The Invention of Iron
Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, just posted this lovely little article about the most distant galaxies so far observed. This cluster of stars comes to us from a long time ago — only a few short billions of years after the universe got kick-started and, maybe more interestingly, even less time since galaxies are thought to have started forming at all. These are young stars in a young universe.
Now this got me thinking, because Diaspora is of course front and center in my mind these days, about what it’s like in that space. And that got me here: as stars get older, they start making new elements. They start by fusing hydrogen together, making helium as a waste product. Be aware that I am vastly over-simplifying, but go get a periodic table of the elements now and you’ll see that there’s an order to these things — it turns out it’s chronological as well as by mass. Anyway, eventually there’s not a lot of hydrogen and they collapse a little and get hotter and are energetic enough to fuse helium into more massive elements. And so on.
Near the explosive end of some stars’ lives, they fuse elements together to make iron. That’s about as far as that goes. Then they explode, and presumably this further energy allows the creation of even heavier elements and all this matter is spewed into space, eventually to be picked up by other stars where it can accrete in a disk and maybe make a planet full of water and meat.
So, long story short, we might be looking at stars of the very first generation. If not now, then in the near future we will be. If that’s true, we are looking at the universe before iron was invented.
If you’re playing or reading Diaspora and wondering how relativity figures into things (and we, the authors, don’t say because it’s part of your story), one reading is that moving faster-than-light, even through the slipknots, is a form of time travel. We can postulate that there is some apparent continuity of events for humans moving through these because of the way the wormholes constrain where your can go, but still, a given system might be deep in the past using the origin of the universe as a universally agreed upon baseline for counting time.
One of your systems in your cluster might exist in a place where iron has never naturally occurred. Holy crap.
–BMurray
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7 Comments
09:53
I love you and want to have your game design babies.
I am reading the book now. It seems like Burning Empires was a big influence. Any reason why it isn’t mentioned anywhere?
09:59
Judd, it’s not mentioned because it wasn’t actually an influence. I’ve never played it. I own it, of course, because everyone owns it, but I’ve only partially read it and that was way back when it was first released.
However, there is certainly a game design influence from that area in a more indistinct fashion. Burning Wheel was an eye-opener for us, our first major diversion from d20 and Traveller, and so maybe Burning Et Cetera should have seen some kind of action in the acknowledgements. It’s not a game that we played a lot and surely not one we play no, but there’s no question that it influenced how we play everything and what we choose to play, and so it has to have affected our design.
I’ll add that to the errata for Diaspora.
02:57
I love this idea. Assuming that you can crow food in the absence of iron, I can see a scenario where the survivors of a shipwreck have to slowly eat all the iron parts of their wrecked ship to survive. “Here you go Captain, today’s filings fresh from the left landing pod. Eat up!”
Mind you, doesn’t this mean that the elements heavier than iron would be missing too?
05:46
Oh yeah, nothing is likely to grow here — iron is essential to our ecosystem. Are there ecologies where it’s not essential? Hard to say, but (to answer your other questions) without anything heavier than iron the biology is going to be fairly unusual. I’m not even sure that planets as we know them will form. A pre-iron region of space might be little more than a lonely research station hanging over a blue-white star in sparse undifferentiated space, waiting for the next shipment for everything.
10:52
One of the minor things I love about Ken Macleod’s Fall Revolution is that it avoids closed timelike curves (and their associated paradoxes) by having the distant wormhole be 2000 light years away and 2000 years back in time! So you pop a hand in and flash a torch, and you will see that light imediately, taking the long way round compared to the signals in the neurons of your arm. In other words, we could be in a cluster with the very galaxy we are observing now with no paradox issues.
11:11
That’s interesting, Josh — I’m not sure that actually addresses the relativity/causality issue, which derives from the fact that nothing travels faster than C — not even events. But if the point is that the wormhole system adjusts for time regardless of location (sounds like an artifact to me!) then it does work and that’s pretty cool. In the classic two of three choice, FTL/causality/relativity, the universe doesn’t guarantee causality but the technology for FTL conserves it. That’s really cool.
Must be what our slipstreams do. See that’s why I don’t explain everything in the book. So I can cheat.
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Brad is one author of Diaspora and is keenly interested in interesting things. The writing here, consequently, might vary widely as his focus flits from shiny to shiny.
A latecomer to VSCA, JB works as a systems administrator to support his severe bicycle-riding addiction. Designing games is an outgrowth of his inability to let well enough alone.
11:33
WOW ASTOUNDING !