Tomas sighed and closed down the report, there was nothing he could do about them arming themselves, that was one of the reasons why he didn’t want to share their technology with them, he knew what they would do with it. He opened up the next report, this one from Professor Hyeon Seo-yun. It informed him that their first interstellar trip was a success, the exploration ship Star Gazer has arrived from its trip to the Alpha Centauri system, the system closest to us. It started its journey more than a year ago, with their version of the alien hyperdrive they were able to travel at ten times the speed of light, making the 4.3 light years trip in just over five months, they spent another month there collecting data and looking around the system and then spent another five months back, it’s now traveling at sub light speed from the edge of our solar system, the edge being the place where Sun’s influence was low enough for a ship to enter hyperspace, which was a few light hours past Pluto, it will take it a few months more to travel back to Mars. The drives worked perfectly even on a trip that long, as did the stasis pods the crew used while in hyperspace, just as Seo-yun assured him they will, but Tomas was still a bit skeptical, he wanted to wait a bit more before they undertook such a long trip, but Seo-yun insisted that there was no need, that they understood the technology and had everything under control, Tomas chose to defer to her judgment and gave her the permission. The report contained a mountain of scientific information that Tomas didn’t understand, sensor readings, readings from the planet orbiting one of the suns in the system and others, he scrolled down until he found Seo-yun’s translation of the data, she tended to leave Tomas notes on the more scientific reports she sent him, he insisted that he get any report on matters she deemed important. Her notes told him that while this was a giant leap and a momentous event in human history, the system itself wasn’t impressive, there was nothing there of interest to them, the one planet was unremarkable, nothing more than a rock, with no or very little materials that they used, she didn’t recommend colonization of that system. There were talks between Tomas and his “council” on colonization of other star systems, they all agreed that if they started colonization they would start with a planet with more hospitable conditions, preferably an Earth like world, but based on the map recovered from the Alien ship, those planets were so far away that it would take them decades to get there from the Solar system. For now they would stay in their birth system.
Just as he finished the report, his second, Nadia pinged him and informed him that Seo-yun wanted to speak to him, he told her to send her in.
A moment later Seo-yun walked in, she had her hair tied in a knot on top of her head, and was holding a datapad in her hand, it was amusing to Tomas how most of those who were born before the age of implants had tendency to review information on their datapads rather than their implants.
“Hello Seo-yun, I have just finished reading your report on the Alpha Centauri mission.” Tomas said.
“Hi, well, I have something even more exciting to show you now.” She sat down on the chair in front of his desk, they had abandoned any formality between them a long time ago. She smiled brightly, with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
Tomas raised an eyebrow. “More monumental than a trip to another star system?”
“Oh yes, much more.” She said.
Intrigued, Tomas motioned for her to continue.
“I have two things to tell you, I waited until we were sure about both of them, it was coincidence that the final test results came within a day of each other.” She said. Tomas knew that Seo-yun had a lot of experiments going on, and that she didn’t bring them to him until they were successful. He kept silent and waited for her to tell him more.
“First, we have been experimenting on faster than light communications, there were some mentions of it in the alien databases, but the data was too corrupted to be recovered, but it helped us by telling us that FTL comms were possible. So we threw ourselves on the problem. First idea we had was to use hyperspace capable comm drones, but since ships or in this case drones can only enter hyperspace when they were sufficiently away from a star’s influence we rejected it, but kept it as a possibility for communication between star systems. Then we got the idea to use gravity. We had discovered that gravity propagates at the speed substantially faster than the speed of light, when we were developing artificial gravity generators. But our understanding of gravity is not yet large enough to pull it off efficiently, we don’t have a power source strong enough to create a gravity pulse focused and strong enough to reach any distance that would be of use to us. So after these failures we tried to follow more abstract and unconventional paths. We tried speeding up the light, at which we of course failed.” She grinned. “We played with the concept of micro wormholes, but decided that at our current level we weren’t proficient enough to pull that off safely, if at all. And then we went back to hyperspace, we know that the law in hyperspace are different than in regular space. We studied the laws of hyperspace and finally discerned that the reason ships can only enter hyperspace when the stars influence was low enough has to do with the mass of the object trying to enter the space. After an object with mass passes certain point of gravitation pull on it, it can safely pass through the barrier between regular space and hyperspace, if it tried to enter hyperspace while the gravitation pull on it was above that point, the gravity would hamper it, and it wouldn’t achieve, for the lack of a better word enough “thrust” to be pushed through the barrier, resulting in it being destroyed. Theoretically one could enter hyperspace within a star system, but it would require insane amount of energy, the closer to the sun you are the more energy you would need, while after it crosses the “passing point” the amount of energy drops off sharply. So after we learned this we set on to find a way to pass communications through hyperspace. We discovered that if we send a charged luxon particles, particles that move at the speed of light, into hyperspace they became tachyons, particles that move faster than the speed of light, and move in the direction they were moving prior to entering hyperspace until they run out of charge. So we devised a way to send information with these particles, we devised computers that can interpret the information once tachyons leave hyperspace and become luxon particles again. So now we have FTL or rather near instantaneous communications, the lag is so small that it is negligible, with a few little problems, one is that the communications are instantaneous in the range of 50 light years, after that the tachyons lose speed rapidly, even if they are still charged, but it will still be much faster communication than anything else. The lag increases substantially after 50 ly point. But we won’t need to worry about that for a long time, we even have some ideas that could effectively remove the problems, we could place rerouting stations that would receive the communication and then relay it for another 50 ly, if we ever need to communicate over such vast distances. The other problem are the calculations required to send the communication on target, the math is abysmal, the biggest problem is that space, our galaxy even is in constant motion, while hyperspace is not, and as such we need to calculate the amount of charge the communication needs, then the coordinates of the receiver, as they will be after the communication exits hyperspace. The only computers that are able to calculate this are our most advanced quantum computers, and only those that have an Ai in them, the Ai’s ability to manage multitude of problems simultaneously lowers the margin of error to barley 0.001%”