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Alien Motives


Pumpkinhead

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Beacause it's referred to as a Tachyon Beam in the manual, which according to Merriam-Webster is: "2 b : a collection of nearly parallel rays (as X rays) or a stream of particles (as electrons)"

 

In other words, with Tachyons being particles, they were "streamed" from Cydonia, so they would have to be directional, and in this case, aimed at the T'Leth :power:

Mmmmm. Tachyon theory. Just my cup of tea. If I were not going to college to be a chemist, I would probably pick being a physicist. Maybe. :eh:

 

Let us just assume that Tachyons really do exist for the moment. What makes Merriam-Webster the defacto authority on the subject. How would they (or anyone else) know that Tachyons travel in a "beam"? They would not, simply because Tachyons have not been discovered yet. This is still an abstract idea conjured up by a couple of imaginitive scientists.

 

From what I understand, Tachyons are born traveling at or above the speed light and never dip below this speed limit during their lifespan - so on the surface they do not really break any of Einstein's laws. They do break the causality rule: if a particle is traveling faster than the speed of light, it could possibly be sent to the past setting up a time paradox. If Tachyons do exist, Einstein's principal of special relativity has to be false. Not good!

 

I really do not see how Tachyons could be sent in a "beam" and received by T'Leth. Tachyons could not be made cohesive enough to form a beam if they can travel in any time period (and possibly multi-dimensionally). One may get to T'Leth, but whats not to say that it was a naturally occurring particle from the future? And being directional in nature? If the Tachyon can time travel, it probably interacts with its current environment changing its course and the possible information stored in its spin-state.

 

Even so, how would T'Leth detect a particle moving faster than the speed of light? What kind of detector would be able to find, decode, and amplify the message being sent if the particle is moving around in this time period now, and 1 billionth of a second later is in the year 43 B.C.? See the problem? :P

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*fires plasma blasts at Zombie*

 

Get the point? :power:

 

But that's just a realistic point of view. It may be possible to justify things somehow.

 

For example, it may be beyond our methods to detect particles which have just been warped to the year 43BC, however, that may not be the case for the aliens. That doesn't mean it would be easy for them. It did take them 40 years to act upon the message, after all. :eh:

 

(Or less, depending... Some people like to really flesh out their UFOpedia, and that takes time... :P )

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Just a minor point of interest:

 

The tachyon beam (which felt more like a typical red laser beam to me) made bubbles when it hit the water.

 

Okay, so you could argue that it was the camera hitting the water. But, eh, as I said, minor point. :power:

 

- NKF

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Let us just assume that Tachyons really do exist for the moment. What makes Merriam-Webster the defacto authority on the subject. How would they (or anyone else) know that Tachyons travel in a "beam"?

It was Microprose who said they move in a beam, not Merriam-Webster! The Merriam-Webster quote was only for the word "beam" :power:

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Warning Techie Bit:

 

Well technically the only thing stopping tachyon communications is localising tachyon disturbances that occur fast than the speed of light, at our present we can only localise them when they drop below the speed of light. You just encode your message in this disturbance and click Send.

 

Bit vague but thats about it.

 

Also If tachyon particles do exist, that means relativity is wrong and the rules of them going back in time wouldn't apply :P

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The special theroy of relativity tells us that no particle which is moving more slowly than the speed of light can ever be accelerated to a speed faster than that of light. But there is symmetry in the equations which allos for the existence of particles that travel faster then light and can never be slowed down below the speed of light.
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Tachyon, tachyon, burning bright

Faster than the speed of light

Equations bring existence nigh

And frame thy immortal symmetry

-- after Blake.

 

Tachyons being wavicles, theoretically like photons, could either be broadcast like a wavefront (eg. CB antenna) or collimated and aimed as a beam (like a microwave antenna). Personally I think the story's better if the beam was aimed at Earth, Cydonia did know (or suspect) T'Leth existed, but had other motives for not acting sooner.

 

A narrow beam from Mars could certainly spread out to bathe the entire Earth, given the distance. It might look like a narrow beam at Cydonia without being able to target the Sigsbee Deep specifically. As for showing up on camera, maybe there was other energy emitted with the beam, or the intense beam was reacting with the martian atmosphere.

 

I don't think travelling faster than light allows for travel into the past in any meaningful way. At best, if you were watching someone preparing a tachyon message through your very long telescope, the message might arrive before you saw them send it, because of course your telescope is limited by the speed of light.

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Yeah, well, my heavy plasmas have the 'Mythos' trademark on them.

 

Bang bang bang!

 

Seriously, *BB takes a deep breath and once again starts his rant, he really should write this down in one place and not re-type it all the time*, Mythos made Lasersquad, Microprose said it wasn't good enough, Mythos then made UFO, Microprose *published* it, money came in in trucks, Microprose said to Mythos 'go forth and make more', Mythos said sure, give us some time, we'll make this great new game, Microprose said "stuff that", and made TFTD on their own, which resulted in the clone we know so well, but they did get Mythos back to do Apocalypse, even if they still didn't give them the time they needed to finish it, and it all went down hill from there.

 

*BB sags into a sofa, gasping for air*

 

So... yeah. Stuff Microprose, long live Mythos.

 

But I presume the tachyon beam was coined by Microprose, as I think the referance was in TFTD. Am I right? I'm guessing, there.

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  • 1 year later...

There was a book I read once where humans where the aliens. I think it was called "A Deepness in the Sky", or something like that. It actually wasn't all that great, but anyway...

 

What happens is that humans take their giant, sophisticated, sublight ships to an alien star system. They get in a little nuclear tussle, and the damaged ships realize they don't have the materials to leave. At sublight speeds and tens of lightyears to the next human colony, nobody is expecting them back any time soon - and in fact, if they don't come back in a hundred years' time, everyone will just assume it's too late to help and not bother. So what can they do? They're just a few thousand guys, and sure they have expensive high-tech toys, but that's really not the same thing as a giant resource harvesting and factory infrastructure to fix spaceships. Lucky for them, the aliens on the planet below are around 19th century technology, so the humans take shifts in cryogenic suspension, waiting for the aliens to develop enough technology to manufacture complex electronics and so on.

 

It puts things in perspective for X-Com. How much of a surviving T'leth do we actually see? How many aliens do we actually get to kill? Surely less than a thousand. These guys were in bad shape when they crashed. The aliens need complex technology just to reproduce, and most importantly, probably very limited resources. Cloning requires a chemical and biological factory infrastructure that they didn't have and couldn't build before they'd run out of resources. So, they sleep, and wait for intelligent guys to develop. They sparringly use their resources to tweak sentient life along. They don't try to completely rule us from an earlier age when we'd be easier to conquer, because they don't have the resources to survive very long. They need to wait for us to develop a high-technology infrastructure. It's a crappy situation to be an alien in; they need us to be smart enough to service them, but that gives us the ability to fight back. But what else can they do? So they keep what warships they have well-preserved, waiting for that desperate gambit in 1999.

 

Anyway, that's my take. It's the only real reason I can think of for the aliens to let us grow into such a threat before they take action.

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