Thomas Aquinas, Explorer of the galaxy (Thomas Aquinas series)
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At this moment Sister Jones realizes the broadcast is going out to every system in the known and conquered galaxy. Hundreds of Billions of Catholic souls will be listening as she speaks.
“Sister Jones, in honor of your beautiful mind and soul, in honor of your fellow scientists and staff, in honor of your University. Let this Pope, this old Pope hear your beautiful voice bless all our immortal souls.”
Sister Jones bites down the lump in her throat and clears her suddenly dry throat. She gulps on a water bulb and drinks deeply. Her mind races. “The Pope, the Pope has spoken to me, asked me to pray for him and with him….!” She forces down the panic rising up in her gut and picks a prayer. She begins. Faintly into the entangled communicator.
“Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you.”
She lowers her head and cries softly into her hands. The Prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas was the first one to pop into her mind. Why she chose this prayer and not any of the more profound or beautiful poems, she does not know. But she did.
Pope Benedict smiles from ear to ear. “My beautiful sister. The prayer of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Tommaso d'Aquino. What a beautiful surprise. Priest, Friar, and Doctor of the Church, Doctor Angelicus and Doctor Communis. A model priest. A model of man. A model of scholarly study. A man of his time and ours both. Sister Jones, what an apt prayer at this wonderful time. Bless you, bless you, and bless you. Your scientific achievement honors us all, your wonderful mind and grace honor us all as well. Sister, I love you, and I honor you.”
Pope Benedict the Nineteenth hangs up the entangled communicator. Brother Sebastian begins to clap. “Clap, clap, clap, clap.” Someone on the Lady Macbeth returns the clap. In moments, everyone is clapping and cheering for Sister Jones. She continues to hold her head in her hands and cry softly. From the Sol system and its many inhabited bodies to the Jurist system 70 light years under the solar plane of Sol, to the northern plane at an altitude of 80 light years on the Dandelion system, to the farthest reaches of the Father Damian system over 1,200 light years away towards the disk of the edge of the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, Catholics stop and pray, and clap and cheer. Sister Jones has brought them all together in a moment of absolute clarity and purpose. Magnificent purpose.
For over fifteen minutes, the attention of virtually every living soul in the galaxy Catholic and non-Catholic has been captured. Mankind is ready to begin to colonize the galaxy in earnest now. The great leap begins.
Chapter Seven
The Great Leap
The Year 2495
After the great discoveries of 2438, mankind, and especially the Catholic Church, have begun to colonize the star systems of the Milky Way in tremendous numbers. The pre-discovery of low speed and low mass FTL brought some hard realities to expansion.
Colony ships had to mass tremendous sizes and travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. A kilometer-long Pope John Paul class colony ship at .25C took nearly 80 hours in side space to transit the 1,250 light years to, what was then, the furthest system. It took nearly a decade to achieve .25C for a ship this size.
Scaling the size and the speed down to small craft massing less than one percent the John Paul class mass and reducing the speed to a much more manageable speed of 100,000 meters per second the time in side space is much longer, in this case nearly seven months. However, the total trip time is cut down by over a factor of 20. No longer does the colony ship have to slowly accelerate over a period of years of even decades to a significant fraction of C. No longer does the craft have to mass such tremendous sizes. No longer does the craft have to spend the same amount of time decelerating once they arrive at the new star system. If you are willing to extend the time in side space from hours or days at the most, into weeks and months, at the most a year or a few years, then the advance in colonizing based on time alone is a tremendous win.
The economies of scale are tremendously advantageous as well. A single black hole pair system with finely ground glass bowls on a kilometer-sized asteroid can launch colony ships around the clock. One zips into the sphere at 100,000 meters a second and disappears the next one can enter. The crews of the asteroid launch sites just keep the transit hole space open for the crews to use.
Not having to drag black holes and relativistic antimatter and exotic matter bullets along and their tremendously large and power-hungry Hawking radiation fields is a huge win as well.
Within a year of the fantastic discovery of 2438, mankind is spilling into the void in ever-increasing numbers. The economies of scale make it possible for even the smallest and most obscure religions on earth still trapped in their corner of that small globe to organize and send their own colony ships into the void.
Pope Benedict opens the first Catholic transfer site, the first launch site to all religious orders. He does demand that each colony ship takes with them several entangled communicators to keep in touch with humanity. Even the secretive Muslims and Sikhs agree, and soon, they too are leaving Sol system in tremendous numbers. Muslims and Mormons pour into space in numbers never seen before.
Colony ships full of Sunni Muslims leap 10,000 light years planning on a ten-year trip time in side space. Mormons race to expand the bubble of human influence even further. The Brigham Young twelve colony ship leaps an unheard of 100,000 light years towards and through the Galactic plane to the far side of the galaxy. Large numbers of Sikh colony ships leave Sol system to compete with the other religions to find new worlds to colonize. Seventh Day Adventists leap into the void. Buddhists. Daoists. Even secular nation states send colony ships.
Advances in side space math make it possible for a colony ship to jump into side space and exit at exactly the right moment to be within an easy day’s cruise at a manageable speed, They achieve orbit around a sun on the nearest spiral arm clockwise from us. Humanity spreads and conquers and spreads some more. Entangled radios make it possible for email and voice and television to be shared anywhere and everywhere.
Men and women terraform strange worlds under red and blue suns in binary systems 1,000 light years from Sol. Catholics take communion under the bright hot light of Supergiant stars that dominate the gravity well for tens of light years on systems thousands of light years distant from Sol system. Nano bots and assembly bots tear asteroids apart and build habitats and space ships under five thousand suns.
Catholics celebrate the Eucharist live with the Pope from his Mars apartments on 5,000 different systems. 48 years of expansion and glory have passed. Seven new life bearing systems have been discovered to go with the other eight. Life has arisen on fifteen systems out of the more than 5,000 discovered, but no intelligent life. The most advanced life so far discovered is a multicellular type of alien under a burning red-hot sun massing six times that of Sol and a planet closer to the sun than Venus is to Sol. It is more similar to coral and plankton than anything else.
Pope Benedict the Nineteenth has passed to his reward, followed by Popes Julius the Sixth and Pope Horatio (Sanz) the First. Pope Horatio urges the faithful to multiply and take dominion of the heavens, and they do. Catholics multiply twice over their population in forty years. The Pope himself leaves Sol system for a tour of the nearby galaxy. He famously visits Alpha Centauri, and then Groombridge and Cygni and Lacaille. He spends a few years on each and builds the faith live over entangled radio. He famously gives mass and blesses the faithful from side space for weeks at a time. Hundreds of billions of Catholics watch live entangled television as the Popes colony ship extends it antennae and forms a highly conductive Mobius strip. It collapses the bubble of side space universe upon itself to rejoin the normal universe.
Pope Horatio extolls Catholics to continue to expand into the void at every mass. And they do.
In the year 2495, the bubble of humankind's reach is over 5,000 light years in every direction. Colonies have begun in 12,880 sy
stems that are known of. The secretive Sunni Muslims and Mormons have several colonies they wish to remain hidden.
This is also the year that Sister Jones and Brother Lewis have a child.
Both Sister Jones and Brother Lewis have taken their sacred vows and are fervent and faithful Catholics and would never break their vows; however, Sister Jones is a favorite of the Pope (And all of humanity) after her discovery in 2348. Brother Lewis as well contributed more to the base of human kind’s knowledge than anyone to ever live excepting Sister Jones herself. They have been allowed a special Papal dispensation to have a child.
The child must be a result of a laboratory union. And Sister Jones may not carry the child. The Pope has been firm in this respect. The duo secretly takes vows of marriage by themselves with a trusted friend and Padre. They arrange for a surrogate and immediately harvest several eggs from Sister Jones and sperm from Brother Lewis. The procedure is performed, and the surrogate is impregnated.
The next twenty years are the happiest and most rewarding of their lives for the duo. They continue to remain celibate and live separately but spend every waking moment together planning the education and upbringing of their son. Life is a joy. Academic freedom and research and a new family. A son.
Brother Lewis also begins to dedicate his time and energy towards discovering alien intelligence in the galaxy. He turns his considerable intellect towards the discovery of radio signals against the harsh background radio waves of the universe. He develops logarithms to help stabilize massive telescopes in Lagrangian points.
He, along with Sister Jones, develop solar system wide telescopic lensing techniques using several hundred separate large telescopes at various points around Sol system. Using his newly discovered lensing and artificial intelligence search routines, Brother Lewis is quickly considered the most knowledgeable and skilled alien life search expert in the galaxy. In short order, entangled communicators are coupled with radio and visual telescopes in multiple systems to visual the same systems from different angles and distances. The new search algorithms and the combined strengths of these new distributed systems quickly find more and more planets with life. Algae, pond scum, even planets completely covered in primitive grass are discovered in the dozens, and then, the hundreds of systems.
Sister Jones uses her time to further refine the side space algorithms. After years of meticulous testing in deep space, she advances the field of side space engineering again by discovering that spin in the axis along the centerline of mass of the ship as it enters and transits side space shortens time in side space. Mass times speed times spin times the time in side space equals distance traveled. A new revolution in colonizing systems begins again. Time is side space is reduced by a factor of ten.
They raise their child. Dutiful and hands on, they spend most of their time with the young Tommaso, holding him and feeding him and teaching him to walk and then to speak and be understood. They home school the young man and push him into great achievement from an early age. Tommaso is loved. He grows and learns.
Under the tutelage of the two most accomplished scientists of the ages, young Tommaso, their son, develops into a prodigy. By the age of five, he is speaking a dozen languages fluently. At age ten, he has his primary education certificate and begins classes at the University. He excels in the academic environment. Brother Lewis insists in his participation in athletics as well as academic pursuits. It is common for the young Tommaso to attend college at the University all day, and in the evening, play with a basketball team in recreation league play against young men and women his age.
Tommaso prospers and develops into an amazing young man. His academic achievement is high. Age fourteen, a Baccalaureate degree in Applied Math. Age seventeen, double Masters in Quantum Effects of Discrete Functions and Hawking Radiation Applied Math. Age twenty-one, Doctorates in Quantum Functions and Vacuum Energy.
His Doctorate thesis in Vacuum Energy proves that the vacuum energy inside our universe is not enough to continue the expansion of the void, and that vacuum energy outside the edge of the universe contains as much energy as inside the universe. His equations famously argue it would be possible to exit the known universe into the void beyond our universe void if one could catch up with the rapidly expanding edge. Of course, the mathematical odds of vacuum energy disturbances would collapse the side space around itself forcing the ship back into the universe. With horrible results.
As a thought experiment imagine this scenario based upon Tommaso’s research.
The universe is 93 billion light years from farthest point to farthest point. This is hard to imagine for a universe that is only aged 13.8 billion years and is bound by the constraints of light speed expansion after the initial inflation of the early universe. But we have been expanding is roughly a sphere in all directions for that time. From the outer edge of the farthest part of the edge on this side to the farthest outer edge of the opposite side is indeed 93 billion light years.
We, on the Sol system, can only see 13.8 billion light years in every direction, because of the limits of light speed, but the volume of universe is much larger than what we observe. We are thirty billion light years from the bottom of the bubble if you could look at the universe from outside. We know this from mathematical models of the expansionary universe and the quantum effects influence of vacuum energy on the early inflationary universe. Our model’s map fairly perfect to the 13.8 Billion light years we can see, so we extrapolate outwards the remaining volume. We would be on the bottom half, nearer the bottom side roughly in the south central portion.
How would it be possible to exit the universe? You have to exceed not only light speed obviously, but the rate of expansion of the outer edge of the bubble crashing into the void. This is possible in side space based upon pre-Tommaso research.
Thirty billion light years sounds unimaginable. But the math works this way.
Enter side space with a thirty RPM spin on axis and at 100,000,000 meters per second (.35CC), on a ship massing twice the Pope John Paul class mass.
30 spin X .35CC X (JPMX2) = 4.86 million hours
202,739 years
200,000 years in the future we could reach the universe boundary at a relative speed of nearly 6,172 light years per hour.
An apparent light speed of 6,172 light years per hour gets you to the edge of the downwards corner of the universe in a little over 200,000 years travel time in side space. Here some horrible things will happen.
Vacuum energy is 10 -9 joules per cubic meter in our universe. Vacuum energy must be 10 -9 joules per cubic meter outside the envelope of our universe as well to account for the apparent vacuum pull of the edge as famously discovered by Brother Sebastian.
What Brother Sebastian missed, or rather did not visualize while in his coma, is that vacuum energy is composed of spinning particles, albeit very, very, very small particles. Smaller than looks, the building blocks of quarks. Plus, the spins change at the boundary. Normal matter leaving the boundary of the universe, even in side space, would be destroyed by reverse spin collisions at the sub, sub atomic level. It would be spectacular for a vehicle at six thousand light years per hour relative speed. It would be the most energetic event in the history of the universe excepting the big bang itself. We are forever trapped in this universe by the composition of our smallest particles and the spin of vacuum energy particles.
The math is that one could step across the universe boundary of expansion at a speed of a few meters per second. That is, if the boundary could hold still for you, and you would survive. But at a significant percentage of C or above, the interactions at that speed over volume would be catastrophic and the amount of mass completely and totally destroyed is relative compared to the speed. Since we need to achieve greater than C to exit the boundary, we are forever trapped inside this universe. The universe edge, as it expands forever at the speed of light, is a mirror of the sub atomic. Particles reverse at the edge, a mirror image of those trapped forever in the universe.
Year 2518, Detroit, Michigan, North America
The evening of the last playoff loss Tommaso finds himself alone in the locker room icing his shoulder. He is physically exhausted after allowing the Pistons to overwhelm his interior defense in the last two minutes of the game. With two other starters fouled out of the game, Tommaso very nearly carried the game and the team on his back to victory. However, his forty-two points, twenty-one rebounds, ten blocked shots and ten steals were not enough,.
His phone rings. He would ignore it if it were anyone else. But it is his parents’ number. He reaches out of the ice water bath and places the phone on speaker.
“Yes, sir?” He answers thinking it will be his father. Mother very rarely calls during his after-game routine.
“Son, I am so proud of you. What an amazing game. What an amazing physical and mental display. You were magnificent!” Brother Lewis, father to Tommaso sighs deeply. The love and amazement are audible in his voice.