this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
612 points (97.7% liked)

Comic Strips

12957 readers
2813 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 49 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

The other problem is the ship signal they traced would have been frequency shifted by the same amount as the time dilation. They would have had to compensate for that to even detect the signal.

It was 1 hour : 7 years I think. So about a factor of 60,000. So if a ping was once a second it would be once every 42 days. And if it was a 1MHz transmission it would be at about 17Hz.

So they somehow realized the once a second 1MHz signal was now a every 42 day 17Hz signal at 1/60000 the power. But didn't realize that there was time dilation involved.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

But didn't realize that there was time dilation involved.

They knew there would be time dilation. They literally discussed it just before they went down there. They just thought they could get it done in a few earth-years rather than decades.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

They did know about the time dilation, though? They weren't surprised by the fact that there was time dilation, they just didn't fully grasp what the results would be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Couldn't you use that in reverse to create a planet-destroying superlaser?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Hmm, this is about an exploit using a theory with much uncertainty about a theory with much uncertainty.

I personally don't think there's something like a singularity. It's just too ugly a workaround.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like those funky robots may have done some of the heavy lifting.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

That implies some code monkey somewhere decided that feature didn't need a user notification!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Unless they run on a neural net or a genetic algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago

Remember when they dialed down the sass? Turns out that setting also affected physics notifications. "physicsassistant" - it was a typo!