Sci-Fi Debate

[maneth]

Science-fiction labeled as such won't sell, except to a niche market. So, if people are aiming for a greater mass of viewers/readers, they'll do just about anything to avoid that designation if possible. With a few exceptions.

To me, SW is a mythological saga dressed up as a space opera. Just because they have spaceships, droids and lightsabers doesn't make it science-fiction. It would be interesting to watch Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and A New Hope at the same time and compare scenes.

 

[Legan]

Star Wars is the cornerstone of science fiction, saying it isn't scifi is like saying water isn't wet. The difference between scifi and fantasy is that fantasy doesn't try to explain the "how" behind the fantastic whereas scifi does. When you read fantasy you accept magic for what it is, in scifi you want to know 'how is that possible.'
Basically you can make up whatever you want and it can pass as fantasy, but with scifi you have to logically defend your 'universe' or it loses credibility. "Credibility" and "Fantasy" are two incompatible terms.

Also, I think the best Fantasy works have a touch of scifi in them to give them base. No rationality at all makes for poor drama. You need a base from which the fantastic can exceed. Take Lord of the Rings, it's fantasy, but with enough scientific base to make it interesting. I.E. catapults, swords, armor, beacon string, bombs. It's not all magic, it's magic intermixed with a base that we're familiar with.

 

[maneth]

Just because it's fantasy doesn't mean that it lacks internal logic. Take Pratchett's Discworld for example. It's complete and utter fantasy in that almost nothing from the world would work the same in our Universe, but it does have a set of internal rules you learn as you read the books. The same goes for, say, Harry Potter, which is fantasy mixed with our current world.

For all we know, faster than light travel may forever remain impossible except for subatomic particles, even on a theoretical level. Even if it were theoretically possible, we won't send a ship faster than light if it would require all the energy in our solar system to do so. Yet FTL travel in one form or another remains the staple of most sci-fi, including B5.

 

[Legan]

For all we know, faster than light travel may forever remain impossible except for subatomic particles, even on a theoretical level. Even if it were theoretically possible, we won't send a ship faster than light if it would require all the energy in our solar system to do so.

Einstein is today's Aristotle. In his time Aristotle was thought to be a genious, but today we know his many theories to be, bluntly, crazy. Einstein is in the same catagory, but technology hasn't improved to the level, or field, that would require a verification of his theories.
Traveling faster than lightspeed is possible, even easy. The theory of relativity is just a bunch of mathmatical mumbo jumbo that most scientists cling to religiously.
Long explanation made short, in order for there to be any chance of a 'universal speed limit' the measurement of speed must be an absolute measurement. However it's not. Living on earth we're used to measuring speed relative to the ground and take it for granted, leaving out the ground part. Living in a medium, i.e. the air, also creates this perceptual bias of speed being an absolute measurement. But it's not. It's a relative measurement.
Why? Consider this: you're moving 0kph at your computer now. Factor in the earth's rotation and you're moving about 1500kph (if you're on the equator, less if north or south). Then figure in the earth's revolution around the sun...and you have another measurement. Now figure in the star system's movement around the center of the galaxy, and you have another measurement. Finally, compare the movement of this galaxy in relation to one of the others and you have another measurement. Figure it for all the other galaxies and you have a least a billion more measurements.
All are valid measurements because speed is a relative measurement. We could be moving 2x lightspeed relative to some other object in the universe right now. Say we're standing still and it's moving 2x lightspeed.

How do you travel faster than light...simply keep accelerating relative to your starting point, and hope you don't run into any debris.

 

[hypatia]

It's not quite that simple.

A scientists with a break-through theory doesn't need to explain all things for all time. That's a claim that religion makes, but never science.

We expect there to be sudden jumps in understanding, and the best among our thinkers (we hope) won't be quite as stubborn about change as they've been in the past.

But that's a personality trait, not an aspect of science. In fact, doesn't Occam's razor really say: "If you have two models that explain to equal rigor a phenomenon, then the simpler explanation is the one that is closer to the truth"?

It may seem like a subtle point, but it's not: whenever I have heard it quoted (even in Sagan's movie "Contact") I hear "is the truth" rather than "is CLOSER to the truth".

If that's not the saying, it should be. It is the nature of science to always strive to understand more, and it is inevitable that some models either get tossed aside or move over to be of limited use, in time.

But some of relativity has already been proven. So as you accellerate and hope you don't hit anything, please to expect time to slow down. We know it does.

Oh, for an interesting take on how to get around running into that potentially-deadly minor space debris, you might like A.C. Clarke's book "Songs of Distant Earth". He addresses that problem specifically.