Sci-Fi Book Questions

[TheFaithfulStone]

Hey Guys.

 

So I'm writing this book (yeah, I know everybody's writing a book.) I have a decent background in practical application kinds of things (making stuff explode, move, etc. I used to work for SRL but I'm not much one for theoretical astrophysics. In any case a little background -

 

The book is basically about a group of human corporations who try to "open up" an alien world - while doing so Our Hero® comes to have ethical misgivings about the way humanity is treating the aliens and tries to sabotage their ad campaign. In doing so, he accidentally sparks an interstellar incident. And.... I don't wanna give away any more of the plot. Anyway, some assumptions explicit in my plot structure are

 

1) Aliens exsist and we know this before the start of the story. Although this is a "first contact" story, I don't want to deal with human religious repercussions that come from finding out we just ain't that special

 

2) The aliens that we contact are similar enough to humanity that we are able to communicate.

 

3) They are SLIGHTLY more advanced than twentieth century humans (ie, able to repel a small invasion with nuclear weapons etc...)

 

4) They have something we want that makes item (5) more feasible.

 

Now ... here's where it get's complicated.

 

5) FTL travel is possible, although EXTREMELY expensive. I'm thinking it requires the equivalent of destroying a large Jovian moon to send a mini-van to the alien world. Since there are a limited number of objects this size in the solar system, it prevents us from just conquering the aliens, although we could send one or two people at a time. Instead we get there at relativistic speeds with beam driven laser or mag-sails. FTL communication is impossible. If you want to talk to Beta Hydri, you have to go there.

 

So my question is - how should "warp drive" work? I'd like to minimize the amount of "handwavium" necessary. I'm thinking something like the Alcubierre / Van Der Broeck Warp Drive. Basically, we are able to create a large negative pressure by "moving" the vaccuum energy, zero point energy, whatever from one part of space to another, effectively creating the negative pressure behind and positive pressure in front of the spaceship.

 

I would like to have the mechanism for doing this be stationary, like a big cannon that "shoots" ships at interstellar "velocities." (Also a limiting factor in conquest, since there is no return trip, and no guarantee of what you'll find once you get there.)

 

Ok, so does that sound like COMPLETE bunk? I want to avoid the "Alakaazam - Tau Ceti!" syndrome, and I'd like for the physics to be at least marginally believable.

 

TFS

[Stargazer]

While I was reading your post I thought about the Alcubierre drive before I saw you mention it. I haven't heard of van den Broeck though. Anyway, wouldn't it be necessary to let the ship create the "bubble" around itself, for as long as necessary? Honestly I don't understand Alcubierre enough, just the basic concept. I thought that the ship had to warp the space time on its own?

[UncleAl]

OK... Implode a moon into a black hole by neutraizing Fermi exclusion of its electrons and nucleons, then ride its parity inversion poly-dimensional shockwave with an exact insertion trajectory.

 

There were two divergent lines of eleven squat maraging steel igloos marching down the engineering bay, rotated at odd angles to one another: One pair each for the three spatial dimensions, one pair for time, and one pair each for the seven compactified dimensions of M-theory sullenly glared at the warp engineers. ("extra" six dimensions loosely comprise one charge dimension, two isospin dimensions, and three color dimensions.) Each member of each pair enclosed a huge facted single crystal ingot, one in crystallographic space group P3(1)21 the other P3(2)21, of SAW quartz crystals to form an opposite parity pair.

 

Each mammoth crystal could be piezoelectrically subjected to a complex tesselation of reciprocal torques just short of material failure - the Instron Parity Drive.

 

"Black space suddenly looked horribly wrong as the ship began to slip through progressively decompactified dimensions in exponentiating IPD starflight. A newbie on her first slide down the glistening haft of spacetime swallowed most of a long long scream." Gives Uncle Al a techno-woodie just thinking about it. Will the crew have problems parallel-dimension parking?

 

Science 296(5572) 1424 (2002)

 

Give the vessel a nice friendly name, like the Chelsea La Fea (if it's military, the Hillary Ramrod Clinton.) Consider each station having an ominous opening called the "V-Port." You could have a nice biological side effect like everybody barfing into their console V-Ports as the dimensionality of thought isn't quite compensated from relative microgram imbalances of the single crystal pillars. Don't eat a newbie big breakfast before your first flight, because when you re-enter real space your nether bung will be hovering hard by your incisors demanding exit.

 

Alas, if one of the brittle alpha-quartz crystals cracks from the stress... Baikonur sleighride! And don't stand behind the thing when the clutch pops SOP, "behind" being kinda relative as these things go, because "behind" won't be there any more.

 

It's too good not to be true.

 

(Did you like the sex scenes?)

[TheFaithfulStone]

While I was reading your post I thought about the Alcubierre drive before I saw you mention it. I haven't heard of van den Broeck though. Anyway, wouldn't it be necessary to let the ship create the "bubble" around itself, for as long as necessary? Honestly I don't understand Alcubierre enough, just the basic concept. I thought that the ship had to warp the space time on its own?

 

I don't know either, that's why I posted the question. ;) The Van Der Broeck (I think) modification is a way to bring the energy requirements for an Alcubierre style warp drive at least down to reality. Basically, you make the "neck" of the warp bubble extremely small, but then it opens into a larger flat space which contains the spaceship. That way it only requires total negative energy about equal to the solar system and not the entire universe to create it.

 

A post that I understood NONE of.

 

What? Okay, okay, so I got the sexual references, very clever. I'm unsure if your making fun of me for wanting help with such an obviously hare-brained idea or what. I looked at your website, and saw you were a member of Mensa - and as such are much smarter than I am. Could you clarify what you said there?

 

TFS

[infamous]

OK... Implode a moon into a black hole by neutraizing Fermi exclusion of its electrons and nucleons, then ride its parity inversion poly-dimensional shockwave with an exact insertion trajectory.

 

 

It's too good not to be true.

 

(Did you like the sex scenes?)

 

UncleAl, I'll have to give you credit, your imagination and literacy are without question on the level of genius. There are many facts, I'm sure you possess, that I would love for you to share with me. I've been a member of this forum for a while now and at the risk of being accused of blowing smoke, I confess that I would give a lot to have a mind like yours. If I thought I could get a straight answer from you, I would be asking your opinion constantly. Understand, this is not meant to offend you, I'm dead serious. I have a few calculations I would love to have your opinion on, but like so many others, I'm afraid to submit them to you for examination because I fear you will take the opportunity to make a sarcastic reference about my intelligence or lack thereof. You see, I recognize that I'm in error about many things that I don't fully understand. I do a considerable amount of reading, but nothing will substitute for the advice of someone that can put many facts togeather and form an intelligent conclusion. I believe you could do this for me but, regrettably I'm not sure I can trust you to be sinsere.

[UncleAl]

What keeps matter inflated against gravitation?

 

A fermion is a particle with half-integral spin. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are fermions. Fermi statistics state that no two fermions in a system may have identical values for all their quantum numbers. When you pile fermions into a potential well, each allowed energy level can contain only two fermions - one spin-up, one spin-down. They stack. Matter stays inflated.

 

A boson is a particle with integral spin. All the force carriers - photons, mesons, gravitons - are bosons. Bose statistics state that an infinite number of bosons can occupy a single degenerate state. Pile 'em in! Hence, lasers and superconductors (bosonic Cooper pairs of electrons).

 

The Earth's average density is 5.515 g/cm^3. Bosonize its electrons and it collapses to nuclear matter, density = 2x10^14 g/cm^3. Work out the new planetary radius and compare it to its Schwarzschild radius,

 

r = 2GM/c^2

 

/_PV = energy, 101.325 joules/liter-atmosphere. Compressing the whole Earth into a lump 193 meters across liberates energy. Oh yes! If that doesn't give you a black hole (work the numbers), bosonize the nucleons, too. Going to a black hole is essentially 100% conversion to energy. That gets you a pretty good WHUMP! It knocks the stuffing out of the structure of spactime too. Gravitational fields expand spacetime. A black hole has an infinite internal diameter.

 

So now we do the sf. Pick your expendable mass. Bosonize its electrons and nucleons and collapse it into a black hole. WHUMP! As spacetime goes infinite inside, spacetime goes to zero outside. In the infinitesimal moment before the event horizon prevents you from looking into the singularity, surf the wave. Carefully.

 

How do we bozonize an entire moon? It's gonna take massive amounts of energy, yes? Sloppy. We expand M-theory's compactified dimensions and let it happen spontaneously. Pull the trigger, let the gunpowder do the work. Add a paragraph of facile bafflegab for the starship and move on. You want the moon-crusher to be portable or you don't get a return trip.

 

sf is about plot. If you get bogged down in the tech it s a boring book.

 

Oh yeah... You need superweapon. A black hole's lifetime depends on its mass. Low mass black holes rapidly decay via Hawking radiation. Look it up. Your folks will flit about the universe imploding moons into stable black holes. What happens if they only implode a small hill? WHUMP! when it shrinks and WHUMP! when it decays. 100% conversion of mass to energy A kilotonne nuclear masses 46.52 mg. A handheld Qpid (quantum phase interference device) that bosonizes a (remote) nanogram of matter makes a 21.5 gram TNT explosion. Nice. The thingie has two aimed beams, one temporal and one spatial. When they intersect it's clobbering time. Oh yeah - individual beams prior to intersection are unaffected by matter. Goes through walls, mirrors, armor like they weren't there.

 

Now give it an Achilles heel for plot development.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Okay, UncleAl, I think I get it now. By "bosonizing" the electrons in something you effectively force it to collapse into a black hole. This creates a kind of "gravity wave" which expands space-time - and that a starship could "surf." It's not terribly dissimilar to the Alcubierre Metric in that it depends not on moving the ship, but on moving the space the ship occupies.

 

Sounds like a good idea, the moon-crusher could be non-portable (I DON'T want an easy return trip) I see two problems however.

 

The plot of the novel depends on FTL travel expenses being a solvable problem. I don't need to explain how it gets solved, really, but I don't want to back myself into a physics corner. Think of it this way - let's say oil was so rare in the US that we could only send a few dozen people at a time to the Middle East. They have lots, so we go over there and try to take it from them - we can't use force, because they have as outnumbered, and roughly evenly "gunned." But while Our Heroes are over there trying to wrest the black stuff from the slightly tanner hands, somebody in the US invents the electric car - obviating the need for oil.

 

Things that throw a wrench in the plot-works then are the need for creating permanent black holes everywhere and the "super-weapon" aspect of it. The proliferation of black holes in Jupiter orbit is a constant cost of the "warp drive" you've described, it doesn't decrease. The same as if all electric power today required you to burn anthracite coal, the cost would just keep going UP, no matter how good you got at doing it. And if I had one of those planet vaporizer things, I don't NEED to negotiate, and I can just terrorize the galaxy.

 

Since the book is really ABOUT the economics of conquest, it's important that the economics of travel be self-consistent. Now of course, I could just always make up the ultra-rare "mysterons!" which are required for FTL travel, but a) that's not very subtle and ;) sci-fi geeks like myself will cry bullcrap. Or "more bullcrap" anyway.

 

TFS

[bULLCRAP I SAY!]

 

edit: Here I go on self-consistency, and then I realize that if I make the moon-crusher external to the ship, that the "superweapon" isn't portable - and can't be dragged to alien worlds to bully their handwavium out of them. So objection one, scratch.

[Jay-qu]

isnt it a slight problem to have black holes floating around? im not just talking about hawking radiation but if they slowly sucked in enough mass so it expanded and eventually took in the whole solar system? and 'surfing' a gravity wave? i dont know, does it actually create an outwards force? isnt it more like space time warping coz of a change in the gravity affecting the area?

also with the trying to get the FTL solution from the aliens you have only considered a military approach have you purposely left out prior diplomatic negotiations?

[TheFaithfulStone]

also with the trying to get the FTL solution from the aliens you have only considered a military approach have you purposely left out prior diplomatic negotiations?

 

Well, if you had a planet crushing weapons of mass destruction why would you negotiate? Also, as I mentioned, the main action of the book will actually be about human negotiating with the alien and trying to get the FTL solution. We already know how to travel FTL, we just can't because we don't have enought "mystery-element" in our solar system. Fortunately, the aliens DO have it. They are technologically advanced enough that we can't just go take it from them, we'll have to negotiate. Like I said, I've got the main plot elements worked out, but I need to fill in the physics. So what I need is a marginally plausible FTL drive that (a) is expensive to operate under normal circumstance (;) has some kind of potential solution that might be located in another solar system.

 

Say for instance, that using matter from a neutron star negates the need to destroy Ganymede everytime you want to jump. (My first idea, actually) A tablespoon of neutron star, roughly equal in mass to Ganymede - good deal. PROBELM - any planet with a neutron star in close proximity is going to be decidedly devoid of biological life. PROBLEM - It requires a whole different class of engineering solutions to take a tablespoon of neutronium than it does to vaporize a moon.

 

So...

 

TFS