The Leonora Christine leaves her home galaxy, never to return, in this chapter. Before leaving, she zigzags through nebulae and dust banks to gain reaction mass for relativistic acceleration. I need to remind myself what the plan is.
A pause for repairs to the decelerators in interstellar, intergalactic or even inter-cluster space would cause death from radiation so it is necessary to fly into the much emptier inter-clan space where repairs might be possible. But then the ship will be flying so fast that nothing will be able to stop it.
Might an endlessly accelerating and self-sufficient ship be able to fly indefinitely through all future cosmic cycles? Eventually, it would become so massive that its gravity would affect the universes through which it was passing and might even prevent the coalescence of a new monobloc. However, Poul Anderson's imagination is destined to carry his characters only one universe into the future. The novel will end with a sense of achievement and completion.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
If I'm recalling correctly, we do see mention in TAU ZERO that humans in the future could deliberately repeat the journey of the "Leonora Christine" to survive into the next universe. I can imagine that being done for various reasons: such as to survive a dying universe. Or a group of humans could be so dissatisfied with life as they had known it they deliberately went into the next cycle.
Sean
The assumption here is that future cycles would have the same physical laws as this one.....
Another thought to consider:
Why would Elsie and her crew be the only ship in the entire history of the universe to do this? Let's say the year after Elsie leaves Terra, somebody runs the numbers and says, "Yeah that might just work!" Let's further say that there are 1000 starfaring races/galaxy over the lifetime of the universe (10exp11 years) and that they launch 1 Elsie every 10exp6 yrs, or the equivalent of 1 every 1000 years. Over the lifetime of the universe, that's 10exp8 Elsies/galaxy. There are ~10exp11 galaxies, *so over the lifetime of the universe, we have up to 10exp19 Elsies be-bopping along until the next "turn of the wheel" That's A LOT...
-kh
* And this assumes Elsie is the first one ever....
This reminds me of CITIES IN FLIGHT. Blish agreed with me that it was an unacceptable coincidence that the only two races which reached the Metagalactic Center in order to respond to the cosmic collision originated in the same galaxy.
Kaor, Keith!
It might be a failure of imagination on my part, but I see no reason NOT to expect the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, etc., to remain the same in future cycles of the universe. Why should it be otherwise? HOW can it be otherwise?
And while I can see some scientists or merely interested amateurs soon realizing a constantly accelerating Bussard ramjet space ship outlasting one cycle of the universe and entering the next one, I don't see that often happening. Again, why should it, if there was no strong reason to do so? It's a one way trip to the future completely cutting all such travelers from everybody and everything they had known.
I do agree it's reasonable to think at least some non-human intelligent races could have repeated the feat of the "Leonora Christine."
Sean
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