Aerobic

[nnnrg]

OK.

1) I hate to say it but this went where I thought it might, but just a little further and in a different twist, which is quite good.

2) Greg Bear's Blood Music includes a scene which is disturbingly similar to the Americas and Angels scenes.

3) The giant entity absorbing the universe into itself... Hm. Saw that in a science fiction potboiler years ago (1977) but it wasn't as physics-breaking as this one, and...

Now we come to the part where I poke at the weak spots.

OK. Where are the other forms of life? Probability says that there IS other life inside the galaxy, even if the 'bus stop theory' as explained in Amir Aczel's book Probability 1 says we won't necessarily MEET them. You've broken the physics enough to ensure that "we" would though.

Eventually they're going to meet.

AND. The universe is very large and very old. If this is something that CAN happen then it's something that CAN happen anywhere, and would happen in more than one place.

What happens when HumanityFusionMartin meets AlienFusionGrog?

Presumably, sex.

How big can they get?

Well, you've heard of the Great Attractor?

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

2) Greg Bear's Blood Music includes a scene which is disturbingly similar to the Americas and Angels scenes.

I ought to track down a copy, since you're not the first person to point this out.

It's a fairly obvious mechanism of arrangement, if you have a fictional subpopulation with genetic differences which will be taking over the world. If you keep them human-shaped, then you need them to have higher mobility, and wings are the obvious choice, there being no organic wheels. (That's certainly how I came up with it.) And if you don't keep them human-shaped, then either you end up with "The Blob" or else "The End of Evangelion". I wanted to have the formula-ed guys help out, so they got to be angels. (In the draft which was in my head, but which didn't get written down, some of them had body modifications, and some people argued that they were demons. I decided against that, because I liked the idea that religious people would be unable to denounce the whole thing. )

And once you get beyond that, when you have this massive entity chowing down on rocks, the only question is whether the entity takes human form immediately (super-wasteful; before long it would have to spend a lot of time running around to keep touching things to absorb) or covers the surface and then burrows inward.

The giant entity absorbing the universe into itself... Hm. Saw that in a science fiction potboiler years ago (1977) but it wasn't as physics-breaking as this one, and...

If you don't break physics, your giant will turn into a black hole before too long, and won't be able to reach other star systems to absorb them in anything approaching a human-understandable time. (Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, is over 4 light years away, which is over 2 x 10^13 miles. So in order to reach Proxima Centauri within the average human lifespan, your entity has to travel at a speed of about 32 million miles per hour — about 1/20 the speed of light. The energy required to accelerate a mass the size of the solar system, or even just the sun, to that speed would be such that you'd have to "burn" a fairly large portion of it via nuclear reactions, and even then you'd have to have a practical way to change nuclear energy into propulsion, which we don't right now. So right away we're talking about doing something which requires some kind of special trick we don't know about yet, or else a break in physics. (For reference to reality, the fastest speed achieved by a manmade object appears to be around 157 thousand miles per hour, and that was only at the fastest point in the orbit of Helios 2, which got much closer to the sun than the Earth does and had a massive gravity assist. The fastest speed achieved without using the sun for a gravity assist is only a bit over 37 thousand miles per hour. So, basically: right now, we have no means of getting anywhere near fast enough to reach another star before we die, and the problem would only be much, much worse if we were trying to send something as big as Martin.)

OK. Where are the other forms of life? Probability says that there IS other life inside the galaxy, even if the 'bus stop theory' as explained in Amir Aczel's book Probability 1 says we won't necessarily MEET them. You've broken the physics enough to ensure that "we" would though.

Ah, ah, ah! How do you know probability says that there's other life inside the galaxy? The Drake equation, which is the usual point of appeal, is horribly loaded with assumptions which, I'm told by an actual biologist in discussion with actual astronomers, may be extremely optimistic. As in "off by enough orders of magnitude to be entirely wrong".

It's very hard to estimate the probability of something which we can only observe one example of. The whole situation calls for errors in interpretation, along the lines of the anthropic principle. (Which is, of course, wrong to anyone who isn't a creationist. The anthropic principle, to use the famous example, is like a sentient puddle saying "the world must be designed for me, because look at how perfectly this indentation in the ground fits me".)

That being said, there's no reason why Martin isn't simply keeping other forms of life in their own virtual worlds and not telling anyone about it. He already has Trevor fussing over humanity — telling everyone there's a race of aliens next door might be asking for trouble.

AND. The universe is very large and very old. If this is something that CAN happen then it's something that CAN happen anywhere, and would happen in more than one place.

Depends on what you think about the universe. Just for a start, everything which happens, if you have a linear-ish timeline, has to happen first at some point. So maybe the probability of a Martin-thing forming is so low that he's the first. (And, if he eats fast enough, the last.)

But also: a current theory is that the universe is... Well, you may have considered the probability question "if gas molecules are truly random, why doesn't all the air in the room bunch into a corner so we choke to death?" It turns out this is entirely possible, despite the apparent violation of increased entropy — but the probability is so low that the average rate of that occurrence is so slow that you would expect it to happen less than once in the length of time the universe has existed so far. (And therefore the walls of the room wouldn't survive long enough to do the experiment.) Applying this to the universe as a whole, the theory suggests that "most" of the time, the universe has its energy spread out, what we traditionally think of as "heat death", but that periodically, just by chance, everything converges enough to cause a crunch, which concentrates enough energy to let more interesting things happen — like, not to put too fine a point on it — us. The universe is eternal, but our view of it is momentary. (In such a view, incidentally, the "arrow of time" is an illusion. "The past" is always the direction towards the nearest crunch, and "the future" is always the direction towards the usual level of entropy.) This being the case, it is also possible that other universe-devouring entities have existed in the "past", but they were "before" the latest crunch.

But also, we don't have an intuitive grasp of the actual size of the universe. Maybe there are other universe-devourers, but they're so far away that it isn't even possible to see the places they come from yet.

What happens when HumanityFusionMartin meets AlienFusionGrog?

Realistically, they try to absorb each other, and the one with the fastest disassembly mechanisms, or possibly the most mass, wins. If there's no clear winner, then either they cut their losses and split off in different directions, or else they waste all their energy trying to absorb each other and eventually both die.

How big can they get?

Since Martin, at least, has the physics-breaking ability to avoid gravitational collapse, and is immune to biological limitations arising from being so large, there is no upper limit. (In reality? The Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 times the mass of the sun; a real-life Martin would collapse into a black hole before finishing off the Centauris. Of course, that presumes that a real-life Martin would be able to eat stars anyway, rather than boiling away in the attempt. Feeding exclusively on planets would let such a being live a lot longer, given how much smaller planets are than stars, but eventually, even a planet-eater would collapse under its own gravity.)

[nnnrg]

Originally Posted by tekuno

I ought to track down a copy, since you're not the first person to point this out.

>snip<

Yes, you should. It's a good story.

So yeah, you did invoke the warp drive research and so on, and presumably that allows the same kind of strange-matter handwave to let him be as big as he wants to get. It's already gone beyond breaking the belt and suspenders of disbelief by then, and one just goes with it because one is on the roller coaster and the ride is too much fun. After all he DID eat the SMBH at the center of the galaxy, so clearly 'black hole' isn't a real limit. Then again, the most recent ponderings by Professor Hawking say that quantum mechanics means there is no such thing as an event horizon, and that means there's no "black" hole as such, and no singularity, and that makes it more likely that MegaMartin can eat the chewy center.

Originally Posted by tekuno

Ah, ah, ah! How do you know probability says that there's other life inside the galaxy? The Drake equation, which is the usual point of appeal, is horribly loaded with assumptions which, I'm told by an actual biologist in discussion with actual astronomers, may be extremely optimistic. As in "off by enough orders of magnitude to be entirely wrong".

Tsk. Condescending tone, and strawman. I didn't cite the Drake Equation.
I cited something with only a single point of assumption.

In any case, you ignored my extremely clever lead for the brain-breaking sequel. You DO know what the Great Attractor is, right? It makes story sense to have it be another Martin-like being. And then, "do they eat each other, or have sex? Yes? In which order?"

I will avoid beating you over the head with your "cosmological twitch" model which is somewhat less useful and provable than the "probability of life" that you pooh-poohed, only so that I can wave it at you. Also, while YOU may not have an intuitive grasp of the size of the universe, mine says "It's bigger than that."

Given the evidence of hyper-inflation, it's at least big enough that if Martin manages to reach the Size of the Entire Universe (Man) before the ongoing expansion makes matter not stick together, he'll still have more beyond the edge of light that he could go to. Of course he'd have to fix that 'expansion' thing eventually anyway.

[Kit Werecat]

I have to chuckle...

It's really fun watching you Doctors in your spotless lab coats, rolling around the lab floor in a wrestling match, "duking" it out!

Please. I'm not making fun. You guys are quoting references entirely over MY head at this point (at least most of them), and one has to respect the fantastic minds doing this. It's almost a Supreme Nerd Alpha fight, in a weird way..

I find all the reasoning you are relating as absolutely fascinating. Makes a lowly High School graduate like me wish he could have gone to college, instead of the School of Hard Knocks. But I'm still always learning, and I keep looking up the stuff everyone brings up in their points of view, and I am proud to say that I am at least, KEEPING UP with the discussions.

Seriously, I don't know many stories on MGS that has invoked this type of heavy-handed reaction before (but I am a story newbie), but I think it is synergisticly inspiring.

I am among Giants of Men, and I'll have to keep that in mind when I attempt my first story.

Tough Crowd.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

Tsk. Condescending tone, and strawman. I didn't cite the Drake Equation.
I cited something with only a single point of assumption.

Having not read the book you were referring to, I suppose that's technically true, but as I say: when people are talking about the probability of life existing, they're usually using the Drake equation as their argument. (Particularly if they're math wonks.) (And I'm a math wonk, so I should know!) So, care to share with me what the book uses as its argument? If it's doing a "law of very big numbers" thing, saying "the universe is just ever-so-big, so this must be happening somewhere" then really it's still talking about the Drake equation, only without going into details and hand-waving a result.

In any case, you ignored my extremely clever lead for the brain-breaking sequel. You DO know what the Great Attractor is, right? It makes story sense to have it be another Martin-like being. And then, "do they eat each other, or have sex? Yes? In which order?"

Every Terry Pratchett fan knows that Azrael is the Great Attractor. And also that the true form of dark matter is the paperwork for the rest of the universe. </reference humor>

You're assuming that, if there's some other Martin-like being, it's recognizably sentient ? and sexual, furthermore, in a way that humans would recognize. It's just as likely that a Martin-like being would have turned inward and just be a tentacular horror after a certain amount of time.

Honestly, I'm not up for a "real"-world sequel to this one. (Although I did toy with the idea of writing a kind of postscript, set so far in the future of the virtual world that all the original humans have long since gotten bored of endless life and either had Martin discontinue them or gone into such deep meditation that they no longer really interact with anyone any more. That far into the future, their great-to-the-umpteenth-power children, never having had a biological reference point for morphology or known a world where there was a reason for sexuality to be linked to pleasure, no longer even recognize Martin as being alive, and have a legend that if you want to reproduce you have to go climb the funny-shaped mountain and make a wish for a child...)

I will avoid beating you over the head with your "cosmological twitch" model which is somewhat less useful and provable than the "probability of life" that you pooh-poohed, only so that I can wave it at you.

It's not my model. It's one which is apparently under serious consideration by genuine paid-up physicists. (It's also an intriguing answer to the "how did the universe start" question ? the inflationary Big Bang is, after all, a model of what happened starting at a (very^zillion small) period of time after "the beginning". It doesn't explain why the universe was in that state to begin with.

Also, while YOU may not have an intuitive grasp of the size of the universe, mine says "It's bigger than that."

You don't have an intuitive grasp of the size of the universe. Nobody does. It's too big.

But even if you assume life is relatively common, that doesn't mean it's common for life to produce a Martin-like entity. Martin's Earth only did it once in around 3.6 billion years of life existing, and it was an extremely unlikely combination of events which made it happen even then. If the likelihood of a Martin-like entity forming from a given instance of life is low enough (for example, one in ten to the 50), and the rate of new instances of life existing is low enough (for example, one hundred times per second on average per supercluster in the currently-observable universe), then it really wouldn't be surprising at all for Martin to be the first one in the observable universe. If the numbers are skewed even more ? life arising a trillion times per second per supercluster, but the likelihood of a Martin-like entity being one in ten to the 100, for example ? then even the existence of Martin would be surprising.

Now: we don't know exactly how large the universe actually is. It might be infinite, it might not be. We strongly believe it is significantly larger than the part we can see. Suppose it to be finite ? X times the size of the currently-observable universe. Using the numbers as my "even more skewed" example, then it wouldn't be surprising for Martin to be the only such being in the entire universe.

Given the evidence of hyper-inflation, it's at least big enough that if Martin manages to reach the Size of the Entire Universe (Man) before the ongoing expansion makes matter not stick together, he'll still have more beyond the edge of light that he could go to. Of course he'd have to fix that 'expansion' thing eventually anyway.

He can stick his hands into stars and not have them undergo fusion. He can keep himself from anatomical and gravitational collapse. He can warp space to travel at speeds which, as far as we currently know, may be entirely impossible. (IIRC there was a research team recently claiming that in actual fact it may be possible to achieve practical interstellar speeds; I didn't go read the article so I'm assuming it's bunk or a prank, but I might be wrong.) And, what's more, since every bit of his muscle is actually also brain as well, the larger he gets the smarter he gets. (You have to wonder when the limits would show up on that. Even a planet-sized brain would run into serious problems with synchronization between parts of itself. What happens when you're the size of a supercluster and it takes millions of years for a signal to travel from one part of your body to another? What if parts of your body start to disagree with each other?) Given how broken the physics already is, it wouldn't surprise me for time travel to be practical (and deducible from physics with a large enough body of examples) in the universe of this story. Furthermore, after a while, it won't be surprising if Martin contains all the mass of the observable universe, and have the ability to fuse or fission it at will for energy, which means that he would be able to travel back to the Big Bang as often as necessary to eat everything. And to stay in the pre-expansionary fraction-of-a-second portion of the universe forever.

(There's a game called "U.S. Patent Number One" which is a race between different inventors of time machines. Think of "Universe-Eater Number One". Ouch.)

[chocomus]

I really enjoyed the story and was glad it didn't end as dark as it could have

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by chocomus

I really enjoyed the story and was glad it didn't end as dark as it could have

Come to think of it, your cat furry drawings would work for the cat-man character too. (Everyone, quick go and look at Chocomus' FurAffinity account!)

[chocomus]

Originally Posted by tekuno

Come to think of it, your cat furry drawings would work for the cat-man character too. (Everyone, quick go and look at Chocomus' FurAffinity account!)

Mhm, now i wanna add more big anthros to my page XD Maybe an angel and a demon too?

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by chocomus

Mhm, now i wanna add more big anthros to my page XD Maybe an angel and a demon too?

More of anything is good. There's not enough Chocomus artwork out there.

[funzies17]

THIS IS THE MOST FUCKING HOT STORY EVER! Please update I can't wait!!

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by funzies17

THIS IS THE MOST FUCKING HOT STORY EVER! Please update I can't wait!!

Um... I don't know how to tell you this, but the story has already been completed. Have you looked at all 6 pages of the thread?

[Kit Werecat]

Originally Posted by tekuno

Um... I don't know how to tell you this, but the story has already been completed. Have you looked at all 6 pages of the thread?

I don't know..

Martin still hasn't absorbed the entire universe yet, Tekuno...