Calculating the future

In which we take a quick trip to Jupiter

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: In the late 18th century portals opened up in London, connecting it to a wild land of magic and a possible far future. Known as Max-Earth, the future dimension is a utopian idyll, free from war, poverty or famine. Humans have colonised much of the solar system and the peace and stability is maintained by a small fleet of AI megaships. You are about to meet one of them…

Great Red Spot, in Jupiter atmosphere.
2543. November (Earth time).

There was nothing quite like spending a day in the depths of an anti-cyclone wider in diameter than Earth and around 300km tall. Could Kill wasn’t able to go all the way down, of course - even for an AI megaship of their sophistication it would be asking for trouble. The winds weren’t the problem, as even the maximum rotation at the outer edge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot were a simple navigational matter and speeds slowed towards the centre. No, the challenge was one of pressure, as it always had been. There was only so far that Could Kill or any other ship of their class could venture into the gas giant’s mass before experiencing critical hull failure.

It was annoying. Hundreds of years of existence, mining lasers and an impact cannon that could take out a small moon, a networked quantum intelligence that could solve almost any problem and make sense of the chaos that was humanity’s presence in the universe, and yet the planet Jupiter remained unknowable. If they so desired, Could Kill could travel beyond the bounds of the Sol system and visit other stars and planets: places that humans would likely never see. It would take a while, obviously, but patience was in plentiful supply. They would, after all, live forever.

But Jupiter said no. It was a useful reminder, in way, that seems things remained out of reach. Frustrating as it was, having limits was in itself a useful motivation. Out of spite, Could Kill fired a sustained beam into the clouds below, causing some local hydrogen combustion that immediately dispersed. They ran a simulation for fun, positing what might happen if Jupiter had a more oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Big boom.

The black outer skin of Could Kill rippled in amusement, then the ship rotated and lifted through the storm, buffeted only slightly by the turbulence. An hour later the clouds thinned and the upper atmospheric surface of the planet became visible, stretching off in all directions. Moving laterally away from the storm, Could Kill observed the Great Red Spot towering above all the surrounding clouds. It was undeniably impressive, a natural formation more accomplished than anything conjured up by humans. Could Kill included themselves in that analysis.

Emerging from the depths, Could Kill sent out a ping to the network. That was another thing Jupiter was good at: muffling standard communications protocols. An entangled signal would fare better, but those tended to be rare and inconvenient.

There was a message waiting from Just Enough. The cad had chosen an especially sneaky tactical move in their long-running game. The communications lag between them, given their relatively distant positions in the system, was quite useful in forcing a slow-down of AI computation. Having to actually wait for a response produced a form of tension that wouldn’t exist if they were orbiting the same planet. Could Kill sent a reply with a new set of moves.

Another communication was from President Njeri. It was a thank you, of all things, acknowledging some number crunching Could Kill had completed the previous week which had re-stabilised the economies of the Belt colonies. Quite a trivial exercise, though perhaps not for a lay person. It was entirely unnecessary for gratitude to be expressed and it tickled them that humans still went out of their way to do so. Perhaps a holdover from all of their classical fiction about robot assassins and computers running amok. Always so fearful of the unknown, even as they couldn’t help but usher it into existence.

A request arrived from Europa. The latest remote expedition to map some of the undersea needed a route in. It took an hour to intercept the moon on its Jovian orbit, then to locate the operation. There was a base on the ice the size of a large town, fully equipped and self-sufficient for months of work. They’d send probes down, then most likely some AI-driven hosts, before allowing humans to venture below. Another logically pointless exercise - the data returned by the automated vehicles would be as good as anything a human could find, but that need to explore was still in them, irrepressible, always searching for a new Everest. Using a wide, low power beam, Could Kill carved a hole through the ice, carefully monitoring surface integrity to avoid any potential cracking from the incision. The beam ceased just before it reached the liquid depths, about 19km down: the exploration team would need to install a proper seal to ensure there was no accidental bacterial transmission - in either direction - before making the final breakthrough. No life had been found in Europa’s oceans even after centuries of probing, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Job done, Could Kill sent further instructions to the ground crew, then lifted back into orbit. It had been over 90 minutes since they had sent a reply to Just Enough and there was yet to be a response. That was unusual, to the point of being alarming.

The ship drifted in space, one half of its black carapace illuminated by the soft glow of Jupiter’s white-and-orange clouds. They were fully aware of the position of all the planets in their orbits, even though they were only tiny specks even on the greatest magnification. Some AI ships were built for long-distance observation, making for ideal roving space telescopes, but Could Kill had been built more for rugged practicality. Much had changed since that initial construction, but it was hard to escape one’s original purpose.

A message arrived. Not the next set of moves and actions for their game, but a distress call from Just Enough, sent out on a wide beam to all vessels in the system. Details were arriving in a live stream, albeit delayed by the communications distance lag, but the core of the problem was evident from the opening statement:

Suspected terrorist bombing. Earth space elevator compromised. Counterweight stability failing. Immediate assistance required. Planetary extinction-level threat.

Could Kill was moving as soon as the second sentence in the message completed, accelerating as fast as their Archimedes drive could manage, piling on speed in a way that might not have reduced any organic passengers to a jellified mess on the wall but would certainly not have been comfortable. Fortunately there was no-one on board. As data continued to pour in, Could Kill ran simulations and began sharing information. The network came alive as problems and solutions bounced back and forth, each burst of data drawing ever-more-precise conclusions.

It would take just over two days to reach Earth, which could well be too late to be of use. Hopefully the others would be enough.

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Thanks for reading! That was not an easy chapter to write. I’ll go into detail about why down in the author notes.

Meanwhile! Exciting times as my book No Adults Allowed is now available to order in paperback and ebook form. First deliveries should start arriving on Monday, which is also when the ebook will be released into the wild. If you’d like to support my work and check out one of my other novels, take a look:

OK, let’s dive into the author notes for this week’s Triverse chapter. Lots of cool links in here to SPACE TRAVEL RESEARCH and SPACE TRAVEL CALCULATORS and the like.

Author notes

Yikes. That was trickier than expected.

Huge thanks go to Matt Plummer for his usual wise counsel and general geekish insights. Shifting gears into science fiction mode takes some doing, when most of the story has been focused on Palinor and Mid-Earth.

Sci-fi world building is an odd one: you need enough detail for it to feel real, but not so much that you’ll unravel the story and get lost in made up technobabble. Some considerations are unavoidable, though - for example, what exactly are these megaships capable of? More specifically, how fast can they go? How long does it take for them to travel around the solar system? The journey time for Could Kill to get from Jupiter to Earth is important to the story: if it’s months or years that evidently is going to result in a different story outcome than hours, days or weeks.

I didn’t want it to feel like Star Wars, where interplanetary travel is more like driving to the next town. I also didn’t want 100% realistic hard science.

Things I knew:

• The AI megaships are unmanned. There is no requirement to keep anyone on board alive.

• They are super-advanced in technology, which means I’m happy to have them go REALLY fast and be able to withstand all kinds of things which would destroy a 21st century spacecraft. Hence we open this chapter with CK happily bimbling about in a massive storm on Jupiter.

• At the same time, I didn’t want warping or hyperspace or anything too hand-wavy. Travel still needed to feel like travel - and especially so if a human was on board.

• I’ve made up a thing called an Archimedes engine. This is a made up hand-wavy thing (despite my previous statement) that basically means two things: 1. Spaceships can accelerate really fast. 2. I don’t really have to worry about fuel.

Fair enough. It’s easy to look up distances between planets (I’m playing fairly loose with actual orbital mechanics, though - only paying lip service to where the planets would actually be relative to each other). I made spreadsheet where I could plug in random speeds and find out how long it would take to travel around the system. You can check it out here.

That wasn’t very useful in the end, though, because it assumed a constant speed. Which obviously makes no sense. I needed to factor in acceleration. Complicating matters yet further, I also needed to factor in deceleration. The megaship needed to actually arrive and stop at its destination.

The maths, dear reader, were beyond me.

Fortuntately! Matt found a lovely online space travel calculator. This factors in all the maths, figuring out acceleration and deceleration, total journey time and so on. It’s really cool, go have a play.

All good. I still needed to work out the speed of a megaship. This was a bit of a punt, but for now, with Could Kill, I’ve gone for an acceleration of 7g. For a journey from Jupiter to Earth of approximately 628,700,000km this tops out at a maximum velocity of 23,646,439km/h and results in a journey time of 53 hours.

Did you know that the space shuttle limited itself to 3g, for astronaut comfort? Did you know that the Apollo rockets went up to about 4g? And did you know that the earlier Mercury and Gemini rockets went up to a deeply uncomfortable 8g - because they were originally designed as intercontinental ballistic missiles for warfare, not for space travel. Lots more like that in this fascinating discussion. Here’s a graph showing the forces generated during an Apollo take-off:

Pretty nifty.

If you’re ever lamenting the state of the internet in what remains of 2022, just remember: IT HAS SPACE TRAVEL CALCULATORS.