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**Space**
Science fiction stories with aliens must find a way to pass through space. The distance between planets is overwhelmingly large. There are only three possibilities to conquer that void.
**Time**: we merely have 100 years per life and therefore we can't reach much further than 10 Ly. We can only extend that radius by involving more than one human generation. That would be the only solution that conforms to #hardscifi criteria.
**Speed**: Using #scifi tricks, we could break through the barrier of light speed and thus shorten the journeys. However, these tricks demand some thinking. You don't want to have Einstein's laws in the way.
**Manipulation**: Even more sophisticated tricks allow us to bend space as we want to and thus bring those far away worlds nearer to us.
Simply speaking there are space odysseys with or without tricks. The type of the resulting stories is fundamentally different though.
If you don't want to wait years and generations until you reach another star system, you imagining #sciencefiction stories have to imagine a propulsion system that allows #spacetravel that is faster than light.
I also needed that, so I've created one a long time ago in one of my back stories that I'd like to present to you in yet another series of posts. I called it the nine-dimensional transspace. And bear with me, the idea is as old as my alien race - well, somehow the humans had to meet the #Kret, right?
So no space opera without a faster-than-light drive. My idea was not to bend space or fly through a portal. I've just extended the known spacetime with some useful additional dimensions (just like the real physics did extensively). Mainly I thought if the space is bending, where does it bend into. So there had to be more than the observable dimensions.
That was my starting point ...
#Transspace - Dimensions
A view of my imagined #multiverse simplified throug the looking glass of popular science comes with 9 dimensions.
Three of them are the space dimensions - basically the ones we know. Three more are time dimensions. One of them is the linear time that we live in. The others are splitting up the world into a multiverse of possibilities.
The last three are bound to gravitation. our existence is bound to two of these grav dimensions, so we live on a gravitational plane, so to say.
Especially with the gravitational part of the theory, there are immediate and reasonable applications for the real life like the possibility to create ad-hoc force fields.
But there is also the possibility to access a higher plateau than the one we live in, which changes some relations between mass and distance and allows moving faster than light.
My next related post will dive a bit deeper into the details.
#Transspace - Space Dimensions
The space dimensions are well known. They already existed in some form even in the earlier theories. Einstein gave them the twist that these dimensions are curved and that mass affects the amount of bending.
The (imaginary) Transspace has given them another angle that changed or extended some of our imagination of the three space dimensions.
The theory itself is computer-assisted. An AI and a Quantum Computer have calculated most of the equations' solutions.
One of them predicts that all dimensions fold into themselves. So very simplified, you could say if you travel some billion years in the same direction, you might be able to reach your starting point again.
Some distant galaxy we observe with our telescope might even be our own milky way in its early days.
#Transspace - Gravity Dimensions
It's getting more esoteric now. This part forms the perfect technobabble for space story essentials like anti-gravity and FTL travel.
Next to the space dimensions, there are also three gravitational dimensions, that our senses and brains can't realize. Our existence incorporates two of these dimensions. We're living on a gravitational plane.
Only on this plane, a meter is actually a meter and a kilogram is a kilogram. And more importantly, lightspeed and the gravitational constant are what they are. You move to another layer and things are different.
In the early days, after the theory had been postulated, people found out that a certain geometry of force fields could form a tube or a portal that allows switching to higher or lower gravity layers.
That made it possible to use the different perspectives over there and travel faster - even faster than light.
In some future chapters, I go into more detail on where that went.
#Transspace - Time Dimensions
The third group of dimensions after space and gravity form the time continuum. The beautiful symmetry also gives us three of them.
However, we humans can only sense one. We live our lives on a timeline moving permanently in one direction.
The theory says that the other dimensions contain alternate realities and form the multiverse of possibilities. The timelines next to us contain a sequence of events that are very similar to ours. Timelines further away form different worlds.
However, it is technically not yet possible to prove that. Many scientists work on gravity effects, some also concentrate on the time effects of the theory. But there was no breakthrough yet. All of this remains theory for now.
But the theory says that time travel is more complex than imagined. Going back in time means contaminating a timeline, which automatically forms another one. So you simply can't go back into your own timeline.
#Transspace - Marla Lay
The theory of Transspace has been created by the dutch scientist Marla Lay. She started to work on it during her PhD phase at the end of the 2080s and published the groundbreaking paper in the year 2095.
The theory came with twelve base formulae and didn't contain any singularities anymore like all its predecessors. Yet it could be considered a superset of the theory or relativity and the quantum theory for most aspects. But now, we could also predict the edge cases.
Although Lay was in the lead, she already had a rather big staff and one of the best quantum computer arrays to work with. And also later, she went through an unorthodox path and decided to involve the best scientists and engineers in the world to work on practical proof and potential technical inventions.
Project "Enclave" started in 1996. More in the next post.
#Transspace - Project Enclave
By the year 2095, Marla Lays theory was complete and confirmed correct, but the practical implications as well as the potential to change the world was either unknown or mere speculation.
One year later, Lay with her good reputation and massive network could convince seven other leading physicists and three engineers of a two-year project called "Enclave".
Together with 50 other doctoral candidates and technicians, they founded a science think tank in Noordwijk, Netherlands, which provided infrastructure for both theoretical context and practical construction and experimentation.
They kept their discoveries close until the designated end in the year 2098, thus the project title Enclave.
The result was a working, faster than light propulsion model, the so-called Grava drive that could project the first artificial force field and a science paper that was considered the seed of all later inventions.
#Transspace - G-Tubes
Two of the participants in the Enclave project, Charles Frempton, an engineer and Janice De Jong, a data scientist, have worked on the possibility to enter deeper layers of the gravitational dimensions. This technology was considered the basis for Faster Than Light travel.
The problem had to be solved with raw computing power. It took them 2 years alone to find a geometric field that theoretically could have worked. Toward the end, they could present the first prototype, that could generate a small 80 cm diameter portal to a 25 times deeper gravitational layer - making everything 25 times faster than in our world without additional effort.
Later on, Frempton created a probe that fitted through the hole. It made it to the moon in 42 minutes using normal propulsion.
They called that tube geometry "G25" but that was not the end. Over the years, other solutions have been found. The current maximum is G180k.
#Transspace: Communication
Things that travel at the speed of light have the most benefit from the anatomy of spacetime that the teams on the Enclave workshops had discovered. So FTL communication was one of the first thriving engineering fields that emerged.
Even the G-Tubes useless for humans had been good enough to send probes, robots and drones into transspace. The first series of transspace communication phalanxes had settled at G171, which brought the moon into high-speed real-time communication ranges of 8ms latency. And the delay for communication from Mars went down to 3 seconds on average, good enough for live streams. The communication in the whole solar system changed completely after the first generation.
Today all colonies are connected through a fourth-generation communication system running on G180k. This renders a reaction time of 22 ms with the Titan colony and 90 minutes with the science station in the Rana system about 30 Ly away.
The conquering of the galaxy. That's what we were striving for after the discovery of the G-Tubes. At that time five big mining companies had already been the lords of the solar system.
The first human transspace flight in a G25 vessel engineered by two of the enclave participants, Wells & Bellman, was started just 3 years later. It took them 7 hours to Mars and they reached 3% of lightspeed.
The most versatile drive was invented in the 2140s, around 45 years later. The so-called Dublin drive was specified as G121 and took 16 h to Titan, the moon of Saturn and an important outpost of Earth at that time.
Zodiac, one of the mining corporations found a specification for cargo and huge ships at G1013 of G1k as it was then called. This drive was replaced only 21 years later by the G21k Starbase drive, which created the kickstart into colonising the neighbour star systems. It took about 1 week per 10 light years.
#Transspace: Force Fields
On a milestone date, January 1st 2100, a company formed out of the enclave think tank launched a product they called "Grava", a brand name that would become a synonym for force field tech afterwards. ...
#Gravity, #SpaceTravel, #FTL, #Worldbuilding, #SciFi, #AmWriting, #SpaceOpera
Full Post: https://octahedron.world/storylines/transspace/11-force-fields?c=mst
#Transspace: Time Travel
The last chapter of this worldbuilding exercise focuses on things not invented yet. Let's go back to time travelling. Even 100 years after the enclave, scientists have no practical clue how to do it, although some groups have worked on it since the beginning. ...
#SpaceTravel, #FTL, #Worldbuilding, #SciFi, #AmWriting, #SpaceOpera
Full Post: https://octahedron.world/storylines/transspace/12-time-travel?c=mst