[extropy-chat] Sasha is alive!

[Lúcio de Souza Coelho]

On 1/3/07, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> wrote:
> Samantha, if I could answer the first question I would start Resurrection Inc.!
> Of course you mean in principle, and not in detail. I do not have, of
> course, the foggiest idea. A fictional technique that might work if
> its assumptions are correct has been described by Sir A. Clarke and
> Stephen Baxter in "The Light of Other Days" (links in
> http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/engineering_transcendence/) and
> is a way to retrieve very high resolution information from the past
> without time travel.
(...)

The same idea appears in another science fiction story that I read
many years ago were the crew of a Superluminal ship studies the
evolution of a supernova "backwards" simply travelling to regions of
space were the image of the star as it was before exploding was still
visible.

Of course, as far as I understand Relativity, Superluminal travel
apparently *has to* imply the possibility of travelling back in time.
(And often other oddities like violations of the Conservation Laws.)
And that apparently includes wormholes like those used in "Light of
Other Days".

Though the subject is still controversial... In particular, I have
seen proponents of Superluminal stuff saying that violations of
causality and conservation appear only if we consider as true the
basic principle of Relativity that the speed of light is the maximum
speed for information exchange in the Universe. But from the moment
that we find something that allows information exchange at speeds >>c
- ie, Superluminal phenomena - then that principle is obviously not
valid anymore, and causality and conservation have to be redefined
under the new framework of speeds/phenomena.