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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 9314096" data-attributes="member: 710">Good nit picks and critiques.I was wondering about the lies, too. But one thing the aliens said that if they communicate, the communication is "total". Maybe when they play games or tells stories, the knowledge of the narrator that this is just a story or game is also communicated. But their communication with humans didn't work like that, and they only then realized that they couldn't actually tell what was a story, what a lie, and what was real. They all took it for real, and realized they were helpless against that. Also I think fun stuff like reading fairy tales to aliens has only become possible very recently with their quantum-entangled sophons. The back and forth interval was basically 4 years (or 8 years for the round-trip), so they probably communicated a lot less and were more focused on essentials and facts.I think while the proton computer is a neat idea, it's limitation are unclear. They mention they can maybe run so many concurrent experiments to overwhelm the capability of them to manipulate all. Maybe their ability to really hunt down the wallfacers is limited by that, too. Sure, they can convince people to join them, but they can't actually make all machines fail all the time, and even persistent sabotage could fail. They only dimmed the stars for a moment, and put that mirror shield up for a limited amount of time.But their goal is not annihilation. They might want to get rid of humans, but they must do so in a way that preserves the planet in a usuable state (for them, climate change might be something to deal with but global thermonuceal suicide would still suck.) Stringing the humans along and hoping their wallfacers don't actually come up with something that works might be still their safest bet.But for the fun of it, further nitpicks.The idea of the sophons seems to based on two ideas: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There are more than 3 dimensions of space.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Quantum Entanglement can be used to communicate information.</li> </ul>The first is basically something that became popular with string theory, that kinda only worked with 10 or 26 dimensions. But unfortunately, so far it offered no testable predictions and instead has too many variables that you can tweaked to explain away if any predictions ever not come to pass, to make predictions for even more difficult to achieve scenarios. Overall it is bad at giving falsifiable predictions. It's mathematically interesting (and has some uses in other areas apparently), but probably not describing our world. Of course, you could always invent reasons why there might be more dimensions. But even with that, it is still difficult to explain how a proton could do anything the sophon does. Definitely the fi part of sci-fi here.Quantum Entanglement cannot be used to communicate information. If you measure result A on yur side, you know the other side would get result B, but you don't know before you measure on one side, and the only way to tell the other side that they'll get A or B is to send a singal to that side - which still isn't faster than light, unless you already had an FTL signal, in which case, why bother with quantum entanglement, just use that other signal.The author is of course in great company - Mass Effect also had a quantum entanglement communication device.</blockquote>

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