Anti-Gravity

 A brief essay on one under-emphasised aspect of my space opera series Chronicles of the Deep Patrol, namely some of the implications of a setting that includes:

Anti-Gravity

Perhaps the most important development on Earth after the passing of the Wavefront was the discovery of working anti-gravity engines followed by their successful reverse engineering. With relatively cheap and simple anti-gravity drives the solar system was opened up for exploration. This also allowed easy contact with Minerva with mixed results.

Not neglected at the time was that working anti-gravity would imply that faster than light travel was possible. (The appearance of the planet Minerva and later the Wavefront removing more than half the population of the Earth and replacing a quarter of the land area would seem to be an indication, but none of that was placed on such a firm theoretical footing as to allow controlled exploitation of the phenomenon.)

Faster than light travel was developed in a handful of years by several different teams. By this time it was clear that local space had changed; exo-planets with oxygen atmospheres had been observed where there had previously been none and radio waves from other solar systems had been detected, including broadcasts in human languages.

These were not the only implications. Firstly, it showed that space-time was more susceptible to manipulation than had previously been thought. Creating gravity without mass warps not only space but time. Various states of local space thought to be impossible became merely implausible after the passing of the Wavefront.

In addition other types of travel were possible. Wormholes, or bridges, allowing instantaneous travel between two points in space by superimposing their positions were found. For various reasons they were favoured by human derived AIs; biological humans find them uncomfortable to use and all but impossible to control.

One final result was the ability to change space and time more fundamentally, varying them so that they no longer resembled those of our universe. These zones, the dimensional gateways, had initially been thought to hold the answers to the cause and source of the Wavefront. In fact nothing could be further from the truth.

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