Recent content by rkolter

I think you misread the overall tone in this thread. Saying no, there isn't any physical basis to believe time-slips actually exist is not a negative tone, in this forum. There isn't any reason to believe they exist, but that hasn't stopped people from writing science fiction. And, that...

Remember that the zero-energy universe was suggested when the universe was believed to be flat, we didn't think the universe's expansion could be accelerating, etcetera. There are specific situations in which the zero-energy universe may apply and we may or may not be in such a situation...

Anesthesia gives the best example of what I believe death is really like - you can be put under for surgery at noon, and suddenly be conscious later that evening and not realize time has passed. Eventually you realize time did pass - it is sunset, family are glad to see you are 'awake', you...

1 - Quasars may be bright but they are distant and it takes an amount of time to get enough light from one to identify it; it takes far less time to get enough light to identify a star in our galaxy. 2 - Not all regions of space are identical, particularly when you are trying to look for...

Yes. Energy and mass can be converted into each other and are equivalent. But, the conversion factor is the square of the speed of light. Hydrogen bombs convert mass to energy - a little mass makes a lot of energy. Charging a (sealed) battery converts a little bit of energy to mass - and a...

The two projects do not have the same scope. They are not meant to find the same set of objects. GAIA: http://sci.esa.int/gaia/ GAIA is producing a high resolution 3-d map of our galaxy. GAIA will flag some extra-galactic objects, but it is not designed to search for them. SDSS...

There are a variety of blockchain technologies out there. Very generally: A blockchain is a database that records transactions. You can query a blockchain but you cannot modify blocks other than the current block. Validated transactions are written to the current block and when the current...

For my failed drives, I crack the drive open using a hammer, and for drives with platters, I grind the surfaces down with a belt sander. I physically break up the rest of the drive and put the pieces into a crock pot full of salty brine overnight. I let them cool in the brine after that until...

That's an interesting point - which kind of immortality are we talking about? You don't age and don't die except of unnatural and gruesome causes (Highlander)? You don't age and you don't die unless you die of something unnatural? You cannot die and you cannot age? If you die, you come...

In the Sandman series of graphic novels, there is a story about a man who makes a deal to live until he chooses to die. He goes through highs and lows and gets to live patterns in society that are only identified normally after the fact in history books. He is at times broke and sickly and...

I want to be sadly, brutally clear here: Microsoft does not publish free technical support phone numbers nor do they provide technical support on an on-call basis for individuals nor do they proactively ask you to call them because they have identified an issue on your computer. They do not...

No. Vanadium 50 is correct. Please read what they are aiming to do: They are live-streaming someone's EEG and making that data available on a public website. That's not exactly the same as turning the brain into an IoT node, regardless of what their long term, loftier goals may be. I...

General question - Is this still a question about science fiction, or an argument about the possibility of intelligent life seeding the stars? I'm happy to argue about if intelligence is an emergent property, or if life could be seeded by intelligent beings, but at this point it doesn't sound...

You have to understand that we go by your original post. Aspirin sized biological pellet moving a tenth the speed of light, impacting planets and surviving to grow and develop. Tell us what is non-negotiable in your story... Can we slow down the pellet? Make it bigger? intelligent? Send a...

Again, the problem comes down to space being big. If you shot a billion of these pellets at a nearby galaxy cluster, they would spread out over time. Without a means to correct for errors in trajectory, they would pretty quickly be placed so far apart as to make the likelihood of one impacting...