How do you explain it?

[Aiken]

Back to WP explanations. Possibly it's an alternative universe, and warp points are an inherent part of its physics. And probably traditional (for us) interstellar travel is theoreticaly impossible there.

In perfectly explains why Aaron rejected to implement intersystem movement at speed of light in se5 - he has arrived from that universe recently (his saucer was last seen about 20 years ago) and this kind of movement is a wild nonsense for him.

[AngleWyrm]

"Time isn't made out of lines, it is made out of circles. That is why clocks are round." -Caboose

Further reference details at:
http://www.redvsblue.com/archive/download.php/?id=607

[Jestak]

Greetings,

Indeed, the time distorsion is not linear. I was just simplifying too much.

Concerning other comments:
"Sounds to me like the kind of twaddle a scifi writer would come out with- Asimov or Clarke from the sound of it. "

Nope, it came from a very serious scientific community. First time I read about it, it was in Discovery magazine then I made some more researches on the web. It is a simple classification. There are others, but this one is the most known and it is done in relation with energy consumption. I am not a physicist or futurologist. Just a simple engineer. hehe

"Why would you *want* to harness all the energy of a galaxy, or a solar system, or a planet? If we could harness all of Earth's energy, we would have thousands of times more energy than we had any clue what to do with."

Not really. Our knowledge of the universe and fundamental physic is far beyond our technological knowledge. Only the energy of the earth will be far from suficient in a distant futur. I gave as an example the Star Trek Enterprise. In theory, a ship like that one would deplete the earth energy in a very few time.

I am not offensed at all. Just that I can't put here the whole "Energy classification" thing. It was more to point out to some people to fin some reading. I underestimated the people by simplifying too much. Anyway, next time I'll have more scientific rigor.

Thank you

[Hunpecked]

In theory, a system in a galaxy moving 10 times faster than our galacy will flow 10 times slower than us

Not necessarily (and I'm not talking about linearity vs. nonlinearity of the time effect).

See the article "Miconceptions about the Big Bang" at

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.c...2383414B7F0147

This kind of stuff makes my head hurt, but as near as I can make out, it goes something like this: In an Earth-type bang (e.g. a grenade explosion) the shrapnel "expands" into pre-existing space. The cosmic Big Bang, on the other hand, was an "explosion" of space itself, and all the galaxies are basically just along for the ride. This means that a distant galaxy can "recede" from us at greater than the speed of light, an apparent contradiction to Relativity. I'm no physicist, but my guess is this means "time" in those distant galaxies is pretty much the same as it is here (although of course what we "now" see in the visible distant galaxies actually happened long ago).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Jestak, what you're saying is right, but I think you made one mistake - you exaggerated the time distortion immensely. If, for example, I move at 5kph, and a bus passes me at 50kph, would time in the bus be moving 10 times faster? OK, I agree with you, if another galaxy rotates 10x faster than ours, they will experience a time distortion discrepancy (err..... OK, sure, right) but not so big as what you described.

[Jestak]

Greetings,

You are right about the time distortion. I was just giving an example, but chose it badly.

Regarding a previous post about energy, I think it was one MIT or CALTECH graduate who calculated that to move the Enterprise (In TNG) at speed of light - 1% for 1 minutes, it would take all the energy of the earth sun burning for about one full month. So it is not impossible in theory.

One scientist classified civilizations in 3 categories:
- Category 1 civilization will harness all the energy of the planet. That means mainly: solar, wind, fosil, all mechanic energies that I can't name, nuclear, lava, tectonic energies.
- Category 2 civilization will harness all the energy a solar system will produce. That means category one plus harnessing the sun energy and taping directly into it and the planet gravitational movements energy.
- Category 3 civilization will harness all the energy of the galaxy. It is category 1,2 and a whole bunch of energy types that I don't understand at all...hehe

Currently, we are not even at level 1. We are at level zero.

Thank you

[dogscoff]

One scientist classified civilizations in 3 categories:
- Category 1 civilization will harness all the energy of the planet. That means mainly: solar, wind, fosil, all mechanic energies that I can't name, nuclear, lava, tectonic energies.
- Category 2 civilization will harness all the energy a solar system will produce. That means category one plus harnessing the sun energy and taping directly into it and the planet gravitational movements energy.
- Category 3 civilization will harness all the energy of the galaxy. It is category 1,2 and a whole bunch of energy types that I don't understand at all...hehe

Sounds to me like the kind of twaddle a scifi writer would come out with- Asimov or Clarke from the sound of it.

Why would you *want* to harness all the energy of a galaxy, or a solar system, or a planet? If we could harness all of Earth's energy, we would have thousands of times more energy than we had any clue what to do with. Perhaps we could fire a laser beam and blow up a neighbouring planet/solar system/galaxy or something. And how do you define *all* the energy on a planet anyway? If you have covered the entire planet in solar panels to harness *all* of the sun's rays, where are we going to put the wind farms to harness *all* the wind power? (which is just converted solar energy anyway) What level of energy conversion efficiency must we achieve to qualify for this arbitrary categorisation? 10%? 50%? 100%?

Theoretically, we have the technology to 'harness' all of Earth's uranium deposits right now (just dig up all the uranium and build lots and lots of power stations), but we haven't used it *all* until there's none left and we'd be idiots to do it all in one go. And why stop at Uranium? Energy can be derived from any matter- must we bleed every atom completely dry? Besides, there are useful things Earth's energy could be doing that don't directly involve us- like growing trees and sustaining our ecosystem for instance.

Similar problems apply to the supposed category 2 and 3 civilisations. And even if, for some absurd reason, humanity did want to harness every single scrap of Earth/Sol/MW's energy, who's to say that any other sentient species would have such an appetite? And even after reading the foundation series, I'm still not convinced by the prospect of an entire-galaxy-spanning civilisation either, which kind of rules out #3. It's just too damn big- it would be a real bugger to administer.

So all in all, a very narrow and somewhat pointless statement, imho. No offence to Jestak though, that's at least the second of your comments in this thread shot down- sorry dude.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Somebody added a "Type 4" to that list, a civilization which can utilize the energy of multiple galaxies. In theory, true lightspeed travel or FTL travel would only be efficient energy-wise for a Type 4 civilization.