Message from the future

Why is that? If we don't know what "manipulating information through time" means, then how can we possibly know how long it takes the aliens to do it, for any amount of information?

So are you saying that we should do as little as possible? And to ensure just that, we should have stayed ignorant as long as possible?

A causes B causes C causes A? That's all very well, but there has to be a beginning. Before we received the message, was this cycle going on? I'd say no. But now that we have, it's started. We have A. And A was caused by C. But C hasn't happened yet. So how can it be the cause of A? How can we have A? I'm not so sure about that.

(WHY am I getting involved in this ??? Well, if the message IS true, we WILL go extinct no matter WHAT we do. It doesn't sound appealing to me to know exactly when and how you're going to die. So if nothing can prevent it anyway, I'd rather not know.If the message is a joke, then it is obviously unnecessary to let it have any influence.

Only if you view time as necessarily moving forward. I don't think it's inconsistent with any known physical laws that time does not "move" in such a way. Feynman certainly seems "cool" with the notion of time without direction.If time REALLY is another dimension, then think of it as existing all at once, just like the 3 spatial dimensions do. "Travel" in time is the same as travel in space.At least.... I THINK so. Certainly Feynman allows for the view of undirected time.

I don't know if this is off topic or not, but it seems to fit. I just happened to read this morning:"By one single impulse of life [God] created all days and all times, so that the life of the first day and the life of the remotest future day are united in Him."
{Tozer, The Pursuit of Man, p. 12 }This message has been edited by Faith, 09-30-2005 03:53 PM

Feynman seemed cool, period.Anyway, if what you say holds water, then the causal chain might be: We live! We must not do B, but D, and we will not find C in our future. It is somewhere out there in time, but if we do D, we will not go past it.Ergo, we must not build the Mars colony.

Kant

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My knowledge, then, is to be verified by itself, which is far from being sufficient for truth. For as the object is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object. Such a circle in explanation was called by the ancients Diallelos.

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You already judged the figure's form. Will your sensibility to move through your ego instead.

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And the logicians were accused of this fallacy by the sceptics, who remarked that this account of truth was as if a man before a judicial tribunal should make a statement, and appeal in support of it to a witness whom no one knows, but who defends his own credibility by saying that the man who had called him as a witness is an honourable man. The charge was certainly well-founded.Only the solution of the problem referred to is absolutely impossible for any man.

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It is not however impossible for you to think that gravity waves resonate within your twistor branes by a Keynesian synthetic adaptation of bonded range changes, only that as such is soooo within the circle, if it exists. Since you are inside the perimeter, you reason that A, B, and C are outside and thus if you know you exist so such even if you did not know, if or how to get there, there-where the domain crossed the range nonethenever the less was. This is not a simple matter of writing out ones disagreement vs. using the verbal shortcut. It seems that Bertrand Russel wrote on many non- logical topics such as to significantly void this charge. The sceptic however is not the creationist this time but the evolutionist. p40-1.

Er, I guess I didn't do that well. I think the view is NOT that things are "revisable" by travelling back and forth in time, but rather that all things exist "statically" at all times. So like the Bradbury story "Sound of Thunder" where people travel to the past and change it is impossible. "Back to the Future" also out (a shame though, classic flick)It's more like in EVERY instantiation of 2005, there's this note from the aliens. If it's here in ANY instantiation of 2005, then it was there for all versions.That's why "circular causality" is legal (I think). Because all "times" "exist" "at the same time" analagous to the spatial dimensions. Clearly we don't have the proper language to explicate this, and I'm not smart enough to find inventive ways to use better terms.

Ben,Your message is a bit confusing: it seems you describe not one, but two models, one where time is a static dimension where everything is fixed at its point in time, and another where there are multiple instantiations of each point in time, each of which is the same as all the others. The logical consequence of this model is that all points in time can have multiple instantiations, but - strangely - all of them the same. In effect, this would mean that there are multiple 'timelines' which are all exactly the same. If they are all the same, then I don't see a reason for the multiplicity.But perhaps I've completely missed your point.{Note for Brad: I'm going off-line now and won't be back for a while. Just so you know I am not ignoring you, but your post will take a considerable amount of thought before I am able to respond with something worthwhile.}

I don't think a precis on the data avaliable during the time of the coming plague violates the Prime Directive any more than this note does. If they were trying to skirt a Prime Directive-type law, the note they sent would have been far, far more vague.If you're gonna take a moral stance against a law, you take a big stance. You don't half-ass it. Did it happen that way, when the series ended? I love SG-1 but Trek never did it for me. Worst science-fiction on television, if you ask me.

what do you mean? it begins when we recieve the message, and ends when we send it. you're getting caught up in the idea that effect has to come after cause, which of course isn't a factor since we're dealing with time travel. tautologically. it's outside the cycle. time travel, it's included in the premise. but i still don't see why the virus would be effected let alone caused by the message.

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אָרַח

I can think of several types of time-travel where the size of the data is irrelevant to transmission time:1) Time-transmission works not by syncronizing two separate time flows but by retroactive "editing" or direct changes to the universe at a discreet instant in the past - like making changes to one frame of a movie, the change appears instant to us here in the past.2) Time-transmission works by dropping off the data stored to some kind of digital storage device, like a small flash drive. Since you have to send the whole drive for it to work, it doesn't matter if the drive has 1k of text data or 512 mb of PowerPoint slides on the infection.There's other indications that bandwidth was not an issue - for instance, when transmission time is a premium, the first thing you don't do is use an intercaps character set; if you restrict to all upper or lower case letters and limited punctuation, you can cut an entire bit off of every character.Instead, they sent an extra bit of data per character in order to have appropriate punctuation and capitalization. As short as it is, the message is too long and too "frilly" to have been sent under a situation where data transmission was a premium. It's much more likely that the limiting factor was our end, and there's a number of places on the internet that could accept a 1 gig file transfer, or 100 gigs, or whatever, about as fast as they could accept a < 1k file.

Erm... has anybody taken a look at my first post in this thread recently? You'd be surprised.

Message? There was never message there as far as I can remember. Just a bunch of edits and some message about going to th cache to retrieve something.You doin' alright Para?