Apart from potential performance issues I can't think of any other reason why not. Keep in mind however that games are made to be fun and sometimes ability to predict actions of not-so-smart AI opponent might be better that facing unpredictable and too intelligent AI.
We already know how to get arbitrarily close to 1C: just keep adding energy to the system to produce enough thrust to overcome the additional mass of said energy's source and the relative mass increase from getting closer to 1C. It's just not practical and the laws of physics forbid it from ever being practical.
I doubt any metric in Formula 1 doubles every 2 years.
To get something like Moore’s law you need a breakthrough that opens up possibilities for many orders of magnitude in improvements. Baring new physics there’s just nothing like that available for rocketry.
No. Moore's law is about making things smaller for speedups.
We can't shrink Relativistic Physics like that to lower the energy required to reach 1c (infinite). Of course, it is possible that there is a better standard model of physics which does a better job of explaining things and which does say we can do so.
Another space race or space F1 would definitely make our engineering better and more reliable, but at massive cost and we still won't get FTL.
Nearly all racing formats have banned certain technologies.
For instance, swimming banned LZR Racer swimsuits as "technology doping". Formula 1 has banned a variety of technologies, some just for increasing risk to spectators. America's Cup banned pedal power and cyborgs. Most human-powered races ban performance enhancing drugs.
I could easily see space racing banning negative mass.
Without a preferential reference frame, that's a nonsensical question. You can define your velocity to be arbitrarily close to C just be defining in relation to which inertial reference frame.
I would point out that this is "nonsensically pedantic." Clearly the frames of note are the one you begin your acceleration in and the one you end your acceleration in.
The question isn't phrased that way, its "as close as possible", implying that there is some physical limitation that's passed by traveling 99.9% c vs 99.99% c.
The more important question is with an Alcubierre drive, how do you decide which direction it was traveling. Since it is traveling faster than C, you can pick a reference frame where it goes frame A to B, one where it disappears from A and arrives at B instantly, and one where it goes from B to A.
just because the vast majority of observers aren't strictly Eulerian and thus there are lots of little details, like a dipole anisotropy in the CMB, or small deviations from a perfect blackbody spectrum. For A and B separated by non-cosmological distances, there are plenty of other local clocks available; around here one might use the orbital period of the Hulse-Taylor binary, for instance.
Of course the Alcubierre metric doesn't use the scale factor, since it is an everywhere-flat spacetime (i.e., not expanding) except in the compact region of the warp bubble's walls, and the metric does not admit a varying scale factor, and it is a vacuum solution so there are no CMB photons, binary pulsars, or any other matter -- not even a spaceship.
Making the Alcubierre metric even slightly more realistic exposes problems [1] which don't vanish when you make a reasonable (or any) choice of frame of reference.
Of course you can easily define an inertial frame of reference that is not moving in relation to the CMB, a binary stare, or whatever else. You can easily define whether the journey in relation to those. The issue is you can change what most people would consider to be fundamental things about the journey by choosing a different inertial reference frame.
> what most people would consider to be fundamental
Most people should then have it explained to them that frame-dependent quantities are not fundamental.
This is something that arises even in their first exposure to Newtonian physics: kinetic energy is just such a frame-dependent quantity.
Generally covariant and invariant quantities are candidates for fundamental quantities.
The stress-energy tensor is, for example, generally covariant. However, one tends to want to slice it up into energy, pressure, stress, and so forth, and the fluxes of those in various directions. Those "sliced" quantities are frame-dependent.
Let's make the ship extremely tiny and have it represented as a contributor to the stress-energy tensor T at some point on the manifold, p \in M. The total of T at p is invariant. We're interested in the content of T at p that represents the ship, practically all of which will be in T_{00} when we write down exactly what axis 0 (the timelike one, unlike the spacelike 1, 2, and 3 axes) is.
Now let's move the ship. We want to shift the relevant covariant content of T at p \in M to p' \in M using parallel transport. With the mild assumption that locally at every point \in M there is a tiny patch of 4d Lorentzian spacetime, we can then talk about any path we like between p and p' as being everywhere timelike, everywhere lightlike, or neither. We still don't need coordinates; this is just a feature of a Lorentzian (sub-)manifold[1].
In perfectly flat spacetime, we have the advantage that there is exactly one everywhere-lightlike path from p to p'. However, that is often not the case when there is real spacetime curvature; and the curvature in the walls of the Alcubierre warp bubble cannot be ignored in this regard. We also have to consider curvature if p and p' are at cosmological distances, even in the non-Alcubierre/always-sublight case.
Coordinates now become useful, and here we will typically want to take a 4d Lorentzian spacetime and slice it into 3d spacelike hypersurfaces arranged by some time coordinate t_{past} < t_{0} < t_{future}. We sprinkle matter[+] on such a surface and use the initial values formulation[2] and covariant laws for the matter content, and predict how it evolves from one time coordinate to the next. In the case of a space ship, we are hoping to evolve to a final values surface, with matter sprinkled differently at some t', t < t'. It turns out that we can do this for matter that is not constrained to an always-timelike (i.e., subluminal) path -- with some mild assumptions[3] one can in principle make concrete predictions of the behaviour of e.g. a sometimes-FTL spaceship. However, what happens is generally very far from intuitive, and so should be determined by actually grinding out each infinitesimally-short-duration hypersurface from initial to final, solving each surface numerically.
Alcubierre, as it happens, has written a textbook about numerical relativity. [4]
So,
> you can change what most people would consider to be fundamental things about the journey
arises here in the choice of a slicing and a set of initial values. In effect, one is choosing an axis, calling it time, labelling it with tiny markings, and choosing a way to reflect "all space everywhere" at that particular time. One has enormous freedom with each of these choices, but some choices would be ridiculously useless to make, and others are seemingly quite sensible. However, note that our choices of initial and final values have ship @ p and ship at p' with p' at a later time coordinate. There is no ambiguity about which came first, and so no opportunity for either case in : "where it disappears from A and arrives at B instantly, and one where it goes from B to A.", where A is p and B is p'.
More rigorously, we would not specify the the slice in which ship is at B at all. We would instead specify all the content of a slice in which ship is at A, and then evolve slice by slice seeing what happens ("case A"). Or alternatively, we could specify all the content of a slice in which ship is at B, and then evolve slice by slice seeing what happens ("case B"). The time-symmetry of the physical laws of matter let us march in either direction from one slice to the next. But for a one-way journey, in "case A" we have only one slice in which we are closer to "case B", and vice-versa. If we evolve backwards from "case A", ship never reaches B. If we evolve forwards from "case B", ship never reaches A. It is only forwards from "case A" or backwards from "case B" that we recover the journey.
However, with realistically specified values surfaces, macroscopic thermodynamics come into play. One direction will have an overall increase in entropy (everywhere, from one slice to the next), the other direction will have an overall decrease in entropy. This difference sharpens as one makes the values surfaces more realistic, and as one applies finer and finer scale laws to the matter so specified. Observing B->A also means seeing eggs unscramble in frying pans at A and martinis being stirred apart into gin and vermouth at B, and many similar things everywhere one looks.
Is this fundamental? No, it's the result of having made a set of choices. However, the arrow of time is important to our experiences, and imagining aliens that experience a backwards arrow of time and interact with us and the things we see marching forward, leads to the latter being washed out by the difference in degrees of freedom (there are a lot more of them when you scramble than when you unscramble) -- by interaction with "our" matter, their arrow of time would be "corrected".
Sean Carroll had a series of blog entries on this topic some years ago [5].
- --
[+] Here this means the contributions to the stress-energy tensor; we may also need to supply values the left-hand-side of the Einstein Field Equations too, in cases where there is non-negligible gravitational radiation
[3] Geroch, R. AMS/IP Stud.Adv.Math. 49 (2011) 59-70 ("New Developments in Lorentzian Geometry", held in November 2009 in Berlin, DE), https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1614 top of p.8 in preprint ("Initial-Value Formulation" subsection).
you could also just avoid your migraine trigger, I have and get around 3 migraines a year max rather than having one every month or 2 or 3 a week as a teen.
Jerry Weinberg, who died yesterday, used to say that every time you hear the j-word ("just") you should replace it with "have trouble", i.e. "you could also have trouble avoiding your migraine trigger". He was talking about software projects, but the rule is general. The j-word usually indicates that difficulty is being glossed over.
Anecdotally, over the years I've tried identifying my triggers by keeping logs of food, drink, sleep, stress, travel, etc, and correlating the data. After all that, I've identified a few specific foods, but even those were unreliable triggers, and avoiding them didn't cause a significant decrease overall. Medication gave me my life back.
You state that as if it's simple and anyone can do it.
What if something common like changes in atmospheric pressure trigger it? What if you have multiple common triggers? What if you don't know all your triggers?
Just keep a food log, mood log, sleep log, stress log, barometric pressure log, air quality log, oxygen level log, altitude log, brightness log, screen-time log, eye strain log, face-shoulder-neck tension log, spine pain log, head trauma log, and a blood pressure log.
Then you can hook up all the data into a recurrent neural network that finds the patterns in the data and lets you know what combination of conditions will give you migraines.
It's really easy to find all your migraine triggers if you follow these very basic steps.
Should also probably log stool weight/color, mineral/vitamin intake across all foods, etc etc - just to make it even more clear that a person has no time to “just log everything” that could possibly play a role. And at the end, it would probably not explain a majority of the headaches - at least in my experience.
> it would probably not explain a majority of the headaches - at least in my experience
This is my experience too. I know a good number of my migraine triggers, but some days I do everything right: I eat good food (regularly), plenty of sleep, no over-exertion, lots of water, breaks from screen time, no eye strain, etc etc...still get a fucking migraine!
Yep and that list of things you did correct could go on for pages. It’s similar for how I treat my headaches. I don’t just take a triptan. I do the yoga stretch, maybe a cup of tea (full cup of coffee if I’m in 9/10 zone), some Gatorade, ginger powder, tumeric powder, heat on the traps, TENS unit on the traps/neck/temples, ice, etc and nothing. I’ve even fallen asleep while doing half of those in the crocodile position before. It worked that time, too.
I was under the impression that identifying the trigger can be quite difficult, to the point where some folks who suffer from Chronic migraines can spend years trying to figure out the combination of factors that act as the trigger?
With the variety of triggers that are possible and the possibility of there being multiple triggers with complex interactions, that is much easier said than done for many. After keeping meticulous logs of anything that might be a trigger, I've managed to reduce my migraines to 1 a month from 3-4 per weeks over a period of about 4 years, eventually identifying 7 or 8 causes. Even then, when I do get one, which combination of pain drugs to take is a huge gamble. CBD oil seems to be the only thing that always works, but that's unfeasible for me. So I'm not going to complain about a new drug for it.
There may be two effects going in parallel, but: for chronic migraine sufferers reducing blood pressure can be effective in reducing attack frequency, and ketogenic (and other very low carb diets), can reduce blood pressure frequently. Blood pressure being a big factor in the effects of vasodilation.
Honestly, I've long dismissed the claimed benefits of ketogenic diets like 'reduced inflamation' as... minor and uninteresting. A few weeks into a low-carb diet for my migraines and my sedentary butt is suddenly running and with my untrained knees never having felt better. I would not be shocked if there were other beneficial effects of ketosis on migraines.
Not all migraines have triggers. This drug in particular is for chronic migraines, and while the definition of chronic is 15 days or more, the people who will qualify for this drug (and who it was really designed for) are the people who have them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week non-stop. So living is their trigger. Nice advice.
Humans are the most adaptable invasive species. The whole ocean can turn to jelly mush before we care. We will say "oh dear", switch our fast food order to fried chicken instead of fish and carry on as usual.
We're adaptable, sure. But we're not some collective. There are hundreds of millions of peoples lives that are tied up in the ocean. There are entire cultures. Those things don't adapt easily. Turn the ocean into plastic mush, and while I in my literal New York ivory tower will be fine, the fishermen will starve.
