http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html



I love seeing cool new shit like this. Apparently it's going to be at the GDC this year too.

Those things are cool as hell.

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Okay, that was pretty slick.

Has anyone noticed yet that we're living in the future? All we need now are flying cars and/or jet packs and we're there.

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haha but whats are future now? Star Trek?

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I don't know if we'll ever find a means of "faster than light" travel. Computers have evolved as quickly as they have because of consumers. There isn't that kind of drive behind space travel because there's no real way to market it except to the very, very rich.

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as we understand physics, faster than light travel is impossible, so there's no real legitimate research going into that area.

if our understanding of physics is proven to be wrong, expect rapid results in the realm of space travel.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Very cool.

Those things are amazingly cool.

True. But even if that's impossible, there's got to be a means of traveling at speeds nearing that of light. We just don't know how, and I don't see that changing. Space travel to anything but the nearest bodies (the Moon, Mars) is probably not going to happen for a couple of centuries. We'll all be cyborgs by then.

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You don't have to move faster than the speed of light to travel faster than it, you just need a shorter route. If space is shaped in folds and light travels in a wave like fashion, perhaps this is possible someday.

Or it could be an effect outside the observable frame. Our current understanding would require some trick, or 'cheating', to send matter or information faster than light.

Who knows, just a few years ago folks would have said materials can't have a negative index of refraction yet we have several in the graduate lab. And businessmen are using laser pointers with a simple crystal that changes red laser light to green.

Anyway, it'd be a feat in itself to simply send anything with mass at the speed of light.

Last I read they thought it MIGHT be possible at the edge of a black hole, which is moot since nothing could travel there and still be useful except for the smallest of particles and even then they might not spin out.

As far as 'wormhole' travel, that's been pretty much disproved last I looked. =\ I was very bummed out, as were a lot of people. We kinda have to hope for something like that though, or it's simply not going to be possible to explore very much.

Space exploration WILL happen, but it will be the machines who go. Humans aren't just limited by the extreme time and distances involved, but also other nasty factors, like radiation exposure. (Which was a big factor in why we're not actively heading to Mars atm).

Lousy robot bastards. /shakes fist

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I think our understanding of the natural universe is about .00001% of what is really out there.

It is typical human arrogance to think we are "advanced".

It wasn't that long ago we were still mounting animals to get from place to place.

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Light is the fastest thing we know about therefore it is the standard we measure speed by. I imagine there are things out there going so fast we just aren't capable of seeing them with our current technology. Also traveling at light speed or near light speed isn't 'hard' it just takes forever to accelerate up to that speed.

No matter how fast light goes, dark has to move faster to get out of the way!!!

Oh yeah... and how are siftables going to help me masturbate???

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You could program each siftable to have a different adult film star in it and when you push them together you create different 'stories'.

I wouldn't rule it out until we at least know more about dark matter and energy.

Then again I'd probably hesitate to ever rule something like that out. Draagun's right... a little over 100 years ago we weren't sure if man would ever fly through the air, let alone inside hundreds of tons of metal.

Put that in perspective. That's TEN 10-year EQ anniversaries ago. 10 years since EQ's launch doesn't really seem THAT long to us, does it? Doesn't to me, anyway =)

Anyway, the last 100 years has seen technology increase at breakneck speed. I can only see it increasing, especially with the advent of computers and the internet(and I think even in the last 15 years that increase has been plenty evident due to computer tech). I can't rule anything out with this stuff in mind, honestly.

I never liked the "100 years ago we...and now we..." comparisons.

There's a huge difference between complete ignorance and having researched something and found it to be an unlikely solution.

Research needs to be a continuing process. As new technologies increase and new discoveries emerge, prior research needs to be revisited. To do otherwise is to assume we know all we will ever know about the subject, which borders on hubris.

You assume that isn't the case in the scientific community, bz. I can assure you that outside of certain research centers that are privately funded *for specific purposes*, this is the case.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I know Vana, I was just countering Bov's seeming finality in stating "researched something and found it to be an unlikely solution" as if that was the end all and be all and despite the astounding advances over the last 100 years, this aspect will elude us in the next 100 years because, hey, we already looked into it.

I didn't say we know everything about everything. I just hate the argument of, "100 years ago we did this and now we do this, so ANYTHING is possible! Weeee!"

Like I said, there's a big difference between just pure ignorance and realizing, "Oh, hey, gravity!"

Bov, things have been thrown on their head despite being "researched" and being deemed "unlikely solutions", Sarissa gave a good example of it even from the last decade.

If we have learned anything in the last 100 years, it is that when we make new discoveries, it CHANGES our previous understanding and moves us in new directions of thought(and occasionally throws out earlier research). I'm not sure if I would throw our understanding of dark matter under "complete ignorance", but it is but one of a number of aspects of our universe that we're still in the process of fully understanding.

Very applicable, in every sense.

And you can say "this appears to be a very unlikely solution/possibility" without being closed-minded and ruling out a possibility completely. In the 1700's, you could have said that attaching a pair of wooden wings to a man and him jumping off a building probably won't result in flight, but also decide to not foolishly dismiss the possibility of the then-fantastical idea of a twin jet-engine airplane made of metal with room for a few hundred.

Oh blah, more "Look what people did a long time ago!" comparisons.

I guess folks are missing the point.

No, actually, you are. What others are saying is that we may currently have an incomplete understanding of physics, much as mankind did centuries and even decades ago. Just because we believe something to be solid fact now doesn't mean we won't discover something that changes it completely in the future.

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And 200 years from now, some guy will jack into the cybernet, and while sending his pure light avatar to what is colloquially called a "forum," he'll say something to the effect of "there's a big difference between just pure ignorance and realizing, "Oh, hey, 4th dimension!"

Again, don't presume we know everything. We don't. New discoveries change our entire outlook in a matter of years.

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Sorry, but it's just piss-poor logic and it doesn't serve to enlighten anything. And it's always "correct" in any number of situations, no matter how conflicting. It's just a silly thing to say in really any context.

If you have some sort of contribution to the subject, great. But just throwing around, "I think time travel is possible because 100 years ago people rode around in covered wagons!" is just annoying, pointless and silly.



(PS: There's already 4 dimensions.)

Nobody is making any claim of anything other than the claim that we are probably more ignorant than what we think we are.

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You don't even know what that means. You're just spewing shit you read on Wikipedia.

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I don't think anyone claimed it was too enlightening, but it's worth pointing out in a thread where it was suggested that there is no legitimate research going on into the area(which is both true and it makes sense at the point where we are now) and the implication that machines will be the ones that search space. Both are entirely possible, but it bears pointing out that nothing should be ruled out or put off the table entirely(not saying either Vana or Tarot are wrong with what they said specifically, but I think it warranted a response akin to Draagun's).

Sometimes it helps to point out the obvious, and I don't think either Draagun nor I thought we were saying anything particularly profound or original. I mean, do you get pissed when someone points out that it's been a great sunny day? Small talk at worst =) I think we could legitimately claim that at least 75 percent of all human conversation is stating the obvious.. I'm not sure where that would leave us on the boredom/social scale, however.



Just to add to what I said above(beyond the "obvious"!), you're stretching pretty far if you now suggest that we're making a rather *direct* implication that time travel will happen JUST because of historical progression, lol.

Not Ruling Out != It Will Happen.

It sounds far less outlandish when you simply suggest that few things should be ruled out because historically we have turned so many ideas on their heads due to technological discovery, and for good reason.

The theories that limit speed in such a way are full of discontinuities, and are generally supported more by other theories than by experimental results.

Quantum is a weird area in that regard. Basically scientists see some new particle dynamic, use the field of quantum to explain its behavior, come up with a new theory to explain it if there isn't one already, and boom the new theory is supported by what they saw.

Which is fine in scientific research if and only if you can develop an experiment to prove a null hypothesis. But in this domain the energies and time scales are outside our capabilities to produce, so it's not yet an option.

So something like Planck's constant is not necessarily constant, it's just constant in the frame we can observe. And c itself is also not locked to the value of the speed of light in a vacuum. I believe that values of c larger than 3e8 have already been shown experimentally.

Yes, I entered your post into Wikipedia just to get some enlightenment. What a fucking retarded thing to say.

I would expect to see "Generation Ships" being used for space colonization. But robots and probes will still have to survey ahead of any colonization. And given the extraordinary expense in building, manning, and provisioning a generation ship would be enormous. plus the time traveled would take such a long time we would never see the results in our lifetime.

I know, and maybe I read too much into it. It's just a pet peeve of mine, because it's one of those things that can just be used anytime, anywhere to support one's side of a debate without needing to back it up and with no way to refute it. (Kinda like when someone plays, "Well, God did it." on you. Grr.)

But again, that's probably too deep of an analysis most of the time, I'm sure some folks just say it out of optimism. =)



I dunno, given the state of things since the moon landing and the current outlook on things, I think people grossly overestimate our prospects for space travel. Not that it's impossible, but that the drive, public support and financial backing just doesn't seem to be there since we beat the Commie Russians down, heheh.

Just seems like the whole thing has been stagnating for 50 years. I know there's been a lot of technological advancements and a lot of great discoveries, but most of it seems to be in the observation and telecommunications and other fields and not quite so much in travel. (Then again, I don't follow it all that much, so maybe I'm just out of the loop and NASA has put a man on pluto.)

It's going to take some enormous breakthroughs in a lot of fields before we really get back into space travel, in my opinion. The distances involved are just so enormous, more than most of us even really think of.

When I was younger I used to think that one day we would receive the knowledge required for FTL travel from a peaceful alien race ... granted that would require winning the coin toss whether the first to recognizably interact with Earth would be a positive interaction rather than a negative one.

Older, and more cynical if not wiser, I think it'd be a real stretch that any intelligent life would give us the ability to cast our seed throughout the universe based our track record for "colonization" and our willingness to inflict harm upon ourselves and neighbors.

When I was younger I wanted to be a dinosaur when I grew up.

When I was younger, I saw a scratch & sniff Hustler and thought it was awesome.

I wanted to be a chicken that lived in a motel. That shit would've been phat.

We sort of live in a 4 dimensional universe~

You don't even know what that means!

YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH!

I want mah mommy. *cries*

Again, talking out the ass. You really don't have any idea what you're saying.

I'm not arguing with you, by the way. I'm not saying "no we don't." I am saying, however, that you and Bov are just spewing shit without understanding what you're saying.

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http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db ... 1459#comic

I thought this link would be appropriate for the direction this thread has gone. Be sure to read the caption.

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There is no such thing as right or wrong; only pleasure and pain.

Oh, please do enlighten us. I'm *dying* to hear the deep complexities that you believe are held within this (relatively) simple issue. Please, please do shed some light on the darkness of our apparent ignorance sir. I plead of you.

Jokes on u buddy Tyral is really Dr. Michio Kaku irl.

Yeah, well, I'm Dr. Kobayashi Maru!

Hey guys, Tyral knows 12th grade physics.

FYI.

It sucks when you constantly bait people and all they do is try to bait you back. Dammit.

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Fishing (204)

ok

I was really hoping one of you would try to pull a physics explanation out of your ass.

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Why would we? The concept doesn't even require an explanation. The only thing we (Or, just me) are curious about is the complexity and depth you're implying with your comments about how we don't get it.

I don't think you know what you are talking about either (for the record). =P

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I know its easy to act smug and not really say anything, but I'm still waiting to hear the explanation of what we don't "get" about a relatively very simple concept. (Indeed, a concept that was formulated for the very express purpose of simplifying things.)

I never said I did.

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By the way, the only thing I know about the "4th dimension" is that most physicists think of time as the 4th dimension. Other than that, I haven't the foggiest clue.

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That's pretty much it. The concept of spacetime as a combined four dimensional idea.

There's not much else to the idea, that's why I kept wondering what the big hubbub over "getting it" was.

From what I know (which I've admitted isn't much) it's just a hypothesis, and that there are multiple ideas for the potential of a 4th dimension, most of them way too complicated for me to understand.

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I was talking to Bov.

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