Author looking for Guidance for a Novel set in Space

[PabloSammartino]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for clicking on my topic. This is my first post ever, I've just registered.

I'll introduce myself. My name is Pablo, I'm a 24 year old french aspiring author.

A few weeks ago, I started working on a novel manuscript based on a simple question: What if an astronaut partook on a future NASA mission designed to launch him to the edge of the Universe to find its limits ?

Thus, because I don't come from any scientific background, and have just started to nitpick knowledge about space very recently, I'm in the dire need of informations about the mystery that is Universe, and what we already know about it nowadays, to base my novel on very accurate facts before adding in the fiction to send my little guy out of our world.

Does anyone know where I could start ?

What are the essentials I need to focus on to have credibility ? And what structures would you recommend getting in contact with, to perhaps get an interview with someone who works in that field ?

Thanks in advance for welcoming me, and have a great day.

 

[Gondos]

Welcome Pablo,
Your protagonist will be limited by the merciless speed limit that is the speed of light. Even if he could travel close to it, when he'd come back the universe would be several tens of billions years older, even if only a couple of days have passed for him.
Unless you use some kind of warp drive, you'll have trouble finding a volunteer for this mission^^
You'll also need to find a good excuse for using a human subject instead of a robotic probe in the first place.
As for the edge of the universe, maybe there is none, maybe we live inside a gigantic blackhole, who knows, but that's where you come in
Hum, this gives me some gloomy ideas about recursively hiding inside blackholes to escape the heat death of the universe, quite chillling

 

[N_Molson]

I find this one interesting, at least to get an idea of what's probably ahead in time... until Time itself is no more.

"We have a pace of life that's based on the energy available to us now. You could imagine living conscious system that could have a very different pace, therefore, can extend out, at least, a lot farther that you'd imagine otherwise. You could have a living system where if, it had a thought every 10 trillions years, that would seem normal. Even if our life dies out, one could imagine at some time arbitrarily far in the future, a fluctuation occurs which allows intelligent life to exist again for a little while. So you might have 'islands' in time of intelligence."

Also, watch Startalk episodes on YT (with Neil deGrasse Tyson).

 

[Urwumpe]

A few weeks ago, I started working on a novel manuscript based on a simple question: What if an astronaut partook on a future NASA mission designed to launch him to the edge of the Universe to find its limits ?

Well, the biggest problem would be knowing where it actually is. Its like trying to take a boat to reach the horizon, but when you get there, there is only more ocean and a new horizon ahead.

Now, I don't want to play Space Police here, its your novel and you can hammer the universe around as you like in it. And the current scientific knowlegde of the universe is some sort of fiction by itself, since we really know nothing yet. Its just a fiction that excludes what we already know that it can't be like that. But still leaves many things open that we don't even know yet or could even imagine yet.

In our state of science, the big bang happened everywhere and what we call "The end of the known universe", is actually just the beginning of the universe seen from the future. We can't reach it by going with the time. Any attempt to reach it would involve some exotic theory of how to break out of the fabric of space time and the laws of causality. Now, luckily, you are the author and can do everything you want, right. Maybe just letting everything at least follow its own rules consequently. Maybe more interesting than the journey in first place, would be how you could actually discover a way to break out of the universe. Maybe even observe the universe for a brief moment from the outside, before it catches us again.

And of course, the opposite end of the universe sits right inside our brain.

 

[N_Molson]

Yes, this is a thing I finally understood, but it took time, like a couple of decades. It is counter-intuitive, but as far as we know, the Universe has no boundaries. You can't sum it up in 3D or 4D (with time), and our brain isn't wired to work with more dimensions. Any attempt to give a 2D or 3D spatial representation or model of the Universe is guaranteed to fail.

The major misconception (and I fell into it a long time) is that the Universe IS NOT a bubble. The 'Big Bang' expression is very misleading, as said Urwumpe there's not a single 'point' of origin. It isn't at all like an atomic bomb exploding, with a 'ground zero'. It happened 'everywhere at once'. So we're not 'at the center', or 'near the edge'. This works within with a galaxy, but not at the scale of the Universe. We're 'included into the Universe', at a given moment in Time.

 

[Urwumpe]

Yes, this is a thing I finally understood, but it took time, like a couple of decades. It is counter-intuitive, but as far as we know, the Universe has no boundaries. You can't sum it up in 3D or 4D (with time), and our brain isn't wired to work with more dimensions.

The major misconception (and I fell into it a long time) is that the Universe IS NOT a bubble. The 'Big Bang' expression is very misleading, as said Urwumpe there's not a single 'point' of origin. It isn't at all like an atomic bomb exploding, with a 'ground zero'. It happened 'everywhere at once'. So we're not 'at the center', or 'near the edge'. This works within with a galaxy, but not at the scale of the Universe. We're 'included into the Universe', at a given moment in Time.

How interesting it would be though, if we could find out that the big bang happened in some places sooner or later...

 

[N_Molson]