Forcasted Technologies in Science Fiction

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 9:47 pm

In order to answer the question of if a teleporter-clone is really "you" or not, you have to understand what "you" means. "You" is the place in a person's future-modelling brain bits that models their own actions in hypothetical situations. The teleporter-survivor and the teleporter-clone are the same person to the degree that your mental model of "what would teleporter-survivor do in situation X" and "what would teleporter-clone do in situation X" give the same outputs. Initially, this is going to be very very high. But it will diverge until the clone and the survivor are only slightly more "the same person" than the survivor and a random person selected off the street.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Nov 30, 2012 2:36 am

Oh, uhm, also:
http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nas ... arp-drive/

Some guys did work on the Alcubierre Drive warp field configuration, and the power requirements have gone down drastically. By many orders of magnitude. Like you only need 1,600 Pounds worth of stuff instead of 1 Jupiter worth of stuff.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Nov 30, 2012 10:59 am

Meh, it's still gunna take a long time for the people waiting back home, and the particle accelerator you're hitting yourself in the face with won't be a pleasant experience either.

Nice trick to send probes out though, if he's got his math right. Not to mention the relativistic bombs he's just invented, though if you've got 10^20 Joules to spare it hardly matters, that's 126,000 years of the world's total energy use at current rates.