Dark Space Universe (Book 1)
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OTHER BOOKS BY JASPER SCOTT
Suggested reading order
New Frontiers Series
Excelsior (Book 1)
Mindscape (Book 2)
Exodus (Book 3)
Dark Space Series
Dark Space
Dark Space 2: The Invisible War
Dark Space 3: Origin
Dark Space 4: Revenge
Dark Space 5: Avilon
Dark Space 6: Armageddon
Dark Space Universe Series
Dark Space Universe (Book 1)
Dark Space Universe (Book 2)
—Coming August 2017—
Dark Space Universe (Book 3)
—Coming November 2017—
Early Work
Escape
Mrythdom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jasper Scott is a USA TODAY bestselling science fiction author, known for writing intricate plots with unexpected twists.
His books have been translated into Japanese and German and adapted for audio, with collectively over 500,000 copies purchased.
Jasper was born and raised in Canada by South African parents, with a British cultural heritage on his mother’s side and German on his father’s, to which he has now added Latin culture with his wonderful wife.
After spending years living as a starving artist, he finally quit his various jobs to become a full-time writer. In his spare time he enjoys reading, traveling, going to the gym, and spending time with his family.
The Research Behind “Dark Space Universe”
A lot of research went into this book. I must have read hundreds of articles to get to the bottom of the science. And it all started with what I thought was a simple question.
What Would We Find if We Could Travel to the Edge of the Universe?
That seemed simple enough to answer. All I had to do was find out what the world’s leading experts thought and try not to contradict their ideas. But not long after I began my research, I learned that the universe may not even have an edge! [2]
Logically and intuitively I couldn’t accept that. I thought: assuming that the universe is made up of a finite amount of material (which may or may not be true), then if you travel far enough, you’ll eventually run out of galaxies and stars, and reach the edge of energy and matter, if not space itself.
Alternatively, you could find that just like the Earth, the universe has no edges, and you’d end up back where you started.
Note: when we talk about the universe, this also includes the fabric of space-time itself, not just the matter we can see, but for my purposes, I’d be satisfied to call the end of visible matter the edge.
Second note: most cosmologists believe that the universe is “homogeneous and isotropic.” This is called the cosmological principle. According to Kate Becker at Cornell.edu, “Homogeneous is defined as ‘the same in all locations’ while isotropic means ‘the same in all directions.’”[1]
So if the visible matter in the universe is somehow adrift in a vast or even infinite amount of empty space, that would violate this cosmological principle. It’s not really an inviolable law, however, since it’s only based on what we can see leading up to, but not beyond, the cosmic horizon.
Of course, all of that is based on the assumption that there actually is an end to matter in the universe.
Is the Universe Infinite?
It turns out that there’s just a few ways that space could keep on going forever without an actual edge. The first and most obvious way, is that if the universe is infinitely large, then it won’t have any edges.
Let’s think about what that means for a second.
In a universe of infinite matter, that matter will eventually assume every possible configuration, and then those configurations will begin to repeat themselves in an infinite number of variations and identical copies of those variations.
This means that there are an infinite number of duplicate earths, and an infinite number of identical copies of you living on them. On one of these duplicate earths, one of your copies won the Nobel peace prize. On another earth, one of your copies became the president of the USA. And on another one, you are a monkey with three eyes and six legs.
In an infinite universe, everything that can happen will happen, so absurdity is the norm. That tells me that the idea itself is absurd.
Perhaps there’s no way to discount the possibility with current evidence, but I reject the idea on sheer absurdity until such a time as the evidence proves it to be true.
If the Universe is Finite, and Flat, then it MUST Have an Edge!
That’s simple logic. A piece of paper is flat and finite, and we can see clearly that it has four edges. We once imagined the Earth like this, thinking that if we traveled far enough, we’d drop off the edge into an abyss.
Well, as it turns out, there is a way for the universe to be flat and finite and still not have an edge.
Topology
Topology is not the same as geometry. Topology asks how space might be connected to itself, not necessarily how it is shaped.
The simplest example of topology comes from the video game Asteroids, where if you fly off one end of the screen, you’ll reappear on the opposite end. Fly off the top and you’ll appear on the bottom, fly off the left, and you’ll appear on the right. The playing area of the game is flat, but the edges are all connected to each other.
There’s no reason to think that the universe can’t be like this, too. It could be flat, but with the edges somehow connected to each other.
Can’t figure that one out? Try it with a piece of paper. Bend the left edge to meet the right one and tape them together. You’ll have a cylinder. Now, if paper were more flexible, you could also connect the two ends of the cylinder to make a hollow donut. This topology is referred to as a torus. We think the universe could be like this, too, geometrically flat, but connected at the edges in some kind of topology. There are 17 different topologies that correspond to a geometrically flat universe [3].
So, the universe might be flat, and finite, and still not have an edge. All it needs is some kind of interesting topology.
But just like the infinite universe theory, I find the idea of a flat universe to be comical as well—if for no better reason than because we used to think the Earth was flat, and this sounds like a repeat of history on a cosmic scale.
Is the Universe Really Flat?
According to recent research, via the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), we know that the universe is flat to within a 0.4% margin of error [4].
Now, of course, we know that our world and the universe itself exist in three dimensions. They’re not flat like a piece of paper. So what do scientists mean when they say that the universe is flat?
Does a Flat Universe Mean That it’s Actually 2D?
“Flat: When we talk about the flatness of the Universe, we are using the term in its most general geometric sense. A flat space is simply one in which geometry is Euclidean; i.e., that parallel lines remain parallel forever, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees, and the circumference of a circle is always 2π times the radius. In contrast with its colloquial meaning however, flatness does not imply anything about the dimensionality of a space. We can talk about a flat 2D space, a flat 3D space, even a flat 4D space. A sheet of paper, for example, is a flat 2D surface, and remains flat whether you roll it into a cylinder, or fold it into an origami swan, no matter how you bend
it in 3D space.” [5]
In other words, 3D space can be flat, too. If that’s hard for you to picture, don’t worry—it is for me, too.
Maybe the Universe Only Looks Flat
Without calling into question the conclusions drawn from the WMAP data, I still feel compelled to ask: what if they’re wrong? Is it possible that the universe only seems to be flat, and yet it’s actually rounded like a sphere?
As it turns out, all of our data is from the observable universe, not the whole thing, so it’s still quite possible for the entire universe to have literally any geometric shape that you can imagine—that’s not something we can observe, so it falls outside the realm of science into pure conjecture, but it is technically possible. Just like the Earth looks flat when you’re standing on a flat field, the universe might also look flat all the way out to the cosmic horizon, but somewhere far beyond that, maybe it starts to curve back on itself.
How Big is the Whole Universe?
We know that the part we can see, the observable universe, is about 93 billion light years across. Note: we also know the universe is around 13.82 billion years old [6]. That might make you think that the universe should be only 13.82 billion light years wide, but the universe is expanding, and it’s expanding at an accelerating rate [7]. The implication of that is that the most distant objects we can see are actually a lot farther from us than we’d expect them to be. What we are seeing from them now is actually very old light that those objects emitted soon after they were born, near the beginning of time.
Some parts of the universe are actually moving away from us faster than the speed of light, but that isn’t because they’ve broken the universal speed limit, it’s because space itself is expanding and taking everything along for the ride. We believe this expansion is driven by something called dark energy.
What Might Exist Beyond the Observable Universe / Cosmic Horizon—if Anything?
Some theories suggest that the entire universe is at least 250 times larger than the visible universe, but those assumptions are based on very little actual evidence.
We really don’t know what’s out there, but we think that it’ll just be more of the same (based on the assumption that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic) [8].
How do We Know There’s Anything Beyond the Cosmic Horizon if We Can’t Observe it?
We don’t know. We’re just guessing, but there are a few good reasons for these guesses.
A. For those who think the universe could be a sphere, the entire universe would have to be at least 250 times bigger than what we can see in order for it to be “closed” like a sphere [9].
B. We know that there must be something beyond the cosmic horizon (the farthest stuff we can see), because if there isn’t, then we are at the exact center of the whole universe, and that would be an incredibly odd coincidence [10].
More likely, we’re like a boat adrift in the ocean—“Just because we cannot see land does not mean we are in the center of the ocean; just because we cannot see the edge of the universe does not mean we lie in the center of the universe” [11].
C. We’ve recently discovered that a bunch of clusters of galaxies in the universe appear to be accelerating in a particular direction, and this phenomenon continues to a distance of at least 2.5 billion light years—possibly all the way to the edge of the visible universe [12&13]. This phenomenon has been called “dark flow.”
If it is proven that the phenomenon extends all the way to the cosmic horizon, then whatever is causing it must exist beyond the cosmic horizon.
In Conclusion: What Would we Find if we Could Travel to the Edge of the Universe?
I couldn’t find an article anywhere admitting that the universe might have a physical edge, so I asked a bunch of physics gurus on stack exchange what they thought, and I got the answer I was looking for [14].
Assume:
The universe has finite mass.
The universe is geometrically flat.
The universe is simply connected (this means the edges aren’t connected to each other, such as in the example of gluing the edges of a piece of paper together to make a donut/torus).
Conclusion: the universe must have an edge!
According to the more reputable answers, my conclusion does logically follow from those three assumptions, so the universe could actually have a physical edge, but then what lies beyond it?
If we travel past it, do we hit a wall and blow up? Do we fall off into a 5th dimension?
Based on all of the articles I read, this is pure conjecture, and there probably isn’t a physical edge to the universe.
The nearest thing the universe probably has to an actual edge is the cosmic horizon, and since we can’t see past that, we really don’t know what’s beyond it; all we can do is guess.
So that’s what I did. I chose one of the more obscure theories about the nature of the universe, one which serves my storyline, but doesn’t technically contradict anyone smarter than me.
This book has begun to reveal the nature of the Dark Space Universe, alluding to another universe that lies beyond the Great Abyss, and a “Holy City” at the center of everything.
From that, you can probably guess about the shape I chose for the universe, but I’m not going to connect the dots for you yet. You’ll have to read the next book for that.
Happy reading!
-Jasper Scott
PS This is really a fraction of my research, but I thought you might like to see what my process of inquiry looks like when writing a book. It also helped me organize my ideas and keep everything straight.
Another subject I researched was one of the moons in our solar system, on which I based the planet “Snowflake.” See if you can figure out which moon that was.
Sources
[1] What do “homogeneity” and “isotropy” mean? http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/101-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/general-questions/574-what-do-homogeneity-and-isotropy-mean-intermediate
[2] Where’s the Edge of the Universe? http://www.space.com/33005-where-is-the-universes-edge-op-ed.html
[3] The Shape and Topology of the Universe https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2236
[4] New ‘Baby Picture’ of Universe Unveiled http://www.space.com/19027-universe-baby-picture-wmap.html
[5] How likely is it that the Universe is closed, rather than flat? http://askanastronomer.org/bhc/2015/12/19/finite_unbounded_universe/
[6] The Universe Is 13.82 Billion Years Old http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/21/age_of_the_universe_planck_results_show_universe_is_13_82_billion_years.html
[7] Why is The Universe Accelerating http://www.iflscience.com/space/why-universe-accelerating/
[8] “The Real Universe” —‘Is 250 Times Bigger than the Visible Hubble Volume’ (Today’s Most Popular)
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/02/the-real-universe-is-250-times-bigger-than-the-visible-hubble-volume-todays-most-popular-1.html
[9] Universe Could be 250 Times Bigger than What is Observable http://www.universetoday.com/83167/universe-could-be-250-times-bigger-than-what-is-observable/
[10] What evidence exists that the universe extends beyond the cosmic light horizon? https://www.quora.com/What-evidence-exists-that-the-universe-extends-beyond-the-cosmic-light-horizon
[11] How Big is the Universe http://www.space.com/24073-how-big-is-the-universe.html
[12] Galaxy Flow Hints at Huge Masses Over Cosmic Horizon https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14814-galaxy-flow-hints-at-huge-masses-over-cosmic-horizon/
[13] Mysterious Cosmic ‘Dark Flow’ Tracked Deeper into Universe https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2010/10-023.html
[14] If the Universe is Flat, has Finite Mass/Energy, and is Simply Connected, Then there MUST be an Edge, Mustn’t there? http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/311468/if-the-universe-is-flat-has-finite-mass-energy-and-is-simply-connected-then-t
[15] We Probably Haven’t Found Evidence for the Multiverse
http://gizmodo.com/we-probably-havent-found-evidence-for-the-multiverse-1740611389
[16] Doughnut-shaped Universe bites back http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080523/full/news.2008.854.html
[17] The Status of Cosmic Topology after Planck Data https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1601/1601.03884.pdf