WestAir

In other words, a Tachyon, once formed, will immediately flatline? Is it possible the reason is that causality then works in reverse with such a wave, meaning t time is always a negative or opposite value? The Tachyon instantly decays because it reaches its cause and causality dictates it can no longer exist?

The tidal forces at the event horizon of a supermasaive rotating black hole are not lethal. An astronaut will not be torn apart by entering the EH of the black hole at the galaxy core, for instance, because the EH is so far away from the singularity.

Can the space time warping effect of an alcubbierre drive let you warp your way out of the black holes event horizon?

So if you build the next Aegis Missile Cruiser out of mirrors, it'll be laser-proof?

As a complete aside, faster speeds are obtainable, but not in a meaningful time-span. A good ion engine can provide the Isp to get to distant stars at (comparatively) faster speeds than Voyager. The downside is it will inherently take decades, if not longer, to accelerate to the speeds you're looking for. Orion concepts would surely work, but concepts like Orion and Solar-sails have a marginal future outlook at best due to their theoretical, or political, nature. Fairy tale solutions like worm holes and FTL also coincide with your earlier statement. The reality of the situation is that the first Earthlings to set foot on an interstellar world will be rovers and by the time they arrive, humanity will either evolved into trans-humanism or faded away.

Quick question. Through the evolution of weaponry, mankind has always found a counter-measure to the latest technological weapon. We can counter a sword with armor, we can counter a bullet with plating, we can counter missiles with bullets, lasers, or other missiles. What can we use to counter a laser? Besides the line of sight requirement of a laser (a downside modern artillery lacks), is there any obvious deterrent to their success? If I build a missile cruiser and throw 20 laser guns on them, powered by magic super-conductors - can any other ship best my ship in combat? Can the State Department quickly conjure up a counter-measure to stop my super-deadly missile cruiser, or is this sort of an "end game" where whomever fires first wins the war game?

Which is why I stated:

Here is another way to think of lightspeed acceleration. It takes time to accelerate. Because the universe contracts as you go faster, it is completely possible from the perspective of the spaceship crew to travel the entire universe in zero time at C. However, it takes finite time to accelerate. If you accelerate to C, it would take longer than the age of the universe to hit C, or from the crews perspective, you would escape the "edge" of the universe before you reached lightspeed. Because neither is possible, reaching c certainly is not possible.

Don't magnets put equal force on both polar opposites? So the force that is crushing the core together will also be the same strength of force trying to force the magnetic chamber apart? At fusion pressures, such a contraption would just explode apart, right?

I have a hard time believing such an event can become "infinite". The idea that there are an infinite amount of "moments" in time, between each moment in time, is dubious at best. In your light switch experiment, we know there is a limit to the speed information can travel, and we know there is a size where nothing can get smaller, so to this I suggest that you'll flip your switch faster and faster until you've reached a point where you must move faster than the speed of light to cut your time in half any further. [Let's just pretend that the frequency of switches is equal to the time it takes a photon to move one Plank Length] At this point your half-cutting will taper off to stagnation, and simple math will be able to tell you how many times you can do this in two minutes, and what position the switch will be in when you stop.

The inability to disprove an observed truth is not the evidence of its infallibility as a truth. Monkeh and Seret are in the right here; at no time were they confusing scientific theory with the English definition of theory.

Custard, Your question is not without merit. In fact, I've been just as dubious when trying to comprehend the extreme precision and complexity single-celled organisms and their organelles seem to achieve. Take, for instance, an embryonic organism. This organism, using only a blueprint written in DNA format, can create entire organs in perfect shape/size/location, a hundred miles worth of fine, precise neural networks, blood vessels, arteries, intestines, etc all weaved through each other at the right place. It gathers resources like carbon, iron, etc all and places them where they need to go and builds things from them to construct a fully capable human being - and it does this with no awareness, no brain, no eyes or sensory apparatus. It builds a person blindly, with no way of knowing if it messed up. We as a people consider animals dumb. We especially consider single-celled organisms as nothing compared to us. Yet in reality, it seems they're able to accomplish things we, with our billions of brain cells, couldn't begin to construct or design. It's an interesting thought game.

I laughed pretty hard at this satire. That said, if we discover an asteroid that will impact within a year of discovery, we actually won't be capable - at all -- of stopping it.

Possible? Certainly. There is absolutely no evidence to support an argument that suggests that a species could not have had language, social hierarchy, and tools. We do know that there were no reasonable structures, shelters, or graves built by anyone prior to man. That doesn't mean man was the first species on Earth to have a language. I will say, however, that it is extremely - extremely unlikely that we were not the first civilized species. The reasoning is that large groups of organisms that intelligently organize and form social structures and languages tend to linger around longer than species that do not. The simple act of information sharing makes a species capable of coping with danger. If such a species had existed, it would have had a better chance at surviving the climate changes, predators, and other species-killers than long-living species that are still around today, such as ants or reptile species or mammals. Social species almost always outlive species that are not, and the fact that very few species around today have shown signs of communication capabilities (Elephants, Dolphins, etc) suggests we are the first civilized species. Suggests - not proves.

I hear the crew survived the orbiters descent, and only died when it impacted the sea.

This logic, with regards to discussions on future technologies, is the logical argument I have an absolute pet peeve with. Let's be absolutely clear here: The absence of evidence stating that something is impossible, is not the evidence of its feasibility. Such an argument by its entire premise is an illogical fallacy. That said, I can't personally imagine any way in which we will come up with the energy to routinely, or if even once, curve time enough to send anything larger than a single subatomic particle in an Alcubierre drive. At the end of the day, energy is required to move mass or space-time, and there is finite energy on this planet and in our star. The energy consumption for accelerating space, matter, or what-have-you grows to titanic proportions when we talk about Alcubierre drives or even 0.01C accelerations. From the most basic standpoint, when looking at this on a general, basic level, you see that you'd have an easier time OBLITERATING THE ENTIRE PLANET than moving matter past C.

They do, however they're still brains and if we ignore the vital consequences of this type of surgery the philosophical question remains: Does splitting the brain create two consciousnesses that are independent of one another? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain for my overall query, just taken to a much further degree.

And even then, replicating it will just result in a new consciousness. It won't be you any more than a clone is you. Though I do now have a question. If you were to split a brain in two - right down the middle so that the left and right hemispheres of the brain now longer connect, have you created two consciousnesses? When you recombine them, does each new "person" just become one again? I'm starting to think I don't even grasp the concept of self-awareness and consciousness, because the whole thing seems so hard to understand.

My point wasn't that it was impossible to create a perfect copy of a brain that then becomes conscience or sentient, it was that such a copy (inside a computer, for example) would not be your specific consciousness. It would be a new consciousness that you are not in control of. Because of this, your consciousness (in your old body) can still be killed, ruining the concept of "cheating death" via mind upload.

I don't understand? I always thought consciousness was literally the end result of your specific neural network. That the physical atoms that make your neurons are directly responsible for your self awareness, and simply "copying" its data does nothing to transfer your perception of awareness to the copy, because the physical atoms that make you are still held up inside your cranium. As far as I know, you can't transfer consciousness (you) anywhere without taking the physical atoms that make you with it. Am I mistaken?

Just open the ships window and throw rocks out the back until it pushes you to 3,000km/s. You could also just look deep into the cosmos, realize that trillions of stars - even entire galaxies, are flying by you at speeds greater than light. Once you accept the concept that it is you who is accelerated past light, and not the brilliant and infinite number of galaxies in the open horizon - you'll realize you've been going faster than 3,000km/s all along and you won't need a $2 billion dollars worth of Xenon Gas and ion thrusters. /win

Can I just point out that uploading your brain to the internet will do nothing to make YOU immortal? A copy of you =\= you. You'll die as an immortal clone of you is born. Not quite how I want to cheat death. The only way we will cheat death is by finding a way to stop the break down of telomerase* in DNA. Only then will aging come to an end.

I've always had a problem with comprehending the concept of "infinitely small radius." and "infinite density." I've heard there's a point where an object can be too large to exist. (If a Star grows too large, the photon pressure actually tears it apart, creating a physical upward limit on the size of a star, or any object really). As for infinitely small, I feel like there should be a point where clumps of subatomic particles can get no closer. You mean to tell me all of the matter/energy/particles that make up entire stars can be squished into a space smaller than the Planck Length? That there's no force or resistance that says "Uh, it's kind of crowded in here. Why don't you particles just have a seat over there?"? - I mean, we know their are forces that stop an atom from imploding, or stop the quarks in subatomic particles from colliding. We know that matter can not exist in the same space, at the same time, as other matter. I just feel like an actual textbook singularity is an impossibility, but my specialty is aeronautical science, not astronomy, and I'm not even that great at that. Back on topic, I want to agree with the other posters that suggest the singularity in question, if it ever existed, was probably ejected from the MWG or at the very least found its way to a completely different orbit than that of the Sol System.

Launch a diamond ball at Earth.

If quick, massive energy transfers (like bombs) would destroy life, what about slow, small ones? Like a low-powered ion engine burning at the appropriate time for the next 500 years?