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Thanks, I'll read it.

I was quite precise in my wording and didn't say what you are responding to.

My opinion (and it's just that, I'm unprepared to defend it) is that we've always been [less and less] wrong on everything.

And since we can't know what the boundaries of knowledge are, and it could easily be some insane unbounded fractal existence, it seems rash to me to decide that we know enough to say that there can't exist civilizations whose technology is magic to us.




Problem is that this technology breaks our understanding of causality. So it isn't a "less wrong" type of situation so much as we have to rewrite everything. Specifically it means things that happen in the future can affect things in the past (communication past the light cone). The discoveries of quantum and relativity didn't break classical mechanics so much as extend it. But to rewrite how a sequence of events happens, well that's a big fundamental change. The light from my flashlight turning on at t=1 does not force me to press the button to turn it on at t=0.


The problem is you/we are working with what you know, not with what you don't know. That is why it's hard to conceive of something different.

You never know, when this advanced technology is revealed by the US military it could just be some kind of physics hack that fits in neatly somewhere and doesn't require any rewriting, just a footnote.


Maybe read the Asimov link first.


The first hit on Google, from a reputable site, suggests that this isn't proven to be impossible to solve by adapting the current frameworks, as we've done before. It's unsettled science, which is imo working as expected:

https://www.sciencealert.com/study-shows-how-the-universe-wo...


> Specifically it means things that happen in the future can affect things in the past (communication past the light cone).

Sure, and that's not a problem so as long as self-consistency is preserved.

> But to rewrite how a sequence of events happens, well that's a big fundamental change.

Depends how you look at it. There are retrocausal explanations of quantum mechanics, for instance.


> Sure, and that's not a problem so as long as self-consistency is preserved.

You break the lightcone...

> Depends how you look at it. There are retrocausal explanations of quantum mechanics, for instance.

Let me save people the time, there's critiques at the bottom but there is no actual evidence for retrocausal explanations: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-retrocausality/


> You break the lightcone...

The point is you can't. Existence would be a static 4D structure. No matter how you tried to change the past, your attempts are already part of your own history and clearly all failed.

> Let me save people the time, there's critiques at the bottom but there is no actual evidence for retrocausal explanations: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-retrocausality

There is no evidence for any interpretation of QM. That's what makes them interpretations and not distinct theories.


A lot of things would be demonstratively broken if Special Relativity is wrong.


It doesn't need to be too wrong, just incomplete. Much like Newton's laws.

See my comment in the sibling subthread.




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