wedrifid comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (305)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 October 2012 01:12:17PM -2 points [-]

Why on Earth would they?

That question sprung to mind too, right before "How could that even make sense?" and a few hundred milliseconds later "What are the precise engineering details required for me to use this effect (and the implied possibility for FTL communication) to go back and sink the first fleet, thereby preventing my own existence?".

Edit: Also that paper does not say anything about cosmological horizons converting anything into Hawking radiation! It's an entirely different and stranger argument.

(My reply is to the version conveyed within the grandparent, not to the strange argument. It is probably best for me to hold off reading said strange argument until is confirmed as reasonable by a sufficiently trusted source. Given the complexity of the subject I may forget to not-believe something I read.)

Comment author: drnickbone 21 October 2012 01:57:07PM *  1 point [-]

"What are the precise engineering details required for me to use this effect (and the implied possibility for FTL communication) to go back and sink the first fleet, thereby preventing my own existence?".

Well there's nothing in the Gibbons-Hawking effect (all causal horizons have a temperature and emit thermal radiation), or in the referenced paper of Bousso et al to imply FTL travel. Where did you get that idea? The "end-of-time" papers may be wrong but they're not that wrong...