Fear and Aggression

by Dane Bagley

Einstein had been wrong. Not that he was far off; the universe did seem compelled to obey the rules according to the paradigm of relativity. And according to every experiment that was ever designed—beyond atomic physics—nature behaved just as relativity predicted. Space travel, to any great extent, appeared to be a practical impossibility because of the vast distance between heavenly bodies. The speed of light was the universal speed limit, and even if crafts were designed that could approach this speed in outer space, it would still take eons of time to move about from heavenly body to heavenly body (though it wouldn't seem to take so long to the space travelers themselves). Therefore, this was of no practical use to either governments, or corporations. And even if it were possible to design such crafts, the amount of energy required and the costs would be literally astronomical. So, governments played around with the moon, Mars, Venus, some comets, and asteroids, but nothing of much use or interest was gained by it.

  It really was nothing more than a mathematical technicality, something very few people could comprehend to any degree, whatsoever, and fewer still could see the beauty in it. With human minds, and everything else in the universe, designed to experience reality in three dimensions, it is startling that it was ever discovered. Computers, however, had been employed to simply analyze logic and math itself; to take mathematic suppositions and see if anything intriguing would come up from it. It wasn’t that these machines were capable of free thought. They were just doing as they were commanded; throwing out or changing one rule or principal at a time and seeing what would happen. Very little had come from this and some of the brilliant yet skeptical minds wondered what could possibly be discovered by machines designed to work by a system of logic, questioning the system of logic itself. Nevertheless, the fruitless computations went on. The next step in the skeptic’s line of reasoning was that if something new, unusual, or intriguing was discovered in the calculations, how would the computers be able to assign it as such, flag it, and bring to the humans in charge an understanding of what was discovered? If the computers were using the logic they were designed to use, everything would simply make logical sense to them.

  Contrary to the skeptics’ logically beautiful line of reasoning, computers, while logical, are not philosophical, nor do they see beauty in anything; they simply do as they are told, and that’s just what they did. The mathematics, of course, was unfathomable to comprehend by nearly everyone. Those who supposedly did understand the math relied heavily on the computers. But the bottom line was this: Anything traveling in the three dimensional universe, i.e. traveling in a straight line, is limited by not being able to exceed the velocity of light.

  However, space was found not to be three dimensional at all. The fourth dimension had been discovered mathematically, as incomprehensible as this was. And, if traveling according to the mathematical paradigm of this fourth dimension, everything in the universe was exponentially closer together. The way that it was described to the average budding intellectual on the street was this: if you were able to look at the three dimensional universe from the perspective of the fourth dimension, the three-dimensional world would look like a sine wave with high peaks and valleys, but with extremely rapid frequency. So high was the frequency, that it was as though the three-dimensional universe was tightly folded up. Traveling in the three-dimensional world would be a-kin to having to climb up a steep mountain, traveling a much farther distance than the actual height because of the numerous and lengthy switchbacks. But, when traveling according to the fourth dimension, it would be like cutting straight across these switchbacks, and thus decreasing the length of the journey immensely. Of course, those in the know say that this analogy is not entirely correct, but for all practical purposes this is how everyone visualized it.

  The actual length from the earth to the furthest reaches of the known universe was calculated to be approximately twenty light years, when traveling via this ‘fourth dimension.’ In theory, this made the entire universe accessible for space travel within an individual’s life time. Now, going back to Einstein, all of the great theorists wondered if the laws of relativity held up when traveling via the fourth dimension, as they did when traveling exclusively via the third dimension. Initial results of experiments were encouraging, but there were always discrepancies. Two camps ensued: those that held that relativity had failed relative to the fourth dimension, and those that held that the fourth dimension was incompletely understood, or slightly miscalculated.

  Whether relativity was accurate or just a good estimate in speaking of the fourth dimension was a debate left up to the theorists, because in all practicality travel at velocities at or near the speed of light was still science fiction.

  Speaking of practicalities, it may be wondered how traveling in this fourth dimension is possible at all. It may seem as though it would be one thing to prove the existence and form of a fourth dimension, but an entirely different thing to maneuver there-in. As it turns out, the engineers who went about tackling this problem didn’t find it to be much of a problem at all. Once the computers had a mathematical paradigm of it, all that had to be done was to let the computer direct the motion of a space craft according to the four-dimensional paths calculated. The fourth dimension had always been there, it was just so different from the third dimension that everyone was completely unaware of its existence. Traveling within it was simply a matter of knowing how it was shaped, and that was only possible by complex calculations.

  The days and weeks prior to the launching of the first space craft designed to travel in four-dimensional space were quite a spectacle. While NASA maintained that what was going on was nothing more than a part of their routine space program, it was not a very well-kept secret. Experts from all over the world were sought after for assistance: mathematicians, engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, philosophers, et cetera. Too many of them lectured in too many halls to not have spilled too many beans for NASA’s liking. When the fourth dimension was nothing more than theory and complicated computer calculations, public interest was all but nonexistent. But when space ships, tax dollars, and journalists became involved, public interest became pandemonium.

  One of the problems was that it was not a very well-leaked secret, either. What was known was that the rocket would release a spherical vessel once it had left the atmosphere. The spherical vessel would have rockets placed tangentially across its surface area, to enable the computers to move the ‘ball’ in any third dimensional direction possible, which would be, effectively, straight ahead in the fourth dimension. Where exactly straight ahead would be was not known for sure, but the best guesses were the moon, Mars, or Venus.

  The skeptics were in full swing. They painted a picture in the minds of the average person of a very expensive ball being sent up to space that would simply gyrate all around; yet NASA thought that it would somehow arrive at its designed location faster than the speed of light. Some suggested that since the ball would be so close to the atmosphere, if the computers decided to rocket it in the direction of the earth, that it would reenter the atmosphere and potentially wreak havoc on the earth’s surface. Others wondered how much precious energy and resources would be wasted on all of these thousands of rockets firing off, seemingly randomly. They reasoned that by having so many rockets fire in so many directions, they would be fighting against one another, and probably, at best, cause the ball to spin uncontrollably.

  It was possible that a very non-vocal minority may have been excited about the possibilities, but public opinion generally ranged from apathy to sarcasm to rage. By the time the big day arrived, it was widely considered likely to be the biggest, most expensive failure in NASA history. The President and members of Congress began to distance themselves from the event.

  Until three days before the launch, it was still classified as top secret, though it was anything but that. With the mission so widely discussed, and pressure on NASA to make live satellite video of the event available for pub
lic viewing, the President made the decision to allow the event to be covered on live television. It was the first time in many decades that the public wanted to watch live anything that NASA had done; however, this time the public interest was in watching NASA fail.

  The launch went off without a hitch; all the disengagements went perfectly. In a short period of time, the rocket, having left the atmosphere, released the ball. It was far less of a spectacle than what had been conjured up in the public’s imagination. Artists’ renditions of rumors are rarely very accurate. Far fewer rockets covered the surface of the ball than the general public though, and it seemed to be rather drab, via the satellite images that the viewers were witnessing.

  The ball and the rocket distanced themselves from one another, but nothing else happened. It lasted two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, but most observers said it seemed much longer. From the angle that the satellite captured the event, one rocket could be seen igniting for a split-second, and then the ball was gone. Silence ensued across the planet. In the upper right-hand corner of the television was a view entitled ‘Moon Cam.’ It appeared to be a still shot of a section of the Moon’s surface. For seconds nothing appeared in either picture. Then, just as instantly as the ball had disappeared from the main camera angle, it reappeared in the Moon Cam as it slammed into the surface of the moon, exactly centered in the image. It had traveled at a velocity far in excess of the speed of light, or so it seemed based on the few seconds it took to reappear at the moon, and yet it barely scratched the moon’s surface. The ball was broken, to be sure; it looked like an egg that had been dropped on a hard floor. But that speed should have caused an impact that would have disintegrated the ball and caused an enormous crater to add to the moon’s copious collection.

  But the ball had never reached a velocity worthy of being called a snail’s crawl. It hadn't traveled fast, just differently. The fourth dimensional distance between the spot that it began its journey and its final resting place was minute; considering how long it took, it had never reached much of a speed at all. Its crash was more akin to a fender bender than a serious collision.

  So there it sat, while the unblinking eyes of the world stared at it in amazement. The world in unison had witnessed the impossible; forever the world would be different. But for anyone to conceptualize this new world, at that point, would be like Benjamin Franklin imagining Las Vegas at night just after he had flown his kite with the key in the rain storm.

  Still, the thoughts and feelings of everyone in the world were one; perhaps unlike any other time in history. While most people had a very poor understanding of the physics of the three-dimensional world to begin with, still, everyone knew that things now were different—much different—and would never be the same again.

  Chapter 2