Time Dilation Prison

[Corvus 501]

What would happen if the government gained access to time compression technology, and used it for (among other things) prisons where a (subjective) multi year incarceration could take only months?

[Darth Tanner]

Why would they do that... you still have all the costs of maintaining a prison to hold and keep the people safe for the same amount of time but now have to add the extra cost of a time machine, paying the guards and service staff extra to give up their lives to the time prison and also offend the victims families by having murderers walk out of prison from 40 year sentences after only a few months.

[madd0ct0r]

I think he means it goes the other way- sentenced to ten years, you are in the prison for only 1 few months to an observer, but you age and experience ten years in that time.

[Darth Tanner]

Yes I know but the prison will still need food and supplies and staff to operate for that 10 years even if its only 1 month to the outside world, only thing being improved is prison cell turn around.

Would you take a job where it literally sucks your life away into a time portal and you start ageing 120 times faster than your friends and family?

EDIT: It would be amusing if this sort of place was set up that shift change would be every 6 minutes on the outside world or so assuming 8 hour shifts with people free to leave to go home - you would actually increase your labour requirement by 120 (relative to real time) as well to keep the prison manned to the same degree as you will have to have a constant stream of people outside walking in to take the place of people having completed full shifts inside the prison whilst spending their free time at normal time. Hell prisoners could very likely never see the same guard again twice, or if they did he would only see him once every 120 days!

[madd0ct0r]

ahhh, I was assuming the fields were based per cell, or better yet just subjective consciousness to prevent everything being incinerated/freezing to death from the light differential.

[Purple]

ahhh, I was assuming the fields were based per cell, or better yet just subjective consciousness to prevent everything being incinerated/freezing to death from the light differential.

If it was cell based than it'd be even worse. You'd have to keep stocking the cells up with months worth of provisions all the while having no way of controlling what happens on the inside. Not that this thing would not be horrifically inhumane to begin with. Time lag would pretty much destroy any chance of communication with the outside world for the prisoners. Imagine having a spouse or friend that visits you once a week but in your time it's actually once several years.

[Corvus 501]

I think he means it goes the other way- sentenced to ten years, you are in the prison for only 1 few months to an observer, but you age and experience ten years in that time.

Pretty much, and you might just step down the dilation field for shift changes, or something.

[Patroklos]

Yes I know but the prison will still need food and supplies and staff to operate for that 10 years even if its only 1 month to the outside world, only thing being improved is prison cell turn around.

Would you take a job where it literally sucks your life away into a time portal and you start ageing 120 times faster than your friends and family?

EDIT: It would be amusing if this sort of place was set up that shift change would be every 6 minutes on the outside world or so assuming 8 hour shifts with people free to leave to go home - you would actually increase your labour requirement by 120 (relative to real time) as well to keep the prison manned to the same degree as you will have to have a constant stream of people outside walking in to take the place of people having completed full shifts inside the prison whilst spending their free time at normal time. Hell prisoners could very likely never see the same guard again twice, or if they did he would only see him once every 120 days!

1.) Only use this for maximum security prisoners with life terms, terms that would go past expected natural lives or volunteers and have it run by screened white collar criminals with the benefit of halving their sentences.

2.) It doesn't have to be in time dilation all the time. You can pull it out every few months their time for visitors, work force transfer, and resupply. This also might let you have non criminal or otherwise coerced workforce as well. I am sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't mind fast forwarding to a future date if it means doing it in three month intervals instead of ten year intervals.

3.) One issue I see with this is I doubt the technology to do this is cheaper than convectional prisons.

4.) Another involves ongoing legal processes such as appeals and the like. An appeal can take a years to process and you are in this prison in the meantime so you may serve out most of a sentence just to have it thrown out in the first place. I doubt you can convince lawyers (good ones anyway) to enter the dilation with their client to allow processing timetables relevant to that client. Maybe you only allow inmates that have exhausted all legal remedies? However we have seen that convictions can be overturned decades into life sentences. In this scenario nearly everyone in cases of reversed convictions would be dead. We would have to be cool with that.

5.) A good thing about this is that assuming you were an IT professional or other tradesman when you went in and were able to maintain your skills reasonable well in prison returning to the workforce for those who had served their time would be far easier. Imagine being an IT professional who was thrown in the clink in 2000 getting out in 2015 and attempting to reenter the field. That would suck. Recidivism or otherwise remaining a state dependent might be decreased.

6.) However at the same time victims and society at large would not have had a time to forgive or forget. Imagine Tsarnaev (assuming a non life sentence for arguments sake) walked out of a Boston prison a free man this time next year. He has served all the law required of him and would probably be a completely different and perhaps reformed and repentant man to him and his peers inside. To everyone else he is still the dude on trial today.

[Corvus 501]

Or, you can go the other way. Imagine if someone is in protective custody. Instead of spending months subjectivly, the individual can spends a few days cooped up. Also, FOOD STORAGE!

[Purple]

Also, FOOD STORAGE!

Now there is a thought. In a RPG I once had my nation had developed ways to stop time. And they used it to create what was referred to as the "millennium sausage". Basically MRE's of warm cooked meals that might well have been frozen millennia ago (some were). Time slowing could be equally useful. Especially if it is cheap enough to replace refrigeration in the home.

[Eternal_Freedom]

This is one of those RAR type threads where the initial idea is not too brilliant but the required technology is such a game-changer that it might make the situation invalid anyway.

Look at the example brought up of food storage. Suddenly the food supply problem is drastically reduced because will keep for centuries or real-world time in a powerful time-dilation field. Food can be prepared, stored and used decades later with no issues, meaning good harvests no longer get wasted over years, stuff keeps for longer in shops and doesn't have to be thrown out after only a few weeks.

Or imagine applying this to computing. Got some really hefty number crunching to do? Stick the processors in a time-dilation field so it can spend a few hours running the computations for only a few seconds of real-time. Brute-forcing encryption keys suddenly becomes more feasible.

Or manufacturing, if using the heavily-automated robotic production lines you see used for building cars and stuff. Or automated refining of raw materials. Or applying a time dilation field to a new;y-planted forest, or in a hydroponics lab.

Basically, for such technology to be considered worthwhile using in prisons, it would have to be so ubiquitous that we might not even need prisons anymore,.

[Corvus 501]

That seems to be the whole point of thease threads. Make a simple point, than wander off on some interesting tangents. Anyways, another possible application would be gravaty generation, your already screwing around with spacetime, so you could probibly get some other usefull applications out of it.

[Elheru Aran]

I am a bit confused. I think I need a tad of clarification here.

There are 2 kinds of time dilation, right? One where time is dilated longer within the dilation effect; 'outside' takes only a short time, but 'inside' goes much longer. This is what I think is being postulated for the prison.

The other is like what happened in Interstellar on the water planet; time 'outside' takes much longer than 'inside' the effect.

Being able to do both would be very useful-- but what if you are only limited to one? That could cause issues. Take the food storage thing; that's a good idea, but it would take up a lot of space.

[Starglider]

The technology should work as a g-dampener as well, because acceleration is force over time and if you increase the duration (for a given velocity change to occur) you decrease the force applied. For example if applied in a short burst to the inside of a car during a car crash, the passengers experience a slow crumpling of the body and almost imperceptible braking force over ten minutes instead of a very sudden deceleration in a fraction of a second. In fact this might actually apply to gravity inside the field as well depending on exactly how it interacts with known physics, i.e. it may have a side effect of being a microgravity field.

As usual for time dilation fields, this should affect all EM radiation e.g. incoming light is massively dimmed and redshifted to radio waves, outgoing light is massively brightened and blueshifted up to x-ray/gamma (depending on the time dilation factor). In fact you could weaponise this quite easily; get a decent torch (100W for a few hours), enclose it in the field for 10 milliseconds at a million-to-one dilation ratio, and you will get a pulse of hard gamma dumping energy equivalent to a stick of TNT directly into the target. Scale up for military use should be straightforward, and that's just one of the more obvious applications.

[Corvus 501]

Or fire a laser for ten minutes (subjective) and get a megawatt to gigawatt pulse in microseconds. Of course, you probibly would haft to set the field around the generator, so I don't that this weapon would be light or inconspicuous.

[PREDATOR490]

Time dilation as a prison system seems kinda needless except if you were dealing with criminals that have been given life. I suppose that might alleviate some of the prison population since a life sentence could be carried out until they die faster. However, this only seems practical if it is limited to an entire bottled community that can self sustain the inhabitants with lots of automated technology. You are not going to get many guards signing up for a job where they will essentially be suffering the same fate as the criminals they are guarding and speeding up time still means everything inside the field works normally for them.

Unless you put resources into the field like farms, machinery and repair facilities that will maintain everything for the decades they need to then the whole prison will quickly collapse into prisoners starving to death and the place falling to bits while people one the outside don't notice until it is too late. If you want to speed up the prison system then... it would be more ethical and humane to just kill them conventionally.

The only way I see this working is if you used it as a strange colonization / exile system. Get an area, provide the basic starting resources and then have your prisoners fend for themselves. Check in regularly to see how they develop then switch the field off.

[biostem]

A form of time acceleration would be interesting to deal with garbage that is very slow to break down. It could also be useful to make plants grow to maturity and produce fruit/grains/etc much more quickly. The idea of slowing down time for things like food storage would also be interesting. It'd also be an interesting way of dealing with terminal patients - slow things down enough for the patient and just wait until the outside world develops a better treatment or cure.

As for prisons - the only thing I could think of would be to setup a self sufficient "lifer colony" for prisoners with life sentences and no hope of parole, where they are accelerated relative to the real world, and basically live out the rest of their lives in isolation, (but much faster relative to the outside world). You'd need only maintain a small security force to maintain and protect the outsie (real-world-facing) portion of the facility.

[Eternal_Freedom]

One major use just occurred to me. Use a fast-time -on-the-inside field to get rid of radioactive waste. Stick the flasks or whatever in said field and crank it up. Hundreds of years can pass inside for much shorter timespans outside, meaning most of the more dangerous stuff (read, short half-lives) will have decayed into longer-lived but more pleasant isotopes. That's pretty much most people's beef with nuclear power solved right there.

[Enigma]

Down side of using a TDD (time dilation device) to increase production in a manufacturing setting or in computing is that you'll greatly increase the wear and tear. Machines that should last for years or decades will now have to be fixed or replaced a lot more frequent than usual. Same with computers. Sure you can shorten the time needed for serious number crunching but now your computer has aged an extra few hours in a span of a few seconds. Constant use of a TDD will render that computer useless in a short time.

As for prisons, sure it could work but the more time is compressed, the more labor intensive it becomes unless you automate it and then again the previous issue that I mentioned will quickly become a problem. I wouldn't mind if the setting was at a 3 to 1 ratio. 3 minutes pass inside for every minute outside. This was a prisoner serving a 30 year sentence will in reality only serve 10. Plus while feeding , etc would occur three times more often, it would not be too much of a hassle. Having a ratio of 120 to 1 would be too extreme and prone to human error and stupidity leading to prisoner deaths.

[Borgholio]

I'm thinking it would be useful for space travel. Say you want to travel to Mars. Load up your ship, launch it, slow down time on the inside so the astronauts only consume a few hours worth of food and air, but three months have passed in real time and they're already arrived.

[Corvus 501]

Or, as Starglider said, use it as an inertial dampaner.

[LaCroix]

Or you can use it to quick-train people - have schools be like a mini-town inside a TDfield - kid goes in, coes out a week later having studied a full semester. Kid takes a few weeks vacation, goes back in. The environment would be resemble a boarding school, but very controlled and even more focussed than normal schools, since you are the only one determining what goes into said school. Or be more family friendly by having the kids go to school in a pattern where they are away for a virtual week each day, and then have a week off. That way, you'd have them less removed from their parents.

Also useful quick-training soldiers or other professionals.

Or vacations. Take a couple months vacation over the weekend? Sure, why not - Fly somewhere, check into the TD resort, and check out that same evening to fly back.

Society would change drastically. Some buildings would resemble bee hives with people going in and out constantly, working their shifts within minutes. Production would soar, but other businesses wouldn't profit from this - maybe TD malls, where you can do hours of shopping in a few minutes. Offices would have problems, since they usually need to communicate with the outside.

Still you'd see people age much faster, children grow up within months, and much random changes in relationships due to the time spent 'offstream'.

I'd imagine some people deliberately placing themselves into reverse TD fields, to travel into the future.

[PREDATOR490]

Or you can use it to quick-train people - have schools be like a mini-town inside a TDfield - kid goes in, coes out a week later having studied a full semester. Kid takes a few weeks vacation, goes back in. The environment would be resemble a boarding school, but very controlled and even more focussed than normal schools, since you are the only one determining what goes into said school. Or be more family friendly by having the kids go to school in a pattern where they are away for a virtual week each day, and then have a week off. That way, you'd have them less removed from their parents.

Also useful quick-training soldiers or other professionals.

It only quick-trains people from the perspective of those on the outside. The people within the fields are still doing things normally from their perspective so...

You propose sending kids into a field to learn X weeks / months / years of work then give them a week off ?
If anything that is going to make them MORE removed from their parents because the parents will miss them for a week while the kids have spent a multiplier of time completely isolated in the school.

Person goes away on Monday, comes back on Friday a X year trained soldier - From the perspective of someone on the outside that might be awesome until you take in the practical costs of what is required.
You are literally putting people in isolated bottles for extended period of times then dropping them back into a world they will have difficulty re-adjusting to with the worst situation when they might as well be aliens.

Or vacations. Take a couple months vacation over the weekend? Sure, why not - Fly somewhere, check into the TD resort, and check out that same evening to fly back.

This sounds like a good idea as a concept but the reality would be awful. Take months of holiday then come back to work - So the employee needs to re-adjust to coming back to a job they have not done for a long period of time which will potentially result in loss of skills which need to be re-trained.

Society would change drastically. Some buildings would resemble bee hives with people going in and out constantly, working their shifts within minutes. Production would soar, but other businesses wouldn't profit from this - maybe TD malls, where you can do hours of shopping in a few minutes. Offices would have problems, since they usually need to communicate with the outside.

Society would fall apart, resource consumption would soar and finite resources would be consumed at even faster rates until nothing was left. Businesses and nations would be competing with one another by going faster and faster within their fields so they can produce goods which causes more resources to be used. Produce a weeks worth of cars in a day only for them to be obsolete by tomorrow.

[Corvus 501]

Or, we just use this technology to expand into space, and squire eanough reascorceresorces to make this lifestyle sustainable. As I ahave said before, you probibly turn this into a warp drive, or failing that, an eletromagnatic ramscoop with inertial dampaners. Expand, advance, and prosper. Anyone read Ian M Banks Culture series?