much
nope, though I now sometimes wonder if they should overlap more
eh, but probably not
anyway, this morning I'm thinking more about my sci-fi world, and the 'magic' that makes things like artificial gravity and interstellar travel possible
I'm trying to come up with a standard way to open portals to alternate dimensions, so that you can make use of that dimension's unique properties
for instance, for artificial gravity I want there to be portals under the floor to an alternate dimension where gravity forces are stronger. A dense mass is lowered into the portal, and the gravitational pull is transferred from the portal to normalspace.
For acceleration anyway. Open a big portal 1 meter in front of the ship for 1/1000th of a second. The gravity pulls the ship forward, then the portal closes. Immediately open a new portal 1 meter in front of the ship. Do this 1000 times a second. The ship will start moving forward, but will never catch the portal be cause it's always 1 meter in front. It's like a carrot on a stick
@AndyD273 I guess I should be clearer. They're not using the gravity dimension for FTL travel. They're using the "there is no limit to velocity" dimension
antigrav involves leaving a portal open and having the gravity come through, FTL involves actually driving the ship into the portal
A scifi book I once read, on a flight to Paris I think, had FTL travel achieved by wormholes forming two-way corridors in time and location. So travelling through the wormhole you'd end up at a slightly different place in space and some 35 years back in time. Then they'd still travel at sublight and in stasis
I've read that in string theory, some of the higher dimensions are thought to be really small... If you could put yourself into one of them you might have to travel less distance... Of course I may not be remembering that correctly
@DaaaahWhoosh honestly by having another magic dimension where you can cross the same space with the same machinery in less time you're already doing time travel
@AndyD273 as I recall, yes. There's a stationary gate that's open all the time you can go through. But I'm imagining also that there are ships that can generate their own temporary gates, and then leave them behind once they're done
I guess what I want in my world is a case where most small colonies don't have permanent gates, so any time a war breaks out there there is a company that goes there and provides a gate for the warships to use. So the usage of gates should be useful, but not useful enough to be provided at all times
@AndyD273 there was a cowboy in one episode. I think he had a horse. But yeah, no actual cows
@dot_Sp0T well, that's my main problem with this FTL travel system. I don't know how to set up supply and demand in such a way that I get all the attributes I need
@DaaaahWhoosh So you open a wormhole/gate/whatever on one end, but the other end isn't exactly fixed, so kinda moves around. But if you put a gate at both ends, they act as anchors so that the wormhole is steady
@dot_Sp0T in my world, I want there to exist ships whose main source of income is going to places other people are going and providing a service to pull them in and out of quickspace
It's like putting a tape measure out without a support. You can do it, but it's not steady, and could collapse. But if you have something to hook it to then you can make it as long as you have tape for and no worries about it falling down
I think it sounds like what you're describing? If you don't have a gate on the other end, you need to get one over there. So you have ships with one time gates that go to far systems and set up perminate gates. Once you have a gate on both ends then you can move back and forth easily.
@AndyD273 right, it's just if it's easy enough to use one-time gates you might as well just do that rather than waiting for the permanent ones
@dot_Sp0T okay, so the technology is hard to build without the infrastructure, but there are factories that can produce gates relatively cheaply once they've started. You essentially set it up, feed it a lot of power, and then it can be opened to allow passage to other dimensions. Once you cut the power, the portal closes after a short period of time
@DaaaahWhoosh That's why I was suggesting the instability factor. Say a small ship could go through and probably not have a problem, but if you try to force something like a battle cruiser it could collapse or move very far from the destination
@AndyD273 my problem is that I don't like the idea of opening a portal to quickspace also giving you a way out again. I want you to be able to go anywhere once you are in quickspace, and open a portal in there to get out
@dot_Sp0T yep, sounds about right
remove the unit or the power and the portal collapses
Are these gates one-way only? E.g. a gate in normal space does only allow you to travel from normal-space to other-space, to travel back from other-space to normal-space you need a gate in other-space - can't use the passage from normal-space the other way round?
@DaaaahWhoosh just make their power consumption exponential to the size of the portal it opens. Bigger portal = more power consumption -> needs a bigger powerplant
@dot_Sp0T so always-on permanent portals are really expensive or optimized for smaller ships, whereas single-use gates can be optimized for the size of the ship carrying them and can be turned off quickly
@AndyD273 sort of. Unattractive enough to use the permanent ones, but not enough to make it hard to go anywhere on your own
oh, wait. I have different stories set in different time periods. Maybe technology changes
@DaaaahWhoosh for example, yes. The gravity gates draw so little power that they can be installed on almost any ship, while the sizes needed to allow bigger ship to pass through will require way more power :)
This will also likely end up in tube-shaped ships specialized for cheap cargo transfer
@DaaaahWhoosh But if you use the single use gates you have to leave it behind, so using permanent gates are going to be the best option, even if you have to pay a toll to go through them
@dot_Sp0T Suppose they would end up being very long too... So similar to trains. Trains in space!
@AndyD273 right... so permanent gates are great, but they cost a lot of money to keep on for long times, so they'll only get paid enough money to stay on if they're in high-traffic areas
@DaaaahWhoosh Or have a schedule like a draw bridge for low traffic areas. The gate opens for 1 hour every day, so ships arrive in quickspace and queue up for their turn to go through
If you have the money you can pay for it to open out of schedule
@DaaaahWhoosh there's another angle you could take. I initially understood your magic portals to simply boost an object passing through them up to speeds we cannot achieve otherwise (also they're transferred into a basically empty room that maps to our universe, so they do not crash into anything), passing through another gate, or just shifting back into normal-space, would then slow them down again. Thus you would pay other ships to do one-way travels where they might potentially
end up way off-target, they'd then use another expensive jump or just normal engines to move towards the real target and eventually act as beacons for the other ships to home on to in order to make more precise jumps
@dot_Sp0T it would if it was replacing what I was already doing, but as an addition I think it could work
so one-time gates to get out of quickspace aren't as precise as permanent gates, because the permanent ones can be set up in relation to realspace objects
In a setting of mine I am going along a similar path, I've got some sort of 'Jumpcore' that is forgotten-tech found by humans and somehow they managed to activate it (or at least part of its functionality - thus I can add whatever I want whenever I want by introducing an external factor that was missing - great for spacemagic) - anyways, these cores allow for any body to be displaced in space, not in time, as long as there's enough energy fed to the system. But they're limited in amount,
there's only so many that have been found and not destroyed during the process of trying to activate them or by scientists who wanted to open them up to check their inner workings (they blow up with a few megatons or so of boom boom power when opened)
So there's specialised companies that lease cores from the United Mankind Space Military Whatever in order to facilitate interstellar transport (most often these are sort of huge space-stations with thousands of docking ports. Freighters and other sublight ships will attach for the jump and then detach)
On Recognizable natural numbers for alien message? I used >! at the beginning of a paragraph in 3 places. Only 1 of them works! What's the problem? I went over it carefully for stray spaces, and see no difference between what works and what doesn't, or what the help states.
@Mithrandir24601 Hey, so I was going to try to type up my ideas of reconciling the supernatural with the natural, as a contrast to what I typed up regarding yours, and then had my attention drawn to an answer where I already did that. In case you're interested:
Several scientific theories predict the presence of extra higher dimensions.
Physics has validated (or at least not falsified) a 4 dimensional (3+1) model of space-time, and if string theory is correct then there are possibly 6+ other dimensions that make up reality, and that we have no way of de...
The 2017 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
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In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. As noted, not every question was compiled - the ...
I was asked if I wanted to throw my hat in. No. I am a newbie and shocked it was just based on points. I have 706. The rep needed should be way higher! What I want to know is, 1) are current mods up for reelection or secure in their positions? 2) Do you have to nominate yourself or can you nomina...
In 2015 we made ads for Writers to submit to other sites. In 2016 the formatting requirements changed and we made just two ads, one for Worldbuilding and one for EL&U.
For this year we've replaced my poor efforts on Worldbuilding with a new ad made by Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 , and Kit has resubmitted last ye...
@MonicaCellio right, good idea, I think I will do that... though a part of me wants to de-emphasize the potential for other users to submit their own designs
Have we had any other submissions besides yours? It doesn't look like you'll be putting yourself at a disadvantage if you open the field, and that way people won't think your trying to hog all the glory
@DaaaahWhoosh there were, yes. I don't think any involved original art, but there were other proposals. Then SE changed the size requirements and we couldn't use those any more (and mostly people didn't remake them).
Well, it's late and I guess I need a better sleep rhythm again. I'll be off reading something and recovering from that horrible horrible joke you just made :)