Delta1212

I was mostly joking, but did start making some progress after I posted. Thanks for the example and explanation, though. It confirms my suspicions about what I've gotten myself into, although so far I think this one is better suited to my personal taste in puzzles than that one.

Before I spend any time actually trying to work out the answer, is it

I would seriously recommend researching relativity, because taking a few concepts that get bandied about without context in pop science descriptions of relativity like "traveling faster than c will cause you to go back in time" and attempting to extrapolate a reasonable understanding of the theory from that is just not going to work out very well and will lead to questions exactly like the ones you're asking. There are very good reasons for why massive objects cannot travel faster than the speed of light. For instance, the faster you go, the more energy it takes to achieve the same acceleration. You get diminishing returns that flatten out as you approach the speed of light. If you have a tank of fuel that is powerful enough to accelerate you to 90% of the speed of light by burning one gallon, the next gallon won't get you to 180% of the speed of light, it'll only get you to around 99% of the speed of light. And then, since you're traveling even faster, the third gallon will only get you to around 99.9% and so on. You can keep getting closer, but you'll never actually be able to reach light speed because the energy requirements spike to infinity.

I think there was some legal minimum frequency with which you're allowed to visit your elderly parents or something along those lines. I came away with the impression that there wasn't much intention to actually enforce it, so it seems to be more of a symbolic law than something with real teeth.

A great deal.

We don't know if there are any bacteria(-like forms of life) on Mars, but if there were, they would already have evolved into something that could live there by virtue of the fact that they were living there.

Well China just made it illegal, so let's see how that goes.

Well, a singularity by definition is a dimensionless point, so there isn't really a "within" for anything to happen in.

Deepstaria enigmatica apparently.

After some googling, it appears that it's a rare type of

Again, though, gravity isn't a charge. If opposite gravities attract and like gravities repel, then you'd expect there to be an attractive force between mass and anti-mass and a repulsive force between mass and mass or anti-mass and anti-mass. Since gravity is obviously an attractive force between two points of "positive" mass, the analogy with charge falls apart and there's no reason to expect similar behavior under as yet unobserved circumstances when the currently observable ones show that gravity does not behave like charge in this respect.

Let's say that the singularity is a waterfall that the current is flowing toward. The light is in a canoe between you and the waterfall. The light is paddling toward you, so the distance between you and the light narrows as you allow yourself to float freely downstream, but the current is moving faster, so the distance between the light and the waterfall is also narrowing. Wouldn't that mean that you'd see the waterfall approaching you faster than the light canoe? Would light travel at something other than c because of the extreme gravity?

Would light inside the event horizon be able to point away from the singularity, though? If I see myself traveling toward the singularity at less than the speed of light, and I see light traveling away from me at the speed of light in the opposite direction, then I am seeing light increasing the distance between itself and the singularity. If the distance between the light and the singularity is increasing, it should be able to eventually escape the black hole, which should be impossible.

Ignoring for a moment the question of what anti-gravity would even look like, in this analogy, "normal" gravity would be 'positive' and two positive charges repel. Since gravity is an attractive force between chunks of matter and not a repelling force, I don't think you can draw conclusions about the behavior of "positive and negative gravity" from the behavior of charges.

No, but the new strain would have a difficult time spreading if it's killing off its primary transmission vector.

I believe Unity+ considers himself a creationist.

The word dinosaur means "terrible lizard." We now know that they weren't lizards, may have been warm-blooded, mostly had feathers and were the ancestors of birds. Please choose one of the following: A) We now know more about dinosaurs. B) We should come up with a different name because "dinosaur" was used to describe the animal when we thought it had some slightly different characteristics than we do now. C) Dinosaurs didn't exist because dinosaurs are lizards. The bones instead belong to a different kind of animal more closely related to birds that isn't a dinosaur. I'd go with A, myself, but maybe that's just me.

If I'm floating out in space and I see a rock floating toward me, is the rock moving or am I? Relativity states that it's equally valid to say that I am at rest watching a rock come toward me, and to say that the rock is at rest watching me move toward it. The case in which each of us is at rest is our rest frame. In my frame of reference, the rock is moving at 100 km/h and I'm moving at 0 km/h. In the rock's frame of reference, I'm moving at 100km/h and the rock is moving at 0 km/h. Let's say I throw a stick at the rock at 10 km/h. I see the stick moving at 10 km/m away from me. The rock sees the stick moving at 110 km/h towards it (10 km/h faster than it sees me moving). So a reference frame is just a coordinate system for measuring speeds because you have to select something as being at rest in order to measure speed, with the resultant speed being relative to the rest frame. The weird part comes from the fact that if I shine my flashlight at the rock, I will see the light moving away from me at the speed of light, and the rock will see it approaching at the speed of light, exactly the same speed despite the 100 km/h difference in our reference frames. That leads to a varsity of implications about the variability of the rate at which time passes as well as how far distances actually are depending on how fast your going.

That's not what the uncertainty principle is about, and unless your plane ride is covering a distance less than the width of an atom, there is no way the uncertainty principle could be relevant.

Well, even hypothetically, a warp drive moves a pocket of space, within which the ship would locally not be traveling faster than light. And even if you could travel faster than light, which you can't, E=mc^2 doesn't mean that traveling faster than light would convert you into energy. So it's answerable to that extent.

What need unifying are quantum mechanics and general relativity. They describe different phenomena from one another, and do so with incredible accuracy, but don't seem to be compatible with each other. Classical mechanics is really just "how things work in the most frequently observed and easily tested occurances by humans." It's a set of special cases of the other two and generally provides very accurate descriptions of most things you'd care to understand in your day to day activities but wildly inaccurate descriptions of anything at the extremes of size, speed, energy, distance, etc. Classical mechanics doesn't really need to be unified with anything. It's like a book on tomatoes and dogs to quantum mechanics' encyclopedia of plant life and relativity's encyclopedia of animals. If you want to know about tomatoes, you could go through the time and effort of researching them in the giant compendium of all plant life, but it'd be faster to just look in the book about tomatoes and dogs and you'd get approximately equivalent information. If you want to know about any other plant, that book isn't going to be nearly as helpful.

I could argue this either way, but it really comes down to what you're defining "important" to be. Important to my continued survival? Important to my happiness? Important to my state of health? Important to the existence of human civilization? Important to the stability of a marriage? Important to your enjoyment of a trip to Las Vegas? Really, this debate topic comes down to finding some issue that you think is important and which money clearly has an upper hand in, and then framing your argument around that. Love without money doesn't feed starving children in Africa or build schools for girls in oppressive societies or any number of important issues that people would view positively. When people say "Love is more important than money" they generally mean for their personal happiness. You could probably find a good deal of evidence that this isn't necessarily true, but it's a romantic notion that most people want to believe on some level, and that makes arguing against it, even with solid evidence, somewhat difficult. The easiest way around that is to reframe the question as far as what money vs love is important to so that it's something generally considered important and that solid evidence can be presented for money being critical to it, but that doesn't require people to re-examine the preconceived notions we've all been fed a steady diet of by entertainment media and popular wisdom for our entire lives.

Good to know I got the 2 number equation right, even if I never did find time to sit back down and work on 3 some more. Kudos to md for getting it.

Maybe what doesn't speed up?

No, it says the faster something goes, the less time it experiences. Slower time is not the opposite of faster speed.