The Song Fight Bulletin Board

<b>The Ouroboral Trifecta</b>

<u>Overview of the OT</u>:
The Ouroboral Trifecta is an anomalous, looping chain composed of three timelines, one of which contains the human race. Each timeline springs from the one before it and ends at an apocalypse, from which the next timeline springs, ad infinitum, forming a stable triangular pattern. Here, the three timelines will be discussed in terms of their major gods. The timeline in which humans live is known as the Vishnu Cycle. From the apocalypse of the Vishnu Cycle comes Rockopolousaninjananophone Eternal, from the apocalypse of Rockopolousaninjananophone Eternal comes Rhy Ninjru’s Wheel, and from the apocalypse of Rhy Ninjru’s Wheel comes the Vishnu Cycle once again. While each of these timelines is considered cyclic, they can all be thought of as (somewhat) straight lines, since it is only the connections between the three that creates the cycle.

<u>Basic structure</u>:
To understand the structure of the Ouroboral Trifecta, one must have an understanding of these concepts:

<i>etherealities</i>: Etherealities can be thought of as modes or tiers of existence, whose internal interactions usually far exceed their interactions with other etherealities. Different etherealities obey different subsystems of physics. Humans live in the Matter Ethereality, traditionally known as the Earthly Plane, while, say, angels live in the Heavenly Ethereality. A presumably limitless number of etherealities exist, inhabited by various types of god and other non-material (read: non-fermionic) entity.

<i>aleph-1</i>: This is a degree of infinity, one step above the lowest degree of infinity, aleph-null, the number of natural numbers. Aleph-one is the number of real numbers, or the number of points on a line.

<i>aleph-1-dimensional space</i>: Most humans see the multiverse in three dimensions and are aware of a fourth one (1-dimensional time). However, there are actually transfinite multitudes of dimensions. Aleph-1D space, sometimes called Real Space or Continuum Space, is presumably inaccessible from the Matter Ethereality, but can be reached by some higher forms of gods. To see the multiverse in aleph-1D space is to see all (local) timelines as if one were looking at a 2D map of them (actually, it could be a 3D, or 4D, or 5D, etc. map, depending only on how the observer chose to think of it).

<i>timelines</i>: The multiverse can be thought of as being divided into an infinity of individual moments. A timeline is a chain of these moments, connected only by cause and effect as dictated by physics. A timeline’s direction or flow is away from cause and towards effect.

<i>t-mass</i>: Just as mass is a quantitative characteristic of objects made of matter, so t-mass is a quantitative characteristic of objects made of time (i.e., timelines or parts of timelines). T-mass behaves much like mass, in that it curves the fabric of aleph-1D space towards itself, creating an “attractionâ€

yeah but can you guys turn in a song anyone would want to listen to?

btw, why is it impossible to accel beyond the speed of light?

christ, I'm bored already and I haven't heard the song yet!

j$

Can someone summarize that? Preferably someone terribly mean with a biting sense of humor.

blue wrote:btw, why is it impossible to accel beyond the speed of light?

It's hard to explain to explain without a lot of mumbo jumbo, but...

Your mass and the speed at which you travel through time are different, depending on how fast you're going. The faster you go, the more massive you are, and the faster your time goes (relative to someone who's not going as fast). So like, if you went superfast through space for a while, when you came back people would've aged more than you, cuz your timeframe was moving faster than theirs.

Well, there's some equations you can use to figure out how just how much your mass and timeframe speed increase, and if you insert the speed of light into the equations, you get infinite mass and infinite timeframe-speed. Which are obviously impossible.

There's probably a jillion other reasons, too.

i say, "bunk!" i am hereby putting the theory of relativity on notice.

erikb wrote:Can someone summarize that?

A triangle whose edges are timelines that lead to each other. It's cyclic.

Karma 'n stuff.

erikb wrote:Preferably someone terribly mean with a biting sense of humor.

More like OuroBOREal SUCKline.

No, my fine feathered friends... NaNoWriMo is here.

It's like you Nevada'd yourself with text up there

blue wrote:btw, why is it impossible to accel beyond the speed of light?

Its not so much that it's impossible, but more of the fact that nothing we know of goes faster than light. I think most scientists probably figure, lets tackle traveling at the speed of light before we start trying to travel faster than it.
And heres a quirky idea, say you can move faster than light, no one would be able to tell, because the light would travel slower than your actual body. and it would look like you were traveling at the speed of light. People would call you a hack and kick you out of Yale.

NeilThrun wrote: Its not so much that it's impossible

I'm pretty sure you'd have to have infinite mass to be traveling at the speed of light because of the proportional correlation between your mass and your velocity. I say "pretty sure" because I haven't been able to repeat the labs that brought modern science to these conclusions in my backyard yet.. but uh, they seem to be relatively sure of themselves. It is possible for some things to travel at the speed of light.. Light, for example. And it is theorized that certain observable effects in lab have been caused by things which move faster than the speed of light constantly. These things, which were spoken of in that huge thing Mogosagatai posted, are referred to as tachyons.

Recent lab results suggest that our current interpretation of the speed of light is flawed. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space ... .light.ap/ .. I'm not really sure what sort of implications this has on this discussion though. For one, the LASER pulse comes out with less intensity, but I guess that's normal. For two, even if light (which is massless or.. well, infinite ..err.. I get confused easily.. the point is it doesn't have mass like an object such as an egg or a desk) could travel at speeds higher than the speed of light through a vacuum, that doesn't change the fact that there is some theoretical velocity which we cannot exceed. I think.

NeilThrun wrote:say you can move faster than light, no one would be able to tell, because the light would travel slower than your actual body. and it would look like you were traveling at the speed of light. People would call you a hack and kick you out of Yale.

dude.


If I told you once, I've told you a fuckin hundred times. My backstory is private. KEEP IT OUT OF THE SERIOUS THREADS MAN.


You know, this is only going back a year or so, but didn't pointless goofy threads used to have better titles like "new topic"?


This thread needs a new topic.

Unless Puce or someone wants to wax theoretically on the speed of light. zzzzzzzz. More like the speed of blight.

I play drums.

Leaf wrote:Unless Puce or someone wants to wax theoretically on the speed of light. zzzzzzzz.

I was holding myself back, but now I gots ta.

According to Special Relativity, as velocity approaches c, rest mass increases at a subatomic level. This is often used by highschool science teachers and people want to make the universe seem like a mysterious, fantastical place as the reason that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. On first evaluation, it seems reasonable, and is indeed the reason that things like electrons and gold atoms never achieve superluminous speeds inside a particle accelerator: at 99.999etcetera% of c your gold atom weighs as much as a Volkswagen, and accelerating it becomes a bit difficult. But, mass increases in a relativistic way, so if you were on a ship traveling near the speed of light, although to outside observers you might appear to weigh several tons, if you got on a scale you would still weigh whatever you weighed at rest. So would the ship. For this reason, an object that is accelerating itself should not be impeded by the gain in mass. There are a bunch of other problems with accelerating yourself to c, but because the equations we have now break down at this point it's tough to say exactly what would happen.

To Neil's quirky idea: ah, but breaking the light barrier would be a lot like breaking the sound barrier, in that any nearby observer would witness a light "boom", ala ST:TNG's warp drives. I think that would be good enough proof for them to give you a grant.

To Mogosagatai: actually the faster you go the slower your time goes. Atomic clocks run slower at the top of tall mountains (which are rotating around the earth's center faster) than at sea level. [EDIT: nm. You noted that]

To Tachyons: Fuck tachyons. They are a purely hypothetical particle that has been injected into the public's collective subconscious by B-grade science fiction writers. Also, fuck the idea that traveling faster than light violates causality/makes you go back in time. That's retarded. Has anyone ever seen a good hypothetical example of how >c = time travel?

Puce wrote:fuck the idea that traveling faster than light violates causality/makes you go back in time

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose fucking was faster than light.
She started one day
In a relative way,
And came on the previous night.

dude I hope that's an original limerick cause its quite good!

Leaf wrote:dude I hope that's an original limerick cause its quite good!

He cleverly remixed it

I can't even claim credit for the remix, I heard it somewhere long ago.

Puce wrote:But, mass increases in a relativistic way, so if you were on a ship traveling near the speed of light, although to outside observers you might appear to weigh several tons, if you got on a scale you would still weigh whatever you weighed at rest. So would the ship. For this reason, an object that is accelerating itself should not be impeded by the gain in mass.

That's a good point. It still seems to be impossible, though, for two reasons:

1. To observers, the object (whether a single electron or a whole ship) would have infinite mass. Even if the people travelling at <i>c</i> felt fine, wouldn't a limitlessly massive object (by the rest of the universe's perspective) cause a lot of problems? Like... all of spactime collapsing?

2. How is the object accelerating itself? It's probably either pushing off of other matter (which is unlikely, since you'd probably want to do this sort of thing in outer space) or jettisoning its own matter (as in a rocket engine). It seems like all the non-luminal matter that was directly interacting with the ship (such as a particle that just flew out of a rocket) would appear infinitely massive to the ship. Or at least, the ship would appear infinitely massive to the particle (I'm not clear on how acceleration works into relatively. Even if one was going only slightly slower than the other--there's a big difference between "superbig number" and infinity. So wouldn't particles that were emitted by (or pushed off of by) the self-accelerating object just get sucked right back into when the object reached c? And wouldn't that screw things up a lot?

I guess those two reasons are actually kind of the same reason.

Mogosagatai wrote:1. To observers, the object (whether a single electron or a whole ship) would have infinite mass. Even if the people traveling at <i>c</i> felt fine, wouldn't a limitlessly massive object (by the rest of the universe's perspective) cause a lot of problems? Like... all of spactime collapsing?

I'll mention again that the math completely and utterly breaks down at this point. For instance, to calculate the mass of an object traveling at >c you need to divide its rest mass by the square root of a negative number (!!), so there is really no way of telling what would happen. I don't think that an object at c would have a limitless mass, nor do I think a large mass dilation would cause an increased gravitational pull, nor do I think that a massive object receding away from you or advancing towards you faster than gravity propagates (making the somewhat risky assumption that that speed is <= c) would have the same gravitational properties as a stationary object. So, idunno. I'd file this under

Puce wrote:There are a bunch of other problems with accelerating yourself to c

Mogosagatai wrote:2. Even if one was going only slightly slower than the other... wouldn't particles that were emitted by (or pushed off of by) the self-accelerating object just get sucked right back into when the object reached c? And wouldn't that screw things up a lot?

Even assuming that big mass dilation = big gravity, you're forgetting relativity. If you're spacemobile is traveling at c, and the exhaust that's leaving the back of it is traveling a bit slower at c minus X kilometers-an-hour, relative to a passenger it appears to be receding away from the ship at X kilometers-an-hour. So, relative to that same passenger, the ship would not be experiencing a mass dilation and the exhaust would only be experiencing a tiny mass dilation. Tiny relative mass dilation != instant black-hole.

But if the ship is going c, and the particle is going c-x, where x is a very small number, the ship still looks like it's going c, and has all the corresponding effects. That's why making the leap from 99.999etc%c to c seems impossible. It would appear to a particle leaving the ship's exhaust that the ship suddenly and instantaneously went from having X mass, where X is a gigantic number, to having infinite mass. And like I said, infinity compared to a really huge number is still infinite.

Of course, if the math breaks down as you say, then that argument might be irrelevant. But, you know, I'll believe it when I see it.

Even if gravity was an issue, the exhaust behind a ship traveling at c would have to travel faster than c to catch up with the ship itself. Seeing as you are trying to show that faster than light travel is impossible, it would help your case if going faster than light wasn't necessary for your argument to be sound.

That's true, so scratch the part about particles getting sucked back into the accelerating object. That still doesn't change that the ship would appear (to an exhausted particle) to go from merely <i>really</i> massive to <i>infinitely</i> massive, which is the crux of the issue.

Mogosagatai wrote:stuff

Puce wrote:more stuff

Egg wrote:other stuff

I'll bet you guys have to beat the chicks off with a stick...