Elite / Frontier Discussion - Reaching Outer Space

[Callum Rowley]

This forum has seen many a suggestion and discussion of what could or couldn’t be in a future version of Elite, but it seems to me that we've not touched the general attributes of the mysterious space around us a great deal (or at least, if it has been touched upon it's entwined in a 100-page thread). For instance, the ideals behind Newtonian physics is something we've seen a lot of discussion on because it fits into a space-game. But what about things which may or may not be possible in the real universe, like parallel universes & galaxies?

There are lots of interesting and exciting concepts for us to discuss – and who knows, discussing ideas about our own theories of the real space around us may even flare ideas for threads which might not have been discussed for the Elite universe [we're always watching and listening].

I'm going to kick things off by asking a question about our universe, and I want to know your thoughts. Respond in any manor you deem necessary to express what you think - but keep it on topic Here we go:


Question: What eerie things do you think lie beyond the fringes of our solar system and galaxy? Life? Emptiness? Remnants? Something else entirely?

 

[Spacegamer]

Well I would not mind coming across the odd bit of animal life in space,like the worm in Empire and of course the old Remnants of a lost Civilization on planets or abandoned station in space would be high on the list.
Other would be like Dyson sphere or ring worlds which have been mentioned a number times on the forum.
Theres huge Opportunity to put planets into the game which resemble there film,book ect counterparts like LV-426,Pandora,Crematoria,Diskworld ect.The same could be done for ships and stations.

 

[B0GiE]

Looks to me like you are trawling for ideas for Elite 4. Why don't you guys just come out of the closet and admit you have Elite 4 as work in progress and post some screenshots?!

For an idea on the other hand, how about glowing space jellyfish? They will also fire sting darts attached to their tentacles at a ship if it comes too close to try to reel your space ship in and digest it?

 

[Callum Rowley]

Looks to me like you are trawling for ideas for Elite 4. Why don't you guys just come out of the closet and admit you have Elite 4 as work in progress and post some screenshots?!

This isn't intended as a thread for ideas about what can go into the Elite universe - though you can contribute that way if you wish. This is intended as a platform to discuss real space and our own ideas about it. Space is one of the few remaining fantastical things where we can still dream about something extroadinary being real

 

[Kipper]

For me, without a doubt there is life outside of our solar system. We might even yet discover life within.

What I can't be so sure about is what form it will take - will it be microbial? Will it be complex? If its complex - will it be intelligent? self aware even? Will we find a race of 'people' (even if they don't look like us - i'm talking about something we can learn to communicate with and have a meaningful two-way conversation).

There are those that say that we are the most intelligent beings in the universe and that we've only been allowed to become as complex as we are because of a series of great coincidences - a planet orbiting a stable star that has, and will burn for long enough to allow complex life to develop. We're in the habitable zone that allows liquid water be present in quantity, and our sphere is big enough to hold an atmosphere - but not so big that the pressure crushes anything on its surface. We have a magnetosphere that keeps the harmful solar radiation at bay so that life can take hold, a moon of sufficient size to create tides that stir up the oceans to allow materials and genetic goo to interact more easily, and a friendly gas giant called Jupiter that sweeps up the most dangerous space rocks and prevents too many from bombarding the fragile life on the planet (though it may also throw rocks at us, from time to time)... And as for us Mammals... If something hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs we might not have been able to grow to the sizes and complexity we did.

But is all that needed? And how many times has it happened bearing in mind the billions of stars in our galaxy alone? The potential billions of galaxies?

I should imagine that if were able to explore the other systems we might find some very interesting things. Life, definately. Life at all stages of development from simple to complex to sentient. Maybe civilisations that were wiped out any number of events - either naturally or caused by themselves. If we think places like stonehenge are special - imagine finding something like that on a whole other world!

I think other life might have faced similar problems to humans - have they developed nuclear fuel? Did they avoid killing each other with atomic weapons? Did they burn fossil fuels? Did they solve that problem? Did they conquer disease? Did they invent iPhones?

Who needs parallel universes - there could potentially be enough different worlds and civilisations to play out any number of scenarious both familiar and unfamiliar to us on Earth.

Have aliens visited us already? I think perhaps not - we might see SOMETHING if they have starships capable of either long journeys between systems or they have an understanding of physics that we don't which allows them to shorten the travel time. I kind of imagine an interstellar ship to be something quite large, akin to our aircraft carriers.

Are they capable of visiting? Who knows? Do they want to? (If life is abundant we might be considered too primitive, but noted down as having 'potential'). Are they watching from afar? Maybe.

I'm not so sure we'll find warlike races - thargoids - war is expensive and its often about resources (with a thinly veiled idealogical excuse), or about destroying something thats a threat. We're not a threat to anyone off-world, and everything suggests that resource wise - there are enough barren rocks and empty worlds out there that we don't have anything worth taking that can be found elsewhere.

I was born in the late 1970s. The right time to witness the rise of computers, but I think the rise of humans in space is something that only todays children will grow up to see - if they're lucky. By the end of my life in the middle 21st century, I think we might just have seen a manned mission to one of our own planets, but thats about it.

Just my ramblings

 

[potsmoke66]

i expect.....
not much, if you ask me we are alone in this universe.
this may sound impudent, but we have to be aware of that.
i don't expect many other, in fact no other life then what we know allready.
even if the known universe is almost endless, it has needet a lot of "luck" to generate life and massive possibilities, a long time to get heavy masses enough to create just this solar system.
after all it's foremost better to think we are alone, there will be noone taking responsability then we.
and we have to!
before we ever can explore space, the final frontier.
but we have to, we are made for that, who else will then?
which creature can describe the universe, from a tree to the galaxy?
who is able to compose music and invent new technologies?
and only this can answer that question with security.

i expect a new stage in human beeing, leaving problems we know allready behind only to get confrontated with new challenges.

apart from that it could give humankind a new goal to live for, something we can work together for, we need such things, else we get lost, i'm shure.
and who will sing then (for me)?

but don't ask me

 

[bananascope]

im a big fan of the author alastair reynolds and rather enjoyed his take on things in his revelation space series, in a nutshell the universe was once hugely populated with hundreds of intelligent species who before to long had all died out or been killed after a cosmic war,then after millions of years humans came along as only to find nothing but relics and empty worlds.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

I think life is the thing that excites us most, and given the sheer weight of numbers it is likely that there's a lot of it out there, albeit isolated from each other by vast tracts of space. I imagine the nearest I'll get to visiting a completely alien culture would be visiting Tokyo, but life must take amazing forms out there.

As for interstellar phenomena, there must be some pretty incredible stuff going on surrounding black holes. The radiation and captured material spinning into the gravity well, stars ripped to pieces, new stars forming on the waves of material thrown off, all that cool stuff. Who knows, there may indeed be a 'white hole' which spews material and travellers back out at the other end of the ride?

On a small scale, there are the hidden pathways through which atoms communicate. I never really understood that concept until I quizzed a physics professor at a seminar. As a photographer I was interested in the physics of light and optics, and I asked him a question to clear up my ignorance. "How can light slow down as it enters a glass, and then speed up as it leaves?" No one knows how light 'knows' it is entering a medium, what slows it and what gives it the energy back when it leaves? It gets worse when you get into interference and entanglement. What it means is there's a whole layer beneath the universe we think we know, and it may be the key to near unlimited energy and faster than light transmission of information. Maybe even interstellar travel?

 

[rgmarett]

Life may be just round the corner - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10790648

But as for life on the fringes of our solar system or between galaxies - nope, just black I think. I think it seems that life needs a sun and the further away from light you are the less chance of life. I imagine the galaxy to be teeming with life - but close to the stars not on the fringes.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

I'm not discounting anything, and since we're wishing for stuff here, I wish for space whales or equivelant. I always thought it was rather foolish of scientists when they stated that life couldn't exist in certain places because there was no light or no oxygen or no whatever. Then they discovered extremophiles living in all sorts of stuff, and then later the whole array of life living around black smokers at the bottom of the sea.

Here was life living at outrageous pressure in 400 degree water with no oxygen or light at the bottom of the ocean living off poisonous chemicals. That made them a tad more cautious in their pronouncements. Just because it evolved a certain way on our planet, doesn't mean another planet is devoid of all life, or indeed the reaches between the stars. What if there is something that evolved in an asteroid belt or airless moon and eventually ended up siphoning space dust or gases from nebulas or something. Like our oceans, with most of the life at the fringes or rich waters, the almost empty ocean expanses have some of the largest organisms making a living.

 

[Bounder]

One eerie thing springs to mind would be a populated rogue planet.. granted the chances of a civilsation surviving being ejected from its system are pretty slim but somehow, somewhere it's bound happen occassionally..

If one were to chance upon one of these 'interstellar wanderers' what sort of state might it be in? Any survivors would likely have adapted thru massive geological and cimatic upheaval, technologically they could be trogolodytes or androids, powerful or vulnerable, peaceful or aggressive etc.. All sorts of possibilities there.

The parallel universe thing tho is killer, just for the amount artistic licence on offer. Some string theory models allow for it - M-theory and 'bubble universes' etc. (strictly you're not supposed to be able to cummute between them but still, if we're talking sci-fi..)

Then there's the idea of universes nested within black holes - again unreachable according to curent theory but hey all science is provisional eh.. and that fractal aspect nicely dodges some of the deeper questions - origins, finiteness and all that... dunno..

'Parallel' universes tho in the fundamentalist Copenhagian tradition i can't subscribe to, that whole infinite branching of all possibilites thing, spurious flimflam..

So yeah, Star Trek style "sub space", hidden dimensions (and traversing them), island universes and all that, why not, it's just about plausible. Alternate realties within this universe, the 'all possible outcomes' fallacy.. meh.

Anyway it's tomorrow morning already, i should prolly go bed..

 

[Michael Brookes]

im a big fan of the author alastair reynolds and rather enjoyed his take on things in his revelation space series, in a nutshell the universe was once hugely populated with hundreds of intelligent species who before to long had all died out or been killed after a cosmic war,then after millions of years humans came along as only to find nothing but relics and empty worlds.

Stephen Baxter had an interesting take on the Fermi Paradox in his novel Origin. Basically in all universes where intelligent alien life existed, human life either didn't get a chance to start, or was wiped out very quickly.

Michael

 

[deej]

I'd like to find the planet where the saucer shaped UFO's originate from....

....and blow it up with a mining laser.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

Maybe Thargoids evolved on a rogue planet?

While I'm with Bounder on completely discounting the whole 'all possible outcomes' scenario, I'd like to extend by dislike to cover all alternate realities.

As much as I like Spock with a beard, I just cant be bothered with the whole premise. Later Star Trek series kicked it to death with the 'Mirror Universe', Dr Who has faffed around with it several times (despite saying it's not possible), and any number of books are written using it. I hate it, both as a theory and as a lazy trope which writers can use to rewrite existing characters to suit themselves. The minute I see zombies or travel between realities in a game/series/movie I am turned off.

I have no issues with people creating their own worlds and universes, similar though they may be to ours in some ways, but the moment you have He-Man drop into downtown LA because of some dimension jump I want to kill the writers family and pets in front of him. If there are other universes out there, why would they be anything like ours at all? It is likely that we are pretty unique as a species as we evolved to fit a very specific set of circumstances on this planet, including the accidental destruction of its previous rulers. A bazillion other near identical universes where the only difference is that I'm wearing different coloured underpants does not smack of how nature works.

 

[OneoftheLost]

First, I'm not much of a thinker, and don't really follow most modern science theories and such. However! I did read a book by Michael Crichton. Which makes me an expert right

In the Sphere a team of scientists work with the government when they discover a crashed spacecraft beneath the ocean. Now, Mr. Crichton was very adament about his research, and cited the Drake Equation which states a great many things, but from what I gather, it sums up technological civilizations as... short-lived Its quite complicated, and apparently out of date nowadays.

Another thing the book discussed, which I have no idea if it is real, or fake, or what, was a government document put forth in the sixties or seventies, detailing the astronomical odds of first contact, and what it would entail.

I like to agree with that ... fictional document, that basically stated, there wasn't a ninth degree in heck that any alien life we encountered would be REMOTELY similair to our own. What where the odds that an alien sees/smells/feels as we do? As is often discussed in psychology, nature vs. nurture. What are the odds such beings would feel, or percieve the world as we do. If such creatures saw a sphere as a common offense to their senses, we could run into problems

To go even deeper, whats to say they communicate with vocal sounds, or even body language? (Hence where Math comes into play, math being universal and all. Thats another theory for another time.)

In summary, I sincerely doubt that a space-faring culture, far advanced to us, would honestly operate on the level we do. I also believe, that they would be just that.. alien. It could be a gaseous life form for all we know. Or, a sub-light type being.

In general, thats my line of thought. So I don't believe in alien 'space-ships' (A manned device that has an engine for the purpose of exploring the stars.) or civilizations in the sense that we do. I certainly don't think they would give a rat's behind about us, or our pathetic affairs. I don't think we'd make an impact at all on a bunch of floating space amoeba who smell colors.

I DO think however, that the universe holds so much... stuff. Not like.. living. Like... anomalies. Look at black holes, and quasars and etc. There must be unlimited mysteries out there.

So yeah. I enjoy sci-fi, I just don't believe any of it.

 

[Sir.Tj]

To quote the wonderful Douglas Adams.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to Space, listen..."


If there is intelligent life out there which has visited Earth If they had any sense the would put up a big sign saying "keep away the planet below is full of lunatics"

And...

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

That's pretty much how I feel about space etc...

 

[Steve]

While we're doing Douglas Adams quotes, here's one of my favourites. It's a great example of twisting logic to arrive at a bizarre conclusion

“It is known that there are an infinte number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely products of a deranged imagination.”

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

It's a thorny problem, that whole vastness of space bit. While there's no doubt in my mind there are other civilisations out there, it's tough to believe they're making that trip and wasting it buzzing rednecks and lonely farmers.

What would we do in a first contact situation? I think most people here will be like me, and assume that at some point in the future we will have interplanetary travel, and that maybe in the far future interstellar travel of some kind. In the back of my mind I just sort of assume that eventually it will happen, just as other advances eventually came our way. If it were you that arrived at Alpha Centauri only to discover sparkling crystaline cities inhabited by a noble race of sentient glowing hatstands on the verge of reaching space themselves, what would you do? Run away? Land in the center of their biggest city? Secretly begin talks with the lead hatstand? Or maybe go land in front of a lone hatstand in the middle of nowhere and shout Elvis lyrics at him?

 

[bananascope]

sadly i cant help but think that if we ever did come across such a situation we'd start a war.

 

[Steve]

sadly i cant help but think that if we ever did come across such a situation we'd start a war.

Sadly, I think you're right