Ouroboros Drive

Nibiru-cosmic-ring-of-fire-ouroboros

I’ve been having this fantasy a lot recently – quite a disturbed fantasy, quite a twisted fantasy actually – and I want to work through it a bit. I want to talk about it and see what happens, see where it gets me. Share it perhaps to see what people think. Put it out there. Though why I imagine anyone would give a damn I don’t know. Anyway – that’s beside the point. We won’t go into that. I have been thinking a lot recently about how transport systems – particularly related to FTL interstellar spaceships – could evolve and develop in the future and then it occurred to me that there could perhaps be this particular rather peculiar possibility of transportation that relies on exploiting a little known law of physics. Kind of like the law or principle permitting the spontaneous production and mutual annihilation of particle / antiparticle pairs on a very small time-scale. OK I know that isn’t a little known law of physics. Everyone knows about quantum foam these days. It’s old hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say. Yawn. But I said like – a law like that, not that actual law. There’s a related kind of phenomenon where a pocket universe can come into temporary ‘borrowed-time’ existence as a result of vacuum fluctuations and then the umbilicus gets cut or twisted or something so that there’s no more connection with the parent universe. Other stuff can happen then.

 

This is interesting to me because even though the pocket universe is only allowed to exist for a very brief few picoseconds or whatever – and you can’t do a hell of a lot with something that only lasts a picosecond – there’s nothing to say that the subjective time flow in it can’t be experienced as lasting millions and millions of years. Billions, even. From its own local perspective, I mean. So maybe that has possibilities for some kind of technological application, if you see where I’m going with this. There’s something there we can exploit. A kind of a loop-hole.

 

  1. I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking that I’m not making any sense here. What has this to do with FTL space ships, after all? How could anyone use a pocket universe that only exists for a picosecond as a means of travelling across the intergalactic gulfs? Well this is where my thinking went a bit lateral. Which is necessary for any truly great idea as I’m sure you will agree. Normal everyday thinking just won’t work. Normal everyday thinking isn’t worth a crap, in fact. It just sort of came to me that it’s not really necessary to actually move from A to B in order to travel vast distances very quickly – which is of course the brief here – an alternative approach to the problem is  for the spaceship to have a drive that contains a device for generating pocket universes so then all we would need to do would be to input information about the origin and terminus and then the spaceship could travel to its destination within a custom-made pocket-universe and this would be exactly the same thing as travelling from A to B in the original parent universe only it wouldn’t be in that universe anymore but we wouldn’t know the difference. It wouldn’t really matter that it’s actually a different universe. It would be a parallel universe, an exact copy – exact except for the fact that the time-scale had been invisibly changed so that one picosecond now equaled ten thousand billion years. You’d never notice it – you’d have no way of knowing… There would be the usual technicalities to work out of course and it may take a while to iron out all the bugs but the basic principle is completely sound and based on actual physical laws. So basically when you wanted to travel somewhere you would create your own short-lived but subjectively long-lived pocket universe and travel long distances in that instead. You could travel this distance very quickly because you could manipulate the inter-universe time differential. Problem solved! Here is the basis for a whole new paradigm for a viable FTL Stardrive. Problem solved. As simple as that.

  1. I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking that I’m not making any sense here. What has this to do with FTL space ships, after all? How could anyone use a pocket universe that only exists for a picosecond as a means of travelling across the intergalactic gulfs? Well this is where my thinking went a bit lateral. Which is necessary for any truly great idea as I’m sure you will agree. Normal everyday thinking just won’t work. Normal everyday thinking isn’t worth a crap, in fact. It just sort of came to me that it’s not really necessary to actually move from A to B in order to travel vast distances very quickly – which is of course the brief here – an alternative approach to the problem is for the spaceship to have a drive that contains a device for generating pocket universes so then all we would need to do would be to input information about the origin and terminus and then the spaceship could travel to its destination within a custom-made pocket-universe and this would be exactly the same thing as travelling from A to B in the original parent universe only it wouldn’t be in that universe anymore but we wouldn’t know the difference. It wouldn’t really matter that it’s actually a different universe. It would be a parallel universe, an exact copy – exact except for the fact that the time-scale had been invisibly changed so that one picosecond now equaled ten thousand billion years. You’d never notice it – you’d have no way of knowing… There would be the usual technicalities to work out of course and it may take a while to iron out all the bugs but the basic principle is completely sound and based on actual physical laws. So basically when you wanted to travel somewhere you would create your own short-lived but subjectively long-lived pocket universe and travel long distances in that instead. You could travel this distance very quickly because you could manipulate the inter-universe time differential. Problem solved! Here is the basis for a whole new paradigm for a viable FTL Stardrive. Problem solved. As simple as that.

  1. I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking that I’m not making any sense here. What has this to do with FTL space ships, after all? How could anyone use a pocket universe that only exists for a picosecond as a means of travelling across the intergalactic gulf? Well this is where my thinking went a bit lateral. Which is necessary for any truly great idea as I’m sure you will agree. Normal everyday thinking just won’t work. Normal everyday thinking isn’t worth a crap, in fact. It just sort of came to me that it’s not really necessary to actually move from A to B in order to travel vast distances very quickly – which is of course the brief here – an alternative approach to the problem is for the spaceship to have a drive that contains a device for generating pocket universes so then all we would need to do would be to input information about the origin and terminus and then the spaceship could travel to its destination within a custom-made pocket-universe and this would be exactly the same thing as travelling from A to B in the original parent universe only it wouldn’t be in that universe anymore but we wouldn’t know the difference. It wouldn’t really matter that it’s actually a different universe. It would be a parallel universe, an exact copy – exact except for the fact that the time-scale had been invisibly changed so that one picosecond now equaled ten thousand billion years. You’d never notice it – you’d have no way of knowing… There would be the usual technicalities to work out of course and it may take a while to iron out all the bugs but the basic principle is completely sound and based on actual physical laws. So basically when you wanted to travel somewhere you would create your own short-lived but subjectively long-lived pocket universe and travel long distances in that instead. You could travel this distance very quickly because you could manipulate the inter-universe time differential. Problem solved! Here is the basis for a whole new paradigm for a viable FTL Stardrive. Problem solved. As simple as that.

 

So I was thinking along these lines and trying to imagine how all the technical issues might be resolved when I drifted off into a type of spontaneous fantasy. It just came into my head. I was travelling in a spaceship only strangely enough it was more like an ordinary airplane than anything else – ordinary apart from the fact that it was going around and around and around chasing its own tail in a fiery circle. It was actually devouring itself, over and over again. I stress again – it wasn’t going anywhere at all, it was just eating itself. It wasn’t actually travelling anywhere apart from up its own exhaust trail! And this spaceship was at the same time an entire mini- universe in its own right – a universe that was continually self-annihilating, continually both creating itself and then destroying itself again. Over and over again. A fiery ring of cyclic self-creation / self-destruction.

 

And I was trapped in that FTL spaceship. There was no way to get out – it was locked into a never-ending loop of creation and destruction. The drive had malfunctioned. And what was worse still – infinitely worse, in fact – was that every new version of the spaceship/universe that was created was an inferior copy, a degenerated doppelganger of the one that preceded it. There had been a fault in the theory – a glitch that no one had spotted. A glitch that I hadn’t spotted, anyway. Amazingly,I hadn’t spotted the possibility of an infinite regress. Not the possibility, not even the likelihood, but the absolute inevitability of an infinite regress. A pocket universe within a pocket universe within a pocket universe. A spaceship within a spaceship within a spaceship…

 

I was trapped in a self-devouring micro-universe that was continually replacing me with degenerate doppelgangers of myself and the process could not be terminated. It was non-terminating – it went on forever, degenerating and degenerating, degrading and degrading. Degrading asymptotically – approaching maximum entropy but never quite reaching it. It was like a beast had been unleashed – it had been waiting a long long time to be unleashed and now it had been!

 

Every time I have this fantasy – or dream, or whatever the hell you want to call it – I come to covered in cold sweat. Drenched in cold sweat. Shaking uncontrollably. Still living the nightmare. Trying to tell myself that it didn’t really happen, that it couldn’t possibly be real, but not entirely believing myself all the same. Part of me suspected that it could happen, that it actually could be real – in some crazy way. Wanting to believe that it was just a dream but thinking deep-down that maybe it wasn’t. Thinking that in some strange way I am remembering something that happened a long, long time ago. In some previous existence perhaps. A type of archetypal memory, you could say. Maybe from another life. Or maybe it’s an event that somehow escaped from the regular linear time-line and it is still occurring, and I’m still trapped in it. Trapped in a kind of perpetual disaster… The ultimate, unthinkable error in reality. The worst fuck-up ever…

 

Did you ever wake up from a nightmare and tell yourself that it wasn’t real, whilst at the same time doubting your own facile reassurances? Well, that’s what keeps happening to me. That’s how I feel. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this fantasy since I came up with the original plan for what I call the Ouroboros Drive. If it actually is only just a fantasy. I’m not suggesting for a moment that it isn’t, but at the very least you have to admit that it is a particularly potent metaphor. A metaphor that is haunting me. A metaphor for what however, I do not know…

 

 

 

 

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