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sciencespies · 3 years

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Simulations reveal the most likely place for a galactic civilization in the Milky Way

https://sciencespies.com/space/simulations-reveal-the-most-likely-place-for-a-galactic-civilization-in-the-milky-way/

Simulations reveal the most likely place for a galactic civilization in the Milky Way

The Milky Way is 13 billion years old. Some of our galaxy’s oldest stars were born near the beginning of the Universe itself. During all these eons of time, we know at least one technological civilization has been born – us!

But if the galaxy is so ancient, and we know it can create life, why haven’t we heard from anybody else?

If another civilization was just 0.1 percent of the galaxy’s age older than we are, they would be millions of years further along than us and presumably more advanced. If we are already on the cusp of sending life to other worlds, shouldn’t the Milky Way be teeming with alien ships and colonies by now?

Maybe. But it’s also possible that we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Recent computer simulations by Jason T. Wright et al. suggest that the best place to look for ancient space-faring civilizations might be the core of the galaxy, a relatively unexplored target in the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

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Above: Animation showing the settlement of the galaxy. White points are unsettled stars, magenta spheres are settled stars, and white cubes represent a settlement ship in transit. The spiral structure formed is due to galactic shear as the settlement wave expands. Once the Galaxy’s center is reached, the rate of colonization increases dramatically. (Credit: Wright et al.)

The Churn

Older mathematical models of space colonization have tried to determine the time required for a civilization to spread throughout the Milky Way. Given the size of the Milky Way, wide-scale galactic colonization could take longer than the age of the galaxy itself.

However, a unique feature of this new simulation is its accounting for the motion of the galaxy’s stars. The Milky Way is not static, as assumed in prior models, rather it is a churning swirling mass. Colonization vessels or probes would be flying among stars that are themselves in motion. The new simulation reveals that stellar motion aids in colonization contributing a diffusing effect to the spread of a civilization.

The simulation is based on previous research by Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback et al. which proposed that a hypothetical civilization could spread at sub-light speeds through a moving galaxy. The simulation assumes a civilization using ships travelling at velocities comparable to our own spacecraft (about 30 km/s).

When a ship arrives at a virtual habitable world in the simulation, the world is considered a colony and can itself launch another craft every 100,000 years if another uninhabited world is in range.

Simulated space craft range is 10 light years with maximum travel duration of 300,000 years. Technology from a virtual colony was set to last 100 million years before dying out with the opportunity to be resettled should another colony drift into range by galactic motion.

The results are dramatic. The galaxy’s rotation generates a wave or “front” of colonization. Once the front reaches the galactic core, the core’s density catalyzes a rapid increase in the rate of colonization. Even with very conservative limits placed on the speed of the space craft, a majority of the galaxy could be colonized in less than a billion years – a fraction of its total age.

Line of Sight

The simulation’s results reaffirm past proposals by Vishal Gajjar et al. to search the galactic center for signs of life. Not only can the center of the galaxy be rapidly colonized, but also efficiently scanned for technology.

We have a direct line of sight to the galaxy’s center which encompasses the densest region of space relative to us. And since the galaxy formed from the inside out, the center is filled with older planets which provide more time for life to evolve.

The center also serves as a logical place to “talk” to and from – a central focal point of the galaxy. If you wanted to get a signal out to the rest of the galaxy, you could do so from the center to blanket the disk of the Milky Way. Likewise, if you wanted to find a signal, you might look to that same center.

Gajjar et al. also hypothesize that an advanced civilization may be capable of tapping into the energy of the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole to power a galaxy-wide signal beacon. Talk about a powerful “hello!”

A view toward the galaxy’s center from Earth captured in the Mojave Desert. (Matthew Cimone)

Then Why so Quiet?

Still, none of this answers the previous question – where are they? In fact, the speed at which the galaxy could be colonized complicates why we haven’t heard from anybody.

Furthermore, Caroll-Nellenback et al. also note that during colonization, an advanced civilization might develop new propulsion technologies shortening the time needed to spread. And yet, preliminary radio scans of the galactic core haven’t revealed any signals.

Perhaps the silence itself is an answer. The galaxy is so old with so much time available for life to spread that some believe the silence dooms any hope of meeting anybody.

But there is still hope!

The simulation shows it’s possible that some parts of the galaxy are never settled despite eons of time. It’s a matter of efficiency. Remember, you want to colonize at the shortest possible ranges.

As time passes, some colonies die out and are lost perhaps from resource exhaustion or cataclysmic event. Rather than reach farther out into space, colonies choose to reinhabit a dead colony at closer range.

Clusters of inhabited colonies form surrounded by uninhabited planets that are never colonized. A “steady state” is achieved where regions of the Milky Way’s habitable worlds are simply too inefficient to colonize.

There are other possibilities to explain the silence as well. Perhaps long-lived civilizations are governed by sustainability to grow more slowly than anticipated. If there are multiple colonizing civilizations perhaps they are competing for resources or keep a distance from each other.

Perhaps civilizations take care to not interfere with inhabited planets such as ours (similar to the Prime Directive in Star Trek) or are cautious of potential biological incompatibilities faced on other worlds. All these possibilities may explain why we have yet to meet anyone… unless we already have… no, seriously.

A Buried Past

Carroll-Nellenback et al. consider a “temporal horizon” – a point in history beyond which Earth would no longer retain evidence of previous colonization. Let’s say, for example, a galactic alien civilization landed on Earth billions of years ago, lived thousands of years, then died off.

After all this time, virtually no evidence would remain of their presence. So “we” haven’t met an alien civilization, but it’s possible Earth itself has.

The simulation shows that, given our location in the galaxy, there is an 89 percent likelihood that at least a million years could pass without visits from interstellar ships – potentially enough time to erase signs of previous colonization.

The point is that between the galaxy being completely colonized, or being completely empty, the simulation demonstrates that there can be middle grounds – valid responses to the silence which still leave room for technological extraterrestrial life even without contact.

Globular Life?

While the center of the galaxy is an ideal future realm for SETI research, there are other regions of the galaxy which mimic the same favorable conditions as the center – globular clusters.

Globular clusters (GC) are ancient massive collections of stars orbiting about the center of the galaxy at distances of tens of thousands of light years. Relics from a period of intense star formation catalyzed by galaxy mergers, there are about 150 known GCs in the Milky Way ranging from 10-13 billion years old.

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GCs are incredibly dense with stars much closer to each other on average than found in the disk of the Milky Way. When considering interstellar travel or communication, we are typically talking about millennia.

However, a civilization within a GC would experience travel time between stars on the order of just a few years with communication times of months or even weeks. Problem is that the densities of GCs may negatively impact planet formation as well as the orbital stability of planets.

R. Di Stefano and A. Ray calculate what they call a “GC habitable zone”. We generally use the term “habitable zone” to describe the distance a planet needs to orbit a star to maintain temperatures for liquid water. Earth resides in the habitable zone of the Sun (good thing for us). Rather than a 2 dimensional radius like the orbit of a planet, a GC habitable zone is a three dimensional shell orbiting around the center of the cluster itself.

The inner part of the shell’s thickness begins where the GC density drops to where solar systems can survive the gravitational interference of nearby stars. The gravity of a nearby star might pull apart planetary dust rings disrupting the creation of planets. Another star passing near a system could also eject a planet from its parent star.

The outer edge of the shell’s thickness is defined by where the density becomes so low that the average distance between stars is greater than 10,000 AU (astronomical units, representing Earth’s distance from the Sun at about 150,000 km). 10,000 AU is equal to about 2 light months.

After this point, the advantages of being in the cluster – namely the short travel and communication times to neighboring stars – diminish. The zone encompassed by the shell is what Di Stefano and Ray call the GC “sweet spot” for colonization – star systems that are close together facilitating quick travel/communication but not so close that they tear each other’s systems apart.

We want the GC sweet spot to encompass mainly lower mass stars which live the longest. Serendipitously, low mass stars also have the smallest radius solar habitable zones. The closer a planet orbits its parent star the less likely it is of being torn away by another star.

Globular cluster M13. (Howard Trottier/SFU Trottier Observatory)

GCs also experience a phenomenon called “mass segregation” where the most massive stars – and therefore the least favorable to habitability in the cluster – find themselves gravitationally drawn toward the center. This segregation then naturally sorts the cluster from least to best choice systems from core to periphery.

The results are favorable. In a hypothetical GC approaching 100,000 solar masses, the sweet spot encompasses 40 percent of G stars (yellow dwarfs like our own Sun) and 15 percent of K and M stars (orange and red dwarfs) in the cluster. That’s a lot of stars.

There is even the possibility that planets which have been ejected from systems could still host a civilization because of the combined ambient energy the planet receives from all the stars in the cluster – especially if the civilization has advanced solar energy capture technology. A free-floating world of space aliens.

Just throwing out numbers, Di Stefano and Ray suggest that even if only 10 percent of GC stars have habitable planets, 1 percent of those support intelligent life, and 1 percent of those host a communicating civilization, at least one communicating civilization could exist in every GC in the Milky Way.

Similar variables assigned to the Milky Way itself – with far lower stellar density – would result in… one communicating civilization (probably us). Changing the percentages to be slightly less conservative would mean more civilizations could exist in the diffuse disk but would be separated by massive distances upwards of 300 light years.

If you were located in a GC, you may try to communicate with the distant disk of the Milky Way. We, unfortunately, have yet to find any direct evidence that planets even exist in GCs. Our techniques for finding exoplanets are impaired by the distance to and densities of GCs. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility. If a civilization does exist in a GC, with quick access to thousands of stars, Di Stefano and Ray say the civilization would essentially be “immortal.”

We’ve actually beamed a message to a GC – the beautiful M13 Hercules globular cluster. Located in the constellation of Hercules, the cluster is 22,000 light years away, 145 light years in diameter, and is comprised of about 100,000 stars.

In 1974, a message was sent to M13 from the Arecibo radio telescope (RIP). The message contained the numbers 1 to 10, chemical compounds of DNA, a graphic figure of a human, a graphic of the solar system, and a graphic of the radio telescope itself. Total broadcast time was 3 minutes. Still has a few thousand years to get there.

Likely the low resolution message won’t be discernible by the time it arrives at M13. But perhaps one day we will make contact with a galaxy-spanning civilization. Or, perhaps WE will become a galaxy-spanning civilization. For that story, I’m eagerly awaiting the upcoming screen adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation series!

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

#Space

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spacecrone · 4 years

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Sorry, Cassandra.

So, it's definite then

It's written in the stars, darlings

Everything must come to an end - Susanne Sundfør

I first learned about the climate crisis in 2008, as an undergrad at Hunter College, in a class called The History and Science of Climate Change. For the next decade I would struggle with how to process and act on the scientific paradigm shift climate change required: that human activity could disrupt the climate system and create a planetary ecosystem shift making Earth uninhabitable to human life. I became a climate justice activist and attempted to work directly on The Problem which was actually, as philosopher Timothy Morton writes, a hyperobject, something so systemic and enormous in size and scope as to be almost unintelligible to human awareness. I’ve cycled through probably every single response a person could have to this knowledge, despair, ecstasy, rage, hope. I’ve landed somewhere close to what I might call engaged bewilderment. For me, his particular locale has a soundtrack, and it’s Susanne Sundfør’s cinematic dance dystopia Ten Love Songs, an album that tells a story of love and loss in the Anthropocene. Sundfør is a sonic death doula for the Neoliberal project, with a uniquely Scandinavian version of bleak optimism. To truly grapple with this time of escalating transition, we need to really face what is, not what we hope or fear will be, but what is actually happening. A throbbing beat with shimmering synths around which to orient your dancing mortal envelope can’t hurt.

Susanne Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs was released a few days after Valentine’s Day in February of 2015, six months after I had been organizing Buddhists and meditators for the Peoples Climate March. I was already a fan, having first heard her voice as part of her collaboration with dreamy synth-pop outfit m83 on the Oblivion soundtrack. Oblivion was visually striking but felt like a long music video. The soaring synths and Sundfør’s powerful voice drove the plot more than the acting, though I loved how Andrea Riseborough played the tragic character Vika, whose story could have been more central to the plot but was sidelined for a traditional Tom Cruise romantic centerpiece. But since the movie was almost proud of its style over investment in substance, the music stood out. The soundscapes were as expansive as the green-screened vistas of 2077 in the movie. It was just nostalgic enough while also feeling totally new, a paradox encapsulated in the name of m83’s similarly wistful and sweeping Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. I am not exempt from taking comfort in style that signifies a previous era, and I am also not alone in it. It’s a huge industry, and while the MAGA-style yearning for a previous era is one manifestation, maybe there are ways to acknowledge culture as cyclical in a way that doesn’t sacrifice traditional knowledge to some imagined myth of perpetual progress.

When Ten Love Songs came out the following year, I listened to it on repeat for days. Sundfør seemed to have absorbed the music-driven sci-fi into a concept album, with m83 providing her with a whole new panopoly of sounds at her disposal. Like Oblivion, Ten Love Songs told the story of a future dystopia with high speed chases, nihilistic pleasure-seeking and operatic decadence against a backdrop of technocratic inequality. It mixed electro-pop with chamber music and I listened to it on a Greyhound ride to Atlantic City in the middle of snowy February. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, that a full album was a sort of soundtrack to my own life, which I could experience as cinematic in some way while the music was playing. This situated me in my own story, of studying climate change as an undergrad and graduating into a financial collapse, working as a personal assistant to an author writing about ecological collapse and ritual use of psychedelics, to joining a Buddhist community and organizing spiritual activists around climate justice.

Ten Love Songs is a breakup album, with lyrics telling of endings and running out of time. But it didn’t read to me as an album about a single human romantic relationship coming to an end. It felt like a series of vignettes about the planet and its ecosphere breaking up with us, all of us. People. Some songs like Accelerate, one of the album’s singles, throb in an anthem to nihilistic numbness and speeding up into a catastrophe that feels inevitable. Fade Away is a bit lighter, tonally and lyrically, (and if you listen, please note the exquisitely perfect placement of what sounds like a toaster “ding!”), but is still about fading away, falling apart. The way the songs seem to drive a narrative of anthropocenic collapse built on science fiction film scores, the combination of orchestra and techno-pop, absolutely draws on Sundfør’s experience collaborating with m83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which itself combined Anthony Gonzalez’s love for the adult-scripted teen dramas of his own 80’s adolescence. In Ten Love Songs, Sundfør takes what she learned from this collaboration and scores not a movie but a life experience of living through ecological collapse and all of the heartbreak and desire that erupts in a time when everything seems so close to the knife’s edge.

I am reminded of another Scandinavian dance album that was extremely danceable yet harbored within it a sense of foreboding. The Visitors, ABBA’s eighth studio album, was considered their venture into more mature and complex music. The two couples who comprised the band had divorced the year before it was released, and the entire atmosphere of the album is paranoid, gloomy, and tense. The cover shows the four musicians, on opposite sides of a dark room, ignoring each other. Each song is melancholy and strange in its own way, unique for a pop ensemble like Abba. One song in particular showcases their ability to use an archetype of narrative tragedy and prophesy to tell the story of regret. Cassandra is sung from the perspective of those who didn’t heed the woman cursed by Zeus to foretell the future but never be believed.

I have always considered myself a pretty big Abba fan, something my high school choir instructor thought was riotously funny. I was born in the 80’s and nobody in my family liked disco, so I seemed like something of an anachronism. But pop music, especially synth-oriented pop, has always felt like a brain massage to me. It could get my inner motor moving when I felt utterly collapsed in resignation to the scary chaos of my early life. But I only discovered the song Cassandra in 2017, while giving The Visitors a full listen. It felt like I had never heard the song before, though, as a fan I must have. But something about 2015 made the song stand out more. It starts with piano, soft tambourine, and the ambient sound of a harbor. It has a coastal Mediterranean vibe, as some Abba songs do, foreshadowing Cassandra’s removal from her home city, an event she foretold but could not get anyone to believe. It’s a farewell song of regret, echoing the regret the members of Abba felt about their own breakups.

We feel so full of promise at the dawn of a new relationship. Only after the split can we look back and say we saw the fissures in the bond. The signs were there. Why did we ignore them? This happens on an individual level but the Cassandra paradox is an archetype that climate scientists and journalists are very familiar with. This particular Abba song, and the Visitors album overall, uses this archetype to tell the story of a breakup in retrospect. With climate change, the warnings have been there, even before science discovered the rising carbon in the atmosphere. Indigenous peoples have been warning of ecological collapse since colonization began. Because of white supremacy and an unwavering belief in “progress,” perpetual economic and technological development and growth, warnings from any source but especially marginalized sources have been noise to those who benefit from that perpetual growth model and from white supremacy itself. Is there a way to undo the Cassandra curse and render warnings signal BEFORE some major event turns us all into the chorus from Abba’s song, singing “some of us wanted- but none of us could-- listen to words of warning?” Composer Pauline Oliveros called listening a radical act. It is especially so when we listen actively to the sounds and signals of those we would otherwise overlook.

When I look back at my life in the time that Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs and m83’s movie music seems nostalgic for, the late 1980’s in New Jersey, I was a child with deeply dissociative and escapist tendencies, which helped me survive unresolved grief, loss, and chaos. I recognize my love for Abba’s hypnotic synth music as a surrendering to the precise and driving rhythm of an all-encompassing sound experience. I also see how my early life prepared me to be sensitized to the story climate science was telling when I finally discovered it in 2008. I had already grown up with Save the Whales assemblies and poster-making contests, with a heavy emphasis on cutting six-pack rings so that sea life would not be strangled to death. I knew what it was like to see something terrible happening all around you and to feel powerless to stop it, because of the way my parents seemed incapable of and unsupported in their acting out their own traumatic dysregulation. Wounds, unable to heal, sucking other people into the abyss. I escaped through reading science fiction, listening to music like Abba and Aphex Twin loud enough to rattle my bones. I wanted to overwhelm my own dysregulated nervous system. I dreamed of solitude on other planets, sweeping grey vistas, being the protagonist of my own story where nothing ever hurt because ice ran through my veins and the fjords around me. My home planet was dying, and nobody could hear those of us screaming into the wind about it.

Ten Love Songs woke up that lost cosmic child who had banished herself to another solar system. Songs of decadence, songs of endings, songs of loss. Though that album was not overtly about climate change, Sundfør did talk about ecological collapse in interviews for her radically different follow-up album Music For People In Trouble. After the success of Ten Love Songs, Sundfør chose to travel to places that she said “might not be around much longer” in order to chronicle the loss of the biosphere for her new album. It is more expressly and urgently about the current global political moment, but the seeds for those themes were present and in my opinion much more potent in the poppier album. But maybe that’s the escapist in me.

The old forms that brought us to this point are in need of end-of-life care. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal theocratic nationalism, neoliberalism, they all need death doulas. Escapism makes sense in response to traumatic stimulus, and for many of us it may have helped us survive difficult circumstances. But if we are to face what it means to be alive on this planet at this moment, we might be here to be present to and help facilitate and ease the process of putting these systems to rest. And maybe this work is not at odds with a dance party. The ability to be visionary about shared alternatives to these dying systems is not inherently escapist, when we are willing to take the steps together to live into those new stories. What would happen if cursed Cassandras, instead of pleading with existing power structures to heed warnings that sound like noise to them, turned to each other to restore the civic body through listening, through bearing witness to each others unacknowledged and thwarted grief over losses unacknowledged by those same systems of coercive power?

Engaged bewilderment means my version of hope, informed by Rebecca Solnit’s work on the topic, comes from the acceptance that things will happen that I could never have imagined possible. Climate change is happening and there are certain scientific certainties built into that trajectory. Some of it is written in the stars. But as with any dynamic system change, we do not know exactly how it will all shake out. These unknowns can be sources of fear and despair, but there is also the possibility for agency, choice and experimentation. The trajectory of my individual life was always going to end in death. Does that make it a failure? Or does it render each choice and engagement of movement towards the unknown an ecstatic act? As the old forms collapse, no need to apologize to the oracles. At this point they are dancing, and hope you’ll join.

#susanne sundfør #abba #anthropocene #hope #climate crisis #climate change #ecological collapse #scandinavian music #dystopia #utopia

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kita-lavellan · 5 years

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2019 Writer’s Round-Up

I was tagged by both @pikapeppa and @elveny so I figured I’d better put some effort in and try to figure this out. It’s not going to be easy since I have my writings scattered everywhere, including handwritten snippets, but I’ll give it my best shot!

Word Count

I can only really get an approximate number for this since, as I mentioned, my writing is scattered all over. Having said that, I’ve gone through my Googledocs going back to January, checked 4TheWords, double-checked what I’ve posted on AO3, and skimmed my last 3 months of Tumblr Posts, and totally ignored my handwritten stuff (I’m not word-counting that for you :p).

After dividing the word counts from my collaborative Original Fiction pieces by 2, and adding it all together with the help of a spreadsheet...

2019 Total Wordcount: 127,565

Number of Smut Scenes

Three.

A low number for me, but I’ve been writing a lot of original fiction that hasn’t centred around the topic.

New Things I’ve Tried This Year

Science Fiction!

I’m usually a strictly Fantasy writer in my original works, but @skekiss challenged me to try my hand at some Sci-Fi, and not only was it surprisingly fun, but it also didn’t turn out terribly, so I might do some more of that next year.

Favourite Thing I’ve Written This Year

My Favourite piece of Original Fiction was that Science Fiction piece my friend challenged me to do. It still doesn’t have a title, but here’s a snippet...

In the year 2421, the colonization of Mars finally became more than a simple societal need to expand, it also became a financially viable option for the over-crowded people of Earth.

The ship, destined to terraform Mars into a planet that humans could not only live on, but thrive upon, was named ‘The Scout’, and set out for the red planet in the year 2436, from a launchpad that had been constructed in international waters.

The Project was funded by nations from across Earth, and ‘The Scout’ was outfitted with the most advanced technology from all of the participating countries.

It was designed to be capable of terraforming Mars into a state that would allow for the development of permanent settlements in a sustainable manner, and construction was completed in under ten years.

The subsequent five years between it’s completed construction and the eventual launch date was spent finding and training a crew of over 3,000 officers, medical staff, scientists, and civilians from all walks of life so that they would be fully prepared for the challenges ahead.

It was a joyous and celebrated day when ‘The Scout’ launched from Earth, it’s state of the art quantum drive meant that travel to Mars would take the ship only sixty days.

Somewhere along their journey between the two planets, ‘The Scout’ encountered the sudden creation of a wormhole close enough to them to disrupt the ship’s controls and, unable to steer away from the pull of the forming singularity, the ship was pulled inside.

By chance, the addition of quantum energy from the ship’s drive core to the forming wormhole stabilised its throat long enough for ‘The Scout’ to emerge from the other side before it collapsed upon itself, stranding ‘The Scout’ and all three thousand souls in an unknown galaxy...

“Kelsey!”

The shout of her name drew her golden-brown eyes from the presentation, complete with an interactive holographic projection, to her employer.

He looked angry, she noticed, which wasn’t surprising really since he’d sent her to get fresh stock from the workshop an hour ago.

“Branner-”

“What do you think you’re doing, girl!?” he snapped as he used his broad shoulders and tall frame to force his way between crowds of early morning shoppers and over to where she was standing.

“Umm…” Kelsey turned her eyes back to the presentation for a moment, the display had continued to explain about ‘The Scout’s’ settlement on an uninhabited planet with permission from the other races of the odd galaxy they’d found themselves in.

The young children were chasing holographic stars and barely paying any attention to their own history, their supervising teacher looked ready to tear her own hair out, and Kelsey turned back to Branner guiltily.

“Nothing?”

He glared at her for a long moment, his own gaze flicking to the presentation and his eyes narrowing.

“Get those ship parts back to the stall, I’ll be along in a minute,” he growled, and Kelsey nodded, moving quickly past him and dodging the smack he aimed at the back of her head with practised ease.

As for fanfiction... I think my Favourite piece of 2019 is probably “Fascinating”. A little Solavellan one-shot I did about my favourite flirt with the bald elf.

Fascinating can be found here

Favourite Fic I’ve Read This Year

Asking the tough questions now... hmm. I do even less reading than I do writing when my depression flares up, but I’m gonna scour my AO3 for my top 3 of the year...

In no particular order;

1) Begin Again by Anthropasaurus A recent find of mine. There are only two chapters, but AO3 says I’ve visited this fic 7 times, so that should tell you how invested I am already. It looks like it’s going to be interesting and clever, so I’m excited to see where this one goes. Rating: M Pairing: Solas/Lavellan Tropes or Tags: Time-travel, Self Harm/Suicide mention, Angst, Slowburn, Fixit-Fic. Summary: “There’s a small moment, as you’re harvesting a person when you feel their soul almost literally in your hands. All you would need to do is cast your spell right at that moment. We know where my body and Solas were at that time. It’s the only chance we have Dorian.” The years following the Exalted Council had not been kind to Raven or Dorian. Years of thwarting Solas at every turn took everything they and what few allies still survived had. They all knew the end was drawing near and if they didn’t act fast, southern Thedas would fall. But not even Solas could have foreseen what would happen when the Veil fell. Her memories of Redcliffe paled in comparison to the atrocities that now spread across the land. The Evanuris were free and roamed the lands like a plague. Whatever plans Solas had had failed. It had been weeks since she had seen him on the edges of her dreams. She feared the worst.

2) Spark of Hope Series by Elveny I don’t read series often, I like all the story in one place, but Elveny’s Lyssa/Solas story just sucks you in, and you’re clicking “Next Chapter/Next Story” without even realising it until you’ve read the whole thing in one night and are DESPERATELY left wanting for more. *coughs awkwardly* It’s not finished, but there are 147,000 words (approximately) over 5 stories, and a new one coming sometime in 2020, so it’s absolutely worth reading. Rating: E Pairing: Solas/Lavellan Tropes or Tags: Anxiety/Panic Attacks, Emotional Hurt, Break Up, Prequel Story Included. Summary: Everything has gone wrong. Corypheus has opened the orb and the magic did not return to Solas. A giant Breach is throbbing in the air, threatening the whole of Thedas before he is powerful enough to do what he set out to do. Instead of following his plans, he finds himself in Haven, caring for an unconscious elven woman whose palm sizzles with green magic... his magic. He needs to keep her alive if he wants any chance to get it back. But then... she wakes.

3) Elastic Heart by cedarmoons I’ve read this half a dozen times, and the end of the first chapter STILL makes my heart stop >.< This is the fic that convinced me there were actually good Solavellan Writers hiding out there. I’ve found many since then, but this was my launchpad moment. Rating: E Pairing: Solas/Lavellan Tropes or Tags: None Summary: For the DA Kinkmeme. After making love to Lavellan, Solas accidentally tells her his identity.

Writing Goals for 2020

At least, an easy question! Write More. I’ve had a rough year for writing with many depression flare-ups. I’m hoping that 2020 I can get back to a more regular schedule, starting with a whole day of it on Jan 1st, I’ve cleared my schedule to get some writing time in and have my fingers crossed that it will be a good starting point for the rest of the year.

Thank you’s and Tagging...

Firstly, thank you PikkaPeppa and Elveny for tagging me! I’ve written more this year than I thought I had, and that’s been a lovely surprise, and a bit of a mood boost too. Thank you @skekiss for getting me into Tumblr. I’m not sure if I should thank you for this since it’s EATING my life, but regardless, I’ve met some fun people here in the last three months. Also, Thank You to @the-solavellan-archive for giving me a place to hang out, and share my Solavellan works, and for welcoming me with open arms ^_^

Now to tag people who may want to take part in this...

@rivainisomniari, @lyrium-lavellan, @solas-disapproves, @cornfedcryptid, @skekiss, @faerieavalon, @ranawaytothedas

If you feel like doing this and I’ve not tagged you, feel free, and @ me so I can be nosey! :D

#Not Dragon Age #Sort of Dragon Age #Writing #Writing Meme #About Me #Real Life #2019 Writer's Round-up #2019 Writer's Round Up #2019 Writer's Roundup #About Ari #About Arista #About Arista Holmes

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terrablaze514 · 5 years

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Space Colonization beyond the Earth Sphere

Meta by AngelT (published in Rhythm Generation Zine, 2019)

Disclaimer: No money is made in the research and production of this presentation. This was part of a team-based project. The contents presented in this essay are inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, which is the sole property of Sotsu, Sunrise and their affiliates. Also, an appreciation for the Universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere; the science of astronomy is beautiful.

Most of us who grew up back in the day recall witnessing space stations, satellites and colonies on our television screens. We’ve seen human life preserved beyond the Earth’s sphere in space colonies. Our beloved characters, including The Mad Five and members of The Alliance, have acquainted themselves with continuing the trend of political stability, health and wellness, education, housing, and industry—miles away from our planet amidst warfare. Today, scientists are researching the possibility of colonizing the Solar System, beyond Earth and the Moon.[1]

Predicting Colonization in CE 2030

During the events of the television series, we see that a lunar station exists. This is a distinct possibility for Earth in the coming years, and it’s not hard to imagine small businesses and corporations operating from there in the future. Prior to launching the official project, however, extensive training and preparatory exercises would be a requirement. Relocating to the Moon comes with risks, considering the physical attributes of the location. Even so, there’s a good chance humans will one day be able to survive for extended durations in space. Scientists and researchers today are working towards opening the doors of opportunity. But successful expansion into the solar system has everything to do with timing, how well we can put knowledge into practice, and overcoming challenges such as limited funding, support from governments and health risks associated with living off of Earth.

Weighing the Odds: Inner Space

Mercury would be fun (imagine seeing your next birthday every 88 Earth days). Unfortunately, that will require a lifetime supply of sunblock and water—both of which will be hard to maintain on-planet. Mercury’s orbit is closest to the Sun, where it experiences a stronger gravitational pull from the sun than other planets in the solar system. In addition, although a year is significantly shorter than on Earth, Mercury’s days last significantly longer (roughly 176 Earth days) due to its slow rotation. Combined with the naturally shorter year, colonists on Mercury would experience a quicker aging process compared to life as we know it on Earth. The proximity to the sun would require measures to be taken to limit sun exposure, and extreme fluctuations in temperatures—made worse by the lack of an atmosphere which would have otherwise helped regulate them—make Mercury less than ideal for human colonization.

Venus is the same size as Earth and its orbit is within the “habitable zone,” a safe enough distance from the sun; however, like Mercury, Venus has a significantly longer day (roughly 116.75 Earth days) and has a shorter year (almost 225 Earth days) which will cause similar stresses on any colonists looking to find a home on-planet. Venus’s atmosphere is not only incredibly toxic but also extremely dense with a surface pressure of nearly 92 times that of Earth’s. This dense atmosphere also means that the planet is hotter than Mercury (surprise!) limiting its chances of being particularly hospitable to humans. For these reasons, it’s best to keep would-be colonizers off-planet. Unfortunately, Venus also has no known moons, so using satellites as was done with Earth’s moon isn’t an available alternative. Therefore, pursuing a space colony project for Venus isn’t recommended.

Mars has been a hot topic for NASA and its affiliates since the late 1970s. Based on results from space probes that captured the red planet’s features, there’s a thin line of similarities to Earth: what many assume to be waterways, ground that is similar to Earth’s soil, and glaciers at the poles. Mars’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, present an opportunity for additional lunar bases, which will benefit a population who relocates to Mars by providing additional space for industry, employment, and lodging. However, anyone who wishes to relocate to the planet should also expect two seasons—Summer and Winter—until the planet can be properly terraformed with an atmosphere able to support human life.

Weighing the Odds: Outer Space

Jupiter is a gaseous planet, the biggest in the solar system, and its volatile beauty is due to the multitude of storms travelling across its surface (similar to what we know as tornadoes and hurricanes). Such a volatile surface would deter on-planet colonization. But if researchers were to approach colonization from a practical standpoint, there’s a good chance lunar bases could be built on one of Jupiter’s moons. The moon Europa, for instance, has garnered attention from astronomers due to the possibility that it could support life if conditions were right. There is a serious threat of radiation from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which is 20,000 times stronger than that of Earth’s, that poses serious challenges for colonizing both the planet and the moons.

Saturn, another gas giant, presents similar challenges, and humans are better served by colonizing one of its sixty-two moons instead. Protection from radiation will be needed. One of the best routes to carry out this mission is on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which is a ball of ice, with water. Titan’s icy layer can protect from the Sun’s rays and drilling the surface will intrigue anyone familiar with mermaids and Atlantis. Although Titan’s air pressure would allow someone to walk the surface without a spacesuit, the atmosphere is low in oxygen compared to Earth’s own and it is bitterly cold. To colonize it, ongoing research and developing technologies will help. Wearing specialized clothes that have the same attributes as space blankets, earbuds that protect the eardrum (in the middle ear) from shifting due to air pressure changes, and architecture designed for underwater environments is a starting point.

Uranus, another gas giant, does not have a breathable atmosphere, consisting primarily of hydrogen (outer layer) and helium. This planet is also the coldest in the entire Solar System, which is roughly -216°C. Unfortunately, the moons of Uranus are pure ice, with intolerable temperatures below -200°C. Although Miranda has various landscapes similar to Earth’s, colonization cannot currently happen. It will take several decades for engineers and scientists to come up with some alternatives: Heated clothing, mirrors that support solar energy, and SMART technology that supports temperature control. A terraforming project also needs to be in effect. Otherwise, living near Uranus is not recommended.

During the early 1990s, Neptune had a Great Dark Spot where powerful wind storms were consistent. Neptune rotates on its axis at a rapid pace, which makes it uninhabitable. Astronomers know Triton is Neptune’s biggest moon, but there’s a major safety hazard. On multiple occasions, Neptune has collided with other orbital bodies (hence its rings). Because of this, building satellite colonies is not the best route. Triton could crash and end up as remnants to Neptune’s ring supply; colonies near this planet present a grave risk to human life.

Pluto[2] has five moons that can serve as optimistic colonizers. But methane and nitrogen don’t offer a livable space for humanity. It’s the farthest from the Sun; a twinkling star in the sky even through a telescope. Colonization in orbit needs technological advancements first, such as lights that emit heat energy, specialized mirrors, and lifelong oxygen supply. Industrial workers can use Charon (Pluto’s largest moon) for lodging, business and trade markets. To colonize Pluto means living off-planet, but its temperatures and distance from the Sun (5.9 billion kilometres) present complications.

Closing Thoughts

Although each planet offers unique challenges to overcome for colonization, there are some things that are consistent across the whole solar system:

1. Colonization needs to figure out how to protect from solar and space radiation. Radiation has proven to have debilitating effects on our bodies (dehydration, weakened immunity, etc.). During the summertime, we’re often reminded by health officials to find a shady spot at noon. Heat and ultraviolet rays are stronger because Earth is closer to the Sun. Beyond the Earth Sphere, the presence of radiation is due to “particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field; particles shot into space during solar flares (solar particle events); and galactic cosmic rays.” Astronauts have been exposed to space radiation on six-month missions in the past.

2. Colonization needs to figure out how to deal with toxic/inhospitable atmospheres, so you’re going to need to have controlled environments regardless of whether you go on-planet or on moons. It’s a matter of trial and error. Therefore, astronomers can send space probes to explore surfaces and observe their behaviours (environment) to determine the pros and cons. Sustaining life beyond Earth poses a challenge; in the case of some aforementioned planets and moons, the best bet is to set up colonies within the orbit of the places that are deemed safe. Additional training/workshops for persons interested in relocating to space, and inventions designed to promote safety and longevity must be considered.

3. Colonization needs to figure out how to deal with fluctuating temperatures. The close proximity of the inner planets’ orbits to the sun and the immense distance from the outer planets’ orbits mean regulating temperatures to support human life is going to be a challenge regardless of where you end up. HOW you deal with those depends on the location (e.g. greater shielding for inner planets, use of mirrors and the like for the outer planets).

4. Colonization needs to figure out if it warrants the cost and time of terraforming the two other planets within the Goldilocks Zone (i.e., Venus and Mars) or if it’s better to keep space colonies outside the planets. The good news is Mars’s surface has similarities to Earth’s own. Mars also has a fluctuating atmosphere which depends on its distance from the Sun. Terraforming Mars will be costly, however, because its atmosphere has only small traces of oxygen (good for humans) and nitrogen (great for vegetation and agriculture). The presence of carbon dioxide (which makes up 96% of Mars atmosphere), and carbon monoxide isn’t healthy. Scientists are making plans to ensure that tanks can convert a higher percentage of carbon dioxide into oxygen by 2020. For Venus, terraforming is a possibility, but the presence of sulphuric acid and volcanoes presents a greater challenge for health and safety reasons.

Additional References

Out-Of-This-World Space Colonies as Imagined by NASA in the 1970s and Today. All That’s Interesting. July 17, 2018.

Victor Tangermann, A Timeline for Humanity’s Colonization of Space. Off World via Futurism.

How long would it take to colonise the galaxy? The Open University. November 4, 2011.

Space Settlement. National Space Society. 2018.

Planet Facts. Space Facts. 2019.

Elizabeth Howell. Interesting Facts about the Planets. Universe Today. 2015.

Footnotes

[1]NASA is working on a Mars Mission, with plans to pursue Europa (Jupiter’s moon) within the next decade.

[2]Although currently classified as a “dwarf planet,” this status remains under discussion among experts.

***If anyone wants a free copy of the fanzine Rhythm Generation, you may connect with @acworldbuildingzine. Thanks for reading!***

#gundam wing #meta #space colonization #astronomy #NASA #tb514exclusive #gwfanworks #rhythm generation

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wits-writing · 5 years

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Earth’s Mightiest Retrospective Ep 50: “Operation Galactic Storm”

(Directed by Boyd Kirkland, Written by Christopher Yost, Original Airdate: October 21, 2012)

“Operation Galactic Storm” begins a two-parter that brings closure to one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes longest on-going threads, dating back into season one, the Kree Empire and their interest in colonizing Earth. It starts when the Kree intercept SWORD agents investigating nearby the sun due to some strange energy patterns. The Kree warp in and hijack the SWORD vessel while setting a few ships in a pattern near the sun. Abigail Brand shows a message detailing what happened to the SWORD agents to the Avengers. They go interrogate a prisoner who might know what the Kree are after, for Kree Science Captain Mar-Vell.

He tells them why so many alien races have been interested in the Earth throughout the series. Energy around the planet makes establishing stable wormholes for instantaneous space travel easy, while even their most advance ships can take a while to travel across galaxies. The Avengers are warned that the ships near the sun will establish the first portal to help the Kree further expand their empire. It’s also going to damage the sun once it activates. That news rings familiar for the Avengers as they recall the warning Kang gave them in his first appearance that the sun would be damaged in a conflict with the Kree and leave Earth uninhabitable in the future. Mar-Vell says the Kree are likely using that location knowing what will happen as retaliation for the multiple humiliating defeats Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have dealt them in the past. He offers to alter the Quinjet so it can get them to the sun more efficiently by using the same subspace technology the Kree use to space travel and help the Avengers save their planet.

As they’re preparing to leave, they get attack by a Kree stealth-ops team that arrives to keep them from going into space. After some fighting and struggling to see the alien stealth-operatives, Yellowjacket decides to stay behind to keep them busy as the rest of the team and Mar-Vell go to the sun. When they get there and decide to engage the Kree out in space, we get to see the return of the Avengers red and white space uniforms with new ones for Ms. Marvel and Black Panther. The team splits up between rescuing the SWORD agents on their damaged ship and hijacking the other Kree warship to stop the aliens from activating their portal to destroy the sun.

The SWORD ship only has two beings on board, one is SWORD agent Peter Corbeau, who helped the rest of his squad evacuate before the Kree attacked, and the other is a Kree Sentry robot. Meanwhile, the Avengers fighting in space struggle to break through the warship’s force field. They throw everything they have at it, but even Vision can’t phase through it. Mar-Vell and Iron Man figure out they can bust a hole in the shields if they can match its frequency and accomplish it. When they take control of the bridge of the ship, the commanding Kree officer on board tells them they’re already too late to stop the portal from opening. The Avengers realize they’ll need to go inside the portal to destroy its source and keep it from damaging the sun and life on Earth with it.

It’s a move that will require sacrifice from all parties involved. Black Panther needs to stay on the Kree ship to direct the Quinjet through the portal while the rest of the team, Mar-Vell, and Corbeau go inside to destroy the machines projecting it, which will leave them stuck on the other side of the galaxy in hostile Kree territory. Captain America almost refuses to let Black Panther sacrifice himself, but the others remind him of Kang’s warnings. The only way to save the sun and keep that future from coming to pass is to let the fellow Avenger die as he thanks the team for letting him fight by their side. It’s a well-done speech and the sacrifice is given appropriate weight before the Avengers go through the portal and finish their part of the mission. The episode closes on the heroes knowing they were able to save the world again, but unable to enjoy it before realizing they’ve ended up directly in front of a Kree armada.

While all the space action was going on, Yellowjacket and Abigail Brand defended Hydro-Base from the Kree stealth-ops. The Kree’s attack on the facility has several phases, including reuniting Ronan the Accuser with his weapon before freeing him and setting a bomb that will blow up the facility and half of New York with it. This part of the episode serves as another showcase for Hank Pym’s impulsive attitude that’s come along with the Yellowjacket identity and costume. Before he can prevent the Kree from freeing Ronan, Brand calls on him to deal with the bomb the aliens planted on the base and the Kree teleport away with Ronan (Spoilers: this thread goes nowhere next episode and gets left hanging due to the series cancellation.) Yellowjacket gets a fantastic moment where he admits he doesn’t know how to stop the Kree’s bomb from counting down. Brand yells at him for his uselessness before he blasts the device with his shrink ray, reducing it in size until it can’t hurt anything aside from a few molecules. Abigail punches him for good measure for putting her under the stress of thinking they were about to let half a city get blown up.

This episode makes a good first half for the conclusion of the drama with Kree this season. Mar-Vell begins his path towards redemption for selling out the Earth to his people back in “Welcome to the Kree Empire.” The logic behind the necessity of T’Challa’s sacrifice is a little loose and kind of underwhelming considering the direness of Kang’s warnings about what would cause the sun to be damaged, but the vocal performances and visuals sell the moment despite that. Now we’re running down the clock on Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with only two episodes left.

Next time, the Avengers meet the mind behind the Kree Empire.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

#Avengers #Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #Earth's Mightiest Retrospective #Wit's Writing #TV Review #Marvel Comics #Marvel #superhero tv #superhero animation #animation #comics

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lit102 · 5 years

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, trans. Ken Liu

An invigorating and gripping book. Probably the best science fiction I have ever read & Cixin Liu is arguably the best sci fi writer alive — in both the “science fiction” and “writer” senses of that term.

The Three-Body Problem asks: If an alien civilization, desperate for survival, invaded Earth — could humanity survive? And would we deserve to? It begins during China’s cultural revolution in 1967, with a brutal act that will shape the future of the whole human race. You might say that this entire book, though packed with plot and information, is merely setting the stage for what’s to come in the next book. A physics professor named Ye Zhetai is being publicly berated in front of a crowd by several passionate young Red Guards, who want him to renounce Einstein’s theory of relativity and thus the “black banner of capitalism” it represents. When he refuses, they attack, whipping him to death with the copper buckles of their belts. The professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, has a front row seat to her father’s death. As the crowd disperses, she stares at his body, and “the thoughts she could not voice dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life.” These thoughts will haunt her throughout a stint in the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, cutting down trees in the once pristine and abundant wilderness — so full of life you could reach into a stream at random and pull out a fish for dinner, now transforming into a barren desert in front of her eyes — and at her hands. There, she meets a journalist who questions the wanton deforestation that has also touched her heart. “I don’t know if the Corps is engaged in construction or destruction,” he says. His thinking is inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a copy of which he gives Ye Wenjie to read and which changes her life. It inspires her to wonder: if the use of pesticides, which she took for granted as a “normal, proper—or at least neutral—act,” is destructive to the world, then “how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.... / It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

This idea shapes the rest of Ye Wenjie’s life. It is what prompts her to invite an alien civilization to our world, serving humanity up to them on a silver platter. She helps the reporter transcribe a letter to his higher-ups, warning them of the “severe ecological consequences” of the Construction Corps’ work. This letter is received as reactionary, and the terrified reporter claims Ye Wenjie wrote it, throwing her under the bus. All is not lost for her, however. Because of an academic paper she wrote before the revolution, "The Possible Existence of Phase Boundaries Within the Solar Radiation Zone and Their Reflective Characteristics,” she is not imprisoned, but scooped up to work on a top-secret military research project: an attempt to contact extraterrestrial life. Because it’s so highly classified, it requires a lifelong commitment, one she gladly makes: all she wants is to be secluded from the brutal world. And at Red Coast Base, on an isolated peak deep in the mountains, crowned by an enormous antenna, she finds the solitude she seeks, immersing herself in her work. It is here that, almost by accident, she harnesses the power of the sun to send a message far out into space — a message that, many years later, receives a chilling reply: “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!” This message is from one pacifist member of an powerful alien civilization, far more advanced than our own, who are facing extinction in their own solar system and desperately need to find a new home. The messenger explains that, if Ye Wenjie replies, she will allow this civilization to pinpoint earth’s location, then colonize earth.

Without hesitation, Ye Wenjie replies.

This story unfolds over the course of the book, interwoven with the present day, during which an ordinary scientist named Xiao Wang is experiencing the results of Ye Wenjie’s message. All over the world, scientists are killing themselves — and strange things are happening to him that are shaking his trust in reality and driving him to the brink of suicidal madness. Before it’s too late, he finds out that he is just one target in an intergalactic war. Through a video game called Three Body, he learns about the enemy: the aliens Ye Wenjie contacted all those years ago. These beings live on a planet called Trisolaris, over four light years away from our Earth. Trisolaris has not one, not two, but three suns, which interact in a chaotic, unpredictable, and deadly dance that alternately scorches and freezes the planet, obliterating Trisolaran civilization — over and over again. When the planet is orbiting one single sun, that’s a Stable Era: a time of predictability and peace. But when one of the other suns dances closer, drawing the planet away, the planet then “wander[s] unstably” though the gravitational fields of the three suns, causing chaos: thus, this is known as a Chaotic Era. No one knows when a Stable Era will occur, how long it will last, or what horrors each new Chaotic Era will bring with it. This brutal, unpredictable environment has shaped the Trisolarans physically, psychologically, technologically... everything. As one Trisolaran puts it, the freedom and dignity of the individual is totally suborned to the survival of civilization. It is a totalitarian society, mired in “spiritual monotony.” As one Trisolaran you might call a dissident puts it: “Anything that can lead to spiritual weakness is declared evil. We have no literature, no art, no pursuit of beauty and enjoyment. We cannot even speak of love ... [I]s there any meaning to such a life?”

Trisolaran society, meaningful or not, is teetering on the precipice of doom. The Trisolarans can dehydrate and rehydrate their bodies, turning them into empty husks that can survive the uninhabitable Chaotic Eras — thus, through both perseverance and blind luck, they have endured up to this point. However, they have never been able to solve the “three-body problem” — they cannot predict the three suns’ movement and thus stay one step ahead. (I’m pretty sure the problem is fundamentally unsolvable.) And there’s an even bigger problem on the horizon... literally. Soon, their planet will fall into one of the suns. Trisolaran astronomers discover that their solar system once held twelve planets — the other eleven have all been consumed by the three hungry suns. “Our world is nothing more than the sole survivor of a Great Hunt.” The Trisolarans have little time left and no hope of survival — unless they can find another planet that supports life. That’s when they receive Ye Wenjie’s message. To them, Earth is the Garden of Eden — stable, prosperous, overflowing with life... like the pristine Chinese wilderness before the Construction/Destruction Corps arrived. The Trisolarans build a fleet and set off for Earth. ETA: 400 years. And they do one more crucial thing: they construct and send what they call sophons to earth, or particles endowed with artificial intelligence that can transmit information back to Trisolaris instantaneously and interfere with human physics research to the point of stopping it completely, essentially freezing scientific progress. They are preparing the ground for their arrival. Through the sophons, the Trisolarans see all — the only depths they cannot penetrate are those of the solitary human mind. And did I mention that Trisolarans communicate their thoughts to each other instantaneously, and there is no such thing as deception? Humanity’s edge is our ability to lie and deceive — an edge that the sophons all but obliterate. All our plans are laid bare to them. And so the intergalactic chess game goes on.

All this, essentially... there is so much of it and it isn’t even the plot of the book; it’s just setup, it’s just the premise, it’s just the question Cixin Liu is asking. If such a thing happened, what would humanity do? What unfolds thereafter is his answer. When humanity finds out that the Trisolaran Fleet is on its way, this knowledge is enough to alter our fate forever. An organization called the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, or ETO, arises, with Ye Wenjie as its guru — an organization that seeks to further the Trisolarans’ aims on earth. Battling the ETO: the governments of the earth, desperate to find a way of defeating the Trisolarans and saving the human race. One faction within the ETO, the Adventists, hopes that the Trisolarans will kill us all; humanity, to them, is not worth saving. Another, the Redemptionists, worship the Trisolarans as gods and hopes that they can coexist with errant humanity and, through their influence, elevate — redeem — them. Ye Wenjie is a Redemptionist, and this is essentially her message: “Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.”

The Three-Body Problem is full to bursting with stunning, unforgettable visual images: like nothing I’ve ever seen or even imagined. Liu's genius lies in his ability to take complex scientific concepts — the kind I am barely aware even exist — and with simple yet vivid language, paint them into breathtaking pictures that will sear themselves into your mind. There are images in this book that deserve to be as iconic as the monoliths from 2001: both vast and microscopic, cosmic and intimate. Many of the most cosmic are set in the Three Body video game or on the planet of Trisolaris itself. Through Three Body, Liu takes us through the history of Trisolaris in an abbreviated yet totally absorbing form: while the player tries to understand this alien world, in order to save it, we learn about it along with him. We stand in awe in front of a vast computer made up of millions of soldiers, waving colored flags, signals washing through them in colorful waves — until they, and everything else on Trisolaris, are sucked into space by the gravitational forces of three suns rising in awe-inspiring alignment over the planet. We see the Trisolorans unfolding a microscopic, eleven-dimensional proton into one, then three dimensions in their sky...

Yet Liu’s skill isn’t limited to these vast, cosmic scenes. He can just as evocatively depict simple and moving ones: such as when a pregnant Ye Wenjie spends time among villagers deep in the mountains:

This period condensed in her memory into a series of classical paintings — not Chinese brush paintings but European oil paintings. Chinese brush paintings are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colors. Everything was warm and intense: the heated kang stove-beds lined with thick layers of aura sedge, the Guandong and Mohe tobacco stuffed in copper pipes, the thick and heavy sorghum meal, the sixty-five-proof baijiu distilled from sorghum — all of these blended into a quiet and peaceful life, like the creek at the edge of the village.

Liu has a vast amount of information to convey throughout this book, and of course he sometimes simply turns to the audience and starts lecturing us, dropping all attempts to “disguise” himself in fictional conventions — such as when one character explains something to another. This kind of conversation, naturally, takes place a lot — but sometimes Liu simply has too much to get across for even such methods (themselves a kind of shorthand) to make sense, and he needs to take even more of a shortcut. But he also knows how to end these long, “dry,” lecture-y scenes with a flourish of beauty that never fails to take my breath away. At times, Liu’s prose can come to feel almost sentimental — it seems to reflect the romantic idea that in the simplest of human societies lies a fundamental goodness... Is this the idea behind the book? Ye Wenjie, the individual driving everything, has a heart hardened to ice by the brutality of the world. Her time with the villagers, and I think her experience of motherhood, thaws it a little — but later, when she confronts the Red Guards who killed her father and sees not a shred of remorse in them — sees that, indeed, they too have been brutalized by the world, and are wrapped up in their own suffering while at the same time asserting its insignificance — “History! History! It’s a new age now. Who will remember us? Who will think of us, including you? Everyone will forget all this completely!” — the dewdrop of hope for society in her heart evaporates and she devotes her life to the ETO from then on. As a Redemptionist, her “ideal is to invite Trisolaran civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, and sinless world.” These aren’t her words, but those of her comrade in the ETO, Mike Evans, who will betray her by splitting off to become an Adventist. What sounds like unconscionable sentimentality — when was Earth ever “sinless”? — is just the cover for the deepest, blackest cynicism of all.

Earlier, I mentioned that the Trisolarans unfold an eleven-dimensional proton into one dimension, then three dimensions, in their sky. They are trying to unfold it into two dimensions, a surface they can write on, so they can turn it into a computer, “re-fold” it to its true, microscopic size, then send it to earth as a sophon. One and three dimensions are mistakes. In one dimension, the proton is an infinitely thin line — one which solar winds scatter into sparkling strings that fall like rain into the Trisolaran atmosphere, drifting with the currents of the air until they attenuate into nothingness. The effect is purely visual and psychological: As one Trisolaran explains to another, the strings have the mass of a single proton and can have no effect on the macroscopic world. However, when they accidentally unfold the proton into three dimensions, it’s a different story. Geometric solids explode across the sky, gradually forming into an array of eyes, which gaze “strangely” upon the planet below. (Not unlike the “eyes” of the sophons, come to think of it.) The microcosmos, it seems, contains intelligence — an intelligence that is, itself, fighting for survival. The eyes conglomerate, forming a parabolic mirror, which concentrates the sun’s light on the capital city of Trisolaris — doing serious damage before the Trisolaran space fleet destroys it. Thus destroying an entire microcosmos — and any intelligence, any “wisdom,” any civilization expressed therein. This is a fleeting moment, but — having just finished The Dark Forest — perhaps key to everything here. The universe is abundant with life, at both the macroscopic and microscopic level, and life wants to live.

#the three-body problem #cixin liu #ken liu #read in 2019 #january 2019

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stompsite · 7 years

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Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they don’t simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.

Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.

So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.

The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.

Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and it’s completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesn’t work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.

I say all this because I want set the ground rules. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.

Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.

This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.

Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--that’s the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh… like… energy coral spread throughout space.

On one hand, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.

Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ own rules to get to where it is.

This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. I’m not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so… careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.

The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasn’t inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.

Scientists are generally pretty careful. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.

This isn’t a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people… and then pretended the giant robot threat wasn’t real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.

But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.

Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.

The Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.

Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.

Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyone’s lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.

It’s a problem with the game’s dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they… well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.”

People don’t talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.

I don’t know how this script made it through editing.

This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?

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Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?

When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?

The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.

Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s an idiot?

How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? I’m exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.

2. Technology and Presentation

Much has been made of Andromeda’s many animation glitches and bugs.

So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:

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Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.

On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.

Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.

But then there’s the art.

Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.

Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like… well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t have any creativity put into it.

And it sucks to say this.

It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (I’d love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.

My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or… well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game I’ve seen in a long, long time.

3. Design.

This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, I’ve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad… then we got a problem.

And the design is bad.

As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and I’m going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.

If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like… holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.

Here’s an example, and I’m going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.

If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you ‘fly’ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.

Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game won’t let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.

Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.

There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldn’t it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?

You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t know how the game shipped like that.

But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, you’ve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.

On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.

I don’t want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.

You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that they’re going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you can’t even justify making DLC for your game.

Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.

I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.

The stakes never matter in Andromeda. You’ll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someone’s office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasn’t like I’d found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her… all the way on the other side of the map. Couldn’t we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.

The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.

If you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.

Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.

And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, you’re wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.

There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule there’s no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

#stompsite #gameautopsy

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furvillaheadcannons · 7 years

Text

Failed Terraforming Experiment Mastertheory

You may have seen this one on FV itself, but some of the first posts I’m going to be making will be compiling some headcannon/theory things I’ve said around the forums. A lot of my personal theories and headcannons tie back into this one, so I figured this would be a good one to make the first post. I’m going to try to keep this one compatible with any on-site lore, so this theory may change as official lore is added. Enjoy!

The world of Furvilla is the modern remains of a failed terraforming experiment, started by humans. The Minipets and the Villagers were both created as tools to eventually make the planet of Furvilla suited for human use. The project was abandoned thousands of years ago, and humans have long gone extinct from this world. Let's start at the beginning... Humans decided to expand their reach in the galaxy by habiting a new planet, something they may or may not have done before. This planet was specifically chosen for its resemblance to Earth, with a similar star, orbit, and temperature. The only two issues with this planet were 1, humans couldn't survive in the atmosphere without the use of oxygen tanks and bio-suits, and 2, the planet was already inhabited by a thriving ecosystem. Four bases were eventually set up, each in a unique biome and strategic location that would be pivotal to destroying the existing ecosystems and molding the world for human habitation. The first and most important base was underwater, as this location was the safest from local fauna attacks. Long after the base and its buildings had rotted away, this area would later become Oceandome as later settlers found it just as safe as the humans had many eons ago. Later bases were made in the regions that would eventually become Olde Foxbury, Dragonsmaw Manor, and Tigereye Peak. In every case, these bases and most of the buildings that were part of them were slowly eroded away by weather and aggressive monster attacks, eventually leaving only manmade objects such as metal pieces and toxic waste. (Quetzal Palace was settled much later) But, let's get back to the past. After establishing themselves on this hostile planet, the humans got started on changing the planet to fit them. Logically, it made the most sense to tackle the 'simpler' problem first: destroying the native life. It would reduce the risk to the humans if the planet was wiped clean of hostile fauna, so that they could change the planet's atmosphere and native floral life in relative peace. On top of this, the 'monsters' were just not aesthetically pleasing to humans. Enter the "Minipet". Technically just called "animals", minipets were genetically engineered to be the ultimate invasive species. Every minipet was created to occupy the same niche as a native 'monster', aggressive or non-aggressive, and drive it into extinction by out-competing it. This is why minipets breed so quickly and are born almost fully formed, only needing a full breeding cooldown to go from newborn to maturity. However, this had an unintended consequence. Though most of the monster species were driven to extinction, there were many gigantic predators that seized this new opportunity and thrived. Many of the worst of the aggressive monsters ended up coming even closer to the encampments than before, chasing their new food source like a fox chasing chickens right back to the farm. This is why most of the monsters you know are so belligerent and come close to your modern villages. Your excess minipets are monster chow. If you've ever wondered why minipets and monsters look so very different, the artificial creation is the reason why. The two groups are completely unrelated, minipets were created to resemble Earth-concepts and be aesthetically pleasing to the humans while monsters evolved totally independently in an atmosphere different from Earth. Thanks to their engineering, minipets were able to survive in this environment without a bio-suit just like a native monster, and this ended up being more useful than the scientists ever thought they would be despite the extra monster attacks, which gave the humans a new idea... Enter the Villager. A genetically engineered creature didn't need a bio-suit to work, it didn't need to eat human rations, and it was disposable if it got injured. They had already made animals, the next step was to give them a useful upright gait and make them intelligent enough to take human orders and do human work. After a few experiments with minipets and making them more intelligent (one of these experiments lead to the Quetzal Palace serpent), the first Villager was born. The Villagers were created to be the servants and workers of the human colonists. This is why Villagers have a deep desire to expand, explore, and colonize. Another big upgrade from the minipets was the ability to change to fit any scenario. At every villager's core is a Shifty, and morphing potions were a quick way to change a villager from one form into another form that better fits the task they needed to complete. A human could quickly change their flying corvid into a strong bear when a monster attacked, without the need to bring multiple Villagers. Every human only needed a few loyal Villagers thanks to the potion system, and towards the end of their stay, they needed even less when the Shifty potion was eventually created, giving Villagers the ability to freely transform into anything they could personally imagine. The shifty potion was the last potion to be created, all other potions and forms were created before the Shifty potion but are just being re-discovered. But, the human civilization did not last. Perhaps the project ran out of funds, perhaps the encampments failed from repeated monster raids, perhaps the Villagers revolted. The terraforming experiment was abandoned, and the humans evacuated. While many of them took their personal Villagers and minipets, far many more Villagers and minipets were left for dead on a wild planet. Without the creators, the creations were aimless. Little more than 'servants' or tools to their human owners, very few Villagers knew how to read and even less know how to work the leftover technology, and thus they were essentially sent back to the stone age. They had to go back to using spears and axes, and created tribes as they tried to survive. Any humans who got left behind eventually either died from bio-suit malfunction, monster attacks, or just plain old age, despite the best efforts of their Villagers to keep them alive. This is why human skulls can be found all over the world, especially near the colonized areas, and why they're super-rare. That was thousands of years ago. Humans and their accomplishments are barely a memory, remembered only by ancient remains and leftover technology such as amulets or the impressive Quetzal Palace serpent. The sites of great civilization were uninhabited for centuries, but no longer! It has been a slow climb, but Furvilla is on the cusp of a great technological revolution. Five major cultures have appeared, and with them, five great nations. Education, new careers, and a greater standard of living is within Villagerkind's grasp, scattered all about the places they currently call home. The game we are all playing is the start of a golden age, and things are finally looking stable on this unnamed planet we've been calling Furvilla.

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in-an-ecotone · 7 years

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Champions of Worlds

I wrote a little thing about human personification of planets (I got the idea from a prompt from writing-prompts but I can’t find the original post anymore sorry) it’s kind of long for one post b/c I have 3 chapters already. Champions of Worlds is the working title, I don’t know if I’ll keep it (I’m bad at titles).

btw I would love some feedback I don’t write much 1st person stuff or changing perspective.

Chapter 1-

“Before we begin, let’s do a quick role call,” I announced. The quiet chatter echoing around the chamber ceased suddenly, and was replaced by the scraping of chairs against the marble floor. The meeting hall was a grand chamber built with elegant marble pillars stretching beyond one’s sight. Artifacts on display lined the walls, silently boasting so we didn’t have to. In the center of the room stood a lengthy, ovalular table with nine ornate wooden chairs sat around it.

Now sitting in these chairs were my fellow champions, representatives of planets, or in my case, stars, responsible for protecting the solar system. Every chair was filled, but rules dictated that I conduct a verbal role call.

“Carlin, of Mercury,” I said in a monotone voice. I glanced at the smallest and closest of the planets; Carlin was swinging his legs back and forth since they didn’t reach the ground. He ran a hand through his sandy brown hair and smiled at me. His skin was covered in circular scars and birthmarks, so many that his pale skin appeared darker.

“Right here,” He said cheerily.

“Thom, of Venus,” I moved to the next planet. Unlike little Carlin, Thom was tall enough to actually touch the ground with his feet, but his legs still bounced up and down in an agitated fashion. His orange bronze hair was neatly styled in a low fade haircut, and he didn’t dare touch it so not to ruin it. His smooth tan skin was scarred in only a few locations, as opposed to Carlin’s hundreds.

“Here,” He responded softly.

“Kaj, of Earth,” I looked upon Kaj. He looked very similar to Thom. The same height, the same face, the same hair. They were practically twins. Unlike Thom, however, Kaj’s hair was a deep blue, the same color as his oceans. He winked one of his piercing green eyes at me. His skin was tan and rough, covered in little bumps or dips.

“Reporting for duty,” He saluted casually.

“Jasper, of Mars,” I ignored him, moving to our first female champion, aside from myself. Jasper’s long, fiery red hair quickly drew my attention. Her crimson locks were practically begging you to look at them. Though she was one of the shorter champions, she was old and experienced, and the many scars on her caramel skin showed it.

“Heya, Ori,” She used my nickname, staring me down with those scarlet eyes of hers.

“Reis, of Jupiter,” I said, glaring at Jasper. Reis and Jasper were separated by a belt in the middle of a table. From here on out, it was hard for me to reach the planets.

Reis was easily the tallest of the champions; she towered over them menacingly, but she was a gentle giant. She had a cute brown pixie cut that reflected her kind personality. She was loud and always cracking jokes. Her great red birthmark was the only discrepancy of her otherwise perfectly smooth skin.

“Yello” She waved.

“Gwendolyn, of Saturn,” I moved on. Gwen was very tall, but still no match for Reis. She kept her yellow blonde hair in a simple side braid, which she was currently fussing with. She had smooth, pale skin which she covered in many necklaces and bracelets.

“Good to see ya, Ana,” She used my other nickname.

“Quilo, of Uranus,” I moved on, angrily glaring at Gwen. After her gaze fell apologetically, I moved on to Quilo. Fey was tall and lanky, with long, bony limbs. Feyr skin was white as sheets, probably due to the lack of sunlight. The bangs of feyr pale blue hair fell into feyr face and fey swept them to the side. Fey had narrow, piercing icy blue eyes to match the color of feyr hair. Fey stared me down without blinking.

“Hello, Oriana,” Fey spoke softly.

“Derya, of Neptune,” I hurried to move on past Quilo. In contrast to Quilo’s pale complexion, Derya had incredibly dark skin. His black hair was curly, like waves, and his deep blue eyes were bright and happy. On his shoulder, there was a large, dark spot, a birthmark.

“How’s it goin’?” He asked.

“Right, so everyone’s here, that’s good.” I finished. “Now, down to business. Jasper.” I addressed the red planet’s champion. She sat up straighter and held her chin high, showing respectful and attentive posture.

“You claimed you have an issue to discuss,” I said.

“Yes, I do have an issue,” She nodded. “It appears that the pathetic whelps that inhabit earth-” Kaj sat up straighter, a fire growing in his usually calm green eyes. “-have plans to colonize Mars.”

“So?” I asked.

“So, Mars is my planet, not his,” She growled, annoyed that I didn’t understand at first. “They’ve already sent those disgusting toys over, and I’ve tolerated that, but I will not stand for them living on my beautiful planet.”

“Excuse me, but if I may interrupt-” Kaj started.

“You may not.” I said. “Jasper, finish your argument quickly, and then Kaj, you will have a chance to speak.” Kaj leaned back in his chair with a huff.

“Mars is uninhabitable for humans anyway,” Jasper pouted. “If they want to leave the planet, at least go to Venus where there’s an atmosphere.”

“I will not be housing those destructive beasts!” Thom roared.

“Calm down!” I shouted. “Kaj, you may state your case, and then Thom, if you still feel the need to do so, you may go after Kaj.”

“Thank you, Oriana,” Kaj put his fingertips together without his palms touching. “Now, might I remind everyone that I represent the planet Earth, not its inhabitants. I cannot control what my little darlings do, and I cannot influence their decisions. That being said, if they want to explore the solar system, why be so apprehensive about it? After all, I’m the only one who can say I have life on my planet. Wouldn’t you all like to be able to say that too?”

“Oh please, like we’d want your sentient piles of shit on our planets!” Jasper hissed.

“Jasper, settle down,” I warned.

“As I was saying,” Kaj continued. “My beautiful creatures are interested in inhabiting Mars specifically because it’s so close to Earth-”

“So is Venus!” Jasper shouted, gesturing towards Thom.

“Quit pushing this onto me!” Thom yelled, equally as angry as Jasper.

“Both of you, be quiet!” I slammed my hands down on the table. They both looked down shamefully. Silence hung in the air for what felt like hours, but was most likely only a few seconds.

Kaj began to continue his argument, but he couldn’t get a word in before the creaking of the large, heavy doors at the end of the chamber interrupted him. Everyone turned to face the opening doors.

A young girl, about the same height as Carlin, stepped into the chamber. Her quick and heavy footsteps echoed loudly around the room. “Sorry I’m so late, everyone,” She said as she gasped for air. I eyed her up and down in confusion. All the planets are here. She must be some moon who didn’t get the memo.

I was fairly certain I recognised her, but I couldn’t place from where. She was short and skinny, with light golden skin and platinum blonde hair. Her hair was in a short, cute bob which made her look young and innocent. She slowed as she approached the table.

“Kaj, I thought I had made it clear, this is a planets only meeting. No moons,” I turned to him.

He huffed, “I’ll have you know my darling little Luna is back home playing with the tides. I’ve no idea who this is.”

“Alright, if she’s not your moon, then whose is she?” I addressed the rest of the group.

“I’m not a moon,” The girl interrupted. “I’m Piera, you know, from Pluto.”

“Pluto?” Derya repeated, annoyed. “You mean that little rock that crosses my orbit for twenty years?”

“That’s the one,” She nodded.

“Girl, you best get out of here, this meeting is for planets only,” He said aggressively.

“But I am a planet,” She argued. “I’ve come to these meetings for years, did you all just forget or something?”

“Pluto is a dwarf planet, a fact we agreed upon a long time ago. It’s why you haven’t been invited to any,” I explained. I must have accidentally sent her an invitation to this meeting. I reminded myself not to make that mistake again.

“I just assumed we stopped having them because we didn’t need to…” She mumbled.

“Well, you were wrong. If you would be so kind as to remove yourself from the premises, now. We have work to do,” I requested as politely as I could manage. Such an annoyance. She couldn’t even show up on time, no, she had to interrupt the meeting and waste our time.

“But…” She started, but it seemed she couldn’t find the right words. “But I’m a part of this solar system! I deserve to be here! I deserve to get a vote in these decisions!”

“Sorry, but dwarf planets don’t count,” I said coldly. This child had wasted enough of our time. “We really are busy, so if you wouldn’t mind-”

“No! I will not be reduced to the same status as a freaking moon!” She yelled. Oh, she can’t even bring herself to swear. How old even is she? “I might not have a perfectly circular orbit, but I’m a member of this family and I will not be treated like this!”

“All you are is a waste of precious time,” I interrupted her tantrum. “Now get out or I will be forced to do so for you.”

The girl’s face was scrunched up in anger. She opened her mouth to argue, but she just closed it again and stormed out in anger. Her eyes welled up with tears as she ran, but she tried her best to keep them hidden. She slammed the doors shut behind her, and the sound echoed around the hall long after they were closed.

Once the sound cleared, I resumed our meeting. “Now then, where were we? Ah yes, Kaj, you were making your case for why your humans should be allowed to colonize Mars.”

Kaj continued his argument without a word from Jasper or Thom. The gas planets silently gestured at one another, having some sort of coded conversation. They did it at almost every meeting, since the hot headed planets up front argued about many things that did not concern them. I didn’t mind, so long as they kept quiet. I did wonder what exactly they were talking about; perhaps they were discussing the child who so rudely interrupted us. Perhaps they think I was too harsh. Whatever they think, at least she’s not bothering us anymore.

Chapter 2-

After storming out of the meeting, I wiped my tears away as best I could. Dwarf planet… Who cares if Pluto’s a dwarf planet? I deserve to be in there. I slid down the wall and buried my face in my knees.

“Piera? What’s wrong?” A squeaky voice asked worriedly. I didn’t have to look up to know it was Styx, the champion of my smallest moon.

“They kicked me out of the meeting,” I said softly. I felt him sliding down the wall next to me.

“Oh, that’s awful. Why?” He wondered. I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“Because Pluto isn’t a ‘real planet’ apparently,” I answered bitterly.

“Not a real planet? Cause it’s so small? Isn’t Mercury also really small?” He pointed out.

“It is, but Pluto is smaller. And it’s not about size, it’s about the orbit,” I corrected him. “Pluto doesn’t have a circular orbit which makes it a dwarf planet.”

“That’s stupid,” Styx commented. “So you get in Neptune’s way sometimes, it doesn’t happen often. And even if it’s just a dwarf planet, Pluto’s still a part of this solar system.”

“That’s what I said, but they won’t listen,” I nodded.

“Piera?” Another, more mature, voice said. It was Charon. “I guess the meeting didn’t go well, huh?”

“It did not,” I confirmed her assumption.

“Well, you know what, fuck them,” She huffed. I looked up abruptly.

“Charon!” I scolded. She knew I didn’t like swearing, but it looked like she didn’t care. She was standing above me, her arms crossed, her face set in a determined expression.

“I mean it,” She said. She came face to face with me abruptly, causing her long straw blonde hair to fall in her face. I backed up as far as I could against the wall, but she just inched closer to me. I tried to read her expression, but all I could get was anger. There was a fire behind her clear white eyes, and she was biting her lip, which she always did when she got angry.

“Fuck them,” She repeated. “Or, if it makes you more comfortable, screw them. Either way, you get the point. Who needs them? They clearly don’t care about you, so why should you care about them? If you want to make a decision on behalf of your planet, do it, don’t wait for a meeting with them!”

“That’s so much pressure though…” I whisper.

“You’re not alone!” She smirked. “You’ve got me, and Styx, and Hydra, and Kerberos, and Nix! We’re all here for you, ain’t that right Styx?”

“Yeah, of course!” He nodded excitedly. I turned toward him. He ran a hand through his straight, white hair and flashed a toothy smile. “I mean, that’s what we’re here for, right?”

“Yeah! We’ll start our own council! The Pluto Council!” Another voice chimed in. I looked up to see Nix, another moon. She stood shyly in front of us, looking over Charon, who was still practically in my lap. Charon coughed and moved next to me so Nix could join our circle. She sat down, neatly crossing her legs and smiling warmly at me. She was about the same height as Styx, and thin bony limbs resembled his. Her hair, which was in short pigtails, was mostly dark grey, but there was one streak of pink on the left side.

Not too far behind Nix were my other two moons, Hydra and Kerberos. Kerberos, a short but tough black haired boy, was holding hands with Hydra, a shorter but equally tough light haired boy. They were inseparable.

“You guys are on board with this too?” I asked. They both nodded silently. I sighed. “Okay, okay. If you all think that highly of me…” I looked around the circle one last time, waiting for an objection, but none came. “Then I guess we can start a Pluto Council.”

They all whooped and cheered excitedly. Charon stood up and offered me a hand. “Come on, we should get home. We have a lot of work to do,” She said. I took her hand and she pulled me up, but once I was standing she didn’t let go. We held hands while we walked away from the meeting hall.

The Center for Planetary Champions, or CPC, was a huge building in the middle of the asteroid belt. It was hidden in a particularly large asteroid so that pesky life forms couldn’t find it. The ceiling of the building was a screen that displayed the perpetually dark sky. Every now and again the asteroid would rotate enough that we could see the sun or other planets. Most of the all we saw was other asteroids though.

In the very center of the building is the meeting hall. From there, hallways branch out into ten different sections, each of which house a different champion. Sometimes, instead of staying in their section at the Center, a champion will return to their planet for a short amount of time. We’ll do this if there is a crisis on our planet, or if we’re just feeling homesick. Moons tend to spend more time away from the Center than planets.

The Pluto section is on the opposite side of the meeting hall of where we were sitting. We pass almost every planet on the way to our section. Above the doorway of each hall, a rotating 3D model of the planet, accompanied by its moons, is suspended in the air. The gas giants’ models have been getting out of hand as they discover more moons; currently Jupiter has 67 moons, and Saturn has 62. Uranus is also cluttered with 27 moons, as well as Neptune with 14, but neither of them come close to the mess of satellites around the gas giants.

Finally we arrive at Pluto’s section. The littlest planet hung rotating slowly above the doorway, with five moons lovingly circling it. Charon and I entered together, with Hydra and Kerberos quietly muttering to each other behind us, and Nix and Styx loudly bringing up the rear.

Inside the section, there was one large living room, six bedrooms, a dining hall, and two bathrooms. In the living room, there was holoscreen on the far wall, which, contradictory to its name, was not a hologram. There was a big, cushiony couch with far too many pillows and blankets piled onto it. The nearest wall was lined with bookshelves stocked with records of Pluto, documents about the solar system, and journals we’ve kept over the years. On the coffee table in front of the couch there was an image of the solar system that moved in real time, tracking the planets and other celestial bodies.

I flopped onto the couch, sighing heavily. I hugged my favorite pillow, a fluffy purple heart shaped one. “Channel 17,” I commanded the holoscreen. The news channel, run by some dedicated moons of Jupiter.

“Right now, the planets are discussing the regulations of human space travel,” The anchor on the left said. Io had bright yellow hair, the color of sulfur, which covered most of his face. He was constantly lifting a pale hand to brush it out of his face.

I perked up at the mention of such a big decision. As Io said, “This is one of the biggest decisions the Council is making in a very long time. It will surely have a great impact on the solar system.”

Charon brought me a plate of earth fruit from the buffet in the dining room. I happily took it and ate as she sat next to me. As Io and Europa, the other news anchor, talked about the last time the Council made a decision this big, Charon gave me the status of the other moons.

“Nix and Styx are filling in their journals, which should keep them busy for at least a little while,” She sighed. Those two were such balls of energy, it was hard to keep up with them sometimes. “Hydra and Kerberos have created a blog on some earth website and are trolling humans,” She continued. “Should we stop them?”

“Nah,” I shook my head, eating a strawberry. “Whatever keeps them satisfied.” Charon shrugged, and we turned our attention back to the news.

“Kaj argues that humans should be allowed to explore the solar system, since they aren’t doing any harm,” Europa stated. “However, as Jasper claims, humans have already done enough damage to their home planet, they shouldn’t be permitted to do the same to other planets.”

“That’s a good point,” Io nodded. “We have a photo of Kaj just half a century ago, and another photo of him today.” The video of the anchors disappeared and was replaced with two pictures of Kaj. In the left photograph, Kaj looked like a young energetic man, but in the right photograph he looked older. The color of his hair had faded slightly, he was thinner, paler, and there were massive bags under his eyes.

“Yes, he has aged worse since humans started advancing,” Europa restated. The image of the two anchors returned. “He resembles his twin Planet Thom even more now.”

“We do have word of a rumor that the proposed solution is to send humans to Pluto, the dwarf planet,” Io said. I drop a grape I had picked up onto the floor. My mouth hangs open, and Charon is looking very similar.

“Since it’s not a planet, it’s not quite as big of a deal if the humans screw it up,” Io continued. I drop the platter of fruit and cover my mouth with one hand. My eyes start watering and my chest tightens. Charon places one hand tightly on my shoulder.

“Yes, and it should be as easy as any other planet to colonize,” Europa added. “Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is also a favorable option, due to its similar size.” Charon’s eyes widened and she frantically ran a hand through her hair.

“Off,” I commanded, my breath becoming shaky. The holoscreen dimmed and we were left in silence. We sat unmoving for a long time, until Charon broke the horrifying silence.

“Are you FUCKING SERIOUS?!” She screamed.

Chapter 3-

“Are you FUCKING SERIOUS?!” I screamed.

“Language!” Piera hissed, looking at the doors to the other moons’ rooms. I stood up and started pacing around the room.

“I can’t believe this,” I repeated that over and over like a mantra. “They can’t do this, it’s not fair! First they kick you out of the meeting, and then they try to decide the fate of your planet without you? They have to see how crazy that is!”

The other moons were starting to filter into the room. They gathered around Piera worriedly. I ignored them, continuing to pace around the room.

“This isn’t fair,” I muttered. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair!”

“Charon, calm down,” Piera said, concerned.

“Calm down?!” I whipped around to face her. “How am I supposed to calm down with this happening?! I mean, are you seeing this? It’s not weird for me to freak out, it’s weird that you’re not freaking out!”

“Charon, please,” She stood and walked over to me, placing a hand gingerly on my shoulder. “You’re scaring them.”

I glanced at the other moons, who were standing behind the couch with wide eyes. They stared at me in shock. I suddenly remembered that they had never seen me get panicked like this; it had happened before, but Piera had been the only one present.

“We can’t let them do this,” I whispered, turning back to Piera.

“I know, but we shouldn’t panic in front of them. We’ll scare them,” She agreed.

“Says the girl who was crying in the hallway a few minutes ago,” I mumbled, smirking.

“Okay, you’re fine, you don’t need my help,” She rolled her eyes at me, removing her hand from my arm. We laughed, which seemed to comfort the moons. Piera shooed them back into their rooms. She followed Nix into her room to tell her the whole situation.

Instead of waiting in the living room, I decided to take a walk. I leave a note explaining where I went in case Piera gets worried. She always jumps to the worst outcome in times of worry. I leave our section and wander around the CPC with no real destination.

In the eastern wing, where Pluto’s section is located, there’s an air lock marked in bold red letters “EXIT.” Often, I would leave to check up on Charon, my moon. There were even times when I visited other planets and moons, which was supposed to be forbidden. I especially liked checking up on Mercury. Aside from other moons and Piera, Carlin was the only champion who seemed to like me. All the others pretend I don’t even exist. After all, Charon is just a moon, it doesn’t actually matter.

Thinking about the planets’ harsh ideals got me even more riled up. I needed to do something. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t wait around any longer. My mind raced; what could I even do? The Council surely wouldn’t care about my arguments, and Piera would just tell me to calm down again. Other moons would tell me to suck it up and deal with it. There was no one I could go to.

I stopped walking in front of the Earth section. Of course, I thought. If the Council won’t listen, I’ll go straight to the champions. I hastily entered. It was very different from the Pluto section. Our home was modest and cozy, but this was extravagant and complicated. The living room was much larger than ours, despite there being less residents. An ornate emerald chandelier hung from the ceiling, and the entire room was decorated in paintings and delicate vases. There were bookshelves chock full of novels I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t even aware there were books other than records of the solar system.

Where the doors to our rooms were in our section, there was a golden staircase leading to an upstairs balcony. I could see from here there were more rooms up there. I carefully and quietly ascend the stairs, hurrying to the first door I see. It leads to a room that is mostly dark, except for a light in the middle of the floor. The light projected an image of constellations onto the ceiling and walls. In the corner, there was a small blue bed with a comforter covered in pictures of creatures I don’t understand. On one side of the room, there was a tank of water that was tall enough to go up to my shoulders. A girl was standing on a stool to reach the top of the tank, and she was playing with the water.

The girl didn’t notice me at first. She had long, white hair that reached her knees. Her pale skin was covered in craterous scars. She was short, extremely so. I concluded that she must be Earth’s moon, Luna.

As silently as I could, I retreated out of the bedroom and closed the door. I hoped she didn’t notice me, in case she wanted to kick me out. Before I moved on to the next door, I convinced myself that she was too busy playing in that tank to notice the slight noise I may make.

The next room was much larger than Luna’s. Despite there only being two champions here, there were four long dining tables with enough chairs to house everyone on CPC and more. For whatever reason, Kaj had decided that each table be decorated with a different color. On the far left, the tablecloth and napkins were a deep emerald green. The table next to it had canary yellow tablecloth and napkins. The one next to that was royal blue. And on the far right, the cloth and napkins were bright scarlet. Other than that, there was nothing of interest in this room. Just a frivolously large dining room.

I moved on to the next, room, which I assumed was Kaj’s bedroom. Upon opening the door, I knew I had to be right. There was nothing else that could explain the hideously boastful display before me.

There were two levels to this room, separated by one small stair. On the first level, the one I was currently on, there was a hot tub, a sleek black leather couch, and a… I actually didn’t know what that was. It wasn’t a holoscreen, but it sort of resembled it; perhaps it was an earlier model? But it was so large. The huge flat black screen took up a quarter of one wall. It was no model of holoscreen I had ever seen; then again, Kaj was the type of person who would brag about having an “authentic, vintage HV.” Holoscreens used to be called H-views, or HV’s for short.

Next to the old HV, there were a bunch of other devices I didn’t recognize. They were all little boxes accompanied by what looked like control devices. There was also a stack of boxes filled with discs. Each disc looked the same, but the box for each was drastically different. I didn’t take the time to investigate what they were.

On the first level, there was also another bookcase filled with more volumes I couldn’t place, a glass case full of bones, and a playpen in the corner. I walked over to the playpen, and inside it there was a small reptilious monster that screeched at me. The harsh noise startled me and I backed away from the pen abruptly. Why the hell was Kaj keeping that thing in a fucking playpen?

Trying to ignore my horror, I moved on to the second level. On this level there was a grand, king sized bed with golden bed sheets. Could he be more pretentious? I thought to myself. Accompanying the bed, there was a night stand, with more books piled on top of it. I never knew he was so well read… I thought. There were portraits and paintings all over the walls. Is he actually… cultured? I wondered. There was a model solar system, as everyone was required to have, next to a portrait of himself holding his planet in the palm of his hand. Nope, he’s a total douchebag. I nodded silently.

It was probably best I wait here for him to get back from the meeting. So, I plopped myself down on his bed (which I might add was incredibly comfortable), and picked up one of his books. This one was titled, Romeo and Juliet by one William Shakespeare. Was this written by a human? Were these all books by Kaj’s precious life forms? Were such destructive creatures able to write?

Out of curiosity, I started reading. It wasn’t like most books; it was all dialogue, and the speaker was written in italics above each line. When there were actions, they were written in parentheses, and often said things like stage left or right. And all the words were so frivolous. What Shakespeare describes in three paragraphs, I can describe in two words. It’s like he’s constantly boasting about his ability to write metaphors. It made sense that Kaj likes him.

After a couple of hours, I had finished the book. I was about to reach for another when I heard footsteps coming from downstairs. “Luna, I’m home!” I heard Kaj yell.

I heard the opening of a door and fast footsteps. “Hi Kaj!” The boisterous voice of Luna yelled back. “How was the meeting?”

“Oh, not good, Luna. I’m being attacked for allowing my humans to explore other planets,” He said.

“That’s not good. Do they not understand the benefits of having life forms?” Luna asked.

“Apparently not,” Kaj sighed. “We argued for hours. Even Thom was against me!”

“Well, as hurtful as that may be, Venus’ atmosphere is filled with poisonous gas,” Luna mentioned. “Perhaps it’s best humans stay off of Venus.”

“Still, I can’t believe he’s not supporting me on this!” Kaj moaned.

“Maybe a nice steak and some mashed potatoes would cheer you up,” She suggested.

“Oh Luna, you’re so sweet to me,” I could hear him smiling. “Let me get changed into something comfortable first.”

“I’ll be waiting in the dining room,” Luna said. Slow, heavy footsteps made their way upstairs and down the hallway. I heard the dining room door open and close. This was my chance. Before I could prepare, the door swung open and in walked Kaj, looking particularly dapper. He wore an emerald green suit with long coat tails, a white vest with a red tie, and a white pocket square. His deep blue hair was styled in a low fade cut and kept neat with lots of gel. He was even carrying a black cane for fashion purposes.

Kaj nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw me. I’d been told I have that effect on people. My pale, straw blonde hair nearly blended into my skin. I wore all black all the time; the outfit I wore right now was a leather jacket, black ripped pants, and lots of dark jewelry. It also helped that I was sitting on the bed, so he had to look up at me. That way he couldn’t see how short I was. What the freakiest thing about my face was though, was my eyes. I had pale white, almost clear, irises that scared most other people.

“Who are you?!” He screeched, aggressively walking toward me. “What are you doing in my bed?!”

“I want to talk about your plan to move your walking scum to Pluto and Charon,” I said, ignoring his questions.

“What are you talking about?” He asked.

“Channel 17, they said that the plan right now is to move your humans to Pluto and Charon,” I repeated.

“Why do you care?” He wondered. “You aren’t Piera.” I was actually surprised that he remembered her name. “Wait, are you Charon? The moon?”

“I am indeed,” I confirmed. “But that doesn’t matter, the point is, you are going to go back to the champions and tell them that Pluto and Charon will remain uninhabited.”

“You don’t think I’ve tried that already?” He said dryly. That caught me off guard.

“Wait, you’ve tried that already?” I repeated.

“Yes, of course,” He nodded. “I’d much rather have my humans stick to Mars, but Jasper’s so full of herself-” I snorted. He ignored me. “-that she demanded I move them elsewhere.”

“And they decided on Pluto?” I assumed.

“Yes, that is what they came to,” He nodded. “But honestly, I’m on your side. Pluto’s so far away, and it’s so cold! Mars is a much better choice. And even if we decreed that they must go to Pluto, I have no way of influencing their decision. And even if I did, what’s to say they’ll stop at Pluto? What’s to say they won’t go to Mars anyway?”

“Oh. I guess I kinda assumed it was your idea,” I mumbled, embarrassed.

“That’s alright, dear. But from now on, perhaps you shouldn’t break into someone’s home just to get what you want,” He smirked.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I bit my lip, avoiding his bright green eyes.

“Would you care to stay for dinner?” He asked. “We’re having steak tonight.”

“Steak?” I wondered.

“Yes, I suppose you’ve only ever had CPC’s signature schlop,” He said sarcastically.

“I think it tastes good,” I argued. The food CPC serves is a special blend of plant matter mixed with added nutrients and vitamins called practoblend.

“Oh please, once you have real food, you’ll know just how awful that goop is,” He huffed. Before I could argue, he took my hand and pulled me off the bed. “Go join Luna in the dining room, it’s the door next to this one, you probably passed it on your way in. I’ll change and join you shortly.”

I did as he instructed and found Luna in the dining room. She was sitting at the canary yellow table. I sat next to her, and she gave me a confused stare. She had silver grey eyes, sort of similar to mine. Her long white hair was practically glowing as the light reflected off of it.

“I’m Charon,” I said. “One of Pluto’s moons.” She nodded.

“I’ve seen you around the center,” She said. “What brings you here?”

“I was kind of pissed that the Council decided to send the life forms on Earth to Pluto and Charon,” I explained. “I came to argue with Kaj about it.”

“Oh, but he’s on your side!” She interrupted me. “Kaj would rather have the humans go to Mars.”

“As he told me,” I nodded. “So, he invited me to stay for supper.”

“Well, it’s good to meet you properly, Charon,” She smiled warmly at me.

“Yes, you too, Luna,” I said.

The doors to the dining hall opened and Kaj entered. He was a mess; his hair that had been styled so neatly was now hanging over one side of his face. He was wearing a plain oversized grey shirt and baggy black pants, and he was now barefoot. He looked like he just got out of bed.

“Well that was fast,” I said, not bothering to comment on his disheveled appearance.

“I do try to make haste as often as possible,” He nodded. “I noticed you had picked up one of my books. Romeo and Juliet. Do you enjoy romance?”

“I’ve never really read any,” I answered. “The only books I have access to are records and journals.”

“No fictional novels of any kind?” Kaj asked.

“None. The CPC doesn’t keep any,” I shook my head.

“Oh my, how deprived you really are. I never realized how much they kept from you,” He gasped.

“I don’t know if I’d say we’re deprived,” I said. “I mean, this is all stuff your life forms have made, right? Are we really missing out on that much?”

“It may not seem like that much, but that’s just because you haven’t really experienced art before,” Kaj tutted. “Once you actually get a taste of human art, you’ll realize exactly what you’ve been shielded from. Speaking of which, I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

He lifted the lid off of a silver platter, revealing what I assumed was the steak they mentioned earlier. It was a huge, thick, dark, glistening block of meat. Kaj grabbed a sharp, serrated knife and cut the steak into inequal thirds. He gave the smallest piece to Luna and the largest piece to himself. I stared at it inquisitively. All of my food was a thick, mushy paste. I had no idea how to approach a solid hunk of meat.

“Potatoes?” Kaj offered a bowl to me. The bowl was full of a white, fluffy substance with black dots peppered throughout it.

“Uh, sure,” I nodded uncertainly. He used a large spoon to serve me a blob of the white paste. He then offered me something he called “green beans,” which I think I had heard of before. I was pretty certain it was an ingredient in one of the practoblend flavors. But these were long, thin, bumpy, green pods. Kaj spooned about ten of them onto my plate.

“Dig in,” He said after setting the bowl of green beans down. Luna grabbed a knife like the one Kaj had used earlier and cut into her steak. I had never had to use a knife before. I tried to copy her actions, but I got kind of frustrated. Kaj watched me struggle with the utensils.

“Ah, I forgot. You’ve only ever had the goop before,” He said. I suddenly felt very flustered and embarrassed.

“Um, y-yes, that’s correct,” I nodded.

“That’s alright. Here,” He took my plate and cut the steak into nice bite sized pieces for me. “There you go,” He said when he handed it back to me.

I stabbed a piece with my fork and bit into it. Juice exploded from the steak in my mouth, spewing out flavor like I had never experienced before. It was salty, savory, but at the same time, sort of sweet. I could barely describe it. And the texture was tough but not too chewy. You couldn’t get this in a practoblend.

I scarfed down more and more, eager to taste the succulent steak again. The flavor lingered in my mouth after I swallowed. I tried the potatoes next; the texture reminded me of practoblend, but the flavor was nothing like it. It was creamy and light and buttery and savory and I could go on and on but words can’t capture the feeling. CPC had taught me that food was essential to survival, but here it was so much more. It wasn’t just a necessity, it could be a luxury.

I tried one of the green beans. It was crunchy, but not hard to bite through. It was a touch bitter, but not bad by any means. I scarfed them down as fast as I did the steak. I couldn’t get enough of this food. I was finished and ready for more while Luna and Kaj were barely halfway finished with their food. I waited patiently even though I was hungry for more. Luna pushed her plate away with potatoes left still.

“You’re not going to finish?” I asked, eyeing the potatoes hungrily. Luna chuckled.

“You can have them,” She passed her plate to me. I happily took it from her and dug in.

“Just wait until dessert,” Kaj smirked. “What are we having tonight, Luna?”

“Brownies with ice cream,” She answered.

“Oh, are you in for a treat. Luna makes the best brownies. Not even Ramsay could dislike them,” Kaj said.

“Who’s Ramsay?” I asked, finishing the potatoes.

“A chef on earth. Don’t worry about it,” Luna dismissed it. She got up and left through a door in the very back corner of the room. When she came back moments later, she was carrying another large platter and a tub. She placed them on the table and lifted the lid off the platter. There was a neat pyramid of warm, soft, gooey brown blocks, probably the brownies. In the tub, there was a thick, creamy, white substance, the ice cream. Luna served one brownie to me and then scooped some ice cream onto it. Before I could eat, she took a bottle of hot brown sauce and poured it over the whole thing, and then neatly positioned a bright, juicy red sphere on top.

“There you go: one chocolate fudge brownie with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and a cherry on top,” Luna said cheerily. Kaj handed me a clean set of silverware. While Luna served herself and Kaj, I took a big bite of the brownie. It was sweet, rich, and soft. It was thick and gooey and warm but the ice cream was cold and creamy. The two items were so different, but they complemented each other so well. I had to show Piera this. She’d love it.

“So, what do you think of practoblend now that you’ve had real food?” Kaj asked after I scarfed down the brownie. I gladly admitted my earlier mistakes.

“It’s nothing compared to this,” I said.

“I knew you’d say that,” Kaj grinned. “And that’s not all humans have to offer. The food’s amazing, but they also make art through painting, music, writing, dance. Not to mention the contributions of mathematicians, scientists, economists, and so on and so on.”

“And of course the other animals on earth. All the beautiful creatures, especially the ones in the ocean,” Luna added.

“Yes, now that we’re on the same team, we have much to show you,” Kaj agreed.

“Okay, slow down a bit. The same team?” I said. “Are you expecting some sort of war? And I’m not alone. I’m not doing anything without Piera and the other moons. Speaking of which, it’s been a while, they’re probably worried about me…”

“Oh, you can invite them here,” Kaj said. “And yes, to answer your first question, I am expecting a war. It’s doubtful it will escalate beyond a lot of angry shouting and arguments, but there will certainly be a division. Those who are for human exploration and those against it. As of right now, we are the only ones for it.”

“I’m not for it,” I disagreed.

“You’re not for human exploration of Pluto. As long as they keep away from your planet, you don’t mind, yes?” Kaj specified.

“I guess so,” I shrugged.

“Good,” Kaj said. “That makes us on the same team. So, if you must get home, go ahead, we don’t want to worry anybody. But do bring your friends up to speed, won’t you?” He requested, getting up. I stood as well, and Kaj lead me to the door. We arrived at the exit into the rest of the center and stopped.

“Thank you for dinner. And sorry for breaking into your room,” I said.

“You needn’t worry, dear,” He waved it off. “Get some rest. There’s going to be many long days ahead of us.” I nodded and quickly left the section. Piera was probably freaking out right now, but hopefully, she’ll be appreciative of our new allies.

There you have it! I am working on a chapter four if you’re interested let me know? It’s really fun to write.

@asexual-trashbag @d-strider @blueberryxz

@deafinatelyfangirling

#writing #my writing #space #planets #champions_of_worlds

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sciencespies · 4 years

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The cost of visiting Earth may be too astronomical for aliens

https://sciencespies.com/space/the-cost-of-visiting-earth-may-be-too-astronomical-for-aliens/

The cost of visiting Earth may be too astronomical for aliens

In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project.

According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?”

This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence.

Since Fermi’s time, there have been several proposed resolutions to his question, which includes the very real possibility that interstellar colonization follows the basic rule of Percolation Theory.

One of the key assumptions behind the Fermi Paradox is that given the abundance of planets and the age of the Universe, an advanced exo-civilization should have colonized a significant portion of our galaxy by now.

This is certainly not without merit, considering that within the Milky Way galaxy alone (which is over 13.5 billion years old), there are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars.

Another key assumption is that intelligent species will be motivated to colonize other star systems as part of some natural drive to explore and extend the reach of their civilization.

Last, but certainly not least, it assumes that interstellar space travel would be feasible and even practical for an advanced exo-civilization.

But this, in turn, comes down to the assumption that technological advances will provide solutions to the single-greatest challenge of interstellar travel.

In short, the amount of energy it would take for a spacecraft to travel from one star to another is prohibitively large, especially where large, crewed spacecraft would be concerned.

Relativity is a harsh mistress

In 1905, Einstein published his seminal paper in which he advanced his Special Theory of Relativity. This was Einstein’s attempt to reconcile Newton’s Laws of Motion with Maxwell’s Equations of electromagnetism in order to explain the behavior of light.

This theory essentially states that the speed of light (in addition to being constant) is an absolute limit beyond which objects cannot travel.

This is summarized by the famous equation, E=mc2, which is otherwise known as the “mass-energy equivalence.” Put simply, this formula describes the energy (E) of a particle in its rest frame as the product of mass (m) with the speed of light squared (c2) – approx. 300,000 km/s; 186,000 mi/s. A consequence of this is that as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass invariably increases.

Therefore, for an object to reach the speed of light, an infinite amount of energy would have to be expended accelerating it. Once c was achieved, the mass of the object would also become infinite.

In short, achieving the speed of light is impossible, never mind exceeding it. So barring some tremendous revolution in our understanding of physics, a Faster-Than-Light (FTL) propulsion system can never exist.

Such is the consequence of living in a relativistic Universe, where traveling at even a fraction of the speed of light requires tremendous amounts of energy.

And while some very interesting and innovative ideas have been produced over the years by physicists and engineers who want to see interstellar travel become a reality, none of the crewed concepts are what you might call “cost-effective.”

A Matter of Principle

This raises a very important philosophical question that is related to the Fermi Paradox and the existence of ETIs. This is none other than the Copernican Principle, named in honor of famed astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

To break it down, this principle is an extension of Copernicus’ argument about the Earth, how it was not in a unique and privileged position to view the Universe.

Extended to the cosmological realm, the principle basically asserts that when considering the possibility of intelligent life, one should not assume that Earth (or humanity) is unique.

Similarly, this principle holds that the Universe as we see it today is representative of the norm – aka, that it is in a state of equilibrium.

The opposing view that humanity is in a unique and privileged position to observe the Universe is what is known as the Anthropic Principle.

In a nutshell, this principle states that the very act of observing the Universe for signs of life and intelligence requires that the laws that govern it be conducive to life and intelligence.

If we accept the Copernican Principle as a guiding principle, we are forced to concede that any intelligent species would face the same challenges with interstellar flight as we do.

And since we do not foresee a way around these, barring major a breakthrough in our understanding of physics, perhaps no other species has found one either.

Could this be the reason for the “Great Silence”?

Origin

The notion that distance and time may be a factor (in relation to the Fermi Paradox) has received quite a bit of consideration over time.

Carl Sagan and William I. Newman suggested in their 1981 study, “Galactic civilizations: Population dynamics and interstellar diffusion,” that signals and probes by ETIs may simply not have reached Earth yet. This was met with criticism by other scientists who argued that it contradicted the Copernican Principle.

By Sagan and Newman’s own estimates, the time it would take for an ETI to have explored the entire galaxy is equal to or less than the age of our galaxy itself (13.5 billion years). If an exo-civilization’s probes or signals have not reached us yet, this would imply that sentient life started to emerge in the more recent past.

In other words, the galaxy is in a state of disequilibrium, moving from a state of being uninhabited to inhabited.

However, it was Geoffrey A. Landis who made what is perhaps the most compelling argument about the limits imposed by the laws of physics.

In his 1993 paper, “The Fermi paradox: an approach based on percolation theory,” he argued that as a consequence of Relativity, an exo-civilization would only be able to expand so far throughout the galaxy.

Central to Landis’ argument was the mathematical and physics statistics concept known as “percolation theory,” which describes how a network behaves when nodes or links are removed.

In accordance with this theory, when enough of the network’s links are removed, it will break down into smaller connected clusters.

According to Landis, this same process is useful in describing what happens to people engaged in migration.

In short, Landis proposed that in a galaxy where intelligent life is statistically likely, there will not be a “uniformity of motive” among extraterrestrial civilizations. Instead, his model assumes a wide variety of motives, with some choosing to venture out and colonize while others choose to “stay at home.”

As he explained it:

“Since it is possible, given a large enough number of extraterrestrial civilizations, one or more would have certainly undertaken to do so, possibly for motives unknowable to us. Colonization will take an extremely long time, and will be very expensive.

“It is quite reasonable to suppose that not all civilizations will be interested in making such a large expenditure for a pay off far in the future. Human society consists of a mixture of cultures which explore and colonize, some times over extremely large distances, and cultures which have no interest in doing so.”

To summarize, an advanced species would not colonize the galaxy rapidly or consistently. Instead, it would “percolate” outwards to a finite distance, where increasing costs and the lag time between communications imposed limits and colonies evolved their own cultures.

Thus, colonization wouldn’t be uniform but would happen in clusters with large areas remaining uncolonized at any given time.

A similar argument was made in 2019 by Adam Frank and a team of exoplanet researchers from NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanetary Systems Science (NExSS).

In a study titled “The Fermi Paradox and the Aurora Effect: Exo-civilization Settlement, Expansion, and Steady States,” they argued that settlement of the galaxy would also occur in clusters because not all potentially-habitable planets would be hospitable for a colonizing species.

Of course, Landis’ model contains some inherent assumptions of its own, which he laid out beforehand.

First, there was the assumption that interstellar travel is difficult due to the laws of physics and that there is a maximum distance over which colonies can be directly established. Hence, a civilization will only colonize within a reasonable distance from its home, beyond which secondary colonization will occur later.

Second, Landis also makes the assumption that the parent civilization will have a weak grasp over any colonies it creates, and the time needed for these to develop their own colonization capability will be very long. Hence, any colony established will develop its own culture over time, and its people will have a sense of self and identity distinct from that of the parent civilization.

As we explored in a previous article, it would take between 1,000 and 81,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri (4.24 light-years away) using current technology.

While there are concepts that would allow for relativistic travel (a fraction of the speed of light), the travel time would still be anywhere from a few decades to over a century. What’s more, the cost would be extremely prohibitive (more on that below).

But getting colonists to another star system is just the beginning.

Once they have settled a nearby habitable planet (and not all died off) and have the infrastructure for interstellar communications, it would still take eight-and-a-half years to send a message to Earth and receive an answer. That’s simply not practical for any civilization hoping to maintain centralized control or cultural hegemony over its colonies.

Space is expensive!

To put things in perspective, consider the costs associated with humanity’s own history of space exploration. Sending astronauts to the Moon as part of the Apollo Program between 1961 and 1973 cost a hefty US$25.4 billion, which works out to about US$150 billion today (when adjusted for inflation).

But Apollo did not occur in a vacuum, and first required Project Mercury and Project Gemini as stepping stones.

These two programs, which put the first American astronauts in orbit and developed the necessary expertise for getting to the Moon, respectively ran about US$2.3 billion and US$10 billion (when adjusted).

Add them all up, and you get a grand total of around US$163 billion spent from 1958 to 1972.

By comparison, Project Artemis, which will return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, will cost US$35 billion over just the next four years!

That doesn’t include the costs of getting all the various components to this stage in the game, like the development of the SLS thus far, the Orion space capsule, and research into the Lunar Gateway, human landing systems (HLS), and robotic missions.

That’s a lot of money just to get to Earth’s only satellite. But that’s nothing compared to the costs of interstellar missions!

Going interstellar?

Since the dawn of the Space Age, many theoretical proposals have been made for sending spacecraft to the nearest stars.

At the heart of each and every one of these proposals was the same concern: can we reach the nearest stars in our lifetimes?

In order to meet this challenge, scientists contemplated a number of advanced propulsion strategies that would be capable of pushing spacecraft to relativistic speeds.

Of these, the most straightforward was definitely Project Orion (1958 to 1963), which would rely on a method known as Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP).

Led by Ted Taylor of General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, this project envisioned a massive starship that would use the explosive force generated by nuclear warheads to generate thrust.

These warheads would be released behind the spacecraft and detonated, creating nuclear pulses. These would be absorbed by a rear-mounted pressure plate (aka, “pusher”) that translate the explosive force into forward momentum.

Though inelegant, the system was brutally simple and effective, and could theoretically achieve speeds of up to 5 percent the speed of light (5.4×107km/hr, or 0.05c).

Alas, the cost. According to estimates produced by Dyson in 1968, an Orion spacecraft would weight between 400,000 and 4,000,000 metric tons.

Dyson’s most conservative estimates also placed the cost of building such a craft at US$367 billion (US$2.75 trillion when adjusted for inflation). That’s about 78 percent of the US government’s annual revenue for 2019, and 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

Another idea was to build rockets that rely on thermonuclear reactions to generate thrust.

Specifically, the concept of Fusion Propulsion was investigated by the British Interplanetary Society between 1973 and 1978 as part of a feasibility study known as Project Daedalus.

The resulting design called for a two-stage spacecraft that would generate thrust by fusing pellets of a deuterium/helium-3 in a reaction chamber using electron lasers.

This would create a high-energy plasma that would then be converted to thrust by a magnetic nozzle.

The first stage of the spacecraft would operate for just over 2 years and accelerate the spacecraft to 7.1 percent the speed of light (0.071c). This stage would then be jettisoned and the second stage would take over and accelerate the spacecraft up to about 12 percent of light speed (0.12c) over the course of 1.8 years.

The second-stage engine would then be shut down, and the ship would enter into a 46-year cruise period.

According to the Project’s estimates, the mission would take 50 years to reach Barnard’s Star (less than 6 light-years away). Adjusted for Proxima Centauri, the same craft could make the trip in 36 years.

But in addition to technological barriers identified by the Project, there was also the sheer costs involved.

Even by the modest standard of an uncrewed concept, a fully-fueled Daedalus would weigh as much as 60,000 metric tons […]. Adjust to 2020, the price tag for a fully-assembled Daedalus would cost close to US$6 trillion. Icarus Interstellar, an international organization of volunteer citizen scientists (founded in 2009), has since attempted to revitalize the concept with Project Icarus.

Another bold and daring idea is Antimatter Propulsion, which would rely on the annihilation of matter and antimatter (hydrogen and antihydrogen particles).

This reaction unleashed as much energy as a thermonuclear detonation, as well as a shower of subatomic particles (pions and muons).

These particles, which would then travel at one-third the speed of light, are channeled by a magnetic nozzle to generate thrust.

Unfortunately, the cost of producing even a single gram of antimatter fuel is estimated to be around US$1 trillion.

According to a report by Robert Frisbee of NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Technology Group (NASA Eagleworks), a two-stage antimatter rocket would need over 815,000 metric tons (900,000 US tons) of fuel to make the journey to Proxima Centauri in approximately 40 years.

A more optimistic report by Dr. Darrel Smith & Jonathan Webby of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University states that a spacecraft weighing 400 metric tons (441 US tons) and 170 metric tons (187 US tons) of antimatter fuel could reach 0.5 the speed of light.

At this rate, the craft could reach Proxima Centauri in a little over 8 years, but there’s no cost-effective way to do this and no guarantees there ever will be.

In all cases, propellant makes up a large fraction of these concept’s overall mass. To address this, variations have been proposed that could generate their own propellant.

In the case of fusion rockets, there’s the Bussard Ramjet, which uses an enormous electromagnetic funnel to “scoop” hydrogen from the interstellar medium and magnetic fields to compress it to the point that fusion occurs.

Similarly, there’s the Vacuum to Antimatter Rocket Interstellar Explorer System (VARIES), which also creates its own fuel out of the interstellar medium. Proposed by Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar, a VARIES ship would rely on large lasers (powered by enormous solar arrays) that would create particles of antimatter when fired at empty space.

Alas, neither of these ideas are possible using current technology, nor are they within the realm of cost-effectiveness (not by a long shot).

Under the circumstances, and barring several major technological developments that would reduce the associated costs, it would be fair to say that any idea for interstellar crewed missions is simply impractical.

Sending probes to other stars within our lifetimes is still within the realm of possibility, especially those that rely on Directed-Energy Propulsion (DEP).

As proposals like Breakthrough Starshot or Project Dragonfly show, these sails could be accelerated to relativistic speeds and have all the necessary hardware to gather pictures and basic data on any orbiting exoplanets.

However, such probes are a potentially-reliable and cost-effective means of interstellar exploration, not colonization.

What’s more, the time-lag involved in interstellar communications would still place constraints on how far these probes could explore while still reporting back to Earth.

Therefore, an exo-civilization is not likely to send probes very far beyond the boundaries of its territory.

Criticisms

A possible criticism of percolation theory is that it allows for many scenarios and interpretations that would permit contact to have happened at this point.

If we assume that an intelligent species would similarly take 4.5 billion years to emerge (the time between Earth’s formation and modern humans), and consider that our galaxy has been around for 13.5 billion years, that still leaves a 9 billion years window.

For 9 billion years, multiple civilizations could have come and gone, and while no one species could have colonized the entire galaxy, it’s hard to imagine that this activity would have gone unnoticed.

Under the circumstances, one may be forced to conclude that in addition to their being limits to how a civilization can reach that there are other limiting factors at work here (Great Filter, anyone?)

However, it is important to remind ourselves that no proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox is without its share of holes.

Also, expecting a theory or theorist to have all the answers to a subject as complex (yet data-poor) as the existence of extraterrestrials is about as unrealistic as expecting consistency in the behavior of ETIs themselves!

Overall, this hypothesis is highly useful because of the way it breaks down many of the assumptions inherent to “Fact A.”

It also presents an entirely logical starting point for answering the fundamental question. Why haven’t we heard from any ETIs? Because it’s unrealistic to conclude that they should have colonized the better part of the galaxy by now, especially when the laws of physics (as we know them) preclude such a thing.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

#Space

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thejourneymanwordsmith · 4 years

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WIP - Adrift

I know it’s not Wednesday anymore, but I wanted to share the first little bit of this anyway, since it finally feels like it’s starting to go somewhere. It was originally the pilot of a tv show that I wrote for my senior project, and I’ve just never really been able to let go of it.

Adrift

The year is 2177. The Earth is dying. Despite our best efforts to save it, it was simply too little, too late. Scientists estimate we have about 100 years before our planet becomes completely uninhabitable.

However, human ingenuity is not to be defeated so easily. Recent developments in faster-than-light (FTL) technology have allowed us to travel to worlds far beyond our previous reach. Once more taking hope in hand, the United Nations has put together humanity’s first ever interstellar colonization effort, loading the world’s best and brightest onto a custom designed, state-of-the-art ship, the United Nations Ship (UNS) Ark Terra, and sending them out amongst the stars in search of a new home.

Part One: Sabotage

Captain Denelle Marshall sat alone in her chair on the bridge, staring blankly out at the distorted light of the stars flowing past the ship as it sailed through hyperspace. She had always thought the sight was beautiful, the way the starlight streaked against the windows, the bent light waves breaking down into their component colors and melting into an endless river of blue and yellow and orange. It made the vast emptiness of space a little more bearable. Or at least it used to.

Two months. Two months since they had left Earth behind. Two months trapped on this ship empty, staring at nothing but that endless river of distorted light. Sure, she’d been sent on long assignments before. But at least then there had been things to do, places to go, people to see. It had been dull at times, yes, but at least she had had the illusion of control to cling to. But this – being stuck in hyperspace, with nothing to do but sit around and wait – it was enough to make even a veteran like herself go mad.

And they still had nine months left to go before they arrived at their destination.

Denelle closed her eyes and sighed heavily. If they’d been a freight vessel, the ship would have been put on autopilot and all the crew put in stasis for the long journey. No need to bore themselves to death. But no. This was a military ship. And not just any military ship, but the UNS Ark Terra, the very first interstellar colonization effort to be sent out amongst the stars. Something so important couldn’t simply be left in the care of a bunch of computers.

At least that was the argument. Personally, Denelle thought it was pointless. Not to mention incredibly egotistical. To think that man could do such a menial task like basic ship maintenance better than a machine. Machines can’t get bored and make stupid mistakes.

But unfortunately, it wasn’t her job to make policy decisions like that. After all, she was only a ship’s captain, not top brass or a politician. No. Her only job was to man the fort, in that one-in-a-million chance that their custom-designed, brand-new state-of-the-art sextuple-tested computer system had a malfunction. This definitely wasn’t the glamorous adventure she had expected from such a historic voyage.

Suddenly, the light changed behind Denelle’s closed eyes. For a very brief moment, everything went dark. Denelle sat up straight and opened her eyes, staring intently out at the endless river of color before her. But as far as she could tell, it remained unchanged. Maybe they had just passed too close to a black hole or something. Or maybe she had imagined it. A bored brain making things up in an attempt to break up the monotony.

Denelle sighed again and leaned back in her chair, eyes once again sliding out of focus.

And then the ship’s lights flickered.

Shit.

Denelle sat bolt upright in her chair, every atom in her body suddenly on high alert. She pressed a few buttons in the armrest of her chair, and suddenly a map of the ship’s power grid was projected into the air before her.

Well that was odd. Everything looked normal. Maybe that specific light fixture was just broken.

The light flickered again. So did the projection.

Okay, that was not normal.

Denelle dismissed the screen and pressed another button on her chair.

“Bridge to Engineering.”

Silence.

“Bridge to Engineering. Does anyone copy?”

More silence. Denelle inhaled, about to make a third attempt. Who was even supposed to be on duty right now?

“This is Sam Fairfax in Engineering,” the radio crackled back. It carried a woman’s voice, light London accent. “What seems to be the problem?”

“The lights are flickering,” Denelle replied. “I checked the power grid, but the ship’s computer isn’t detecting any abnormalities.”

“Hmm. Maybe that light is faulty?”

Denelle sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s not just the lights,” she growled back, failing at keeping the frustration from her voice. She was starting to get a headache. She pressed a slender index finger against the center of her dark forehead.

“Hold on one moment. Let me just-”

The lights flickered again. The radio cut out.

“Doctor Fairfax?”

Silence. Denelle pressed the button again, much harder than she needed to.

“Doctor Fairfax, do you copy?”

“I said hold on,” Dr. Fairfax snapped. “I still need to- Oh fuck.”

Denelle’s heart skipped a beat. She swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.

“That didn’t sound good,” she said, somehow managing to keep her voice even.

Silence.

“Doctor Fairfax?”

“Captain, you need to drop us out of hyperspace right now.”

“Doctor Fairfax, what is going on?”

“There’s some kind of malfunction with computer system, it’s causing the main reactors to overload, and the automatic shut-off isn’t engaging for some reason. We have about five minutes before the ship explodes.”

…

“I’m sorry, did you say the ship was about to explode?”

“Yes, I did. However, this can be avoided by temporarily cutting the power.”

“Then why haven’t you done that already?”

“Because if we cut the power while we’re in hyperspace, we could end up crashing into a planet or a star, and therefore still die a horrible, fiery death. You need to calculate an exit point and get us back into normal space-time before I do anything.”

Denelle got up from her chair and ran over to the navigations console at the front of the bridge. She reached under the desk and fumbled for the switch even as she sat down, bringing the station to life.

Numbers flashed across the multiple screens before her. Her eyes glazed over, not seeing them. What was she even doing? She didn’t know how to do this. FTL was still a pretty new technology. All the classes she had taken on it at the Academy had been purely theoretical.

Stop. Take a breath. Calm down. Being panicked right now is just going to waste more time.

Still, she wished she could call Lieutenant Loi up to the bridge. He understood how this thing worked. Probably the only person on the ship who did. Even so, it was the middle of the night (well, “night”). By the time he put clothes on and got his ass up here the ship would have exploded. No. She would have to do this herself and hope they didn’t crash. In theory, they should have pretty good odds. Space was supposed to be almost ninety percent empty, right?

Denelle closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her heart rate slowed. She opened her eyes.

Pull up star charts. Map current position. Remember the protocol for emergency hyperspace exit. They’d made all of the senior officers take a short course on the practical applications of FTL after they’d been selected for the Ark Terra assignment. It didn’t matter that this was the first time actually implementing these skills. She knew what to do.

“Okay, I’ve mapped an exit point,” Denelle said, finger on the coms button. “Exiting hyperspace in thirty seconds.”

She should probably warn the rest of the crew that they would be dropping out of hyperspace. Not that it would do them much good. It was “night time” after all. Most of them would be asleep. Twenty five seconds simply wasn’t enough time.

Twenty seconds.

What if she did it wrong? What if they crashed into a planet?

Stop. You did it right. You know you did.

Fifteen seconds.

But what if she didn’t?

Even if you didn’t, space is mostly empty. The odds of crashing into something is ridiculously small.

Ten seconds.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

But what if she did it wrong?

Five.

Four.

Stop it. You didn’t do it wrong.

Three.

Two.

But what if-

One.

The ship shuddered. The river of colored lights shimmered, turning white before snapping back into pencil straight streaks against the windows. Another shudder. The sensation of stopping. And then the stars were stars again.

They were in wide open space, with nothing around them for a couple million kilometers. According to the ship’s scanner, the closest star system was half a light-year away. Denelle breathed a sigh of relief. She couldn’t crash the ship here even if she wanted to.

“Bridge to Engineering. FTL has been disengaged.”

“Copy that. Initiating emergency shut-off of main power.”

The lights flickered again, dimmed, then cut out entirely. A moment later, the main display screen turned off, erasing the stars and casting the bridge into pitch-black darkness. The gentle hum of the engines faded and died, leaving behind an eerie silence that pressed in around Denelle, suddenly making her feel just a little claustrophobic. And ever so slowly, Denelle began to drift up off her seat and into the air.

#wip wednesday #adrift

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