On the future’s pull on the present
Also an item of old business
So, the ripple effect.
Thanks to stones and ponds, we tend to think of them as occurring on a two-dimensional plane. But there really isn’t such a thing as a two-dimensional plane. I got to thinking about this when watching a science fiction show (The Expanse) and considering the ramifications of searching for an object in space—an object that could be anywhere.
In olden days, the captain of a ship in the age of sail, say, need only keep a sharp lookout on all points of a curved but flattish horizon. Today they must additionally consider submerged threats and airborne, but these are still somewhat routinized in behavior. Like Khan’s thinking in Star Trek II, they’re two-dimensional: submarines and airplanes still cross their respective media laterally, as though on highway overpasses and interchanges. An airplane has a harder task of it, being unanchored to a fixed elevation and beset on all sides and depths by potentially veering bogeys. But a spaceship has it hardest of all. Out there in the gravitationally null free-for-all, “up” and “down” are nonsensical descriptors. An object could be anywhere, heading in any direction whatsoever.
Consider the ripple effect as it would transpire there—not a radial expansion of waves on a flat surface, but a radial expansion of waves in all directions at once.
Aaaaaaaand just like that you’re thinking of time travel, because how can you not, being a speculative-genre novelist chewing on spacetime? Thinking specifically about the nature, in so far as we know it (pretty damn well, apparently1) of the bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline M.O. of gravity and objects, and wondering if an event could have weight…ramifying, rippling, causal weight that projected equally into an aura of surrounding spacetime according to intensity.
What if what we in our uptight, one-way-roadist linearity fail to recognize is that the present is influenced by the future as well as the past? What if the seemingly freakish-at-the-time votes for Brexit and Trump and the Cubs in 2016 were actually a reaction to COVID in 2020?2
I don’t know if this is as nuts as it may initially sound. The deeper our knowledge of nature advances the more we uncover its interconnectivity. Approaching a massive body in space, starfarers would experience the effects of its presence prior to necessarily realizing it was there.
Why would a social event share the properties of a stellar or planetary event? Why wouldn’t it, when everything that exists in the world is a happening troubling the calm of its puddle?
Historians have long puzzled over the origins of WWI. It’s been suggested that a couple well-placed fax machines would have completely forestalled this unprecedented global conflict, had they only existed at the time. Certainly no one among the powers-that-were anticipated the total breakup of the world order and the annihilation of twenty million human lives. And everyone knows that WWI planted the seeds of WWII.
But what if we actually have that backwards, and the first world war was triggered by the second?
I effed up
I effed up when I started this Substack. I uploaded a vast swath of email addresses in what I incorrectly believed was an introductory capacity: These addresses would receive my initial submission and then have the opportunity to subscribe or not. In fact I was automatically subscribing every email address I copied in. This was an embarrassing mistake and I apologize.
For various reasons I’m now weighing converting Tallboy Radio from a free account to a paid one. If I make the change, the fee would be nominal. (There’s good reason to believe that the site’s algorithms favor fee-based accounts.) This will no doubt cause scores of you to reconsider (or consider for the first time, as the case may be) whether or not you wish to be subscribed to Tallboy Radio. I’m not going to keep track one way or the other, so if you Irish exit from this particular party, this particularly careless host won’t ever know.
“Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” - John Wheeler, 2000
I meant what I said about the Cubs.