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Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 3:12 am
by ShadowDragon8685
Arioch wrote:If the effect of gravity in negative hyperspace mirrored that of hyperspace, then as with hyperspace, all objects would eventually return to normal space, and negative hyperspace would be just another section of hyperspace. However, negative hyperspace is the inverse of hyperspace, and the curvature created by mass in realspace propels objects away from realspace, not towards, and so a ballistic object will "fall" deeper into negative hyperspace.
I'm assuming a no, but...

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 realspace curve into negative hyperspace in the vicinity of sensors, or something?

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 5:43 am
by novius
Huh, interesting question. Let's broaden it a bit...

Objects in Hyperspace do have little to no interaction with objects in realspace - aside from gravity wells of masses having an influence on hyperspace travel. But what happens with objects that cross (as ShadowDragon8685 implied) or even just bounced off the spacetime curvature?

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.


For something completely different, introducing 'hyperspace friction' would make things even more hairy. Whoever played around with dampening in oscillators (mechanical, electronics, whatever you come up with) might have noticed that with high enough dampening an object might not come to rest at 'zero position' because the dampening effect would cancel out the force that would push the object towards zero.

Translate that to our hyperspace physics it would mean that too short jumps (thus building up too little momentum) or a ship bleeding out momentum with a series of skips would risk to never return to realspace because the 'pull' spacetime exerts on the ship would be canceled out by the 'friction', thus keeping the skip being stuck in low positive hyperspace for all eternity.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 9:55 am
by Arioch
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.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 5:40 pm
by Mjolnir
Likely not story-relevant at all, but: is there any serious in-universe speculation about stable "layers" or "bands" in hyperspace, with the jumps used by ships being only a shallow entry into a transitional area, or is that as much the realm of crankery and fiction in the Outsider universe as hyperspace is in ours?

It does seem odd for what we consider to be "normal space" to be the only speedbump on the way from the most distant positive hyperspace to the most distant negative hyperspace.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 6:49 pm
by ShadowDragon8685
Hrm... IF Negative Hyperspace is in fact a finite curvature with a mnogo singularity at the core, that would mean that, in theory, you could take a dive through the realspace plane from hyperspace into Negative Hyperspace, at such an angle that your trajectory is a parabola around the mnogo singularity instead of directly into it, and potentially reach escape velocity again, resurfacing through realspace. Possibly on the underside of realspace.

I mean, that's all waaay out there cuckoo speculation, but...

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 7:05 pm
by Arioch
Mjolnir wrote:Likely not story-relevant at all, but: is there any serious in-universe speculation about stable "layers" or "bands" in hyperspace, with the jumps used by ships being only a shallow entry into a transitional area, or is that as much the realm of crankery and fiction in the Outsider universe as hyperspace is in ours?

It does seem odd for what we consider to be "normal space" to be the only speedbump on the way from the most distant positive hyperspace to the most distant negative hyperspace.
It might be possible; the seeming randomness of jump exits implies that hyperspace has unexpected curvature. But I'm not sure how one would measure or demonstrate this.
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Hrm... IF Negative Hyperspace is in fact a finite curvature with a mnogo singularity at the core, that would mean that, in theory, you could take a dive through the realspace plane from hyperspace into Negative Hyperspace, at such an angle that your trajectory is a parabola around the mnogo singularity instead of directly into it, and potentially reach escape velocity again, resurfacing through realspace. Possibly on the underside of realspace.

I mean, that's all waaay out there cuckoo speculation, but...
This is like saying that one should be able to exit a black hole by slingshotting around the singularity, but it's not possible. Inside the event horizon, all possible paths lead to the singularity. Any path that can achieve escape velocity has to be outside the event horizon.

PBS Spacetime has a great video on mapping the interior of the event horizon, and how objects behave inside.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 3:53 pm
by sunphoenix
Arioch wrote:
PBS Spacetime has a great video on mapping the interior of the event horizon, and how objects behave inside.
Uhmmm.. WOW! I've always considered myself a connoisseur of science and scientific theory... those guys on the PBS Science videos.. make me feel like a complete aboriginal moron! I LOVE IT... but wow... I wish I had the intellect to understand more!

THANKS A BUNCH Arioch! I completely am going to watch more.. I hated he did not go further into the multiple realities part of his Spacetime map... but now I understand so much more about why 'Black Holes' behave the way they do and WHAT is actually going on with what we call a black hole!

LOTS of food for thought! Technically a black hole is not an object ... as it is effectively the space that is not measurable AS SPACE in our universe it is; basically a glimpse at the edge of what we would consider our 3-dimensional universe where you go when you are truly outside 3D Existence as we perceive it, at least in this universe. Any future events that take place within a black hole are truly not part of our universe...

FASCINATING! I totally love it! Thanks a bunch! TONS of food for thought!

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 8:48 pm
by Arioch
I recommend starting at the beginning; they take you through some pretty heavy concepts step by step, and each video builds on the previous ones. They're really well done.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 8:51 pm
by novius
Another far-fetched (read: absurd) possibility would be that the hyperspace graph would wrap around at the lower and upper boundary - like rolling the graph into a cylinder. As in, if you get far enough into -hyperspace, you end up far in the +hyperspace and vice versa. After all, the observable universe is limitless but still finite - its curvature would lead anything back to its origin if it flies a straight line for long enough. Hyperspace could be about the same.

Of course, that would be irrelevant because once in -hyperspace a ship would start "dropping" ever faster, and continuing to drop faster and faster even through subsequent wraparounds, so that only very steep spacetime curvature, like being close to a black hole would have a chance to "catch" the ship back into realspace. And even in that theoretical case a ship would be doomed by black hole.

So, still. Whatever gets into -hyperspace is lost forever. End of story...

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 9:08 pm
by novius
Arioch wrote:I recommend starting at the beginning; they take you through some pretty heavy concepts step by step, and each video builds on the previous ones.
Seconded. Add to that
  • "The Universe in a Nutshell" and
  • "A short history of time"
,both by Stephen Hawking, as recommended reading. It covers the concept of Spacetime (there you see the cones again...) and explains the Hawking radiation which is mentioned in that video, amongst other things.

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:01 am
by Absalom
novius wrote:After all, the observable universe is limitless but still finite - its curvature would lead anything back to its origin if it flies a straight line for long enough.
As I understand, the universe doesn't loop back within it's observable bounds, so that's just a suspicion rather than a observed fact. And more importantly, not observable regardless of whether it's true, due to the dense gas that filled the universe early on, and I think the mass expansion that occurred at the tail-end of that. It's a reasonable postulate, but it can't be anything else with conceivable technology (even if you got FTL drives, you'd be assuming that your aim was perfect, and would still have to cross the entire universe: even Stargate Universe didn't claim that scale of travel).

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 8:00 am
by Arioch
Current observations suggest that space is remarkably flat, so even if it is slightly curved and therefore finite, it must be unimaginably large... many orders of magnitude larger than the observable portion (which is approximately 93 billion light years in diameter).

Re: Hyperspace

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 12:27 am
by StarCruiser
I've been following Outsider since...ancient times (pretty much the beginning) but, never actually registered here.

Anywho, the discussion of the size of the universe and/or Hyperspace prompted old memories of a classic quote and I just couldn't resist the temptation:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on space...
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Otherwise, carry on...