I just started reading Sunward, and came across the notes on 'If an advanced alien civilisation wanted to iron-bomb the sun..'
And, well. there's an arguably easier way.
I'm new to the system, but I could have /sworn/ I saw mention of some habitats having artificial gravity (Not produced by rotation) but I may be mistaken.
There's an easier way to blow up a star, if and only if you have some means of generating gravity. (I'm easily bored, OKAY?)
I surround you star with sattelites that convert solar energy int oa gravitational point source inside the star. (Hypothetically doable if you can wor kout a way of generating High Frequency gravity waves and generating constructive interference at the point of intersection of two or more waves. If you can figure out how to do this, you get a nobel prize. Bunus points if you can find a way we can /actually power/, since space is not exactly easy to move.)
now, if I have hundreds, millions of these sattelites, so as to make a /noticeable/ effective increase in the star's mass, then the fusion reaction of the star intensifies.
This is a balance. If the sattleites are all then turned off? Then we have an imbalance. Make the imbalance big enough, and boom. no more star.
A nice threat for your hostile aliens or Titand to pull out! since if you wanna shut it down, you have to destroy the sattelites or shut them down /slowly/. dial it down. So imagine a nanoswarm building these things. If you stop them before too many are built.. fine. otherwise, what we have is what is technically known as an 'interesting problem'.
Enjoy!
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Blowing up the Sun
Mon, 2011-07-25 19:50
#1
Molikai
Blowing up the Sun
Tue, 2011-07-26 01:57
#2
Arenamontanus
Re: Blowing up the Sun
No, there doesn't seem to be any artificial gravity technology known by humans. The habitats get it by rotating.
There is a brief mention in a text box for Locus (I think) where artificial black holes made by the local bad scientist are mentioned, but that might be the speaker exaggerating a bit. As far as I know, the only thing remotely like antigravity is the fixors in Gatecrashing.
But if you just convert that energy into lasers you have a great doomsday weapon anyway. Same logic: the weapon is distributed across billions of little stations, and destroying a few will not have any effect.
If you could make small artificial black holes, then they would be very useful for destroying planets. Just dump one into the core and wait (exactly how long is tricky to calculate due to the interplay of gravity, plasma dynamics and radiation pressure; I have tried: answers range from hours to eons). An imploding planet is bad for the neighbourhood too, since a fraction of it gets turned into x-rays during the implosion.
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Tue, 2011-08-09 02:39
#3
rfmcdonald
Re: Blowing up the Sun
The prototype for this might be David Brin's Earth, where hostile aliens responded to the first radio transmissions of Marconi et al by dispatching a micro black hole to Earth to eat up the planet before the locals could leave their home.
What sort of experimentation with singularities is there? I know of the experiment mentioned in the habitat in the Jovian Trojans, but is that it?
Spoiler: Highlight to view
What actually happened is that when humans found the black hole, it was manipulated via gravity radiation to not only achieve a viable orbit around the Earth's core--i.e. passing through areas of lower density so that it would lose mass--but to produce coherent gravitational beams capable of space launch and weapons use.
Tue, 2011-08-09 12:39
#4
Arenamontanus
Re: Blowing up the Sun
The problem is radiation balance: the black hole attracts stuff, which partially gets turned into energy while falling in. This energy creates a pretty big radiation pressure, counteracting the gravity. Exactly how this plays out seems to be *messy*: the accretion might be nice and spherical (in which case even pretty heavy black holes will not gain mass fast), or it might get turbulent and produce complex flows, in which case things go much faster.
In Earth the black-hole makers knew what they were doing.
I think that's it, and that is likely not entirely canon. But for a xrisk, this tech is of course really interesting. Singularity making devices are likely near the top of the Firewall "No Way!" list, and anybody working on them will get a visit from the player characters.
Here is a fun scenario: an autonomist physics research collective has a theoretical breakthrough, and the Prometheans realize that the implications include a fairly easy way of making singularities. Total destruction of the solar system within 5 years is predicted if the tech gets discovered. So the sentinels are sent to stop the researchers. They have of course already published their papers online, the real challenge is to make sure nobody ever reads them seriously again. How to discredit them, or lead them along a false avenue of research?
Meanwhile the Prometheans can't keep their fingers away from the singularity generator tech. They want to test it far away, so they set up a gatecrashing expedition with equipment that will try triggering a black hole and measure relevant data. Of course, the gatecrashers (the PCs?) don't know what their equipment is going to do. So when things start happening they have little clue... and then the gate home starts malfunctioning due to the presence of the growing singularity. However, they might have a secret ally in the form of the Promethean delta fork agent who really wants to bring the new data home... or in the form of the Ozma infiltrator who was sent to steal the data.
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Wed, 2011-08-17 03:39
#5
BlackJaw
Re: Blowing up the Sun
Iron Bomb The Sun...
It's actually the major driving plot point (and not really a spoiler) of the Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise. In that book, some massively complex AI time traveling pseudo-god manipulates time and space to put the center of a sun into a pocket dimension with alternate physical rules and time scale, turning it into metal, and then drops it back into the center of the sun it was plucked from more or less exactly when it was removed... resulting in bad times for many in the solar system. By Eclipse Phase standards, this would be something the ETI might be able to do, and if it did so, humanity is immediately screwed. Not really anything they could do to stop it, so not really much drama in using it in game.
Strange Matter Apocalypse
A more accessible to the (trans)humans of Eclipse Phase concept is the creation of Negatively Charged Stranglets. If introduced to a planet, they would reduce it to a warm goo of dense strange quarks in a disturbingly short period of time. Worse, if introduced to the sun, it would eventually turn it into a Strange Quark Star, and likely wipe out every bit of "standard" mater in the solar system along the way. This crazy idea could be (within game margins of error) achieved using massive particle accelerators, like those found in the anti-matter factories on mercury, or by the largest accelerator in the solar system: which is in orbit over the North Pole of Titan and is run by the Titanian University. The creation and spread of such materials might be difficult to use in game play, as it's similar to Anti-matter in it's requirement of magnetic true-vacuum containment, but a sample of the stuff in the wrong hands is a serious threat, and if used, it replicates.
I had a TITAN AI system hijack the Titanian university accelerator in my game, and the players had to think fast to get the strange quark "infected" sections cut out of the rings and launched into space (outside the ecliptic) before it could impact something and spread to larger chunk of mass. Firewall is still watching it leave the system with much concern. If it falls back into the gravity well toward a planet or sun, it's a true X-risk... which makes it a heck of a target.
For the record, there are people that think the LHC could actually cause this kind of problem in real life, although not everyone even thinks that strange mater is actually stable enough to cause a massive conversion of normal mater, and point to the lack of observed small quark stars. If this stuff exists and is stable, in theory, we should see stars made of it else where in the observable universe... Or at least that's my understanding of it.
Wed, 2011-08-17 10:29
#6
Arenamontanus
Re: Blowing up the Sun
Actually, you could probably make use of it for a campaign. First, gatecrashers would find themselves unexpectedly separated from Earth, their QE comms suddenly unresponsive (a very bad sign). A while later the gates would come online again (they seem to be pretty much indestructable) and cautious explorers would find the lethal destruction... (several gates just orbiting in free space around a young neutron star, lots of radiation, streaks of volatiles where the planets were). The different exoplanet crews are the only survivors: how do they link up? What to do now?
It is not entirely certain everybody in the solar system would be killed by a supernova. If you are in the shadow of Jupiter or another giant planet you are safe from much of the initial radiation pulse, and the neutrinos may have a short lethal radius (I have seen papers arguing lightyears, but also estimates of just 1 AU). Supernova remnants radiate a lot, but are not much worse than an ongoing very big solar flare - a lot of habitats can weather this. So I would think at least synthmorphs that quickly burrow deep in a jovian moon (Europa divers?) would have a chance.
And it is a *marvellous* McGuffin!
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Wed, 2011-08-17 14:18
#7
jackgraham
Re: Blowing up the Sun
Physicists have already replicated some of the properties of black holes in laboratory settings.
I leave it to individual GMs whether someone is really doing this in a hab module in Locus, or the character talking about it was just employing hyperbole, however.
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J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
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