Scenario idea

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

In the original series the whole Logopolis story arc at the end of Tom Baker's run postulates on the head death of the universe, but that the universe had already reached that state, and that the inhabitants of Logopolis had staved this off by opening up portals to other universes- so that the universe was no longer a closed system. The Master carelessly killing off a few of the inhabitants puts the whole universe (plus probably a few connected ones) into jeopardy as there was no one ready to fill and and do the work of the murdered people.

 

Thanks , all good choices! I thought, as I introduced the idea, let’s let others carry it forward.

Edited September 24, 2021 by Bill the barbarian

[Atgxtg]

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Hey Atgxtg, thanks for your lengthy post!
Very good for people like me who didn't watch a single Dr Who episode! ^^

There is a lot of it. Overall the production values were a bit cheesy at times, and in the 60s the show could dip into old style Sci-Fi, which was a bit more "space fantasy", but it often had some very good stories and was usually well written.In part because Sci-Fi had to be well written to work on TV because they didn't really have the effects.

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

As a side note, to nitpick on physics concept if ever there was a need to, falling into a black holy only take an infinite amount of time from the perspective of an outside observer. For whoever is unfortunately falling into it, it happens as fast as one would naively think. Which can be quite long when falling from a few light year away 😉 

Yeah, depending on the mass of the black hole you could have practically as long as you want to run a campaign. The ship could actually run out of supplies and power before it happens.

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Other side note, personal thinking on the matter, after watching numerous video on the topic. I believe nothing can go backwards in space once one cross the event horizon,

Well, that the point where light can't break free and in the real world nothing else can go faster than light (as was as we can prove, anyway). Now if a ship had some sort of faster than light propulsion, it might be able to break free. Then again it might get ripped apart by the gravitation forces while trying to do so. And that's assuming that the ship (and crew) is still intact and functional when it gets to that point, which isn't all that likely.

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

hence I guess all matter should instantly lose cohesion and death will be instantaneous I reckon,

Probably the opposite. All matter would be pulled together into a very compressed sphere. Probably before it reaches the event horizon too. Kinda like a sumarine. The hull would probably be crushed long before the engines stopped working. 

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

despite the assertion that falling into the biggest black holes might go unnoticed for a while due to the size of their event horizon, i.e. no spaghettification at that point - funnily enough though, one can move back and forth through time once the event is crossed, how weird.

Theoretical science often is weird. The thing is all this stuff is still mostly theoretical. We've never notice something moving back and forth in time that way, how could we, so we can't be certain that it all works that way. All we really know is that stuff seems to go in and not come back out - at least not there. 

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Other than that I am not really into dark hopeless story, it's just how the idea came to me wholly formed... I had to brainstorm a bit for the hopeful ending when I realized despair was too sensible an option. And will take it, my ideal scenario ending will be either die a fiery radiation death in a whole new universe, or "you are god of this new universe now"....

Well despair is only a sensible option when you look at the big picture. For example, one day our sun will stop working and the Earth (assuming it still exists) will no longer be able to support human life. Thus all life on Earth is doomed, eventually.  But that is a long time off, and even assuming that we do not or cannot do anything about it, humanity still has generations before that happens. Likewise Habitat 47 might be in a death spiral but if it is a long slow death spiral then it might not matter all that much to people on board. I mean if the end is going to happen in two hundred years or so would people feel quite so doomed? They'll all be dead of other causes long before it happens.

[Lloyd Dupont]

21 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Well despair is only a sensible option when you look at the big picture. For example, one day our sun will stop working and the Earth (assuming it still exists) will no longer be able to support human life. Thus all life on Earth is doomed, eventually.  But that is a long time off, and even assuming that we do not or cannot do anything about it, humanity still has generations before that happens. Likewise Habitat 47 might be in a death spiral but if it is a long slow death spiral then it might not matter all that much to people on board. I mean if the end is going to happen in two hundred years or so would people feel quite so doomed? They'll all be dead of other causes long before it happens.

true, true.

As a side note, I feel compelled to mention, this is the end of time, this civilization is the omega of all civilizations, these people are beyond mere mortality (I mean immune to aging, not invulnerability, of course, although, perhaps a little)... But yea the doom is in a while, and perhaps despair can wait!.... 
I wanted the players to not despair as well! 😉

Edited September 25, 2021 by Lloyd Dupont

[Baron Wulfraed]

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Probably the opposite. All matter would be pulled together into a very compressed sphere. Probably before it reaches the event horizon too. Kinda like a sumarine. The hull would probably be crushed long before the engines stopped working.

Outside of the event horizon... Submarine implosion does not apply. Implosion requires pressure pushing inwards on all sides. The gravitational gradient (acceleration due to gravity) of a black hole, instead, is PULLING on the body at different rates. One's feet may be in a 6G realm while just 5 feet away one's head is under 1G (IOW: one's head is accelerating toward the event horizon at 32 ft/s/s, but one's feet are accelerating at 196 ft/s/s -- and things just get worse the closer one is) -- the body gets stretched until it tears apart.

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Theoretical science often is weird. The thing is all this stuff is still mostly theoretical. We've never notice something moving back and forth in time that way, how could we, so we can't be certain that it all works that way. All we really know is that stuff seems to go in and not come back out - at least not there.

And one of those theoretical models does have matter "coming out" of black holes -- though it tends to require micro black holes to be noticeable. It relies upon the creation/destruction of virtual particle pairs near an event horizon. Normal particle pairs (matter/anti-matter) materialize and then almost immediately recombine. Near a micro black hole however, it is possible that one half of a particle pair is captured, while the other escapes. At that point the escaping particle becomes "real", and the energy used to create it is essentially sucked out of the black hole. Micro black holes "evaporate".

There are some even stranger ideas floating around (though I think dark energy/dark matter may have killed one off). In the 70s someone calculated that the known matter in the universe, if it were all in a black hole, would result in an event horizon equivalent to the known "size" of the universe. Then, if one took the volume enclosed by that event horizon and distributed the matter throughout it (no infinitely small singularity), the /density/ of that volume would match the observed density of the universe. By this hypothesis -- the universe is inside a black hole, which could be formed from matter coming in from a different universe containing our universe-mass black hole (and that universe might be inside its own black hole, inside another universe). This hypothesis goes back to the days when the measured value of the Hubble constant was on the cusp between expand-forever, steady-state, and collapse (big bang in reverse) -- the universe would collapse into a black hole, which "balloons out" into a universe size event horizon, and a density of the known universe; from inside this universe collapse it would seem to be a big bang forming a new universe.

 

 

[Atgxtg]

14 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

Outside of the event horizon... Submarine implosion does not apply. Implosion requires pressure pushing inwards on all sides. The gravitational gradient (acceleration due to gravity) of a black hole, instead, is PULLING on the body at different rates. One's feet may be in a 6G realm while just 5 feet away one's head is under 1G (IOW: one's head is accelerating toward the event horizon at 32 ft/s/s, but one's feet are accelerating at 196 ft/s/s -- and things just get worse the closer one is) -- the body gets stretched until it tears apart.

My point was that the ship would probably be destroyed by gravitational forces long before it reached the event horizon, much like a submarine;s hull is crushed long before the engines will stop working. It's not like the event horizon is some line of death. It's just the point of no return for light. THe point of no return for everything else is further out. 

14 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

And one of those theoretical models does have matter "coming out" of black holes -- though it tends to require micro black holes to be noticeable. It relies upon the creation/destruction of virtual particle pairs near an event horizon. Normal particle pairs (matter/anti-matter) materialize and then almost immediately recombine. Near a micro black hole however, it is possible that one half of a particle pair is captured, while the other escapes. At that point the escaping particle becomes "real", and the energy used to create it is essentially sucked out of the black hole. Micro black holes "evaporate".

Yup. It's important to remember that over 99% of this stuff are things that scientists and mathematicians theorize about, and less that 1% of it has any sort of solid proof. We didn't get our first photo of a black hole until 2019. So a lot of this stuff is just speculation. Well though out speculation by some very intelligent people, but still speculation.

There is a tendency for people to present it all as factual, especially in videos, when most of it is guesswork, and much of it contradicts other stuff..Considering what little of the universe we've actually seen and dealt with there is so much we really don't understand. Of course in an RPG the GM can decide what's true and how their universe works, but as far as the real one goes (assuming that we are in the real one), We still got a lot of unanswered questions. 

14 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

There are some even stranger ideas floating around (though I think dark energy/dark matter may have killed one off). In the 70s someone calculated that the known matter in the universe, if it were all in a black hole, would result in an event horizon equivalent to the known "size" of the universe. Then, if one took the volume enclosed by that event horizon and distributed the matter throughout it (no infinitely small singularity), the /density/ of that volume would match the observed density of the universe. By this hypothesis -- the universe is inside a black hole, which could be formed from matter coming in from a different universe containing our universe-mass black hole (and that universe might be inside its own black hole, inside another universe). This hypothesis goes back to the days when the measured value of the Hubble constant was on the cusp between expand-forever, steady-state, and collapse (big bang in reverse) -- the universe would collapse into a black hole, which "balloons out" into a universe size event horizon, and a density of the known universe; from inside this universe collapse it would seem to be a big bang forming a new universe.

I wonder what a black hole inside black hole is? It reminds me of D&D magic-users casting nested rope trick spells. 

[Alex]

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

My point was that the ship would probably be destroyed by gravitational forces long before it reached the event horizon, much like a submarine;s hull is crushed long before the engines will stop working. It's not like the event horizon is some line of death. It's just the point of no return for light. THe point of no return for everything else is further out. 

Depends on the size of the 'hole.  A "small" mass -- stellar-mass or modest multiples -- would have a very steep gravity well, so the tidal forces are extremely strong, and and you say you and your ship will get 'spaghettified' long before you reach the event horizon.  OTOH for a super-massive black hole -- galactic-core range -- they're waaaaay less.  Less than earth-gravity indeed, much less insta-crushing.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Yup. It's important to remember that over 99% of this stuff are things that scientists and mathematicians theorize about, and less that 1% of it has any sort of solid proof. We didn't get our first photo of a black hole until 2019. So a lot of this stuff is just speculation. Well though out speculation by some very intelligent people, but still speculation.

There's a big evidential distance between "just speculation" and "confirmed by direct observation".  The 2019 photo, while an astonishing feat of imaging science, isn't the strongest evidence for the existence of black holes.  After all, in isolation all it is a bright accretion disc around...  an invisible thing.  How do we know it's not a neutron star, say?  The same evidence we had before the direct observation: the stellar astrophysics, the orbital mechanics, and so on.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

There is a tendency for people to present it all as factual, especially in videos, when most of it is guesswork, and much of it contradicts other stuff..

Contradicts what other stuff?  Most of which is "guesswork"?

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

I wonder what a black hole inside black hole is? It reminds me of D&D magic-users casting nested rope trick spells. 

For similarly sized BHs, there's been observations of them merging, which is part of the body of evidence for them existing (AKA the speculative guesswork), by way of the resultant gravitational waves.  Though I think at that point it was seen more as evidence of the theory behind the GWs themselves, given that in order to make the observation, they had to identify the merger ahead of time.  (Well, "ahead of time" relativistically speaking...)

As for one that are of drastically different sizes "nesting"...  Dunno!  Sounds like there could be many crippling headaches and a PhD or two in that.  On the piece of it, if you're inside the event horizon of a SMBH, and you're next to a star that goes supernova, then this could occur?  It's not obviously paradoxical, as means in the first instance that you have an outer set of closed light paths, inside the super-massive EH, and another set of closed light paths inside those associated with the stellar-mass EH.

[Alex]

On 9/22/2021 at 4:37 AM, Lloyd Dupont said:

I am going to conclude (in a while) my current fantasy scenario with player awakening in the respawn room, and "slowly remembering" it's all a simulation and awakening in Habitat 47... 😮 

Hopefully it will be a cool segway! 😄 

Great segue if they buy into it, and avoids those pesky Session Zeroes if you hate those.  People still scarred by the ending of Lost and by that lost whole series of Dallas might stage a riot. 🙂

Edited September 25, 2021 by Alex

[Alex]

On 9/19/2021 at 10:26 AM, Mugen said:

@Lloyd Dupont  My intention was not to say everything will fall apart at the same time (the time scales involved in this process are absurdly long), but precisely that Black Holes will remain longer than any planet or life form 🙂

Very plausible, but it's a comparison of two unknowns!  (Not to be confused with an unknown unknown, of course, which is always an option. 😄)  Stellar-mass and up black holes will persist an absurdly long period of time, even if the Hawking Radiation model is bang-on correct.  Planets will persist indefinitely in a Big Chill universe, and possibly lifeforms too.  Though quite what they're doing for energy 10⁶⁴ years in the future is a good question.  And you may have thought the Paris Climate Agreement was an unreasonable restriction on your lifestyle! 🙂  

But if go with the Olde Worlde Big Crunch idea, obviously that's moot.  And if the most recent Big Rip model is correct -- and bear in mind the observational error-bars on it are huge, and the theoretical basis of it incredibly sketchy -- then squishier objects (planets and lifeforms) will indeed get Ripped before singularities do.  But that accelerates hugely towards the end, rather than there being any lengthy stable stage where you have isolated populated planets wondering where their sun went.

[Lloyd Dupont]

What he was referring to, and what I heard as well... and it's a little confusing, is that dark energy will forever grow to the extent it will eventually distort galaxy clusters, then galaxy, the star system , then planet, then atoms... not only the universe is slowly cooling (by extending) but dark energy is gonna make it extra cool....

 

Edited September 26, 2021 by Lloyd Dupont

[Alex]

3 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

What he was referring to, and what I heard as well... and it's a little confusing, is that dark energy will forever grow to the extent it will eventually distort galaxy clusters, then galaxy, the star system , then planet, then atoms... not only the universe is slowly cooling (by extending) but dark energy is gonna make it extra cool....

... unless it will not, and does not.  This is a possibility (as I just said), but not within the realm of prediction with any amount of confidence, due to both how poorly understood 'dark energy' is -- basically it's a name to slap over the hole where they hope some theory will go at some point -- and the lack of definitiveness in the observational evidence.

OTOH it could occur even within (what would otherwise have been!) the lifespan of our own solar system.  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078851-when-will-the-universe-end-not-for-at-least-2-8-billion-years/

[Lloyd Dupont]

we are not talking absolute here.. but conjecture..  and sharing which conjecture was talked about 😉

i.e. let you understand better what other people probably means.. not whether it's right or wrong or certain or uncertain... 😉

[Atgxtg]

This would be a great setting for Paranoia. Perhaps the group could be on Habitat 47 to find out what happened to Habitat 46? Next session their clones could be the crew of Habitat 48, tasked to find out what happened to Habitat 47.

 

[Lloyd Dupont]

10 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

This would be a great setting for Paranoia. Perhaps the group could be on Habitat 47 to find out what happened to Habitat 46? Next session their clones could be the crew of Habitat 48, tasked to find out what happened to Habitat 47.

 

 Wow.. you must have been a Spanish inquisitor in a past life, I certainly didn't expect that! 😮😛 

[Alex]

13 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

we are not talking absolute here.. but conjecture..  and sharing which conjecture was talked about 😉

 

Sure, but that's what I was trying to do -- to point out that there are different observationally-consistent models for the outcome of the different 'fates' of the universe.  There's Big Chill. in which case the universe will outlast every star, and essentially all coherent matter, after it's been chewed up by and eventually spat back out again by black holes.  And there's the Big Rip, in which the universe ends in medias res., while we still (or almost to the end at least) still have galaxies, stars, planets...  protons.  Things like that.

"Conjecture" is a little unkind, though.  Cosmologists aren't just spitballing scenario ideas, they do have to smuggle this stuff past peer review, tenure committees, grant bodies, etc. 🙂  Ideally with reference to existing observational evidence, or at least some sort of proposal to at some stage get some some!

[Alex]

10 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

This would be a great setting for Paranoia. Perhaps the group could be on Habitat 47 to find out what happened to Habitat 46? Next session their clones could be the crew of Habitat 48, tasked to find out what happened to Habitat 47.

"Yello, J. Michael Straczynski's office, J. Michael Straczynski speaking!"
"Mr Straczynski, we have a proposal for you, regarding--"
"Oh, the Doctor Who showrunner role?!"
"... no?  It's about your Babylonian Productions franchise. We have a treatment for a new season--"
"A season six of Babylon 5!?!"
"Not exactly?  More of a... season 216."

[Lloyd Dupont]

5 hours ago, Alex said:

Not exactly?  More of a... season 216.

nailed it!

[Atgxtg]

17 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

 Wow.. you must have been a Spanish inquisitor in a past life, I certainly didn't expect that! 😮😛 

Ironically, the Spanish Inquisition always gave the people being questioned advanced warning so that they could get thier affairs in order beforehand. So everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition! Which actually make the skit funnier.

But the dark depressing tone of the setting concept combined with the black humor of Paranoia could make the whole situation funny. Especially if there was indeed time to turn the ship away from the black hole, but the A.I. computer running the ship won;t accept any deviations from the pre-programmed route to the new homeworld. Doubly so if the ship is loaded with nuclear and biological waste (including the crew) that the other inhabitants of the homeworld were trying to get rid of and the flying into a black hole was deliberate.

Maybe too much of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe there?

Or what if the crew are already dead from some other cause  and the PCs are all robots on board wondering what to do now? Imagine what the Alien movie could have been like if all the crew were androids. 

 

Sorry just getting some weird ideas with this.

 

[Atgxtg]

16 hours ago, Alex said:

"Yello, J. Michael Straczynski's office, J. Michael Straczynski speaking!"
"Mr Straczynski, we have a proposal for you, regarding--"
"Oh, the Doctor Who showrunner role?!"

I hear Russel T. Davies is taking that job back. 

16 hours ago, Alex said:

"... no?  It's about your Babylonian Productions franchise. We have a treatment for a new season--"
"A season six of Babylon 5!?!"
"Not exactly?  More of a... season 216."

Strangely enough there are some similar concepts. Not so much with going into a black hole, but the idea of a habitat ship, often a generational ship,  flying through space to some sort of doom. Star Trek did it, as did Hitchhiker's. Sometimes with the crew not realizing they were on a ship. It's something of a trope. Metamophsis Alpha did something like that. The idea has lots of possibilities and is open to all sorts of plot twists and turns. 

For instance, going back to Doctor Wo, the TARDIS time machines are powered by (an in a couple of shows actually contain) a black hole, and are much larger that they appear. So the whole concept could be taking place inside a malfunctioning TARDIS, with the black hole eating the ship from the inside. That could be a nice twist as the idea that the characters would be safer the closer they were to the exterior of the ship is somewhat counter intuitive. Oh, and Doctor Who also had the Matrix about twenty years before the Matrix movie. 

 

[Lloyd Dupont]

44 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Ironically, the Spanish Inquisition always gave the people being questioned advanced warning so that they could get thier affairs in order beforehand. So everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition! Which actually make the skit funnier.

But the dark depressing tone of the setting concept combined with the black humor of Paranoia could make the whole situation funny. Especially if there was indeed time to turn the ship away from the black hole, but the A.I. computer running the ship won;t accept any deviations from the pre-programmed route to the new homeworld. Doubly so if the ship is loaded with nuclear and biological waste (including the crew) that the other inhabitants of the homeworld were trying to get rid of and the flying into a black hole was deliberate.

Maybe too much of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe there?

Or what if the crew are already dead from some other cause  and the PCs are all robots on board wondering what to do now? Imagine what the Alien movie could have been like if all the crew were androids. 

 

Sorry just getting some weird ideas with this.

 

Those are excellent idea that will make the adventure more lively! 🙂

[Baron Wulfraed]

On 9/25/2021 at 11:00 AM, Baron Wulfraed said:

There are some even stranger ideas floating around (though I think dark energy/dark matter may have killed one off). In the 70s someone calculated that the known matter in the universe, if it were all in a black hole, would result in an event horizon equivalent to the known "size" of the universe. Then, if one took the volume enclosed by that event horizon and distributed the matter throughout it (no infinitely small singularity), the /density/ of that volume would match the observed density of the universe. By this hypothesis -- the universe is inside a black hole, which could be formed from matter coming in from a different universe containing our universe-mass black hole (and that universe might be inside its own black hole, inside another universe). This hypothesis goes back to the days when the measured value of the Hubble constant was on the cusp between expand-forever, steady-state, and collapse (big bang in reverse) -- the universe would collapse into a black hole, which "balloons out" into a universe size event horizon, and a density of the known universe; from inside this universe collapse it would seem to be a big bang forming a new universe.

While I haven't searched for the book summarizing that hypothesis -- I'm pretty certain it was one of Isaac Asimov's collected essays on science and math, but that book is in a cubic-foot carton (6"x1'x2') in a stack of over 120 cubic-feet of such boxes, in my rental storage locker [to put that in perspective, the average bookcase has a shelf of 2.5'x1'x10" -- a fraction over 2 cubic feet, so I'm looking at 60 SHELVES, at 5 shelves per bookcase, that requires 12 bookcases beyond the 17 I already have at home] -- an updated hypothesis came just before 2006, and I found that one in the book "Discarded Science" (don't be misled by that title -- the author uses this hypothesis as an example of how a hypothesis should be... as the authors of the paper  even provided candidate tests which could be performed to verify the hypothesis/theory). It is mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-energy_star but the link to the actual paper is a $$ archival site.

As paraphrased in "Discarded Science" the authors of the paper consider black hole theory to be flawed in that a number of points are incompatible with quantum theory

1. Information is lost when matter falls into a black hole
2. (related) The singularity leads to infinities -- since the singularity is decreed to be a point, it has no volume, so has infinite density (mass / 0.0 => Inf)
3. That time becomes infinitely slow as one nears the event horizon, as seen from an outside view (so an infalling light emitter becomes frozen at the event horizon -- a violation of quantum principles

The prime scientists were actually working on superconducting crystals -- and to their surprise found that  electron spins seemed to show time slowing down.

They then analyzed star collapse using quantum theory. The result was not a black hole but a "quantum energy shell" -- the inside being an "energy rich vacuum" showing an anti-gravity effect; similar to that associated with dark-energy. NO SINGULARITY. Outside the shell it shows similar gravitation effects as a black hole. The repulsive force inside could shove some some matter/energy back out (so no "information loss").

Most of the outflow would be positrons and gamma rays.Strangely -- there is a surplus of positrons near the center of the galaxy, the home of Sagittarius A*, posited to be a super massive black hole. Could it be a dark energy star? The gamma rays emitted would have a resemblance to those from gamma-ray bursts.

Quote

Even more intriguing, the team calculated the strength of the repulsive vacuum energy there would be inside a dark energy star the size of the Universe and discovered that it matches the deduced value for the dark energy that cosmologists have invoked to explain the Universe's expansion.

The hypothesis also implies that infalling matter should cause dark-energy stars to emit infrared radiation -- which would be detectable with proper instrumentation. (Thereby a test to validate the hypothesis.)

Edited September 29, 2021 by Baron Wulfraed