Surfing Chance - Chapter 13

Universe Alpha[1]

It was nearly the end of the exam session and students were getting ready for the summer holidays. Yoshi was planning to go work as a lifeguard this summer at Shimoda in the Shizuoka Prefecture. He was trained as a diver, but was terribly afraid of giant sea creatures that hide in murky waters. Ema was going to visit her family in Yokohama and then get back to Tokyo for an internship program at JAXA[2]. James was going back to Britain for at least a few weeks to meet up with his friends and family. Nobody had seen Yuri lately, as she applied to take her last exams remotely. She has not been feeling well for a few months. Fermi was still missing from Tokyo and the university was trying to get in touch with him, but he no longer seemed to care about his past responsibilities. He was happy in his Napoli villa with his family reunited. They were rushing the renovation project because he was expecting guests at the end of June. Chance promised to organise a class reunion at his house. Fermi had been growing yellow tomatoes, zucchinis, artichokes, white asparagus, thyme, basil, rosemary and he even planted a few olive tree saplings that were yet to grow in the following years. They repainted the outside walls of the house and prepared guest lodging for at least 10 people.

On the day of the final exam, Ema, James and Yoshi went straight to the Chance's apartment building complex. He was waiting for them and opened a portal as soon they arrived. They were sent one by one to Napoli and they were all greeted by Fermi's mother who was putting aside wood for her compact terrace oven. The guests were treated with homemade lemonade and Venetian Prosecco that was served in red plastic flutes. Guests were invited to arrive at Chance's apartment between 7.30 and 8.30 Tokyo time and at nearly 8.29, the last guests arrived, which was Serghey and Yuri. Serghey persuaded her into joining the team and picked her up himself. Chance teleported the last of them and they arrived in Italy at half passed one, which was just in time for lunch. They had left Tokyo a bit after sunset, and yet in Napoli the weather was perfect for a terrace lunch in the shaded by grapevines. The salty sea breeze was pleasantly cooling and the students were excited to dig into the delicious treats. Fermi's mother prepared a yellow tomatoes and ricotta cheese pizzas as well as classic Margheritas. Fermi was still cooking the Zucchini flowers and he was expecting a traditional Neapolitan lemon tart delivery from their neighbourhood bakery.

Around two, all of them sat around the table and Fermi poured himself a cup of red wine in order to raise a toast:

"What is good and evil? As scientists, we should not rush headfirst into this archaic religious paradigm. The Christian religious text has proven to be defective time and time again in defining moral values.

What I understood in all these years spent off-world is that nature has no good and evil. A flytrap plant will eat insects and a fox will hunt mice not because it is evil, but because it is the natural way of things. People have created the concept when they realized that through tools and intelligence, their actions can cause significant damage.

A hunter, hundreds of thousands of years ago, could not cause the extinction of half the world's animals. Yet, today, these things to happen and the scale of the damage is quick to spiral out of control.

To me, all people make mistakes… all, without exception… sometimes with the best of intention we end up hurting our family members and the ones we love. Our dearest friends. Our children. It is in our nature to break things. It is important however, what we do after such a mistake. We have the choice to either to move on in ignorance or to go back and fix it. Mustering the courage to go back; this is what I consider to be the true test of goodness."

…

When the lot of them finished eating their homemade pizzas and small zucchini focaccias, they were still around the table talking. Yoshi confessed that he was quite anxious of his summer job. James decided to create a fear-facing challenge for him and asked if he would go through with it.

"Are you sure, Yoshi?", asked Ema.

"Yes, I think I am finally ready. If I don't try this now, I will be forever bothered by this ridiculous fobia.". Yoshi saw all the documentaries on fishing and he was scared of the type of monsters that dwell on the sea bottom. Especially at night, he would be terrified to swim in the sea, yet his life guard job might demand this of him.

"Professor, please join me for a bit. I need to explain this to you.", said James as he got up from the dining table. Chance grabbed his wine glass and joined him to talk about the special assignment.

James was whispering so that nobody at the table hears them. Chance started laughing.

"That sounds like a wonderful idea! Let's do it."

Fermi's mom brought over a dark gray kitchen towel and they tied Yoshi's eyes. Chance disappeared into a portal and came back in about 10 minutes.

"I found them."

He opened a portal and asked all of the guests to step into it. The turquoise entrance-way was beautiful and one by one everyone went in. James grabbed Yoshi's shoulders and pushed him in. As soon as all of them were on the other side, Chance closed the portal and now they were in the beautiful under-waters of French Polynesia in an air dome. It was like being at the most beautiful aquarium in the world and they got to witness a whole colony of whales' swim passed them. Sea turtles, fish, shrimp were all around them. They were just in time for sunrise. Yoshi's blindfold was removed and he fell on his back with eyes wide open watching the dome ceiling. His jeans got all wet from the floor of the dome, which Chance did not waterproof. Chance walked to the wall and put his hand through the water wall and touched the back of a passing whale.

He then moved the dome lower to the sea floor and they saw all kinds of coral, fish, octopus, squids and sadly also lots of plastic garbage. They collected as much as they could through the water walls and they put it together. Chance pressed the plastic into a dense cube, but then he got an even better idea. He melted all the collected plastic into a giant surfboard that still retained the colors and textures of all the rubbish items. Green bottles, black bags, face masks, slippers could be seen on the board.

"This is the board that I will use to surf through the cosmos… I never thought of this before, but essentially, I could use any materials as long as it has a break coating. A force field protecting it from being bound by the limitations of physics."

Chance's class was celebrating with him and they were discovering new things together. Soon after they returned from Tahiti back to Napoli and then from Napoli back to Tokyo.

…

After everyone left his apartment, Chance left for Kepler 186f again. He grew accustomed to spending time there and it was comfortable to sleep in the gardens. If you spend 8 hours off-world and 16 hours on Earth, this will obviously speed up one's ageing as perceived by someone from Earth. For Chance this was ok. If he did it every day, this would amount to ageing with 4 months every year, so it was not too hazardous. To people on Earth, he appeared to be working 24/7.

James called him at 9AM the morning after their trip to Italy.

"Hey James, nice to hear you. How have you been?"

"Professor, we saw each other just four hours ago."

"Ah, indeed… time flies.", said the professor when in reality it seemed to him that several days had passed since.

"I have some ideas to discuss. Can we meet now?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Please portal me."

"Ok. Give me 5 minutes."

…

James started to explain his idea:

"Professor, it is possible for you to pass the expansion line of the universe. I have constructed a simulation of the scenario. The thing that you told us about covering your surf board with a coating of the break, this could actually work.

Imagine this, you are at the beach and you catch a wave. You leave yourself to be pulled forward by the current and you capture this motion and you break the E=mc2 and put yourself in a coating of weightlessness and accelerate yourself to a speed of one billion lightyears per second. You should also apply several other coatings on yourself that would protect you from the rise or drop in temperature, time dilation (break time with special relativity) and you'd need to nullify your gravity impact on the cosmos space-time fabric. Otherwise, I'm afraid you will simply swipe it open like a picnic blanket stuck under a sports car.

You don't need to worry about portals or finding the right coordinates. You don't need to think of surviving in outer space for long times. You don't need to worry about changing your body or fending off radiation. In this way, you'd just shoot off with the unimaginable speed like a bullet and you'd pierce through the expansion line in under 50 seconds."

"James, what happens if I won't be able to cross it? Won't I be smashed like a fly to an enormous windscreen?"

"It is a possibility."

"You must have calculated the risk of this happening?"

"Well… given that there is no spacetime outside the expansion line, it is highly likely that anything with mass won't be able to crossover into that new dimension. We don't even know if that space is subject to causality. You may cross over into a realm that freezes you there for all of eternity… Even if you do find a way to apply additional coatings, we don't know if your breakings work outside our universe…. I mean, laws of physics are bound to our home universe."

"When you remove all that is impossible, whatever is left, however improbable must be the only way to surf past the expansion line of the universe…"

…

Chance went out for a smoke on the building rooftop. He needed to take a break and think things over.

If I would have flown with 1 billion light years per second, without nullifying the effect of gravity during motion, the cosmic spacetime would curve around my flight trajectory like a two giant water waves that would ultimately fold into one another. Like a giant jam sandwich. It would have torn the universe apart and destroyed causality, mass and everything in it. I should not overestimate its robustness… yes, it is infinite, but all objects with mass bend it.

"Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve"

A small black hole has a colossal effect on spacetime, it bends it downward infinitely with its intense gravity field.

Chance felt anxious and equally exhilarated about trying something as radical as this. He was bouncing his leg like a horny dog while glancing emptily into nothing. His eyes were void and he was so caught up inside his mind games that he did not feel the cigarette flame reaching his index finger. He crushed the cigarette but under his yellowish boot sole.

If I was to move at this incredible speed without breaking special relativity, the time dilation effect would cause the universe to die before I even reach nearly full lightspeed. The friction of my body with objects and spacetime itself, would produce heat high enough to melt spacetime itself. It would be like striking a match through a cosmic matchbox comb.

In my understanding, there is no such thing as absolute time… meaning a time that is the same for everyone. Time is a glue-like concept that sticks to all objects with mass. It exists around Earth and the Sun and black holes, but it is far from universal. If there was such a thing as absolute time, then increasing my speed to a billion times the speed of light (c*109) then in 46 Earth seconds, I would break out of our universe.

The place to which I will break out will be outside spacetime. Outside time and causality. Ultimately it is impossible to say what will happen when I reach that point, but I would need to keep a part of the current universe around me as a bubble environment. I would need to retain a piece of space-time for myself to be engulfed in (like a space suit).

"Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world." (Archimedes)

I will need to shoot off into space. If I use planet Earth as pool jumping board, it may fly off to outside the solar system and into a whole other galaxy like a flaming baseball. Instead, I should fly off an accelerate gradually. It would almost be like warping space in front of me and teleporting it behind me, with insane speed and precision. Like a sewing needle through cloth, I will pop in and out of spacetime until I reach the outermost limit. I will surf it and then break out of it like a golden fish through a waterbag…

…

In Bunkyo City, in a small apartment in the Atlas Avenue building, Chance was waxing his oversized surfboard in preparation for his cosmic voyage. It was occupying the bigger part of his tiny living room. The board was made of the recycled materials collected from the Ocean and it showed parts of green glass, blue thick plastic, slippers, pampers wrappers and other pieces of plastic packaging. He knew that it might be a one-way flight… a very short one for that matter.

Our universe was formed 14,8 billion years ago and strangely enough, it is now 94 billion light years across. It expanded faster than the speed of light, because the expansion of spacetime itself is not bound by the same rules as objects within it. It would be the same as saying that Usain bolt cannot run as fast as he can if he runs in beach sand… he can run faster on a running lane. Our universe's space time is like the beach sand that stops you from running faster than a certain limit… at the same time, it expands faster than you can run through it. If you were to run through the sand, you'd never reach its limit. However, if you were to glide, on some kind of motorized vehicle, you'd reach it faster than its expansion velocity.

Some scientists say that the universe expansion is like a balloon-rubber table cloth that keeps expanding to fit many guests at the same table. Sadly, no new guests are showing up and what ends up happening is guests sitting further and further apart from one another. Most of the guests that needed to arrive in time for dinner are already here, but the host acts as if more and more have RSVP-ed. In our universe, the number of stars and galaxies is finite. Most if not all of them have already been created and the universe keeps expanding as if there are more to come. Sadly, more are not coming or at least not fast enough and we end up being driven faster and faster apart from one another. Galaxies are accelerating from one another and more than 90% of them are already unreachable even if we were to travel to them at the speed of light.

Chance is planning to fly out of the sandpit. He was getting ready to make himself immaterial, endlessly accelerating past any limit, making the spacetime around him immune to the gravity he'd be creating mid-flight, encapsulating him in spacetime so that Earth time is preserved for the duration of his full journey… he was even thinking of dividing himself into quantum sized particles that would penetrate the expansion line (if it to be a wall) and to rebuild himself on the other side of the barrier.

Mid-thought, he heard an intense knock at his door. It was Yuri.

"Please don't go! If you go through with this plan, you might end up destroying everything. There is another way."

[1] Universe Alpha is the Universe in which Chance and his students explore the universe together.

Universe Beta — scheduled for annihilation.

[2] Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency