Idea fiction #001 : A short story about Ra, science, the sun and human evolution...... or something like that.
I like to tell stories. I guess you could call them far out theories, a joining of information to come up with an interesting new idea. I was telling one such story to a friend of mine yesterday and he said "you should totally write that down" so here goes to the start of my new series of 'fictional' stories.
I actually have two separate stories, It all depend on who you think came first, people and their gods, or the sun itself. First up lets consider people.
ONE
A source of free clean power is one of humanities dreams. In the modern day, since the discovery that atoms can be split, we have had the somewhat dirty nuclear powered generators using nuclear fission as a power source. Nuclear Fusion is the real dream, rather than split atoms like barbarians, the elegance of joining them together is both clean and beautiful. Take some simple hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, and under favorable conditions, fuse the atoms together to form helium and get a free load of usable energy as a result. Modern physicists and engineers are working on this but the main problem is containing the truly extreme amounts of heat produced. Were talking temperatures around 100000000 degrees kelvin. Lets go back to ancient time, back before recorded history, back to the times of the gods and Ill introduce you to my old friend Ra, the god of the sun.
Now Ra in this story, at this time, there is no sun, just Ra, working alone in his lab. A eureka moment, nuclear fusion, but then just as now there are problems. Two of them in fact. First the issue of heat, this could be solved by placing this new energy source somewhere extremely cold. Sticking inside a glacier or at one of the earths poles, probably wouldn't cut it though. Plus assuming you did have a giant power station smack in the middle of Antarctica, that's a really long way to run your power cables which brings us to the second problem, power distribution. Nikola Telsa had the right idea, but were quite a few hundred year before his birth in this story, Ra's solution to both these problems is quite simple, Nuclear fusion in space. A sufficiently large enough ball of hydrogen gas floating in space will stick to itself purely due to gravity. With an average temperature of around 2.4 degrees kelvin, space is certainly cold enough and the power distribution problem, solved. All that glorious energy simply pouring down on us from space. This amazing new clean free energy machine named after its creator and giver of light to the world Ra. The god of the sun.
(I did promise two stories, so here we go)
TWO
Lets imagine the sun, it is quite a massive ball of hydrogen, fusing into helium, carbon oxygen silicon nickel iron cobalt. Pretty much all the good stuff. Sure its not some magic factory that can make all the known elements, but its got a fairly decent range. Now when I say massive, were looking at 1x10^57 atoms which looks a lot more impressive when written as 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. By contrast there are only 7x10^27 atoms in the entire human body, a significant order of magnitude smaller. Now in this story the entire earth doesn't exist yet. So there we are a giant fusion ball floating in space high energy particles moving at incredible speed, but if we take a close look at at the chaos we see patterns form, change and be destroyed over and over again. Take the pi ratio as an example, in an infinitely long string of numbers, there are an infinite number of smaller patterns that appear within it. Your phone number, important dates, and recipe for apple muffins written entirely in binary, they are all in there somewhere.
The sun has been around for about 4.5 billion years, an extremely large number of atoms in a high energy environment in a constant state of motion. Consider for a moment, that the human consciousness is itself nothing more than an arrangement and connection of atoms, in a state of motion, but captive within the confines of ones skull. The probability of an arrangement that is conscious coming into existence inside the sun is certainly greater than zero. I am no mathematician, but given 1x10^57 atoms, 4.5 billion year the chance of a single 7x10^27 event is certainly in the realms of possible. So there in the sun brought into existence we have out conscious entity who for purpose of this story we will name Ra. Now Ra is alive, well as alive as any being living in a nuclear furnace can be. Ra may have even been born and experienced death many times over. While the possibly of creation within the sun is quite high, it comes at the expense of certain annihilation. Most thing that are alive have a tendency to do one of two things, maintain life or create new life. Failure to do either of these things usually leads to extinction. Ra, in all his wisdom realizes that while he is doomed by the place of his birth, can create a less volatile environment for his children to live on. Ejected from the sun a variety planets, each unique in its design, a place where given time life will take hold and prosper. One of these experiment succeeds, earth. A few million years pass, but on this scale time is merely an illusion anyway, and we arrive to a time where life, in the image (I use this word loosely perhaps idea is a better word) of its creator is trying its best create an environment on earth suitable for the the likes of Ra. When stable nuclear fusion on this planet is achieved, we will have harnessed the very power of the sun and Ra will be able to live with us once again.
The point of all this?
were on a large sphere (if you take away the water its actually peanut shaped) that's spinning at 460 meters per second, flying in orbit around the sun at 30 000 meters per second which it self is flying through the milky way galaxy at 230 000 meters per second and the entire milky way is hurtling through space, at well, you need a reference point to measure speed against and once your this far out it all starts to become meaningless again. Among all this though one thing can be said for sure..... life goes on.