Prelude to Extinction

by Andreas Karpf

  Kurt looked in vain at the two aliens, searching for a hint of what they were thinking; but to his eye, their faces remained expressionless.

  Gamma continued, “To some degree you are correct in your thoughts that the devices through which you passed are wormholes. When properly configured, they allow you to travel between two points almost instantaneously.”

  The room went completely black and an iridescent, flat green table top appeared, floating about chest-high. Centered on it was a small, but perfect representation of their IPV. “Take this flat surface to be a two-dimensional universe,” Beta said. “Within it an object may travel forwards, backwards, or side to side.” The image of the IPV traced out a circular path on the green surface. “It may go anywhere it desires, as long as it stays on this flat surface. Being a Two-D universe, its inhabitants have no perception of the third dimension: up and down. They don’t see anything in this extra dimension, nor can they move in it.”

  Don interrupted, saying, “We’re quite familiar with these concepts.”

  “I will move ahead then. As you are aware, the Two-D surface itself doesn’t have to be flat. It can be curved in the third dimension.” The image of the table top changed to a large green sphere, while the miniature IPV continued tracing out its circular path on the newly-formed globe’s surface. “The inhabitants can travel along the surface again, and still never be aware that their seemingly flat path is curved around this unseen dimension.

  “Of course, as you know from your Albert Einstein, the curvature of this space-time is caused by matter. Each massive object bends or distorts space-time itself.” The green globe with its circling IPV vanished. In its place the green table-top returned, but this time with several widely spaced, white spheres; Kurt assumed the spheres represented stars. Each star caused the flat green plane to distort, as if it were a rubber sheet giving way under their weight. “As you know, the more massive the object, the greater the distortion in space-time.”

  “So you’re able to distort space-time enough to move from one point on the surface to another?” Kurt offered.

  “In a sense, yes. Keep in mind that this flat Two-D space is just a crude analogy.”

  “Yes, we understand,” Don said. “In the case of a closed universe, the Two-D surface is curved around a three dimensional sphere; a globe like before. In the case of an open universe, its form could be similar to an open, saddle shape, and may be infinite.”

  “Not really,” Gamma said politely. “There are other aspects to the fundamental force at work that complicate things. Some of your theorists were on the right track with the idea of cosmic strings that were massive remnants of the original big bang. In reality, there are sub-dimensional, ultra-dense objects that cause space-time to have a very complicated, undulating shape that’s superimposed on its larger structure.” The green table top vanished, and Kurt found himself looking at what could only be described as crumpled, ball of paper. However, instead of sharp corners, all of the edges were rounded off. It almost reminded him of a piece of brain coral he’d once seen while snorkeling in the tropics. The surface in front of him meandered randomly, in and out of a myriad of folds, all while maintaining an overall, ball like structure.

  “This complex pattern of waves and folds,” Gamma said, “is partly a by-product of high-level asymmetries in the original big bang. There are, of course, many other processes at work, but we can discuss those later. Also keep in mind that the magnitude of these folds is exaggerated in this simulation so that we can see them more clearly.

  “In the regions where the surface bends away and then back in towards itself, we can use the equivalent of extremely dense objects to distort space-time further, and make the two sides touch. The point of contact simply allows us to move from one fold to the next, and thus cover large distances almost instantaneously. It’s not truly tunneling or using wormholes; but it is something along those lines.

  “Taking this analogy back to the real-world, we’re dealing with three macroscopic dimensions warped in an unseen fourth dimension. The results are, however, exactly as I described in our Two-D example.”

  Kurt just stared at the undulating green form floating in front of him. The image zoomed in on one of the folds. There were two simplified icons representing the three-ringed form of the AGCs – one on either side of the folded surface. The image showed the AGCs pulling the surfaces toward each other until they overlapped and the folds touched. Gamma spoke again. “As you can see, we use the AGCs to create a stable point of intersection; this is what allows us to travel from fold to fold.”

  “What about the time travel we experienced?” Don asked.

  There was a pause before Gamma said, “I don’t understand. There was no time travel.”

  “What do you mean?” Don pressed. “Of course there was. I mean at Epsilon Eri D we started out in Earth year 2129. After our first transit we used stellar drift to calculate the year to be around 1790.”

  The lights came back on, and Kurt watched as Beta and Gamma appeared to look at each other from their alcoves. A moment later Beta said, “I think I understand what you mean. Your understanding of time is ... is different from how we see it. The first thing that you need to do is take a step back and ask yourself, what is time?”

  “Time defines the sequence of events,” Kurt quickly volunteered. “You know,” he said as he took a pen out of his pocket, “if I drop this pen, it will of course fall to the floor.” Kurt let the pen go and it hit ground with a soft thud. “Gravity governed its motion. The effect of my releasing the pen is its falling to the floor. Time defines that sequence.”

  “Excellent,” Gamma said with what Kurt could only describe as excitement. “The most general, qualitative definition of time is that it is the dimension that governs cause and effect. An effect can never come before a cause. Just as the physical dimension of length defines the distance between two points are along a line, so does time define the separation between two events.

  “My next question is then, what makes your pen fall? That is, why is falling an effect of your releasing it?”

  Kurt just stared at their alien hosts, not understanding why they were talking about elementary school science.

  “I’m sorry,” Gamma said. “Please just bear with us, it will all make sense in a moment.”

  Their continued silence coupled with Don’s impatient gaze, prompted Gamma to continue. “Your textbooks of course state that when you released the pen, the gravitational force accelerated the pen, causing it to fall. The pen followed the gravitational field lines down to the floor. A more precise explanation though would be that it required energy to lift the pen to the raised state. When you release it, it released this energy when it fell to the floor. All motion, whether it be mechanical movement or chemical reactions, in fact all events represent a change in energy states. Time can be defined by this transfer of energy from one state to another. Not by the simple ticking of a hand on one of your antique clocks.”

  Kurt just stared at his alien hosts and managed a simple, “I see.”

  “So now I’ll define the present differently than you. We define the present as the time period in which an object interacts with its surroundings. More specifically, it is the time period during which the object interacts with force-carrying particles that were emanated from somewhere else. In other words, the moment that one object receives energy from another object. This could be your interaction with a heating element by absorbing infrared photons, or your interaction with a planet’s surface via gravity by absorbing its gravitons. Nothing else matters.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” Kurt said softly. “You’re just talking about very basic physics. This is nothing more than the conservation of energy.”

  “It goes deeper than that,” Gamma answered. “What this definition means is that there is no universal moment that is the present. Let me give you an example. Your Earth is a hundred-fifty-million kilometers from its sun. Because of this distance it takes ligh
t a little over eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth.”

  “Yes, of course,” Don finally said.

  “If I were standing on the Earth right now, I could ask you to tell me what was happening on the sun at that exact moment. Would you be able to answer me?”

  “I don’t see your point,” Don said.

  “Could you tell me exactly what is happening on your sun before its light rays, its photons, reach you?”

  “We know how the sun works. We can predict flares and other phenomena, so yes I could,” Don said.

  “No you can’t,” Gamma responded. “You can estimate what may be going on based on your knowledge of nature, but you can’t tell me exactly what’s happening on the sun. If the sun suddenly brightened, or for some mysterious reason became more massive, you wouldn’t know for eight more minutes until those extra photons or gravitons reached you. Physical objects, planets, asteroids, gas clouds, rocks, and so on, can’t try to predict what’s happening. They don’t think or understand nature. They can only react to the flow of energy. The present is defined as that interaction between the energy released from one object reaching another. Following this reasoning, I would define the present on Earth as that moment in time connecting the Earth and the sun. In other words, the moment in time when those photons or gravitons from the sun reached the Earth. In your current definition, you would say that those light rays, those photons, give you an image of how the sun looked eight minutes earlier. We say that they tell you how the sun looks right now. Whatever the sun is doing before the next set of photons reach you is unknown to you. It is the future. It is a cause that hasn’t occurred yet, and therefore cannot have an effect.”

  They sat in silence. Kurt could see where Gamma was going with this, but the connection to the change in year was just out of reach.

  “But that still doesn’t explain what we saw,” Don said. “We saw a change in stellar position. It was three-hundred-thirty-five years earlier.”

  “I understand the confusion,” Gamma said calmly. “Think more about the eight minutes between the earth and sun. Now think about G3-Alpha. How far is it from Earth?”

  “Three-hundred-thirty-five light-years,” Don said.

  “Now picture yourself on Earth, this very second, looking through a very powerful telescope at G3-Alpha. Based on your current understanding of time, what year was the light you’re seeing, the photons that are hitting your eye, emitted from the G3-Alpha?”

  Don just stared at the alien. The math was simple, but the answer was becoming unsettling. “About 1790,” Kurt finally said.

  “Correct,” Gamma said. “That date which you call 1790 is really the present, not three-hundred-thirty-five years ago as you label it. That light, those photons, are the interaction between that planetary system and your own.”

  Kurt saw that there was logic in Gamma’s argument, but wasn’t convinced. “I think I understand, but I’m still having trouble with your concept of linking different areas of space at different times into a definition of the present. Think of it, if I look through a telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy, it’s two and a half million light-years away. Or if I look in another direction, I can see the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is fifty-thousand light-years away. The light that I’m looking at took thousands or millions of years to get to me. How can those images that are vastly different ages be the present?”

  Gamma answered patiently, “Like I said, you are a thinking being. Your thoughts and perceived understanding of nature allow you to arbitrarily assign a universal ‘present’ across the universe. However, natural objects can’t think or define things. They can only interact via their transfer of energy. It is that energy that can cause something to happen; in other words, create an effect. We use this natural interaction to define the present – nothing else. This law allows us to more precisely define causality. Your definition, on the other hand, led you to believe that you had moved backwards in time and could even try to send a message to your earlier selves to prevent any of this from happening. That of course, was not possible.”

  As they sat in silence, Gamma continued, “Your scientific literature even shows that humanity is already on the path to understanding this. It refers to solutions of Einstein’s General Relativity equations that some people say allow for time travel. The equations, of course, don’t allow for that. What those equations did do, was provide you with the details of how the time-dimension of space-time is distorted under some very special conditions: the conditions that we use in the AGCs to move between the stars. In fact, taken a bit further, the results of those equations actually lead to the maximum level of distortion that can be made to the basic fabric of space-time; this maximum level of distortion in turn explains how causality cannot be violated.”

  “So you’re saying that when you bend space-time with your AGCs to connect those different folds, that it actually distorts time too,” Don said.

  “Yes, of course,” Gamma said. “But you shouldn’t be surprised. Even your relativity theory shows this connection between space and time.”

  “And that preserves causality?” Don asked.

  “Yes,” Gamma said. “If we achieve a maximum level of distortion, then the change you thought you saw in your year, actually corresponds to the light travel time between the two points. In other words, if you were to travel through the AGC from G3-Alpha back to Epsilon Eri-D, using your understanding of time, you would have left in 1792 and arrived there in the year 2129. However, if at the same time, I sent message via radio from G3-Alpha to Epsilon Eri D, it would arrive there at the same time you did through the AGC. It just took the message travelling through regular space exactly three-hundred-thirty-seven years to get there.”

  “But now you’re saying the AGC would take us forward in time,” Don said.

  “The direction in which time flows through the AGC, what you would refer to as forwards and backwards, depends on the orientation of the folds we brought together. That embedded directionality is what preserves cause and effect.

  “Now going back to your original question, using humanity’s current point of view you might say that we exist many worlds spread across thousands of light years and exist across several millennia simultaneously. But reality contradicts this since by following an appropriate route through the AGCs, I can travel from one end of our civilization to the other in only days. Thus I say that all of these worlds exist in one common ‘present,’ linked by the common events that they experience.”

  Gamma paused for a moment and picked up Kurt’s confusion. “I know that this is a bit much to try and describe in a short amount of time. We will work with you to understand it.”

  Desperate to steer the conversation to something less abstract, Kurt quickly asked, “Well, can you at least tell us how you build them – the AGCs. I mean it looks like your compressing planetary masses into…”

  As Kurt’s voice trailed off, Gamma replied, “It is tough to describe our technology in terms that you can currently understand. So, please forgive me if my analogies don’t completely answer your question. In a sense, we deploy an automated array of nanotechnology that, for lack of a better word, digests asteroids and other planetary objects into a processed form of matter. Basically you saw the remnants of one of these sites when you were near our colony at Epsilon Eri-D. I believe you referred to the body as asteroid A832. The microscopic robots we use…though they’re not really robots…deploy a superconductive sheath across large sections of the terrain. We then use a fluidic suspension containing other nano-devices that precisely control the flow of electrical current across the superconductor. This delivers large quantities of energy used to decompose the surface compounds on the target asteroid. The technology acts at a fast enough speed that it immediately reorganizes the component elements into a crystalline structure that in turn can be used to construct the AGC.”

  “So you’re saying that you can deliver and control electrical currents with atomic-level accuracy across an entire
asteroid?” Kurt asked in amazement.

  “Yes,” Gamma replied. “It’s a completely automated process. We deploy the nanotechnology onto the asteroid. It then uses the asteroid as raw materials to synthesize both the superconductive sheath and the controlling fluid. In addition, these robots build more of themselves to accelerate the process until they cover the entire asteroid. Once the asteroid’s base material is completely transformed, our technology then decomposes as much of itself as possible into the processed crystalline material that is the raw material for the AGC.

  “At this point, I cannot explain the way in which we process this raw material into the AGC in anything close to a satisfactory manner. However, given time, we will be able to describe this to you as well.”

  Before Kurt could question him further, Don jumped back in, asking, “How do the AGCs work? I mean how do they fold space time?”

  “We can show you that too, but it will of course take too much time to explain right now.”

  “I know, but bear with me. I think I have an idea about this,” Don continued. “It’s almost as if you use the AGCs to create the effects of a black hole. But the problem I have is that they don’t have enough mass; plus, even if they did, the tidal forces should have ripped us or any ship going through it apart.”

  “You are on the right track. But, keep in mind that it is based on some physics of which you aren’t yet aware. Suffice it to say that there is a fundamental universal force, and that gravity is just one manifestation of it. We can manipulate the fundamental fields to create what you perceive as a gravitational effect with only a fraction of the mass you think is necessary. As for the tidal forces, we just create a resonant cavity in which we generate standing gravitational waves. It dramatically amplifies the fields, not unlike the way in which you use an optical resonant cavity to create a laser. This allows us to get around the tidal force issue. There is, of course, much more to it. And, we will help your species learn this, but it will take time.”