Nate's not so generous.

No, I think I'm very generous. I'm allowing for the fact that the people who work in the field consider themselves scientists and not hobbyists.

they are differant but there linked as ufo's are generally percieved as containing aliens and aliens come from space and astronomy is looking at space, then again any randome two things are somehow linked if you think hard enough

Ufology and Astronomy are about as linked as Biology and the Holy Communion.

that's true, but if you think hard enough you can find a way too link anything in some crazy way. for example biology is the study of living creatures (I think) all living creatures need some sort of food and drink to survive, the holy communion involves consumption of bread and wine (in some cases grape juce) which are examples of food and drink.

I was going for Holy Communion being the body and blood of Jesus, but regardless this isn't really relevant.

As soon as a ufologist actually finds out what the hell it is that they're studying, it must necessarily leave their "department". They fumble in the dark, and if they actually find anything they pass it on up to real scientists, and spend the rest of their time making up outlandish stories about what they're looking for.

I don't think we'll ever reach FTL speeds.

...just saying.

me neither, the best I think we'll do is making something heat resistant enough to do a slingshot around our star, how fast does our sun move?

It makes a complete rotation every 25 days.

I hate the sun.

Faster than light travel is irrelevant when we have teleportation.

Fun fact: We will.

if I understand teleportation correctly than it would be at the speed of light, it would still take 4 years to get to alpha century (probably incorrectly spelt) 20 years to get to gliese, and as for the stars many thousands of light years away, the amount of lightyears = the amount of years to get there, and how would they get the probes to rematerialize when the signol eventially gets to it's destination, it would be a good step but it would hardly make FTL irelevant.

I was watching a show called "the universe" on 7mate and they came up with a theory, dark energy, a force continuously pushing the universe out, at first it was controled by gravity but the further apart the matter gets the less gravity affects the dark energy and thus increasing how fast the universe expands

The shows about that on Mate sprout speculation. Don't take them too seriously.

I was watching a show where "if" and "possibly" were the most common words. I wasn't watching it for long.

No, Dark Energy is pretty much part of established Physics canon at the moment. That said, it's really just a bit of a hand-wavey non-explanation for something that the physicists don't understand.

"The universe is expanding. We don't know why. There must be some energy source that we don't know about. Let's call it 'Dark Energy' until we find out what it is"

that pretty much sums it up

Yes, but when you use a teleporter you die.

it could still be used to transport objects and poeple with death wishes

EDIT: Deleted because it didn't make sense. I don't have to time to rephrase it.

I wonder if people succeed at making a teleporting machine, that would mean that they would be able to make an exact copy too? Cos that's what it essentially is as far as I understand.

Seeing as the teleporter would remember your molecular structure, break you down and transmit that information elsewhere for reconstruction, that information could be used to make copies of you or other objects later.

Maybe. Teleportaiton consists of deconstuction at one end and exact reconstruction at the other, so it's probably best just to be used for inanimate objects. A living organism would run the risk of arriving at the other end as a corpse. Even if it wouldn't, I hope everyone says it does, just so no-one tries to use it themselves. After all, they'd still die, there'd just be a clone arriving in their place. That shit's too heavy for my liking. Plus everyone would have to copyright their body.

I watched The Prestige, you may have noticed.

For the copies idea, you could just (making it sound simple) have the exact configuration of your body scanned into a computer without the deconstruction part. This information could be used to make copies of you or an object. If it did come out dead, you'd have to find a way of getting the electrical charge back into a new body.

we could make several million clones of stephan hawking

Or we could combine informations and put his brain in Cameron Diaz's body.

Yes, precisely. It would essentially be a perfect 3d photocopier, not a teleporter.


Coincidentally enough, I watched this video barely minutes before opening this thread and seeing the direction that the conversation had turned.

Jeff Goldblum should work on the teleporter.

Consider a state-of-the-art computer. Consider your use of it on a day to day basis.

Now consider entrusting it to recreate your body without errors.



Human teleportation will go bust fairly quickly.

is that his French nephew?

what? stephan hawking is the scientists that has that cool robot voice thing because he cant talk himself anymore

never heard of him.

Oh, you mean Stevie boy, good old Stevie.

oops meant stephen hawking, my bad

I would like to congratulate all of you on the efficient means of spell-checking you collectively invented. You certainly saved time.

such a bastard.







hang on. you're not Max.

Wait, wouldn't Teleportation work without the whole 'dying on one end' thing if they were somehow able to transmit the brain/brainwaves in a sort of secure...beam? It'll happen, just you watch.

Anyway, I think preserved brains implanted into synthetic bodies capable of keeping them alive indefinitely would be the way to go for space travel. Because I'm such a master of the subject.

I read a Stephen King short story once where they beat the problem of teleportation by keeping everyone unconscious throughout the process. One kid doesn't inhale the sleep gas and his consciousness moves through space time and out the other end before he wakes up. Then claws his eyes out.

It was charming really.

That's all part of recording (and recreating) the quantam state of the body's atoms. We're all just a collection of chemical reactions, after all.

But... but... how does your consciousness work when your brain has been split in to its component atoms?