Friday, September 10, 2021

Relativity is a Bitch

Brainstorm for a Mothership adventure.

A black hole like Gargantua from Interstellar. A system of planets in its orbit. Each carries a different time dilation factor proportional to its proximity to the event horizon.

Something is wrong. The time dilation calculations aren't correct. It's much higher than it should be - much higher than should be possible. That's the kicker.

The Company is offering hefty bounty for some volunteers to take some quantum entangled measurements on the various planets. They won't tell you about the time dilation.

Go too deep towards the horizon and time will simply slip away.

This last planet is a prison. A time prison for the worst criminals of eons past and future. Things forsaken by gods and intelligences impossibly old. All arriving at once upon the cusp of the event horizon. Reach this point and there's no going back. Trapped for infinity, 'til the heat death of the universe.

Ideas

  • Far enough towards the collapsed star, the skies are full of ships landing, just like you. Like you, trapped. Constantly arriving. They rapidly get more advanced with every integration, practically on every hour.
  • The ship's captain, if not a PC, has a death wish. They know about the time dilation, but their past haunts them and they're okay with putting it hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years behind them.
  • Androids can deal with the existential implications of the time dilation just fine. Humans, though... Stress and sanity a-plenty.
  • Communications to time dilated people. Life events, deaths.
  • A timeline with three scales: Days, Years, Centuries. The further in you go
  • Timekeeping is important. Keep track of time for the ship and the crew. Calculate how long it'll have been away from the star.

Places
  • A distal planet: hazardous but fairly boring. Maybe a wreck. Maybe a space station. Some dicey atmospheric conditions. Time Dilation Factor: 1:4 (1 Hour = 4 Hours)
  • A distal-medial planet: some space pirates have a hideout here. They use the modest time dilation to lay low while the heat blows over at a faster relative time. Time Dilation Factor: 1:30 (1 Hour = 1.25 Days)
  • A medial planet: ships distant by years apart are arriving days after one another. People on these missions are discovering with rude awakening that The Company keeps sending people on the same mission. Time Dilation Factor: 1:720 (1 Hour = 1 Month)
  • A proximal-medial planet: civilizations decades and centuries apart are all arriving at this planet mere hours after one another. Every human day is a new human era. Later civilizations are more advanced, and potentially more hostile. Time Dilation Factor: 1:9,000 (1 Hour = 1.02 Years)
  • A proximal planet: who arrives at a planet where one day will waste away a over a millenia? Religious colonists, probably. They haven't yet set the flags down before dozens upon dozens are here to do the same. Chaos. Madness. A thousand civilizations all landing in quick succession. Time Dilation Factor: 1:1,000,000 (1 Minute = 1.90 Years)
  • The event horizon. A planet resides on the very edge. Things are here which shall never escape. And if you're here, neither will you... Hell is becoming crowded. An infinity of arrivals just keep packing in.

4 comments:

  1. Reminds of False Machines the Infinite City, but with a more scifi bent to it! Anything on the scale of Deep Time is always fascinating, especially as it relates to our normal civilizations methods of reckoning time.

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    1. Even closer to the Infinite City than this, you could look at The Infinity Hotel tagged posts (you can find it in the Labels section of the sidebar of this blog).

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  2. Once you arrive *at* the event horizon, does the rest of duration of the universe pass instantly?

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    1. Naw, it's just really slow relative to everything else. On a human scale it might as well be, though.

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