Sojourn: The Abyss

There’s a lot about the Triglavians’ tech that suggests it isn’t as dangerous as it looks at a glance.

Starting with: we’re allowed to build it.

Even if you think CONCORD and all the empires and the SoCT and everyone are all horrible … playing with something like this would be suicidal if it were as dangerous as it looks. “Horrible” and “suicidal” are normally a distance apart.

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Unless ‘insane’, ‘foolish’, ‘scared’, or even ‘desperate’ come into the mix.

And I suspect different actors in the decision-making process may fit different mixes of those categories. If human history has shown us anything, it’s that when people with a smidge of understanding say things like ‘the people in power would never let us do this if they thought it was dangerous’, what they’re really saying is ‘the people in power have absolutely no idea how dangerous this is, and their regulatory process will inevitably lag years behind the technology we have’.

I suspect that you, right now, have a better grasp of the potential dangers of letting capsuleers tinker with singularity-based technology than most of the decision-makers (note: NOT the technical staff, the politicians making the actual decisions) at CONCORD do. And a better chance of saying ‘I don’t know how dangerous it is’, by a much greater margin.

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Arrendis, I’m not sure what to say other than, “I live in a region of space mostly powered by antimatter reactors and we’re not all dead yet, so it can’t be that bad.”

Anyway, I’ll let you know if I wake up to find myself in a backup clone because the station imploded while I was sleeping.

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It’s wizardry.

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Aria, antimatter reactors are candles compared to a singularity. An antimatter reactor is controlled annihilation of particle/anti-particle pairs, inside a magnetic bottle, which then releases more energy than it takes to emit the particle/antiparticle stream. The amount of mass involved is… something like a quarter-gram of anti-matter annihilating with a quarter-gram of matter has an energy yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of trinitrotoluene (TNT).

Move that around in a magnetic containment system? Yeah, no problem. You’re fueling the reaction with a constant particle stream. The amount of mass needed for fuel is… maybe a metric ton, between the matter and anti-matter, over the lifetime of a ship, assuming the ship doesn’t blow up in combat?

And matter/anti-matter annihilation is clean. Perfectly clean. Nothing but energy is left over, because the easiest way to do it is electron/positron collision, and leptons are fundamental particles. No smaller bits. No neutrino emission. Nada.

Compared to the complexities of creating a small, stable, singularity… it’s the difference between lines scratched out on one rock with another to represent numbers… and quantum computing.

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Hm, well.

Given that we’re dealing with people* who seem to be able to mess with some of the basic parameters of space-time in a place where those are at their most strange and turbulent, maybe that’s an assumption in the vein of “You can never hope to read in the dark, you would need to bang a million million rocks together to make enough sparks to match the intensity of the sun!”

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Hee-- I was thinking something like that, Jev. If there was a place where you’d have both the right environment and the motivation to learn to mess with spacetime in some very interesting ways, the Abyss would definitely be it.

Arrendis … I was more suggesting that “fail-deadly” basically isn’t a new concept to the bureaucrats? After a certain point, just how “fail-deadly” something is maybe doesn’t matter all that much, and so far the fact that we haven’t been having star systems abruptly pick up new black holes in place of stations / moons / planets seems to suggest that the Triglavian power cores are surprisingly safe.

Antimatter goes up when containment fails. For whatever reason, Triglavian singularities seem to go away, instead. Probably someone early on figured out why, which is why that Vedmak was allowed to dock, but it’s not too much of a suprise if they’re not announcing the details. After all, if we understood how it worked, someone might try to weaponize it.

(Which they’ll probably do anyway. Disintegrator beams? So not the worst thing you can do with a singularity.)

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Yeah, roughly. It’s clearly like a run-of-the-mill mass singularity in some ways, and also clearly not, so there you go: something entirely new. Perhaps something like a black hole battery? Spend a lot of energy to create it, sure, but then you get to keep it constantly on the edge of evaporation and bleed off energy as needed through deep-magic manipulation of some kind. Some kind of inherent passive safety features to shunt off energy to elsewhere if it exceeds sane use parameters.

Maybe.

I hope we actually get to ask one of them.

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No, it’s more in the vein of ‘maybe you’d want to understand how the sun works before you decide you’re going to build one in every home’.

‘Fail-deadly’ isn’t a new concept to anyone. Your pod falls under it. Ground vehicles fall under it (brakes fail, it can plow into pedestrians, etc), bridges fall under it. But when those things fail, we understand why they failed. We know how to try to prevent that failure. And we know, roughly, what the potential ‘deadly’ involved in that failure is.

Let’s say there’s someone you don’t know, but you’ve interacted with them. That interaction has taken the form of them running you through a maze to get to a reward box. You have 20 minutes. If you haven’t gotten the box and gotten out, the entire maze is flooded with poison gas. They keep changing the conditions of the maze, and you can tell it’s probably because they’re trying to judge how smart you are, how competent, how resourceful, and how well you can figure out the rules of the test you’re being put through.

These boxes contain a bunch of substances you’ve never dealt with before, but you can understand they’re basically sugar compounds. And recipes to make them into candy.

You gonna let Luna’s kid eat one? It could be another test, ie: are you dumb enough to take at face value the ‘gifts’ of someone who’s been trying to kill you? Or will you take your time and perform your own tests on these things?

Right now, we’re gleefully scarfing down the candy, even though we have no idea what it’s really made of.

Tiny little problem with that: unlike matter/anti-matter annihilation or nuclear fusion, singularities don’t release more energy than it takes to sustain them. Sure, in standard black holes, this is partially offset by the background radiation of the universe being sucked in to fuel it, but… that relies on interaction with the rest of the universe. It relies on not being ‘contained’. The more massive the hole, the bigger the deformation, so the more background microwaves it sucks in, while also operating at a lower temperature (less energy).

Just trying to figure out how to contain something like this hurts my brain. You can’t, for example, use any kind of energy emission, for the reasons I outlined above. You can’t try to contain with in any form of magnetic bottle. You could conceivably move it with a magnetic bottle, but make sure you keep the bottle aligned with the axis if it’s spinning, so it’ll be hard to pitch things forward or back (point the nose of the ship up or down, sorry). But the field would have to be moving it without directly acting on it, because if it’s directly acting on it… it’s getting sucked in. And even that isn’t containing it. It’s still capturing matter around it because ultimately at macro scales, gravity wins.

And hell, at micro scales, gravity’s only really opposed by the strong and weak atomic forces, and in a singularity there’s so much mass it’s beaten them, too.

I have a feeling that, at such advancing-time coordinates as the studious communion of augmented foreign narodnya through cladistic proving completes, either the Convocation of the Supreme Strategic Troika of one Clade or the Convocation of Commune Troika will achieve metaxy and dispatch a Technical Troika to initiate playful communion.

Or, they’ll just kill us all. I really do hope for the playful communion, though. Metaxy seems preferable to extirpation.

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So-- here’s a funny question for you, Arrendis (and silly, but, we’re already there in real life so why not) …

What if it’s an anti-singularity? (Insert spooky noise here.)

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Well, Aria, what if it’s a fsdvbtrghgfdvbetrghgfhbn?

Take a look out any window you like on a space station. You’re seeing a whole lot of ‘anti-singularity’. A singularity’s just a place where there’s so much mass, so close together, that everything’s compressed together. What’s the opposite of that?

Vacuum. A place where there isn’t nothin’. Space doesn’t behave weirdly under those circumstances. It expands. Constantly. Well, no, not constantly, it expands at an accelerating rate, but the acceleration’s not really enough to impact the atomic structure of stuff yet. It will be, eventually, though, and then atoms will tear themselves apart as the space-time they’re in expands and rips the protons, neutrons, and electrons away from one another. At some point after that, the protons and neutrons will rip themselves apart as the quarks within them get pulled away from one another. (The electrons won’t. They’re fundamental particles. We can’t find anything they’re made of.)

And then, if future existence is really really lucky (or, maybe not, it could be completely inevitable, we don’t really know), a quantum fluctuation will occur with enough juice that it’s another Big Bang that starts the process all over again with maybe a different set of dimensions that are easily-observed by any life-forms that may eventually develop within it.

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Does the idea of an antimatter singularity not make any sense for some reason? I’m aware antimatter has basically the properties of ordinary matter, just … annihilation reactions, you know? It just occurred to me when you were talking about the problems with containing and drawing power from a singularity-- if, as seems to be the case, you overcome that problem somehow and strip the event horizon (impossible, I get it) (so’s everything else this year seemingly), would you be able to get a singularity to produce energy by dumping matter into it?

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An antimatter singularity… would both present a fundamental problem, and be otherwise indistinguishable from a matter singularity (or a theoretical ‘energy singularity’). First, the problem:

You can only feed it antimatter. Normal matter would make it evaporate. What does this mean? It means anything not a photon that you’re trying to use for containment… evaporates it. So now you’ve added the problem of keeping it alive with only radiation, or anti-matter, which you already need to be expending energy to produce, contain, and store. So there’s that.

But once you get out of the singularity itself, into the space around the singularity… it’s indistinguishable from a singularity made of matter. Look at two singularities. You know how you can tell whether they’re made of matter or anti-matter? Y’can’t. Being able to tell would mean retrieving information from the singularity, and nothing comes out of a singularity. The energy emission at the poles, and at the edge of the event horizon, is stuff near the singularity, but not yet ‘in’ the singularity itself.

An event horizon could be millions of kilometers across (from the outside, from the inside, ‘across’ has stopped having meaning, because a straight line forms a circle), but the singularity inside it… is still a singularity. You know how far across a singularity is? Ignoring the ‘across has no meaning’ part? It’s not. It doesn’t have an ‘across’.

Neutron stars do. They’re tiny. They get down to about 10km. 2.8 nonillion kg, 10km. Compared to say, a standard mid-class star of around 2 nonillion kg, at a radius of 1.5 million km. So let’s review:

Star: 1.5m km radius, 2 nonillion kg, VOLUME: 1.41×1019 km3
Neutron Star: 10km radius, 2.8 nonillion kg, VOLUME: 4188.79 km3
Singularity: Radius has no meaning. Mass: vOv (it’s pretty variable once you get there and depending how long its lived, but no minimum exists except evaporation). VOLUME: 0 km3. It has no volume. It has no ‘across’. All spatial directions have become 0, and space is infinitely curved.

Even a Neutron star, the density of which really only gets expressed in math because actually trying to picture actual matter at a relatable scale in those conditions is more or less brain-bleedingly traumatic, doesn’t come close to that level of gravitational lensing.

But…

You’d just evaporate it.

Edit to clarify a bit, because it’s likely that in trying to illustrate the ‘why’, I wasn’t really clear on the ‘what’:

The only external effect of a singularity is the distortion of space-time around it. Doesn’t matter what the singularity’s made of. No effects are felt outside of the event horizon other than that.

The place all the energy that I guess is getting produced by using these things as a power plant, is the stuff falling in. As everything gets closer to everything else falling in, it causes friction, and heats up. This eventually leads to photon emission. That’s it. That’s the only energy produced. It’s coming from the stuff around the event horizon, not from any characteristic of the stuff inside.

And Jev, it’s lovely that you’d like to derail this into insults and personal attacks, but sorry, not gonna play.

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One suspects what really hurts your brain is the notion that someone might know something you don’t, struggling to emerge.

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It’s not just an oversimplification–it’s wrong. I don’t mean to be rude! I’m glad to see people are interested in science, but this particular misconception is one I see a lot, and it’s a shame. The picture it paints is a pretty one, but it’s marred by the fact that virtual particles don’t exist. They’re an artifact of (one particular choice of representation of) perturbative calculations. They’re not actual things in their own right!

I’ll try and give a more realistic outline of the situation without resorting to outright calculation.

What’s the vacuum, beyond “that thing you get when you take away everything else”? In a quantum field-theoretical sense, it’s the state (and “state” has a precise meaning here) which contains no particles. Cool and good.

Now, quantum field theory is the effective (again, “effective” being used in a precise sense) description of nature at the right energy scales. Right at its core, though, is a detail that now becomes relevant–the vacuum is boost-invariant. That is, if you look at the vacuum and then go shooting off in whatever direction you want at whatever speed you want, you still see the same vacuum at the end of your pinging back and forth.

This is the bit where I can’t get away from some degree of elision. I can go into some more detail if you want, but I’m unconvinced how productive it’ll be. When one starts curving spacetime, people stop agreeing on the vacuum state. This is certainly plausible–the vacuum is the state of lowest energy, and energy is inextricably linked to time evolution, and in curved spacetimes that time evolution can get “odd” for different observers. An actual demonstration of the fact would come down to how we’re quantising fields in the first place, and I don’t think this is the place to discuss that!

The upshot is that (for instance), you could sit near the event horizon of a black hole and I could sit well the hell away from it. You’d pick one state as a vacuum–but I’d see it as containing some greater number of particles than “zero”. These are your radiated particles. At least as long as there’s actually an event horizon; if there’s not things get more subtle again, but then again I’ve never found a model of a stable naked singularity, so we’re fine!


This post came up when I was writing my own! There are still some points I’d like to address, though, so that’s very well-timed!

What does this mean? I’d like you to explain, since I think my understanding differs undamentally from yours here.

Edit:
Oh! You explained before I finished writing this! This really has been some superb timing.

I think you’re confusing sapping off the angular momentum of a black hole with the evaporative process I describe above. They’re not the same effect!

I’ve bolded a part I don’t think makes sense, but I might be misundersanding you! The point I wanted primarily to make is that a singularity in gravitational physics is entirely capable of having an “across”! To give a heuristic interpretation–angular momentum is conserved, and that’s fantastic news. If something rotating collapses down to a black hole, though, that angular momentum goes somewhere, and it certainly can’t go into a point. How can a point spin? It’s got no extent! Extending it into a ring with no thickness but finite radius solves that issue.

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Yes. It is wrong. But let’s face it, if I were going to give the explanation you just gave, I’d have done it at 3-4 times the length and detail with less useful language, and completely managed to not get my point across. So I used the ‘it looks basically the same from the outside/casual perspective’ version that’s a lot easier to explain.

Nah, I’m just attempting something of a short-hand conversion because I have a tendency to get over-specific and bogged down in details that generally leave everyone who isn’t concerned with the fine details accusing me of being intentionally confusing. :confused:

Same with the ‘across’ bit, in part. I mean, I don’t necessarily think we can draw conclusions about whether or not the ‘singularity’ is spinning in this case, so why introduce the additional complexity of the rotating model?

Also… and this is a minor but salient point that I haven’t made in this discussion because Aria already knows it… I’m not a theoretical physicist by trade, I’m an engineer. I make no claims on understanding these things perfectly at the bleeding edge of physics in New Eden. But I do know enough of the basics to know this is not the sort of technology you play around with and start using for combat purposes without a lot more actual lab time than this stuff’s had.

I’m also sitting on enough income to think maybe setting up those lab facilities and paying people who know more than me, and don’t have their brainpower diverted with things like flying in combat, working on technical specs, or figuring out how I want to remodel the atmospheric systems in a supercarrier again, and can just focus on answering two really basic questions:

  1. What exactly are we playing with here?
  2. What’s the worst thing that could happen involving this technology?
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Has anyone tried to use one of the triglavian prints for invention? )
I’d be very interested in how morphite can enhance their ships

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Yes, but not the ships. (It seems the SoCT has been tinkering, but, the results from that seem to be limited to the Alliance Tournament participants for now.)

So far, the focus for inventors would be the weapon systems. I’ve done “invention”-type research on the disintegrators at all three sizes, and also their efficiency modifications. Exotic plasma charge blueprints of the appropriate types can also be converted to produce “Occult” short-range and “Mystic” long-range charges. As usual for shorter-range weapons, the damage output is impressive, but at the cost of accuracy. Funnily the last time I checked high-tech charges were actually cheaper than the normal ones, I assume because there’s not a lot of demand yet. Skill training for advanced disintegrators is slightly rare.

Construction of high-tech variants for disintegrators and their modifications is pretty simple, but in both cases a basic, “unnamed” version is a necessary component. That’s particularly significant for supratidal (Leshak) disintegrators, since the amount of zero-point condensate needed to build them exceeds what is needed for the Leshak itself, by, if I remember, a lot.

At least the stuff’s relatively cheap, for now. I don’t expect that to last once people realize how much of it’s going to be needed to arm the Triglavian ships they’re building.

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940 to the Leshak’s 850.

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Hee. Okay, not as much as my impression, but you have to admit “a little over 10% more of the weird singularity-related stuff than it takes to build an entire singularity-powered (somehow) battleship” is actually a pretty impressive number all on its own.

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