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« on: July 24, 2008, 11:46:13 PM »
Re the lecture... is that how we're going to travel in time, going faster than light? Didn't we know about that already? We're used to the idea of faster-than-light travel in fiction because it's a convenient plot device, but when you start to get an idea of how enormous these forces and distances are, you start to realize what small, powerless, and ignorant creatures we still are, relatively speaking. No pun intended.
I've heard something about somehow using a couple of spinning micro-singularities in some sort of time machine, mini black holes in other words. How you make a black hole and stick it in a machine I have no idea.
Google "John Titor" if you want to spend an afternoon getting freaked as I did. This is someone who claimed around 2000 to have come from the future and is believed in by quite a few people. You can even google for pictures of the machine. He said General Electric made it, in the future, and that it does have those two "spinning singularities" in it.
I think if we had time travel it would be a disaster. We'd destroy whatever we touched. At the very least we'd end up with McDonald's in the middle ages or something.
The idea of a "wormhole" came up years ago as a total speculation, on what unexpected things might happen if you went into a black hole. The idea has taken on a life of its own in science-fiction, but probably nothing like that happens in a black hole. We'd be torn to shreds first then squeezed down to nothing like in a trash-compactor.
My information comes from years ago and bits and pieces I hear from audio magazines, though, so I'd like someone to catch me up if I'm behind on all this.
Interestingly, technically speaking, you can travel faster than light, as long as you always have been. The speed-of-light limit goes both ways... we can't accelerate up to the speed of light, and nothing already traveling faster than light can ever slow down to the speed of light.