euhal allen writes about...
Challenge 149
Sorry, but the oceans would never boil. At least not until the sun went nova and then the boiling would happen too fast to time.
Since the Galactic Council quarantines an entire system, the Force Globe would encircle the entire system, all that a race would have to use for themselves if they never discovered interstellar flight, including the Oort cloud. The Galactic Council does have respect for property rights.
It is the purpose of the Galactic Council to quarantine, not directly execute the inhabitants of a system. Only if the sun in question were of sufficiently low power output would the Council be forced to place a Force Globe within a system.
And, since, as efficient as the modules are by Galactic Standards, the power requirements for such a Force Globe would still be tremendous, so the modules are put into place based on the power available at the distance required. Thus the formula for Sol allows for 87,000 modules to balance out the excess energy output of the Sun. The operative word here is balance, the modules must be placed at a position that does not allow for the increase in the available energy, as put forward by the excellently configured challenge, but, at the same time must not be at a distance that would allow it to become insufficiently powered and have the Force Globe fail.
The Galactic Council, in initiating a quarantine, seals the system until its race can break out of the system by defeating the Force Globe. Since no system has been seen to have accomplished such a thing, it is reasonable to assume, for public consumption, that they have died or are in the process of doing so. It is not a matter of importance to the Galactic Council if this is not actually the case since, dead or alive, they are no longer figured into Galactic Council policies.
There are those, of course, as there are in any society, who do not agree with this assessment and do worry about the outcome if a society should break free of quarantine, but, this not yet having happened, and being in a minority, they have the sense to keep their mouths shut and tend to their own business.
One of the things that we find out as we continue on through the story is that the Qwell’Na have a wonderful cognizance of how to use the bureaucracy as both a weapon to interfere with directions that they don’t want the two civilizations to take and as teaching tool for those directions that they want them to follow.
Using bureaucratic methods they can make the englobement as painless as possible, and they do so, since they are the ones who, using the principles of Qwom-Sor, will be picking up and shaping the pieces as those quarantined races reach a place where they can be induced to join the Tunnel Worlds.
euhal
Copyright © 2005 by euhal allen
I can’t remember our ever receiving a footnote before, and footnotes are seldom as interesting as yours, euhal. Thanks for the reassurance that the Galactics don’t really intend to cook the remaining Earthlings in their own Solar System. If I understand your explanation correctly, the Galactics seem intent on setting up what amounts to a one-way window: they can look in, but Earthlings can’t see out.
What concerned me, in Challenge 149, was the idea that the Force Globe would block all radiation from Sol beyond a certain point. The closer the Globe is to the Sun, the hotter it will get. And if it has any reflectivity at all, then the Solar System will receive proportionally more sunlight and heat. Obviously, as you say, it would take a very long time to warm things up appreciably. However, that also means that the Force Globe modules will have to pack their own power supply; they can’t possibly get enough from the Sun. But that should be a minor detail for the Galactics.
A more interesting question is: What is the boundary of the Solar System? The short answer is that there doesn’t seem to be any. The long answer is that you have almost any number of choices:
You can take the heliosphere or heliopause, where the solar wind is balanced by radiation coming in from interstellar space. But the Solar System is moving, and that creates an irregular shape, like that of a comet with a tail: the “stagnation point,” at the center of the “bow shock” will be closest to the Sun. The “heliotail” will stretch out almost indefinitely, until it fades away presumably to the “aft shock.”
The Oort Cloud would not seem to be a good boundary: it extends outwards almost three light years, which means that we may share it with Alpha Centauri. And that may complicate the Galactics’ respect for “property rights.”
- I think the Galactics could settle for an arbitrary boundary somewhere in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto.
But the long and the short of it seems to be the psychological effect. The Force Globe surely couldn’t be a kind of wall that would cause comets to bounce off or, by extension, keep Galactics from visiting or even Earthlings from venturing beyond it. Rather, its purpose seems to be simply to prevent anyone on Earth — or in the Solar System — from seeing the stars any more.
Don
