Interesting ideas, I haven't read any of this before. But it might help me come up with ideas for my story, after reading the summary on Wikipedia, I've noticed that it's quite similar to my story in terms of the scale and circumstances. But you're going to have to explain to me how a ship made of compressed space-time or "timelike" curves" works. It all sounds very interesting!
The Milky Way galaxy alone is 150,000-200,000 light years across. The far reaches of it could have been wiped out before before humans started using fire (low-end estimate) and we'd just be learning about it now. The rest of the universe is so far away it might as well not be there for all we'll ever know, due to the limitations of lightspeed.
Well let's just say that because my story is written by an omnipotent being, he knows the universe was once full of galaxies before they were wiped out. In real life though, we could be living in a black hole and we'd never know it. Maybe everything we see around us is actually inside of a black hole and the time dilation is so great that practically nothing will change for an eternity.
Literally nothing would look different from our perspective for a long time. Light that we see was sent thousands of years ago for the nearest stars, millions of years for the closest galaxies and billions of years for most of them. Gravity also has a movement at the speed of light and spacetime can’t snap back so it’ll have to flatten out over time. It’s also important to remember that the stars and planets make up a small percentage of what’s in a galaxy. The disc of the Milky Way is like a small dense object bobbing around in a huge dark matter halo. Dark matter is the dominate structure building entity on the universe. Dark energy would not be effected in the slightest by the galaxies disappearing, it’d still be the dominate force in the universe at large scale.
But you're going to have to explain to me how a ship made of compressed space-time or "timelike" curves" works. It all sounds very interesting! Dude. I have no idea. It's so over my head, and I get the feeling that the author dumbed the reality of it all way, way down to make it readable. As neat as it all is, it wears me out. "Oh, the gravitic constant is different in this universe, better adjust my cosmic string whackadoo thing." Sure, sure thing pal. You adjust that thing. I'll be over hear re-reading Joe Haldeman, where physics are still newtonian for us peons. There's a book called Don't Be Such a Scientist that tries to help hardcore PhDs relate what they do to normal people, required reading for some staff where I work. I bet it would be worth taking a look at for you as well, given how complex all of this is. So much math.
Dark matter/energy is mostly theoretical and our knowledge of it is limited, we just discovered it quite recently in terms of scientific progress. Black holes were theorized at least 200 years ago or so through mathematics and look how long it took us to actually confirm black holes exist. You talk about dark matter being the "dominant force" in the universe, what exactly do you mean by this? Sure, most of the universe is made up of it but that still won't prevent planets and stars from being obliterated. I'll have to change up a few things in my writing on how the universe would appear to people after the galaxies are destroyed though, I kind of expected a thousand years to be an unrealistic expectation in visual change. Likely a few hundred thousand years before the stars in our galaxy would start disappearing and then the galaxies that we can actually see would disappear after 2 million or so years. To be honest, I wanted the night sky to be empty to add that creepy and horror factor to show the repercussions of the war. I might start writing about dark matter and bring it into the fold though, it has a lot of potential to add to the realism of a Sci-Fi world and I could make some really cool alien species from dark matter too.
I feel like I have an idea of how utilizing compressed space-time could work and it sounds like an extremely efficient form of transport that might be superior to wormholes if anything. But to turn compressed space-time into a ship is kind of redundant, isn't it? I mean, if you already possess the ability to manipulate space-time then why would you need to turn it into a ship? What does the story actually say about it? Do you know? I don't think I could slog through hundreds of pages just to find the section about compressed space-time in the Xeelee Sequence books. I also want to avoid doing the whole "gravitic constant is different" thing and just stick to actual, established physics but I also involve alternate dimensions and really weird dark magic stuff is involved as well. It's funny that there's a book to teach people to not talk in science/maths language all the time though!
Not true, we know a lot about what dark matter must be. It must be warm, it must have mass, it must not self-interact, it must interact with the weak force and gravity, it has an upper and lower bounds for is mass. It must have a spin of 1, and it must have no charge. We can see it with measurements of gravity. The Bullet Cluster is a clear example. We just haven't isolated the particle itself yet. Dark energy. At the largest scales only two forces matter: gravity and dark energy. One pushes the universe apart, the other pulls it together. Gravity is caused by energy, which is constant in the universe (not really, but for our purposes we can say it's so.). As the universe expands, this energy becomes less dense and the gravitational attraction between everything dwindles. Dark energy, however, seems to come from empty space itself, and as the universe expands, there is more and more space, so dark energy becomes more and more powerful and the grandest scales. There is a point in time where the outward push of dark energy overcame the inward pull of gravity and the universe began to accelerate. This happened about four billion years ago. Dark energy is a strange concept because it's a positive feedback loop, it's counterintuitive to think that using energy to expand the universe actually creates more energy and seems to violate the laws of thermodynamics, but those don't apply in this case because those only work in a closed system.
Ah, I stand corrected. Thank you for the interesting facts even though I never really mentioned or brought up the idea of destroying dark matter/energy in the first place.
@LordWarGod I have to say honestly this book sounds really fascinating, I'd love to see it someday! Do you have a title chosen? Or like want some other ideas?
I'm not sure if it's your kind of book, it's more of a sci-fi history/document/tome book in the D&D fashion. But you can check out my work so far here, it's in progress and is far from completion. The title is called "The Tome of The Last God" and there is a synopsis included on the first page. If you enjoy reading the lore and history of worlds in books, video games or movies then this is probably something you'd like. If you're into strictly novel-type writing then this'll be a slog for you to read through.
I'm checking this out, I'm genuinely very interested in this idea! Also I kinda wrote a "fictional history book" thing too, two actually, though kinda short. Partly to act as a way to keep continuity in line and partly to offer a kind of "series bible" and backstory for some of the more obscure or odd parts of the series. "History of the Neo-Terran Bible". I don't know if this would work for you but I was kinda working on the idea that the books were actually dramatized teen-oriented fictions written about actual events that were millennia in the future.
So, you wrote a fictional history book to compliment your novel series? Or they are your actual work? It's a very cool idea to create a "bible" series to maintain continuity! "History of the Neo-Terran Bible", is that the title of your book series? It sounds very cool! I'm not sure what you mean by "teen oriented fictions" though, is it like an exaggerated version of actual events or some kind of alternate reality?
@LordWarGod Thank you, I'm glad to hear it sounds good! Yeah I wrote a kind of history book, two actually I'm working on a second one, which accompanies the actual books, which I intended to be serials in episodes like comic series or something. Mainly kinda novellas like 150-250 pages, or short story off-shoots, with the larger backstory driving them. The history books, the History of the Neo-Terran Bible, is where I kept the continuity, timelines, the branching family trees--it covers a rather expansive history. The books or serials themselves...kinda in keeping with my own preferences in terms of writing and story arcs...are kinda romance driven soap opera-y stories with the space opera/cyberpunk/military sci-fi aspects as a grounding for them. The History of the Neo-Terran Bible expands on this, so if something like the Oligarch Wars comes up, gets mentioned, you can look it up and go "Oh that's what that means". And, as a result, I kinda make references like "In the personal diaries of Character A, she says this happened and modern historians speculate it meant this" as if the books are like some kind of tv show or actual serial based on actual events...I kinda thought about an "inspired by actual events" kinda disclaimer. Like you look at 300 and you know that's not what ACTUALLY happened, and no one can know for certain what did, but we can piece together stuff based on actual historical records or the writings of people who were alive at the time and then we can embellish it a bit and say people scream THIS IS SPARTA! and add lens flares and slo-mo. The actual title I was going for...I honestly had more than one idea, "The Osiris Chronicles" is one.
I see, it's a nice idea, do you plan to add illustrations to your "bible series" as well? I'm doing something similar with history and adding elements of my own to actual events such as the influence of Dark Gods or aliens on them. Then the next 60,000 years after the year 2018 is all completely made up by me and is another reality. What did you think of my work, by the way?
@LordWarGod I haven't had a chance to check it out, I was kinda...busy last night lol But I intend to today, definitely. I don't know about illustrations, probably not since I can barely draw stick figures, but if I did I would look for a kind of 90's Anime aesthetic akin to like M.D. Geist or Genocyber, or Robotech which is perhaps my favorite anime series of all time. One of the main kinda backstory aspects is that basically, they're looking back on all this from the year 30,000 A.D. to stuff that happened in millennia past, so basically everything prior to the 1980's is myth and legend for them. Like they know that WWII must have happened, and by that logic WWI, because thousands of books and tomes mention WWIII and WWIV, but they have no idea what "Nazis" were or if it was some kind of person or thing or entity or what, just that "it" or "they" killed millions and the "nations of Mankind" fought against them in some distant time known as the 1940's. Or like as far as they know, the 1990's was like this mythical age like Ancient Rome, and they could only speculate on what was happening--like they KNOW that this "Gulf War" happened, because records speak of it, but what it was and why is unknown (legends speculate some organization or being called "Sadam" started it, and they figure this was some kind of singular being however as it's referred to as a "him" but what "he" is they have no idea).
One piece of advice I have for you is to keep your writing tidied up with Notepad documents so you can maintain consistency while you write your actual books. Interesting story, I think you should check out the Silmarillion out for inspiration, it was a book written by Tolkien but was released much later after his death. The contents of it was basically the entirety of his world's history explained in depth. Although you might want to avoid the huge droning on and on thing and compartmentalize each point in history separately like an actual history book instead.
Wow, John Calligan must be onto something here! I am so excited to hear his insightful thoughts on this deeply philosophical question. No, really, I'm so excited right now to hear about those neutrinos.
Honestly I doubt it would have any impact on OUR universe, like if I set off a hand grenade in the street outside your house, the windows may shatter and the house shakes but you'd be largely unharmed. Now the fact we can REACH another universe is more impressive, because that means
Everything's relative, there was even a theory about it. Let's say a galaxy we've never heard of is destroyed. The impact of this on us wouldn't be as much as to something that was living inside of that galaxy before it was destroyed. Relativity my dear Watson.
Now is relative.. My now and your now is close enough, but extend the distance between two points.... now can factor in with direction and motion. So if you're facing each other, it's 250 years into their future when diluted across the vastness of space, do you follow me? And if you're facing away, it's 250 years into the past and now, making for a 500 year segment of now consisting of a dilation of 250 years into our history or future and vice versa for now. Time Space is 1, increase the space, increase the 'now' time.
