To every observer except its fifty occupants, the Leonora Christine has become:
a flat hard sheet accelerating in a direction at right angles to its height;
immeasurably and increasingly massive;
moving at a speed probably indistinguishable from that of light;
destructive of any object or body in its path;
unaffected by any impact;
consuming every atom of matter that it encounters.
Will anyone recognize this as an artifact? Might it not instead be regarded as a powerful beam of energy propelled either from a weapon or from some unimaginable natural cataclysm?
Reymont says that:
the ship interacts only with dust and gas;
galaxies within a cluster are about ten diameters apart;
however, stellar diameters are a microscopic fraction of a light year;
even in a galactic nucleus, two stars are like two men at opposite ends of Asia.
The ship's crew live and sweat and their descendants will compose epics about them. Physical strain and psychic exhaustion are not a metaphysical crisis. Echoing Sartre, Reymont says that philosophical significance is a luxury.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I hope these vast distances lessens the harm done to any stars and planets.
Sean
While Elsie may be immeasurably massive, she's not incalculably massive. If her rest mass were 10exp7 kg, and her y were 3e12 (crossing 100k ly in 1 s), her relativistic mass would be 3exp19 kg, or ~the mass of Saturnian moon Mimas or the asteroid 704 Interamnia.
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
Good! That should lessen any harm which was unintentionally caused.
Sean
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