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Re: starship-design: stuff
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...