space | Martyn K Jones

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about astronomy. Mainly because we’re discovering so much now. All the while Cosmology is in the process of being upended by new observations, and all the old paradigms have become subject to question while others are confirmed. But that’s how science works. You go the way the data tells you.

One of the reasons my thoughts are turning this way is the hoopla over 3I/Atlas, the latest of three large interstellar objects observed whizzing through our solar system. Closest approach to Earth is about 1.8 AU (Astronomical units) or about 269,276,167,260 kilometres or a smidgeon over 700 times the distance to the moon. Not even close.

The usual suspects are out on social media doing the wavy hand ‘look at mee!‘ thing, spouting off about how it could be ‘Aliens!’ without a shred of proof. Even some of the more sober commentators are getting caught up in the fuss because drama gets clicks and in the digital economy, clicks mean cash.

While these antics are entertaining, it doesn’t mean we have to take them seriously. Like speculation about the ‘wisdom of the ancients’ and ‘ancient technologies’. We simply don’t know because there is no incontrovertible evidence, which just highlights our ignorance.

However, this is how we falteringly increase our knowledge of the world, by asking questions, speculating about the answers and either proving or discounting the questions asked or by observation derived from experiment. This is the scientific method. There is no such thing called ‘the science’. Science is questioning and observing. Fudging data to make a postulation or theory work is not ‘science’ but risks producing dogma. And there’s way too much of that about.

Excuse the rant, but I feel quite strongly about this sort of thing.

Anyway. This is besides the point of this post. My collection of what I call my ‘future parables’ has just increased by one with the completion of a tale of humanities first contact with a completely alien species and the end result. It is called “I scatter Lavender”, just under 1900 words. A short first person narrative born from my natural scepticism, first hand experience of my fellow humans and online chatter over the recent interstellar objects whizzing through our solar system from who knows where.

While not working on my kitchen upgrade and various repairs to the house, fixing the drains and other general domesticities, this is what I do. I’ve been keeping a video record of the completed stages, and may put it up on YouTube / Rumble / Bitchute in one to three minute chunks when my new kitchen is finished.

Christmas means family, and we have a full house this year which means all my projects will grind to a halt for a couple of weeks until it is time to take down the decorations, pick through the festive debris and carry on regardless into 2026.

Spent the day cutting up fallen branches in the yard after our return home. There’s a lot to do still, but at least I’ve made a start. The main yard is now clear of windfalls, but all that has done is show me how much more there is to do, fixing the tree damage due to that storm and our secondary septic systems grey water drains are backing up.

What all these manual problem solving tasks do is give you time to think,while focused on the mainly physical, letting inspiration come as your hindbrain focuses on the mundane, allowing the frontal lobes to play around with concepts and storylines uninterrupted.

Like on the ferry over, I was making some routine notes and looked up to see a curious sight. Looking out of the window at a 45 degree angle a life ring attached to the ships rail gave rise to a curious optical illusion that made me think. To the left, in the direction of travel, the sea looked to be flowing normally toward the life ring (From left to right), but around the edges appeared to compress into streams warping around the life ring, and to the right of the life rind, appeared to be accelerating rapidly in opposition to the direction of flow.

I blinked, but the sight did not disappear. Turned my gaze from right to left. Tilted my head and then watched curiously as the illusion changed. All this gave rise to some half buried thoughts I’d had about space warp drives, and how they might work within space / time. What effects would they produce for those traveling within the warp bubble? Would such a field produce an anti relativistic effect for those traveling within it? I’ve explored this idea before in ‘Sky full of stars’ where the drive used to speed FTL travel has some unexpected effects of space / time for those using it to travel between star systems.

That idea being such a vessel traveling faster and further would, because of space / time compression and distortion, cause said vessel to arrive slightly backwards in time, because the flow of space / time around a warp field would mean that space / time in the direction of travel would be accelerated and compressed past the warp field, but, as nature abhors a vacuum, so does space, and would subsequently rush in to fill the void behind the accelerating bubble of space / time containing the FTL drive ship. Like a ships wake, only this phenomena would help accelerate the warp bubble at an increasingly Faster Than Light (FTL) velocity..

Obviously this is only a blog post, and a pretty non technical one at that. However, it is an intriguing thought. Would an Alcubierre type drive behave in such a manner? Einsteinian and Quantum physics say no, but the principles of flow and displacement are well established, and why should they not apply to space / time? Or had I just consumed far too much caffeine that morning?

This sort of thing occurs to me as I meander through my life. I find it more entertainment than anything anyone else can put on screen.