The new movie "Arrival" depicts first contact with aliens, and its producers faced the question of how interstellar spacecraft would actually work. They turned to futurist Stephen Wolfram, who came up with an answer overnight, and also tasked his son with writing much of the computer code seen on displays in the movie. Slashdot reader
mirandakatz brings us Wolfram's story:
Christopher was well aware that code shown in movies often doesn't make sense (a favorite, regardless of context, seems to be the source code for nmap.c in Linux). But he wanted to create code that would make sense, and would actually do the analyses that would be going on in the movie... For instance, there's a nice shot of rearranging alien "handwriting," in which one sees a Wolfram Language notebook with rather elegant Wolfram Language code in it. And, yes, those lines of code actually do the transformation that's in the notebook. It's real stuff, with real computations being done...
For the movie, I wanted to have a particular theory for interstellar travel. And who knows, maybe one day in the distant future it'll turn out to be correct. But as of now, we certainly don't know. In fact, for all we know, there's just some simple "hack" in existing physics that'll immediately make interstellar travel possible.
Wolfram's theory posited that space is just one of the attributes emerging from a low-level network of nodes, where long-range connections occasionally break out of three-dimensional space altogether. His 6,900-word essay (originally
published on his blog) also suggests film-making has "some structural similarities" with software development -- and grapples with the question of how we'd actually communicate with aliens once they've arrived.
Stephen Wolfram came up with an answer overnight
By hcs_$reboot
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2016-Nov-13 04:03
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Easy. He just asked
Worlfram Alpha.
Re:Why is this news?
By samkass
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2016-Nov-13 04:05
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Now that we've gotten the "why is this on Slashdot?" post out of the way, can someone please complain about Slashdot editors and then somehow find a way to work in a criticism of SJW's and Microsoft so we can get on with the rest of the comments?
Transition from movie to documentary
By sp4ni3l
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2016-Nov-13 05:14
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As the code is real the rest of the movie now also must be real..........
Space is man's hopeless romance
By Chewbacon
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2016-Nov-13 10:40
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Unless there is the "simple physics hack" space travel will be a royal pain in the ass when you take the planning that is involved. The energy problems, bio issues, logistics, all of it.
Even if we overcome all of that, you'll be flying into the unknown. Think about it: you want to go see the pillars of creation a thousand light years away. There was a discussion that an explosion may have occurred or was imminent that would destroy them... a thousand years ago. So even if you found the hack tomorrow (say toasting pop tarts still in the Mylar in an upside down toaster) that lets you arrive at the pillars, or anywhere else, instantaneously, then whatever you went to see would have changed or have been long gone over the millennia. This is something sci-fi never fully discloses: hey, see that in the telescope? Let's go! Wait, where the fuck is it??
So for an advanced civilization to find us and make contact, they'd have to have been watching for the past, what, 100 years to pick up on the noise we make or make on hell of a guess as to where we are.
Still sounds like an adventure.