Tomasius Space

 
Out of Darkness

2024.0429.1107

Space is is the dread cold hand of entropy, shrouded in darkness and silence. It is the unheard, muffled scream of life overwhelmed by death. Space; space is the most hostile environment to life. There is no pressure, no air, no water, no food and only unseen, dense rocks to collide with in the silent, freezing, inky darkness of the vastness between the stars. And for those who make it this far, an unstable jump point can collapse at any time to strand a traveller to die alone in the deep empty black and even, on occasion, completely outside the traveller's timeline. It may therefore come as a surprise that this miserable abode of death, itself, has become a frontier of unimaginable dimensions where those with nothing else left to lose seek new livelihood far, far from places where the last of such opportunities have been inherited by others. Yet greater hazards than we could even imagine lay in wait, concealed in the shadows.

Citizens of the Stars

By the 30^th Century, concluding the course of a millennium, space travel has progressed from dream to reality to something accessible to everyone who wants the life. It is no less dangerous but, by the same token, who would want to become a billionaire just to have enough money to barely survive in a disused utility closet somewhere in what was once one of London's sewers? No, the abode of death itself has become the salvation of everyone who wants more than the eternal squalor of competing for increasingly scarce living space in the mud and blood of the rock upon which our ancestors evolved.

Thus far, our encounters with alien civilizations have been a matter of blind luck. The Banu were friendly. The Xi'An, for all their aloofness, also proved friendly. The Tevarin, while hostile, weren't extensive enough or advanced enough to extinguish our species - and their hostility made us stronger. For better or worse, it was out of Tevarin hostility that the UEE was born. Although doomed to the rapid decay of any military dictatorship; the extent of the UEE, as well as the blood and iron of the human war machine that emerged from the Tevarin conflict, gave us the space and the time we needed to eventually weed out the corruption that weakened us collectively. And, yet, as we emerge from the clannish culture of a corrupt dictatorship, we find ourselves seeing our most formidible foe yet as a disparate collection of clans. I suspect we assume the mirror of our recent selves when we look upon the Vanduul and I am compelled to wonder. Do we look upon the Vanduul and their kingships just as the indigents of faraway lands once gazed, from their canoes, upon newly arriving Europeans in their tall-ships?

Tomasius Space: Exploration and Research - It's what we do.

Tomasius Space comes down from a much older tradition and the history is just a little bit too convoluted for polite company. Suffice to say, we've been around the block once or twice and we know how things go - at least well enough to know what to do in which season. In the springtime of civilisation we focus on exploration to find safe locations and raise funds for new bases. Once a civilisation enters its summer phase, we go out and build those bases with as much discretion as possible for autumn and winter surely follow. The autumn of civilisation is a time of extensive research where the dividends of our efforts strengthen the community against what is coming while allowing us to stockpile for the coming winter. And the winter of civilisation sees us scouting so that others may not die in vain. It is a cycle as certain as the seasons by which agriculture has prospered since time immemorial.

Right now, our 2948 objectives revolve around quantifying key phsyical data about the systems, which are currently accessible to us, in addition to benchmarking as many ships as we have access to; so that informed decisions can be made concerning deployment. Whether you sense the eerie calm before the storm or have deep misgivings about the so-called "status quo" which seems to obtain betwixt us and the Vanduul, you have to know that a long and harsh "winter" is coming and, I suspect, that how we pull together now will determine whether the opening phases of the new offensive against the Vanduul bears fruit or just whithers and dies as they close ranks and begin to overrun system after system.

Quite frankly, the future is grim. We are prepared for an extended tour of the deep black with the ability to set up a temporary remote space station. But, by the same token, we are not adequately stockpiled nor has our jump point research achieved its targets. And I suspect we will all pay dearly for our shortfall in the jump point research. On the daytime side of the satellite, we do have streamlined, more efficient benchmarking procedures in the pipeline and, with sufficient time for implementation (before everything goes sideways) we may be able to devote enough time to draw some relevant questions from the jump point research before the Vanduul who tagged the Stanton System return with a kingship.

Why the mundane is really so much more interesting:
A brief exploration of how the Universe can be percieved.

Gravity, matter and entropy together dictate that the universe is finite and subject to states of finite duration. In light of this, it is not entirely surprising to come across the 20^th Century notion that red-shift was purely the product of everything moving away from a centre, as a consequence of The Big Bang; a definitive beginning for the universe and a point scored for closure-obsessed Western Cosmology. But then a change in the red-shift was observed and it seemed as if this motion were being accelerated in a manner unphysical. Such paradoxes can only indicate that something has been left out of the picture. Gravity, matter, entropy ... what could possibly be missing?

An alternative view, which began to emerge in the 21^st Century was that the matter between stars served to scatter and relay radiation which propagated more and more at the wavelength corresponding to the temperature of that matter and, suddenly, red shift had a new explanation. Just as atmospheric dust scatters sunlight to diminish the violet end of the spectrum and enhance the reds of Sunrise and Sunset, so too could interstellar dust not only cause red shift, but also cause variations in red shift to be observed as the solar system moved from sparser to denser regions or from denser to sparser regions. We know from 19^th Century Thermodynamics that interstellar dust need not be "dark matter" in order to impose black body distribution on the scattered radiation as it only takes one particle which is near enough to "dark matter" to do the job - as any cavity oven experiment can demonstrate. Yet, how is it so; that all of this matter does not come crashing in upon itself as a consequence of gravity, or are we missing something?

Gravity is a force and we know from the study of magnetic and static electric forces that the same rules apply across all forces and that both electric and magnetic force exhibit polarity such that opposites attract and like poles repel. And, yet, gravity is so much more fundamental; existing as it does in connection with matter - seemingly without the polarity seen in magnetic and electric force. But what if we're missing something because we're only looking at things from one end? The universe contains both matter and antimatter. If the force of gravitational attraction existed between both, would not the universe consume itself in an entropic nuclear pyre as matter and antimatter fell into one-another's gravity wells? This we do not see and you being here to read this is sufficient evidence that, once again, a flight of fantasy has erupted from something left out of the picture.

Do matter and antimatter repel one-another? Of all the cosmological things discussed, this has been the only fruit born of the effort. It would explain a great deal; in particular, how gravity and entropy can co-exist, indefinitely, without significant impact on the extent of the universe and may yet hint at how a universe might well reach a steady state by imposing an upper limit to which entropy may approach but never quite arrive. Yet, of all these mind-boggling considerations, we gain only one question and only because we looked beyond the more comfortable conclusions yielding the beginnings and ends so necessary to the mythos of Western Cosmology. When dealing with things which just are, the need for well-defined closure tends to be counterproductive. But answering a simple, practical question such as whether matter and antimatter repel one-another provides knowledge of the real world which, in and of itself, has practical applications - unlike the flights of fancy which are mandated by a culturally influenced exploration of cosmology. This is why, when we theorise at Tomasius Space, the end must always be a question with a practical experimental answer.

 
 

Monday, ISO: 2024-April-29, 11:07 hours, UTC.