Measuring the curvature of the universe
The angles of a triangle ad up to 180 degrees. The angles in an equilateral triangle are all 60 degrees.
This is what we are taught in early geometry class and for the most part it works well because we usually deal with triangles that are ether on a flat plane, relatively small or both. But as many of you know it doesn’t work if the triangle is not on a flat surface. Take for example earth. Draw a triangle from the North Pole the equator south of Greenwich and a point a quarter of the way around the equator. This is defiantly an equilateral triangle but drawn on a curved surface all angles are 90 degrees. The angles of any triangle on a curved surface will have angles based on the triangles size compared to the curve of the surface. And with more math than I have you could calculate the curve based on measurement of the triangle.
According to modern physics space itself is curved, all the triangles we draw are just too small to measure the effect. In eclipse phase however there are many distant points we can get to (Pandora gates), draw triangles from and measure the angles and distances and then calculate how curved space really is. Use a number of different triangles and you can determine if the curvature is even (like a sphere) or irregular (like say a kidney).
One of my players is considering trying to launch this project, thinking he could get some R-rep. after some consideration I decided it was too big for him to do alone, and would take months he could use it as a description of his currying rep rolls and that would be the amount of rep he gets.
Now my problem is that this project will ultimately yield results, and I can’t check my text book for the correct answer. What answers might I give, and what if any consequences would these answers have.
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Measuring the curvature of the universe
Tue, 2013-12-31 06:36
#1
thezombiekat
Measuring the curvature of the universe
Tue, 2013-12-31 10:45
#2
nezumi.hebereke
Do bear in mind, some
Do bear in mind, some possible answers include:
1) You jumped into another place in space, but also another place in time. You're going to have to wait centuries for your personnel at the Brezhnu gate to get their equipment functioning (but they'll be back at base next week).
2) It's possible the gates don't go to an actual 'place', but to a simulation of a place.
I guess my point is, you may learn more about the gates than about the universe.
Tue, 2013-12-31 12:29
#3
ShadowDragon8685
Have the Factors drop RKVs on
Have the Factors drop RKVs on all attempts to perform the experiment. No explanation, no warning, just a couple of cones of tin-foil coming in at .98[i]c[/i] followed by being resleeved from backup.
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Tue, 2013-12-31 21:37
#4
thezombiekat
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Have
why. would the factors do that, in terms of activities humanity is engaging in using the Pandora gates pure science is relatively benign.
why would i do that as a GM, it punishes a player for what is an interesting idea and creates a major active enemy outside of trans-humanity. all to get out of answering a question about the universe.
as to the nature of the gates. enough observations have been made that there is strong evidence it is not a simulation (corpses found at fissure gate, milions of tones of raw materials have been taken from the gates) and not time travel (they calculate there position based on stellar observations. you could hardly fail to notice the stellar drift if you where at a different point in time). also as this will be a heavy gate crashing campaign i don't want the big reveal to be "the entire campaign happened in simulation and is therefor meaningless"
Tue, 2013-12-31 23:24
#5
Leodiensian
Why Would the Factors Nuke The Gates
The first things the Factors said to us when they made first contact were "1. Don't mess around with seed AI's. 2. Don't touch the Pandora Gates." It stands to reason that they wouldn't do that unless there was something incredibly dangerous, or at least suspicious, about both of those things. And the TITANs already taught us why seed AIs are dangerous. It also stands to reason that if the Factors learned about massive Pandora gate use by transhumanity that this would... sour our diplomatic relationship with them.
As to the nature of the gates, it doesn't have to be time travel, simulation or anything like that - but there are other ways you could make the gate seem a bad idea. The gates, as xeno/TITAN/????tech are where the game starts diverging from hard sci fi to horror and are meant to be [i]weird[/i]. Using them at all should be [i]unsettling[/i]. For instance, imagine five people walk into a gate in a straight line, one at a time, roughly equidistant from each other. Only four people come out. The middle person just vanished and the gate apparently even adjusted the entire group somehow so that the four are still equidistant when emerging and there's no 'gap' where the missing explorer should be. The four people spend twenty minutes freaking out and then the middle person emerges from the gate, apparently fine and with no perception of the change ("How'd Frank get ahead of me?") Maybe someone goes into the gate normal and comes out an async, or with edited memories. Maybe someone comes out the other side, takes one step and falls apart into their component molecules, as if the Pandora Gate just atomically recreates you on the other side and glitched a little making this one. Start implying that the gates are alive, or at least semi-sentient - and that they can mess with you...
As for what shape the universe is... honestly, that's up to you. But remember that outside our solar system is where things get even weirder, where the ETI is king/god. Maybe the different planets start getting conflicting results - stars not where they should be in relation to each other. Perhaps this experiment risks drawing the ETIs attention to us again, which is why the Factors oppose Pandora Gate use.
Wed, 2014-01-01 04:15
#6
ShadowDragon8685
thezombiekat wrote:why. would
Two possibilities come to mind, ICly, which are not mutually exclusive.
1: They told humanity not to meddle with those damn gates, but the big apes didn't listen. This is the equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper across the nose.
2: Performing the experiment to discern the curvature of the universe would lead to scientific breakthroughs the Factors don't want humankind to have; perhaps the means by which they derive their reactionless propulsion system, perhaps the first steps towards the Gates themselves. Either way, they don't want humanity pursuing that research goal, and won't hesitate to drop cee-sabots on anyone who is attempting to do so.
Because your players are asking you to answer a question in-character which is unknowable in real-life. It's not like a fantasy game where you can just make something up and it doesn't affect much; they're proposing a specific, hard science experiment to receive an answer to a question you, as a GM, cannot reasonably provide an accurate answer for. This is why research scientists make poor PCs.
Answering that question, being that it would involve you basically pulling something out of your arse, would be a bad idea. The ramifications for what will happen if you provide an answer to players who are scientifically-inclined enough to propose the experiment in the first place are unknowable. You might give them an answer that seems half-way plausible only for them to come back next week with a thesis on why that answer enables teleportation or the construction of their own Pandora Gates.
So having sufficiently advanced aliens just nuke any attempts to perform the experiment solves the problem nicely, and potentially pushes your players towards taking action against the Factors.
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Wed, 2014-01-01 04:38
#7
Leodiensian
Another, nicer alternative
Another, nicer alternative might be this - have the experiment take too long and be too slow to be the main focus of the campaign. Have him fork off, send the fork to do it while they address the more urgent concerns of, say, exsurgent chihuahuas eating every taco on Locus. Then every few sessions give him a little progress report ("established first base, setting up equipment") and a smidge of r-rep here and there. Then, one day, the reports just stop. What happened? That's up to you. Maybe his fork discovered something he shouldn't and was eaten alive by ravenous sea-cows. Maybe he went to a exoplanet so wonderful he's decided to give up on the research and just live in paradise for the rest of his days... etc etc. Who knows? Gatecrashing is dangerous. This stuff happens all the time.
By this point he'll have some r-rep to show for his work so it wasn't a waste of his time and effort and you don't have to answer it. Then he can either try to resolve the subplot by finding out what happened to his fork and you present him with a solution - he can know the truth but the only way to get it is to reintegrate with his fork, who by this point has been gone for months or years. This should be a last-session choice, part of the climax to the campaign - how much does he really want to know? If he reintegrates, he gets the truth - and everything that comes with reintegrating with a fork after so long. Then as the final thing his character experiences, you just say "It is what it was all along. And what it always will be." or something vague OOC. IC, he's entirely aware but also raving mad. OOC you don't have to give specifics.
Wed, 2014-01-01 20:36
#8
thezombiekat
@ Leodiensian
@ Leodiensian
The factors know full well that trans humanity is squeezing everything it can out of its 5 Pandora gates. They know how to translate our communications and the mesh is full of information on the subject. And they are not in the habit of launching obvious attacks on exo-planet bases.
A strike against the various bases being used by one project would indicate that that project was /extremely important/ and probably result in those more interested in power than safety applying considerable resources to finding the answer.
The dangers you suggested relating to gate travel are unrelated to the project. Gate travel is safe enough that the hyper elite of the inner system have holiday destinations on exo-planets. It remains creepy of cause but I don’t wish to give the impression that it is a major risk in a campaign that is focused on gate crashing.
@ ShadowDragon8685
I like the idea of the answer being key to a reactionless drive it actually lines up with a thought I had about the implications of an object moving through space that is unevenly curved. Bringing it back to a 2d around 3d model, consider the surface of a pumpkin (the type you would make a jackolanton out of) as a 2d environment wrapped around 3d. Imagine upon it a 2d object that can bend around 3 dimensions but cannot stretch in 2 dimensions, attempt to move that object to another part of the pumpkin and it will get stuck. It can’t leave the surface of the pumpkin because that would be moving in a third dimension. If space is unevenly curved this effect could be the bases of a reactionless drive that pushed against the curvature of space. The tricky part would be making a material sufficiently low stretch to jam in local space. Or somehow manipulate the curvature of space to provide a greater local curve.
I see what you mean about the risks of answering the question. But at the same time I really don’t want to forbid scientific research in a hard scifi setting. It creates a feeling of stagnation, a lack of progress over time scales when progress should be expected. And devalues scientific skills when I want them to be taken so they can be used in the study of exo-planets.
Having the factors destroy the experiment would get me out of the problem this once. But in doing so I have wiped out dozens of exo-planet bases controlled by different factions with different primary functions. I have confirmed (to myself if not the PCs) that the factors do have near instantaneous travel (the books suggest that they are likely only capable of several times the speed of light), or both instant communication and ships near all those locations. And transhumanity becomes aware that they face a deliberate active threat capable of coordinating attacks across vast distances, and this would get in the way of my campaign concept
My players stay out of the spoilers
If I can’t answer the question then I will have to ask the player ooc not to run the experiment. I really don’t want to do this, I would like to give an answer, but blowing up the experiment just leaves far too many loose ends.
Spoiler: Highlight to view
I am planning a conflict between trans-human and ex-human factions fought threw Pandora gates. At the beginning at least I don’t want alien factions to be an issue. If an alien entity has just obliterated a couple of dozen basses controlled by a variety of factions there will be no way to have their influence be insignificant.
Thu, 2014-01-02 04:16
#9
ShadowDragon8685
thezombiekat wrote:Spoiler:
Alternatively, you can tell them that their instrumentation is insufficient to measure that which they are attempting to measure; an inconclusive result on the basis of insufficient instrumentation is a pretty hard barrier to jump over.
Imagine Louis Pasteur or other scientists of his era attempting to explain a weaponized nanobot plague. The scientific acumen is there and the theory that there are things too small to be seen ordinarily is as well, but microscopes capable of magnifying into the nanoscopic range are still centuries away. Even if someone tells him exactly what he's looking for, he's not going to be able to find it.
Or you could go with the suggestion of telling him that a project of this magnitude will involve years of hard work, bureaucracy and running tests upon tests upon tests; this is not a project that can be completed in an adventuring timeframe, and his best bet would be to spin off forks, or propose the project to an Argonaut with more free time on their hands.
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Thu, 2014-01-02 19:58
#10
thezombiekat
the accuracy of the
the accuracy of the instruments is known, and quite good. with today's instruments we could do this project (we just lack a way to deliver the instruments to suitably distant points)
i could have the project take a long time to give any results. but i would have expected it to be fairly quick. taking a measurement should be doable in hours. writing the software a couple of months. running the maths also hours. preliminary results after 20-30 measurements more required to fine tune the answer. the time consuming part would be arranging access to that many exo-planets. i had planed considerable downtime during this campaign so a 6-12 month project is likely to be completed.
i have thought of 3 answers.
no detectable difference. to within the tolerance of the equipment the angles add to 180 degrees so space is ether not curved or so gently curved that the triangle is still small. try again when you can travel between galaxies.
the angles add to more than 180 degrees with lager triangles having a higher total. space is evenly curved and you have a good estimate of the curvature. (i could say something about how strong it is)
the triangles are adding up to widely different values not correlating with the size of the triangles. the curvature of space is irregular and you would need a huge number of reference points and enough progressing power to support a seed AI to map it.
Fri, 2014-01-03 02:43
#11
ShadowDragon8685
thezombiekat wrote:The
Damn. That's... Quite a conundrum, isn't it?
The "Drop RKVs on any attempt to perform the experiment" option is still off the table, right? It doesn't have to be Factors. It could be TITANs...
Yeah, just checking.
I'd suggest going with 1 or 3. I don't honestly know what you could [i]do[/i] with the certain knowledge of 2, but a player who's on the ball enough to propose this experiment probably has an idea in mind already. Players are a crafty breed, always ready to pull something brilliantly devious and deviously brilliant.
1 is probably the safest bet. 3 will somehow lead to your players deciding that space curves like an ocean and wind up flying a galleon somehow.
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Fri, 2014-01-03 04:20
#12
thezombiekat
well i have made a decision
well i have made a decision (a justification for delaying a decision is a decision isn't it)
the project will take a considerable time to produce use full data (6 months +). during that time the player will be able to contribute in any way he sees fit (send a fork to work full time, assist during down time)
the player will be asked now to give me any implications of each of the answers he can think of both for the campaign setting in general and things he could do as a result (i truly believe his goal is to gain rep and advance pure science, but if anybody can think of a fulcrum to go with this leaver it is him)
i will decide closer to the completion time what the actual answer is, or to blow the project up as i see fit.
Fri, 2014-01-03 04:33
#13
thezombiekat
one possible implication,
one possible implication, that would justify certain agencies blowing up the project dose ocoure to me.
luckily its not a mater of hard science so i can use it or not at my discretion.
if the universe is curved any instantaneous long distance travel system would need to account for the curvature. thus the rate of curvature would be an important variable in gate systems. the amount of curvature could even be embedded within each address. if this is so knowing the curvature of the universe could be key to identifying the location of a gate address.
of cause it is equally possible that the address block dose not include the curvature correction and it is instead stored in the gates operating system and applied to the address when dialed.
Fri, 2014-01-03 10:33
#14
ShadowDragon8685
thezombiekat wrote:One
That's the spirit!
That would probably make it easier for someone to dial in to one of the other gates in Sol, aye. There's implications that that's already been done by accident at least once.
It would also explain the phrase "Localized distortion in the space-time continuum," to mean "Space ain't curving the way it ought to curve here." Which could be why Synergy lost contact for five years.
And then learning the curvature of the universe would put them on the road to creating their own Pandora Gates. Wonderful! :)
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Fri, 2014-01-03 18:33
#15
thezombiekat
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
yes but not soon. working out the curvature of the universe would defiantly be necessary to build a pandora gate. but its one of hundreds of known questions and thousands of unknown questions you need the answers to.
as a GM i have no problem with the PCs answering a handful of those questions. of cause some in game might
Sun, 2014-01-05 04:24
#16
ShadowDragon8685
thezombiekat wrote:Yes but
You mean like, say... A certain sufficiently advanced race of sapient, predatory trap-laying ambulatory mold that's known to ride around in vehicles capable of accelerating to nearly the speed of light? That have demonstrated either an irrational fear of Pandora Gates, or evidence of an undisclosed threat regarding them?
The RKV option just came back to the table, right? ... Tabled in committee? Shelved? Okay. :(
That said... The TITANs are hinted at in [i]Gatecrashing[/i] to have started producing their own Pandora Gates. I don't care what anyone says about hard-takeoff AIs, even the fastest-thinking computers would still be limited by the data they have, and conducting scientific experiments takes time, even if analyzing them happens super-fast.
That makes me think that Transhumanity might be closer to Pandora Gates than they realize. Wouldn't that be a kick in the ass? Especially if they figure out how to [i]construct[/i] Pandora Gates without necessarily gaining a vast amount of additional understanding about them or the theories behind them...
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Sun, 2014-01-12 01:11
#17
Sepherim
As a GM, a way to focus the
As a GM, a way to focus the whole project may be a bit evasive, but could work. When it ends, after dozens of problems and perils, and all those things that give good stories, you can go ahead and say "you have the answer, I can't give it because humanity now doesn't know it, but your character does". If (s)he's mature enough, the player will understand this, and also have the answer they need to carry on with their RP, character goals, etc. If this can lead to further plans and actions (like advancing a small bit the understanding of how Pandora Gates work) great, the player doesn't need to know the answer to be able to have fun and enjoy having the character know the answer. No?
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