Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Which do you prefer, the original films or the newer one with Mark Wahlberg in it?

SandRider wrote:What NEW one ??

The one with that woman in it with the double barred surname.

That doesn't really help.
Is there an Othodox Planet of the Apes forum I can go rage on ?

SandRider wrote:That doesn't really help.
Is there an Othodox Planet of the Apes forum I can go rage on ?

The new film came out in 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_ ... 2001_film)

In it, the apes were more animalistic than in the original film. And Mark Wahlberg's character is not as awesome as Charlton Heston's.

Interesting discussion to catch back in on.

GP - we're reading from the same hymn sheet .

Chig - My point about the earlier post (spice needed for space travel to arrakis) was a catch-22. (you cant use spice to travel in space if you need to travel in space to get spice).

Two conditions:

A)UNLESS humans used navigation machines prior to discovering spice OR had another unrevealed method to navigate safely. Then landing at arrakis must have been simply accident. Hard to replicate something which happens by chance.

Therefore, either it was A) Chance B)Machine Help or C) an unrevealed technology.

which helped humans find arrakis.

Unless i missed a step?

And to ATOE - Unless we accept GPs assertion that only thinking machines could navigate (without the prescient variable which, IMO, was introduced during the INM/NO-field technology period post-GEOD) Then i find it hard to think that humans would condemn such a useful technology, even after TBJ.

This is purely my opinion now, but i see a significant difference between a a calculator and AI. Independant intelligences would indeed be a threat. Sat Nav would not. Skynet yes, internet no.

But thats just my opinion.

SandChigger wrote:Oh, well, just butt me out why don't you.

loremaster wrote:Frank's text makes it obvious computers had never been used to direct foldspace machines. By simple omition. If it were possible, then it would have been mentioned at some point, i feel. (same logic with bene gesserit telekinesis)

You are kidding, right? It may be the same (wrong) logic (argumentum ad ignorantiam), but in no way the same thing.

I really didn't follow the point of some of your one post the other day...the assumption that space-folding using the spice would be the only way to travel long distances? I was thinking exactly in terms of "scattering colonists" and expansion in waves. Canopus is a little over 300 LY away (as was pointed out after your post), so it would take a good while before the colonization wave got there. (But maybe not a series of automated probes?)

without wishing to disturb something i may later regret.... where is the logical flaw?

The duniverse is an inclusive, not an exclusive universe. We can hypothesise about ALLSORTS which isn't mentioned in the books. Some of which would be apparent, some less so. Nowhere are sentient aliens mentioned, but does that exclude their existence? It does to me.

So yeah, As far as im concerned, if it's not mentioned and doesnt follow as a result of relatively direct application of logic, it didnt happen in my Duniverse.

loremaster wrote:Chig - My point about the earlier post (spice needed for space travel to arrakis) was a catch-22. (you cant use spice to travel in space if you need to travel in space to get spice).

I got that. My point is that there is no catch-22: you don't need spice to travel in space if you have computers or AI to do the navigating.

I believe the emphasis on mathematical abilities among the later Navigators implies that they calculate their course and then use their prescience to determine whether that course will place the ship safely at its destination. (I'm looking for a quote to that effect but haven't found one yet.) I believe that is the common, Freak-approved interpretation here. The only mystical part of the process is the prescient peek.

There is therefore no reason why a computer or AI could not pilot a ship, since either could do the calculations necessary. (Presumably even a non-enhanced human could do it with enough time and a calculator?) The safety level drops quite a bit because a "thinking machine" is not prescient and cannot know with any certainty that there won't be a ship or rock currently occupying (or due to soon enter) the volume of space it is aiming for. But as it turns out, there are ways around this problem as well.

So I have no problem with (B) Machine Help.

Until the machines were destroyed, of course.

And machine probes would have been the ones to discover Arrakis, IMO. (Or someone using a space-based telescope in another system.) Humans probably would not have ventured into the Canopus system until space-folding was available because—incorporating what we now know as much as possible—the star is unstable and we have no idea when it's going to blow. (Of course, our understanding of stellar evolution will no doubt have improved in the future, so maybe it will be possible to determine how long the star has left with greater accuracy.) It'd be a real biotch to be halfway there by STL ships and detect the star beginning to go supernova. But machines will presumably be deemed more expendable.

i find it hard to think that humans would condemn such a useful technology, even after TBJ.

If the Jihad forces (with their psychic pilots or "assistants"—my assumption) are the only ones who can move from system to system with any sort of reliability (dodging debris from space battles is going to be an issue during and after the Jihad), it might not take them long to shoot down or take over anyone still trying to use machine-piloted ships. And once they were in control of most planets, would it have been hard to keep people from building new machines or ships?

This is purely my opinion now, but i see a significant difference between a a calculator and AI. Independant intelligences would indeed be a threat. Sat Nav would not. Skynet yes, internet no.

But thats just my opinion.

Right, but you're not a religion-crazed fanatic drunk on victory and suddenly in control of how people live and what they can do. Smash all the AIs, robots, computers and calculators! Rah!


My Duniverse includes the possibility that there may be sentient aliens somewhere (because the people in the Duniverse believed it; at least, they paid lip service to the idea in their excuse for keeping their House family atomics), it's just that no one has ever encountered any (or found any trace of any) in the galaxies humans have spread to. (It's obvious alien life exists in the Duniverse, from the worms and various plant species. So why nothing intelligent, somewhere out there? Kinda like the real world again, where we're the closest thing to intelligent life that we know of at present. )

SandChigger wrote:I believe the emphasis on mathematical abilities among the later Navigators implies that they calculate their course and then use their prescience to determine whether that course will place the ship safely at its destination. (I'm looking for a quote to that effect but haven't found one yet.) I believe that is the common, Freak-approved interpretation here. The only mystical part of the process is the prescient peek.

I sense the truth of it.

I don't think you're going to find a quote to back that up. There is no first hand account of a Navigator doing his thing.

"The Great Revolt took away a crutch," she said. "It forced human minds to
develop. Schools were started to train human talents. "
"Bene Gesserit schools?"
She nodded. "We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene
Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure
mathematics.
~RM Mohiam, Dune

Contrary to the nuDune books, this suggests to me that the Guild was started as a technical school after the Butlerian Jihad. If they specialized in math they would have been obvious canditates for interstellar navigation. The prescience would have come later with the discovery of the spice.

Can anyone think of a canon date of the discovery of spice in reference to the BJ?

loremaster wrote:Interesting discussion to catch back in on.

GP - we're reading from the same hymn sheet .

Chig - My point about the earlier post (spice needed for space travel to arrakis) was a catch-22. (you cant use spice to travel in space if you need to travel in space to get spice).

Two conditions:

A)UNLESS humans used navigation machines prior to discovering spice OR had another unrevealed method to navigate safely. Then landing at arrakis must have been simply accident. Hard to replicate something which happens by chance.

Therefore, either it was A) Chance B)Machine Help or C) an unrevealed technology.

which helped humans find arrakis.

Unless i missed a step?

Didn't we already go over this? I spoke about that back on page 7. A Thing Of Eternity also offered an addendum to my post as well.

viewtopic.php?p=26711&highlight=#26711

At any rate, there's a very wide gap of history left open to interpretation in between our current era and the future history of the Dune books. The books take place in 10,191, so it's not like there is a shortage of time to develop the Dune world as it begins in the first book. So even if no one possessed FTL technology of any sort, there would still be plenty of time to explore thousands of worlds in the Galaxy and Arrakis just happens to be one of the closer worlds to Earth.

"Folding space" implies to me plotting one course per fold.

Baraka Bryan wrote:

Freakzilla wrote:"Folding space" implies to me plotting one course per fold.

exactly. but does that mean the ship follows a course through space, or just leaves one spot and pops up in another. if the former, then that is why the prescience would be so damn important, since you have to plot a safe passage around obstacles. if the latter, it's much easier for a computer to do that since it's almost purely a mathematical question.

The way I see it, a wormhole is created by the Holtzman generators which the ship passes through. Other than entering and leaving the wormhole no actual distance is crossed.

loremaster wrote:I
This is purely my opinion now, but i see a significant difference between a a calculator and AI. Independent intelligences would indeed be a threat. Sat Nav would not. Skynet yes, internet no.

I don't understand: Why people have to think that any Artificial (and independent) Intelligences have to be evil? It's too KJA for me.

Be a intelligent machine doesn't you will have the unstoppable necessity to conquer or kill every human life. It's no sense.

And about folding space:
Why would folding space be a simple thing? Only because you can instantaneously go from point A to B doesn't mean that all mechanisms and math behind are easy. It would be the opposite.

That is the same "logic" applied to the AI's above.

And we have to to remember that AI might not have been needed at all, likely it wasn't. Just a regular old high speed computer. Why does everyone always jump to AI when talking about computers in an SF setting? According to the BJ a thinking machine could have easily included a non-thinking calculator.

Either way, I say what everyone else just said about this topic.

Baraka Bryan wrote:

Lisan Al-Gaib wrote:

loremaster wrote:I
This is purely my opinion now, but i see a significant difference between a a calculator and AI. Independent intelligences would indeed be a threat. Sat Nav would not. Skynet yes, internet no.

I don't understand: Why people have to think that any Artificial (and independent) Intelligences have to be evil? It's too KJA for me.

Be a intelligent machine doesn't you will have the unstoppable necessity to conquer or kill every human life. It's no sense.

And about folding space:
Why would folding space be a simple thing? Only because you can instantaneously go from point A to B doesn't mean that all mechanisms and math behind are easy. It would be the opposite.

That is the same "logic" applied to the AI's above.

I meant the math on the part of the navigator. it's the engines that fold space, not the navigator. there are obviously some sort of computers to take the coordinate inputs which gets the engines to fold to that point, but the navigator wouldn't have to do any complicated math if all they need to do is 'see' the destination and ensure it is safe.

unless they're inputting line commands into the engine's user interface or something, which i highly doubt

I understand what do you said. =)

However, as I see it, navigating and operating a folding space's ship are two intricate problems. You can navigate well if your ship and crew are not fully working. And, by what I understand of Orbital Dynamics and Astronomy, to travel from a place to another, between two stellar systems (i.e. two gravitational systems) it's not so simple as set the coordinates in the computer. You have to realize everything about small bodies, gravitational perturbation, caos regions,....Because if the ship suddenly appears in the stellar system, without the right projected velocities, it will fall toward the star or planet, or will be ejected!

Lisan Al-Gaib wrote:You have to realize everything about small bodies, gravitational perturbation, caos regions,....Because if the ship suddenly appears in the stellar system, without the right projected velocities, it will fall toward the star or planet, or will be ejected!

I worried about that stuff, too, Lisan, until I remembered that they're apparently able to nullify gravity and zero out inertia, so those small detail aren't really a problem.

I've been wondering about this as well, if we do invent anti-gravity, how would this affect momentum? Not only is earth moving at a decent clip around the Sun, the Sun is moving through the milky way. I guess I'm mixing in if this would just zero out momentum rather than gravitational force.

Still gravity basically puts us in geo-synch 'orbit' around earth (at zero altitude)

ugh physics

There's an article about it in that Science of Dune book as well.

Author uses the example of zeroing out the gravitational force of the Earth on, for example, something in your kitchen like, say, a toaster. With nothing holding it to the surface any longer, its momentum (from the turning of the planet) basically sends it crashing through your wall and several houses next door.

Not good for your relations with your neighbors or, more important, what is described in the books.

Maybe it's better to think of the suspensors as filtering out some of the gravity and thereby increasing the buoyancy of the object in air?

SandChigger wrote:There's an article about it in that Science of Dune book as well.

Author uses the example of zeroing out the gravitational force of the Earth on, for example, something in your kitchen like, say, a toaster. With nothing holding it to the surface any longer, its momentum (from the turning of the planet) basically sends it crashing through your wall and several houses next door.

Not good for your relations with your neighbors or, more important, what is described in the books.

Maybe it's better to think of the suspensors as filtering out some of the gravity and thereby increasing the buoyancy of the object in air?

That's not true. The toaster would not lose all of its momentum just because gravity loses its hold. Momentum changes are demonstrated most easily by putting something on your dash board, then taking a hard left. The object slides because it is still moving forward, and the car is turning around it. The toaster may gradually lose momentum, but to say it will go crashing backwards is wrong, especially in an atmosphere that has momentum too, and will help push the toaster along with the earth.

To be honest, I've never really liked the term "anti-gravity" anyway. Most sci-fi technologies are described in ways that don't actually produced some kind of anti-gravity antipode like anti-matter, they only produce a localized reduction in gravity or a control over gravity. Though I suppose in Dune, the suspensors are said to "nullify gravity" so perhaps Dune is the one case in which the term "anti-gravity" might be appropriate.

In either case, the suspensor in Dune would have to be some kind of gradual or proportional effect to avoid the greater forces affecting the suspended object, like the inertia of the planet itself.

One thing I don't think Frank describes is how the generate gravity artificially, such as on board a space craft. I don't recall ever reading whether or not the Holtzman technologies created gravity. Obviously some kind of technology must create gravity for the ships of Dune, but I don't recall it being mentioned.

Anit gravity devices probably should be viewed differently than lift engines. Jet engines, for example, lift objects by pushing. An anti gravity device will probably be able to affect the gravitic field that affects an object. There will be no force invovled. It will just affect a local area by controlling gravity, for example, and rendering it to zero.

There's hardly any mention of actual space travel at all. Usually what we are presented with is a lighter ferrying passengers to and from Guild ships and later No-Ships. RM Mohiam being arrested in DM and the BG attack on Gammu in HoD come to mind. I do specifically remember Odrade complaining that her lighter was not using suspensors to dampen the rate of decent or something similar, in her visit to Spider Queen's lair on Junction.

[EDIT]

I thought of another, Waff's meeting with the HMs was on an Ixian-Guild ship.

Omphalos wrote:That's not true. The toaster would not lose all of its momentum just because gravity loses its hold.

Never said it would.

The toaster has the same inertia as everything around it (kitchen counter and cookie jar on it, kitchen, house, air, etc). Things with inertia tend to keep moving in a straight line. The reason we and everything around us doesn't go flying up off the ground in a straight line in the direction of the Earth's rotation (as the Earth fell away beneath us) is the Earth's gravity (and some surface friction) is holding us in place, forcing our path of motion to curve. (That's why the Biblical story about Yahweh making the Earth stop rotating is such bullshit: if the Earth suddenly stopped, everything on the surface would be scoured clean by 1500 mph winds as the atmosphere kept moving. )

So if you completely cancel the force of gravity on the toaster, there's nothing other than friction from the counter surface and the pressure of the air around it keeping it in place. That's not going to be enough to keep it from becoming the envy of Indy 500 drivers: 0 to 1500 mph in less than 1 second. (Actually ignoring a few factors here: the exact direction the toaster will take off in depends on where your kitchen is and where the Earth's rotation has placed you at that instant, because as someone mentioned the Earth is also moving around the Sun at a given speed and direction.) The collisions with your walls and anything else in the way will significantly slow the toaster's speed, reduce its inertia and eventually stop it.

No?

Youre right. It would go forward in a straight line while the earth curved away from it. Though the friction with the atmosphere would probably keep it from moving perfectly straight. Gravity is after all still working on the atmosphere here, and it is touching the toaster. But the paths of the two bodies would slip away from each other.

I think it would be a freaky thing to see.

I like to watch.