Probably because it’s much smaller than people think and we are looking at the containment. Not the event horizon.
The same reason that Minmatar nuclear reactions are competative for power output with antimatter. Because of the amount of shielding needed.
1 Like
It’s probably not. I mean, it’s a singularity. They’re all that small.
3 Likes
I believe that Mr Auscent was on about mass, rather then the size of the singularity itself.
After all, any object can become a blackhole if you compress it down small enough to its tipping point, but smaller ones evaporate quicker. Perhaps we’re getting less power because of the fact it needs to be fed either energy or mass to prevent itself from explosively evaporating, rather then containment?
2 Likes
So-- I’m not at all a specialist in such a thing, but, the whole point of an event horizon is that it has a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape, right? It seems like creating such an effect is beyond the abilities of the singularities we currently have, and creating and sustaining it would cost way, way more power than you’re ever likely to get out of such a thing?
1 Like
Every singularity has an event horizon, it’s just a question of how far from the singularity itself it is. More mass == more distance as the curvature of space-time is more pronounced at a greater number of radii from the center. If we have a singularity, then it creates and sustains the event horizon simply by existing. The event horizon isn’t a field that needs X amount of energy to be maintained.
And Utari? :thejoke: man…
But yes, there are serious issues with the sustainability of microsingularities, and even more serious questions about ‘how does the amount of mass we know goes into making this thing result in one?’ The answer has to lie in the condensates, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how 37.5m3 of the stuff (the total volume of the condensates used to make a Damavik) discharges and/or channels a large enough volume of quarks or anti-quarks to initially produce the required curvature of space-time. Sustaining the singularity after that…
… one impossibility at a time, hey?
It’s one of the things I’m spending some (most? Ok all) of my free time obsessing over in simulations. I may or may not be contemplating building a research facility dedicated specifically to that problem, if I can figure out someplace where it’s accessible, and still remote enough that playing with the principles that underpin ‘we’re gonna put a naked singularity right where you can all see it muahahah’ doesn’t needlessly endanger pretty much every life in the system.
After all, if the controlled and understood process of using this stuff (controlled and understood by the Trigs, mind you, cuz we’re literally just sticking their parts and materials into their outlines. It’s like coloring with a set of infrared crayons) produces sufficient power to give a single battleship weapon an energy output on the order of a sieged tachyon cannon (single)… experimentation with it in order to understand how… could produce larger results, because the control mechanism is as ill-understood as the creation mechanism.
And while I expect it would evaporate quickly, any singularity large enough to cripple or destroy the facility could have an adverse effect on nearby structures… or biospheres. Or orbital paths… all depends on how massive it gets and how long it lasts before poof. And when you can’t explain how it’s made… you can’t really predict those values.
Oh, and that’s not taking into account the polar x-ray jets or any short-term accretion disk that may result (and hopefully it can’t eat enough mass to not evaporate).
But hey, more and more people are flying around in these things every day, getting shot at, having critical systems malfunction, producing them in facilities working for minimal costs… no worries, right?
Edit to add: This also seems likely to be either the technology underpinning the Jovian precision wormhole generation abilities (including those used by the Drifters), or at least another application of the theoretical physics employed behind the generation of those wormholes. Which just means reckless experimentation would be even more irresponsible. So I’m hoping for… I guess… recked? experimentation? reckful? I’unno.
4 Likes
… reasonably sure those are universe breaking. As in “impossible without altering the rules of existence”. Please don’t break the universe, I keep all my stuff there.
3 Likes
I’m reasonably sure a self-sustaining microsingularity that produces enough power to not only feed/sustain the singularity, but simultaneously maintain a containment field capable of moving the singularity without requiring the mass-equivalent of a planet or dwarf star in energy is, too.
1 Like
That’s what I was thinking pretty much exactly. It’s a lot of the reason I think it must be getting brought through from somewhere. So, yeah, I agree: wormhole tech.
About “evaporation” … I take it that’s the term for a singularity ejecting its matter in some form? (If it can even be called matter at that point?)
Soo-- boom, but, extended boom?
Oh-- by the way, you know what involves a really absurd amount of that condensate? Building the disintegrator weapon system itself. Which, because it seems to channel energies related to the singularity rather than the singularity itself, seems also to suggest that maybe we’re looking at a transfer medium?
(She said hoping she made even a tiny bit of sense?)
Edit:
Looking at a Triglavian caged singularity, could we actually be looking at the business end of a wormhole instead of at the thing it looks like we’re looking at? Just, a wormhole into something appalling instead of the actually appalling thing? It seems like it could explain why Triglavian ships can casually push singularities around if they’re not actually moving the singularity.
Further edit:
I’m aware it sounds totally absurd and bizarre but we’re dealing with absurd bizarre stuff, so … yeah.
2 Likes
This suggests to me that we’re not dealing with self-sustaining micro singularities, not that everything we know about physics is dead fuckin’ wrong. What we’re seeing is something else, I bet. No way in hell some alien off-shoots of humanity advanced so far beyond us in this kind of time-span. It’s just too science fiction for my tastes.
Not boom. Just evaporation. It slowly but surely radiates energy past the event horizon as particle pairs spawn near the edge of the horizon, and one of them end up outside and the other inside. Splits the pair. Without feeding it more mass, all singularities eventually suffer this fate, but for most large ones it’s so far into the future it’s beyond reasonable timeframes. Edited to add: It should also be mentioned that this kind of blackbody radiation is predicted to increase significantly the smaller the singularity becomes, which is why ‘micro singularities’ are exceptionally short lived.
This is a far more reasonable hypothesis, given what we know about wormholes right now. It’s still absolutely ludicrous, but a great deal less ludicrous than actual fuckin’ singularities in the belly of our ships.
4 Likes
Nothing escapes the event horizon of a singularity. However, singularities slowly (smaller ones less slowly) evaporate, because of quantum fluctuation at the event horizon. Basically, the theory runs like this:
At the level of the quantum foam of existence (the stuff we normally think of as ‘the fabric of space-time’ or ‘the fabric of reality itself’, it’s actually kind of a… you know what? Tangent. Not helpful right now), the answer is 0.
What does that mean? It means the laws of physics as we understand them, where you can neither create, nor truly destroy, energy or matter, only change them. If the sum total energy/matter of the universe is X, it will always be X.
But… that doesn’t mean stuff doesn’t happen. Quantum fluctuations happen, where particles spontaneously come into existence. But here’s the thing: they come into existence paired. So, to use particles you’re familiar with, when an electron spawns, it spawns with a positron, it’s anti-matter equivalent. Same is true no matter what fundamental particle spawns, it always has its anti-particle with it. The two particles almost always immediate collide and annihilate one another. Math-wise, the process looks like this:
X + (+1-1) - (+1-1) = X.
So something is created, something is destroyed, but that something is, taken in its totality… nothing.
When this happens on the event horizon of a singularity, one of two things happens.
- both particles are on the same side of the event horizon. They self-annihilate normally. Nobody notices.
- they’re not. One gets sucked in, the other is emitted away from the event horizon as energy. Because the total energy in the universe is constant, the singularity just ate, in effect, negative energy… it got smaller, by a tiny, tiny little amount.
Yes, this is a vast oversimplification.
And, as Miz said, there’s no… kinetic boom when a singularity evaporates. There’s a measurable gamma burst, but it’s (as you might guess) extremely brief. Blink, and you missed it many times over.
You’re right: it does sound totally absurd and bizarre, but we are dealing with absurd bizarre stuff so… maybe? I doubt it, though. While I agree with Miz that on the surface, it seems a hell of a lot more reasonable than ‘we’re running around with singularities and we keep them outside the armor plate where who knows what could be fired into them’… there’s no indication of any connection between the ships we’ve built and anywhere else. And moving a wormhole around is just as difficult as moving a singularity… maybe moreso.
It would also raise serious issues about taking one end of a wormhole… through wormholes. Which we know people do with these ships. Or bridging them with titans or jump bridges. I mean, there’s perfectly reasonable questions about bridging these things if they have singularities in 'em, too.
I think the first question that arises in either case is… “ARE YOU INSANE!!!”
Seems like the answer to that one is ‘yep’. So…
2 Likes
Well … does taking a Damavik through a “natural” mass-limited wormhole immediately cause collapse? (I’d guess the answer is no.)
That might tell us a little about whether we’re actually carrying singularities through them.
1 Like
No, but the singularities that have been identified powering the Trig gates, which are identical in every way we can examine to the thing in the middle of the ships, also don’t immediately suck in all of the structure they’re embedded in. And they should. I mean, we’re talking about singularities here.
For comparison, a singularity with an estimated lifespan of 1 second before it evaporates (unless fed) has a mass of 228,000 kg. 1 second, 1/4 the mass of the Damavik. Now, background radiation does feed a natural singularity, so once the mass gets above that of say, a small moon, it can self-sustain… but that’s a moon.
Are there 3 moon-masses crushed into geometric points in every gate? If so, the gravity around them should be tremendous. Not event-horizon tremendous, but definitely ‘there are stresses on your hull that it wasn’t made to take’ tremendous. And yet, we’re assured those are, in fact singularities.
So we’re looking at some incredible containment tech. And we’re building that tech, as near as we can tell, using the Isogen-10 and Zero-point condensates… but we don’t know what we’re building. We don’t understand how it works, or even what it does, but we’re building it!
If I wasn’t an insomniac, it’d keep me up at night.
2 Likes
Eh … we’ve kind of been doing that for a while, though, Arrendis. I mean, shield emitters are standard kit in basically everything, and we know how to build them trivially, but we’re fuzzy on the actual mechanism by which putting this together with that and that other thing produces an immaterial energy barrier that somehow actually wards off high-kinetic-energy attacks more efficiently than it holds off, like, intense light.
We picked them up from the Talocan, and their deeper secrets are something only the Talocan really seem to have understood. (Sleeper drones don’t even use them. The Drifters seem to have come up with some crazy uses for them, though, so maybe that’s not for lack of understanding?)
It’s the same for stuff we pick up off the Sleepers and use for building STRACs and so on. We get how to use it, but the underlying principles might as well be magic, and there’s some stuff we still can’t build or use if only because we’ve never gotten the necessary parts or schematics.
And then there’s the capsule itself.
Basically, we use crazy stuff we don’t understand all the time, and have for decades (since shortly after we first started recovering Ancient tech). The Triglavians are just the latest and most extreme example.
2 Likes
We use crazy stuff we don’t fully understand all the time, yeah, but generally, we understand what it does, we just don’t understand quite how it manages it. This is an order of magnitude more insane.
We don’t know how the containment systems work (which means repair could be an issue, but ok). Ok, we don’t know how they do what they do. We don’t even know what they do. We know they contain something. We think we know that that something is a singularity. We’re not 100% on that, as this discussion highlights. We don’t really have a good picture of the mass of the singularity, even, just a range that’s… kind of impossibly small.
So we’ve got an impossible singularity that’s well below the range of ‘must feed it or it dies’… as in, not actually an exothermic reaction. It shouldn’t be able to be self-sustaining. We should need to keep filling up the tank, as it were. But we don’t. And we don’t know why. And we’re moving it. And we don’t know how. And keeping it from exerting any gravitational influence, because that would screw up the gravitational capacitors in the warp navigation system. And we don’t know how.
And then we put mutliples of these things… I’ve seen a dozen or two in the same place… next to one another, blithely assuming the singularities can’t have any containment failure and start eating one another…
…
There are times when I’m reminded of a moment at PTS, when one of my classmates asked an instructor how the Augoror and Osprey (and Guardian/Basilisk) appear to conjure energy out of nothingness with the Remote Capacitor Transfers that definitely do not break the Law of Conservation of Energy on normal hulls. The student, whom I understood to be an adherent of the Amarr faith, asked if God was creating the extra energy. The response was short, simple, and to my mind… utterly annoying in its lack of clarity:
“No. Shut up.”
I feel like right now, all of the empires and CONCORD are saying ‘shut up’, and just hoping nobody really starts poking at just how potentially dangerous it is to say, put a handful of Leshak in orbit over Gallente Prime.
How exactly does one of these things blowing up never have catastrophic consequences, or even just release a gamma burst that sterilizes everyone within two parsecs?
1 Like
Well-- that’s part of why I was thinking it might be channeled from somewhere, either by just keeping a conduit (wormhole, probably?) open to it (which would explain why you can fly it around) or by pulling some stuff through, like trapping air in a balloon (made of WHAT? … no idea), but just squeezing the channel closed and letting the “air” drain back out before the balloon disappears. That second one seems like it has to be what’s going on if the “singularities” are really present and not just appearing to be.
(Along with the energy transfer mystery, it really is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder if a lot of our tech is pulling power from another universe or something.)
1 Like
One point that I don’t think has been touched upon (I may be incorrect) particularly is that ‘naked singularities’ and ‘black holes’ are two separate things. A black hole has an event horizon, a naked singularity does not – that’s why it is ‘naked’ – you can actually see the singularity, because the event horizon doesn’t prevent light from escaping.
Naked singularities may or may not be physically impossible. Some theories regarding the laws of physics do allow for them, though most conventional understanding, to my knowledge, does not.
As I understand it (though my understanding in this field is somewhat limited) the evaporation is due to interaction between the event horizon and the singularity, thus it seems possible that if there is no event horizon, there might not be evaporation. But without an event horizon, there’s also nothing stopping things from escaping, so perhaps there would be some other sort of evaporation or degradation, I don’t know.
So depending upon if these are truly naked singularities (as has been suggested a few times), well . . . we don’t really understand all the rules for those, which may explain some of the weirdness. Of course, it still leaves us playing with things we don’t really understand at all.
3 Likes
That’s pretty much exactly why I was thinking a Leshak going up doesn’t explode anywhere near big enough. If it’s got a captive naked singularity, I’d think it would either be growing an event horizon (bad) or expanding into normal* matter (worse).
*okay, very exotic and also super-high energy
1 Like
No idea. Even that should take a hell of a lot more power just to initiate than forty cubic meters of condensates and a couple hundred units of Isogen isotopes should be able to do. I mean, sure, we can theorize that the power to keep these things running is coming from the ‘other end’ of some connection… but when we build these ships, in our normal shipyards… something has to make that connection in the first place, and that something has to be on our end. The other end wouldn’t know to make the connection, much less where.
Yeah, and as Miz said, they’re impossible. When I used the term ‘naked singularity’, I was being a bit hypebolic for illustrative purposes. It would be like imagining you can stand in mud without a single molecule of the mud moving whatsoever.
The event horizon isn’t a separate thing. It’s an effect of the singularity’s existence. If there’s a singularity, then that singularity exists within space-time. And so it impacts the space-time around it. Even if somehow there’s a containment system that prevents the gravitational effects from reaching beyond a certain point, if the event horizon would normally be wider than the containment zone, the event horizon exists at the edge of containment. If it’d naturally be smaller, it’ll exist inside the containment zone.
In the case of a containment system that limits the reach of the gravitational effects… here’s the tricky bit: that takes energy. That takes a lot of energy. Because to do that, you basically need to surround the singularity with enough mass/energy to offset the gravitational effect on space-time. In all directions. And that much mass/energy… bends space-time.
You’d need negative energy. And I don’t mean energy from anti-matter. Anti-matter decay that releases energy doesn’t release energy in negative joules. It doesn’t hyper-straighten space-time to make the vacuum more vacuum-y. Imagine… hm.
Ok, imagine a sheet of metal. It’s dented, so you take a hammer and knock out the dents. Except you’re really not, you’re making more dents, they just go in the other direction, so it appears straight. Now imagine the original dent… goes in every direction. There is no direction you can apply force that isn’t in the same direction.
This is just one of the problems with containment for a singularity: the energy you pour into cancelling the gravitational effects of the singularity would amplify the gravitational effects of the singularity.
1 Like
Hm. Only … we already have tech that works by kind of un-sticking things from the universe, right? Warp drives and so on, allowing us to scoot across systems at way above C? We even have a way of only partially unsticking stuff so we can move it around easier-- MWD’s.
Sooo … maybe the singularity’s “there,” just, not quite so much really? Like it’s in its own little reality-bubble?
(I’m talking such nonsense except everything’s been like that since we found out about the Abyss and the Triglavians seem to be so accustomed to messing with spacetime that it’s affected their language. So maybe we should just sort of think of the singularity as a spacetime knot that the Triglavians have figured out how to drive around as casually as we use lesser spacetime weirdnesses like warp drives, MWD’s, jump gates, and gravimetric smart bombs?)
1 Like
Not really. Warp drives don’t push us up over the speed of light… we just express it that way because it’s a lot easier than trying to deal with all of the differential timeframes involved. Mostly, what they do is they let us ‘deplete’ vacuum. What this really means is that we’re not moving through space so much as mauling space itself, by compressing space ahead of us and expanding space behind us. Then we cross the compressed space (the tunnel) at normal speeds (but which don’t register as normal because every navigational marker is moving around us as superluminal speed relative to our position) and stop compressing space.
And yes, ‘compressing’ and ‘expanding’ sound a lot like ‘bending’… but they’re not. It’s still ‘flat’. At least, in the sense that a 3-dimensional descriptor can apply to 5th-dimensional deformations (yes, 5th. There are 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension that we regularly perceiving interacting through, and they’re being deformed in a direction we don’t perceive, producing effects we do perceive). Which… isn’t all that well.
Point is, the manipulations we’re doing with warp drives are neither the same sort of manipulations that gravitational effects produce, nor are they nearly as large a set of perturbations, even when we’ve got enough of it going on that it produces noticeable local dilation effects.
And… yeah. I suspect this sort of change in reference is exactly why the Triglavian language is so different in its temporal framework. Even if they don’t directly perceive extra-dimensional interaction (and I don’t mean that in the ‘zomg, creatures from the 8th dimension!’ manner, but in the physics sense), the specific subgroups of their culture whose correspondence we’ve been given access to clearly have experience dealing with extra-dimensional interaction, and it’s shaped their use of words, in what probably amounts to their version of technical jargon.
As for the singularity existing in its own little reality-bubble… Need more data. Anything beyond ‘we really have no idea how this potentially extremely dangerous technology works or what the potential risks of catastrophic failure include’ requires careful investigation… and a lot of it. In extremely isolated, controlled facilities. Where it won’t have as good a chance of trashing all Miz’s (and everyone else’s) stuff.
1 Like