this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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[–] Hugin@lemmy.world 43 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

The other problem is the ship signal they traced would have been frequency shifted by the same amount as the time dilation. They would have had to compensate for that to even detect the signal.

It was 1 hour : 7 years I think. So about a factor of 60,000. So if a ping was once a second it would be once every 42 days. And if it was a 1MHz transmission it would be at about 17Hz.

So they somehow realized the once a second 1MHz signal was now a every 42 day 17Hz signal at 1/60000 the power. But didn't realize that there was time dilation involved.

[–] stephen01king@lemmy.zip 1 points 38 minutes ago

They did know about the time dilation, though? They weren't surprised by the fact that there was time dilation, they just didn't fully grasp what the results would be.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 hour ago

But didn't realize that there was time dilation involved.

They knew there would be time dilation. They literally discussed it just before they went down there. They just thought they could get it done in a few earth-years rather than decades.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Couldn't you use that in reverse to create a planet-destroying superlaser?

[–] M1nds3nd@lemmy.ca 19 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like those funky robots may have done some of the heavy lifting.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 13 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

That implies some code monkey somewhere decided that feature didn't need a user notification!

[–] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Unless they run on a neural net or a genetic algorithm.

[–] Randelung@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

Remember when they dialed down the sass? Turns out that setting also affected physics notifications. "physicsassistant" - it was a typo!