Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri - Posts Tagged "space-travel"

When I was charting out my future history, I presumed that after 14 centuries, there would be very little chance people would still be speaking English. In fact, the Vuduri do not speak at all. But they do have a language.

I estimated the spread of Darwin's Virus Strain 4 and decided Portugal would have the most survivors of any uninoculated population. So I based the Vuduri language on Portuguese.

At first, I used Google translate to convert English to Portuguese then later Yahoo's Babelfish. Currently I use Microsoft's translate API.

I also felt the language would "drift" over time so I came up with a simple vowel and consonant substitution pattern. A <-> E, I <-> O, T <-> D, F <->V and B <-> P.

Here are two examples:
When Rome was cast out of the Overmind, the word becomes C E (swapped with A) S D (swapped with T) I (swapped with O) U and D again. Cesdiud.

Same for Tau Ceti. D for T, E for A, U, C, A for E, D for T and O for I. Deucado.

I wrote a computer program to do the translation for me. All I do is highlight the phrase I want to translate, hit Ctrl+C to put it in the copy and paste buffer, run my program then hit Ctrl+V and poof, the Vuduri equivalent is ready to paste.

There is no limit to how much I can translate. Rome wrote a letter to her mother which was over a page and a half. It was translated with a few keystrokes. Unfortunately, to cut down the size of the book, it had to be excised but will reappear when I release the Vuduri Companion.

So there you have it. You, too, can speak Vuduri, which, by the way, is nothing more than the word Future, in Vuduri!

The 24-chromosome Vuduri have a number of remarkable characteristics. Their optics have been heavily modified. In addition to having a tapetum and a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope built into their eyes, they also have an extra, internal iris built in. Rei refers these as to built-in sunglasses. The internal iris reacts very quickly and allow the Vuduri to go from total darkness to extreme brightness without any discomfort. They also have a second set of cones called Ucones. These cones have been modified to detect into the ultraviolet. Finally they have a second set of rods, call Irods which allow them see deep into the infrared. Basically, heat vision. They can often use the heat of their own body to "illuminate" an area sufficiently to make out some details.

When I was inventing the Vuduri race, I knew I wanted to make Rome a mosdurece (half-blood) because I wanted her mother to be Vuduri and her father mandasurte. However, how would she be able to participate in the Overmind if she did not have a complete 24th chromosome or worse, no 24th chromosome at all?

Answer: make full-blooded Vuduri diploid, meaning each had two full sets of the 24th chromosome. When Binoda mated with Fridone, their child, Rome, would have one full pair of the 24th chromosome. You only need one functioning pair to participate in the Overmind. That meant Rome could as well until she was cast out (Cesdiud) on Tabit.

Later, I decided that the 24th chromosome reproduced using mitosis rather than meiosis but that is not critical.

By the time Rome was finished being poked, prodded and injected, she had so many chromosomal pairs, she was unique in all the world. She had her original 24th (currently inactive), the new pair inserted into her on Deucado (currently active), MASAL's prosthetic 24th chromosome (never activated) and OMCOM's 25th chromosome.

Her daughter, Lupe, was born with all of these chromosomes activated making Lupe one of the most potent communicators in the galaxy. You will find out more about Lupe in the novel entitled The Milk Run.

It has been well documented that a fissure in the disks between vertebrae allows interstitial fluid to come in contact with the layer within the disk called the nucleus pulposis. In turn, this releases a substance called Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha which is highly inflammatory.

So some back pain (and even swelling) can be caused simply by having a fissured disk.

This fact is integrated into the story Rome's Revolution in several ways.

First, almost all of the frozen occupants of the Arks wake up and suffer from extreme back pain due to this condition.

Second, OMCOM creates a special pill which not only restores Rei's back to a condition appropriate for someone his age, it also gives him some abilities (sonar vision, "cell-phone" in the head, and more). OMCOM later creates a second, less powerful version of the pill which simply fixes up the back pain and this is the pill that is given to the majority of the colonists.

The pill is mentioned again in the sequel to The Ark Lords called Rome's Evolution. One unexpected benefit is that pill prevents the normal Vuduri genotype as expressing itself as the Onsira phenotype. If this pill would become available to all Vuduri, the Onsiras would eventually be eliminated forever.

The speed of sound at sea level is 340 m/s. The speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000,000 m/s. But what is the speed of gravity? How would you even measure it?

Scientists have gotten closest by measuring the speed of gravity waves. Basically, how long does the gravitational changes due to an exploding star take to affect other stars.

Some scientists believe that these gravity waves travel at the speed of light since they are limited by that of the observer and the observer only has EM transmissions to measure.

Some experimental physicists conclude that gravity travels at 2 X 10 to the tenth times c or a million, billion times the speed of light. If that is the case, that is pretty darned fast!

I chose to accept the faster figure as my working figure in Rome's Revolution. All of the interactions that occur with PPT transmissions occur virtually instantaneously. While PPT transceivers have an effective range of a light year or so, within that radius, the interaction is more or less real time.

Postulating that virtually instantaneous transmissions can occur over such large distances allowed the Overmind to form and also for MASAL to operate as he did.

If it is ever discovered that gravity only travels at the speed of light, I may have to rework some sections or invoke other dimensions (string theory anybody?) to get the velocity back up to where I need it.

When writing Rome's Revolution, it was necessary to create not one but two completely different but plausible star drives. The faster-than-light drive was actually easier because it was wilder and could not be verified or refuted. The Casimir Effect is real therefore the existence of negative energy is a real possibility. Some have speculated that space cannot exist where there is no energy so all I did was project a big blob of negative energy using "Casimir Pumps" and voila, you jumped past space yielding effectively faster-than-light travel.

The slower-than-light star drive was much more difficult since it had to be based on what we know today. Brute force chemical rockets weren't going to get it done. I decided the slow but steady method was the best bet. Solar wind is free and constant but dies off outside the Oort Cloud. So I built what I called the "Grey Drive" named after the fictitious scientist Wally Grey who invented it. It consisted of a quantum black hole and a big tank of xenon. They shot one atom of xenon at a time into the black hole to "feed" it and the atom disappeared into the black hole. Because it was so tiny, its matched white hole was only a few angstrom units away and the atom re-emerged as Hawking Radiation which pushed against a back plate and generated an infinitesimal amount of thrust. But infinitesimal times a long time results in a top speed of about 1/20th the speed of light. That was sufficient to get us to the stars.

For the first Ark, the mission to Alpha Centauri, they burned their fuel at twice the recommended rate so they were able to reach our nearest neighboring star in just over 40 years. Tau Ceti, where most of the action occurs, was just 12 light years away which means the trip there was supposed to take 240 years. Of course, the Ark II missed the mark and that formed the basis of the entire novel Rome's Revolution. Next post: cheap space ships.

I was thinking about what it would take to send people to the stars. I figured that travel over such long distance involved risk. To build a complex spaceship that could survive micrometeorites, cosmic rays, mechanical failure, etc. was unlikely. So instead of building an expensive spaceship, I had the mission planners build a cheap one, not much more than a flying tin can.

They sunk their money into building expensive, individual sarcophagi figuring any one might fail but the likelihood of all 500+ failing was very slim.

They built the Ark out of pig iron so the colonists would have some fairly refined materials to start their new life. I also made it so the nuclear power rods that reanimated the colonists could be ganged together to produce electricity for 7000 years.

The one thing the Vuduri have, that we do not, is infinite free energy. They use "Casimir Pumps" to split zero energy in neutral space into positive and negative energy. They use the negative energy to create PPT tunnels which effectively bypass normal space thus allowing them to (mathematically at least) travel faster than the speed of light.

But a by-product of the Casimir Pumps is positive energy. The Vuduri do many things with it including creating electricity. This is very handy when they are in normal space, since they need a way to drive their ships forward. So they take the excess positive energy and reverse the equation e = m * c squared and use e divided by c squared to get m. In other words, they use energy to create mass. Usually these are very elementary particles, rarely organizing more than just a ball of plasma. They then force that plasma out of jets built into their ships to get forward thrust.

They aren't much for brakes. They usually just rotate their ships around and use the plasma thrusters in retro mode to slow themselves down.

Pretty cool, huh?

The Dyson Sphere concept was invented by physicist Freeman Dyson in the late 1950s. The idea was that intelligent species could build a partial or complete sphere around a star. This would allow them to capture all of the energy emitting from the star and simultaneously create a semi-infinite amount of living space on the interior. Larry Niven took a slice of a Dyson Sphere and used it as the basis for his Ringworld series.

While the concept is fascinating, why bother? Who needs infinite energy or infinite living space?

Regardless of the reason, I was still enthralled with the idea of a gigantic sphere encapsulating a star so even with the first draft of Rome's Revolution (called VIRUS 5 back then), the "villain" was the Stareater, called Asdrale Cimatir in Vuduri. The people observing this would be in awe and terror. If it happened to your star (the Sun!!!) all life outside of the Dyson Sphere would cease.

Click here to see my teaser/trailer illustrating a Stareater "swallowing" a star.

My hero, Rei Bierak, was able to figure out how to "defeat" the Stareater by using VIRUS units. A neat invention back in 1973 when I first came up with it but now nanotechnology is sort of old hat.

As I pushed on with Part 3 of Rome's Revolution, I wanted a double climax and the return of the Stareaters, especially to eat the Sun, seemed very exciting. You'll see how Rei and Rome defeat it in the book but suffice to say, you will be shocked as to the how and the why.

Pretty neat stuff.

The problem with getting to the stars is that it takes a lot of energy. At least until we invent an FTL drive. Traditional chemical rockets burn up their fuel rather fast. In the late 50s, scientists came up with the original Orion concept of a nuclear powered ship which literally had a series of atomic explosions pushing the ship forward. This has fallen out of favor but may be resurrected some day by using fusion instead of fission.

So how to send people to the stars? Ion engines produce very little thrust but are extremely efficient. I came up with the idea of feeding xenon atoms to a Quantum Black Hole (QBH) and using the resulting Hawking Radiation to provide a tiny amount of thrust. Once you hit interstellar space, they would collect external space dust, hydrogen molecules, etc. to "burn up" similar to a Bussard Ramjet but no fusion involved.

As I said, ion drives produce very little thrust so it takes a long time to build up speed. Since my people are frozen, so what if the trip takes 200 years? That wasn't the issue. The problem is the QBH. They don't exist. For the story to succeed, at least my version of it, I assumed that someday someone will figure out how to do this. I don't think the Hawking Radiation idea will work but it sounds cool.

What made it even more fun was proposing that the US Government resurrected the Tevatron to produce the QBHs. The Tevatron then plays a starring role in The Ark Lords.

It is pretty neat how it all ties together. Check it out.

Rome's Revolution and The Ark Lords.