Re: starship-design: stuff

[Christoph Kulmann <kulmann@zfn.uni-bremen.de>]

Hi Mike,

It's me again.

So, you think about time... Here is something about time - from a 
biologist's point of view.

I know that most physicians would hang me for what I say now, but time 
itself seems to be an invention of our brains. As you know, there is no 
absolute time in the universe - Relativity and so on. But even on this 
very planet, time doesn't have to flow at the same speed everywhere. It 
doesn't matter if an animal lives only a day or a hundred years - they 
all have their own personal feeling of time. In a small flee, all 
biological processes run much faster than a human body - but the flee 
would feel the same amount of absolute time as we do during our whole live.

All this is controlled by several "clocks" inside our brains. If you 
destroy these clocks, an organism would live without even the very 
FEELING of time - it would live in a permanent PRESENT. And there is even 
the opposite case: rats with an overdose of "clock" hormons speed up 
their entire lives - eating, sleeping, biting... they even die earlier 
(of old age...).

So as to my opinion, you should be very careful with any concept of 
physical time, because everything we feel, everything we measure, is 
actually censored by our brain to make things as simple as possible - and 
believe me, this organ inside our head is cheating us a great deal...

By the way, there actually is an experiment involving transmission beyond 
the speed of light. This was done in 1991 by Dr. Guenter Nimtz in 
Koeln/Germany. In short, the weird quantum habit of tunneling through an 
otherwise uncrossable barrier allowed information to be transmitted at 4.7c.
So nothing is really impossible in this world...