Time is of the Essence

haleighdever:

Ugggggh I mean, don’t get me wrong I love dogs and don’t mind watching them on occasion… but not being a morning person, this whole waking up before 7 am thing is killing me! I’m gonna be like this all day so, if you see me at all expect whining.

thebeebumbles:

I’m handed something perfect yet still I find flaws..

They changed the deductable on us last minute. Now I have to wait until money comes in on the 3rd. FUCK. I WANT TO DRIVE! I NEED A JOB! STOP MAKING ME WAIT YOU STUPID FUCKING LUCK.

I GET MY FUCKING CAR BACK TOMORROW!!!!

It is not my forte today.
BUT WHY MUST I HAVE SO MUCH IN MY HEAD!?
I want to continue the book but little details make it so hard to do. I NEED INTERESTING THINGS TO TALK ABOUT.

                Earth, the only known place in the universe where life had developed, is threatened. My team of astronomers, biologists, and geologists, has been searching for a replacement, a destination for every living being, down to the smallest microbial that has evolved upon this used up chunk of rock. It has been discovered little over a year ago that we are on a collision course for what we used to think was nothing but theory, guess work done by our physicists from the last decade. It turns out that the center of our galaxy, the great spiral of stars, planets, dust, space rocks and centuries old satellites, is really rotating around a super mass of “stuff”. “What stuff?” you might ask. The reality is that we don’t know. So much “stuff” that it holds hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes in an infinite elliptical spiral, balanced only by the elegant push and pull of cosmic giants. So much matter, compacted into an area that is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, that not even light can escape the gravitational pull that this object puts off. The Milky Way galaxy’s focal point is made up by nothing other than a singularity, a black hole.

                Scientists have been speculating for decades that, yes, the Milky Way did indeed rotate around a gravitational singularity, but the effect of this was unknown to anyone until it became obvious that this black hole was growing at an exponential rate. Over the last several billion years, the black hole has been rapidly expanding, enough so to begin devouring star systems around it, thus fueling its growth more so. The human race was oblivious. Black holes are so immensely dense that even the photons in light cannot escape its gravitational pull, so the picture in the sky that we thought was real, was actually long outdated. To begin with, light takes time to travel. At close range, such as almost any distance in which a naked human eye can witness, light appears to travel instantaneously, but this isn’t so. In reality, photons that make up light still have to travel just like everything else. This is where the term “light year” comes into play. A light year is the distance that light can travel in a single Earth year. In our case, the center of the galaxy is approximately 27,000 light years away, so in order to see an image from the stars around the focal point of rotation, we are actually looking at something many millennia old. On top of this, the singularity was holding some light photons back, taking them even longer to get to us. Needless to say, we had no idea it was coming.
                A year ago, we started feeling the effects of the black hole’s pull, or, at least a year is what all of the digital clocks around the world say. That’s when scientists got a clue and realized something was wrong; very, very wrong. The sun recently stopped having as much of a pull on us, and our orbit has all but stopped, leaving some places in perpetual night, or everlasting sunshine. The places that are forever in light are just about unpopulated now; the UV rays and excess heat, being too much for most life forms, and have all but burnt up most of the landscape. The Americas have once again struck lucky, being almost completely on the “dark side of the world,” caused the nearly 15 billion remaining persons to almost entirely immigrate to this area, or to the poles to the south and north of Europe and Africa in attempts to keep cool. Other masses in our solar system haven’t been so lucky as of late. Four months ago the populace had been informed that the planets Pluto, Neptune, and Saturn were evidently missing from view and had more than likely devoured by the endless pull of the black hole. Mars was last month, and two weeks ago nearly every soul was able to witness the moon become stretched and eventually become nothing more than wet length of pocked spaghetti in the ever dark sky. That’s when the suicides and riots began.

It’s an odd feeling, this pull from an invisible source. One is so used to just the downward pull of the Earth that even the most minute difference in gravitational pull in a different direction is disconcerting. At first it just feels like you are a little dizzy, as if you’ve had just a tad too much to drink or the very beginnings of a migraine headache from hell. Over time the feeling just keeps getting worse and worse, and eventually, even walking straight becomes a chore. After a couple months, it started to feel like one was in a tractor beam from Star Trek. There was an ever consistent pull from a direction not entirely from above oneself. At some point the pull was enough to make the task of weighing objects pointless; Earth no longer had a steady -9.8m/s acceleration to objects on its surface.

Once the world knew exactly what its fate was, I was asked firmly to do two tasks for the world: the first being to calculate, to the best of my ability, the amount of time that we had left here on Earth before we were close enough to the singularity for it to be too late for an “ark”-like spacecraft to leave Earth in search of a new home with the aid of the latest attempt at cryogenic-sleep technology. The second was to gather a team of as many scientists I needed to design something to save the planet itself. The first part was simple: use Doppler triangulation from multiple spots on the Earth to determine the velocity of our planet compared to other cosmic bodies that we knew for a fact weren’t moving in the same direction we were. The estimation was approximately a year from the time of the first ominous tug. Designing a savior for the entire planet? That was a different story all together.

Does anyone want to read the first bit of the novel I’m now writing? I’ll post it if I get at least one person who likes or comments on this post.