The RDA can't do physics

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Why would there be more than one destination for it? Anyway, the networking only becomes important if the rate is 3b/hr, which is silly. See next paragraph.

You need if it you want your 'hurrrrrr remote control the robots' argument.

Ah, the solution to that is quite simple: induce the state again, and then measure it, and then try again if the induction failed. Try this a few thousand times, and suddenly your success rate rises to arbitrarily high levels. Ideally, you will want to treat all particles like this in parallel, so you don't disturb any particle you've already successfully set.

Yes, in parallel - requiring a different multi-billion dollar system for each one. I thought you were the one complaining about cost, now you've switched track to fantasising about the film you wanted to see?

Oh, just to throw a spanner in the works: did you know FTL comms are functionally equivalent to a time machine, and so the RDA is not going to even bother with unobtanium if they have one? The stock market will make them rich enough.

Without distances on an astronomical scale, the time change is less than a single clock cycle. You can not do anything on a single clock cycle other than the very basic instructions. If they do attempt to use it as such, then the data needs to return, with a 4.4 year light speed lag.

Why would that be? We don't usually include startup cost in that sort of figure.

I said potentially. If it isn't, that just digs your hole even deeper.

Your offsets would be pre-arranged? That honestly seems obvious.

Only if each bit had a defined exact time to transmit or each transmitter was only used for a single bit per packet.

Some EC schemes let you infer missing or corrupt bits.

I know. Don't profess to greater knowledge here than me - each error bit reduces the chance of detection of others, and increases overhead - in usual applications, bandwidth is far less of a concern than noise itself, as the more complicated an ECC implementation, the more data overhead it creates.

I don't think I've said there were no humans there, only less than the RDA were putting there. You'd need perhaps 5-10, rather than the hundreds shown.

That seems marginally more realistic an assumption, but it still doesn't show that other humans should not be there.

And they can make whatever value judgements you want them to make, so long as you're specific. As mentioned, they can drive cars. (True AI would be overkill. You don't want it to talk to you, you want it to defend you.)

Depends on what's at stake. Determining the difference between lifeforms and making a judgement that could have such huge repercussions is very different from following defined traffic laws (and assuming that others will as well).

Then synthesize wetware at both ends. You have genetic engineering cracked, a few colonies of neurons should be fairly trivial.

That may potentially work, but there has to be some reason it wasn't used - there could still be a reason it doesn't work - even if it's signal strength or light speed lag.

But why would you skimp on a few months of R&D when it saves you astronomical quantities of energy, and thus money?

Hang on, I thought we were talking about communication within the magnetic field here. Stop jumping form one topic to another for the same argument.

They are immediate on the scale of interstellar flight. It takes over 11 years for any investment in ISVs to make a return. Businesses live and die in 11 years. Entire new technological paradigms appear in 11 years. The original iPod did not exist 11 years ago. The internet was not in widespread use 11 years ago.

I'd contest the second, certainly, but that's beside the point. A rate at which things are developed does not mean any research will instantly complete, ever.

And that rate of technological change is increasing. It is not good business to gamble unless you're relatively sure that it will pay off. You can't possibly be sure that an ISV will pay off, hence no business would endorse you.

...unless they were looking for minerals available outside Earth's solar system, exactly as they were. They most likely already are utilising resources found elsewhere in Earth's system including asteroids and potentially comets, the next logical step is further. No resource in the solar system lasts forever even if humanity WAS planning to only ever live there.

Yes, but in the case of the energy I'm talking being available, there are far more useful things to spend it on than unobtanium.

Useful? Possibly (yet you fail to give any examples) - but profitable?
Surprisingly, there isn't unlimited use for energy anyway.

It doesn't work here on Earth, when the costs are high enough. If it did, the asteroid belt wouldn't be around any more. There's gold in themthar rocks, it just takes ludicrous funding to get to it.

...and when it is reachable?

Yes; the former suggests the latter is possible.

Yet it doesn't instantly make it possible. As far as we can see, the former has not happened yet, and while the latter MAY be possible, it's still a long way off if so.

I think there is an upper limit on the DC current you can put through a superconductor before it stops superconducting, but I can't find anything on that. However, there's definitely an upper limit on AC current; superconductors fail when exposed to a powerful enough magnetic field.

That level also varies by superconductor, with some available today requiring >100T to do so.

And it's still linear if conditions remain constant. The difference in running costs between superconducting and non-superconducting infrastructure doesn't depend on how long that structure has been there for.

No, but if the amount of said infrastructure is growing, the savings are too.

Synthesizing a molecule requires arranging electrons. This has an energy cost of maybe a few hundred to a few thousand electron-volts per atom. Manufacturing antimatter requires constructing particles out of the vacuum; this requires hundreds of millions of electron-volts per atom. For every atom involved in the construction of unobtanium, you need either 1) 900,000keV of antimatter or 2) 2-3keV of electron rearranging.

This is a hard limit produced by the laws of physics, and cannot be avoided. In what possible universe is option 1 more economical than option 2?

For about the fifth time, option 2 is not an option at this point in time.

It may well be in the future, but with the current state of understanding at that time, it is either flat out not yet possible, or possible but not on a macroscopic scale. You are clearly underestimating energy availability via the simple fact that they are there (and for that matter, who is to say they haven't found a natural source of antimatter much like the recent belt around Earth, albeit far larger? - their understanding of physics will clearly be far more advanced than a 2011 one).