Re: Fermi's Paradox and FTL drives

Gene Ward Smith wrote:
> Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
> news:47AAF6D1.2060701@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 
>>>How does that work? How do you know you can stand on an 
>>
> FTL 
> 
>>>****p while subjective time p*****, and you are in what 
>>
> seems 
> 
>>>to be space of some kind?
>>
>>     As we don't KNOW how to make an FTL drive we have to 
> 
> decide on  its 
> 
>>characteristics in order to talk about it. The vast 
> 
> majority of such 
> 
>>postulated drives require a UFOR. Which you obviously must 
> 
> know, 
> 
>>having been on this group as long as you have. I'm utterly 
> 
> at a loss 
> 
>>as to why you are ducking and weaving on this to this 
> 
> extent.
> 
> I was asking how to relate the most plausible FTL drives, for 
> those who believe they are plausible, to the Fermi "paradox", 
> People keep dragging in loony-tune Star Trek stuff, which I 
> am assuming no one actually thinks is plausible.[...]

> 
> Of course, it could be no one here believes FTL is plausible, 
> but I had another impression.
> 

	No, you were asking how to relate some FTL drive that you seemed to 
have invented out of your head, which had some incredibly high top 
speed, to the Fermi Paradox. All of the FTL drives I've seen proposed 
as vaguely handwavily possible by any form of modern physics have had 
strict limits on their speed -- either in the actual speed of 
transfer, or in the speed to arrange the connection. For instance, 
Roger McBride's "Ring of Charon" series has FTL transfer which seems 
near-instantaneous... but to set up any connection you must first 
travel to the destination by normal-space, meaning that your expansion 
can only be carried out via normal space travel, even though once 
you've established yourself in the new location you can travel back 
and forth instantly. Other handwavily-plausible FTL I've seen has 
definite top effective speeds.

	It is, of course, quite possible that there are other 
handwavily-plausible FTL drives which have truly vast effective 
velocities, but even so you are still guilty of the crime of linking 
your statement to one specific subset of FTL travel rather than the 
wide variety thereof, and pretending that you had actually 
demonstrated something.

	From MY point of view, FTL is perfectly acceptable in SF, and as this 
is an SF group, discussions using FTL drives drawn FROM SF are 
perfectly reasonable when someone brings up FTL.





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                      Sea Wasp
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