You are just making fun of bad sci-fi plots.

Well, I'm in the middle of writing a sci-fi book with a bad plot... :) It has time travel, FTL travel, terraforming planets that really can't be terraformed (Venus), man-made neutron stars as weapons of mass destruction, all sorts of impossibilities. But most sci-fi is really fantasy anyway. Chapter 2 ridicules Star Trek, even though I've been a fan since 1966. It's in my /. JEs.

The Butterfly Effect says that the most minor change in the distant past will cause huge changes in the future, so nobody can travel back and live in their own past.

I remember a short story with this theme, but it's been so long ago I can't remember its name or who wrote it. Despite Hawking's Daily Mail piece "how to build a time machine" (which I believe was tongue in cheek) I don't think anyone will ever travel backwards through time, and have serious doubts about FTL. It's fun to fantasize, though.

That is basically the result of massive advances in public health and disease prevention, and massive reduction in child mortality (which is partly the same thing, but also specific medical advances).

Exactly. That, and better pollution controls, and OSHA keeping so many young men dying on the job, and other things that have nothing to do with medicine. My grandfather probably would have made it to a hundred if Purina wasn't too cheap to put doors on the elevator.

When my grandmother was 95 she told me "I don't know why anybody wants to live to be a hundred, it ain't no fun bein' old!" Of course, she'd outlived 3 of her 4 kids, two husbands, and several doctors who all told her if she didn't cut her cholesterol down she'd die. She finally did, five years later when she fell and broke her hip. Outliving those you love is bad for your health!

However, I'm 60 and in better health than a lot of people I know who are half my age. I'm starting to get a touch of CRS, though.

Do you really think any time traveler will risk the possibility that something they do will cause them to have never existed? I know if I were a time traveler I'd be pretty careful about what I did.

Remember when they were building the LHC and screwed up the power supply? That was the doings of time traveler. Oh, and ghosts, bigfoots, Bermuda Triangle, Area 51... ;)

How would we know?

Log scale? Yep, that complicates it a little. However, didn't they test the time dilation with a couple of astronauts? I don't think they got anywhere near .8C. .8C is pretty damned fast.

Also, how's he going to read the rest of the Nobots book?

How did you know he didn't?

Thanks! I was about to post a similar JE with pretty much the same question; I want to control an XP box from a Linux box and a W7 notebook and get that monitor, mouse, and keyboard out of my living room (the TV is the Linux box's monitor, have an IR mouse and keyboard for that one).

It looks like it would probably work for d_r as well. I'd probably have found it on Google, but as it's closed source I wouldn't have trusted it without a trusted opinion.

If I find that someone (Person or corporate entity.) has installed software on MY computer without my explicit permission, they will be explaining to law enforcement why they think they have the right.

LOL, who went to prison for Sony's XCP? I was bitten by Sony's malware almost ten years ago but idiots keep buying Sony's shit. It cost them NOTHING, I'll never EVER buy another Sony product but I'm one in seven billion.

Someone should have gone to prison for deliberately infecting thousands of their paying customers' PCs, but no... rich people only go to prison when they fuck over someone with more wealth and power.

Is there a silver lining in this cloud? FOSS will benefit... a tiny bit. There are too many people stupid enough to buy Sony products after XCP, OtherOS, and all the other fuckings over they served their paying customers.

If you have mod points and buy Sony, mod me flamebait because I'm calling you a fucking moron. God damned dumbasses. Yes, I'm still pissed and I still want someone in prison over this, but governments are and have always been owned by the rich. Expect malware in your proprietary shitware.

I want Sony to fucking DIE. Unfortunately, they won't be bothered one tiny bit. They can do any damned thing they want to you. Bend over and take it, serfs.

Stephen Hawking says time travel is possible. Maybe some day, but I doubt even your great great great grandchildren will see FTL or time travel.

Within 50 years (if not much sooner), we'll almost certainly have cured aging.

Well, there are some folks who know a lot more about medicine and biology than I do who believe that, but it's far from a certainty. Note that the average and median life spans for people have increased greatly in the last hundred years, but wake me up when someone makes it much past 115. Those outliers have been around since antiquity, there are quite a few in my family tree from centuries ago (an uncle was into genealogy).

I'm 60 and already starting to feel the effects of aging. I'll be 110 in 50 years. I'm pretty skeptical, they're going to have to figure out how to extend telomeraise (I don't know how to spell it, and neither does FireFox) without giving you cancer. They're going to have to figure out how to stop genetic errors when cells divide, and quite a few other thorny problems. I doubt my ten year old great nephew will see it, let alone me, and it may be an impossibility.

Once you approach even half the speed of light, local time slows down for you, so e.g. a 50 year trip would be 'only' 30 or 40 years (I haven't done the exact math)

Unless I'm mistaken the math is straightforward; at C the trip would seem instantaneous to the traveler, so half C a 50 light year trip would seem like 25.

But then, there's the problem that time speeds up greatly as you age -- remember how far apart Christmases were when you were five? That phenomenon accelerates as you age.

the goal of sending autonomous robotic explorers to stars (a la Mars Curiosity) just 13ly away may be quite feasible in some of our lifetimes

Certainly we'll have robotic probes to the stars in a few hundred years, but I'm very skeptical that you'll see it in your lifetime.

we take for granted, may change dramatically - e.g. the typical human lifespan.

The typical lifespan already has nearly doubled, but the longest lifespan hasn't changed at all.

Also, perspective: We've been 'human' for approximately 2 million years. We have millions of years ahead of us as a species, and even on cosmic scales, you can do an enormous amount in even just 2 million years.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I think our future in space is practically certain, and that we'll probably ultimately reach hundreds of other stars, and establish colonies on other planets. It's a matter of when and how, not if.

That I will agree with. I'm in the middle of writing a sci-fi book set ten million years in the future. In the book, we have evolved into at least four separate species (there may be more, I never know from one chapter to the next what's going to happen), one on terraformed Mars, one Terraformed Venus, and two on Earth. The Earthians have time travel, FTL travel, and a 500 year old is a young man. If you're interested, here's the first chapter. What's done so far is all posted (if you hate it, blame slashdot! They started it...).

Interesting, thanks. Apparently I've been miseducated.

If we did find a planet with technological creatures that close, it would be a pretty good indication that tech civilizations were pretty common.

It would be pretty hard to decipher the signal, though. You've probably seen this and this. We miight not even realize the signals were from an intelligence -- Greg Egan's Luminous has an extraterrestrial race with a completely different math than ours (I read it in 1995's The Year's Best Science Fiction, it's a very good, thought-provoking read. Wikipedia says he has a book by the same name, with that story in it).

Agreed.

It's pretty cold outside here, too (at least in the north right now) and we're alone as far as we can ascertain. But why would the newly found planet not have an atmosphere? It isn't like they can tell if it has a magnetic field. If it does, and it's Earth's mass more or less, it should have an atmosphere.