Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A The role of inexplicable events in hard science fiction

First off, may I suggest a post I did many years ago on WorldBuilding: What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?. I think the first step to answering your question is to unsea...

posted 6y ago by Cort Ammon - Reinstate Monica‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T09:27:54Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37819
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Cort Ammon - Reinstate Monica‭ · 2019-12-08T09:27:54Z (almost 5 years ago)
First off, may I suggest a post I did many years ago on WorldBuilding: [What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40949/whats-the-smallest-change-to-physics-required-to-allow-magic/40992#40992). I think the first step to answering your question is to unseat the assumption that things could ever be boring.

The next thing that I'd recommend would be looking at the Self. Science and technology cannot completely define the Self, because the preferred languages for scientific or mathematical descriptions break down when dealing with many of the attributes we associate with the Self. You'd have to pioneer new languages to describe things before the Self ever got boring.

Chaos is another interesting topic. Chaos and other "topologically mixing" phenomena. They make it very difficult to figure out what happened after the fact. You pretty much have to observe it as it is happening. If I gave you all the weather information you could process starting January 1, 2000 and ending December 31, 2000, you still could not do a good job of predicting whether it had been raining or shining Dec 1, 1999.

Also, there are limits to processing and storage. Consider that the internet currently stores around 1200 petabytes. That's basically all the harddrives hooked up to the internet. Many internet backbones are now 100G lines, meaning they transmit 100 Gigabits per second. If you run the numbers, any one of those backbones could "fill" our entire storage capacity in 3 years. And there are a _lot_ of backbones. Most of that data has to simply... vanish. We lose it. It's gone forever. It's job is done.

All you need is for some of those lost bits to acquire newfound importance, and you have a mystery already.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-07-24T05:53:57Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 5