The nearest gate-accessible world nearest the solar system is Chrysaor, a colonized moon of the hot jupiter 51 Pegasi b some 51 light-years away from our corner of the universe.
There's something interesting in that since 51 Pegasi b, known informally but consistently as "Bellerophon", is the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a normal star, detected in 1995 some years after the unexpected discovery pulsar planets earlier in the decade. Is this just a coincidence? Is part of the gate network Earth-centered, more precisely centered on the areas of the galaxy known to transhumans? Does the location of the gate that may be one of the ones nearest Earth have any relationship to the density of the gate network in our galactic neighbourhood? This sort of thing probably has people thinking.
This also gave me an idea. With very few exceptions (Luca II), almost all of the gate settings open onto destinations which can be precisely located relative to Earth, even mapped in some detail. I'm almost certain that transhuman astronomers would have known of Chrysaor's existence before that world's gate settings were discovered: Bellerophon is just too prominent a target, astronomically and historically, for a substantial moon not to have been found. (This assumes that it is a substantial moon, which may be open to question. Orbiting 0.05 AU from its sun, can Bellerophon even retain a moon?) With the very extensive infrastructure in space predating the fall, transhumanity knew much, much more about the galactic neighbourhood that we could have imagined possible before Bellerophon's discovery. The re-analysis of data in light of discoveries from extrasolar destinations may be very fruitful.
The astronomical observatories of the solar system could also have useful implications for the exoworlds. While the resolution might be low, with sufficient information about the locations of different Gate-reachable destinations astronomical observatories back in the solar system should be able to image these planets. It could provide useful historical data ("What was Droplet's climate like three thousand years ago?" "Happily it's three thousand light years away! Let's take a look right now.")
The potential is there for the observatories to determine whether or not the Gates open onto actually existing reality as opposed to some sort of simulspace. They seem to do so locally, with information apparently having been transferred at effectively FTL speeds between gates in the solar system that can be made to link up to each other. Might things, somehow, operate differently on interstellar scales? It's too soon to find out: a signal sent from Chrysoar as soon as that world was reached would be only something like one-sixth of the distance to the solar system.
Thoughts?
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Astronomical observation of Gatecrasher destinations?
Sat, 2011-10-29 08:10
#1
rfmcdonald
Astronomical observation of Gatecrasher destinations?
I've put a little bit of thought into the idea of observing worlds that are accessible via gate travel. Or more precisely, observing their stars (which are a lot easier to make out than implied evidence for planets.)
Somewhere in Gatecrashing is a note about one exo-colony getting a distress call or fragmented ego transmission from another world 5 light years away. Apparently a gate crasher from years early died on that world and his ego spent some time at (near) light speed as a neutrino(? ) burst before luckily reaching a receiver on a much more recent colony in another solar system.
The idea got me thinking about some Exo-colony with an orbital observatory setup managing to catch the glimpse of a neighboring solar system experiencing a purging by some ETI event/weapon. Maybe something like the sun-spiking in Arthur C. Clarke's Sunstorm novel. The observatory can pick it up because it's a nice rig they have, and it's the other solar system's sun. Maybe the event happened 100 years ago (IE: 100 light years away). More interestingly, the solar system has Pandora gate, and explorers there can see the ruins of the civilization.
As a plot point, evidence (from earth's observatories, or maybe again from some other exo-planet observatory) might show that something similar is on it's way towards Earth's Solar system, crawling along a some pace slower than the speed of light. Maybe it was launched by the ETI after it detected Earth's first real radio transmission, so it's been en-route for hundreds of years? Maybe it's got only decades before it reaches our solar system and spikes our sun? Maybe it has a gate on it and the players can visit, and try to stop it. Hell, they might visit it well before they find out what it is.
I'd still need to work out some math on the travel time/speed/distance issues to make the time scale(s ) work. I'd also need to pick a radio broadcast. The first radio broadcast(s ) might work, although it would be weak. Alternatively it could be possible to pick one of our more deliberate alien contact attempts where we beamed information about ourselves towards nearby stars. One real disturbing idea, if the players enter the weapon via a gate and find evidence of it's purpose, is to steal a page from Contact and use Hitler's 1936 Olympics opening speech.
If the math gives me trouble, I can adjust the time scale system by making FTL Communications involved (like Quantum Entangled probes seeded by the ETI for just such a purpose.)
I also have some interesting ideas about the nature of an ETI weapon. It involves a Tesseract shaped complex wrapped around a singularity. I have to imagine dropping a decent sized black hole into the Sun would be a viable away to ruin our solar system.