Star Traders

“The beginning huh?” Jake asked thoughtfully. “OK, captain, you asked for it!”

“Just don’t get so technical you will lose me. I’ll stop you when I’m lost! Expect a lot of that!” Jayne settled back in her chair, a pen and pad in her hand.

“Hey! I’m not going to test you, you know!”

“Just for my own information, Jake. I need lots of help!”

Jake settled back in his chair, a wireless computer pointer in his hand. He turned on the large screen computer and the screen lit up. The picture of a huge explosion appeared on the screen.

“How much education do you have, Captain?” Jake asked, leaning back in his chair, “I need to know this to determine just where to start.”

Jayne laughed. “Like I said, Jake, start at the beginning. I didn’t graduate from high school. I ended up getting a GED five years later.”

“Math?”

“The last time I passed math was in the sixth grade.”

“I suppose calculus is out then.” He sighed.

“I can’t even spell it,” Jayne said.

“Chemistry?” Jake asked hopefully.

“I can mix a mudslide.”

“No geometry either?”

“Not a bit,” Jayne admitted.

“So, you don’t know who Euclid or Lobachevsky are?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Jayne said, leaning forward. “Is that important?”

“Well, geometry is the branch of math that is thought to be the science of space. Since that is what we are dealing with, it may be important, but at times knowledge of it could even be a hindrance to understanding what we now know to be a combination of geometries. Euclid stated the rules of a plane, or two-dimensional geometry, back about 200BC. This geometry is the geometry used in road maps.”

“Then I know how to do that!” Jayne said.

“I’m extremely happy you can read a road map, Captain,” Jake laughed. “I guess that’s about as good an analogy as we could get. Next came three-dimensional geometry; finding the volume of a cylinder, a cube, a sphere, etc.

“In the 19th century a Russian, Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky came along with a new idea. He demonstrated the possibility of constructing a consistent system of geometry in which there would be an infinite number of parallel lines through a point. The details of all the geometries are complex, so I’m not going to go over them here. We’d need years of study to understand them anyway. Lobachevskyan geometry is a hyperbolic geometry. He states that a universe is the insides of a sphere. And since that is the case, and since the definition of parallel lines is that they never meet, there is an infinite number of them inside that sphere since the lines end at the edge of the sphere, and therefore never meet. He claimed space was infinite but limited.”

“Whoa!” Jayne held up a hand. “You just lost me. Actually, you lost me a while back! How does this affect us?”

“The popular belief is that the beginning was a big bang. In fact, it’s called the Big Bang theory. The universe started with a huge explosion, it is thought. From there, matter from that explosion started to expand throughout space itself. It formed galaxies of stars that had from hundreds of thousand to millions of stars in them. Galaxies themselves expanded in groups or clusters.” The on-screen show of the universe expanding was graphic.

“In the 1950s scientists who were studying the evolution of the universe were considering two theories for the origin of the universe. The first, the big bang theory, felt that the universe was created from one enormous explosion. The second, known as the steady state theory, stated the universe had always been around. Russian-American theoretical physicist George Gamow wrote about the big bang theory in a Scientific American article. Gamow’s estimate of a 5-billion-year-old universe is no longer considered accurate; the universe is now thought to be significantly older.

“Eric holds the theory that early on in this expansion, the world of Larn spawned life. The Larn are an incredibly ancient race, and may very well be the only form of life in this universe. There is no evidence of any other life. The original location of the planet of the Larn has been lost in antiquity. I am using the collective word Larn to include both the Larn and the Dran. You already are aware of the relationship between the two. If other worlds of the Larn know where it exists, we will certainly find out. Eric feels the planet is out at the farthest reaches of the universe, for the galaxy it would appear in is also ancient and has had plenty of time to be the farthest away of all the galaxies in the universe. We know of galaxies from thousands of light years away to billions of light years away.”

On the screen the pointer followed a star as it made its way to the far edge of a large galaxy of stars. The screen then showed a smallish planet some 93 million miles from the primary.

“The Larn achieved spaceflight early on, but were never to discover the Hyperlink, so they took, at times, thousands and maybe millions of years to reach other planets. Popular belief among my colleagues is that the early flights seeded promising planets with the flora and fauna of the planet Larn. The follow up space flights millions of years later would colonize these planets. How did they find these planets? Probably they just started off in a promising direction. Their early astronomy should have given them a possible direction. Certainly they would not head for giant stars, but to g-type stars. That is; earth type. Such stars are plentiful. And perhaps the planets able to sustain human life are also plentiful. Indications are there are more of them out there than we had first supposed.

“Somewhere along the line, the Larn race learned the existence of Hyperlink and was able to use it to communicate with their neighbors in the galaxy by Faster Than Light communications. The technology, however, was limited in that one had to physically carry the communication devices to the location to be used before using it. One could not aim it and start to talk as one would in radio. The technology was very directional and selective in that one must know the exact location of the receiver in space and time for it to work.”

“Whoa! I think you are about to lose me again!” Jayne stopped him. “I take it that this is not just a point and click technology!”

“You got that right, captain. You see, every object in space is in motion relative to every other object. Just how fast and in which direction it is going depends on your point of reference. Thus the basis for Einstein’s theory of relativity. For instance, our own sun and planets are traveling through space about 15 miles per second relative to the near stars and in direction of the constellation Hercules, near the bright star Vega. At least, that’s what it is in our universe of E-1. We’re not so damn sure of this galaxy. In other words, before we can determine how fast we are going, we have to have a point of reference. Again, the popular theory is that the Larn use their home planetary system as a reference to the speed of the rest of the universe. Thus they are able to identify where a particular galaxy or star is at any given time or where they are going to be in, say, 10,000 years. If we are going to go to the star Epsilon in this universe, we have to remember that the light we see from that star started from that star 50,000 years ago. We have to find its location where it is now. It’s going to be at a location in the direction and the speed of its star relative to the direction and speed of the world Larn and transposed to the Sol system. Without computers it would be impossible to determine. It takes only a blink of an eye, however to solve this complicated problem with modern computers. The Larn did it, and did it in spades! They not only found the worlds, but catalogued them with a system whereby they could load the information into a computer and send a signal through Hyperlink to any world on which they had previously set up a receiver! They had a faster-than-light communication system! It took Eric only a few years to discover that their communication system was a particle wave, and was able to transpose that information to include an entire ship. Thus, we can travel along the same lines as the Larn communication device.”

“What’s a particle wave?” Jayne asked.

“Another great question,” Jake said with a grimace. “There’s a few questions I can’t answer, and that’s one of them. Apparently Eric the Elder adheres to the theory that if God made this whole shebang, He gave us the tools to find out the equations that run it. The universe, or universes in our case, is run by a set of equations that describe a wave of some kind. Mathematicians, scientists; hell, even musicians have been expounding that theory for centuries. According to them everything can be reduced to an equation that is a function of a wave.

“OK. I can follow that, I think! So, we are traveling to the world Epsilon 4. When we get close to it, Eric tells me the alarms will begin to sound 24 hours before we have to come out of Hyperlink. I take it we will be in the vicinity of the star Epsilon is when that happens.” Jayne offered.

“Correct. When we are ready to leave Epsilon 4, we enter the present location of Epsilon 4 and our destination of Sol 3. We drop into Hyperlink and activate that direction and accelerate. A month or so later we are home. There may be some difference in the time going out and coming back, for both systems are traveling through space either toward one another, away from one another or on parallel courses. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has its center some 30,000 light years from our own earth. What this means is that the planet Epsilon 4 is on the other side of the center of our galaxy. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of earth-like planets in solar systems closer than that to earth. We chose this one out of those thousands because of its distance from earth.”

“I know,” Jayne said. “Eric told me why. I still don’t have enough knowledge to argue with him! But, you have helped some. At least I know I’m traveling damn fast, even when I’m standing still on Earth!”

“It is obvious that the stars in this universe are not the same as the stars in our universe of E-1.” Jake continued. “Remember, we are in the universe of E-6. Even though the Earth seems to be the same, there are some differences. In this universe, for instance, the Sol system has 12 planets, not 9, even though the sun is in the same position relative to the earth.

“The Sun, we call Sol, is about 93 million miles from Earth. That distance is called an Astronomical Unit, or AU. It looks different from the stars visible in the night sky because it is about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next closest star. The next nearest star is Proxima Centauri, which is more than 20 trillion miles from Earth. While light from the Sun takes only about eight minutes to reach Earth, the farthest stars are so distant that their light takes billions of years to reach Earth.

“There is little doubt that Epsilon 4 will be approximately the same distance from its primary as the Earth is from its sun. And it will no doubt have a very similar period or rotation. Life, after all, is pretty fragile. It cannot stand a large variation of temperature or gravity to survive. I think we will find practically identical conditions as Earth on Epsilon 4.

“I could get more specific, if you are interested. We could discuss luminosity of stars, brightness, magnitude and all that crap, but I don’t think it’s necessary for your purpose. Perhaps another time. I think it is sufficient we just cover the surface information. We know where we came from and we know we can get back there whenever we want.”

“I think you’re right, Jake,” Jayne said wearily. “You’ve given me all I can handle for the time being. My mind is mush now!” She rose from her chair. “Thank you, Jake. I don’t know anyone else who could have done this!”

“Anytime, Captain. Anytime! Most of the time I just sit around and read on this mission. Not a hell of a lot for me to do. I only have a few classes in the evening for the rest of the crew, and the rest of the time is my own.” Jake rose, saluted, and left her cabin.

He had given her a lot to think about. Most of it was totally beyond her comprehension, but it was interesting, to say the least. Who would have thought that when I flunked science in the 9th grade, I’d end up interested in astronomy! she thought, shaking her head.