What if Saturn was a wormhole?

[Tom Kalbfus]

I had some thoughts for my Triplanetary setting. What if in addition to making Mars and Venus habitable, Saturn was a wormhole, of the same size and mass as Saturn, except with a breathable atmosphere. The wormhole connects this alternate Universe with the Traveller Third Imperium Charted Space, near the bottom edge of the map South of the Subsectors Numentower, Warzone Defense, Galizon, and Sulurman, just beyond the edge of this map in unexplored space. The other end of the wormhole is a Saturn Sized planet within the habitable zone of a yellow subgiant star, the light shines up through Saturn's atmosphere and warms and illuminates from below. Just a thought To use the wormhole, one must dive into the planet's atmosphere, below the 1 bar altitude, gravity begins to diminish, eventually reaches zero and then reverses, as one climbs out the gravity well of the other planet.

 

[wbnc]

I could see it being a major alteration to the triplanetary setting..and not for the better.... a single system couldn't hold out against the combined resources of a single Noble house....especially if they had access to TL-12/14 star ships...

even more insidious... the resources of a major corporation would lead to some serious trade problems...high tech goods/weapons flood in at low costs, and soon the major powers are wholly owned subsidiaries of a corporation. or several corporations turn the system into a nasty little proxy war.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

What if... Saturn was a wormhole

OK plot spoiler...

You might want to read 'The Algebraist' by Iain M Banks. One of its main plot devices is gas giant wormholes.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I could see it being a major alteration to the triplanetary setting..and not for the better.... a single system couldn't hold out against the combined resources of a single Noble house....especially if they had access to TL-12/14 star ships...

even more insidious... the resources of a major corporation would lead to some serious trade problems...high tech goods/weapons flood in at low costs, and soon the major powers are wholly owned subsidiaries of a corporation. or several corporations turn the system into a nasty little proxy war.

Except the otherside in charted space is unexplored, and way outside the Imperium's borders, it is rimward of the Amderstun Sector.
http://travellermap.com/?x=19.188&y=-239.514&scale=9.515625
If you look at the map, its on the other side of the Solomani Sphere from the Imperium, About 5 sectors rimward from the Solomani Rim, that is about 200 parsecs.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

What if... Saturn was a wormhole

OK plot spoiler...

You might want to read 'The Algebraist' by Iain M Banks. One of its main plot devices is gas giant wormholes.

The midpoint, in the wormhole's neck is in zero g with a type 8 atmosphere. There are rock islands here and bodies of water and of course animal and plant life adapted to zero g.

 

[wbnc]

Except the otherside in charted space is unexplored, and way outside the Imperium's borders, it is rimward of the Amderstun Sector.
http://travellermap.com/?x=19.188&y=-239.514&scale=9.515625
If you look at the map, its on the other side of the Solomani Sphere from the Imperium, About 5 sectors rimward from the Solomani Rim, that is about 200 parsecs.

D'oh.....

Good point ... it'd be a little less likely for any "Otherside" forces to come through the worm hole into the Tri-planetary system....It's be a bit less treacherous...but no less of a shock to encounter the more advanced ships, and weapons in the Imperium continuum.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Except the otherside in charted space is unexplored, and way outside the Imperium's borders, it is rimward of the Amderstun Sector.
http://travellermap.com/?x=19.188&y=-239.514&scale=9.515625
If you look at the map, its on the other side of the Solomani Sphere from the Imperium, About 5 sectors rimward from the Solomani Rim, that is about 200 parsecs.

D'oh.....

Good point ... it'd be a little less likely for any "Otherside" forces to come through the worm hole into the Tri-planetary system....It's be a bit less treacherous...but no less of a shock to encounter the more advanced ships, and weapons in the Imperium continuum.

Well actually someone does come through in the timeline, at around just prior to when World War II would have been, he doesn't go back however, so the rest of Charted Space doesn't learn about the wormhole until much later. That person is from the Solomani Sphere, if you look at the map, it is closer than the Imperium. That Solomani guy finds himself in the Terra System, back just prior to World War II. As a Solomani citizen, he prides himself on his knowledge of Earth History, he knows what is about to happen, so he decides to start a space race between the would be World War II powers on Earth, so he starts a company and with his knowledge, he begins building spaceships and selling them, various other powers steal his secrets, he knows about this, by making other planets within reach, planets that are easier to conquer than the Earth itself, he distracts those powers from starting World War II by getting them to try and build colonial empires in space instead. With a bit of trial and error, he helps along the Manhattan Project as well, he pioneers the development of a safe Thorium reactor, before the traditional fears of nuclear power develops in society, he gets an atomic rocket built, and patents a number of designs including variations of the various common space craft used throughout Charted Space. The Solomani guy doesn't know much about Jump physics, so he can't pass that on, and basically he doesn't want the First Imperium of this Universe, if there is one, finding about this Terra anyway. He knows someone must have terraformed Venus and Mars and created that Wormhole where Saturn was. Venus is full of primitive stone age humans, and some monsters as well, Mars has a decaying civilization that has lost the ability to travel in space some time ago, but they still have scattered bits of high technology distributed among an otherwise medieval civilization. Saturn/Kronus is an inhabited wormhole with lots of rock islands floating around in the wormhole's neck along its gravity plane. (That is where gravity reverses itself). Some distance above the gravity plane gravity pulls toward it. Some rock islands are tall enough to experience a full gravity at its peak, being so massive, these structures are fairly stable and don't roll around much since they already are in their position of maximum stability along the gravity plane. Trees sometimes grow on the surfaces of these islands, and sometimes there are various inhabitants living on them including humans. Collisions between rock islands do sometimes cause local "earthquakes" in them, but these islands are scattered across a huge planet, and since the wind typically blows them in the same direction, when collisions do occur the impact velocity is usually slight, much like two icebergs colliding in the waters of the Arctic.

I think I'll make the Solomani a starship thief. the particular starship he stole was a 1600 ton lab ship, in the course of escaping with the ship, he was pursued by Police cutters, he was forced to jump early, damaging the ships, drive and he misjumped into the Kronos System. Kronos is by the way, the Greek name for Saturn, the part called Kronos is the Charted Space end of the Saturn/Kronos wormhole. Kronos is warmer than Saturn due to the brighter Sun on the Charted Space side.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I think I should mention something about the Kronos system, Kronos is a Saturn Mass gas giant/wormhole, it is actually the same body as Saturn in the Triplanetary setting. Kronos is the part that exists in the Charted Space Traveller Universe. and the star it orbits has the same mass as the Sun, it orbits that star at a distance of around 10 AU, and to put Kronos in the habitable zone at that distance, the star has to be 100 times brighter than our Sun, there is only one type of star that is this bright with the mass of our Sun, a red giant.

Kronos orbits a red giant, of one solar Mass. Kronos has the same rotation rate and axial tilt as Saturn, it also has several satellites. Kronos is more habitable than the Saturn end of the wormhole, Though Saturn is warmer than it should be due to the rays of Kronos' sun shining through the wormhole. As you pass above the gravity plane on the Saturn end of the Wormhole, it gets cooler. The red light from Kronos' Sun filters up from beneath Saturn's clouds and illuminates Saturn's rings and Moons from behind the planet. So a Saturnean day alternates with a Kronos day, both of which are 10 hours and 14 minutes long. The red giant Kronos orbits is in the hydrogen shell burning stage, which lasts about a billion years, on the scale of human history, this is a very long time. To the human eye, this red giant appears orange to yellow near the zeneth and deep red near the horizon, definitely redder than Earth's Sun, its disk also appears larger in Kronos' sky, though its brightness is less intense, it is still painfully bright to look at.

 

[wbnc]

Heck, I'd play that scenario....

Okay nothing about that scenario is setting off my bogus-ometer it's a bit more space opera than hard sci fi..but that's no big deal.

 

[Rick]

Heck, I'd play that scenario....

Okay nothing about that scenario is setting off my bogus-ometer it's a bit more space opera than hard sci fi..but that's no big deal.

Really? Nothing at all? Not one little thing set off your bogus-ometer? Have you checked the batteries recently?

 

[Rick]

You could use the conspiracy theories of the supposed 'Freiburg disc' spacecraft and the 'SS Black Sun' ideas, but they would still need to develop the technologies to develop further technologies to build a reverse-engineered spacecraft. Even without WW2, I don't see this happening before the 1980's in your accelerated timeline, sorry.

 

[Matt Wilson]

Tom, your setting ideas are crazy imaginative.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Heck, I'd play that scenario....

Okay nothing about that scenario is setting off my bogus-ometer it's a bit more space opera than hard sci fi..but that's no big deal.

Well I'm no expert on wormhole physics, but a number of things occur to me. The openings of a wormhole in 4d space would be a sphere, as the 2-d analog of a warped surface is a circle. So one end would look like a sphere. Also gravity is a bend in space, so if you bend space to create a wormhole, gravity is involved. Since a wormhole has two ends, both ends would have some gravity, so one would tend to fall into a wormhole. According to theory wormholes need to be propped open by exotic or negative mass in order to prevent the wormhole from becoming a black hole. I understand you need nearly equal amounts or normal and exotic matter. In order to allow passage through the wormhole, the exotic matter in the neck would need to be insubstantial, but like neutrinos, which have the capability of passing through a light year of lead. So in the Saturn/Kronos, wormhole there is exotic matter in the throat, which basically turns the direction of the pull of gravity around. Someone falling through this wormhole can't perceive this exotic matter directly, only its gravitational effects, as one dives into the area with the exotic matter, the force of gravity diminishes to zero and then reverses as one climbs out the other end of the wormhole. This is the "game physics" I'm using here, its no worse than that used for the Jump Drive I guess.

The wormhole stays continuously open and it allows for the passage of matter, light radiation and so forth. I decided to fill this wormhole with breathable air, as the creators were in the habit of making uninhabitable planets habitable, so why not do that with the wormhole as well, it becomes an abode of life. The wormhole itself has the same mass as Saturn as seen from both ends, the Saturn end of it retains Saturn's rings and its Satellites, Titan is a cold world the same as in our Universe. Orbiting Kronos is an Earth sized moon, I'll use the World Aurora, since I went to the trouble to create a map for its surface.

This technically is the mainworld for the Kronos system in Charted Space
UWP is X867870-2, among the inhabitants of this world, as in Venus and Mars, are humans, the flora and fauna are as Earthlike as can be expected given than the Sun is a red giant, human have been living on this world for tens of thousands of years put there by whatever agency also terraformed the planets Mars and Venus and that made the wormhole out of Saturn. Auroran humans are pale-skinned, light almost white-haired albino, even those living in the tropics, as the red giant doesn't put out a lot of UV rays. Auroran humans would need some protection if they ever were to live under Earth's Sun. The leaves of the plants of this world are a very dark shade of green. Most of the varieties of plants are variations of those found on Earth, except adapted to the light of a red sun.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

You could use the conspiracy theories of the supposed 'Freiburg disc' spacecraft and the 'SS Black Sun' ideas, but they would still need to develop the technologies to develop further technologies to build a reverse-engineered spacecraft. Even without WW2, I don't see this happening before the 1980's in your accelerated timeline, sorry.

Well actually the year in this setting is 2015 according to what would have been the Solomani dating system in this alternate timeline, the Traveller setting of Charted Space on the other side of the wormhole is the year 1103 Imperial. So the starship thief stole a 1600-ton lab ship, was pursued by authorities, and was forced to make a jump too deep within a planet's gravitational well, this blew the jump drive, and the misjump sent the ship hundreds of parsecs off course. The Starship thief was able to do a bit of astrogation to figure out where he was, but he wasn't able to fix the jump drive. the blue gas giant was an extraordinary find. the lab ship had a fuel shuttle and two ships boats as subordinate craft. He explored the Moon Aurora, dipped into the Gas Giant Kronos and discovered that it was a wormhole, explored the system on the otherside including Mars, and Venus, the most advanced civilization was Earth, which according to historical records and this version of Earth seemed to be following history, was on the verge of World War II. The date according to the radio signals he was receiving was 1937, thus the date he left Charted Space on his starship heist was 1030 Imperial. Being a Solomani citizen, though a thief, he recognized the historical pattern, so he landed a ship's boat in some out of the way place in Wisconsin off the shore of Lake Superior, and established an identity for himself as a local inventor. With his knowledge of advanced technology, he was able to build a vast fortune, and by 1939, he was turning out Thorium rockets that used liquid hydrogen as a propellant, he launched a few expeditions of Venus and Mars and made news taking black and white photographs of the planets surface and the natives. The Germans immediately built their own spaceships with plans stolen by German agents, this is over a number of years in which World War II would have played out in our history. The starship thief became fabulously rich and lived to a ripe old age, dying in the local year 1983, he got married, and a number of children and grandchildren, and they ended up living in a mansion in Connecticut. Various colonies were established by the six powers, USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia (The Soviet Union collapsed in 1970 in this timeline and reverted to being Russia). So the current year in the setting is 2015.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

You could use the conspiracy theories of the supposed 'Freiburg disc' spacecraft and the 'SS Black Sun' ideas, but they would still need to develop the technologies to develop further technologies to build a reverse-engineered spacecraft. Even without WW2, I don't see this happening before the 1980's in your accelerated timeline, sorry.

The spaceships are still very primitive by Traveller standards, they have acceleration ratings ranging from 1% to 6% of Earth's gravity, and take weeks to a month to reach Venus or Mars from Earth, Saturn is a bit longer. A planetary thruster guzzles rocket fuel to reach orbit allowing multiple g thrust at enormous cost in propellant, basically a Nerva design, except with a Thorium reactor. The Early rockets were fairly dirty and spread radioactivity, later ones were much cleaner. By 2015 work on a fusion reactor is still underway, but breakeven has not yet been achieved. The Starship thief had only limited knowledge of the technology of his setting, he knew about nuclear reactors and rockets, the computers have the same capability as ours. No grav vehicles have been developed yet. The original starship the thief arrived in continues to orbit Kronos as a space station, while crews are busy trying to reverse engineer the reaction-less engine and the Jump Drive. Radio signals from the inhabited portion of Charted Space have been picked up by the Six powers, and radio signals also propagate outwards from Kronos, but its going to take away before someone in Charted Space notices, so far they have travelled 25 parsecs in all directions from Kronos, this is about two and a half subsectors from the Kronos system, sooner or later someone is going to send a starship from out their to investigate, but it hasn't happened yet.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I decided to site the wormhole rimward of the Holowon sector instead. There are pocket empires on the fringes of Charted space called the Nihongi Empire, the Marian Empire, the Free Worlds League and the Old Earth Union.
http://travellermap.com/?x=-10.81&y=-235.402&scale=50.2109375
Just curious, has there been any published material on these polities? Judging from the names, as a guess, I would say these worlds had been colonized during the Rule of Man. The Nihongi Empire for example seems to have been settled by Asians, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese etc. Do you think any of these pocket empires might prove to be a problem if they discovered the Saturn/Kronos Wormhole? By the way, I decided to name the starship thief who gets the ball rolling Kyle Bronson. Perhaps he could repair the Jump Drive if he was sufficiently motivated, but perhaps he would rather just be a big fish in a small pond, rather than a thief in jail for grand theft starship. He could have come from one of these pocket empires, perhaps the Old Earth Union, Free Worlds League or Marian Empire. I generated a subsector, and I'm going to do 12 more. The top edge of my map will include the bottom 4 subsectors of the Holowon sector. According to the Triplanetary timeline I created the secret of the Jump Drive died with Kyle Bronson. There are documents in Kyle's stolen lab ship, their are also fabricators on board which could produce spare parts for the Jump Drive, once the scientists on board learn the language and educate themselves sufficiently to operate all the equipment and computers, the Lab ship has been orbiting Kronos in its current state of disrepair for about 73 years, acting as a space station and a base of operations for exploring the satellite Aurora as well as investigating the various rock islands that drift with the air currents long the zero gravity plane in the neck of the wormhole.

 

[Reynard]

There's another game system out called Starfire which features interstellar travel by means of instantaneous warp points. Solar systems are seemingly interconnected randomly with each system having from 1 to 10 connections. A system's overall gravity determines the chance for more warps.

Ships themselves have no interstellar drives, only needing a means for interplanetary locomotion. Once a race has the technology to scan for gravitational anomalies they can search for these warp points which are otherwise undetectable.

Interesting variation on a Traveller setting. Ships would be more powerful without interstellar drives and accompanying fuel. Non-military ships would be more efficient for the same reason. There would be no distinction of size for interstellar travel only function. More than likely, ships would have the best engines to haul themselves to in system ports and between warp point spread across the system. The most important military objective is defense of important warp points.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

There's another game system out called Starfire which features interstellar travel by means of instantaneous warp points. Solar systems are seemingly interconnected randomly with each system having from 1 to 10 connections. A system's overall gravity determines the chance for more warps.

Ships themselves have no interstellar drives, only needing a means for interplanetary locomotion. Once a race has the technology to scan for gravitational anomalies they can search for these warp points which are otherwise undetectable.

Interesting variation on a Traveller setting. Ships would be more powerful without interstellar drives and accompanying fuel. Non-military ships would be more efficient for the same reason. There would be no distinction of size for interstellar travel only function. More than likely, ships would have the best engines to haul themselves to in system ports and between warp point spread across the system. The most important military objective is defense of important warp points.

The only problem is that wormholes would have to be everywhere to replace jump drive. Wormholes can have a place in Classic Traveller as well, just as they do in Star Trek Deep Space Nine. The main thing is wormholes are fixed locations, usually very massive. Wormholes appear spherical as you fall into them, but as you fall into them the positive curvature of the sphere flattens out at the midpoint and then becomes negative as you come out the other end. You need gravity to bend space and make the wormhole, and you need antigravity to flatten out the space inside to hold the wormhole open, the difference between the gravity and the antigravity is the gravity of Saturn, you fall into the wormhole, and your momentum created by the fall carries you out the other end. In the case of the Saturn Wormhole, it is filled with atmosphere, which will slow you down on the way in, so you will need additional thrust to get out again, just as you need to escape a planet's atmosphere and accompanying gravity well. The gravity outside of the actual wormhole in this case is identical to that of the planet Saturn. So you fall into it as you would fall toward a planet. The atmosphere is also what prevents the lab ship from using the wormhole, as you need a ship with streamlining to fly through it, without risking damage to your starship. The lab ship I talked about comes with 3 subordinate craft, two ship's boats and a 95 ton shuttle used for atmospheric skimming of gas giants for fuel, these have reactionless multi-gee maneuver drives and can pretty much travel anywhere in the Solar System within a couple of days. The Triplanetary scientists have to be careful when they use these, because they don't know how they work or how to repair them, their are repair manuals of course and spare parts, but they don't go into detail about the operating principles of a reactionless maneuver drive, or how to build one from scratch. For most trips they rely on atomic rockets, this can take up to a month or two, not bad when compared with chemical rockets, but nothing compared to the reactionless manuever drive which they don't understand. Probably by the year 2015 in their calendar, they have managed to assemble a radio telescope in orbit around Kronos or on one of its moons. Aurora is most likely because of its Earthlike conditions and the native help they can hire to operate it.. Through this radio telescope they can detect the radio transmissions coming from the direction of the Core, most of this radio traffic is interplanetary between ships and planets within systems, but a large enough radio telescope based on Aurora can pick them up.

The Triplanetary Scientists know that the Third Imperium is out their, and their are pocket empires on the fringes of charted space that are closer, and in between that is about 2 and a half subsectors of interstellar wilderness. Space based telescopes can detect Earthlike planets in that wilderness, but they don't have the Jump Drive yet, and they have to be very careful in examining the damaged Jump drive of the Lab ship so as not to cause further damage to it in their examinations of it. Pretty much there are western scientists examining it on board the lab ship along with the children and grandchildren of Kyle Bronson, as they are the rich inheritors of this one example of a Jump Drive Starship they have, There are some spies among those scientists passing along information to the Eastern Alliance of course, much like those scientists that delivered plans of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The six powers worry constantly about what will happen when first contact is eventually made with these interstellar Empires. Probably despite their opposing political views the six powers would band together in the face of some overly aggressive interstellar Empire, most particularly the Third Imperium, even though it is very far away. For the interstellar Empires, the Wormhole represents a gateway into another Universe, an area known as the Solomani Rim in their Universe.

 

[Reynard]

You do realize we are talking about two interpretations of time-space telelocation? They are similar and function similarly but could be considered different physics and origins. Actually I believe you were also describing transdimensional too.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

You do realize we are talking about two interpretations of time-space telelocation? They are similar and function similarly but could be considered different physics and origins. Actually I believe you were also describing transdimensional too.

Well according to theory a wormhole can also be a time machine.
The creators of the wormhole grew it out of quantum foam to macroscopic size. At this point the wormhole is still tiny, one end is accelerated near the speed of light while the other end remains in the Sol System. The accelerated end of the wormhole experiences time dialation, the other one does not, the time difference between the two ends is 4518 years, about the difference between the Solomani and Imperial Dating system so at the Charted space end of the wormhole it is the year 1103 Imperial or 5621 AD, at the Triplanetary end of the Wormhole, the year is 2015 AD, there is no Imperial Dating System here, because in this timeline the Imperium will probably never exist, unless they come through the Wormhole from Charted Space, in which case the Imperial Date will be the same as in the Charted Space Universe by Imperial Edict. (Naturally, as you might expect, the one thing the 6 powers can agree on is they don't want to fall under the rule of the Third Imperium, they like their independence just fine!)

The wormhole with 4518 years of time displacement was then further grown and fed the mass of Saturn, then the terraforming occurred, Venus and Mars were then terraformed by the Aliens. Terraforming these two planets and establishing a wormhole the size and mass of Saturn naturally created a new timeline, this one diverges from that of the Third Imperium at around the 20th century with regards to political events on Earth. Somehow the butterflies of history were minimized until the true nature of Venus, Mars, and Saturn were realized by the Earth inhabitants, as well as the visitor from Charted Space, this sets up the Triplanetary setting. Dispite the alternate timeline that has been created due to the aliens knowledge of the future through the wormhole, the wormhole still connects both timelines. The Aliens, by the way obtained the Dinosaurs for Venus through another wormhole which has not yet been discovered. the Aliens exist in the past and through wormholes they also watch various possible futures from their point of view, the aliens might even be intelligent dinosaurs themselves from an alternate timeline Earth where the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by an asteroid impact. The only way that could happen is if the intelligent dinosaurs discovered a wormhole leading to their own past which was build by an even more ancient alien race. I would say the aliens would be carnivorous therapods similar to raptors in appearance but with a larger brain size.