It was a few hours and one meal later before Sunset Shimmer and the other Twilight Sparkle appeared. Twilight had quickly realized this and the trio had resorted to brainstorming other hypotheses to test. Without the critical data, however, they simple could not risk testing them. Spike had by this point returned, and was somewhat relieved to see the pile of dead Twilights had not significantly grown in his absence.
******************************************************
After a modest dinner of carrot-and-hay sandwiches, Twilight sent Spike to gather a few things before the shops closed. Twilight, Sunburst, and Starlight then went to the portal room to await their extradimensional colleagues.
It was not long before an orange unicorn with a red and yellow mane emerged from the portal, standing on her hind hooves. After a moment, she plopped down on all fours and checked her saddle bags.
"Hi Twilight! Hi Starlight! Twilight should be right behind me," Sunset said.
Indeed, very shortly thereafter, a purple (or possibly lavender) unicorn wearing glasses emerged, also standing on her hind hooves. This arrival, however, took several unsteady steps on two hooves. Sunset reached out and steadied her friend, helping support her weight as she lowered her front hooves to the ground.
"Now THAT is something tha takes some getting used to," Twilight who's not from Equestria said. Don't worry, they will get easier names in a moment.
"Hello! I think this is the first time we've met," said Sunburst, pushing up his glasses, "I'm Sunburst." He held out his hoof.
Twilight-from-Canterlot-High looked unsure what to do, so Sunset took the initiative and bumped his hoof.
"Hey," she said with a smile, "I'm Sunset Shimmer. I've heard about you from Starlight."
"Twilight Sparkle," Twilight Sparkle who wasn't a princess said, repeating the gesture the other two had shared, "Starlight was right... you two really do look alike. Are you sure you aren't related?"
"I don't think so," Sunburst said, pushing up his perpetually-falling glasses onc more, "But then I don't know all my cousins on my Father's side of the family, so maybe?"
Twilight Sparkle's own glasses had gotten a bit out of place in transition, so she awkwardly attempted to mimic Sunburst's movements to push them back into place.
"Hi umm... Twilight," Princess Twilight Sparkle said, "Did you bring the thing?"
"Oh right!" she said, nearly standing up before she remembered. She glanced back at her saddlebags, which a few minutes earlier had been a backpack.
"Oh right," Sunset said, "Hold on..."
"No wait, I've got this," Twilight said, "It's like the telekinesis stone magic, right?"
"I don't know... Probably?" Sunset said.
"Stone magic?" Sunburst asked.
"I'll explain later," Starlight told him.
It took three tries, but Canterlot High Twilight managed to use magic TK to open one of her bags. She began pulling items out and placing them on the floor.
"Thermometer... no... Air pressure gauge... no... Hall probe... no..."
"Where were you planning to plug that in, anyway?" Sunset asked.
"I've got a miniature generator in here somewhere," student Twilight said, "Multimeter... no..."
"Wow you two really ARE alike," Starlight said.
"We are not!" both Twilights said simultaneously. They blushed and student Twilight went back to her examinations.
"Say it might be kind of confusing to call you both Twilight," Sunburst said, "Maybe we can find something else to call you?"
"How about Twilight 1 and Twilight 2?" Sunset suggested.
"No way!" Twilight 2 said, "Then I'd be 2!"
"Not necessarily..." Sunset began. But Twilight had her number. Which was 2.
"You met me second, it's only logical," Twilight 2 said.
"I agree with Twilight," Twilight 1 said, "We need a way that's fair. Calling one of us Twilight and the other Twilight 1 wouldn't work, either. Hmmm... How about I be Twilight 1 and she can be Twilight A?"
"For Alternate?" Twilight A asked, "I don't know that I'm thrilled about that, either."
"Actually I was just thinking A is the first letter of the alphabet," Twilight 1 said. 1
Twilight A thought about that for a moment, ceasing her rummaging.
"I can accept that," she said. She went back to it, switching to her other bag.
"And all that's in here is the mini-generator. Now I KNOW we packed that magic detector!" Twilight A said, "Sunset, is it in your bag?" 2
"Uh, let's see..." Sunset said, removing her saddle bags. She was about to turn it over and dump it out, but seeing the look Twilight gave her in stereo, she decided against it. Instead she set them gently on the ground and opened them up.
"I think this is it," she said, "But isn't this different from the one you used at the Friendship Games?" It was a somewhat bulky hand-held device with two anntenae and a screen.
"Yes, it's a lot easier to modify than the compact version," Twilight A said.
"Let me see!" Twilight 1 said excitedly. She took hold of the device with her magic and held it in front of her.
"So the needle showed the direction of magic and the screen shows concentration?" she asked.
"More or less, but it's calibrated for our world so..." Twilight A began.
"Hey, let's see which of us has higher magic!" Starlight said, taking hold of the device and flipping the obvious switch. The needle flipped back and forth rapidly lazily, not actually pointing anywhere. The readout on the screen showed a flat line. Starlight shook it a bit, before Sunset used her magic to grab it and return it to the table.
"As I was trying to say, it's currently calibrated to detect Equestrian magic. But there is so much Equestrian magic around here that it wouldn't know what to do. I've got to tweak it to detect dimensional frequencies first," Twilight A said. She then added under her breath, "Assuming Starlight didn't damage it..."
"Right, let's get to the lab," Twilight 1 said. She closed her eyes and her horn glowed. With a 'pop' sound, they were all in her lab, along with Twilight A's equipment and Sunset's saddlebags.
"Wow, you've gotten good at that," Sunset said admiringly.
"Oh that's nothing!" Twilight 1 said, "You should see... well that's why I asked for your help, actually."
"Yeah I wasn't clear on that. You said you die and respawn?" Sunset asked.
"Oh right well... Oh wait I can't do that until we test this. Ok, let's try this..." Twilight 1 said.
***********************
Twilight A had set the detector on the lab bench (which is a type of stabilized table) and was sorting through the tools in Sunset's bags, when suddenly she found herself outside. Staring at a pile of her own pony-form's corpses.
"AAAAAAHHH!" she yelled. Sunset was a bit more prepared, but was still clearly startled.
"Oh, hey Twilight, hey other Twilight," Pinkie Pie said happily, "Here for the 'Twilight's dead but not really so let's all eat cake' party?"3
Sunset blinked. That phrase was, in fact, written on a sign above a stand that Pinkie now sat behind. It said "Cake, 5 bits. The baker is IN" on a paper sign taped to the front. Behind Pinkie was a table of cakes frosted in black with little tombstones sticking up out of them.
"This is a party?" she said, looking around, "I don't see anyone... err anypony else here."
"Yeah, the pile of corpses scared them away," Pinkie said non-chalantly, "Oh well, more for me!" Pinkie opened her mouth wide and stuffed a piece of cake into it.
"Also we should probably figure out what we're going to do with these before they start to smell," Starlight said.4
"These are all RECENT?" Twilight A exclaimed.
"Uhh, let's go back to the laboratory for now," Starlight said, igniting her horn. With another 'pop' they were back in the lab.
*******************
"So yeah," Starlight said once they were back," Turns out Alicorn immortality works by forming a new body when their old one dies. And apparently it can be done repeatedly."
"Huh..." Sunset said, unsure what else to say. "So umm... what did you want us to test?"
"Well we're a bit worried that Twilight might be taking those bodies from other Twilights in other dimensions," Sunburst said, pushing his glasses up yet again. Teleporting with Starlight always managed to shift them juuust far enough down his nose to need correction, for some reason.5
Twilight A shook herself out of her shock on hearing this. "Hmmm, that is a possibility," she said, putting a hoof to her chin and accidentally hitting it. How DID they manage without fingers? 6 "Hence the need for a dimensional detector," she continued, "Well, I can't gaurantee it will detect any dimension, since they all might act differently, but we can at least test those like the ones we know. I'll need some sort of dimensionally sensitive object. I'll also need some way to boost the output so it's still readable over the electronic background. We'll just have to hope the physical friction doesn't damp it too much."
"Oh! Were you using the electric-magic resonance for that detector?" Sunburst asked.
"That's a thing?" Twilight A said, surprised, "That would have made things a lot easier."
"Well, yes," Sunburst said, "I didn't go into electro-magic engineering, but I know it's used in Unicorn communities when there isn't a river available to dam."
"So your civilization uses entirely green power?" Twilight A asked, "Fascinating."
"Green? I don't know that it's green," Sunburst said, "The water is mostly blue and the magic is..."
"No green as in..." Twilight A began. She stopped on seeing Starlight's uncomfortable look. "You know what? Never mind," Twilight A said, "We have more pressing issues to deal with. Anyway, no that's now how this works. After I found a stray bit of magic-infused grass, I discovered it would vibrate just a little in certain areas." Twilight A at this point stopped fiddling with the device and slipped into lecture mode, standing (as much as she was able) up straight, facing the general direction of those she was talking to, and projecting to the back of the room. I hypothesized it was reacting to the presence of other magic. Hook that to a piezoelectric circuit and you've got a signal. Put two of them at angles and you have direction.* Of course around here, everything is magic, so I'd hypothesize that the effects cancel out, much like how Newton's law shows that the gravity inside concentric spherical shells depends only on the mass inside the shell youre on.**"
"You have Fig Newton in your world, too?" Sunburst said, interrupting.
"Ours is called Isaac, but he's basically the same," Sunset supplied.
Twilight A looked irritated at having her lecture interrupted. Sunburst looked abashed and waved with his hoof, motioning for her to continue.
"Now, Since we know the mirror portal reacts with the magic detector, and the portal is dimensional, Equestrian magic must relate somehow to dimensional variance," Twilight A continued, "We just need something with more dimensional than magic to test it with."
"What about the mirror?" Starlight asked, "It's dimensional. Could we break off a little piece of it without breaking it?"
"I don't know about the mirror itself," Twilight 1 said, "But the crystal frame isn't just for show.*** They've been resonating with the dimensional magic whenever the mirror is used, so we could remove one of them. We'd just need a replacement first. Starlight, think you could ask Maud?"
"Sure thing," Starlight said. She eyed Twilight A warily before teleporting away.
"And there were other mirrors, according to Celestia," Twilight 1 said, "I can probably have Spike send a scroll. It wouldn't be as fast as dying but..."
"Right, don't want to accidentally kill your parallel self," Sunset said. On seeing Twilight 1's look she added, "Probably shouldn't have mentioned that."
"The point is we'll then have more than one data point! Oooh, this is so exciting!" Twilight 1 said. She stopped her squeeing abruptly. "Um, assuming I'm not killing other Twilights of course."
"The rest of us can help you out," Sunburst said to Twilight A.
"Not sure how well that will work," Twilight A said, "Too many people on something this small tends to result in getting in each other's way." She turned her attention to the detector as she spoke. She flipped it over with her magic and picked up a screwdriver with the same. She stuck out her tongue as she concentrated on maneuvering it to undo the screws. Sunset gently took control of it and turned it effortlessly. Twilight A smiled sheepishly.
"Ok, maybe I could use a little help," Twilight A said.
"Then let's get this dimensional detecting whatever built!" Sunset said with some enthusiasm, albeit less than either Twilight.
*Piezoelectric systems are those that emit charge in response to mechanical stress. Some microphones use piezoelectric materials as their pickup, as do some electric guitar pickups. With the right material and a lot of experimentation, it is in princple possible to use a piezoelectric set-up to detect anything that produces movement in the receiver. The notion here is that Sci-Twi found something infused with magic (I can't find where Friendship Games actually showed what) and through a combination of math and trial and error rigged up such a system to detect magic. The directionality is obtained by setting up 2 such systems, each corresponding to one of the antennae on her original device. This is similar to how stereo audio is recorded: 2 mics are used (either literally or with some clever use of a single mic) to get not only pitch and volume, but also the relative direction. The best part is that while the components are not necessarily cheap, neither are they absurdly expensive, and they are easy enough to find via cannibalizing what are more commonly called 'crystal' microphones. A student who can afford Crystal Prep probably has the resources necessary to procure these.
**It's true! To first order at least. In this case we have to suppose that because magic is permeating their world but with little appreciable effect on most applications, SciTwi's instrument, being intended to pick up single large spikes sticking up from zero, reacts to random blips that occur rather than a single identifiable source. It's a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) thing, similar to trying to discern what song is on a radio station that is almost-but-not-suite coming in. Actually without doing the math I'm not sure the SNR works as it would need to, but it's at least plausible that it could. The effect here could, interestingly, manifest as a high magical creature like Twilight having objects 'stick' to her. This will lead to comedic potential at some point, I'm sure.
***The most commonly used piezoelectric materials are crystals, so this is doubly convenient. Sometimes the universe gives you one for free.
1 She also felt that numbers trumped letters in the heirarchy of labels, but she didn't want this debate to drag on forever.
2 This is the most common use for research assistants: Moving heavy things between labs and field locations.
3 This had replaced her previous idea for that day's party, the "Anniverary of 5 days after the Cake twins first burped in a way that kind of sounded like language" party. It was a slow day for parties.
4 The pile only represented about half of the corpses. Twilight 1 had donated the first 20 to the local hospital for organ transplants, but had to stop when she was informed that they had neither the immediate need for the organs nor any way of storing that many. It was clear that a better distribution network would be needed. There were also further difficulties that would arise, but Twilight 1 wouldn't find out about those until the next day.
5 It was because Starlight thought the gesture was cute, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
6 The answer was 'surprisingly well, all things considered'.
Glad you said stone as opposed to geode. Also have to wonder if Fig had 40x the normal level of mercury in his system as well.
This story breaks my brain and I love it
10318951
I have no doubts.
Both are attempting to model the functions of an infinite number of variables, half of which we can't comprehend with human senses, in a way that solves for an X that any idiot could make use of.
The difference is, physicists don't get to lie about the variables to get the answer they want.
(angry accounting horse noises in the general direction of LIBOR)
I'm gonna add on to my previous comment about air pressure. They should check both the source and destination for a drop in air pressure.
Also, do superficial injuries carry over? What about clothing? Bacteria in the stomach? If they inject Twilight with a radioactive sugars and then her die, would her new body show up in a PET scan? That would prove that blood contents are transfered.
10318970
All things that may be discussed or tested in the next few chapters.
Holonomic structures might be N Dimentional, but if you take a 2D Hologram, then monstrously abuse it by first turning it into a tube, then instead of a Flat Torus, give it a half twist so it becomes a Flat Klein, and Then, place two Flat Kleins face to face, to me gives a 2D Mbrane hologram generating a 3D universe but needing 5 dimentions and most importantly, as far as I can very crudely work out, has no outside?
The hologram principle of N+1 dimentions also works with detectors, if youre using a 2D detector, pair of orthogonal antenna in 3 space, you can wave the thing around. If you cant wave the thing around, then you can still work out the signal is not planar to the dimentionality of the array and so you need to look up, or at least out. My Googlefu, due to paid for placement is absolutely useless these days, and so I cant find the articles that used to be available on experiments in x ray analysis of random packing of constrained 3 spheres in 3 space, having effectively near perfect 4 space packing solutions. To me, this implies that gravity, curvature of spacetime is a 4th physical spacial phenomena, and that if each sphere is an antenna, then not only 4 D wave forms can be directionally detected, but also possible 5D wave forms.
I apologise for the total mix up with the ELF article, I apparently got distracted from the Hackaday link and selected something I hadnt read instead.
Ponies dont have to be limited by our crippling reliance on one man, one vote, one logical operation at a time processing philosophy. They can totally bypass the silicon revolution and go straight from heliograph to piezo optical sapphire resonators and massively parralel solid state optical logic processors. Goven the current Earth record for mechanical oscillation frequency of a crystal is Green, as in the phonon vibration frequency is the same as the photon frequency, thats a clockwork mechanism running at 600 Terrahertz? Thats an awful lot of research and develpment industry and history the pones can go through and sill have nothing to do with a huge amount of Earth technology. If anything, theyd probably be extremely confused why we were taking, to them, a perfectly good ten billion bit silicon crystal, then wrecking it?
An intresting information comparison is using 1 Terrabyte SD memory cards. Stack 10 together, and you get about 10 terrabytes in about a cubic inch. Or in 100 cubic inches, roughly 1000 Terrabytes. There are approximately 1000 Trillion synapses in the human brain, which is just over 100 cubic inches. But there is far mroe than one byte needed to define the state of a given synapse, at least at first approximation in spacial placement either absolutely or relative to other synpses and neural assemblys. So its nice to know we are at the point where we can start to build computational objects similar in size and complexity to the human brain, just so we can start getting a better idea of what we are getting totally wrong.
Is it possible, that if infinite leading zeros on integers makes the number line have cardinal 2, at least topologically?, that it can then be shown that the cardinal 2 integers can be mapped to cardinal 2 reals?
Dragons bathe in lava. this suggests they dont have a water based structure at all, but there are three other compounds that have floating solid forms, one of which is Bismuth, which also in alloy form has a melting point below 50 Celcius. Could dragons have low mellting point metal blood equivalent, foam tungsten bones, and palladium mitochondria?
As for being an outsider to the department, I was barely in it at university, UK, 30 years ago, and things have drifted a looooong way since then, so all I get is high street publications and sales news that I have to think is great if it worked, but does it make sense in SciFi, never mind in the real world.
Ive also misplaced the small piece of paper showing all my working out, in simplifying a 4th order function, through complex values to end up with a purely real solution, that origionally when I typed it into Wolfram Alpha, it couldnt complete the function. Since then, Wolfram has done an immense amoount of work in formula analysis etc, but Ive lost the origional function I tried, to see if I came up with the same working out, and solution, as someone who actually knows what they are doing
Could always drop the spare bodies into a handy volcano? Assuming the Dragons and Griffins etc get fed up of alicorn steaks?
10318885
WRT Fig: One assumes.
10318967
It's harder to check the numbers on physicists, so there is a certain amount of fudging that goes on. However, since the people doing the funding frequently don't understand the results anyway there's less incentive to do so.
10318970
The pressure gauge was actually just intended to be thorough. I'm assuming teleport-related pressure drops are well-studied already.
First one was partially tested off-screen. Twilight 1 concluded that the new body was in 'perfect health'. So at least, whatever she considered an injury isn't transferred.
The rest I'll keep in mind as I see where this thing goes after the next chapter (which I have planned out).
10319057
...Come on I'm trying not to stretch this out to infinity! :P
Starlight's Otherwise Silent Libido: "Hummina hummina hummina."
Starlight: *beats back with a stick* "Back, back. Get back in that closet."
10319478
I'm a fan of Starburst, but I can see the charms of Trickstar (Trixie/Starlight, it's what I call it) and Moonburst (Moondancer/Sunburst). Just wish the last 2 had interacted in cannon.
Also closet. Heh.
10319606
I hadn't read your notes on it yet when I wrote that and I found it to be the most logical reason why she keeps doing that INTENTIONALLY. Like human males watching human females flip their wet hair Starlight finds it extremely sexy when he has to adjust his glasses. Come to think of it, humans find this attractive too. Wait, you mean you don't lock unwanted thoughts in a closet in your mind?
10319618
That is also a thing. I thought about just leaving it without the note, actually, let the reader interpret, but as I had already gone kinda crazy with the footnotes, it seemed appropriate to add another one.
10319625
Did you read the whole comment? My phone was glitching so it posted the comment when it was only half way done.
10319632
Whoops! Nope, only saw the half-finished version! Let me respond to the whole thing.
10319618
I was thinking when I wrote that that some humans find the glasses gesture attractive, like you said second. I find it kinda cute, myself. My SO does not seem to have a particularly strong opinion on the matter.
This is probably a more serious answer to the last part than you wanted, but I have mild OCD so unwanted thoughts manifest as a repetitive thought pattern. Suppressing them is more like locking a wheel in place. I guess also 'not looking at it', which is like a closet, I just don't visualize it that way.
Oi! If you're going to put Equestria Girls in the story, it needs the Equestria Girls tag!
10319687
...Was unsure about that. Added.
Well first of all I really like this kind of doing science to random magical power thing, so good job. It would be nice if there were more stuff like this here (I mean there is some but not enough to sate my insatiable hunger for more fics :b)
But let's get to the fun overananalizing part.
I think the potentially killing alternate twilights problem is not the most pressing one, because we have a more likely problem of twilight killing herself.
The main ethical concern is related to the teleportation thing but not actually the same.r more accurately it is the teleporting problem but there and additional complication.
Although maybe when the respawn is triggered Twilight's mind is not actually in her body and it's just connected to the new twilight leaving the dying twilight a braindead husk instantly in which case we don't have any problem.
And her running on some kind of magical substrate instead of a brain kind of makes mind magic and the whole afterlife thing make more sense, but doesn't really fit that much with the mention of ponies having brains.
(It would be funny if the afterlife is full of copies of ponies since CPR was invented either case)
And that kind of makes it less conducive to overanalyzing philosophical implications (also known as more boring).
So let's take the case where after the alicorn magic detects whatever it counts as "dead" it just recreates a new twilight with the same brainstate the one that died had and places her in the afterlife thing, and afterward just teleports her.
(which begs questions of what would happen if Twilight suffered brain damage that are not precisely ethical to investigate)
This poses the classic teleporter question, and then all the typical arguments apply, etc long philosophical discussion I've seen lots of times ensues.
Personally I consider that a working model of continuity of consciousness needs to depend on whether an agent is vaguely a valid next step of the computation of the previous agent, meaning teleporting preserves it, but it's not like I actually understand consciousness so I don't put much weight on that guess.
I am pretty sure Penrose is wrong though and would heavily bet against him being right, but that's a different issue.
But anyway whether you agree or disagree that the "new" twilight that goes to the afterlife and then respawns is the same twilight than the original one we still have something else to consider, namely that the old twilight is still there.
And as starlight pointed out the brain takes more to die than what twilight takes to respawn.
In fact, a few minutes is what it takes to start getting irreversible brain damage and when the brain actually dies more slowly later.
And even if it took longer, twilight is not experiencing a few moments of hypoxia followed by respawning, meaning the new twilight must be necessarily copied before she starts really dying.
On the other hand, this is obviously exploitable to getting more twilights if stopping her heart works and you can restart it reliably.
And better tech than we currently have/magic should be able to revive ponies that have been without a heartbeat for increasingly longer, and maybe repair some of the brain damage if it happened.
The new twiligths might not have whatever magic makes the respawn happen, but it's still petty good(no villain can defeat the unlimited twilight army muajajaja , also lots of science will get done, this is much better than the mirror pond that just makes bad copies).
So since the bodies are revivable isn't she basically letting copies of herself die? , regardless of if the new body comes from another universe(which would be weird since it would have to reescribe the alternate twilight's brain but maybe it takes identical twilight, in which case it wouldn't be murder) the old one still dies.
I mean it might even happen by accident if ponies who don't know about the respawning find her and get her to medical care fast enough, and suddenly we have a very confused non respawning twilight that might kill herself on accident before realizing what happened.
10320129
A valid discussion, but I'm trying to keep this fun, so I'm hesitant to explore that too much. The short respawn time is from the original story. Personally I'd have had it take longer to avoid precisely this problem, but it's also fun to take what you're presented.
I didn't think about just not having them have brains... That also would have been a solution.
The second sentence was more or less what I was thinking. Admittedly that's more on philosophical grounds but I also like the Penrose-Hamerhoff hypothesis for sci-fi. I don't know enough neuroscience to make a call on whether it could be true in reality, it's just a good 'out' for the teleporter problem. However, I've not actually planned out more than a vague outline past the next chapter, and those almost always change with me, so I don't know how it'll go after chapter 3.
10319255
I mean it has an outside if observed in 5 dimensions but not in 3, if my understanding is correct.
Yes and you can even measure in 2 dimensions with a single detector with the 'waving around' method. It's just a pain.
Also a good subject for a fic, but I'm not familiar enough with that specific topic I'm afraid.
An intresting information comparison is using 1 Terrabyte SD memory cards. Stack 10 together, and you get about 10 terrabytes in about a cubic inch. Or in 100 cubic inches, roughly 1000 Terrabytes. There are approximately 1000 Trillion synapses in the human brain, which is just over 100 cubic inches. But there is far mroe than one byte needed to define the state of a given synapse, at least at first approximation in spacial placement either absolutely or relative to other synpses and neural assemblys. So its nice to know we are at the point where we can start to build computational objects similar in size and complexity to the human brain, just so we can start getting a better idea of what we are getting totally wrong.
If the generalized continuum hypothesis is true then I think that would work. That's still an open question though.
But they can also survive outside of lava, meaning it would need to be liquid at room temperature, or their bodies would have to be kept at relatively high temperatures due to their own energy generation. A system can be devised either this way or via insulation with closeable ventilation. Be a bit more work than I want to put in myself but a materials scientist could probably put something together more easily.
You don't really get into the jargon until graduate work really.
Have to see the function to know what you're talking about. There's a chance there are no real solutions.
Not a bad idea, actually. When in doubt, toss stuff into lava.
You know, I'm a little shocked they werent more suprirsed by the time of death thing.
I mean she comes back before shes medicaly dead after all, which means they might be able to resusitate the old twilight after the new twilight has already reformed. What would happen then? 2 fully sentient and indipendant twilights? 2 consciousnesses being spread across 2 bodies?
10319606
Ah, shipping wars. So much simpler when you're poly!
Starlight's shoulder angel: "Sunburst!"
Shoulder devil: "Trixie!"
Starlight herself: "Por que no los dos?"
shoulder angel and devil look at each otner, nod resolutely: "Both is good."
10320316
This presumes that whatever "subroutine" the body has to initiate the respawn once the body is incompatible with continued life doesn't have a kill function that fries out the old body's necessary working parts.
10320220
What happens if Twilight dies while pregnant with an earth/unicorn/pegasus pony? What about an Alicorn baby? Would they remain in her corpse, reform in her new body, or respawn outside her new body?
10320422
...At this point I'm going to have to quote the author of Ranmna 1/2 when asked about female Ranma getting pregnant. 'I don't think about that.'
It's not an experiment than can be performed quickly or easily, to say nothing of the controversial ethics, so it won't be tested here. It may be asked.
10320391
Previous discussion gave me an appropriately crazy idea for how to deal with this. It'll come up before we're done.
10320373
A particularly interesting discussion in this context as horses in the wild are polyamorous. Typically a herd has just one breeding stallion, but it's not unheard of for a herd to have 2. I don't know if the stallions share mares in that case: you'd have to ask a zoologist or breeder. Oddly the ratio of breeding stallions to breeding mares is typically between 1 to 2 and 1 to 4. Yet the birth rate of mares to stallions is under 1.1 to 1. Higher than for humans, but less than that structure would indicate. There are thus a lot of non-breeding stallions, which ordinarily would imply a protective force. Yet the bachelor herds generally run on their own. Of course in domesticity, the non-breeding males are often gelded (and usually not called stallions at that point), but I don't know how that works in the wild. Apparently horses do exhibit homosexual behavior, though.
On the other hand, MLP ponies are clearly modeled on humans, for whom polyamory in the sense of having multiple emotionally bonded 'nest-mates' at once is rare. Won't get into the ethical arguments there. The point is one can justify either stance.
You know actually I wonder what happens if twilight had stuff inside/combined with her body in different ways when she dies (like some kind of cybernetic/magic implanted camera or some other sensors ).
Also maybe if starlight temporarily switches her cutie mark with another pony (for example a terminally ill patient that volunteers) the alicorn magic would get confused and respawn them in perfect health.
Another interesting question is is it only ponies or can other creatures be visited on the afterlife?.
Can twilight respawn on other planets/in orbit ?would be another interesting thing to check since it opens the door to cheap space construction (although normal teleporting might already do that depending on how it works).
10320215
Yeah It would probably be fun for me but maybe not for most people so, fair.
/warning pointless rant about the Penrose-Hamerhoff hypothesis
I guess the Penrose-Hamerhoff hypothesis does patch that kind of thing and its fine to use it in scifi.
But personally I both think is very unlikely and don't like it much.
The idea of consciousness depends on quantum stuff idea does get rid of lots of philosophical problems like that by fitting our initial intuitions
but that's not necessarily a good thing since a lot of our intuitions are actually wrong about how the universe actually works(and if that's all you want you can call it a "soul" and be done with it but I guess quantum sounds more scifi flavored).
Penrose and Hameroff's specific version of it it's more detailed than just that and it's based on the idea of humans being able to do uncomputable stuff(and therefore impossible to emulate by computer
, even if its a quantum computer).
And it seems that Penrose its mostly starting from the bottomline that consciousness relies on uncomputable operations and then thinking a plausible mechanism for them.
Which since I don't think that the arguments for that initial assumption really make sense, makes the rest of it look pretty unlikely.
I do think they should get credit for, unlike most people tying consciousness to qm, actually having some mechanism for it.
Penrose understands that he would need new physics to actually have uncomputable consciousness stuff and he actually posits new physics,
instead of just having a vague quantum=consciouness idea.
And the idea is even testable.
On the other hand, while I'm not a neuroscientist or anything so I can't refute their specific neuroscience parts, but I do know that the specific mechanism in the brain they proposed has changed a bunch of times as previous versions got refuted by experiment. And it has been heavily criticized by lots f people who actually know neuroscience.
And I think there is a point where ,even if you can't point everywhere a hypothesis is wrong, it feels unlikely enough by being overcomplicated and not well justified by observation to call bullshit, even without having to figure out exactly why.
Otherwise, you always have infinite "plausible" hypothesis that you haven't explicitly disproved yet.
But it doesn't really need to be really plausible to be used in scifi so it's fine for that in either case(even if I roll my eyes every time I see scifi stories with humans having magical mind powers that AI can't replicate).
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Where does it say that
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Warning: Similarly rambly discussion of Penrose-Hameroff incoming.
I'm not sure that any of what Penrose introduced was new physics per se. All the bases had been hypothesized before, just not in that way. Quantized space-time, for instance, naturally leads to self-gravitation at the Planck scale, at least to my understanding. It was definitely a novel theory, though.
I again don't know about the neuro-science details, and Penrose's model pre-Hameroff (I've been spelling it wrong, I double-checked) underwent a lot of hemming and hawing (and hence why I avoid referring to it as the Penrose hypothesis), but since their 1996 publication the basic mechanism hasn't changed: quantum processes in microtubules. Admittedly I'm unclear about the gravitating self-energy part so maybe that's still in there somewhere.
Now that also develops some problems. While a single microtubule CAN display quantum coherence ("Multi-level memory-switching properties of a single brain microtubule Appl. Phys. Lett. 102, 123701 (2013); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4793995
Satyajit Sahu1, Subrata Ghosh1, Kazuto Hirata2, Daisuke Fujita1, and Anirban Bandyopadhyay1, a)
(I really hope that comes out right), it does not appear that a group of microtubules over multiple neurons can: (Mckemmish, Laura & Reimers, Jeffrey & McKenzie, Ross & Mark, Alan & Hush, Noel. (2009). Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective-reduction proposal for human consciousness is not biologically feasible. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 80. 021912. 10.1103/PhysRevE.80.021912. )
Mind you those papers are paywalled so I'm going off the abstracts.
All of this ignores the self-gravitating energy on the planck scale part, which seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient anyway, unless I am grossly misunderstanding it. My reading was that it served as a starting point to get one around to wave collapse. Which I'm also skeptical of as the Bohm model (or rather its relativistic extension) can precisely reproduce the quantum statics by sacrificing locality rather than determinism, showing that that assumption isn't 100% necessary.
At this point we've exhausted the physics part and I really don't understand the neurological part. It looks like Hameroff's details are problematic, but again I really don't understand it. The link below has a bunch of back-and-forth on that from around 2014. Maybe you can make more sense of it than I can.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations-in-microtubules-inside-brain-neurons-corroborates-controversial-20-year-old-theory-of-consciousness
You probably already knew most of this. Still, might be useful for anyone still reading along after all this. :P
And of course none of this mess is either necessary or sufficient to demonstrate the existence of something which fits the description of a soul or spirit (depending on ones theology) as they are typically conceived. So there's that.
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Just speculation at this point, has yet to be addressed in-story.
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It's implied in the idea that she comes back before being medically dead; I'm just positing the idea that whatever process brings her back may result in !edical death before she can come back.
I've previously covered alicorn immortality in a story, but not in this way lol.
The 'author's note' info block is the first time I've encountered something 'smart' that has made my brain hurt trying to wrap my head around it. I now understand that this is now an actual possible thing, and not simply a figure of speech. I now wish I was more educated than I am so that I could actually understand most of what is being said.
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It's ordinarily the sort of thing I'd be teaching over 2-3 lectures plus a lab in a college course, so don't feel bad if you don't get it in a 1 paragraph blurb.
And actually I haven't gotten to teach that class yet. I keep having to change schools (not getting fired, it's more fluctuating enrollment) so I'm always the one getting whatever classes are left over.
10322090 This makes far more sense.
I feel like there was a missed opportunity here for Sunset to already be aware of the immortality of alicorns... having accidental offed Princess Celestia a few times during her own studies. Or maybe deliberately, either as lethal pranks or assassination attempts her a few times during her later bad girl days. Actually, why not both!
and
--
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This is a great idea.
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fixed
The hay is that?
So is Twilight a Two-nicorn now?
Haa, references!
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A device for measuring air pressure.
...Oh wait you probably meant the Hall probe. :P It's a device for measuring magnetic fields.
"Two ni-cooorn!"
Fixed.
I'm glad that I'm able to understand this albiet I'm only in middle school so my knowledge on these topics is less extensive than I would like. I never bothered figuring out the specifics of magic, but your theories add up! I'm glad to see a nerdy story on here. Great job so far!
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Hey if you like nerdy stories check out "Rainbooms 101." That one involves aerodynamics.
I love the amount of science in your fic! Almost everyone is writing about some Deus ex machina and are unable to explain how it works. Putting actual equations to support your story? I adore it!