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 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
'According to our knowledge of physics' is the thing you want to look at in that sentence What if our knowledge of physics has missed something fantastically obvious?

Extremely doubtful we've overlooked anything that would make interstellar travel easy and simple.

Doubtful, but far from impossible.

 Pouncey wrote:

I have heard of a brand-new idea in physics that might make it possible though. Negative mass.

The problem with going at the speed of light is with mass, really. If we could somehow entirely remove mass from our vessels and everything on and in them, we could go the speed of light, and in fact would have no choice in the matter as the only way to stop going at the speed of light would be to return mass to our vessels.

If we can manipulate mass like that, theoretically we might be able to push mass lower than 0. If we did that, then we could travel faster than light by activating our engines, since we'd have a negative resistance to being moved.

An interesting effect of that though, is that even though we'd have no mass to add gravity from the relativistic velocities, we'd still have to deal with the effects it would have on time. At lightspeed, we would be effectively frozen in time and would interpret traveling literally any distance whatsoever as teleportation, even though the actual journey to another star system would take years to an outside observer watching us from Earth. If you go faster than light, time outside the vessel appears to start going backwards. If you go fast enough, you arrive at your destination before you left, and effectively we just invented a time machine too, and can effectively put ourselves in stasis by traveling at the speed of light exactly whenever we want to return to the present. Or future, for that matter.

Yeah negative mass would be interesting if possible, and the time-dilation effects of FTL are very interesting

I'm not sure you've got it right with time going backwards though. In our current understanding of physics that's impossible. As you get close to the speed of light, from the outside universe looking in, time on the starship would appear to have ground to a halt (or rather be moving imperceptably slowly). I'm not certain that time running backwards as you go past the FTL barrier is anything more than a 'maybe it works like that'.

 Pouncey wrote:

Actually, our own generation of stars are the very first in the universe's existence that are capable of supporting technologically-advanced civilizations. Previously the heavier elements our technology relies on to function did not exist yet.

And it's almost certain there are other civilizations like ours out there, they're just so far away we can't communicate with them. We may have spotted a Dyson Sphere though.

That they may well be, but in the terms of the relative time it's taken life to develop in our particular solar system and the current estimated age of the universe, there's a massive range of time in which technologically advanced civilisations could have flourished and died well before life on Earth even developed.

Interesting about the Dyson Sphere though. Must read up on that

 Pouncey wrote:

Uhh, you might want to run the math on how many alien civilizations that would lead to if you think they're being created 200 times faster than they're dying out.

Maybe look up what a "millennium" is, as well.

B*gger, teach me for trying to do two things at once.

I meant a million years, rather than a millennium :S

Also, the numbers are arbitrary to make the point that even though it's likely that two technologically advanced civilisations would co-exist in the same space, it's increasingly unlikely that they would exist in the same space and time.

 Pouncey wrote:

We've had radio IRL for about 100 years. Our radio signals have reached a 100 lightyear radius around Earth. Our closest neighbour is Alpha Centauri, and it's only 4.3 lightyears away.

A radius which encompasses 512 stars. Alien life in the universe is only probable because if the fantastic numbers of stars that there are in the universe. If you narrow that down to our teeny-tiny little area, the chances are infinitesimally small. Expand that radius far enough to make it probable that we'd encounter life, and chances are it would have happened a very, very long time ago indeed.

 Pouncey wrote:

How'd they get the gate to the second star system, exactly? And why do you want to fold space in the atmosphere of a planet you intend to live on?

Also, maybe look up what FTL stands for too.

You're assuming that this hypothetical device requires a gate on both ends, and that it's in some way destructive when used in the atmosphere of a planet. And folding space to travel across distances at faster than the speed of light is Faster Than Light travel.

 Pouncey wrote:

If any human actually figured out an easy way of interstellar travel that actually worked in real life, we would be exploring other star systems by now and you'd be browsing photos of alien planets on the Internet taken by human explorers who went there and brought pictures back.

Based on what evidence do you think we'd already have discovered it? The time that we've had to explore our universe/set of physical laws isn't nearly enough to have exhausted the possibilities for something really simple to be the case.

 Pouncey wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
Seriously, any civilization capable of propelling a planetary invasion fleet of starships at near the speed of light has access to weaponry so powerful that it makes everything humanity has at its disposal, including the Tsar Bomba, look like nothing. It doesn't matter if they have firearms or not, their weapons make firearms look like a sharpened rock tied to a stick in terms of destructive potential. Them BREAKING the speed of light to go at FTL velocities requires a mastery of physics so superior to our own that we cannot even fathom the ways they have devised to kill people and break things, the same way a Roman Centurion would have no clue what the hell a nuke was or how it worked.

The idea we ever win in these situations in movies requires the aliens to be so ludicrously underpowered they should never have been able to reach us in the first place.

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
There's an assumption that if there's something that we can't do at the moment, it must take a more advanced society to accomplish it. It could equally just be a society that thinks just a little differently to us

You realize that all of the authors thinking up these stories are in fact humans positing ideas that, by definition, humans came up with, right?

As much as anyone can prove people on the internet are human

Apologies, but I don't understand the point your making.

My point was that it's an assumption that you're making that just because a culture is technologically advanced enough to produce FTL travel, it must also be similarly advanced in other areas. Don't get me wrong, it's likely to be the case given the evidence that we have available, but it's far from a certainty.

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
I'm not sure you've got it right with time going backwards though. In our current understanding of physics that's impossible. As you get close to the speed of light, from the outside universe looking in, time on the starship would appear to have ground to a halt (or rather be moving imperceptably slowly). I'm not certain that time running backwards as you go past the FTL barrier is anything more than a 'maybe it works like that'.

Well, we don't even know how we'd achieve negative mass, since we don't even know how to reduce mass at all in the first place as far as I know. We call that concept "inertial dampening" in sci-fi though and on a smaller scale it would do things like let power armored infantry wearing half-ton suits of armor, just, kinda, you know, fly without a jetpack or wings or airplane or anything, because they become so light they can float in air.

And, uh, relativistic speeds messes up ordinary physics to the point where, uh, well... weird stuff starts happening. Like, atoms literally passing through each other. The effects of an asteroid made of diamond plowing into Earth at the speed of an "Oh-My-God Particle" (named after what the first scientist who discovered one said out loud after reading what their monitor said) would convert the entire planet into plasma as Earth explodes with enough force to strongly affect the Sun and "scour the surface" of Venus and Mercury.

And we're not simply talking "relativistic speeds" we're talking about going faster than we believed to be possible to go within the laws of physics until the past year or so.


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 Ynneadwraith wrote:
Based on what evidence do you think we'd already have discovered it? The time that we've had to explore our universe/set of physical laws isn't nearly enough to have exhausted the possibilities for something really simple to be the case.

The fact that we have seven billion people on Earth and going to other planets is something we consider cool enough there are people willing to pay ten billion dollars to book a reservation to live on Mars.

Also that the rules the universe operates on are not purely a human concept and are in fact universal.


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 Ynneadwraith wrote:
As much as anyone can prove people on the internet are human

Apologies, but I don't understand the point your making.

My point was that it's an assumption that you're making that just because a culture is technologically advanced enough to produce FTL travel, it must also be similarly advanced in other areas. Don't get me wrong, it's likely to be the case given the evidence that we have available, but it's far from a certainty.

My point is that if they have the knowledge of physics needed to invent a vessel capable of traveling faster than light, it doesn't matter what weaponry they ever came up with, because physics itself tells them that the FTL drive they used to get to Earth, attached to an asteroid is a solid-slug torpedo capable of destroying an entire planet.

Literally, they could probably just ram one of their ships into Earth at full speed and put an end to all life on Earth.

 Pouncey wrote:

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 Ynneadwraith wrote:
Based on what evidence do you think we'd already have discovered it? The time that we've had to explore our universe/set of physical laws isn't nearly enough to have exhausted the possibilities for something really simple to be the case.

The fact that we have seven billion people on Earth and going to other planets is something we consider cool enough there are people willing to pay ten billion dollars to book a reservation to live on Mars.

Also that the rules the universe operates on are not purely a human concept and are in fact universal.

Makes it very unlikely, but given our current knowledge base, and the (relatively) limited resources we've applied to the problem it's not even close to impossible.

 Pouncey wrote:

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 Ynneadwraith wrote:
As much as anyone can prove people on the internet are human

Apologies, but I don't understand the point your making.

My point was that it's an assumption that you're making that just because a culture is technologically advanced enough to produce FTL travel, it must also be similarly advanced in other areas. Don't get me wrong, it's likely to be the case given the evidence that we have available, but it's far from a certainty.

My point is that if they have the knowledge of physics needed to invent a vessel capable of traveling faster than light, it doesn't matter what weaponry they ever came up with, because physics itself tells them that the FTL drive they used to get to Earth, attached to an asteroid is a solid-slug torpedo capable of destroying an entire planet.

Literally, they could probably just ram one of their ships into Earth at full speed and put an end to all life on Earth.

That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...

It's also assuming that their goal is solely to destroy the earth, rather than something that would involve leaving the planet mainly intact.

I'll agree with the premise though. It's fantastically unlikely that a FTL-capable civilisation is similar in military strength to us. The knowledge-base of physics required to produce working FTL would give them the ability to create weapons far more advanced than anything we could produce, even if they had no concept of weaponry before they met us. Again though, far from impossible given the assumptions we're making about technological progression.

That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

Really though, you are right. You'd have to make far more assumptions to end up with an FTL-capable civilisation we could take in a fight than one that would steamroller us from orbit.

Plus, the idea of an aggressive spacefaring race simply plowing their starships into a planet as a weapon feels very 40k I approve

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...

You may want to research what things like "acceleration" and "velocity" and "speed of light" even MEAN at this point, really. Maybe the word "faster" too.

It's also assuming that their goal is solely to destroy the earth, rather than something that would involve leaving the planet mainly intact.

Want to cause less destruction? Just go slower. No biggie.

Like, you don't even have to go lightspeed to cause massive devastation. An object the size of a baseball traveling at 90% the speed of light causes a nuclear explosion comparable with one of our nuclear weapons. You'd actually WANT to slow it way the hell below lightspeed when designing your infantry's weapons so that firing their weapons stops causing city-ending nuclear explosions at point-blank range.

I'll agree with the premise though. It's fantastically unlikely that a FTL-capable civilisation is similar in military strength to us. The knowledge-base of physics required to produce working FTL would give them the ability to create weapons far more advanced than anything we could produce, even if they had no concept of weaponry before they met us. Again though, far from impossible given the assumptions we're making about technological progression.

I'm telling you, the kinetic energy weapons they would inherently know how to make simply by being capable of reaching us means that any alien invasion fleet that attacks Earth outclasses us in military hardware. They don't need gunpowder, they have weapons BETTER than any kind of firearm that is physically possible to create, and the fact they got to Earth PROVES they know how to make them.

That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.

If they can figure out how to work a starship, they're advanced enough to build their own, too. And figuring out how to work the ship properly over time would give them the same knowledge. You need to know how tech works in order to operate it properly. You start pushing buttons at random, you could easily ram into your own planet instead of going to Earth.

Really though, you are right. You'd have to make far more assumptions to end up with an FTL-capable civilisation we could take in a fight than one that would steamroller us from orbit.

Plus, the idea of an aggressive spacefaring race simply plowing their starships into a planet as a weapon feels very 40k I approve

They could also run those ships by remote or autopilot and not even sacrifice the crew to do it, too.


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Like, seriously, their surface troops would have to be trained never to fire their weapons into the air in celebration, because their space navy got annoyed by the celebration bullets occasionally smashing into their ships' hulls. If humans had weapons like these, Looney Tunes' Yosemite Sam would be a public menace for occasionally taking out satellites, space shuttles, or the ISS with stray rounds.

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...

You may want to research what things like "acceleration" and "velocity" and "speed of light" even MEAN at this point, really. Maybe the word "faster" too.

Please see my earlier reference to how folding space so you can travel distances faster than the speed of light (all the while travelling at walking pace) constitutes Faster Than Light travel before suggesting I go and look up dictionary terms

Want to cause less destruction? Just go slower. No biggie.

I'll give you that one

I'm telling you, the kinetic energy weapons they would inherently know how to make simply by being capable of reaching us means that any alien invasion fleet that attacks Earth outclasses us in military hardware. They don't need gunpowder, they have weapons BETTER than any kind of firearm that is physically possible to create, and the fact they got to Earth PROVES they know how to make them.

The fact that they've got to earth proves nothing other than the fact that they have access to FTL technology. It proves nothing about whether they can manufacture, or even understand it.

The fact that they have FTL categorically does not mean they are inherently able to produce kinetic weapons of equal sophistication. Give a farmer access to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a button to press and he can smash particles together at stupid speeds. Doesn't mean he know's anything about how to make it, operate it, or anything else apart from how to press the button.

It would suggest that they are advanced, but there are enough plausible scenarios around to make it far from a certainty.

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.

You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.

If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.

More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.

A good analogy would be the colonisation of the Americas by the Europeans. The Native Americans had no knowledge of how to manufacture muskets, no knowledge of the chemical processes by which gunpowder works. However, they could still shoot you dead as ably as the next man if they were shown how a musket works.

 Pouncey wrote:

If they can figure out how to work a starship, they're advanced enough to build their own, too. And figuring out how to work the ship properly over time would give them the same knowledge. You need to know how tech works in order to operate it properly. You start pushing buttons at random, you could easily ram into your own planet instead of going to Earth.

I don't think that's remotely true.

Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.

A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.

If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).

 Ynneadwraith wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...

You may want to research what things like "acceleration" and "velocity" and "speed of light" even MEAN at this point, really. Maybe the word "faster" too.

Please see my earlier reference to how folding space so you can travel distances faster than the speed of light (all the while travelling at walking pace) constitutes Faster Than Light travel before suggesting I go and look up dictionary terms

FTL. Faster than Light.

Please consider that that is a literal term and refers to actual velocities, not simply any case of traveling a very great distance in a short amount of time..

It's already known that there are ways we can cut down on the travel time without actually traveling faster than light. Folding space or creating a wormhole is a relatively old idea, and we could probably do it eventually. It's not considered to be FTL though, because your ship is merely taking a shortcut, not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.

Want to cause less destruction? Just go slower. No biggie.

I'll give you that one

: D

I'm telling you, the kinetic energy weapons they would inherently know how to make simply by being capable of reaching us means that any alien invasion fleet that attacks Earth outclasses us in military hardware. They don't need gunpowder, they have weapons BETTER than any kind of firearm that is physically possible to create, and the fact they got to Earth PROVES they know how to make them.

The fact that they've got to earth proves nothing other than the fact that they have access to FTL technology. It proves nothing about whether they can manufacture, or even understand it.

The fact that they have FTL categorically does not mean they are inherently able to produce kinetic weapons of equal sophistication. Give a farmer access to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a button to press and he can smash particles together at stupid speeds. Doesn't mean he know's anything about how to make it, operate it, or anything else apart from how to press the button.

New counter-argument: You're suggesting that aliens who understand and create that advanced technology are supplying a less-knowledgeable race with technology and weapons from their own civilization, and teaching them how to use them effectively.

Earth is still fethed. Iraq wasn't less destroyed by the US military in 2003 just because most US soldiers don't understand the science that went into their weapons and equipment.

It would suggest that they are advanced, but there are enough plausible scenarios around to make it far from a certainty.

The tech's being created and used against us in a war intended to conquer Earth. Probably even if the civilization that made the tech was using it themselves, most of their military wouldn't actually grasp the science. The weapons are no less effective or advanced.

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.

You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.

If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.

Once they figured out that buttons do stuff, how much of the ship's systems do you think they'd catastrophically wreck by learning what each and every thing does by simply pushing every button to see what it does?

For an example, close your eyes and start pressing buttons on your keyboard at random while moving your mouse around and clicking a random assortment of buttons. Continue this for about a minute. Then stop and open your eyes and see what state your computer is in. Now consider what that might do on a war vessel instead of a home computer.

More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.

Most of our soldiers IRL don't understand how their own weapons work.

A good analogy would be the colonisation of the Americas by the Europeans. The Native Americans had no knowledge of how to manufacture muskets, no knowledge of the chemical processes by which gunpowder works. However, they could still shoot you dead as ably as the next man if they were shown how a musket works.

Yeah, I mean, if the guys that made the tech and understand it show you how to use it... of course you can come to operate it properly.

But that means you're no longer simply discovering an abandoned derelict, you're now being used as a proxy military and supplied by the people who made the tech, who train you in its use. That's literally how modern militaries train with their own weapons and vessels, since the actual engineers who designed the ships and guns in the first place are not typically soldiers themselves being sent out into the field.

I don't think that's remotely true.

Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.

A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.

If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).

Yeah, uh, the owner manual taught you how to use it. Maybe even an employee whose job it is to teach you how to use that stuff.

The aliens who built it would basically have to be instructing the less-advanced race in its use.

I actually read a book like that. Humans in the early 21st century (about 15-16 years ago, actually) were recruited as a military force by a galactic federation of pacifistic races who were being attacked and losing badly. The aliens offered us their science, technology, and production facilities to supply us with any weapons and tools we could come up with, since they knew from observation we were good at fighting, and had a bit of a penchant for wanting to defend the helpless from aggressors, and they simply couldn't fight back very well on their own (they tried, it didn't work). Humanity came up with power armor so advanced it makes 40k stuff look crappy, guns that shot so fast at relativistic velocities they looked like lasers and punched through like 5 ranks of enemies, exploding the torso of every one of them (they should've cut down on the fire rate actually, as it was too high and they ran low on ammo on occasion, but one particular Gunnery Sergeant insisted on a laser and that was the best they could do), anti-starship lasers that basically kept a nuclear explosion rolling and focused the explosion into a coherent beam (techniccally didn't use lightt, but it was a coherent beam that was like a laser whose beam was made of nuclear explosions) and at one point they made a couple of kilograms of anti-matter, which the general freaked out about because that's an amount typically used to fuel an entire fleet of starships, then they used it as a bomb and took out a massive area. The guy who invented humanity's first antimatter bomb couldn't bear to look as he pushed the button tto launch the rocket, because they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't explode in the silo. The general in charge just watched the whole thing, knowing that if it detonated, his death would come so swiftly he literally would not be capable of comprehending the fact anything went wrong before his body was obliterated.

Oh, also, they might have antimatter bombs. I was once informed by a physicist (during a discussion about WH40k conversion beamers where I thought they converted the target's body to antimatter for some reason) that an optimal detonation of a 60kg antimatter bomb would end all life on Earth due to the ensuing environmental effects, though the planet itself would remain intact.


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As for operating computers properly... Uhh, I guess their understanding of computers might be cut short if they enter the wrong thing. There's a text command you can type into your computer which will instruct it to delete literally every file on your hard drive. All of them. In every folder. Literally every file of every sort. No, I don't just mean your photo album, I mean literally every piece of information on your computer. I won't say what it is because I damned well don't want anyone to try it out of curiosity. It won't get them all of course, because eventually it'll stop when it's deleted enough files that the computer is no longer capable of operating whatsoever and shuts down permanently.

 Pouncey wrote:


FTL. Faster than Light.

Please consider that that is a literal term and refers to actual velocities, not simply any case of traveling a very great distance in a short amount of time..

It's already known that there are ways we can cut down on the travel time without actually traveling faster than light. Folding space or creating a wormhole is a relatively old idea, and we could probably do it eventually. It's not considered to be FTL though, because your ship is merely taking a shortcut, not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.

Quibbling over literal meanings of terms

The context of the discussion is if a hypothetical alien race could travel to earth faster than light could do so without having a similarly advanced level of tech in other areas.

If you want to get really literal with terms, 'faster' could relate to time as well as speed. For the purposes of interstellar travel, cutting down travel time is the important goal, and speed is only one particular way to achieve that. Folding space is another equally valid way of travelling somewhere in less time than it would take light to travel there (so...faster than light).

New counter-argument: You're suggesting that aliens who understand and create that advanced technology are supplying a less-knowledgeable race with technology and weapons from their own civilization, and teaching them how to use them effectively.

Earth is still fethed. Iraq wasn't less destroyed by the US military in 2003 just because most US soldiers don't understand the science that went into their weapons and equipment.

Hah, true. In all of these cases, the overwhelming probability is that yes, Earth is fethed

Still, Iraq wasn't destroyed. It's beat up, but it's still there. Vietnam's still there, despite the US' best efforts.

Also, what if the advanced race is anything like the Dark Eldar? They might send their less advanced neighbours our way simply because it's funny to watch us try and fight for survival. No idea what the motivations of interstellar arms dealers would be

Interstellar treaties that prevent arming less developed societies, but allow sharing of other technologies?

Plenty of possible scenarios (although admittedly again, none of them more likely than the 'we're fethed' scenarios).

The tech's being created and used against us in a war intended to conquer Earth. Probably even if the civilization that made the tech was using it themselves, most of their military wouldn't actually grasp the science. The weapons are no less effective or advanced.

No-one said it had to be created by the same people who are using it to get to Earth

Beyond that it's back to the whole linear technology development thing. It's likely that it is linear, but not a certainty. Our technological understanding has progressed in the areas it's progressed in because of the events of our past and our surroundings. Who's to say that different circumstances wouldn't produce a vastly different level of understanding in different areas?

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.

You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.

If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.

Once they figured out that buttons do stuff, how much of the ship's systems do you think they'd catastrophically wreck by learning what each and every thing does by simply pushing every button to see what it does?

For an example, close your eyes and start pressing buttons on your keyboard at random while moving your mouse around and clicking a random assortment of buttons. Continue this for about a minute. Then stop and open your eyes and see what state your computer is in. Now consider what that might do on a war vessel instead of a home computer.

More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.

Most of our soldiers IRL don't understand how their own weapons work.

Precisely just because you're able to use a piece of technology, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean the rest of your technology base has to be at a similar level.

Yeah, I mean, if the guys that made the tech and understand it show you how to use it... of course you can come to operate it properly.

But that means you're no longer simply discovering an abandoned derelict, you're now being used as a proxy military and supplied by the people who made the tech, who train you in its use. That's literally how modern militaries train with their own weapons and vessels, since the actual engineers who designed the ships and guns in the first place are not typically soldiers themselves being sent out into the field.

True, it's another possible scenario in which someone could reach earth with FTL.

Would you want to arm your warlike proxy militia-species with weapons that can hurt you as well? Surely it would be far safer to equip them with the means to get to Earth, and leave them with whatever weaponry is just enough to do the job...

Likely we're still fethed, but less fethed! Maybe even less fethed enough that we might not all die!

I don't think that's remotely true.

Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.

A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.

If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).

Yeah, uh, the owner manual taught you how to use it. Maybe even an employee whose job it is to teach you how to use that stuff.

The aliens who built it would basically have to be instructing the less-advanced race in its use.

Yep. That's my point. I don't need to understand how the physics behind the technology works, I just need the user manual. A spacefaring race doesn't need to know how the technology behind an FTL craft they've found works, they just need the user manual

Ergo, spacefaring race with similar levels of tech to us is a possibility

I actually read a book like that. Humans in the early 21st century (about 15-16 years ago, actually) were recruited as a military force by a galactic federation of pacifistic races who were being attacked and losing badly. The aliens offered us their science, technology, and production facilities to supply us with any weapons and tools we could come up with, since they knew from observation we were good at fighting, and had a bit of a penchant for wanting to defend the helpless from aggressors, and they simply couldn't fight back very well on their own (they tried, it didn't work). Humanity came up with power armor so advanced it makes 40k stuff look crappy, guns that shot so fast at relativistic velocities they looked like lasers and punched through like 5 ranks of enemies, exploding the torso of every one of them (they should've cut down on the fire rate actually, as it was too high and they ran low on ammo on occasion, but one particular Gunnery Sergeant insisted on a laser and that was the best they could do), anti-starship lasers that basically kept a nuclear explosion rolling and focused the explosion into a coherent beam (techniccally didn't use lightt, but it was a coherent beam that was like a laser whose beam was made of nuclear explosions) and at one point they made a couple of kilograms of anti-matter, which the general freaked out about because that's an amount typically used to fuel an entire fleet of starships, then they used it as a bomb and took out a massive area. The guy who invented humanity's first antimatter bomb couldn't bear to look as he pushed the button tto launch the rocket, because they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't explode in the silo. The general in charge just watched the whole thing, knowing that if it detonated, his death would come so swiftly he literally would not be capable of comprehending the fact anything went wrong before his body was obliterated.

Oh, also, they might have antimatter bombs. I was once informed by a physicist (during a discussion about WH40k conversion beamers where I thought they converted the target's body to antimatter for some reason) that an optimal detonation of a 60kg antimatter bomb would end all life on Earth due to the ensuing environmental effects, though the planet itself would remain intact.

Neat sounds like a cool book. What's it called?

If you've read any of the Culture books they've got a cool example of how multiple societies with differing technological levels could exist and interact

I don't see why a 40k Movie wouldn't work. I can see how some would say that Horus was acting like an overly emotional teen, but then again things like that are more actor portrayal then anything else, so there's no reason he couldn't be portrayed differently. Sam could be said for all the Primarchs, when dealing with written media, a lot of how we see the characters behaving really comes from what we think about them. As for Maries all having helmets being a problem, it's not a problem for Star Wars and all their Storm Troopers. They've even had a couple well known actors play Storm Troopers and it was no big deal. There's plenty of scene potential for the main actors to not have their helmets on, and even when it would be necessary, Hollywood has gotten past the need to expose the actors head just so we can see them (for the most part).

There's no real reason to not have a 40k movie series, personally I think a Horus Hersey TV show would do much better. There's so much to cover in it, that you could easily keep it running for a deccade or more without getting overly drug out like the novels have. Just the main story alone would be enough.

 Ynneadwraith wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:


FTL. Faster than Light.

Please consider that that is a literal term and refers to actual velocities, not simply any case of traveling a very great distance in a short amount of time..

It's already known that there are ways we can cut down on the travel time without actually traveling faster than light. Folding space or creating a wormhole is a relatively old idea, and we could probably do it eventually. It's not considered to be FTL though, because your ship is merely taking a shortcut, not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.

Quibbling over literal meanings of terms

The context of the discussion is if a hypothetical alien race could travel to earth faster than light could do so without having a similarly advanced level of tech in other areas.

If you want to get really literal with terms, 'faster' could relate to time as well as speed. For the purposes of interstellar travel, cutting down travel time is the important goal, and speed is only one particular way to achieve that. Folding space is another equally valid way of travelling somewhere in less time than it would take light to travel there (so...faster than light).

Okay, clearly you're not accepting the real meaning of the tterm from me. I'll link you to Wikipedia's page about FTL and you can read it yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

New counter-argument: You're suggesting that aliens who understand and create that advanced technology are supplying a less-knowledgeable race with technology and weapons from their own civilization, and teaching them how to use them effectively.

Earth is still fethed. Iraq wasn't less destroyed by the US military in 2003 just because most US soldiers don't understand the science that went into their weapons and equipment.

Hah, true. In all of these cases, the overwhelming probability is that yes, Earth is fethed

Still, Iraq wasn't destroyed. It's beat up, but it's still there. Vietnam's still there, despite the US' best efforts.

Also, what if the advanced race is anything like the Dark Eldar? They might send their less advanced neighbours our way simply because it's funny to watch us try and fight for survival. No idea what the motivations of interstellar arms dealers would be

Interstellar treaties that prevent arming less developed societies, but allow sharing of other technologies?

Plenty of possible scenarios (although admittedly again, none of them more likely than the 'we're fethed' scenarios).

The tech's being created and used against us in a war intended to conquer Earth. Probably even if the civilization that made the tech was using it themselves, most of their military wouldn't actually grasp the science. The weapons are no less effective or advanced.

No-one said it had to be created by the same people who are using it to get to Earth

Beyond that it's back to the whole linear technology development thing. It's likely that it is linear, but not a certainty. Our technological understanding has progressed in the areas it's progressed in because of the events of our past and our surroundings. Who's to say that different circumstances wouldn't produce a vastly different level of understanding in different areas?

 Pouncey wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).

I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.

You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.

If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.

Once they figured out that buttons do stuff, how much of the ship's systems do you think they'd catastrophically wreck by learning what each and every thing does by simply pushing every button to see what it does?

For an example, close your eyes and start pressing buttons on your keyboard at random while moving your mouse around and clicking a random assortment of buttons. Continue this for about a minute. Then stop and open your eyes and see what state your computer is in. Now consider what that might do on a war vessel instead of a home computer.

More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.

Most of our soldiers IRL don't understand how their own weapons work.

Precisely just because you're able to use a piece of technology, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean the rest of your technology base has to be at a similar level.

Yeah, I mean, if the guys that made the tech and understand it show you how to use it... of course you can come to operate it properly.

But that means you're no longer simply discovering an abandoned derelict, you're now being used as a proxy military and supplied by the people who made the tech, who train you in its use. That's literally how modern militaries train with their own weapons and vessels, since the actual engineers who designed the ships and guns in the first place are not typically soldiers themselves being sent out into the field.

True, it's another possible scenario in which someone could reach earth with FTL.

Would you want to arm your warlike proxy militia-species with weapons that can hurt you as well? Surely it would be far safer to equip them with the means to get to Earth, and leave them with whatever weaponry is just enough to do the job...

Likely we're still fethed, but less fethed! Maybe even less fethed enough that we might not all die!

I don't think that's remotely true.

Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.

A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.

If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).

Yeah, uh, the owner manual taught you how to use it. Maybe even an employee whose job it is to teach you how to use that stuff.

The aliens who built it would basically have to be instructing the less-advanced race in its use.

Yep. That's my point. I don't need to understand how the physics behind the technology works, I just need the user manual. A spacefaring race doesn't need to know how the technology behind an FTL craft they've found works, they just need the user manual

Ergo, spacefaring race with similar levels of tech to us is a possibility

I actually read a book like that. Humans in the early 21st century (about 15-16 years ago, actually) were recruited as a military force by a galactic federation of pacifistic races who were being attacked and losing badly. The aliens offered us their science, technology, and production facilities to supply us with any weapons and tools we could come up with, since they knew from observation we were good at fighting, and had a bit of a penchant for wanting to defend the helpless from aggressors, and they simply couldn't fight back very well on their own (they tried, it didn't work). Humanity came up with power armor so advanced it makes 40k stuff look crappy, guns that shot so fast at relativistic velocities they looked like lasers and punched through like 5 ranks of enemies, exploding the torso of every one of them (they should've cut down on the fire rate actually, as it was too high and they ran low on ammo on occasion, but one particular Gunnery Sergeant insisted on a laser and that was the best they could do), anti-starship lasers that basically kept a nuclear explosion rolling and focused the explosion into a coherent beam (techniccally didn't use lightt, but it was a coherent beam that was like a laser whose beam was made of nuclear explosions) and at one point they made a couple of kilograms of anti-matter, which the general freaked out about because that's an amount typically used to fuel an entire fleet of starships, then they used it as a bomb and took out a massive area. The guy who invented humanity's first antimatter bomb couldn't bear to look as he pushed the button tto launch the rocket, because they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't explode in the silo. The general in charge just watched the whole thing, knowing that if it detonated, his death would come so swiftly he literally would not be capable of comprehending the fact anything went wrong before his body was obliterated.

Oh, also, they might have antimatter bombs. I was once informed by a physicist (during a discussion about WH40k conversion beamers where I thought they converted the target's body to antimatter for some reason) that an optimal detonation of a 60kg antimatter bomb would end all life on Earth due to the ensuing environmental effects, though the planet itself would remain intact.

Neat sounds like a cool book. What's it called?

It's a series actually. John Ringo's Posleen series. The first four books are "A Hymn Before Battle," "Gust Front," "When the Devil Dances," and "Hell's Faire."

There are more, but those are the best ones.

I recommend skipping Cally's War entirely. It starts with an incredibly graphic torture scene in the first chapter. I put the book down after that, but according to what I've head, it only gets worse from there.

If you've read any of the Culture books they've got a cool example of how multiple societies with differing technological levels could exist and interact

I have not, actually.

Honestly, I'm not responding to any of your points, nor did I read them, because it's clear you're completely unwilling to accept the reality and prefer to linger in the fantasy of humans somehow being able to fend off an alien invasion.

And that's kinda my point. All of these alien invasion stories invent a critical weakness for the aliens that the humans then exploit to win. There's no alien invasion Hollywood Blockbusters written about a more realistic alien invasion force that sets its sights on destroying Earth and then has the aliens win. The aliens always blow up a bunch of stuff, then humans find a way to defeat them, by exploiting a weakness that shouldn't really exist.

The closest we come is stuff like The Day the Earth Stood Still, where the humans talk the aliens into giving up on killing us. But even that has problems - these aliens decided an entire species needed to be exterminated for the benefit of the planet, and were making it happen. Why would our promises of being willing to change in the face of an unstoppable force sway the aliens at all? If they believed we were willing to change, why would they try to wipe us out at all instead of simply convincing us change was necessary? Disseminating the command to change would also have proved difficult given how much stuff was already destroyed by the time they chose to stop - they basically set us back 1800 years in terms of technology and wiped out our global communication systems, so no one has any idea why the aliens stopped or even that they should change, because there's no way to relay any information short of sending a human being by one of the surviving ships or planes to tell everyone. They effectively wiped out the Internet, telephone, and television systems in the process of ravaging most of the planet in a sentient, deliberate Grey Goo scenario.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/

Huh. Humanity, right now, has laser technology powerful enough to convert our own atmosphere to plasma, killing all life on the planet, and push the Moon out of Earth's orbit, we simply lack the energy production to power an array of such lasers in a sufficient manner to do so.

I like the idea of a small scale 40k movie.

Here's an idea that could work
Alien, but with a Genestealer. 1 lone Genestealer aboard a Freighter. You won't even need to do a 20 minute monologue of background to have things make sense, cause who would even care about the Horus Heresy. These would be ordinary people, all you have to is have one or two say 'Throne' instead of a swear, or sub Emperor instead of God. Hell, they probably would be on the same level of technology; huge space ship, tiny black and white screen. Sure, throw in the odd 40k Phrase, like Space Marines, but the average person knows what a Marine is, so they would get the connection. If you want to really bridge the gap at the end the survivors could be met by a Space Marine vessel, and then it has a quick moment of "Oh gak, thats what they meant by Space Marine".

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I like the idea of a small scale 40k movie.

Here's an idea that could work
Alien, but with a Genestealer. 1 lone Genestealer aboard a Freighter. You won't even need to do a 20 minute monologue of background to have things make sense, cause who would even care about the Horus Heresy. These would be ordinary people, all you have to is have one or two say 'Throne' instead of a swear, or sub Emperor instead of God. Hell, they probably would be on the same level of technology; huge space ship, tiny black and white screen. Sure, throw in the odd 40k Phrase, like Space Marines, but the average person knows what a Marine is, so they would get the connection. If you want to really bridge the gap at the end the survivors could be met by a Space Marine vessel, and then it has a quick moment of "Oh gak, thats what they meant by Space Marine".

Uhh...

You DO know that "Space Hulk" is basically a direct ripoff of Alien, right?

 TheoreticalFish wrote:
I like the idea of a small scale 40k movie.

Here's an idea that could work
Alien, but with a Genestealer. 1 lone Genestealer aboard a Freighter. You won't even need to do a 20 minute monologue of background to have things make sense, cause who would even care about the Horus Heresy. These would be ordinary people, all you have to is have one or two say 'Throne' instead of a swear, or sub Emperor instead of God. Hell, they probably would be on the same level of technology; huge space ship, tiny black and white screen. Sure, throw in the odd 40k Phrase, like Space Marines, but the average person knows what a Marine is, so they would get the connection. If you want to really bridge the gap at the end the survivors could be met by a Space Marine vessel, and then it has a quick moment of "Oh gak, thats what they meant by Space Marine".

But why would anyone want to pay GW's licensing fees to make an Alien ripoff with minimal 40k content when they could just rip off Alien directly and spend less money?

Making a decent 40k movie would only be marginally harder than making a decent Dune movie. You just have to leave out the more ridiculous stuff (orks). You could easily do a movie about a Rogue Trader investigating a planet that turns out to be a Necron hive world, for example. Mostly human cast of characters, some CGI necrons and a squad of Space Marines for the action sequences, etcetera.

Possibly a different can of worms, but what if instead of a Hollywood blowout. (I mean seriously, what mob is going to commit serious finances to a movie with a niche audience.). Suppose this was put into the hands of Japanese animation studios?

Giantwalkingchair wrote:
Possibly a different can of worms, but what if instead of a Hollywood blowout. (I mean seriously, what mob is going to commit serious finances to a movie with a niche audience.). Suppose this was put into the hands of Japanese animation studios?

Or maybe something like Heavy Metal?

40K players aren't a huge market, but it's a recognized IP as far as computer games go, and it's sustains an actual publishing line of books. It's valuable enough as far as Hollywood might be concerned, it probably depends more of how much money GW wants for the rights (likely too much).

John Prins wrote:
It's valuable enough as far as Hollywood might be concerned, it probably depends more of how much money GW wants for the rights (likely too much).

Valuable enough to do what? Throw the 40k brand on the latest Generic Action Movie they're working on as a cheap way to sell a few extra tickets? Sure, as long as GW agrees to pay for the right to sell licensed the 40k toys the movie will be promoting. Spend hundreds of millions of dollars on big-name actors, a massive CGI budget, etc, to create the movie the 40k fanboys want? Hell no. There aren't enough 40k fans to justify working within the constraints of GW's IP, especially when anyone who wants to can rip off the same material that GW was "inspired by" and create a movie that is 99% of 40k without paying GW anything or having to follow their rules. There's a reason why the Ultramarines movie was unwatchable garbage with a $10 budget.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Giantwalkingchair wrote:
Suppose this was put into the hands of Japanese animation studios?

I doubt it changes much. The same principle is still true regardless of CGI vs. 2d animation: the 40k brand name isn't valuable, and licensing the IP makes things a lot harder for very little gain. If a 40k anime is a profitable concept then anyone who wants to is free to make it without dealing with GW.

 Peregrine wrote:
There's a reason why the Ultramarines movie was unwatchable garbage with a $10 budget.

What exactly did the creators get for free if they only spent 10 dollars?

 Pouncey wrote:
What exactly did the creators get for free if they only spent 10 dollars?

You know $10 is an exaggeration, right?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
What exactly did the creators get for free if they only spent 10 dollars?

You know $10 is an exaggeration, right?

It's so unbelievably low though...

Couldn't you have said "shoestring budget" rather than think of a specific number?

 Pouncey wrote:
It's so unbelievably low though...

Couldn't you have said "shoestring budget" rather than think of a specific number?

Do you have to be so ridiculously literal about nitpicking this?

Edit: I'm done with this nitpicking tangent. Everyone else understands that $10 is an exaggeration to make a point, we can continue the discussion from there instead of arguing about precisely how much I should have exaggerated it.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
It's so unbelievably low though...

Couldn't you have said "shoestring budget" rather than think of a specific number?

Do you have to be so ridiculously literal about nitpicking this?

Edit: I'm done with this nitpicking tangent. Everyone else understands that $10 is an exaggeration to make a point, we can continue the discussion from there instead of arguing about precisely how much I should have exaggerated it.

Fair enough, but I think the fact that I was nitpicking over it should suggest that I felt a need to do so. However, that has ceased to be the case, so yes, we can continue. You may now continue the conversation as you like, and I will respond if I feel like it.