Breaking Interstellar: Android Lives Matter Read online

Breaking Interstellar

  Android Lives Matter

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  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue: In the beginning!

  Chapter One: Asteroid hunters

  Chapter Two: Working in space

  Chapter Three: Bag and Tag

  Chapter Four: Android Carter

  Chapter Five: Copernicus Hall

  Chapter Six: Space station

  Chapter Seven: Captain Nyla

  Chapter Eight: Attack on Higgs-Boson!

  Chapter Nine: Nyla’s condition

  Chapter Ten: Heavy lifters

  Chapter Eleven: Rockets into the night

  Chapter Twelve: Bon Voyage!

  Chapter Thirteen: Motherships

  Chapter Fourteen: Mars

  Chapter Fifteen: Dire situations!

  Chapter Sixteen: Coming in hot!

  Chapter Seventeen: Gravity waves

  Chapter Eighteen: Brave little thieves!

  Chapter Nineteen: Are we there yet?

  Chapter Twenty: Oberon Prime!

  Prologue: In the beginning!

  The night was eternal .... especially, towards the end! .... Not a creature was stirring, not even a quark .... There was no room for anything .... no room for dimensions, no room for space, no room for time, no room for squat! .... Then, quite suddenly, out of the tiniest speck of nothingness imaginable, a searing flash of pure energy detonated in a relative way! .... Some theorize this came about from a hyper-massive black hole in another universe, tearing its own space-time fabric and belching out a gargantuan energy-burst into a void that would then become our universe. We humans, call this phenomenon the big bang. And, it may have been what has since become known, as a white hole detonation. Producing the polar-opposite effect of what is known of a black hole’s influence on electromagnetic radiations and matter, in this universe.

  With an inflationary phase estimated to be faster than a trillionth of a second, this infinitely hot, infinitely dense bubble of energy expanded much, much faster than the speed of light, which is really fast! Electromagnetic radiation can travel about 670-million-mph in a hard vacuum; or about 16-billion-miles a day. If light were forced to travel in circles, it could circumnavigate our planet, nearly eight-times every second! In our universe, it’s the fastest kid on the block. Nothing with mass, can hope to keep up…. without cheating.

  However, this fantastic speed of inflation was only allowed, due to a quirk of nature. This quirk, is that the fabric of space-time can exceed the speed of light under specific conditions, carrying whatever’s in its grip, along for the ride. The energy waves from the big-bang rode upon the very fabric of space-time that unfurled in infinite directions just ahead of the energy pulse. Within its powerful grip, it dragged not just the energy but also some of the dimensions such as depth, width, height, time and possibly more. Within this universe, everything that is, or ever shall be, began its incredibly long journey before that first baby-second of time was even out of the delivery room!

  But this stupendously violent detonation may have actually been mute. Quite possibly, without even the slightest whimper, the universe came into existence. This ‘quiet’ big-bang as it were, would have been due in large part because an elastic medium for propagating sound waves had not yet developed. Much later, it would be said that in the vacuum of space, no one can hear you scream. This quaint analogy may have never been more accurate than at the beginning of everything.

  Within the first ten seconds or so of our still expanding but ever cooling universe, many critical epochs came into being as the energy of the detonation raced away from the scene of the crime. Some of these included the anti-matter epoch, Higgs-Boson epoch, Quark epoch, and Lepton epoch. Each, consisting of subatomic particles that are major players in the development of all we see, and don’t see, taking place around us this very moment.

  Of these shiny new sub atomics, perhaps none was more important than the presence of the almighty Higgs-Boson! This subatomic particle is often referred to as the ‘God particle’. From this enigmatic particle, which engages with other types of particles and electromagnetic radiations, causing them to slow down and gain mass, all other building blocks of matter can come into existence.

  With the power of the four fundamental forces of nature that arrived along with the big-bang, (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces), these subatomic particles went on to form the atoms and elements that make up our bodies today. Quarks, are the building blocks of neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus, and also the protons that orbit that nucleus.

  Leptons, formed into the ubiquitous electrons that also orbit the nucleus of atoms, and are fundamental for our body’s very ability to live and function. Also, our fancy electronics wouldn’t work so well without them either. In fact, our bodies, including the musculature, heart, and gray matter, could never function without these electrons and their ability to easily flow from one atom to the next. This flow of electrons, we know of as electric current. Without it, our hearts could not beat, our brains could not think, our eyes could not see, and our electronic gadgets could not function. Three cheers for the minuscule atom, electrons and electromagnetism that we hold so dear! Without electromagnetism.... atoms and everything else, would simply fall apart and dissolve, as if they never were!

  A brief and violent war of annihilation occurred in the first seconds between these particles of matter and what would later become known as anti-matter. This conflict, released yet another tremendous wave of energy into the expanding universe. Luckily for us, for about every thirty-million-collisions of matter and anti-matter, there was one tiny particle of regular matter left over. This surplus of particles added up, and was enough to build our universe, and our home planet that we enjoy so much.

  The detectable matter in our early universe was mostly an uneven distribution of dense hydrogen clouds, that formed an immense tapestry of nebulas. These expansive nebula clouds were suspended throughout space on scaffolding, or webbing, composed of a mysterious dark matter. At first, these spectral clouds of hydrogen atoms were void of any real form or purpose, but they soon began to accrete due to uneven distribution and electromagnetism. This electrical force along with gravity, attracted the hydrogen atoms, clumping them into spheres. Without that first uneven distribution of matter, electrical-attraction and gravity may have never been able to take hold, forming all we see around us today.

  Gravity is more a curvature in the fabric of space-time than it is an actual force. Everything that has mass, including ourselves, creates gravity. As a mass, this sphere of hot dense atoms puts a divot in the local space-time fabric, and anything nearby simply falls into the dent. The greater the mass, the deeper and wider the dent. After considerable hydrogen atoms, have fallen into this de
nt and compressed into a dense sphere due to gravity and electromagnetism, the core at the center, heats and heats until suddenly; critical mass occurs! Followed closely by a thermonuclear-fusion chain-reaction on an astronomic scale.

  Within the core of the hydrogen-sphere, nuclear fusion joins hydrogen atoms together, creating helium atoms. This process produces a huge energy byproduct that tries to blow the star to bits. However, the grand master of our universe; ‘gravity’…. keeps the outward pressures of that chain reaction in check, creating balance. And thusly; A star is born! Three cheers for gravity! Except for when it’s breaking our ass!

  Our star Sol, fuses approximately 700-million-tons of hydrogen atoms together every second, to form 695-million-tons of helium atoms. The 5-million-tons difference, amounts to the pure-energy released during the nuclear fusion process. These energies consist of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiations of which visible light is just a very tiny fraction. Some of the very same helium atoms that were created inside of stars, helps to power modern day society’s lighter-than-air party balloons, along with other helium atoms that were produced here on earth through radioactive decay. Three cheers for stars, and the parties they enhance!

  What came first…. the chicken or the egg? Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. What came first…. the galaxy or the super massive black hole at its heart? One logical theory, is that of direct-collapse. The nebulas of hydrogen gas during the early star-forming epoch, had regions within that were much, much denser than the surrounding neighborhood. With all that food, gravity gone wild, pigs-out on a grand scale. And, in a relatively short time, that part of the cloud collapsed directly into a black hole, rudely bypassing the star formation phase. With so much to eat, they gorged and gorged until their status as being ‘massive’ took hold very quickly. Contrary to modern belief, super-massive black holes didn’t become massive, by eating salad....

  From the get-go, they were the 800-pound-gorillas in the room. The normal critical-mass and thermonuclear-detonation phase of a star’s birth, was just a muted flash-in-the-pan for these behemoths. Gravity gone wild, overcame any chance for normal star formation, as more and more hydrogen was sucked into the seemingly bottomless maelstrom. Suffocating and burying any attempt of nuclear reaction; threatening to rip the very fabric of space-time itself. These heavyweights put such a strain on the fabric of our space-time, that only the tougher inter-universal fabric can maintain integrity between adjacent universal boundaries. At least most of the time....

  Around these astronomical-anchors, stars in the neighborhood began to gather in orbits, due to the irresistible gravitational-authority. Many wandered too close, becoming tasty morsels for the insatiable monster at the center. Even to this very day they do.... However, many more stars didn’t become snacks, and instead formed into delicate orbits. Poetries in motion. Then, a modicum of orderliness and beauty, began to take form all along this intricate webbing of space-time and gravity. Soon.... a galaxy is born! Three cheers for galaxies! Especially, the one we lovingly call, the Milky Way.... and home.

  Our galaxy, like most, has a super-massive black hole at its heart. Our black hole is called Sagittarius ‘A’ Star, and has approximately 4-million-times the mass of our own star, Sol. Now, that sounds like a lot of mass, and it is, but the term super-massive in this case, is the epitome of being relative. In physical size, our super massive black hole is a puny runt, when compared to the immensity of the galaxy.

  Please, consider this: If our ‘galaxy’ were scaled down to the size of the Earth, and our ‘solar system’ were scaled down to the size of a compact disk, our ‘super-massive black hole’ would only be about the size of a bee-bee; of extremely condensed yesterdays. Yet it warps the fabric of space-time far beyond the 26,000-light-years distance we are away from it.

  If it were in the place of our sun, the event horizon might extend to somewhere between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. And the super-massive singularity at the center would be much, much smaller than that. Perhaps, even too small to be quantifiably measured! Therefore, even though it’s small in comparison to the size of the galaxy, it’s still damn big, in relation to our solar system. Moreover, it’s estimated to rotate on its axis, once every 11-minutes! That’s so very fast, that the human mind has a tough time getting a grip on the contemplation.

  Sagittarius ‘A’ Star, along with considerable influence from mysterious dark matter, maintains an iron grip on all the other 300-billion or so stars in our galaxy. Not to mention all the other junk; which includes billions of much smaller, stellar-mass black holes that span the slightly more than 100,000-light-year-diameter of the Milky Way.

  Many of these stellar-mass black holes are nomadic in nature. They’re wandering vagabonds, eating everything in their path. In fact, a brilliant astrophysicist and inventor, once analogized that; ‘black holes are such voracious eaters, they sometimes eat like the cookie monster; often much of what they eat, doesn’t always end up inside. A lot of it gets spit back out’.... When encountering an overabundant food source, these greedy eaters bite more than they can chew. And, from each polar region, intense gamma-ray-bursts of indigestible cosmic-rays issue forth; and a Quasar black hole is born! They’re a very beautiful phenomenon when seen from the far distance, but within the death-beam, not so much. Many Quasars produce such intense beams of energy, they can be seen clear across the observable universe, and can easily smite anything that gets in the way for many thousands of light-years.

  There are also billions of nomadic planets throughout the galaxy. Orphans, that were cast out of the family nest and into the endless void beyond. Worlds without purposeful direction, but with lots of velocity. As star’s age and die, they lose their grip on many orbital bodies they once controlled. These planets are flung off into space like undesired stepchildren. Or massive gas giant planets, collect and fling smaller brothers and sisters into slingshot maneuvers that don’t end so well for the one being flung.

  Gravitational micro-lensing indicates, that there are more planets bound to stars, than there are stars in the galaxy. No big surprise there. However, it has since been theorized, that there are also more planets ‘not’ bound to stars, than there are stars in the galaxy. A very scary thought; as these many wondering orphans, cruise the frigid darkness, just waiting to ruin someone’s day.

  It takes about 240-million-years for our star to drag the Earth and its siblings once around Sagittarius ‘A’ star. In fact, our solar system has only made about one-third of an orbit since the dinosaurs went extinct! Earth has only been around the block about 20-times, since its formation some 4.5-billion-years-ago. In addition to all of that, the galaxy itself is moving through space at about 1.5-million-mph when compared to extragalactic frames of reference.

  It’s estimated that there are more than 300-billion galaxies in the observable universe. That covers a distance of about 47-billion-light-years from earth, in all directions. How can that be, one might ask? The universe is only 13.8-billion-years-old. How can light travel that far in such a short time, one might ponder.... However, due to the expanding nature of space-time, light is able to travel further than what might seem natural. When space-time expands, it drags everything along for the ride. Space-time, can expand faster than the speed of light.

  In all those galaxies, reside more than an estimated 300-sextillion stars. That’s a 300, followed by 23-zeros! More stars than all the grains of sand, on all of Earth’s beaches, with extra granules to spare. And, space is ever-expanding. Galaxies are moving away from everything else in all directions. And the expansion is accelerating!

  A mysterious force called dark energy may be the culprit for this accelerated expansion. But, nobody actually knows for sure. Observations beyond the far edges of our known universe, may be physically impossible, due to this dark energy expanding space-time faster than the speed of light. And, in this way, preventing light from beyond the edge, ever reaching us. This will eventually make some galaxies disappear from our methods of
observation altogether.

  All of this matter; the stars, black holes, gas clouds, yadda yadda yadda.... only accounts for roughly 5-percent of all the normal matter in the universe. That would be about one-proton of matter, per every four-cubic-meters of volume. In other words, there is not only a lot of space in outer space, but also a lot of space between the atoms too! We live in a hollow universe! The rest of the universe is theorized to contain approximately 27-percent dark matter and 68-percent dark energy.

  Nobody really understands the makeup of these two ghostly enigmas, except that dark energy is what may be causing our universe to accelerate its expansion, and dark matter seems to be a ghostly source of gravity, that’s trying to keep the universe glued together. Dark energy has apparently won the battle for control of how the universe will play out. And in the end, it is likely that the cosmos will expand endlessly, becoming a cold, dark, and very lonely place.

  When a star of sufficient mass reaches the end of its fuel, it can no longer fight the battle with gravity. Without enough outward force to overcome gravity, the star collapses into what remains of its core material. This collapse is so violently fast, that it can exceed one-third the speed of light, as the core is mercilessly crushed. Almost instantaneously, this collapse is accompanied by an equally-violent rebound, known as a supernova explosion, or detonation.

  Some stars are so large (20 or so, solar masses) that the event crushes the core material into an ultra-dense neutron star, or its close cousin, the very scary, magnetar. These crushed stars are perhaps only 10-miles-in-diameter, but weigh many times more than our sun. While, super-massive stars with perhaps 50 or more times that of our sun, often collapse directly into what is known as a solar-mass black hole when they die. And some stars, even bypass the supernova phase completely. When their fuel expires, they collapse directly into a black hole in what some have named a non-nova. The star simply blinks out; and is gone, but not gone. No flash, no beautiful light show, just a black gravitational abyss, waiting to gobble everything within reach.

  This is a place where the laws of physics break down, time stops, and gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from beyond the event-horizon that surrounds the singularity. They are not massive enough to rule a galaxy, but powerful enough to disrupt everything in our solar system, if one were to wander through.

  No matter what size the supernova, the process of a star’s death creates most of the other elements that are heavier than hydrogen. Hydrogen fuses to create helium, helium into beryllium, then theirs carbon and oxygen.... etc. etc. Each of those newly created elements, use the ashes of the previous, as fuel to keep the star alive. When a normal-sized star reaches a point where it’s fusing iron, it can no longer produce enough energy to fight against gravity. Many of them go supernova; spreading iron and lighter than iron elements, into space.

  Elements heavier than iron take much higher temperatures and pressures to create. These conditions can be found in truly massive stars that might weigh 50 or more times that of our star. As a star burns through all these different elements, it forms a kind of layer cake before exploding them out into space. This can happen even if the detonation results in a black hole.

  However, it is also theorized that elements such as gold or heavier, take such enormous temperatures and pressures to create, that only colliding neutron stars or black holes can achieve such a feat. There are not so many colliding heavy-hitters as there are regular supernovae, and that’s perhaps why gold and heavier elements are so very rare in our universe.

  All the elements that eventually accreted from this soup-mix of stardust, formed the earth and everything else, such as the iron in our blood or the calcium in our bones, including all the other elements that make up our bodies. The atoms that make up these elements are the very same ones that came out of the process of the big-bang. Our bodies are literally made of material that’s as old as the universe itself. We, and all living things on Planet Earth are quite literally, children of the stars. The atoms and elements in our right hand may have come from different stars than the atoms and elements in our left hand.

  One of the most interesting phenomenon’s in all of nature, is that of time itself. Time is what allows everything in the universe to interact. Without time, there could be no movement. Not even light would be able to propagate across the cosmos. Time is a kind of governor; it keeps everything from happening all at once. It’s a spatial-lubricant whose flow can be altered when in the presence of gravity and velocity. It has been proven, both mathematically and physically, that velocity and gravity will slow time when they are increased. So, this ‘governor’ can be manipulated under certain conditions, but is most noticeable when approaching the velocity of light; sometimes known simply as ‘c’.

  Time passes slightly ‘faster’ on GPS satellites, as compared to time here on the planet. This is because the satellites are in much less of a gravitational field, than when they were sitting on the launch pad, and this counteracts any effects from the velocity increase, for maintaining a geostationary orbit.

  Conversely, time passes minutely ‘slower’ for the astronauts on the international space station, when compared to an earthly clock. This is because, while they are in much less gravity, the stations tremendous velocity of over 17,000-mph, overrules the micro-gravity; and the time dilation swings in the opposite direction.

  Without correction of this time-dilation, our GPS system would be useless. We would be instructed to make turns too early, because the space clock was running a tiny bit faster than earth-bound clocks.

  Using a more robust time-dilation, let’s say that you wanted to time-travel into the future. Simply, get into a really fast spaceship, and travel close to the speed of light for about 3½ years by the ships clock, then turn around and come back at the same velocity. When you arrive home, a little over 500-years would have passed for everybody there, while you would have aged only about 7-years. That’s roughly five-minutes, for each of their full days!

  At the speed of light, or inside the event horizon of a black hole, it’s theorized that the time-dilation is so severe, as to cause time to stop altogether.

  Now, as for the chicken and egg paradox.... please ponder this:

  “There was once a young chicken named Bright, who could lay eggs faster than light. She laid some one day in a relative way, and they hatched the previous night!” Three cheers for time! May we never run out of it!