It's About Time

Rocketman the Sequel wrote

yeah yeah funny cal--way to freak people out.

I know for one my doctor does all of those things just to put patients at ease.

I found the experience fine--especially with the newer soft touch coloniscopes with the spef lubricating tip.

THe only problem with them I see is the constant pushing that they have to do to make sure...that...it...

oh...

....i need to go and shower now....sob...

It's about TIME you stopped blocking that memory! lol, that was funny, RtS. But what you really need is an enema. Top down.

[Smellyoldgit]

I shall now make an attempt at moving the time related posts from the Shitlord thread. It could be the end of civilisation as we know it. I'm going in.

Edit - if posts are moved into this thread - they would be placed chronologically (!!!!) - which would bugger up Philboids new thread order, therefore I'm leaving well alone. Nice thought though.

[Philboid Studge]

Fuck, I missed this because it took place yesterday. Unless -- maybe I could go back in time one day and ...

Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day

You must spend the entire day in costume and character. The only rule is that you cannot actually tell anyone that you are a time traveler. Other than that, anything's game.

There are three possible options:

1) Utopian/cliché Future - "If the Future did a documentary of the last fifty years, this is how badly the reenactors would dress." Think Star Trek: TNG or the Time Travelers from Hob. Ever see how the society in Futurama sees the 20th century? Run with it. Your job is to dress with moderately anachronistic clothing and speak in slang from varying decades. Here are some good starters:

- Greet people by referring to things that don't yet exist or haven't existed for a long time. Example: "Have you penetrated the atmosphere lately?" "What spectrum will today's broadcast be in?" and "Your king must be a kindly soul!"

- Show extreme ignorance in operating regular technology. Pay phones should be a complete mystery (try placing the receiver in odd places). Chuckle knowingly at cell phones.

2) Dystopian Future - This one offers a little more flexibility. It can be any kind of future from Terminator to Freejack. The important thing to remember is dress like a crazy person with armor. Black spray painted football pads, high tech visors, torn up trenchcoats and maybe even some dirt here or there. Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they've gone back in time. Some starters:

- If you go the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.

- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say "In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that." Then slip away.

3) The Past - This one is more for beginners. Basically dress in period clothing (preferably Victorian era) and stagger around amazed at everything. Since the culture's set in place already, you have more of a template to work off of. Some pointers:

- Airplanes are terrifying. Also, carry on conversations with televisions for a while.

- Discover and become obsessed with one trivial aspect of technology, like automatic grocery doors. Stay there for hours playing with it.

- Be generally terrified of people who are dressed immodestly compared to your era. Tattoos and shorts on women are especially scary.



And that's it. Remember, the only real rule is staying in character and try to fit in. Never directly admit you're a time traveler, and make really, really bad attempts at keeping a low profile. Naturally, the dystopian future has a little more leeway. And for the record, I've already tried out all of these in real life, in costume. It is so much fun you want to pee yourself.

I've set the tentative date for December 8th. Who's in?

[Professor Chaos]

I can't believe I missed that!

[antix]

Professor Chaos wrote

I can't believe I missed that!

No worries. You can still pretend to be a time traveler pretending to travel back one day further than what you were pretending to begin with. Or something

[Sternwallow]

I think that tomorrow I will pretend to come back from 8DEC2007.

[VladTheImpaler]

I don’t understand time.

Time is very puzzling to me and a rather hard concept to grasp for my mind. When I first discovered that time was relative I was mind boggled. It is hard to imagine time as not being constant. I still don’t quite understand what it means that time is relative in practical terms.

As far as I have come to understand, time is relative to the velocity between two observers (?). This means that objects in orbit around the earth are travelling at a faster rate than us down here on Earth and therefore they experience a slight time dilation (time goes slower).

Then consider the following premise: humans colonize Mars. Now, I don’t know what speed Mars revolve around our sun, but lets for the sake of argument say that the speed it travels around our sun is 100 times that of Earth. Would this mean you age slower on Mars? I’m sure the mathematics to calculate how much of a difference this would make is not easy, but does anyone have a clue?

Now, consider this next premise: Humans create an artificial moon and plant ingredients for life along with an atmosphere upon it. If we were then able to accelerate the object so that it would revolve around our sun at, let’s say, 90% of the speed of light (perhaps this speed would mean that the Sun's gravity would not be able to maintain its hold on the object, but ignore this for now). Would then any organisms that would evolve on this artificial moon evolve at a much higher rate than organisms on earth?

[Kate]

[Smellyoldgit]

[VladTheImpaler]

I just realized that in my artificial moon hypothesis, the result would be the opposite. Doh.

Read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". That will help.

[a different tim]

OK, twins paradox - in your spaceship (let's ditch the artificial moon, spaceship was good enough for Einstein) time would pass slower to an observer on Earth. If you had two identical twins, and flew one around in a spaceship approaching the speed of light, while the other stayed on Earth, the one flying around would age slower than the one who stayed behind.

Subjectively, though, he would not gain any "extra" time. If both twins had a life expectancy of, say, 70 years, the earth one would live 70 years Earth time, whereas the traveler would live 70 years ship time. Both would experience what they regarded as a "normal" lifetime. This has been confirmed by accelerating normally short lived particles to close to light speed, where they last a lot longer from our point of view (but not from theirs).

You can do the same thing with gravity - time moves more slowly in higher gravity. So an atomic clock in a satellite will tick off the seconds slightly faster from our point of view than one on Earth. GPS satellite positioning has to take this into account as the effect is enough to throw off the calculations, apparently.

To answer your Mars question...No...you would age exactly the same on Mars as you do here. Your cells do not care how long it takes Mars to circle the sun.
Now, you want to talk about a few thousand years from now, and humans have adapted and evolved on Mars, we may see a difference. This difference, however, is not due to a change in "time", but purely due to the different cycle of Mars. Does this mean that martian-humans live longer or shorter, probably not. It just means they live "differently".

[VladTheImpaler]

a different tim wrote

Subjectively, though, he would not gain any "extra" time. If both twins had a life expectancy of, say, 70 years, the earth one would live 70 years Earth time, whereas the traveler would live 70 years ship time. Both would experience what they regarded as a "normal" lifetime. This has been confirmed by accelerating normally short lived particles to close to light speed, where they last a lot longer from our point of view (but not from theirs).

Right, they’ll have the same amount of time available, however in practical terms, it basically means that by moving close to the speed of light is the same as moving forward in time relative to objects that are moving slower relative to your self. You can basically create a forward moving time machine.

Now begs the question, why does time behave this way? I've tried to read up on Time dilation but much of it is hard to really grasp and I can’t really weed out a solid good and easy to understand answer.

[Professor Chaos]

If the finer details of spacetime and the universe were easy to understand, there would be no need for religion.