Jan. 29th: Alien "gods"? and more on star genealogy
Astrophysics, cosmology, and a lot of imagination
The Sun's oldest twin
HIP 102152, also known as HD 197027, discovered in 2013, is a Sun-like star just 250 light-years away from us. This star sparks interest in the scientific community since it enables a better understanding of our own Sun. To me, it is interesting because it enables me to postulate a bracket of time where Sun-like stars started appearing.
If you remember our last newsletter, or if you don't remember at all, I was concerned about the distinct generations of stars because it is likely that they will have planets hosting different kinds of life at different times on the timeline of the universe. Trying to refine those timeframes, I came across HIP 102152, that is a yellow dwarf nearly identical to our Sun, except 3.6By (billion years) older! There I was thinking that yellow dwarves appeared at around 6 or 7By ago, but this super-old Sun-like star proves me wrong. It was birthed when the universe was just 5.6Byo (billion years old), which means, we can imagine yellow dwarves appearing over 2 or 3By earlier than I thought. Which means, they've been, although rare, around for a very long time.
Alright, maybe that doesn't speak to you. Here's a timeline I came up with, to make things clearer:
t = 0 - Big Bang
t = 100My - First stars
t = somewhere in between - Potential first sentient life in the universe, around those stars
t = 5By - First Sun-like stars
t = 9By - 2nd wave of sentient life from Sun-like stars (5By ago)
t = 13.8By - Today
This is still pretty hazy, but it would imply that the first gen aliens had been there for over 5By before the second gen, which has been around since 5By by now. This is the result I've been searching for, even though this is very speculative and most likely somewhat inaccurate data. There are indeed a lot of elements missing, which I'm still researching, but it does give us an idea of the repartition of these alien generations I've been mentioning, which is about every 5By. I will refine this guess when I get to researching red dwarves, the missing element here.
Including methane life (which we discussed in a previous newsletter), there would be as far as I can make up a total of three generations of aliens, spanning over 20By. And then it would be all about making the party last until the end of the universe. Speaking of which...
Almighty aliens
(contains spoilers)
With my new project, I've been wondering what kind of aliens I'm going to have around, since I want as many as (relatively) realistically possible in this book. It occurred to me that I could have aliens that originated from before what we consider to be the beginning of the universe, popularly referred to as the Big Bang. It would be a good idea, since I want to have xenos that would be around since a time so long that they permeate this reality. And it took me all the way down a peculiar chain of ideas...
First I had to ask myself what was there before the Big Bang, where are these beings coming from? I realized that I could start talking about a universe that constantly dies and rebirths in a new Big Bang singularity, and that these aliens were possibly from several iterations back.
Then I started thinking, why wouldn't these aliens be the ones that created this cycle? In the first lifetime of the universe, the sentient and technologically evolved beings present inside of it noticed that it was going to end at some point, through a kind of cold death (when all the stars stop shining as they have used up all their fuel). There was no expansion or contraction happening to spacetime back then. So they gathered and decided to engineer a solution... involving having the cold universe contract into a singularity, and reignite in a Big Bang.
We can go as far as imagining that they engineered the fabric of the universe as to create a repeating expansion-contraction-singularity-rebirth scenario... We can even go as far as to imagine that, using the same method of manipulating the fields making up space-time, they adjusted the cosmological constants such as the value of gravity and such, to values of their choosing, most likely facilitating the emergence of life.
In other words, the universe in which we live in right now would be entirely engineered by these ancient aliens.
This is exactly the feel I was going for with project Their Silence, so I'm quite glad I figured it out. I hope you like it as well.
Thank you for reading!
This week I've been mostly working on kickstarting this new project, brainstorming a lot of ideas, and now I have at least the basics figured out, of which I'm sharing the brightest with you today. I will continue developing this new project, and eventually write it in the form of a shortish novel. In any case, I hope to gather enough insight to be able to write confidently about a universal civilization for project Heal in the end. Just so you know I'm not giving up on that one. I'm just going where my inspiration and research leads me, to expand my scientific knowledge while working my writing skills.
As always, thank you for reading, it means so much to me... This one was a bit sketchy, so I hope it doesn't disappoint you, and I'll be back next week with the follow-up! Stay tuned ;)
Ah the Big Crunch and Bang, rather curious how you plan on explaining how the alien ‘gods’ survive and if they are perhaps replaced after certain cycles. I would suggest reading Man-Kings but that is only found in the 2017 body horror anthology (I swear that story has no amount of body horror). If we are engineered by alien life does that mean the panspermia theory is true to an extent and there’ll be some similarities between aliens?
Impressionnant!