ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Has anyone ever intentionally launched anything into negative hyperspace and gotten any useful data out of it somehow? Like, from the entry, or if they aimed it to blast through the real space-time curve into negative hyperspace in the vicinity of sensors, or something?
Hyperspace is a realm in which objects travel faster than the speed of light, so by definition, it should be impossible to track such objects from real spacetime. The only way you can get information about an object traveling through hyperspace is to wait until it returns to real spacetime, and then query the object's systems about what it experienced. If the object never returns to real space-time, or returns in a location you don't expect and can't find, then you may never know what happened to it.
As far as anyone knows, no object that has entered negative hyperspace has ever returned to real spacetime. According to Outsider-era contemporary theory, the boundary between real spacetime and negative hyperspace is analogous to the event horizon of a black hole; any crossing object is accelerated away from the boundary at greater than the speed of light, and so no information about it can ever return to real spacetime. Some theories suggest that the singularities of black holes must themselves have left the real universe and exist in negative hyperspace (or in a layer between spacetime and negative hyperspace), and that the surface tension of spacetime may be the mechanism that provides the negative pressure that accelerates the expansion of the universe.
If space-time has a positive curvature, then it's possible that hyperspace is infinite and negative hyperspace is a finite spherical volume, perhaps with some kind of unimaginable singularity at the center.
novius wrote:I mentioned that an overshooting ship would bounce off the 'flat' spacetime curvature in ever smaller skips, as seen in one of the graphs. That may be
- Due to some sort of 'friction' while being in hyperspace having a dampening effect
- Every bounce (or punching through) would 'bleed' off some energy, maybe into realspace.
Note that these two possibilities need not to exclude each other, but the first one has an insidious side effect. I'll get to this.
Re-entry into realspace is accompanied by a visible flash of light, so there's definitely energy to be dissipated. A rather good assumption would be that whenever a ship would touch - or cross - realspace, some 'hyperspace momentum' would be shed into realspace... Punching through into negative would definitely be noticeable, but skipping on the top of curvature might be too, with a series of flashes in realspace along the travel route.
Spacetime must have a "surface tension", so to speak, that provides resistance that deters objects from moving in extra-dimensional directions, and prevents objects from simply "slipping" into hyperspace by accident. Overcoming this surface tension to escape into hyperspace requires a certain amount of energy (generated by the jump field), which is returned either in the case of a direct re-entry (partially in the flash of light) or in a loss of +hyperspace momentum in the case of a bounce back into hyperspace. There is no "friction" in hyperspace that affects real space-time momentum; interacting with the spacetime/hyperspace interface affects only +hyperspace energy/momentum.
Since an object in hyperspace loses +hyperspace momentum with each bounce, an object that bounced enough times would enter a dribbling path in which the +hyperspace momentum would eventually bleed to zero, in which case the trajectory would become flat and the object could re-enter spacetime in flat (empty) interstellar space. However, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that this would happen before the object was drawn towards and collided with a mass in real spacetime... and even if it did reappear deep in empty interstellar space, it's even more unlikely that it would ever be able to make contact with its own civilization again, since it would have to crawl to a nearby star at a slower-than-light speed, and then have to content with the potentially incomprehensible distance it must have traveled while dribbling through hyperspace.
An object falling from hyperspace that punched through real spacetime into negative hyperspace would never actually enter real spacetime, and so there would be no sign to observers within spacetime near that location that anything untoward had happened. There would be no disturbance or flash of light.