SOXBLOX

As you can see, I have already addressed your objections. It isn't just the supply chains that expand, there are more entirely new jobs available.

*facepalm* I concede the point! I ignored the possibility of time travel because it is practically, in the literal sense of the word, impossible, since we ain't got no negative mass.

Robot guard dogs at Nellis AFB? Can I have one? http://thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36229/the-air-force-just-tested-robot-dogs-for-use-in-base-security

Oh, drat. @kerbiloid's description is correct, but it doesn't say what time is. He's saying you can run in circles in space, but you can't return to a previous point in time. Here's an analogy which helped me. Joe and Bob are test drivers for a car company. Joe gets the job of test-driving a most impractical car, which always drives at its top speed of 100 mph. The test track is 10 miles long, runs due east-west, and is wide and flat. Bob looks at the recorded data about the duration of each test drive. They should all be 6 minutes long, since the vehicle moves at 100 mph, but he sees that the last few are much longer. 6.5, 7, or even 7.5 minutes. What happened? Joe has an explanation. The sun was setting, and as he was driving west, it was in his eyes. So, he drove the last few, anomalous runs at an angle, not due east-west, but pointed slightly south. Because of this, he was sharing some of his 100 mph motion with the north-south direction, leaving less of his 100 mph for the east-west direction. Now, if you realize that motion can be shared between dimensions, you will have picked up one of the core insights of special relativity. The trick is to realize that one can share motion between time and space dimensions as well. Actually, most of our motion in the universe lies in the time dimension. We are all moving through time, because you can see changes happen over a period or duration. We are moving at light-speed through time, but when we move in space, we borrow some of that motion. Thus, not all observers have the same clock rate when you compare them; some observers are moving from some other observer's perspective. (Light does not experience the "flow" of time; it has no motion in time because it moves at light-speed through space.) As for what time is, I can't help you. There are some ideas out there. One is that it has to do with the increase of entropy, and another is that our universe is actually in motion within another dimension, moving in a direction distinct from the three spatial directions. That direction, or dimension, would be time. IDK. Bit isn't it fun to accidentally run into one of the most important questions in theology, philosophy, and physics all at the same time? I love it!

Hmmm... Robots will not cause a global unemployment epidemic. Why? New technology always creates more jobs than it replaces. Let's look at the textiles industry. Originally, there were a handful of jobs requiring intense manual labor and which might cause you to go blind from squinting. The products were few and varied, dependant on the skill of the worker. When mechanical looms were invented, the jobs of the hand-weavers were eliminated, but there were more jobs operating machinery. As a second-order effect, the increased production required more people to distribute the products. People were also required to see that the company did not run below profit or manufacture too much. This gave birth to management. The raised real wages and lower prices of consumer goods benefited everyone. The third stage is, of course, a completely autonomous factory. While no one works at the factory, there are many jobs which support it. Engineers, power grid workers, investors, textile designers, and many others. *** Now, generalizing, we see that there are three stages in any technology. We can use the simple example of hammering a nail to demonstrate this point. First, there is the hammer, swung by a man's arm. The hammer is powered by a human, and guided by a human. Second, there is the pneumatic hammer, used commonly by roofers to drive tacks. This is not powered by a human, but it is still guided by one. The ultimate (third) evolution of hammering technology will, therefore, be a machine both powered and guided mechanically. We have these; they are called gang-nailers, and they are used to build prefab houses. *** The pneumatic hammers made such jobs as "roofer" possible. They also add such jobs as "nail making factory worker" and "manager of a store to buy pneumatic hammers at". Gang nailers replace prefab house builders, for the most part, but they add jobs. (More than they eliminate.) These jobs are even less labor-intensive than those added by pneumatic hammers. We have the people who design the gang nailer, sell it, etc. We have the people who use it to provide low-cost, abundant housing, and those who provide insurance for that housing. There are people who design houses to be built, and there are people who decorate those houses. The list can go on and on! More jobs, and less strenuous ones! These jobs need to be filled. If they are not, they will become more lucrative, until people do fill them. Simple market forces. The scarcer workers are, the higher the demand. The workers will compensate by filling those jobs rather that lower wage tasks. *** The question here is whether the final evolution of a technology, the transition from human guidance to autonomy, creates a fundamental alteration of economics, such that some principles need be abandoned. The answer? It does not, and they do not need to be. The laws of economics and the capitalist system are the logical end of the starting principles of economics. These principles, or axioms, really, are known as human nature. Human nature is, by definition, unchangeable. If you change human nature, you will create apes or angels, but not humans. Many philosophers have tried to change human nature, or else make incorrect assumptions about it. This always results in a philosophy inconsistent with the universe. Such systems are the philosophical and economic equivalent of physics' perpetual motion machine or free-energy device.

Gravitation won't slow the light down, but it will distort the path (or rather, it distorts the space through which the light travels). Because of this, the path light travels is longer than one would expect if the space were flat. Of course, the distance in curved space is the actual distance to the object, so if you measure 500 LY, it is 500 LY away. The big thing is, the ruler is always correct, though not all reference frames will agree on the length of an object or the distance between two points. I am doing a miserable job of "explaining" this. Please forgive me.

Yes, we do. All observers measure the speed of light to be the same, regardless of what their circumstances. I love that website!

Well, on the political office topic, someone has to program it. Their biases would creep in. If you're saying they wouldn't be programmed, then yeah, anything is possible in our imagination. As for the piano playing, we already have computers that play music and even instruments, but humans still attend concerts and theatre productions. They do it because hearing a human play it (while the sound isn't very different) the intangible quality of attending a concert, performed by a human, cannot, by definition, be replicated by a robot. The idea I'm trying to convey is that "authentic" and "handmade" will carry more weight in the future. As for computer-generated art, it probably won't sell as well as human art. Why? It is meaningless. If one can crank out piece after piece, they are as cheap as common dirt, because they are as plentiful. The playing field of the future you describe is real, but I would conjecture (meaning no offense, and not pretending to be an expert) that your conclusion is wrong. Humans are not irrelevant in this future, they simply have so much individual power with so little effort that they appear so. But of course. Any company that makes the same product but has higher prices or lower margins due to the use of more expensive labor will not last long enough to be written about in the history books. When machines are cheaper than humans, human labor will not be economically feasible. And we are using computers and data management. My point is that the "maximum extent practicable" will expand. So far, you seem to be correct on computers being unable to think. Strong AI may never come to pass. I withhold my judgement on the possibilities of quantum computing. If capitalism got us here and is taking us to this future we are imagining, it makes zero sense to abandon it once there. Also, ouch. Debates like these are the reason I love these forums! Pretty sure we all love your questions, @Spacescifi

Yeah, technological history has been one of humans saying "only a highly trained human can do my job", and then someone coming along and screwing things up by building something that can, or better yet, something that eliminates the job entirely. Then we say, "Well, huh. This machine is pretty handy! My job is so much better now; I almost have fun while I'm working!" And the cycle repeated itself over and over again. It still is repeating, but there is a limit somewhere. When we get to that limit, my guess is that almost all jobs will be finding things for robots and computers to do, building better robots, or scientific work (assisted by robots and computers to the maximum extent practicable). Drudge work will be almost nonexistent. What I mean is, robots can't give a live performance of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing or Franz Liszt's "La Campanella", or handcarve wooden furniture. It's things that have a human tag attached to them that will be prevalent. Other jobs will be dreaming up new items for robots to make, new games for people to play, and other things that really require a human. I assume you are being facetious about public office? And future war is gonna be *kinda* different from that of 1943, or even today.

Most old SF books or what-have-you's include robots like this. If they could provide an economic benefit, they would have been built and deployed into the workforce in large numbers long ago. Of course, SF usually gets its predictions only sorta correct. Like you said, we have computers aiding us, they just don't look like people. Eh. Maybe, but it seems to be going in the direction of either "no more tanks" or "tanks have active defenses", like Israel's Trophy or Russia's Arena. Airborne drones are being launched from tanks to scout ahead, but these are only a few inches long, and aren't weaponized. Much better than small drone tanks would be active defense-equipped (manned) tanks with tons of CAS from UAV platforms.

Thermal=infrared Tanks already have advanced sensors and computers to process the data for the soldiers. No Mk I eyeball needed. Teleoperation can be jammed, might not work in urban environments or prohibitive terrain, and leaves the system open to electronic attacks other than jamming. If you put humans nearby to teleoperate the "tank" then they need to be protected by something. Armor boxes work nicely. Now how about an armor box on highly mobile treads, and with a gun on top to defend itself? Oh, wait, we've got that already...

I hate building space stations because I have to use the Clamp-O-Noodles to do it. If the devs fix the bizzaro wobbling and instability, I'm all in for new station parts!

Maybe they're cheaper in some militaries, but not Western ones. There aren't drone tanks mainly because A) drones don't need armor, so they won't look like tanks, and B) only humans can currently discriminate between a dangerous suicide bomber and a harmless young man with a box of food. Anyways, robots will likely not need to be humanoid. You might want, say, two tracks and manipulator arms above. Much easier, and nearly as versatile in artificial environments, like a space habitat. In future, most jobs will revolve around finding things for robots to build or make, building the robots, or doing highly complex repair work. That will be cool, for the folks alive then.

Okay, this one, now. I knew I should have tested the link...

It looks weird. Silly French words. Oh, wait...

Yeah, when high energy particles run into steel, they release energy, in the form of gamma rays, as they pass through the electron clouds of the material. So a steel box would literally fry you. Well, maybe not so drastically... Anyways, metals are good at stopping uncharged particles like neutrons, so you do want metal shielding. Just, you need something fluffy underneath, to stop the bremsstralung gammas.

Ah, the decisive battle. One of A. T. Mahan's favorite theories. The problem is, of course, that it ended rather poorly for the Japanese. Such a doctrine led to them tricking themselves into thinking they could attack an enemy force and have it sit still or move in one direction long enough that they could wear it down and then destroy it decisively. This could only have happened if the US Navy had an objective it needed to reach. The Japanese assumed this would be their Home Islands; they thought that the American objective would be invasion. Of course, the objective was not invasion, it was ending the war with a minimal cost of American and Allied lives. Like Nimitz said, "winning was a simple matter of arithmetic; subtraction for them, addition for us". The American strategy was to destroy Japanese power projection capabilities and force an economic collapse, as well as liberate captured territory in the Pacific. Hence blockades and destruction of factories. Also important is information warfare. Codebreaking, sensors, sensor data fusion, etc. It gives commanders a better picture. See the page here for more information on this kind of warfare. An example of the idea would be this: one nation is militarily supreme but in a semi-precarious position on the galactic stage. This nation, let's call it nation A, controls a large, backwater expanse used as a strategic buffer zone between it and the rest of the galaxy. Just bordering the expanse is another nation which is on its way up in the world, at least, according to it. They are tired of not being able to access this expanse, full of unused resources, or perhaps their leaders need to distract from the failings of their totalitarian regime at home. For whatever reason, this nation, nation B, declares war on nation A with the aim of humiliating A and taking over a chunk of the local economic market. Nation B's military leader uses rapid, unpredictable strikes to eliminate A's infrastructure in the region in the opening hours of the conflict. This forces A to extend supply lines from its home bases, or mount attacks from more distant, unaffected locations. If B can win just a couple more victories, they can offer peace terms to nation A under which B keeps a significant part of the buffer zone. If A cannot retaliate forcefully enough to drive out B (because A's infrastructure was destroyed, they cannot maintain a fleet in the region), and they are under pressure from the rest of the galaxy to end the war, they may opt for conditional surrender. This timely peace offer would be a diplomatic fait accompli.

Rosetta rendezvoued... ren... What the heck is the past tense of rendezvous? IDK. But Rosetta just kinda matched orbits, I think. The problem is, if they have gravity, they have to run on rails (I think), so we can't move them anymore. They become like Gilly.

Do they ever read that?

@JoeSchmuckatelli Beautiful analysis! Modern war, and presumably future war, as you pointed out, is not about destroying the enemy, but about defeating him. Destroy the ability and will to fight of your opponent, and you won't have to lose men and munitions against his tanks and aircraft. Take down the base, fuel depot, or railway bridge, and move on. On a grander scale, crippling the enemy's economy and political integrity are the fast ways to bring him down. Break the logistics chain, and their tanks can't move. Mission kill an opponent, rather than hard kill, right? The Death Star was, of course, there to show you how evil the Emperor was, and as a convenient big bad wolf. Much more interesting would be an actually philosophically evil villain with more conventional forces. Oh well... *** Oh, and as @DDE pointed out, sucker-punch FTL, provided you can see where you are jumping, makes for a completely different type of warfare, geared towards the defense of planets. Or maybe geared towards total offense, where you hope to cause as much damage as possible before your economic collapse. I think either is a possibility.

The WORST they can do in the monetization realm is to do a Stellaris, and use DLC spam to keep getting money, as I have pointed out before. They probably won't even do that. It goes against the Kerbal spirit.

Too many people have spent too much of their time in school learning useless things, and now we in the USA have a non-trivial scientifically illiterate population. They sure can yell, though... Seriously, I saw non-GMO salt for sale. Freaking salt! Since when does sodium chloride have DNA? Oh, and it was the allegedly healthy Himalayan Pink Salt...

Oh, no... Don't feed the sci-fi fanboys...

Great questions! I assume you've read Winchell Chung's excellent Atomic Rocket website. If not, run, don't walk, and go check it out. As for your first question, escape pods can make sense for a ship in Low (Inhabited Planet) Orbit or in a magictech fiction show like Star Wars or Trek, but in deep space, it is pointless, unless there is a fleet travelling with your spacecraft which can pick you up. If you're doing brachistochrone trajectories, like in The Expanse, then ejecting while aimed at a planet, before you've decelerated fully, will make your reentry fatal; you'll be moving too fast. As for space warfare, assuming a space setting like The Expanse, with the constant acceleration drives that a certain other user is so fond of, there will be no manned "fighters". High-acceleration drones will have their uses, especially near a planet or other strategic location. So "carriers" will be mobile drone platforms, servicing and rearming defensive drone warships. Also, something that can carry drones internally is probably too large a ∆v investment; drones will dock externally to a drone tender, like WWII seaplane tenders. If you're wondering about ship types, go check out the "Templin Institute" on YouTube. They just released a video detailing ship types and their adaptation to sci-fi. *** Edit: Oops, I thought my posts would merge. Sorry for doubleposting. My bad.

At 6'4", I'm with ya. If someone rubs me the wrong way, I think I might just ask that...