The Dark Energy Bomb: A Science Fiction Story

In the year 2030 the long-anticipated problem of Peak Oil had arrived, along with global shortages of various important metals. The world needed much more oil and metals than it was able to produce. But there was one nation which had abundant oil and metal supplies: the nation of Kazmenistan. One day that nation received a demand from the United States that its troops must be allowed to enter Kazmenistan.

The official justification for the demand was not that the United States wanted to gain access to the oil and metals in Kazmenistan. The White House made no mention of the natural resources of Kazmenistan when the demand was made. Instead, the official reason for the demand was that various terrorists and insurgents had found safe refuge in Kazmenistan. The United States demanded the right to occupy the country, as part of its global War on Terror that had been ongoing since 2001.

President Khalani of Kazmenistan denied that his country was harboring any terrorists, and claimed that the real reason the United States wanted to enter the country was to gain control over its oil and metal resources. He refused to allow US troops to enter Kazmenistan.

The United States denied the charges of the President of Kazmenistan, and gave a date on which US troops would begin to enter the country, with or without the consent of Kazmenistan.

A few days later there was an astonishing announcement from the President of Kazmenistan.

“Our great nation has been engaged in a research program which has produced a weapon of unprecedented power,” said President Khalani. “We have harnessed the power of dark energy, the mysterious quantum energy that is the main driver of the universe's accelerating expansion. We have used this breakthrough to create a dark energy bomb. The bomb is so powerful that if it is ever exploded, it will shatter into pieces our entire planet, destroying all life on it. If the United States enters our nation with its troops, we will detonate our dark energy bomb, killing all life on this planet.”

At the White House when the President of the United States heard about this announcement, he was very scornful and skeptical.

“Give me a break – a dark energy bomb?” said the President. “Do these guys really expect us to swallow that story?”

“It's probably just a bluff – but maybe it's for real,” said Donald Whitehead, the White House science adviser. “If people were ever to harness the power of dark energy, they probably could make a bomb that could blow up the whole planet.”

“What is dark energy, anyway?” asked the President.

“The astronomers say that 68 percent of the mass-energy of our universe is dark energy,” said Whitehead. “Scientists don't know exactly what dark energy is, but they believe that it is produced by quantum effects in ordinary space. Every second quantum uncertainty causes particles called virtual particles to appear everywhere. These virtual particles only last a tiny fraction of a second, but there are so many of them in every unit of space that every cubic meter of ordinary space supposedly has a huge amount of dark energy associated with it.”

“That's sounds a little scary,” said the President.

“Suppose someone found a way to manipulate a vacuum so that the virtual particles in it stayed around for a few seconds, rather than lasting only a tiny fraction of a second,” speculated Whitehead. “That would unleash the power of dark energy lurking in ordinary space. The explosive effect would be unbelievable. It might well be enough to blow up the entire planet.”

“But these guys in... in...what's it called again?” said the President.

“Kazmenistan,” said the President's chief of staff.

“These guys in Kazmenistan couldn't have the science needed to create this type of bomb, could they?” asked the President.

“Our intelligence indicates that the capital city of Kazmenistan has various research centers capable of advanced scientific research,” said the director of the CIA.

“Then maybe it isn't a bluff,” said the President.

Heated discussions went on for days in the Oval Office of the White House. Finally the President made a fateful decision. He decided to launch a surprise nuclear attack on all the cities of Kazmenistan. The President solemnly announced his decision to his main military leaders and cabinet leaders.

“My science adviser tells me that if Kazmenistan really does have a dark energy bomb, it could blow up the entire planet,” said the President gravely. “We can't take any chances. We are launching today a full scale nuclear attack that will wipe out all possible places where this dark energy bomb might be in Kazmenistan. It's going to be a surprise attack, so they won't have time to sneak their dark energy bomb out of the country.”

The attack was launched with devastating effect, using ICBMs and nuclear missiles launched from Trident nuclear submarines. All of the cities of Kazmenistan were destroyed. The nuclear fallout killed millions outside of the cities. 

A few hours after the attack, the President of the United States sat glumly in the Oval Office of the White House, along with his national security adviser and chief of staff.

“I guess it will be a long time before we can access their oil and metals, with all the radiation left from the attack,” said the chief of staff.

Then a young aide entered the Oval Office.

“Mr. President, you should read this,” said the aide. “It's the last message sent from the President of Kazmenistan before our nukes hit the country. Sorry about the delay in getting this message to you, but it was hard to translate their language.”

The President and the national security adviser read the message together. It said this:

Dear Mr. President:

I am sure you are far too intelligent a man to have believed for a moment our ridiculous story about a dark energy bomb that could destroy the world. It was, of course, a complete bluff, without any truth whatsoever. Since our story has failed to persuade you to change your plans, we have no choice but to agree to them. Your US troops may enter our country at any time. We will cooperate fully.

Yours cordially

Akmed Khalani, President of Kazmenistan

At a loss for a sentence, the President resorted to a one-syllable response: “Oops.”

The President's national security adviser ripped up the note into a hundred pieces, and then said: “This message never was written.”

Could Neptune's Tiny New Moon Be an Alien Spaceship?

A tiny new moon has been discovered around the planet Neptune, the first new moon to be discovered around Neptune in a decade. The moon was discovered by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute while poring over some data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

For now the moon has the drab name S/2004 N1, and its size is estimated by scientists as about 20 kilometers. This new moon orbits between two much larger moons, named Proteus and Larissa, with sizes of about 400 and 200 kilometers respectively.

Scientists think that the existence of a moon this small in this orbit is surprising. It seems surprising that a moon this small could have avoided both of two different fates which would have eliminated it from its current position: (1) the fate of falling into the much larger nearby moon Proteus because of gravitational attraction; (2) the fate of being struck by an asteroid early in the formation of the solar system, when asteroids were flying around much more commonly.

Referring to the early solar system and the newly discovered Neptune moon, a New Scientist article says, “In the post-Triton chaos, such a small rock should have been swept up to become part of Proteus, or broken up by interloping asteroids sometime after the system settled down.” So the existence of the new moon is something of a riddle.

Now as long as we have a cosmic mystery, I think we are entitled to think outside of the box, and ask: is it possible that the new moon of Saturn may be a recent arrival to the solar system – perhaps a spaceship from another star?

This question is not quite as outrageous as it may seem at first. If the new moon were, say, 1000 kilometers in width, then it would be pretty ridiculous to suggest even a remote possibility that it came from another star.

However, a size of twenty kilometers (about 12 miles) is actually within the size range imagined by scientists for one type of interstellar spacecraft: an artificial world spaceship, originally called the Bernal Sphere.

The Bernal Sphere was originally conceived in 1929 by John Desmond Bernal as a mobile artificial world which could travel from one star to another. In a web page on the Bernal Sphere, the British Interplanetary Society lists a size of 16 kilometers as its proposed size, and mentions it having a population of 20,000 people. Such a traveling artificial world could be created by hollowing out an asteroid, or it could be constructed from materials created from asteroids or lunar materials.

A Bernal Sphere (which could also be a cylinder) might create artificial gravity for its inhabitants by simply rotating, thereby creating artificial gravity through centrifugal force. Such a spaceship would not be designed to travel from one star to another in a single lifetime. It would instead be designed to reach another star after a long slow journey lasting many generations. 

The same web page mentions some work done by Bond and Martin to create detailed engineering specs for a cylindrical artificial world spaceship similar to a Bernal Sphere. Below are pictures of the spaceships they designed. In their design, the radius of these rotating cylinders is 5 kilometers, meaning the total length of the proposed spaceships is some 250 kilometers.

Credit: Adrian Mann/British Interplanetary Society

In light of such plans, it can be said that there is nothing unreasonable about the idea that aliens might have created an artificial world spaceship of 20 kilometers, and parked it in orbit somewhere in the solar system. But is it conceivable that some alien civilization might have had the technology to do such a thing?

The universe is about 13 billion years old, and astronomers say that intelligent life could have evolved on other planets millions or even billions of years ago. When scientists imagine what a civilization could do if it were millions of years more advanced than ours, they imagine astonishing engineering feats such as the dismantling of planets or the construction of spheres surrounding an entire star (Dyson spheres). Compared to such possibilities, the creation of a traveling world spacecraft of 20 kilometers is a relatively modest task.

In short, the creation of a traveling world spaceship of about 20 kilometers in size is something that would be similar to what Earth scientists have already envisioned doing, and we have reason to suspect that many alien civilizations might be capable of undertaking such a task (and also tasks that are vastly more difficult).

So is it possible, then, that S/2004 N1 (the newly discovered moon of Neptune) is an alien spaceship, a traveling world spacecraft that originated in another solar system? Yes, it is possible. But it is not likely. Even though the existence of a moon of this size in this orbit is surprising to scientists, one would need more basis for suspicion before drawing any extraordinary conclusion about the moon.

But I suggest that this moon may be worthy of further investigation, to rule out the possibility of an artificial origin.

The Stem Cell Starlet: A Science Fiction Story

The filming of Scene 53 of Gina Tyler's latest movie went horribly wrong: instead of seeing her narrowly passing through a burning hall, the director saw the lovely star catch on fire.

Using cheap plywood, the special effects crew had rigged up a hallway to catch on fire. The shot on the Hollywood sound stage was supposed to show the actress running through the burning hall, and escaping to safety. But somehow the burning hall collapsed while they were filming the scene. The burning plywood fell on Gina's body, knocking her out. By the time the movie crew had removed the plywood, they found Gina's body horribly burned.

Gina was rushed to the hospital, and her husband Alan got there as fast as he could. When Alan went into Gina's hospital room, he found her body wrapped in bandages. She was connected to various medical machines. Alan cringed when he saw this depressing sight.

“Does she have a chance?” Alan asked Dr. Coe.

“She's in a coma, hanging by a thread,” explained Dr. Coe. “I'm afraid her chances are very slim at this point.”

Alan sat in Gina's hospital room staring into space. Eventually a visitor came in, a young man named Richard Crick.

Crick introduced himself and expressed his sympathies. “Wouldn't it be great if you could have your wife back just as she was before?” he asked.

Alan stared coldly at Crick.

“Believe it or not, it's possible,” said Crick. “There's a way to do it. I work for a group that specializes in complete recovery from accidents such as this. We use stem cells.”

“So let's get started,” said Alan.

“There's a catch,” said Crick. “The work of our research group isn't just cutting edge – it's bleeding edge. We haven't got FDA approval yet for our techniques. So the only way we can start our work is if your wife dies first. Then we're free to try anything we wish.”

Alan was repulsed by this talk, and asked the man to leave.

Later the doctors had a talk with Alan. They told him his wife would probably never come out of her coma, and that if she did she would have a painful life with a very disfigured appearance. Alan was asked whether he wanted the doctors to unplug the heart and lung machines that were keeping his wife alive in her coma. Alan sadly agreed.

The machines were unplugged, and Alan watched as his wife's vital signs ended. A few minutes later someone from the hospital pronounced Gina dead.

Then Richard Crick entered the hospital room. He came with seven other people dressed in white lab coats.

“Alan, remember what we were talking about?” asked Crick. “The stem cell therapy? We can do it now. We have complete freedom of action now that your wife has been pronounced dead. We can bring her back from death, and make her body as good as new. Just give us permission, and we'll get started right now.”

Alan stood for a few seconds with a bewildered expression on his face.

“Alan, you have to decide right now,” said Crick. “We have to act before your wife loses more of her brain cells. It's now or never.”

“Okay, do it,” said Alan.

The men in white coats rushed Gina's body on to a stretcher, and wheeled her to another room in the hospital. Alan tried to follow them into the room, but was told to stay out.

Alan waited in the hospital's waiting room for fourteen hours. Finally Crick came to see him.

“We've done it,” he said. “The stem cell therapy worked. We brought your wife back from death. And she's as beautiful as ever.”

Alan was taken to a hospital room where his wife was recovering. When he came into the room, he couldn't believe what he saw. There was his wife, with the same beauty that had made her a movie star.

Alan began talking to his wife, and found that even though her memory and speech were damaged, they still functioned fairly well. Alan thought to himself: she may never be able to memorize a movie script, but at least I have her back.

A few hours later Crick entered the hospital room, and Alan thanked him tearfully.

“Alan, there's one little issue you should be aware of,” said Crick. “We had to break a whole lot of rules to do what we did, and we did quite a bit of jamming round pegs into square holes. Your wife's recovery from death is a kind of scientific miracle, but it doesn't come with any lifetime guarantees. We used some highly experimental tissue replacement, and we don't know how long it will last. Maybe it will last a lifetime, or it could fall apart at any time.”

Alan thanked Crick again, and tried not to think much about his warning. After a few weeks he brought his wife Gina back to their Malibu mansion. Gina began a slow program of recovering her motor skills and language skills.

Four months later Alan came over to Gina with a smile on his face.

“Great news, darling!” he said. “You've been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.” It was for a film she had finished before the accident.

“The Oscar?” Gina said. “But do you think I could handle getting up on that stage and giving a speech, if I won?”

“You can do it,” said Alan.

The big night of the Academy Awards ceremony finally arrived. The reporter's cameras flashed as Alan and Gina entered the huge theater crowded with movie stars, directors, and producers.

A famous actor opened the white envelope and read the Oscar result.

“The winner for Best Performance by an Actress in a motion picture is... Gina Tyler, for The Shining Dream.”

Gina kissed her husband's cheek, and he helped her rise from her seat. She slowly walked up to the podium on the stage of the theater. There was a huge round of applause. Gina knew she was being watched by hundreds of millions on television.

At the podium Gina held the Oscar statue in her hands and looked out at the crowd in the theater. Then she felt a horrible sensation. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, a feeling that her flesh was dissolving. 

The horrified crowd watched as the left half of Gina's face sagged down and then fell on her left breast, like a marshmallow on a stick melting when the stick is inserted into the flames of a campfire. The same thing then happened to the right half of Gina's face. Finally all that was left of her face was a bony fleshless skull.

After standing there on the podium for several seconds without any face, Gina fell to the ground. Medical personnel rushed her body to the hospital.

Everyone at the Academy Awards ceremony was distraught, except for the show's producer. “Do you know how many Twitter tweets this has produced?” he said excitedly. “Our ratings will go through the roof.”

At the hospital Alan was told his wife was dead. He was approached again by Richard Crick.

“Sorry about the glitch,” said Crick. “I gave you fair warning. But we can do again what we did before. We can bring her back. We'll just try a slightly different stem cell therapy.”

“No dice,” said Alan. “Get me the number of the Hollywood Cemetery.”

When the coroner came to examine the body, Alan spoke philosophically.

“We tried to cheat Death itself, and for a while it worked,” said Alan. “But it looks like Death, as always, had the last laugh.”

Cosmic False Alarm: No Evidence of Activity Before the Big Bang

Most astronomy textbooks describe the Big Bang as the fiery beginning of everything, when the whole known universe started to expand from a tiny point of fantastically high temperature and density. But in 2010 the scientists Roger Penrose and V.G.Gurzadyan created quite a stir when they published a paper entitled “Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity.”

The WMAP data in question is data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a satellite which has analyzed the cosmic background radiation. The cosmic background radiation is the faint microwave afterglow of the Big Bang, and its discovery in the 1960's was one of the two main pieces of evidence for the Big Bang theory, the other being the expansion of the universe. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson led to them winning the Nobel Prize in physics. The cosmic background radiation bathes the Earth from all directions of the sky in a highly uniform temperature of 3.2 degrees Kelvin.

What Penrose and Gurzadyan claimed to have detected are concentric circles in the cosmic background radiation, which they have claimed may support Penrose's highly speculative and idiosyncratic theory of a cyclical universe, called CCC, which stands for conformal cyclic cosmology. This theory does not seem to be supported by any cosmologists other than Penrose and Gurzadyan themselves, despite the claim in their paper.

The WMAP data for the cosmic background radiation is shown below, and no matter how you magnify this image, you will not be able to see any circles with your eyes. Penrose and Gurzadyan used statistical techniques that led them to see circles where the naked eye does not detect them. Their circles are “circles you may see if you tweak the data in our special way” kind of circles.

The paper by Penrose and Gurzadyan attracted attention in the popular press, and it led to a few headlines back in 2010 saying that scientists may have detected traces of something from before the Big Bang. Other very careless headline writers used the paper by Penrose and Gurzadyan to justify headlines about hints of a cyclical universe or hints of a universe existing before our universe. But this uproar was a gigantic case of a false alarm, a classic case of runaway hype. No one has detected any evidence of all of anything occurring before the Big Bang, nor have they detected anything supporting the idea of a cyclical universe.

Other scientists tried to replicate the findings of Penrose and Gurzadyan, and ended up debunking their findings. There was this scientific paper by Wehus and Eriksen which examined the same data, and found no evidence of anomalies other than what would be produced by chance. Then there was this scientific paper by Moss, Scott, and Zibin which also debunked the findings of Penrose and Gurzadyan. Then there was this scientific paper by Hajian which also found that the alleged circles are not anomalous.

The link here gives a Nature article on the controversy, which is entitled “No evidence of time Before Big Bang: Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.”

Apparently there may be some way to statistically torture the WMAP data to get something weakly resembling concentric circles, but it is nothing different from what one would be expected to get from a random data set. It's a little like the fact that hundreds of digits deep into a printout of the digits of pi (the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle) we find 7777 followed about 80 digits later by another 7777. But nonrandom as it may seem, this type of thing is exactly what one might expect to find in a set of random digits of the same length.

If we did find evidence of circles in the cosmic background radiation, which were hard to explain by chance, it would not be evidence of some cosmic cycle existing before the Big Bang. It would merely be another unexplained mystery about the Big Bang. We already have lots of those, such as the mystery of what caused the Big Bang. In fact, it can be said rather firmly that there is nothing we could detect in the cosmic background radiation that would be evidence of a previous cycle of a cyclical universe. If there had been any activity or previous cycle before the Big Bang, all trace of it would have been entirely wiped out by the unimaginable heat and density of the Big Bang, far more certainly than a 100 megaton H-bomb would wipe out any trace of a building if that building is at ground zero. This point has been made by numerous scientists such as Robert Jastrow, who pointed out that even if there had been some history of the universe before the Big Bang, it would have been entirely wiped out by the Big Bang.

We have not one particle of evidence of any natural events or processes or history existing prior to the Big Bang. And it is extremely unlikely that we ever will have any such evidence. Like it or not, the Big Bang is a locked door. We are forever barred from tracing back any history of our universe prior to this event. 

 

As for the notion of a cyclical universe, it is on life-support ever since the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The one cyclical theory of the universe which seemed halfway plausible was the theory of an oscillating universe. This theory held that the current expansion of the universe would slow down because of gravitational contraction, and that the universe's expansion would be followed by an equally lengthy period of contraction, ending in a “big crunch” in which the universe became incredibly dense and hot as it was at the time of the Big Bang. The theory of an oscillating universe held that there were an infinite number of cycles consisting of a Big Bang, a period of expansion, a period of contraction, and a Big Crunch. However, the theory was ruled out when scientists discovered in the 1990's that the universe's expansion is accelerating, meaning the universe will continue expanding forever, never to contract down to a hot and dense state. No other cyclical theory of the universe has gained wide acceptance. Like it or not, the finding that the universe is accelerating suggests with almost final certainty that our universe has only one cycle, consisting of a Big Bang followed by endless expansion.