“THEY SAY THE COSMOS IS A VOID, DISTURBED BY A FEW ISLANDS OF MATTER. THEY’RE WRONG.”
– Captain Elric Main of the Light Security Corvette MEDJAY.
“I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years.”
– Wilbur Wright.
December 17, 1903, the brothers tested their first successful
flying machine.
“We’re finding that we don’t really understand the limits to life.”
– Geologist Sherwood Lollar on the discovery of microbes that
don’t need sunlight and use sulfur instead of oxygen deep in
Canada’s Kidd Mine.
Hello. Writing about space adventures, mysteries, and similar genres would seem easy. What with movies showing vessels, actions, and concepts which defy the fundamental laws of physics and all its derivative fields of study. I do admit such theorems – which they are – are not immutable, and maybe, just maybe, in the far future, one could fly a spacecraft from sub-light to light-speed by just shifting gears. Even Einstein believed in a static, non-expanding universe once upon a time.
If one were to check recent discoveries about our reality and our galaxy, not to mention the incomparably vast playground which is the universe, our scientists are discovering, almost on a daily basis, phenomena which shouldn’t exist in the first place.
All that is well and good as an excuse to start a story set in space where only the imagination of the writer becomes the limiting factor. Unfortunately, certain truisms cannot be disregarded in that milieu. To quote Carl Sagan, and the reader is absolutely free to disagree with him – it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.
The speed of gravity, for instance. We know it exists, and it’s there, though its outer boundaries have yet to be truly determined. Ask a scientist of fifty years ago and chances are, he’ll say that in terms of speed, light beats gravity. Yet now appears the reverse is true. Can a story really ignore the existence and importance of gravity, no matter how limited our knowledge is at present?
Writing a future tech story is riddled with potential scientific pitfalls and land mines, and the best that we could do is make allowances for the incredible. But it is also true that that the seeds of what would be discovered in the future could be found in the present. All one needs to do is keep an open mind. And a fertile imagination.
Plasma lifeforms would be another subject wide open for debate. Only the future would show whether such sentient organisms, formed from the stuff that makes up 99.9 percent of the universe, could be found in the billions of stars we now have accepted as existing in our reality. Nobody had probably counted them all yet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a eureka! came up with a number in the trillions, or even a much higher number.
Now for alien sentient lifeforms, when we do encounter them, there exists the danger of framing our perspective and understanding of such organisms from what Carl Sagan described as the carbon-centric view. He was kind. Astrophysicist Victor J. Stenger used a blunter term – carbon chauvinism. That is a world where sulfur-breathing single-celled organisms that do not need sunlight to survive have just been discovered.
In sum, we know almost nothing about the universe, barely know our own planet, and much less about our galactic neighborhood. And I am not even talking about stellar clusters. But the infinitesimal knowledge that we do have reveal the existence of certain general truths about the galactic house we live in, as well as the space and time which rules our very existence. I used the word general because who could really say that what they declare now as their findings and conclusions about the details of such phenomena are correct and final?
In sum, physical laws are governing our universe, though many are hidden from us. As for those we know to be present, unfortunately, humanity has not been given the full text of such laws. That’s the reason why mankind finds itself astounded by a particular subsection it didn’t know existed.
These beliefs and concepts have been adopted in the story you are about to read. The writer has also taken refuge in that eponymous shield called artistic license. Otherwise, you’d be holding a very dry and scientifically bogus monograph on untested scientific theories instead.
But the story is built on certain aspects of hard scientific constants and recent findings. Because of that, I apologize in advance for the unorthodox listing of sources and material used in the story. Still, it is a science fiction tale after all, with a little bit more emphasis on the science.
A final word. The story contains notes from the characters which have their individual sections. These are meant to provide some of the background for the Void Templar universe. There are two kinds of background information coming from Medjay’s captain and TacSci officer. One would be the Cadet Notes, which were written down during their Academy days, and the other would be Captain’s or TacSci Notes, information which relates to their present experiences and encounters. As the story progresses, more information on the Void Templar galaxy/universe will be made available from a variety of other characters.
I do hope you would enjoy the story.
The Writer.
December 2019.
Reference:
Corey S. Powell, Strange life forms found deep in a mine point to a vast ‘underground Galapagos, September 7, 2019 news report, at https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/strange-life-forms-found-deep-mine-point-vast-underground-galapagos-ncna1050906
