Re: Tipler's Conjectures

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Sat May 05 2001 - 11:14:13 MDT


At 11:42 AM 5/5/01 +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>Lee Corbin wrote:
>
>> To a creature for whom a nanosecond is like a second to
>> us, light will appear to move less than one mile per hour.
>
>You seem to be slipping a couple of orders of magnitude here.

How so? A billionth of the speed of light would be 3*10^8 / 10^9
meters per second, which is about one foot per second.

>Either for energy conservation, or cooling reasons one would
>want to settle to a timebase 1 s : 1 us, a fraction of a million.
>Maybe, but only maybe, ten million. Light would be the appear to
>be speed of sound, or so.

Yes, a million to one speed-up will occur before a billion to one.
But I don't think that we can rule out even faster speeds.

>Nanocritters would probably use light for communication, such as we
>use sound. Phased array optics and sensorics. Interference. Weird stuff.

Lee Corbin



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