• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Star Trek Discovery


Fabulous article. But there seems to be a loophole in their argument, which basically says that modelling the number of possibilities with respect to the properties and behavior of individual particles increases the processing load with each additional particle so dramatically that before long any simulation would require more processing power than would be theoretically available in the known universe. Therefore we cannot be living in a computational construct.

This is certainly a fair statement given their approach, which is deterministic. However the universe isn't necessarily deterministic. In other words, it doesn't need to deal with all the possibilities before making a decision and may not know or care exactly what happens next. It only needs to assign values. Therefore dealing with all the probabilities may not be relevant to the system. It's only relevant to those inside the construct who are trying to reverse engineer it with a method that uses probabilities in an attempt to get values that are useful in making future predictions.


The solution to this problem is to use quantization that makes the simulation workable and forget about it being deterministic.
So does gravitational waves play a part in the fabric of "quantum complexity theory"? The current search for so called ET signatures of spacecraft currently from some SETI researchers downunder would it be possible to find these signatures with exoplanet oceans as human technologies advances with underwater drones with sonar and could black holes be the part of a matrix type system?
 
I see many are discussing if there should be moral lessons in Star Trek, well there always has been,but my comments were about a love of a TV show plain and simple, I will leave the discussion about issues within the show to those who don't have time to have fun.
As a giant Star Trek fan, one of my favorite things to do is complain endlessly about it.
 
So does gravitational waves play a part in the fabric of "quantum complexity theory"?
I don't know enough about Quantum Complexity Theory to answer that question, but hypothetically someone could consider the problem. They've considered black hole event horizons. As a side note, gravitational waves are generally misunderstood to be equated with something analogous to radio waves. That is as waves of particles ( or whatever ) that cause gravity, but that's not the case. What scientists are referring to as waves is the varying amplitude ( so to speak ) due to rapidly orbiting bodies such as binary stars or black holes. Or sometimes collisions. So to clarify the analogy, the waves are like ripples in a lake created by two boats going around in a circle. These waves aren't creating the water ( that makes up the gravity ), they're just creating a noticeable disturbance in the existing fields.
The current search for so called ET signatures of spacecraft currently from some SETI researchers downunder ...
I don't know what program it is you are referring to there.
... would it be possible to find these signatures with exoplanet oceans as human technologies advances with underwater drones with sonar
You mean like what Proxima b might be like? If so, I suppose that if we could send an underwater drone there with sonar that it could take sonar readings, but they would be just like any other sonar readings, meaning they'd be acoustic signatures rather than gravitational. Sounds like a cool idea though. We've made land probes that explore land surfaces, so why not explore oceans too? I suppose the next step would be something amphibious and then something that could handle land, sea, and air. Then finally something that can leave the planet too. I suspect that some UFOs are something along those lines. The thing I saw acted very much like a probe rather than a passenger vessel.
... and could black holes be the part of a matrix type system?
As Chalmers suggests, anything could be part of a Matrix type system to the extent that what we perceive is interpreted as our reality. However viewing the universe as a computational construct of sorts is actually a bit different. It doesn't presume that our minds are "jacked in", but that everything in the observable universe ( including our brain ) is part of the construct. Hopefully this gives us some freedom to independently discern what else is going on within the construct besides what's going on inside our own heads.

Black holes present a bit of a problem in that they're a sort of paradox of nothing being something that is also extremely massive. IMO a computational construct is the only way to reconcile the paradox, otherwise it seems like black holes would be impossible. Assuming we're in a computational construct, there must be some arbitrary quantization going on to resolve the infinite recursion problem. Ultimately this would be necessary for a lot of things, otherwise a computational construct would also be impossible ( as pointed out in the QMC article we were just referring to ).


But to be perfectly honest, a lot of this is at the limit of my ability to make sense of. For that matter I suppose it's pretty much at the edge of anybody's ability. These are the big questions, the ones nobody can be 100% sure at this time that we have the right answers to. I try to be as logical as I can, so I tend to think my views are more reasonable than some others, but until we know what's really going on in the big picture, all we can do is say that one thing seems to make more sense than another, so follow that direction, and most importantly, change that direction when better evidence or reasoning comes along.
 
Last edited:
And is it going to be a policy that all the men are more character flawed than the women on this show?

Ah yuh huh.

Welcome to the hypocrisy that is gender equality. Females under index in the most senior paid jobs in society like execs and they also under index in crappy manual Labour jobs like trash collection and street cleaning. Strangely enough the push for equal representation seems to be only at the senior end

But yes, equal representation for men and women means all men must be represented as sinister douche bags
 
FAH-KING lame.
Boring uniforms.
Flying space suits-who cares.
Klingon orcs?!?

Holy smeg.
I'll just rewatch TOS TNG or finally finish Voyagers last couple seasons.
Or try watching Enterprise past two episodes..
I also found the early Klingon arc/make-up etc, very tiresome and just not 'new' enough for a whole new season etc. But I stuck with it cos
I really digged the spore drive cos it was just awesome.

Just keep watching - I'm on season 3 now and I'm actually loving it. Love the ship, plenty decent new crew characters I think it's quickly taken Star Trek extremely far, very fast and delivered the goods.

I really did nearly give up on the whole show during the war with the silly looking Klingons but once you get past that I think it's easily the most innovative new incarnation compared with the competing different timelines.

By the way I wouldn't have made Picard with Romulans as enemies. Picard collected so much personal debt to those he felt he could not save over their his lifetime that there was ample of that to use.

They gave DATA an ending so much better than I could have imagined. So moving; so deep and delivers everything you could want.

Goggs
 
Dont mind the new Star Trek Discovery and at its not trying to push the "great reset" notion. It shows slavery just like here on Earth and its corruption . Some of specials effects come close to actual real ecounters descriptions - by eyewitness . For example large bubble space port and massive beam above. Dimensional (ball lighting and magnetosphere waves affects events) and odd interaction unknown life forms -time travelers. Ball lighting and its ability to expand to step into and see different world with breathable atmosphere -cool wind and sky view daytime . Lifeform that scans and moves while ability to shot back into space in matter of seconds then reappears. Creatures that move from light into human form and there's is the eye s lens change to black and back to normal in seconds.
 
Three years in, what's the prevailing verdict so far?
I was literally born a Trekkie into a Trekkie family.
My wife has put up with it for 20+ years, and watched every single episode, movie, and gone to many conventions with me.

And this is the first Star Trek that I've ever given up on. So very very bad.

But Lower Decks is awesome.
 
I was kind of mixed about season 2 of Discovery. But season 3 remains entertaining.
I dunno. I just can't stomach it. In the middle of season 2, my wife stood up and announced "I can't do this anymore. Spock's family wasn't like this. Spock wasn't like this. She was never his sister. The Klingons are wrong, Starfleet is wrong, Burnham is an idiot and would never be in Starfleet, and I tried to take all that. But mess with Spock and his family and I'm out."

And I thought about it, and decided she was right. I couldn't go back to it after that.
 
I dunno. I just can't stomach it. In the middle of season 2, my wife stood up and announced "I can't do this anymore. Spock's family wasn't like this. Spock wasn't like this. She was never his sister. The Klingons are wrong, Starfleet is wrong, Burnham is an idiot and would never be in Starfleet, and I tried to take all that. But mess with Spock and his family and I'm out."

And I thought about it, and decided she was right. I couldn't go back to it after that.
Some of the concepts are sort of cool, but you can't mess with stuff like that and expect to get away with it. It would have been better IMO to have created an entirely new franchise and characters than try to map it all onto the Star Trek universe. Even the the new Star Trek movies in the alternate universe barely get away with it, and that's only because the setting is in another universe. We know it's a cheap plot device, but technically it works, so we give it a pass.
 
There are strategic show business-related reasons to try to keep in the same universe. In fact, I think the "Kelvin" universe movies were outliers and not as well done.
 
There are strategic show business-related reasons to try to keep in the same universe. In fact, I think the "Kelvin" universe movies were outliers and not as well done.
Sure, but to Randall’s point, it could have just started 1000 years post TOS in the first place. Then they could have done whatever they wanted. Visual reboots of the ships, Klingons, everything. And they would have kept Spock out of it.
If it weren’t for all the screaming and crying and whispering from Burnham, and the utter fixation on her for the entire universe, the show might have made a decent go of it.
 
Back
Top