Sometimes people need to remember that in our early space race we could have colonized the solar system just with 60s technology. Imagine species that colonized the galaxy with 60s tech and now realize that humanity is the most technology advanced race.
This video covers exactly what you described. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oMiHioZrlOw.html Simply put it, Isaac describes that the we could have colonized the solar system would be with 60s/70s technology though it could be possible with even 50s or 40s level tech. The mathematics are there, and the theories and principles/laws were thought up. All you need is manpower, a good power source, a few technological advances, and the incentive to do it.
You know, I kinda like this idea. We're more advanced than all the other races, but we skipped FTL because wewent down the wrong branches of the tech tree.
The Road Not Traveled. Not the poem, but there's a short story. FTL tech is SO easy it's some property of iron, and so many have FTL, but their tech level is WAY behind, with FTL itself being capable in the iron age. (Yeah, it's weird.) And thus, we get invaded, but by sentient teddy bears, armed with muskets of the kind used to fight off Redcoats. It goes as well as you might expect. We learn just HOW much further advanced we are. And of course, they gifted us FTL, unintentionally.
People don't realize how powerful a Raspberry Pi 4 is compared to what we used to get man to the moon or what ran the space shuttle. It would have been an incredible supercomputer then. I am glad the story went open systems rather than convincing the aliens that we were snobby idiots by giving them an iPad.
heck, my old graphic calculator that got me through Math 600 classes in college is more powerful than the computers that got us to the moon.... and it's only an antique Ti-89
Now imagine them giving the Xenos a _Threadripper PRO_ 😵 Poor Xeno will be making a trip to Earendel as a trial run... "We jumped *HOW FAR?!* "😭 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS
@@machinist7230 Nah, the warp drive device would not be powerful enough for that single jump, but they would likely be able to calculating more then enough ways to jump back through time itself.
For comparison: ~6 billion instructions per second on the cpu, and 32 billion floating point operations per second on the GPU. The Apollo guidance computer is 2 million instructions per second, which means it's around one hour on the AGC to one second on a raspberry pi (cpu), or almost 5 hours to 1s on the gpu. Note that it's probably even faster than that since there's instructions that do fairly complex stuff in a few cycles, and memory access is way faster.
Reminds me of a story called "The Road Less Taken" In that, FTL is ridiculously easy to invent, most species that do, just perfect it and go conquering. Those that don't are still in the stone age, and soon enslaved. Eventually a ship from the largest and most advanced empire discovers Earth in the 2060's (headcanon it to the 1980's, that's the tech level we have in the story), and they try to conquer it... with muzzle-loading muskets and cavalry sabres.
Would be hilarious if all we were missing was some material not native to Earth to make an FTL and there are alien races running around with their ships powered by computers that can be outmatched by smart phones.
And we end up making a FTL engine that only takes 1/10000 of the material needed for it and our FTLs are a million times more efficient and a thousand times faster with a 100 times range.
It is stupidly powerful as a calculator, 32 billion floating point operations per second. The rtx 4090 does near 100 trillion flops, that's 100 000 billion multiplications per second. That's also what's estimated to be needed to simulate a human brain in real time. Also folding@home network has reached 2 exaflops (2 billion billions) For comparison, calculating an orbit is probably a few 100s of operations at most. That means that we could probably calculate the orbits of all planets in the milky way to a decent degree in less than 5 minutes on a single computer, or a few ms on the folding@home network. And we use that power to play games.
On having more advanced tech but no FTL. Sometimes details just get missed, or didn't get thought of. Case in point: Steam engines have been around since the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, but none of them ever thought to scale it up to do work. It was just a novelty.
Alien: we need the most technologically advanced computer you have to save the lives of billions. Steve: [on the phone] Hey mom, I’ma call you back, my guy here needs my phone to save people… uh-huh, yeah, I-I love you to mom, see you soon. [to alien] here you go man, do what you gotta do. Alien: You use a piece of technology so powerful to call your mother? What if you break it using it so carelessly. Steve: 1. That’s my mom, so yes. 2. I buy another one, obviously.
We gave them the computing equivalent of an erector set, that can be had for less than a trip to McDonald's, to replace the Xeno equivalent of _Univac II_ . 😵 Now imagine if they gave them a Beowulf Cluster.😭
having just enough to do something can work but being overkill is always good and redundancy is better. Would be hard to imagine a species getting that far without upgrading to match their need... though humanity better freaking have some really good bio control and suits, verging on keeping Halo's "Flood" and grey goo at bay as a level of cautiousness that should be taken into account when contending with unknown contaminants...
when they said "tiny" little black box, I really thought it was a blade server, a tower, a high end gaming laptop, hell, I would even accept an Intel Nuc. But, a rinkydink goshdarned RasPi ?! Probably even running a free Raspbian at that. .... goshdarnit, xenos. smh.
Reminds me of two other stories, "The road not taken" and another one I can't remember where the rest of the galaxy used modified lizard brains connected to the ship used as a computer. Can't remember the name of that one though.
"Computers" plural. The space shuttle had 5 computers, each created with a different CPU, each performing the same task and programmed by different people. The whole idea was for redundancy. If there was a coding mistake in one of the computers, the other four could spot it and override the faulty data. If I remember correctly what I read, it was a case that any 3 of the computers could override the other two if the 3 were in agreement on the correct data. There was never, to my knowledge, an incident on the Space Shuttle caused by a faulty computer. This was due to the built--in redundancy. The computers may have even saved the shuttle at one point. The main engines "light up" with five seconds to launch. On one occasion which I saw on TV, the engines lit up and fired for three seconds, then shut down with two seconds to go to launch. The announcer said that the computers aboard the shuttle had detected a problem with the fuel flow and had forced an abort of the launch. A pump was faulty. It was replaced and the shuttle launched for real some days later.
Asymetric development I see, this is one of most interesting ideas in sci-fi, civilisations developing differently to the point, were one of them can have some technologies insanely advanced, but other primitive even by our standards.
Astrological vector probability along a route. Calculating said route from the chance of mapped objects crossing paths with the route. Ranging from the intra-system to extra-system vectors. Anti-grav though would be tricky, but that's probably more of a tech-side issue in application rather than calculation.
@@Burneth_ Basically it's a formula to calculate the probability of matter being present at x time as the ship passes through x point. Calculating the route by data input, seeing as the computer is rather simple in this case. Think of it like a simple spreadsheet and the final course is the result of the inputs having the formula applied to them.
Kinda reminds me of Doc Smith's Skylark series. All of the advanced races still used vacuum tubes. It also made me think of a fanfic xover I once read between Stargate and Galactica (77). In that tale, Earth's computers made the Galactica's look like crystal radios.
Hmm I guess that is plausible if we are missing something simple that wouldn't require that much calculation... It is possible some alien civilisation with a better way to represent the world than out maths could have discovered it a lot earlier and made it work with much more basic computers...
Hi! Author here! *waves excitedly before continiung on to her reply* In the case of the Captain's race, straight up dumb enough luck they find a crashed ftl vessel within easy reach. (we got to the moon with slide rules and huge super computers that were still pre microprocessor... so lunar orbit can be considered 'easy reach')
The main issue right now is making sure we have the right base formulas for the calculations. Once we have those figured out we could revert back to the old punch card "super computers" for the level of tech needed to calculate flight paths for FTL travel, but since it would be pointless to go that far back in tech development outside of resource scarcity we would have enough computational power to cover all the needed redundancies to keep the trip as safe as possible.
According to several different sources the first equivalent to the modern zero was not defined until 628 so it is entirely possible that we are missing something seeming obvious that could make ftl travel relatively simple
@@sirbreadstick5664 kind of like how the reason for the creation of the concept of dark matter was that observations of galaxies showed that given our current gravitational theories being correct, galaxies would require far more matter than they appear to have in order to have the field strength necessary for galaxies to hold together and not effectively fly apart, we've assumed that it must be that this concept of dark matter must be real, rather than a flaw in our understanding
humanity looking at the ftl: hmmm seems too slow, I suppose that means that's also a bug. lets get this to working order! aliens: wtf wtf wtf why did we basically teleport that's not how that's supposed to work
Well, games are mostly just training materials warped in a fun skin, its not that different to train a pilot on a multi million dollar training machine then a simple MircosoftFlightSimilator2022 with VR headset and a hydraulic powered chair.
@@Saviliana Yes, but companies keep wanting to sell games with better, shinier graphics and more complex coding and AI, so people need to buy better computers if they want to keep up and be able to play them, so computer companies keep designing and making better computers.
Should have given them a 2xEpic server with 4 TB DDR5 Ram and a Petabyte M.2 Storage with (8) 7900XTX (would use the 4090 but the ship might catch fire)...get them there in 5 minuets.
Wait vacuum tubes? Dayum... now those things are ancient. No wonder their calculations took forever if even possible. Transistors of that size doing interstellar vector computing is impressive in itself.
Aliens: our computer broke and we're trying to get medicine to colony facing a plague. Humans: So what I'm hearing is, you want to go fast. Aliens: *come back after several years*. Humans: we made medicine and ships to deliver it because we want to be good guys. Aliens: *_* it's been two years man.
Thanks for posting this good story! It had an interesting and entertaining mix of serious with a little humor. And of course, the hew ship absolutely had to be named "Enterprise!"😂 Including the Raspberry Pi was funny, too.😂 Never had one or seen one, but I've read about them. I suspect that my new tablet has more computing capabilities than the early manned space ships. My first flip phone could do way more than a Star Trek communicator. I started with a hand-me-down brick phone. Then went thru 2 flip phones, and a smart phone. Smarty died at the beginning of this February. It was replaced with Flippy 3 and Tabby 1.😂 While I'm being silly, I must confess, I named my rolling walker Warp 9.😂 I like reverse humor.😂 Anyway, I also liked this story.
Dont forget you on mobiles have more power in your hand than we used for the first 5 space launches usa russia etc. Just in your hand on your desk Think on thay
There's a point at the end of this bio. First introduced to a computer circa 1970 when I was around 12yo and fell in love. First programm was FORTRAN 4 in college (punchcards) and the first personal computer I owned was an Adam which I bought at ToysRus that got me through med school in the 80s. Now on my toilet with a $400 Cat 62 phone, still amazed by these machines. Everything from MickeySoft after 7 is crap. XP is still the best they ever put out. Less is more, and because of so much processing power and memory, what's commercially available today is crap. Also been injecting joints wo an ultrasound since I was 16yo. What's a 2 minute procedure has become 20 minutes in the hands of those with too much tech. They also screw up more often. Less is more, don't overcomplicate things younglings and KISS; Keep It Simple Stupid.
You're a smidge older than I am, but same basic points. My first programming experience was in BASIC to futz with the Radio Shack computers in the mall in the early 80s. Made it through C++ because Dad decided to retire from active duty and become a computer programmer. Rare brain infection in my mid-brain wiped memories and left me dealing with a few issues. It's hard to learn stuff, so I have to take the time to really think about how much I want to do something (like trace the steps for CompSci) Games are great for hand-eye coordination, rapid eye translation, and pattern recognition. It's not wasting time, it's therapy! Less is more. KISS. Just because it's new and/or fancy doesn't mean it's better. Sometimes Good Enough for a thing is Good Enough.
we also went to space with that. we could of colonized the solar system with 40s and 50s tech. the only reason we didnt is because of internal reasons.
8:11 that’s actually possible aliens would go down different technological paths than us in this we obviously are superior because of hfy but yeah there would be more “primitive” aliens and more “advanced” aliens and everything in between
