Best HFY Sci-Fi Stories: The Return

[@ejensen101]

Okay now I'm curious as to who the enemy was in this story that was holding back the other races from making much progress.

[@Wichitan]

I'm curious who the enemy is that's giving these people a hard time. They create SUNS, of all things. Who would their enemy have to be?

[@NXTangl]

​@@WichitanPhotino birds.

[@mitchellwhite9728]

@@NXTangl Yeah. If the f*cking Xeelee would just get out of the way....

[@GarmrsBarking]

how to jump start a universe 101: use some dyson spheres/swarms... as easy as toasting bread....

[@Snipergoat1]

Presumably a significant amout of mass is consumed to power the processed that turn the old matter of the now red dwarf and onto the active hydrogen and helium of a type 3 star about mid range (or a bit younger, cant go too young though else we mess up our lovely regenerated planets) Such a thing is conceivable using physics as we know it but it would require considerable mass to consume as it doesn't sound like they just did away with entropy they just punched things back a bit. Not all mass could be recycled. A large amount would be spent in converting things to a hi potential energy state.

[@anathardayaldar]

Instructions unclear. Accidentaly awakened Azothoth.

[@zalfir]

Instructions unclear. City is now swamped by self replicating solar powered bread.

[@alexfranz817]

And now we've been fighting for a quadrillion years because we absolutely refuse to quit

[@DubiousFIN]

A first contact situation? in this day and age? in this part of the country? localized entirely within your kitchen?

[@ElectroNeutrino]

Yes.

[@tomaszkarwik6357]

​@@ElectroNeutrino can i see it?

[@KaiHenningsen]

@@tomaszkarwik6357 No, you're not in that kitchen.

[@howardchambers9679]

In Norfolk.

[@iDontKnowAnyCoolName]

In this economy?

[@oddctioum]

a light minute is exactly a minute. because its a measure of distance (the distance light travels in a minute) just like a lightyear. its not a measure for time, its a measure for distance.

[@morgankuikka4940]

Glad i wasnt the only one who caught that, its like the starwars parsecs being used as a time too.

[@Snipergoat1]

So not quite a reversal of entropy but a serious expansion on how long until it eventually gets everything and we are talking extensions potentially into the quadrillions of years.

[@purpledevilr7463]

If anything that’d reduce the lifespan of the Universe/Civilisation. It’s essentially chucking energy out that could be harvested and power life support for quadrillion more years.

[@Snipergoat1]

@@purpledevilr7463 TLDR:I spent way too much time nerding out on this but my statement was based on the premise that entropy cost all had to be paid. There was no magic conversion to reusable forms without all nuclear and potential energy costs fully paid. So while you would be losing energy out of the system it could go on for a unbelievably long time just paying these cost from the energy gained from chucking mass into a black hole. I'm sure I'm screwing something up or got some bad math somewhere but it is too long already so. I present to you the Snipergoat plan for indefinite universal replenishment. All using physics as we (or at least I) understand them. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notice that they they are not reversing entropy, they are using high amounts of harvested energy to convert matter into less entropic forms so that stars may shine again and planets may grow new life. I am assuming that they have a very efficient way to do this as these energy requirements would be beyond belief. I mean extremely efficient, like near 100% (by way of comparison the most efficient way of converting mass into energy that we have in the universe barring anti matter is to chuck the matter into a black hole. The maelstrom around the black hole called the accretion disk is subjected to such extreme crushing, grinding, and smashing forces that about 55% of the mass is converted to energy that manages to escape the black hole. That is why while we cannot see a black hole itself the accretion disk is often very visible (This is what the famous pictures of black holes are really showing us, these glowing accretion disks) and emitting high energy gamma bursts of such magnitude that a direct hit from one as near as a few hundred light years would completely sterilize all life from our lovely little blue dot. Lucky for us none seem to be near enough and pointed in our direction. There is safety in distance and space is unfathomably large and unfathomably empty. At any rate it's not like if one was heading our way right now to end us we would ever see it coming. Just poof, everything is dead (real gamma rays don't create super heroes, they just ionize every thing they hit and kill everything all the way down to the virus level) Sleep well thinking about that. Think about rejuvenating our star, Sol. It would be a neutron star. Since they are not reversing entropy here there is no infinite power source and they would first have to have the energy to take the mass of the sun, held together so tightly that the matter itself has only the Pauli exclusion principle to keep it from becoming a black hole itself. There are no protons and electrons. The immense gravity has overcome the atomic forces that usually keep them apart and the resulting matter is made of nothing but neutrons and in unimaginably heavy. Some in the range of a a billion tons per cubic centimeter. At 100 % efficiency it would take the same energy as the sun has released in it entire lifetime to fully reset it to it's original state. If we just skipped those tempestuous first few billion years and put it right into the phase of life where it is right now or even a billion or two earlier (We only have about a billion years or so before changes in the sun will make Earth too hot live on, or have any surface water. Buy that Mars vacation home now.) No matter how young or old we set it it would require all the energy that the sun would emit for the remainder of it's life span to set it back to that state (spent on moving all this mass into a less dense but higher potential energy position and the rest on somehow cracking the neutron mass back into hydrogen. Now consider that every year the sun loses about 174 trillion tons of mass, lost to pay the E=Mc^2 cost of all that fusion energy released and a bit more just being blown off as solar wind. After a few billion years this really adds up although in the grand scheme this relatively paltry mass cost is overwhelmed by the other costs. Some quick and dirty math (and very possibly incorrect, it's late and I ain't checking it.) make this actual mass loss over 5 billion years to be only about 1/7 of the total mass of the Earth, a relative bargain. We could get that much from snagging a moon or two from Jupiter. The biggest cost would be paying the entropy costs of potential energy in the nucleus of these atoms to be split into hydrogen. (for later re-fusion in this rejuvenated star). So tugging around a black hole with it's 56% conversion rate means that for the cost of a couple more moons we could, with our 100% mass/energy conversion rate, rejuvenate our star. Now salvaging the planet is another matter still but if the titanic feat of getting the star online could be done, I have little doubt that remelting the core,(gotta have that magnetosphere to protect our vulnerable organic life from that deadly laser called the sun) then getting some water and microbes back on the now warming planet would be a comparative simple matter. So doable on a system scale but yes it would require the loss of about 44% of the total mass/energy re injected into the system. Lost to us entirely past the event horizon of our portable black hole. Still, the loss of a couple of moons every cycle and some planetary mass from some of our less popular planets could keep this going for a rather long time we are still winding down. So now things get really long term. Like where where trillions and quadrillions of years becomes a meaning length of project time. Now if we are really going nuts we could think about tugging around not one large black hole but several smaller ones. The thing about black holes is that the smaller they are, the faster they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. This is why there are no primordial black holes (black holes formed not by the pressure of collapsing matter but by the incredible heat and pressure in the first few seconds after the big bang) smaller than the size of a 100 billion tons or so.(In reality we have not found any , but we have every reason to believe they do exist.) Smaller than that they would have evaporated in the 13.6 ish billion years since the big bang. The last instant of a black holes, existence is not that of a minuscule ball of all absorbing nothing but as a white hot ball of blasting Gamma death as it dissolves into nothing. This gives us a potential entropy cheat as over the countless ages this ship travels about rejuvenating stars all willy nilly the dissolving black hole would return all of it's mass/energy with this Hawking radiation. The time scale of this would be incomprehensible from our current perspective but we broke that with the very premise of the story. Of Course this assumes that protons are stable. If not a mere 30*10^32 years or so go by and the universe just dissolves away as the protons break up but that gives us a lot of time to research this little problem.

[@Maty83.]

​@@purpledevilr7463Considering there's talk about stopping the Big Rip, you already have infinite energy coming out of somewhere (Changing either physics, which adds one way, or sustaining a counter-force to the ever increasing force of the Big Rip), that doesn't seem to be an issue. Especially with them using less mass than they had for restarting the sun.

[@purpledevilr7463]

@@Maty83. is there? I must’ve missed that. But in a big rip scenario, it’s not about the energy in the universe. It’s the rate of expansion literally tearing the fabric of reality apart.

[@slogary4790]

10:43 : mass : 1M (symbol) the symbol is the astroloical symbol for Earth, a cross in a circle.

[@wildwikedwanderer1208]

Haha why Pluto can’t get no proper love

[@KaiHenningsen]

For the same reason Ceres can't. You know some while back, Ceres counted as a planet?

[@RedRipperDragon]

Sounds like humans Came back from ascension and are using tech that most of them are just so far beyond.They don't remember it very well

[@ladyrayne9706]

As a Cole family member we greatly enjoy any time our Family name is muttered

[@Snipergoat1]

So did your old King ever get his pipe and bowl and fiddlers Three? In a related vein, did your cousin Paula ever figure out where her cowboy went? And what is up with your famous slaw? Do you really like cabbage that much?

[@beingsneaky]

AH the Big Rip means every this expands to fast and every things Rips. down to atoms, the particles that make up atoms. so there would have been nothing left. no life no light nothing. but he did say the big rip was stopped. how? and what happened after this story?

[@Snipergoat1]

Not in the way I understand it. The big rip means that while that while the universe would irretreavably spread too distant for any interaction to be possible, universal expansion is just another force that acts within the universe. In areas as small as your local gallactic cluster, gravity would remain the dominant force and would thus stay together despite the other clusters getting ever farther away, eventually becoming causally disconnected from each other as the universe expansion rate in the great distances between clusters grows at greater than lightspeed just as about 90% of the observable universe is right now. Billions of years ago when their photons left them, they were still close enough. "Now" as the concept applies to things as we like to think of them, no light or object traveling at any speed would ever reach them no matter the speed or time of travel allowed. Thus there is nothing we can ever do that would effect them in any way nor could they do anything that would ever effect us, even a full on false vacuum collapse could be happening somewhere out there but if it is more than a few billion light years away, it will never reach us. Hence we are "causally separated" They effectively no longer exist as far as we are concerned we can watch them for a couple billion more years or so as they slowly redshift into oblivion. The lightspeed limit applies to things in the universe, not the universe itself. The "Big Rip" as concept well as the "Big Crunch" or the universal stasis and that whole geometry of the universe is based entirely on the rate of universal expansion vs the total mass of the universe as gravity and expansion vie for what will ultimately be the dominant force and determine our universe's ending. We have a bit of a problem as we have two fairly good ways of measuring this and have come up with two different answers. Although either one would suggest that we are big rip bound unless we are very wrong about the mass of the universe or we don't understand the fundamental forces enough to make a good call (Both are very real possibilities, the fact that to any observations that we have been able to make the actual universe appears to be flat, meaning universal stasis kinda points out why I lean towards we just not knowing enough to figure out what is going to happen in a trillion years or so.) EDIT: Thought of a flaw already. By the time the Sun becomes a neutron star it is going to be down to about half of it's starting mass as it will have ejected a lot of matter during its red giant and Nova phases. This is going to be a lot more than a few moons could cover. Jupiter entirely would not me enough to make up for this loss. Well crap, entropy wins yet again and far more quickly than first thought.

[@lordrynogaming1553]

Humanity, the antithesis of entropy.

[@rexmann1984]

Wow! Nice one.

[@victortahlor4038]

Thank you for the reading

[@Azrael9826-o1n]

Definitely made by a halo fan.. I love it lol

[@nobodyimportant2470]

Pretty good story but there was a mistake as at point they refer to waiting 5 light minutes like it was a measurement of time rather than distance.

[@GenStallion]

You missed a word. " Five light minute GAP." To me, that implies distance.

[@GarmrsBarking]

as I understood it was that they were getting closer and closer between the communication.... and not a measurement of the time between communications....

[@paulqueripel3493]

​@@GenStallionthe actual phrase was after five and a half light minutes of anticipation .

[@USS_Grey_Ghost]

5 light minutes is 931411.985 miles

[@lordrynogaming1553]

Yeah I suppose at that point it's just 5 minutes lol

[@KaiHenningsen]

1 M🜨 is one Earth mass. And +- is plus-or-minus. And a light minute is not a measure of time, it is a measure of distance, 17,987,547,480 kilometers or 11,178,468 miles.

[@jasonwarren9279]

Suck it, Time Lords. HFY

[@johnwaugh5372]

Any connection to Hunt for the Cradle?

[@Terran.Marine.2]

Chief astronomer prattler 😅

[@MayTheFay]

The implication of the prefix HMS are WILD on this context, feels more like attention lacking writing by the author.

[@Snipergoat1]

It took me a rather long time before I ever considered or really even noticed the oddity of the Enterprise being the USS Enterprise. I'm sure he could cover his overlsight with an post hoc acronym to justify the HMS just like I suspect Star Trek did with "United Service ship".

[@Reh8111]

Second here, enjoyed this

[@MarcZachman]

1

[@voidseeker3260]

First here

[@randompersonnobodyknowsroa2]

...

[@thelastone0001]

@@randompersonnobodyknowsroa2 same

[@GarmrsBarking]

zzzzzzz!!!!!

[@russellperry9902]

All yall should start putting read by a real human in your stuff and get on the twitters to proves it. .. or ya know... Admit to your AI superioutry

[@lupaswolfshead9971]

Net Narrator is SpartaWolf

[@Andrew-tf8jt]

The milkdromada galaxy....really?...and I thought I was lazy at least the ship wasn't called Prometheus I guess...

[@AidestheKiwi]

To be fair, it's an acceptable enough name for when Andromeda and the Milky Way eventually collide (and they are on a "collision" course).

[@Snipergoat1]

Just hang out and chill for 4 billion years or so then you will be in that galaxy. What will most likely happen to the Earth during that great galactic merger? Nothing, as the sun would will be a dying red giant and would have scorched the Earth to a cinder billions of years previously. For anything that might not be inside the corona of a dying star on it's last legs? Likely nothing since space is huge and distances between things is vast it is unlikely that anything near us will hit anything at all but would make for a awesome light show if it did happen. If you think the name itself is lazy, blame the astronomers who track these things. They named it. (For instance, the average distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is about 100,000 miles. Not much like in the movies at all.)