Gravity

It’s pretty simple if you don’t think about it too much. Gravity works a lot like light, once we clicked into that everything else started making a lot more sense in the confusion of quantum physics. We didn’t always know everything about light, it’s colours, it’s speed limit, how it bends through gravity or the concept of wave-particle duality. When Isaac Newton unified the laws of Gravity it set us on a similar course of discovery. In the same way we learned these things about light and slowly learned to master them,

Gravity at first was something that pulled us into the earth, a force

At first we thought vision was like a radar system in our heads, sending out signals and getting them back, painting a picture. A few people thought about that some more and realized they better figure out what was actually going on. They decided it was special energy waves emitted from everything, and our eyes were just scanners. That made sense for a while until people started noticing that light was acting like a particle, and not a wave. We started detecting gravitational waves.

Gravity-magnifiers were the final discovery to bring us to the stars. A Grav-Mag works like a telescope in a lot of ways. Just don’t mind the name, TeleGrav was taken by a Swedish DJ. They gather a tiny amount of gravity and concentrate it right in front of you. The prototype levitated a grain of sand. Artificial gravity to explore the stars was an ambitious goal for the future of the technology. We tinkered and tested and improved our designs. Like we learned to bend and play with light we learned to to manipulate gravity.

“You’d need to concentrate the mass of the entire planet for that! To a single point!”

“Great! Where do we start?"

In order to concentrate a lot of gravity, you need to start with a lot of gravity. And you need to be able to build on it. A planet is basically the perfect starting point. The first Earth Collective Grav-Mag could accelerate objects at 10 G up to 30,000km/h. Not much different than a long train tunnel with the entire mass of the earth magnified through it. In just over a minute it could deliver anything the size of a shipping container safely to orbit using zero fuel. [Space Elevator] This was like the first trans-Atlantic flight for space, changing the way we understood our planet. It turns out when you can [bring asteroids of the worlds most precious metals to you from the asteroid belt] [shop from the asteroid belt like it’s the internet] it solves a lot of the problems brought on by the scarcity of just one planet! In 14,789 we first attempted to move the earth, it was only by a few picometers.

By the 16,000s we had skipped our way through the habitable zone, settling Mars and Venus afte r some careful adjustments to their orbits. Spaceship Earth! It used to be a joke in the 12th millennia, but we learned how to steer this thing! Mars and Venus were set up with their own Grav-Mags. Like Light and Gravity, humanity had mastered the solar system.

We never stopped looking out across the vastness of the universe, for a sign that there was something else out there. But found nothing. Planets upon planets in the goldilocks zone, with liquid water, breathable atmospheres and they were empty. Were we the first? The only? The last ones left in the cosmos? Had we lucked out with the perfect set of variables that would allow life to exist? But at the wrong time? We focused and refined our telescopes, building otherworldly structures spanning entire orbits to squeeze every photon and gravitron into focus. Nothing. We reached out to infinity and were left hanging.

Like the first move of the Earth, every calculation checked out and every model said it would be ok the first passage to

The first interstellar passage marked a monumentous moment for Mankind. In 17,171 a small crew piloted Venus out of the solar system for the first time on their way to our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri. The immense power of Grav-Mags paled in comparison to the vastness of the galaxy. Venus was predicted to make the 4.2465 light-year journey to the triple-star system in a little over 25 years. Venus was supplied with centuries worth of energy and supplies, enough to make it there and back a few times. Venus would cast itself adrift through the solar system, Sol shrinking in it’s wake until it would become just another star in the night sky. Extra fission generators were prepared to substitute the energy of the disappearing sun, and artificial daylight cycles were set up across the planet to help keep the artificial atmosphere in place. On an otherwise unremarkable day in the universe Venus left the gravity well of our solar system.

As Venus’ GravMag accelerated the crew into deep space, the predicted delay in communications grew longer. By the time they reached their destination it would take light and information over 4 years to make it between the once neighboring planets.

“Something’s not adding up with the comm delay”

“Something?”

“Yeah, something. It’s too long, our timestamps don’t match”

“Could it be time dilation, already? We only left a year ago we shouldn’t be reaching relativistic speeds yet”

“Tell that to Venus“

For all our great discoveries, the universal speed limit set by light and gravity was a constant that couldn’t be beat by our greatest intelligences. Quantum entanglement was a fun trick at parties and string theory could knit you a nice scarf, but 300 million meters per second couldn’t be topped. Grav-Mags could help us get there, but couldn’t shorten the 4 year lag that would exist between the two systems.

[It’s faster, Voyager Probe goes dark after a certain amount of time in interstellar space, not out of power but accelerated by dark energy/matter]

Grav-Mags brought us to the corners of the universe to us, no need to build a ship to travel between galaxies when you can park your planet in another system’s goldilocks zone and hop around from there.

They used the mass of their planet to focus gravity

ToDo:

Explore more solar systems. more galaxies.

No FTL travel, no FTL communication, planets stay together.

Venus goes to black hole.

Rewrite above from POV of other planets parked around black holes.

Black holes are connected. shift time, planets park on rim and wait for other civilizations to join. No planet can leave or communicate out of black hole.

Venus get’s there and watches the Earth and Mars keep exploring systems.

Mars goes to another black hole. It’s been 100,000 years for Mars, 10 years for Venus.

Earth has a plan? or dies?