Wrath of Khan stole the Death-Star blueprint and SF fans have been dealing with that ridiculous macguffin ever since, from Space Quest's Star Generator to... to Return of the Jedi (siiigh). Anyway here's Edontigney's Rinn's Run, skipping to chapter 36.
This device speeds up the evolution of a star along the main-sequence. But... how?
In a universe of FtL, where we're (somehow) preserving causality, at least better than these servants of Chaos have managed, I guess we can envelop a small star in a bubble as ages faster than the rest of us do. That would be the opposite of the environs of a black hole wherein, of course, time slows down. I don't know how far this scales but - hey, the baddies have had time to think it through, as far as to experiment on something like TRAPPIST-1. (Assume they slipped over to Mirrond's "Discord" station.)
My issue: the experimenters are getting the results of their experiments. This means: electromagnetic waves are radiating out of this bubble. This light is, relativistically, blueshifted. But not only that, but the waves should be piling up. Say we want to age our Sun to the point where, at the end, its HZ zone runs past Earth; I think that's 500 MaD ("meganni Domini"; why not). By 250 MaD, animal life on the Pangaea is mostly-screwed anyway; but right now we're talking aliens microwaving the Sun, only.
Edontigney's MaD-scientists doesn't have to age this star to six GaD over a few weeks just to watch it go redgiant. They don't even have to age it to 500 MaD. They could probably just age it, like, by one year over those few weeks.
Here's why: pushing a star to do energy output it would normally do in 52 weeks, over 4 weeks, means: the star is thirteen times as radiative over that time. By comparison, Venus gets 1.9 times as much as we get.
More: this is all blueshifted. We're not getting 13 times the infrared - if I'm correctly reading the "solar spectrum by wavelength" graphs we might be getting "only" six times that. Also the infrared is shifted to visible light, making that 13 times what used to be had from the infrared (oh and some of that gets absorbed by particles in the atmosphere and clouds, heating all that up). Again: maybe "only", like, eight times what used to be had from visible light. Here's the real problem: we are getting more - much more - than 13 times the usual ultraviolet. That's what used to be in the visible spectrum, which is what our sun concentrates on.
I ... don't think life on Earth or in any normal space-station is rated to take a UV spike of, I'm guessing, thirty times normal, in four weeks. If Lunar and Martian colonies are in lavatubes then, ehh, maybe; and aquatic species (and bases) should be fine. As far as ozone goes, that might depend on how far we blueshift (here's where my physics desert me), since past UV-B we get UV-C to build the ozone back up; but either way brute force 30 times the UV of any sort is not what a land animal wants.
That may be a problem I have with death rays overall: they're too big. If Lucas wants Exterminatus on Alderaan, it's enough that the Death Star has tractor-beams; big rocks will pummel Alderaan back into the early Palaeocene quite nicely (yes I know, "rocks aren't free" either). Or maybe the Death Star can spare some neutronium, which it obviously has to keep up its gravity, as to inject into Alderaan's mantle like that "red matter" from over in Abrams' other space dreck (you don't need the full black hole to ruin Alderaan's crustal stability).
Aging a star to billions of years is... overkill.
No comments:
Post a Comment