2018-12-14 3:52 am
I’ve been thinking about spacetime and the idea of a warp drive.
If you replace the Sun with a one solar mass black hole, then the orbits of the planets do not change. The gravitational field is the same, right? No big deal. Doesn’t help with propulsion across the Galaxy. Even the million solar mass BH at the center of the Galaxy doesn’t warp space so much as to contract the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri.
So, then I have to think about what warping space even means and how warping a little space in front of your ship could help. How about creating an Earth mass in front of your ship. The only benefit would be in providing a G of acceleration for your ship. Do I have this right? Shortening the distance is unhelpful. Acceleration of the mass is all that can help. Then, you have a ship accelerating at 1G, which is really slow (by Galactic measures).
If you’re going to go that slow, then you might as well take the Earth with you. The Earth as a spaceship then requires the Sun, which then requires that you accelerate the Sun toward your destination. I recall a SF story with that world-building, about an advanced civilization that had built a Dyson Sphere around their star (or some convoluted structure that had an opening for the main characters to enter through and also contained the structure of the spacecraft “drive”). So, you have a generation ship the size of a planet that takes forever to get around.
My conclusion is that conscious beings will not travel the stars until they master inertia. (Inertia has always been a bothersome concept throughout my adult life.) There are these options: miniaturize consciousness so as to implement it with fewer particles or perhaps with the constituent elements of spacetime itself (the quanta of spacetime), free consciousness from matter, comprehend the fundamental causation of inertia and engineer its defeat.
4:07 am What the hell is inertia? Done, for now.
4:40 am Nope, I’m back.
Photons have no inertia. What is it about them? They are the quanta of EM. EM has no inertia? They have momentum, but they go at the speed of light, so no inertia. What is the speed of light?
What holds the quantum of EM, the photon, together? Is it really a packet of EM? Does any of this make sense?
Okay, time for assumptions:
1) any sufficiently complex system will be come conscious
2) photons have internal structure
therefore, consciousness can be encoded in a photon.
Alternative: a system of photons, an EM field, can be “held together” (bound), manifest complexity and become conscious.
A sufficiently high-energy photon (or EM field) will become self-gravitating (bound) and can manifest complexity and become conscious.
If it is possible to have self-gravitating EM, then we should look for “bright holes” (not wormholes) that are these bound EM fields.
4:47 am sleep?