Space Sci-Fi Concept

[Onix]

I was talking to my son and he asked if it were possible to control gravity. Not with our current technology I told him. But then we started to talk about the fact that no one's been able to isolate gravitons, if they even exist but that if you could, you might be able to make a gravity laser or gaser (or graser if you will).

My first thought was if you could do that, you have an interstellar means of transportation where you could get near the speed of light.

Take a star and lens it's gravity into a gaser and you have a highway into that solar system. Except you'd need a way to slow down too, so you'd have one star on one end and another star on the other end and you'd point the gaser just past each other. You now have two opposite "lanes" that a starship hops into one to accelerate toward their destination and another to decelerate.

My thought is that this would still be a very long trip, even near the speed of light. There could be some vacuum engineering that you could do that would make things faster but I haven't decided on that yet.

With relativistic time effects, a trip could take a long but not generational amount of time. Lets say a standard jump is still ten years long to the starship and it's passengers, but is thousands of years for the rest of the universe. I don't know if that's reasonable or not but lets go with it for a minute.

A ship could signal a planet and have the communication arrive several hundred years before them.

Just traveling this way would mean that a society could advance in unimaginable ways during your trip. You'd have almost no way to know what kind of planet you'd be arriving at. Trade between planets in information and technology would be immensely profitable if the planets are following different development paths. But there'd also be the danger that the planet you were heading to discovers the same thing 800 years after you left. Now your trip is meaningless. But if you hang onto your goods for another trip, now your cargo is ancient relics and you can give first hand accounts of history.

Now, maybe with advanced tech, and maybe hibernation you might live thousands of years anyway. You could make the trip hundreds of times. Who would that person be at the end of a thousand year life span that took millions of years to live? Would you even be able to comprehend the technology that you would experience when you arrive?

Think about a traveller from the year 1014. They might be illiterate, they might know old english (or old french, spanish, whatever) and wouldn't have the first concept about electricity. That's essentially what you'd be.

"We communicate by computer code now. Sometimes we use the old speak, but it's mostly when dealing with historical figures to try and make them sound authentic. Oh and when someone re-creates the Avengers movie, I think the High school just put on their own production of it this year. It's a classic and you want it to stay that way." Sure some people today might be able to transition into that environment (maybe Rob) but most of us would be lost.

Well, I really don't know what to do with that idea now. Maybe it'll bounce around and become something useful.

[Anastylos]

It could be a funny roleplaying game: You know a Planet you want to travel too and then you roll how the planet is changing till you arive there. It should be semi random, since some quality of the planet would always remain the same.

The problem is the acceleration. To reach lightspeed would take forever if you do not want to get killed in the progress.

[Onix]