Lol I could if I was desperate to be right but I think I used the wrong word to describe what I intended and you can clearly see that. It’s so difficult to pin down meaning on culturally developing words just due to how fluid languages can be. I intended for it to be a clear-cut example of things that can’t exist but you’ve clearly shown it isn’t so clear cut.
Yeah, it’s not easy to come up with something that is absolute like that, and also make it immediately understandable to a wide audience without needing to explain it.
For example I can say “an anarchist country is like saying an unarmed interstellar spaceship”, a lot of people wouldn’t know that it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship, so this defeats the purpose of the comparison because it requires an additional explanation.
I can’t think of any example right now that is absolute and that is also ubiquitous knowledge to be immediately understood without relying of specialised interest knowledge or explanation…
it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship
Since this subthread had already stepped into the realm of sidetracked internet debate, I’d like to challenge that claim.
I understand that the reasoning behind this statement is that interstellar travel requires some properties that disqualify the ship from being considered “unarmed”:
Interstellar travel requires ridiculous speed, which makes the ship itself a kinetic weapon.
The ship will need formidable defensive mechanism to survive cosmic radiation and impact with particles at the speed it is traveling.
I see two problems with this argument:
The spaceship could use some sort of FTL travel, which may or may not bypass these requirements entirely.
Regular cars have enough kinetic energy to kill people, and they are reinforced to a certain degree so that they won’t break from the strains of the speeds they travel in. Would you also say that it is impossible to have an unarmed car? One could certainly make such a claim, but that kind of drains the meaning out of the term “unarmed”…
About cars, road injuries are responsible for about 1.2 million deaths per year, they are extremely dangerous death machines, so I think it is reasonable to say that a car can’t be unarmed, though I agree that it would stretch it. By that definition, a large wrench can be a weapon, so I am hesitant to just call anything that can be used as a tool for violence as a weapon, because almost anything can be… I have a pretty heavy keyboard which could be used as a weapon if I really wanted to.
If you consider a weapon as an instrument that increases the attack potency or range of the wielder, a car is certainly can be used as a weapon… We even require people to have a license because of how dangerous they are, just like weapons.
If you consider only something that was designed for the purpose of increasing the attack potency or range of the wielder, then a car isn’t one. It all boils down to how you define a weapon.
And about the FTL thing, assuming it is possible, I can still think of a couple of ways any relativistic/FTL ship can be used as a weapon even without using it’s kinetic energy for impacts.
Blue shift of electromagnetic radiation. If you are getting closer to the target at either relativistic or FTL speeds and you release electromagnetic radiation (not necessarily visible light, even a powerful radio, which I’d imagine all interstellar ships would need in order to communicate over enormous distances), or even just a regular thruster… the blue shift would turn it into extremely lethal, short wavelength, somewhere in the deep X ray.
If the FTL system works by stretching and compressing spacetime around it to travel distances with some kind of field… It would be theoretically possible to asymmetrically stretch space in a way that would wreck a target’s structural integrity, and depending how aggressive you can take it, go full blown spaghettification like black holes do.
Lol I could if I was desperate to be right but I think I used the wrong word to describe what I intended and you can clearly see that. It’s so difficult to pin down meaning on culturally developing words just due to how fluid languages can be. I intended for it to be a clear-cut example of things that can’t exist but you’ve clearly shown it isn’t so clear cut.
Yeah, it’s not easy to come up with something that is absolute like that, and also make it immediately understandable to a wide audience without needing to explain it.
For example I can say “an anarchist country is like saying an unarmed interstellar spaceship”, a lot of people wouldn’t know that it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship, so this defeats the purpose of the comparison because it requires an additional explanation.
I can’t think of any example right now that is absolute and that is also ubiquitous knowledge to be immediately understood without relying of specialised interest knowledge or explanation…
Since this subthread had already stepped into the realm of sidetracked internet debate, I’d like to challenge that claim.
I understand that the reasoning behind this statement is that interstellar travel requires some properties that disqualify the ship from being considered “unarmed”:
I see two problems with this argument:
That’s a fair critique.
About cars, road injuries are responsible for about 1.2 million deaths per year, they are extremely dangerous death machines, so I think it is reasonable to say that a car can’t be unarmed, though I agree that it would stretch it. By that definition, a large wrench can be a weapon, so I am hesitant to just call anything that can be used as a tool for violence as a weapon, because almost anything can be… I have a pretty heavy keyboard which could be used as a weapon if I really wanted to.
If you consider a weapon as an instrument that increases the attack potency or range of the wielder, a car is certainly can be used as a weapon… We even require people to have a license because of how dangerous they are, just like weapons.
If you consider only something that was designed for the purpose of increasing the attack potency or range of the wielder, then a car isn’t one. It all boils down to how you define a weapon.
And about the FTL thing, assuming it is possible, I can still think of a couple of ways any relativistic/FTL ship can be used as a weapon even without using it’s kinetic energy for impacts.
Blue shift of electromagnetic radiation. If you are getting closer to the target at either relativistic or FTL speeds and you release electromagnetic radiation (not necessarily visible light, even a powerful radio, which I’d imagine all interstellar ships would need in order to communicate over enormous distances), or even just a regular thruster… the blue shift would turn it into extremely lethal, short wavelength, somewhere in the deep X ray.
If the FTL system works by stretching and compressing spacetime around it to travel distances with some kind of field… It would be theoretically possible to asymmetrically stretch space in a way that would wreck a target’s structural integrity, and depending how aggressive you can take it, go full blown spaghettification like black holes do.