Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

[fectin]

That mage could sit on Earth, have a marker on Mars, and do stuff on Mars. None of the things he could do on Mars would have a very long range.

Communication is (sort-of) an exception. He can communicate with people near his marker, without regard for distance.

[Endovior]

Thing is, all of this discussions is about useless, because as far as i understood franks magic system, magic does not work via interstellar space distances . .
in your example with the red and blue mage, te blue mage on earth could, with his markers on mars, do stuff on mars, but not from mars to earth . .
at least if i understood franks intent correctly . .

There is illusion magic. You can use it to create illusions of whatever messages you like over your markers. Since there's no such thing as spell range when dealing in markers, that's all you need.

[Username17]

I suggest software is dead, for all the reasons already is mentioned. Expert systems and unlimited memory can be plugged in, if desirable. But many-core will probably kill a part of your setting that you really don't want to be killed.

You make a super good set of arguments for that. I think it's the way to go, yeah.

-Username17

[Username17]

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

how?
the distance is pretty limited . .

In the broader sense, time travel is pretty disappointing. When you travel very fast, time moves more slowly for you. That makes you everyone else's "past", and thus everyone who interacts with you a time traveler. That's trivial, and not particularly interesting, but it's nonetheless physically true. The issue with instantaneous information sending is that "right now" is a fuzzy concept because if movement happens the time dilation appears to happen to different people from different points of view. Sending magical sendings instantly from Mars to Earth and back again could actually end up sending information a second several nanoseconds or so backwards in time. And that... doesn't actually matter unless you're really in to free will or you're trying to incorporate Mars into a simultaneous banking system with the entirety of Earth. But since banking in AT has a confirmation delay on it, the tiny time perturbations don't make any difference.

Edit: Bottom line: you're doing a five minute ritual to send information backwards in time by a fraction of a second. Over a distance that it would literally take you twenty minutes to confirm by objective means. So who gives a fuck? If humanity was extended well beyond the solar system and had colonies on the other side of the galaxy, that might start to matter. But maybe there's a reason that can't happen that hasn't been discovered yet. And in any case, it can't happen in 2075, because no one has uncovered a Stargate.

-Username17

[Username17]

Going to need to write some actual tables, but here's Psychometry:

Psychometry
“I can see through you. See to the real you.”

Many magically oriented creatures can perceive the astral plane from the material world. In-world this is called spirit vision, astral perception, sixth sense, or a myriad of other names. But for game terms it is called “astral perception”. Everything on the astral plane is incorporeal, and it is not possible to “be” on the astral plane. However, astral shadows of everything in the material world are cast as auras that appear to the astrally perceptive as swirling masses of color. Sometimes things in other worlds extend auras into the astral plane as well, and this can be a good clue as to when and where things are going to phase in to our world.

Auras are objectively there: one person astrally perceives the same thing as another, and auras can even be photographed using special “spirit cameras”, but interpreting them is difficult. Emotions create colors, but some of those colors are very similar. All the “primal” emotions like hunger, lust, and fear are very nearly the same color of red. Intensity of color increases with intensity of emotion, but it also increases with duration. It is almost impossible to tell what someone is feeling when they are in a place where a lot of people have strong feelings night and day (like a hospital) or where people have been congregating for group activities for hundreds of years (like a cathedral). Auras give clues as to the inner workings of creatures and objects similar to how X-rays or magnetic resonance can. Auras extend outward from whatever generates them, so a metal plate inside a person's body would have visible shadows outside the body. Reconstructing the actual contents of something complex like a human from viewing their aura is difficult – like putting together a 3d puzzle. The process of getting useful information from a viewed aura is called “psychometry”.

Pieces of auras cling to other auras when they are in close proximity and when they have emotional connection. A piece of an aura is considered to be “the same” as the whole for purposes of where it is. This is called the rule of sympathy. Actually figuring out which auras are connected to which other ones and how is quite difficult, and the psychometric investigation can take quite a bit of time for tenuous connections. It is theorized by many paths that every aura is connected to every other aura in the universe through a series of links, some guessing the number to be in the hundreds of thousands and others positing numbers as small as a five links to get from any one thing to any other thing. This doesn't seem to be testable since channeling is incapable of passing through more than one link.

Finding a Link
“There has got to be a way.”

Finding a tenuous link between a spoon and an unknown person who held it some time ago requires a great deal of psychometric skill and a great deal of time to sort out. On the other hand, finding a link to one's own aura to a recently handled emotionally important object is so easy that even channelers who can't perceive auras at all can do it and the amount of time it takes is negligible. Broadly speaking, there are three separate criteria that increase the timeframe and difficulty of finding a link between two auras:

• Familiarity with the target aura. The less familiar the character is with the target aura, the more difficult the task.
• Strength of the connection. The weaker the connection, the more difficult the task.
• Duration of separation. The longer two auras have been apart, the more difficult the task.

Add up the Linking modifiers from each variable and compare to the Linking chart to find the amount of time it takes to set up a link and the psychometric difficulty of doing so.. If the linking modifiers are all zero, as is the case when a channeler is casting through one of their own markers, there is no reason to even roll a psychometry test – it just happens.

Finding the Truth
“But you can't handle it.”

Psychometry can also be used for diagnostic purposes. Getting more in depth information takes more time, and the quality of the information is based on the number of hits the character gains on their psychometry test. Very basic information such as how far auras extend and whether there is a giant spell ward pulsating with baleful astral energies doesn't take noticeable time to analyze. The difference between magical and non-magical things is immediately apparent, non-magical Stress is more time consuming and difficult to quantify.

[fectin]

Auras are objectively there: one person astrally perceives the same thing as another, and auras can even be photographed using special “spirit cameras”, but interpreting them is difficult. Emotions create colors, but some of those colors are very similar. All the “primal” emotions like hunger, lust, and fear are very nearly the same color of red. Intensity of color increases with intensity of emotion, but it also increases with duration. It is almost impossible to tell what someone is feeling when they are in a place where a lot of people have strong feelings night and day (like a hospital) or where people have been congregating for group activities for hundreds of years (like a cathedral). Auras give clues as to the inner workings of creatures and objects similar to how X-rays or magnetic resonance can. Auras extend outward from whatever generates them, so a metal plate inside a person's body would have visible shadows outside the body. Reconstructing the actual contents of something complex like a human from viewing their aura is difficult – like putting together a 3d puzzle.

From this much given, I could personally build a CT scanner better and safer that anything out there now.

Someone who actually knew what they were doing, like dozens of folks at GE, or Phillips, or Siemens could probably build it without a scanning ring, so it could cover arbitrarily large areas. Like buildings. As you've described it, auras are flat-out super-vision.

Not that I object to that, but make sure that's on purpose. (You probably also need a really good explanation for how this is not enough for computers to do perfect pattern recognition on anyone anywhere near a building)

[jadagul]

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

how?
the distance is pretty limited . .

In the broader sense, time travel is pretty disappointing. When you travel very fast, time moves more slowly for you. That makes you everyone else's "past", and thus everyone who interacts with you a time traveler. That's trivial, and not particularly interesting, but it's nonetheless physically true. The issue with instantaneous information sending is that "right now" is a fuzzy concept because if movement happens the time dilation appears to happen to different people from different points of view. Sending magical sendings instantly from Mars to Earth and back again could actually end up sending information a second several nanoseconds or so backwards in time. And that... doesn't actually matter unless you're really in to free will or you're trying to incorporate Mars into a simultaneous banking system with the entirety of Earth. But since banking in AT has a confirmation delay on it, the tiny time perturbations don't make any difference.

Edit: Bottom line: you're doing a five minute ritual to send information backwards in time by a fraction of a second. Over a distance that it would literally take you twenty minutes to confirm by objective means. So who gives a fuck? If humanity was extended well beyond the solar system and had colonies on the other side of the galaxy, that might start to matter. But maybe there's a reason that can't happen that hasn't been discovered yet. And in any case, it can't happen in 2075, because no one has uncovered a Stargate.

-Username17

Frank, the big problem with Earth-Mars communication is actually slightly different, which is that "simultaneous" isn't really well-defined here. If I send a message to a dude on Mars and he receives it simultaneously in my reference frame, and then he sends it back to me and I receive it simultaneously in his reference frame, the message has gone back in time about 35 minutes.

Now, that whole setup is dumb and probably not what you're envisioning. You can do lag-free communications without having time travel problems (I think, as long as you can't observe the result of the communication directly--though that's a really strong assumption. Magically enforced, maybe?) You set up some ritual and within the ritual circle two people can have a normal conversation, but the circle is sealed in some way that doesn't let information out in a way that breaks relativity.

But "simultaneous" doesn't mean anything over relativistic differences, and attempts to give it meaning tend to create time travel.

Or you could go the Schlock Mercenary route and say, "It just doesn't work, okay?" But as you keep pointing out, in a game like this you need to have some way of knowing what actually happens if people try to pull these shenanigans.

[Grek]

So far as any in-universe experimentation goes, relativity just doesn't seem to apply to things that travel faster then light. Instead, instant FTL signals always just seem to arrive pretty much instantaneously, and without doing anything that would obviously violate causality from a universal time perspective. This is, of course, a clear violation of relativistic time principles. Some people take this to mean that the idea of relativistic time is wrong and theorize absolute time instead; this theory lines up pretty well with the data available from experiments with magical FTL signaling, and pretty badly with any data from the whole rest of science. Some people theorize that the magic 'locks on' to a theoretically appropriate 'now' to signal to instantaneously; if so, then it does so in an arbitrary and inconsistent way that differs from all the other known rules of science and magic. Some people theorize privileged observers or special metaphysics on the astral plane; none of them have a really good explanation of how this would work beyond some especially opaque mathematical systems, and even they are incomplete. No one has a really complete theory of anything that accounts for the questions at hand; in the year 2070, this is the major unsolved question of physics.

This is a perfectly acceptable answer, and I strongly encourage that Frank use it.

[jadagul]

So far as any in-universe experimentation goes, relativity just doesn't seem to apply to things that travel faster then light. Instead, instant FTL signals always just seem to arrive pretty much instantaneously, and without doing anything that would obviously violate causality from a universal time perspective. This is, of course, a clear violation of relativistic time principles. Some people take this to mean that the idea of relativistic time is wrong and theorize absolute time instead; this theory lines up pretty well with the data available from experiments with magical FTL signaling, and pretty badly with any data from the whole rest of science. Some people theorize that the magic 'locks on' to a theoretically appropriate 'now' to signal to instantaneously; if so, then it does so in an arbitrary and inconsistent way that differs from all the other known rules of science and magic. Some people theorize privileged observers or special metaphysics on the astral plane; none of them have a really good explanation of how this would work beyond some especially opaque mathematical systems, and even they are incomplete. No one has a really complete theory of anything that accounts for the questions at hand; in the year 2070, this is the major unsolved question of physics.

This is a perfectly acceptable answer, and I strongly encourage that Frank use it.

Well, yeah, and that's the Schlock answer I mentioned. But if I send a magic message to Mars, and Mars immediately sends a message back, something happens. And the question is what.

[Endovior]

So far as any in-universe experimentation goes, relativity just doesn't seem to apply to things that travel faster then light. Instead, instant FTL signals always just seem to arrive pretty much instantaneously, and without doing anything that would obviously violate causality from a universal time perspective. This is, of course, a clear violation of relativistic time principles. Some people take this to mean that the idea of relativistic time is wrong and theorize absolute time instead; this theory lines up pretty well with the data available from experiments with magical FTL signaling, and pretty badly with any data from the whole rest of science. Some people theorize that the magic 'locks on' to a theoretically appropriate 'now' to signal to instantaneously; if so, then it does so in an arbitrary and inconsistent way that differs from all the other known rules of science and magic. Some people theorize privileged observers or special metaphysics on the astral plane; none of them have a really good explanation of how this would work beyond some especially opaque mathematical systems, and even they are incomplete. No one has a really complete theory of anything that accounts for the questions at hand; in the year 2070, this is the major unsolved question of physics.

This is a perfectly acceptable answer, and I strongly encourage that Frank use it.

Well, yeah, and that's the Schlock answer I mentioned. But if I send a magic message to Mars, and Mars immediately sends a message back, something happens. And the question is what.

What happens is, assuming that your buddy on Mars is ready to send and receive messages when he gets your message, then you get the reply a little over five minutes after you've finished sending your message (this is, not incidentally, the time it takes to cast the ritual).

[Draco_Argentum]

"finding a link to one's own aura to a recently handled emotionally important object"

Pretty sure this is meant to be "finding a link from one's own"

[Username17]

Auras are objectively there: one person astrally perceives the same thing as another, and auras can even be photographed using special “spirit cameras”, but interpreting them is difficult. Emotions create colors, but some of those colors are very similar. All the “primal” emotions like hunger, lust, and fear are very nearly the same color of red. Intensity of color increases with intensity of emotion, but it also increases with duration. It is almost impossible to tell what someone is feeling when they are in a place where a lot of people have strong feelings night and day (like a hospital) or where people have been congregating for group activities for hundreds of years (like a cathedral). Auras give clues as to the inner workings of creatures and objects similar to how X-rays or magnetic resonance can. Auras extend outward from whatever generates them, so a metal plate inside a person's body would have visible shadows outside the body. Reconstructing the actual contents of something complex like a human from viewing their aura is difficult – like putting together a 3d puzzle.

From this much given, I could personally build a CT scanner better and safer that anything out there now.

Someone who actually knew what they were doing, like dozens of folks at GE, or Phillips, or Siemens could probably build it without a scanning ring, so it could cover arbitrarily large areas. Like buildings. As you've described it, auras are flat-out super-vision.

Not that I object to that, but make sure that's on purpose. (You probably also need a really good explanation for how this is not enough for computers to do perfect pattern recognition on anyone anywhere near a building)

That is horse shit. There is no mention at all of how finely auras can locate objects in a body and it is well established that auras extend a variable number of meters from a person. The comparison point would be the MRI, which is 100% safe and can be accurate down to individual hydrogen atoms if you have enough power to spend on your superconductive magnet coil.

It is essentially inconceivable for psychometric spirit photography to ever be even as good as MRIs already are for the purposes of imaging the insides of human bodies.

-Username17

[Username17]

Frank, the big problem with Earth-Mars communication is actually slightly different, which is that "simultaneous" isn't really well-defined here. If I send a message to a dude on Mars and he receives it simultaneously in my reference frame, and then he sends it back to me and I receive it simultaneously in his reference frame, the message has gone back in time about 35 minutes.

That is factually wrong. The differences in chronological reference frames between Earth and Mars are nothing like that large. They can be and have been measured but it requires atomic clocks because the difference isn't even visible if you go to the mere hundred thousandth of a second.

Time to bust out some math. We go to Mars, the long way. That's 401 million kilometers. And in order to do that we go on a fast-burn ship that accelerates at 1G until reaching the midpoint and then decelerates at 1G for the remainder. It covers the distance in about 113 hours. Pretty damn impressive. At the midpoint, it achieves a relative velocity of almost two thousand kilometers a second. That's almost two thirds of one percent of c (which is almost three hundred thousand kilometers a second). The time dilation is totally present, it's just measured in billionths of a second.

If you spent a hundred years flying around in a high speed aircraft, you would temporally displace about one ten thousandth of a second. And sending information instantly to a compatriot who hadn't been doing that would allow your friend to look back... one ten thousandth of a second.

There are no available distances or speeds or time frames large enough in the setting to even know if it is possible to send information back far enough in time for anyone to give a fuck. It's possible that in Asymmetric Threat 3000 or whatever, that people will be doing magic sendings across the galaxy both ways to warn themselves in the past. But it's equally possible that there is some limit where that sort of thing just doesn't work past a billion kilometers or something.

It's a fascinating issue for physicists to argue with each other about, but it makes no difference at all to the game or the lives of the people in the world at the time the game is set.

-Username17

[Username17]

Software is Dead
“Everything is better at doing what it is designed to do better.”

Moore's Law ran into some pretty severe problems in the twenties. The fact is that there are very real limits to how many logic gates you can fit in a piece of silicon. Simply doubling the number of circuits in a chip is something that cannot be done past the limits of the ability of semiconductors to provide current with pathways. And so it was that engineers were forced to increase the effective processing power of chips by making them more specialized. A well designed system running in hardware can be orders of magnitude faster than software running on generic hardware, and so it is that generic hardware is pretty much a thing of the past in 2075.

You can still get old school software and there are chips that are dedicated to running legacy programing. But this is so much slower and weaker than the dedicated chips, and it's so much harder for corporations to make money off of piratable software, that serious development money hasn't gone in to transferable software for almost fifty years. Software is the province of weird hobbyists who want to share capabilities with like minded individuals more than they want their programs to run with any kind of reasonable power or speed.

Dedicated Systems
“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in hardware.”

In the early 21st century, it was not uncommon for a computer to have a set of chips dedicated to a specific task or set of tasks – the most ubiquitous of them was the “graphics card”. This happened because while the graphics card was not usually capable of making as many total operations in a second as the CPU, its more specialized nature made it better at calculating the specific operations needed by a graphics intensive video game. In the late 21st century, it simply makes sense to divide up all tasks into dedicated chip sets. In fact, due to the availability of modular chip fabrication, it makes sense to have your video game come on its own chip. Rather than have some semi-specialized chipsets that run various tasks like sound and graphical equations that your game might need and leave everything else to a CPU, the game comes with an entire specialized chipset that does everything the game needs. The game runs faster with the chips it comes in than it would running any part of it on a CPU, so people don't even have CPUs anymore.

Every program has its own processing power and is a literal physical object. Like the cartridges that video games came on in the 1980s. However, the inner workings are largely optical and the connections are good enough that you don't normally have to blow on them.

Drivers
“We don't have a universal protocol but we do have a comprehensive library of protocols.”

The last real refuge of software is the “driver”, a program that interprets the outputs of one piece of hardware for another piece of hardware to understand. Every corporation has their own system by which their hardware handles inputs and outputs, and oftentimes different programs made by the same company have different I/O systems. However, the software that translates the rantings of one program into the specialized language of another is generally quite small and runs very quickly, especially when it has its own specialized hardware to run on. When you have a program, it is generally self contained in a rectangular prism about the size of a lighter, and all it really needs to run is a power source. But it still needs to interface with other things, including presumably a user at some point. Each device to device interaction is handled by a driver. The most important set of drivers is the one running on your Anchor.

The standard architecture is that you have your brain, and your brain has information sent to it by the DD and commands are sent out from “you” by some combination of controllers, be they motion sensors, type pads, motor shunts, or scanners. There is also the actual program chip that is running whatever program it is you want to use. Connecting all three (or more) of these devices together is the Anchor, and the connection between the Anchor and each device is mediated by drivers that are run by the specialized driver hardware of the Anchor itself.

When you get a new program or device (the two concepts aren't really different in 2075), chances are that you'll need driver software to make it actually talk with your Anchor. Once it's doing that, it can talk to any of the devices that are already talking to the Anchor – including the DD and controllers that allow it to have input and output from and to the user. So each new device you add requires just the one driver so long as your Anchor is working properly.

Passive hacking is like adding a new device for whatever you are listening in on. While the quantum decoder will cut through the encryption on anything that isn't using EUE, you're still getting uncontextualized machine instructions unless you have a proper driver to contextualize it.

Black Systems
“Just because you're not supposed to have something doesn't mean you don't.”

The rules on what devices and programs people are allowed to have vary wildly from region to region. In some places, it is even illegal to have programs that aren't designed by “trusted vendors” (the assumption being that it is not plausible for an independently produced program to not contain copyrighted or trademarked code, so every program that isn't vetted by a major corporation's legal department is assumed to be a violation of someone's IP). But above and beyond that, in most places the gear that hackers want to use is restricted or banned. Private ownership of the quantum computers that hackers use to listen in on SE transmissions is discouraged, and devices geared to perform basilisk hacks, trepanation, and flashing are outlawed in most regions. The devices that hackers use that they aren't supposed to have are called “black systems”.

In 2075, the existence of 3d printers that can make computer chips has shattered the primary limitation of dedicated systems: that you probably didn't have one that did whatever it was that you specifically wanted to do. Anyone who really wants a chip that does something incredibly specific can have one printed. All you really need is the design and a big chunk of money (chip printing is not cheap even in 2075). Chips produced on any kind of mass scale are much cheaper virtually by definition. So most hackers prefer to break the safeguards on “normal” chips rather than fabricating chips from scratch. Cutting out the limiter on a sonic image projector that keeps it from making bowel-voiding frequencies is not especially difficult, and it is considerably less expensive than printing up a low frequency sonic image projector.

Rules on black systems are very unevenly enforced. In most regions it is against the law to make DDs with any kind of range, possibly on the grounds that the street name for them is “basilisk guns”. But there are “legitimate” industrial and entertainment uses for them and many corporations simply manufacture them for those purposes. The police contractors are unlikely to arrest a major news outlet for having a 3DP (Deus Deceptor Distance Prompter), even though that is a DD with a range measured in meters. Many devices that are integral to a hacker's black bag of illegal tools are actually commercially available if you claim to be using them for other things.

[jadagul]

Frank, I'm pretty sure you're quoting me, not Grek. And you're right that the accelerations people can get are totally irrelevant to anything useful--but that's very specifically not what I'm talking about.

I'm actually totally ignoring velocity, and assuming the Earth and Mars are stationary with respect to each other. That's a simplification, but as you say, not much of once since the speeds involved are so small. But my point is that after special relativity, even without acceleration, the word "simultaneous" isn't well defined, and if you don't define it very carefully, you wind up with informational time travel.

Suppose I send a message via radio wave and magic at the exact same time. If they both show up on Mars at the same time, magic's just another speed-of-light communications system, and therefore boring (well, in this sense). On the (probable) other extreme, if the magic message arrives at a time I observe to be simultaneous with me sending the message, then that means that if the other end sends a magic message back immediately then I'll receive their response 35 minutes before I send my first message. If no one's moving at all.

I'm pretty sure the math says that any FTL signal lets you do this, but I'm not sure (not my field).

However, what seems to hold up under casual inspection is magic moving at twice the speed of light from the reference frame of the sender. We're assuming symmetry--that is, the same rules hold on Earth and on Mars. So I send a radio signal and a magic signal at the same time. If the magic signal arrives eighteen minutes before the radio signal, then that first exchange works fine. Because from my perspective, I send a message and get a radio response 18 minutes later. And since magic signals arrive 18 minutes before the radio signals sent with them, I got my response right after I sent my first message.

I think this works. In technical terms there's nothing "simultaneous" about it but it's what any layman would describe as simultaneous. (As for why I didn't say that earlier: I've now spent about half an hour poking at numbers and drawing diagrams to see what works and what doesn't. I think this does, but I'm not sure).

[Endovior]

@jagadul: That... seems to be a ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn non-relativistic signals (ie: FTL, since FTL is by definition beyond the jurisdiction of relativity) into a relativistic framework. Your only argument for why the signal loop must arrive backward in time of the original transmission seems to be because it's faster then light, and light would take X long, so something that is X faster then light (ie: 'instantaneous') would arrive X before the transmission was sent.

But that assumes the application of hard relativistic causality to something that's entirely beyond the bounds of relativistic theory. It assumes that a non-relativistic signal cares about what reference frame you're in, and adapts itself to the viewer's reference frame on transmission just like something that obeys all the laws of the universe, when this is something which explicitly violates locality.

Long story short, the fact that sympathetic magical connections exist means that locality is shot. Since there are things that can affect other things at a distance at a rate faster then light speed (instant, in fact), then there's no reason to assume the principles of locality and reference that you get relativity from. Relativity itself winds up being a special case of whatever it is that's actually going on. And so as a theory it gets shelved and we move on.

The only question is whether or not the difference between our observations of 'no significant time lapse in FTL transmission' and our theories of relativistic time differ macroscopically, to the point that physicists sit up and take notice.

[fectin]

That is horse shit. There is no mention at all of how finely auras can locate objects in a body and it is well established that auras extend a variable number of meters from a person. The comparison point would be the MRI, which is 100% safe and can be accurate down to individual hydrogen atoms if you have enough power to spend on your superconductive magnet coil.

It is essentially inconceivable for psychometric spirit photography to ever be even as good as MRIs already are for the purposes of imaging the insides of human bodies.

-Username17

So are you saying that:
a) You can't actually capture aura photographs;
b) You can't capture aura photographs from more than one perspective;
c) Aura photographs are uniquely unsuited for tomography;
d) Auras don't actually show intervening material like metal plates?

Because if you're not either arguing one of those points or employing fiat, you can use use auras exactly like you use the spin in an MRI, and you can use something with an aura as a source just like the tube in an X-ray CT scanner.

As an aside, MRIs are actually very dangerous. They throw oxygen tanks across the room on a fairly regular basis, and do hideously bad things to anyone with ferrous metal inside them, and slightly bad things to people with tattoos. (And they don't and couldn't go down to individual molecules. Whoever told you that was wrong. Cranking up your source does improve your image, but only in that it gets rid of shadows. Do that too much though and you'll visibly lose details.)

[zeruslord]

jagadul: FTL communication with no signal delay (the signal arrives at the same time it was sent in the reference frame of the sender) doesn't let you violate causality unless the two endpoints are in different reference frames. now, what you seem to be proposing is one where a radio response arrives when the message is sent. This is just flat-out sending information into the past.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Frank, it seems like the advantages of lightspeed transfer and negligible space make software pretty damn' competitive with purpose-built hardware. When the graphics processing capabilities needed for one 3d video game are pretty much equivalent to any other, carrying around a sack of redundant lighters seems like a lot of work -- even if the process of getting Nerpswars 2087 is just downloading the schematic and then sending it to your nanoassembler.

That said, it would totally work for drones, smartlink targeting systems, and cyberlimbs, all of which would benefit from having slot-able and upgradable processing modules. Given how consumer electronics work today, the processing module would probably be the main limiter on the effectiveness of you weapons.

[Vebyast]

One other thing to note is that hardware will only replace software's code, not its data. Instead of every video game coming on a different chip, every video game engine will come on one chip, and the worlds, characters, sounds, music, and plot will all come on different chips. If you've ever taken a close look at TF2 or Portal, you'll probably notice that they use exactly the same executable - the same code as - half-life 2, and that everything different about the three games is in the data.

A few situations where this actually matters:
[*] All expert systems are actually the same code; they just use different data. You have an "expert system" chip and plugin memory modules for given tasks.
[*] Drones don't need new chips when you want to change their targeting parameters. Instead, you give their neural network chip the edge weights for recognizing a new set of enemies.

[name_here]

I've never really seen a clear explanation for how sending information faster than light violates causality. Specifically, I've never seen an answer to why it doesn't work like this:

1. Alice sends an FTL message to Bob.
2. Bob receives the message and sends a reply.
3. Alice receives the reply.

All the explanations I've seen seem to boil down to "Alice will recieve the reply before non-FTL means would allow her message to have reached Bob, QED violation of causality." But they don't cover why it would allow a reply to arrive before the initial message was sent.

[Endovior]

I've never really seen a clear explanation for how sending information faster than light violates causality. Specifically, I've never seen an answer to why it doesn't work like this:

1. Alice sends an FTL message to Bob.
2. Bob receives the message and sends a reply.
3. Alice receives the reply.

All the explanations I've seen seem to boil down to "Alice will recieve the reply before non-FTL means would allow her message to have reached Bob, QED violation of causality." But they don't cover why it would allow a reply to arrive before the initial message was sent.

Technically, this is because when the proponents of the theory say it violates 'causality' they mean causality in terms of locality, which assumes that the maximum rate at which particles in one place can affect particles in another is the speed of light, and that in all practical terms, the universe of any given particle is only as big as it's light cone. Accordingly, violating locality IS violating causality, so far as they're concerned, even if there's no significant difference in reference frame.

Practically, this is an argument which is worse then useless. Magical signals are not just FTL but actually instantaneous, so locality is false. This is a given in the setting. This also makes it not strange that quantum entanglement works in a useful way; if magic can violate locality, so can quantum effects. If locality can be violated, then relativistic time is similarly untrue. This has other implications for the theory of relativity as a whole; with the most likely conclusion being that relativity is a special case of some larger unknown principle.

Hence my original explanation.

[Vebyast]

How Time Travel Works IRL If You Can Communicate Faster Than Light

Read this explanation. It will explain everything.

Alice and Bob are in one inertial reference frame. Carol and Dave are in another inertial reference frame moving very very fast relative to Alice and Bob's frame. Alice and Carol are right next to each other, and Carol and Dave right next to each other and way far away.

1) Alice sends FTL message to Bob. Because of time dilation weirdness, Carol and Dave observe that this message goes back in time in their reference frame.
2) Bob sends near-instantaneous STL message to Dave.
3) Dave sends FTL message to Carol. Because of time dilation weirdness, Alice and Bob observe that this message goes back in time in their reference frame.
4) Carol sends near-instantaneous STL message to Alice.

Alice and Bob observe the following: message goes instantaneously from A to B, then quickly from B to D, then back in time from D to C, then quickly from C to A, and A receives the message before she sent it.

Carol and Dave observe the following: message goes back in time from A to B, then quickly from B to D, then instantaneously from D to C, then quickly from C to A, and A receives the message before she sent it.

There is no dependence on locality, there is no dependence on light cones and so on. All you need is that going fast causes time dilation. We've experimentally verified that time dilation works the way we think it does, all the way up to .999999c (particle accelerators FTW). If you do this, Alice will actually physically receive the message before she sends it.

Again, Read this explanation. It does so much better than I can, especially since it uses pretty pictures.

[Endovior]

-snip-

We're not dealing with time dilation, though. The reference frames are not notably dissimilar, there's only a question of distance. In 2070, we don't even have fast STL travel.

Also, my whole point is that it's not necessarily true that FTL transmissions work like that. We don't know if FTL transmissions work like that IRL, since we don't have FTL signals. It's entirely plausible that the messages aren't being sent 'simultaneous' to any given reference frame, in the relativistic sense of the term... if we're using magic, then it's feasible that the messages are being sent simultaneous to the reference frame of the Astral Plane instead. Or perhaps it's sent simultaneous to the current tick of the Absolute Now, and whatever subjective time dilation a given individual is experiencing in relativistic space, they receive instantaneous messages based on the Absolute Now as opposed to instantaneous based on their local reference frame. Or perhaps even stranger rules are involved, that have yet to be discovered. The point is, existing scientific rules are not adequately suited to explain this situation, because it assumes a counterfactual for which no observations may yet be made.

[Vebyast]

In 2070, we don't even have fast STL travel.

Yes. I agree with that. It's no longer a major problem as far as the game is concerned. It's just that we absolutely need technobabble for this situation and it would be a shame if the technobabble here was distinctly lower-quality than the rest of the technobabble. People are also confused about it and asking for help, and providing a definitive answer will hopefully end that conversation.

I do think we need an explanation of why it doesn't work, though, just so people don't wonder why the space agencies haven't even attempted to build a super-voyager. Even a quarter-second of time travel would be enough to, say, blow explosive bolts on every internet connection you own before an attacker sends "rm -rf /" to your root server.