It was a great surprise to everyone when an unassuming Australian physicist worked out the equations that permitted faster-than-light travel.
It was an even greater surprise to find that the engineering required to build a device to implement the theory was found to be almost trivial. It was not even particularly expensive - a typical EV car cost more than an FTL drive unit.
In accordance with things coming in threes, there was one final surprise: Organic life could not survive the process.
It only cost the lives of five astronauts - and several dozen test animals.
Once this was proven, enthusiasm for the FTL projects around the globe dropped dramatically. But some did continue. One of the more interesting aspects of the mathematics was that the process did not involve any sort of acceleration. The device simply created a field that linked two points in space. Increasing the energy just increased the size of the object transferred.
All you had to do was define the relative coordinates of the origin and the destination.
The first probe sent further than across a room vanished. So did the next three. On a hunch, the engineering team of the fifth probe fitted a powerful transmitter, and sent it on its way. Again, the return program appeared to fail.
And then, a few minutes later, the NASA Deep Space Network reported receiving a beacon message from the probe - just inside the orbit of the moon. The probe had been gone 30 minutes.
Astronomers quickly worked out what was wrong - it was not a problem with the probe, it was because the Earth, and the Solar System had moved.
Having worked out that problem, the next probe was retrieved successfully. And then sent on the first real mission: to a point outside the Milky Way to image our home galaxy.
The probe dutifully returned several hours later, to a point far enough away to not fall to Earth, but close enough to transmit the data it had gathered. The image of the galaxy was all that the designers had hoped for.
The radio transmissions were less expected. Hundreds of them, very high powered, but all structurally the same. And only able to be picked up outside of the radio noise and gas clouds within a galaxy.
When decoded they all basically said the same thing, in many different ways.
TFW you aren't quite sure how repaired someone broken leg is going to be by the time protagonist A gets to where he needs to be. I may have to go back and edit the timeline. I hate math. So. Much. Why is there math in my writing? A curse upon needing to keep track of the sequential passage of time. #iamwriting#writingcommunity#writing
Does anyone else find that sometimes it is so hard to write the opening sentence of a story?
Or is it just me who can literally spend hours typing various opening words and then deleting them, and doing it over and over and over again, before the right words in the right order are assembled on the page.
Yea verily, 'tis true, and ye should try
To prove me wrong, and rectify my view:
That placing toilet cisterns ceiling high
Would guarantee one flush to clear all poo!
NEW WRITING SCOTLAND 42 seeks new poetry & prose in English, #Gaelic, & #Scots from #writers who are #Scottish by residence, birth, or inclination. Submission is free & all successful contributors are paid!
#Writers – send your work to NEW WRITING SCOTLAND 42!
We want poetry & prose in English, #Gaelic, & #Scots from writers who are Scottish by residence, birth, or inclination. Submission is free & all successful contributors are paid – deadline 31 October!
“so much of the writing submitted (and selected) peeks through the cracks of doors, pushes boundaries, asks the reader to step out of the known and comfortable… these are haunted pages. There are many, many ghosts.”
Since the #reddit rebellion has been quashed and things have gotten quiet. I have been tossing around the idea of setting up a #lemmy#instance for #Fandom to share links and stuff like the old days of reddit.
Sometimes I really need this reminder to view my purpose for writing in perspective. These philosophical words help to calm my anxieties about all of the other demands and challenges, stripping them down to the value I see in making a meaningful connection to another struggling soul. ❤️
We've been conditioned to think that this is not a photograph of scientists. We've been made to believe that scientists wear white lab coats and sit in shinny looking expensive offices (and have a white person supervisor? should I add that) but anyway this photo seems to have come straight out of one of my stories, where scientists look like this and dress up in a similar manner. So inspiring. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110953580709971636
Yesterday I got author copies of my most recent book, a collection of short stories titled Where Rivers Go To Die. They look lovely and the red tones make me want to change my favourite colour from blue to red. You can find yourself a copy of this book on online stores.
These are stories I've written over twenty years, since the earliest I first wrote circa 2003-4
Reminding myself that if this research thing was easy you wouldn't need years of training to do it, and that no matter how much training you've had, it stays hard.
It's not a personal shortcoming to find it difficult. It's just difficult. Damn difficult.
Pushed a huge update of the second chapter of #categorytheoryillustrated - the one where categories are introduced: rewrote a lot of stuff, corrected many mistakes and added an overview of Lawvere's Elementary theory of the category of sets, right before the concept of a category is introduced, section "Defining the rest of set theory using functions".
I was a bad husband and a worse ex. No wonder she wanted me gone. Alas for her, her plan succeeded — and now I am gone but can never leave. She says the house is haunted. I say I am still the same.
I have just written the first explicitly violent scene in my novel and I'm drained. It's easy for me to disconnect from a scene like this as a reader, but the writer has no such luxury.