We may be operating on different definitions of what it means to “break” a setting. For example, how useful is flight by itself, really?
Many abilities seem potentially very useful if other people don’t know you have them, but become much less useful once you get found out:
The “energy blast” type abilities common among wizards and superheroes are not terribly combat useful in a setting with modern weapons. Their big use would be assassination: slip past metal detectors and pat-downs, baffle detectives… but once you get found out, no one wants you around and the police know the otherwise inexplicable burning death was probably you.
Mind-reading, if it has standard limitations on range, similarly becomes a lot less useful once you get found out and banned from everywhere.
Super-senses on a level comparable to what’s already possible with technology: lets you spy on people from a distance without anyone wondering what you’re doing with those binoculars… otherwise not so useful.
Thats because those are among the worst possible ways to use those abilities.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that. Even if not, they make you an extremely portable and efficient energy source, perfect for a spaceship where mass is critical and a human needs to come along anyway but it doesn’t matter in particular who since it’s for PR reasons.
Mind reading is a means of communication that does not require cooperation or any abilities in the target, and cant be lied through. Communication with locked-in patients, interrogation, extraction of testimonials from animals. And if you an find a way to yourself precommit, you also have fully reliable precommitment checking for everyone, lie detection for political promises, and the ultimate forensics tool.
If you combine the strengths of 2 kinds of system, you get something greater than the sum of it’s parts. So it is with human senses and digital sensors. The key here is bandwidth, and analysis. Sure, you can get all the same data onto a computer, but it won’t do much good there. Someone with true super-senses as flexible and integrated as their normal biological ones, after a few years for the brain to adapt if they were not available from birth, would most likely be able to see patterns at a glance that’d take large teams days or months to discover in some database format. The exact applications of this depend on what sense we’re talking about.
Common factors: Focus on things done with to cooperation of large numbers of other people, finding an economic niche, fundamental physics exploits, and/or using large and expensive equipment. If not that, look for a niche within the military as a specialized technician, most likely not in the field and if in the field then in some large vehicle with a crew of many. Almost NEVER is an efficient use of a power found in brawling or acting alone like all your descriptions where.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that.
Wait, explain that? What is “a bit of physics trickery” here?
I know in HPMOR, Harry points out that violations of conservation of mass in magic imply FTL signaling, and I know from relativity FTL implies time travel, but Harry doesn’t even consider running off to get time travel from common spells. Assumed turning the theory into practice would be far from straightforward.
Heck, it’s not even obvious to me how you turn FTL travel into time travel in practice, if you don’t have control over what frame of reference you’re FTL in.
In the approximation of the True Laws Of Physics which is in use today—The Relativistic Standard Model—FTL (and subsidiarily time travel) is nonsense. Like, it’s gibberish. It is a description of a situation which not only does not happen, but which is a mathematical falsehood. It is impossible. It is like violation of conservation of energy, or violation of entropic developments.
The maths plainly states that assumptions like that leads to a contradiction, and we do in fact know that the Standard Model is complete and consistent (i.e. cannot encode formulas as objects).
Any hypothetical scenarios involving time travel will invariably be contrite, non-causal, and require classical mechanics. It is fiction, make of it what you will.
We may be operating on different definitions of what it means to “break” a setting. For example, how useful is flight by itself, really?
Many abilities seem potentially very useful if other people don’t know you have them, but become much less useful once you get found out:
The “energy blast” type abilities common among wizards and superheroes are not terribly combat useful in a setting with modern weapons. Their big use would be assassination: slip past metal detectors and pat-downs, baffle detectives… but once you get found out, no one wants you around and the police know the otherwise inexplicable burning death was probably you.
Mind-reading, if it has standard limitations on range, similarly becomes a lot less useful once you get found out and banned from everywhere.
Super-senses on a level comparable to what’s already possible with technology: lets you spy on people from a distance without anyone wondering what you’re doing with those binoculars… otherwise not so useful.
Thats because those are among the worst possible ways to use those abilities.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that. Even if not, they make you an extremely portable and efficient energy source, perfect for a spaceship where mass is critical and a human needs to come along anyway but it doesn’t matter in particular who since it’s for PR reasons.
Mind reading is a means of communication that does not require cooperation or any abilities in the target, and cant be lied through. Communication with locked-in patients, interrogation, extraction of testimonials from animals. And if you an find a way to yourself precommit, you also have fully reliable precommitment checking for everyone, lie detection for political promises, and the ultimate forensics tool.
If you combine the strengths of 2 kinds of system, you get something greater than the sum of it’s parts. So it is with human senses and digital sensors. The key here is bandwidth, and analysis. Sure, you can get all the same data onto a computer, but it won’t do much good there. Someone with true super-senses as flexible and integrated as their normal biological ones, after a few years for the brain to adapt if they were not available from birth, would most likely be able to see patterns at a glance that’d take large teams days or months to discover in some database format. The exact applications of this depend on what sense we’re talking about.
Common factors: Focus on things done with to cooperation of large numbers of other people, finding an economic niche, fundamental physics exploits, and/or using large and expensive equipment. If not that, look for a niche within the military as a specialized technician, most likely not in the field and if in the field then in some large vehicle with a crew of many. Almost NEVER is an efficient use of a power found in brawling or acting alone like all your descriptions where.
Wait, explain that? What is “a bit of physics trickery” here?
I know in HPMOR, Harry points out that violations of conservation of mass in magic imply FTL signaling, and I know from relativity FTL implies time travel, but Harry doesn’t even consider running off to get time travel from common spells. Assumed turning the theory into practice would be far from straightforward.
Heck, it’s not even obvious to me how you turn FTL travel into time travel in practice, if you don’t have control over what frame of reference you’re FTL in.
In the approximation of the True Laws Of Physics which is in use today—The Relativistic Standard Model—FTL (and subsidiarily time travel) is nonsense. Like, it’s gibberish. It is a description of a situation which not only does not happen, but which is a mathematical falsehood. It is impossible. It is like violation of conservation of energy, or violation of entropic developments.
The maths plainly states that assumptions like that leads to a contradiction, and we do in fact know that the Standard Model is complete and consistent (i.e. cannot encode formulas as objects).
Any hypothetical scenarios involving time travel will invariably be contrite, non-causal, and require classical mechanics. It is fiction, make of it what you will.
Oooh, that’s even better: from a contradiction, anything can be proved. Thus, if we can break conservation of energy we gain literal omnipotence.
… I am pretty sure that is not how it works.
To make a time machine out of an FTL drive, simply travel somewhere at near lightspeed and FTL back. Now you’re where you started, before you left.