The Nature of Reality TV in 2050

[Dean Roddey]

This came up in another conversation... So, let's say that time travel never really becomes possible (you know it's a good thread when it starts like that, right?) There are all of the issues of causality and such. But, pure *observation* of the past would cause none of those issues and break no laws of physics I know of. So, if indeed the past is preserved in some way that can be accessed, eventually someone will figure out how to do it.

If so, that means that reality TV in the future could be basically all of us in our most humilating moments. Who could sue them for that? We are dead, what happened really happened. It's there for anyone to see since now the past has become another 'public square' that is open to anyone to exploit.

So, someone has the idea, I hire a couple hundred unemployed house wives, give them terminals, and set them scanning the past for the most humiliating situations they can find. We cull through them, find the best ones, and we have The World's Funniest Dead People or something of that nature.

So, the next time you find yourself wearing a dress and are utilizing a lolipop in some way that exceeds its design parameters, think about that. The whole 'Cocker Spaniel Incident', or the thing with the clown makeup, the mayo, and the taser. You could be responsible all by yourself for another percentage point in ratings in the mid-west. Or more likely in California probably.

Of course you'll be FAR more likely to get whacked if you end up becoming famous in the future for something. If you are a well known person from the past, of course someone is going to be more interested in digging through your undies looking for a stain or two. Toppling the biggest statues is always the most fun.

Hence my strategy of failing at everything. I just don't want to take the risk.

[joelpatterson]

Wow... that's almost like kind of imagining that message board posts will somehow last forever, be there for all to see at some future date... scary stuff!

[Revren Jesse]

I just dropped by from from the future to tell you that you have been doing very well as far as ratings are concerned, especially whenever we re-run your "Cocker Spaniel Incident". It's a classic episode.

[chrisdee]

Hehe. Let the past be the past. I'd rather want to know how to avoid embarrassing moments in the future.

[ElMosca]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

So, someone has the idea, I hire a couple hundred unemployed house wives, give them terminals, and set them scanning the past for the most humiliating situations they can find. We cull through them, find the best ones, and we have The World's Funniest Dead People or something of that nature.

Well, really, if I'm going to be famous after I'm dead, I think I'll run to the store and pick up a couple of extra cans of whipped cream.

Also, since the show creators will be reading this, have them deposit a couple of billion dollars into your account, like yesterday...

Cheers,
++aldo

p.s. ...just like in Idiocracy...

[Dean Roddey]

Actually, I don't think I should have posted this. Since yesterday, there've been these black cars and trucks with tinted windows driving back and forth in front of my apartment, and I'm almost out of groceries...

[joelpatterson]

You may not realize it, but this is about to be one of your best episodes!

[jeremy.c.]

In the future, everyone gets their fifteen minutes of shame.

[Chrislpp]

Time travel in the sense of Back to the Future etc. is quite simply....impossible, and if you pursue creating someway to do it you are
1). Wasting your life
2). Probably so unhappy with your own mistakes and decisions due to having a weak character, you WANT to perfect time travel.

[Farm sounds]

Originally Posted by Chrislpp

Time travel in the sense of Back to the Future etc. is quite simply....impossible, and if you pursue creating someway to do it you are
1). Wasting your life
2). Probably so unhappy with your own mistakes and decisions due to having a weak character, you WANT to perfect time travel.

You just described me.

If Time is like a river, and I go back and throw a stone in the river. It will cause a ripple in the water, but the wave starts where I threw the stone, it doesn't affect the future instantly like people have wondered. If I shoot myself, I won't disappear. Just from that point on I will be dead.

Time travel IS possible, and has been going on for some time by people alot smarter than me.

[jeremy.c.]

Originally Posted by Farm sounds

Time travel IS possible, and has been going on for some time by people alot smarter than me.

Dude, you live in 'Sconi, just drive your car to Beaver Dam (where I grew up) and you'll be instantly transported back 10 years!

[Revren Jesse]

Originally Posted by Chrislpp

Time travel in the sense of Back to the Future etc. is quite simply....impossible, and if you pursue creating someway to do it you are
1). Wasting your life
2). Probably so unhappy with your own mistakes and decisions due to having a weak character, you WANT to perfect time travel.

Time travel is impossible because time itself does not exist. There is only cause and effect, amongst an eternity with no beginning and no end.

The concept of time is a convenient illusion -- our bodies are inherently designed to sense the illusion, just as we sense many illusions (color, taste, etc.) -- and it exists only as a sensation.

[Dean Roddey]

Well, if we are actually going to be serious (perish the thought), the nature of time is not at all proven or fully understood in current physics. It may purely be a thermodynamic/statistical phenomenon, or it might not.

But, if it is, then of course that would make relativity a little hard to explain, since you can't warp a dimension that doesn't exist. In terms of relativity, time cannot be just a side effect of the processes of thermodynamics, since everyone experiences those the same in any frame of reference, it seems to me. In order for your to experience a different time from me, purely by parking yourself above a black hole and running the jets full blast for a week, that would tend to argue that it's not just our way of percieving the effects of the statistical activity of particles.

You could argue, well it just slows down those processes. But, if that's true, what regulates those processes that could be slowed down? If they always operated the same everywhere, you could kind of argue that it had nothing to do with time. But if you can slow them down and speed them up based on your rate of acceleration (or resistance to a very powerful gravitational field, which is the same thing), then clearly something is regulating their actions and that is being affected, which kind of has to mean it is some sort of separate entity.

If it is another dimension, as apposed to a perception, it's still very unique, since it appears to be a unidirectional one, but there's no way of knowing why that is at this point.

Anyway, the whole thing is really up in the air, as far as I can tell. Whoever even comes close to really answering that one will be assured of fame and fortune, at least as far as such things go in the geeky physics world. I'm sure that there are some physics groupies. Feynman seemed to do ok.

[chrisdee]

All of us constantly travel forward in time, and there is currently nothing we can do about it other than dying

[joelpatterson]

Totally, man, we are all just riders on the storm.

[chrisdee]

I tought my perception was the awareness part of who I am ? Without perception I would not know that I exist. How can I go on without perception ?

[The Listener]

Originally Posted by chrisdee

I tought my perception was the awareness part of who I am ? Without perception I would not know that I exist. How can I go on without perception ?

You could hypothetically go on without perception (meaning: decoding impulses from "physical reality"), but not without "awareness".

If we leave out any after-life scenarios that speculate that your awareness continues (while ghost stories speculate that also after-life perception continues...) the whole world seizes to exist with your death, because for anyone of us anything exists only while we are aware... without awareness - nothing IS (for each particular one of us).

[chrisdee]

How do you define perception and awareness.

[The Listener]

Awareness: I AM / or just "IS"

Perception: "I AM in relation to" OR "IT IS"

.....

edit:

Popular "after-life" scenarios:

Religious - there is an entity or "quality" - "Self", "Soul" that transcends physical reality - it works as "Awareness" - you can BE, but not neccesarilly "in this world" - you don't percieve it anymore, you just "ARE" - infinite, blah, blah...

Occult - ghost stories...: there is an entity that even after physical body vanishes continues to percieve the consensus reality - "a ghost"...

[Macky]

I time travel every night..
What i do is lie down on my time machine, its funny cos some people say it looks like a bed.. Anyway once i,m comfortable i close my eyes and the most amazing thing happens,.... i open my eyes again and its daylight.. i,m in the future.
Sometimes i even have a woody.... time travel is exciting.

[jeremy.c.]

Originally Posted by Macky

I time travel every night..
What i do is lie down on my time machine, its funny cos some people say it looks like a bed.. Anyway once i,m comfortable i close my eyes and the most amazing thing happens,.... i open my eyes again and its daylight.. i,m in the future.
Sometimes i even have a woody.... time travel is exciting.

Hahahahahaha! Nice!

I usually just call my friends in NYC (I'm in LA), since they're 3 hours in the future I get the down low from them.

[chrisdee]

Hahaha. Your taking timetravel to another dimention

[chrisdee]

Up, up and away.

[Revren Jesse]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

You could argue, well it just slows down those processes. But, if that's true, what regulates those processes that could be slowed down? If they always operated the same everywhere, you could kind of argue that it had nothing to do with time. But if you can slow them down and speed them up based on your rate of acceleration (or resistance to a very powerful gravitational field, which is the same thing), then clearly something is regulating their actions and that is being affected, which kind of has to mean it is some sort of separate entity.

Yes, exactly -- processes may slow down under acceleration. It is the processes that are warped; 'time' is merely a shorthand reference to a certain process. If you could find a practical way to warp specific processes selectively, (e.g., slow down your processes relative to everything else) you would not travel forward in time; you would merely experience cause and effect. Conversely, slowing everyone else's processes, relative to you, would not send you back through time.

Hmm... now I wonder... Does radioactive decay occur at the speed of light? I have somehow neglected to test this... Doh!

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

Anyway, the whole thing is really up in the air, as far as I can tell. Whoever even comes close to really answering that one will be assured of fame and fortune, at least as far as such things go in the geeky physics world. I'm sure that there are some physics groupies. Feynman seemed to do ok.

Physics groupies? Huh. I was told nothing of this... Is it too much to hope that they give satisfactory brainjobs?

[Dean Roddey]

But you didn't address the point of what regulates the speed of those processes? Something has to be getting affected to slow them down.

It's not like temperature related change in the statistical activity in particles. That's an easy one to understand, since you are lowering the average energy of all the particles involved, and easily measured in your own reference frame. This is completely different.

It's one of those things where it's so easy to just accept that particle activity is going on all the time that you don't question why they happen at the rate that they do, and so you don't even think about how they are being slowed down. But clearly something is regulating their speed and that something is being affected in order to slow them down. It's not a change in the energy level of the particles, since that will measure exactly the same to the person in that reference frame, AFAIK.

Otherwise, you are putting forward an effect as the answer, instead of the actual cause.

[The Listener]

Aren't all of this just concepts? Including "cause and effect". Everything works within the specific set of rules... like in mathematics, so it is with the illusion of "time" which is merely the interpretation of "cause and effect" and the same for those two, which could be merely disjointed states that we "errantly" connect? Percieving "states" being the illusion itself, too? So theories can work within set limits. And we cannot concieve rational understanding and interpretation outside the limits of logic & mathematic, anyway? Particles just being another concept to calculate another approximate explanation? Why should something external regulate the "processes" of particles? Isn't all this well beyond the thermodynamic explanation of the Universe to be bothered with concepts that are only valid on the macro level?

Sorry, not much of a physicist... more fond of philosophy... please kindly explain if there is anything to explain...

[Revren Jesse]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

But you didn't address the point of what regulates the speed of those processes? Something has to be getting affected to slow them down.

My only point is that time does not exist when you get past the inherent sensations of the human reference frame. It's a circular reference. We see cyclical events and talk about yesterday and today and tomorrow but all that exists is cause and effect within a static eternity.

Time is a myth leftover from the beginning, and one that will continue because of its many uses in society. But it is time for Science to move on already (no pun intended). In any event, 'time travel' is impossible.

I don't know why the speed of processes are affected, but it seems likely connected to to the physical effects of length contraction, as they are inversely proportional. If I knew all the answers, I sure as hell wouldn't be posting in The Moan Zone. Well, maybe I would.

[Stevil]

see Idiocracy. "ow my balls" will be all the rage
YouTube - Ow my Balls! Idiocracy

[Dean Roddey]

Originally Posted by Revren Jesse

My only point is that time does not exist when you get past the inherent sensations of the human reference frame. It's a circular reference. We see cyclical events and talk about yesterday and today and tomorrow but all that exists is cause and effect within a static eternity.

Entopy existed before humans were around to witness it. It's a fundamental part of nature, and something drives the rate of that process.

[joelpatterson]

Come to think of it... what are people talking about when they say a "time-out"?

A total upending of causal reality as we know it?