What defines "pure" scifi and "pure" fantasy? The two very often overlap what are examples of each?

>psychic powers
What is technotelepathy?
>laser swords
they just have indefinite length and cant block. You know you want to see mirror knights duke it out with deadly laser pointers

negative energy, the presence of which is derived from an observable phenomenon

>negative energy
Yes, that thing we've never observed and have no theory of how to manufacture...
>the presence of which is derived from an observable phenomenon
You what mate?

OIh hell yes.
Popping smoke and a spraying water from the fire sprinklers whilst charging towards a shiny fucker. All the while hoping that he's going to lase the drones first so you won't have to find out if your cheap mylar blanket does anything useful.

>negative energy, the presence of which is derived from an observable phenomenon

>Scientists see something
>Can't explain it using theory
>Invent something so that it fits the theory

Anything that relies on exotic matter or energy is pure bullshit.

I'd say sci-fi at its "purist" depends highly on having a heavy basis on reality, with a set of rules that it breaks, but consistently, so as to make things not yet possible seem feasible. Usually minor things that seem like a speculative guess where technology can go, like smaller microchips or quantum computing. Fantasy, I would say, has a basis over folklore, legends, and myths, and does not revolve on speculation over new or upcoming technologies. Things that are impossible that happen in fantasy does not need a rational explanation or speculation, and a consistent set of rules for how things work is not necessary for fantasy except for good world building. There's no need to try to figure out the common ancestor for Goblins, nor to explain the miracles seen by a Francescan order of monks. Things just happen.

Pure fantasy is mostly elf being virgin at 300 years old. You have the purity of the elven woman with the purity of the faery, the eternal life (and eternal youth), the virginity of the maiden. Pure fantasy rates high.

Pure science fiction is mostly AI that likes you because of no fleshy meatbag hormones but your personality. It's a more abstract kind of purity. How can an AI even be a virgin if she doesn't have fleshy bits? But if you go further, I would argue it is a more fulfilling kind of purity.

Both are equally valid in my book and should be appreciated for what they are.

Physicist here. A century and a half ago, the idea of antimatter existing would have been met with similar scorn ("An electron with positive charge? Impossible!") Now we have observed and can induce interactions that produce antimatter. While it seems unlikely to me personally that the exotic matter needed for an FTL system like the Alcubierre drive could be produced, harvested, or indeed even exists, we simply don't know enough about that kind of physics yet.
This is all ignoring the fact that if FTL was properly represented in any narrative, you'd have people going back in time and all sorts of shit. I'd accept FTL without relativistic effects as a narrative conceit that allows you to tell cool stories in a different kind of setting, sorta like ignoring the intricacies of socioeconomics, disease, consequences of magic, etc. in a fantasy setting.

First
>He things genre exists
I’m lafin at u, m8. Genre and classification stem from the time and culture in which a work is being viewed; something drama to one era is comedy to the next.

>Scifi
Literally means “science-fantasy” you shitlark. Unless you’re reading theoretical physics papers (or Greg Egan), it’s going to be fantasy because it will be fucking fantastical and necessarily a departure from reality.

Fuck. I didn't want to be serious.

Physicist here too. You can't have FTL without causality breaks. End of story.

Unless you map a network of stargate as to have their own frame of reference, and that is its own can of worms with a lot of issues the size of Texas most people won't care.

If you have FTL you have time travel, kiddos. And I don't like time travel. Unless it's central to the setting. Then it's cool. But don't put FTL in your Star Wars and not expect every Jedi to time travel to the time before Sheev. It doesn't work like that. The universe doesn't work like that.

I can't accept the literary license of FTL and no time travel in a serious work that calls itself science fiction.

Maybe in the future we we'll find negative mass bullshit and alcubierre drives and whatnot. But don't expect us to not have discovered time travel by then.

>This is all ignoring the fact that if FTL was properly represented in any narrative, you'd have people going back in time and all sorts of shit.
I'm the guy who started the stink about FTL not being hard sci-fi, and I would unironically love to see this.

One extremely well understood and extremely well predicted (as in, we have 100 years of works that agree, all our science is based on that) consequence of special relativity is that if you go faster than c, you break causality. You travel through time.

The universe works like that. Why? Because the universe works like that. Do we have proof? All modern physics, from cosmology to quantum field theory, agree that the universe works like that. Your computer works because we know the universe works like that.

FTL and no time travel is an absurdity.

The concentrated meme in this picture could kill someone

Scientists increased the speed of information in 2097 to avoid having to argue about this.

Didn't know wormholes and other stuff was rendered fiction lately, thanks for the advice.

When were wormholes not fiction?

>What defines "pure" scifi and "pure" fantasy?
An autist. Nothing else.

You're thinking of black holes user, Worm Holes are only a theory.

There's no "pure" genre. It's all autistic screeching.

>scientific theories are fiction
The fuck?
Guess what, everything we about physics is based on theories

Some theories are based on evidence and remain only theories because we cannot definitively prove them. Others, like Worm-Holes, are pure speculation.

>the year 1000
>flight for men is impossible, not without the help of god
>the year 1959, 900 years later, men land on the moon in a rocket ship they flew there, only 50 years since we fucking *invented* planes
>turns out we can fly pretty good

>the year 2017
>FTL is impossible, not without time travel free magic mumbo jumbo
>...

Don't tell me you faggots think we finished the science tree, literally all of human history is full of people being wrong about that.

>Some
Actually all

Like string theory
Relativity
Dark holes
And a long etc

...

>confusing fiction with fantasy
you must be 18+ to post here

Scifi is when the impossible, pie-in-the-sky bullshit is purported to be due to advanced science. From there, the exception proves the rule.

There was always evidence that things could fly though, which is why men for the longest time attempted to imitate birds in their attempt to fly.
Nothing suggests FTL is possible. Thinking that reality works to accommodate you and you can do anything if you work at it you is the height of hubris.

Fantasy is just a genre of science fiction, it's just the absence of science fiction.

1. Everyone knew flight was possible because it happened in nature
2. Manned flight existed long before planes, it was just limited to non-powered variants which limited its scope

To the other guy, FTL travel has several theoretical workarounds which means that it is a perfect subject for science-fiction, which aims to take the cutting edge of theoretical science and imagine a world where the "improbable is possible".

"pure" is kind of a weird way to put it.
What makes it pure can vary depending on what you want.
Scifi can be scientifically plausible or entirely speculative, but both can be considered examples of scifi.
The same goes for fantasy, there is no single aspect that makes it pure.

And yes the two overlap but it is mostly a matter of theme and story elements.
Star Wars is fantasy setting that has enough scifi elements to blur the line between the two. Monster Hunter is also fantasy but has a lot of scifi elements in it's lore.

To all the silly physicists in this thread, I say this

Gravity is a theory and so is evolution.
A scientifical theory is not the same as the colloquial term "theory", which means hypothesis really.

A scientifical theory can be tested and used to predict the results of experiments and processes, it is the closer a scientist will get to say "this is the absolute truth".
The colloquial use, the "normal people" use of the word theory is kinda wrong.

>nothing in our current frame of reference suggests FTL is possible
we have evidence (theories on mass as it relates to the speed of light) that FTL is not possible, but the fact that we currently have a limited frame of reference with regards to the universe at large is more due to the fact that we haven't yet expanded our view of the galaxy beyond telescopes etc.

Muons say hello

It is more likely that we will discover immortality in this century than ever discovering FTL.

No, user. This is a much more fundamental problem.

youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo

The solid prove that FTL is impossible is that we don't see time travelers from the future infesting Earth or aliens having expanded even beyond the reaches of the observable universe. Even without causality, think how much more difficult is to justify the fermi paradox when you have FTL too.

>This thread is full of more autistm than a rick and morty section of a convention

I don't agree with the anti-FTL guy, but gravity is an observable force and evolution is observable biological change in populations over time.

I find it funny how the people who say "immortality is impossible", when there are no laws of physics against it, are usually the same ones who say "FTL is possible" even when physics say it is impossible.

>caring about definitions

It's like you are a child.

>observable
and?
just because you can observe something and come up with a explanation doesn't make that thing "real". Theory is just that, a series of rules that explain and predict observable behaviours
Gravity is a theory, as far as we know it can explain what we call gravity, but nothing says it will stay that way forever or that it can't change rignt now and fuck all our preconceptions
>Even when physics say is impossible
Physics mean shit though, physics is just what we know so far, you threat physics like a dogma, and they aren't

Muons keep saying hi

taking into account that the 4 fundamental forces are supposed to be one but we aren't able to come up with a single formula that explains all of them at the same time, really proves that "gravity" is just a bandaid to explain part of that fundamental force.

The more we learn the more our theories match reality, but we still don't know much.

Those things are observable but they are still theories.
What I was trying to explain was that the word theory in science is the closest thing one can get to the truth, while people in general say that something is "just a theory" when they actually mean that it is "just an hypothesis".

A theory is for intents and purposes true based on what we know so far and have tested.
An hypothesis is something that might be true but still lacks evidence and testing to be a proper theory.

FTL is an hypothesis but not a theory, if in the future we find a way to workaround the current known laws that make it impossible to travel faster than light only THEN it will become a theory.

>OP opens a thread about sci-fi
>Cue nerds telling other nerds how science fiction needs to be realistic
Every time, and people wonder why nobody writes sci-fi stories anymore, go figure.

Maximum shitposting, user. Maximum shitposting.
Get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head

That's WAY too many memes in one image, buddy.

They're going by what's common in popular scifi. That's all there is to it.

In fact, we know how immortality is achievable even though we haven't cracked the code yet. If I'm wrong I'd like to be corrected, but the key to decay of human bodies is that with every cell division, our telomeres decay further and further and every cell division becomes more and more prone to errors. If we could find a way to prevent decay of telomeres or to "repair" them, we'd achieve elf-like immortality (by which I mean we effectively become ageless, but something like a truck running you over can still kill you). If you can write a plausible way for telomeres to be fixed, you can justify immortality in a hard sci-fi setting.

These memes are forcing me to take a sane check

>Relativity
Relativity has been proven though