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The Gap:
Do we have an official answer on what kind of jumble we see and hear (via light and radio and other stuff) if we look at a world from 400 or more light years away (and thus back into the Gap)?
Obviously things have to be as jumbled as the unreadable history books in a library for the Gap to work, or else it would be easy to map how long it lasted and what was happening (at least visually, via radio and TV, etc). But how do people run it?
Pet theory:
I am 99% sure that the Gap is a cosmic quantum-level repair for a causality breach caused by Drandle Dreng messing around with pre-Earthfall civilizations. Fight me.
Pet theory:
I am 99% sure that the Gap is a cosmic quantum-level repair for a causality breach caused by Drandle Dreng messing around with pre-Earthfall civilizations. Fight me.
Our current campaign (midway through level sixteen) is gradually uncovering the reason for the Gap (and Aroden's death thrown into the bargain) in our DM's universe.
Causality breaches and repairs of such were definitely involved, although (unless Drandle Dreng is an avatar of a Iomedae, Desna or Sarenrae) he is unlikely to show up at the finale..
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It's a good question - I guess it could be a kind of quantum pairing: The stars and nightsky looks perfectly fine and normal, but if an observer is trying to piece together "what was happening a few hundred/thousand years ago" then the measurements start going all screwy and not making sense (one bit of the sky gives you a different answer than the other, kind of thing..)
The gap is at the very least some form of quantum b+~&%@+!tery.
So, going light speed distance away would technically work with our current understanding of physics. It does not in universe. Even if a galaxy is hundreds of thousands of light years across.
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The gap is at the very least some form of quantum b@***$+$tery.
So, going light speed distance away would technically work with our current understanding of physics. It does not in universe. Even if a galaxy is hundreds of thousands of light years across.
Yeah, relativity pretty much has to be a non-thing in the Starfinder universe - there's a fair bit of assuming a constant procession of time "in the background".
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Ha, I've been blaming Drendel Drang too!
For my games, I'm assuming viewing Gap year data is inconsistent- usually reasonable-looking but random garbage.
So say they sent out some expeditions through the drift to the point where looking back they should see the area as it was at the start of the Gap...
The first expedition to try to map it got one, valid-looking data state.
The second expedition got a completely *different* data state.
The third expedition go nothing, literally blank and assumed computer error.
The fourth expedition got yet another data state, with no consistent points with 1 or 2.
They kept trying, looking for patterns or consistencies, until finally now, you just can't get grant money approved for it anymore.
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My best guess is a simplified form of cosmic censorship.
In order for the night sky to look right, you need to be able to see the stars -- but you don't need to be able to see the planets outside of your own solar system. So, if the light of a star left it during the Gap, then that star is all you see -- details of its planets are fuzzed out no matter how good your telescopes are. I am not sure what cosmic phenomenon would need to be invoked to create that effect, but it can't be any more difficult to pull off than messing up records from the Gap period.
After all, the most obvious trick that natives of the Pact Worlds would attempt to pull off would be to carry powerful telescopes to distant parts of the Galaxy via Drift Drive and then point them back at Golarion's sun in an attempt to find out when and how Golarion disappeared. These attempts would invariably fail because, while they have no trouble seeing the Pact Worlds at any point after the end of the Gap, all they would see for periods during the Gap are Golarion's sun and a cloud of unidentifiable bodies orbiting it. The data would invariably be too fuzzy to reveal whether Golarion or Absalom Station is present or not.
You'd need to be pretty careful with that, astronomers have gotten pretty good at noticing planets and their composition based almost entirely on what the star looks like.
Thus the "fuzzing". Some effect would have to be preventing astronomers from finding out too much about a solar system at any particular time during the Gap.
If you can still pick up signal at 400 light years away well enough to determine anything, then someone was putting way, way too much power into their transmitting station.
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Hee!
Back in 1978 we were estimating that you could see the Earth up to 250 light years away (though the wavefront is not yet so far, of course!). We have gotten both louder and more perceptive since then...
Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth
W. T. Sullivan III, S. Brown, C. Wetherill
Science 27 Jan 1978:
Vol. 199, Issue 4327, pp. 377-388
DOI: 10.1126/science.199.4327.377
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/199/4327/377
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Long baseline interferometry where you can easily have your baseline be light-hours in length would make it possible to make out details on something 400 light-years away even with no other technology advances on today. For that matter, choose the location you want to look at and a heavy object like a star ~200 ly off, then go 200 ly past that star - gravitational lensing will do a lot of work for you.
Fast, lowish cost interstellar travel is an astronomer's dream.
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In my game, in Douglas Adams esque fashion, and researcher attempting this method repeatedly receives a constellation spelling out: “nice try, smarta**” signed by Desna
More seriously: results will likely vary or make no sense, or would “fuzz” on recording equipment or in memory
Another possibility is that light got sped up at the end of the Gap so that anyone viewing anything so far away that its light would normally have come from it during the Gap instead sees the star in question as it was the moment the Gap ended.
One consequence of this approach is that some very important data would be missing: anything related to velocity.
Or the creation of the drift just ate all the radio waves from the gap, the leaving all pre gap information as far as radio and energy waves are concerned, literally non existent
That would be somewhat terrifying. If you go 300 light years from everything else, it looks like the galaxy has disappeared.
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Non zero chance we're all in a big simulation run by Triune anyway.
Well, I am, the rest of you are just part of my environment.
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Or the creation of the drift just ate all the radio waves from the gap, the leaving all pre gap information as far as radio and energy waves are concerned, literally non existentThat would be somewhat terrifying. If you go 300 light years from everything else, it looks like the galaxy has disappeared.
That would also mean that, in addition to all of the other associated problems, the night sky of any planet would basically be empty of stars immediately after the Gap ended. For that reason, I think it is important that both of the following happen:
1) Stars at any distance can be seen, but
2) Stellar observations do not yield any information about what happened during the Gap or how long the Gap lasted.
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Yeah, if the gap erased light during the gap... that would be weird.
From an observers point of view in the universe at the moment the gap ended there would be darkness around them a distance across = light years of the time the gap lasted, that would then move outwards at the speed of light as the light from distant stars ran into the gap... shadow that is spreading outward relative to the observer.
Point is, that pretty obviously didn't happen. The gap probably occurred at all points of existence at the same time, and it didn't destroy anything, merely changed it.
I doubt the gap happened at a stellar time scale. It was likely short enough that astronomical observations can't really tell you anything except in the rare cases of a star that appeared to nova at one point, but didn't the next. Similar to historical records that change mid-sentence.
You could hunt down the light showing that contradictory information. It won't really tell you anything, but I'd bet the starfinders try and locate places to observe this sort of thing all the time. It tells them exactly as much as historical records, but it does tell them something.
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2) Stellar observations do not yield any information about what happened during the Gap or how long the Gap lasted.
It does if any star went supernova in that time. In fact, that sounds like an awesome plothook for the start of an adventure designed to resolve questions about the Gap:
Follow it up with elves starting to have strange dreams of things that happened in their early childhood. One of them is even on a world they do not recognise and some believe it could be Lost Golarion! Dun, dun dun!!!! People from across the Star System and beyond race towards the elderly elf to research him and learn what they can from his memories!
By my theory, in the early 300s AG you would never see a supernova exactly 400 light years away since it was already gone by the end of the Gap. I suppose it might be possible to see supernovas in other galaxies since providing the information that the Gap occurred less than a million years ago does not give anything away.
But you are definitely right that the sight of a supernova at that distance would be a sign that information from the Gap period is escaping to where current day observers could receive it.
There’s only so much meaningful information you can get from light years away. I expect at least Golarion is fuzzed, but most other planets? Sure, you can see back into the gap, but atmospheric data is only going to tell you so much. Any powerful directed sophant-made radio signals aimed at another system are treated like any other record.
Atmospheric data won't tell you much, if nothing important happened. If some planet undergoes terraforming/an energy revolution/a nuclear war, it's going to start showing up on the spectrograph.
Sure. That leaves some significant room for debate over what the spectrograph readings mean. I imagine that’s up to GMs, though. It’s pretty easy to introduce discrepancies in if you want, since one of the first things people will do is FTL jump to get readings from different time slices. I might be inclined to have atmospheric data be one of the few things you can use (on most planets; Aucturn doesn’t giv consistent data even outside the gap looking through ordinary telescopes). Other GMs might ignore it or have discrepancies.
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1. It seems like information from the Gap is blocked not just around Golarion, but everywhere. (Since it’s “worlds across the multiverse” that erupt into chaos after the Gap, not just worlds near Golarion.)
2. Regarding the “light/radio waves/etc from that era vanished, leaving a dark void” proposal, one might worry a bit that this could have various weird knock-on effects. On this hypothesis, right after the Gap, the planets in Golarion’s solar system will have stopped receiving warmth from the sun for minutes to hours, depending on how far away they are. And the only stars that would appear in the sky would be ones further than several millennia (or however long the Gap was) away. After a couple years some bright nearby stars would appear, and some of the faint stars that would now be sending us light from during the Gap would vanish. And so on. Hrmm. That would be a little funny, but I guess not strictly incompatible with Golarion lore.
3. I think the “mixed messages” story is the most plausible one. Think of something like a probability distribution over possible histories from the start to the end of the Gap. At any given distant location, you’ll see images of one of them. So most places will agree on high probability things (such and such a star burned normally throughout the Gap), but they’ll generally disagree about low probability events, and there will be some disagreement even about high probability events (in one location, the star exploded, and then was reconstituted shortly afterwards).
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*pictures desna flying around taping individual photons with a farie wand*
"you get a Heisenberg uncertainty and you get a Heisenberg uncertainty and YOU get a cheeseburger and you....
^Sounds like that might cause heartburn . . . .
In my universe, covering up the light cone issues is part of why the end of the Gap isn't a nice clean cut - because the end of the Gap is actually moving fourth-dimensionally to make sure the light cone doesn't extend beyond 300 lightyears from the frame of reference of the observer.
But that does mean that the sky would have looked rather weird immediately after the end of the Gap, with no stars visible. Then, as the years passed, a new star would appear in the sky every few years.
That is why I would prefer to go with the theory that anything seen from the Gap period would provide no reliable information about its state during that period. Anyone pointing a telescope at a star within the galaxy but outside the post-Gap light cone would see a snapshot of how that star appeared at the end of the Gap, while anyone pointing a telescope outside the galaxy would see other galaxies as we would, picking up only the trivial clue that the Gap lasted less than a million years or so (depending on how far away the nearest galaxy is).
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My theory is that the Gap is a Temporal Uncertainty point , where everything both happened and didn't happen so no real knowledge or memory can be retained of it. Similar to Schrodinger cat being both alive and dead until you have knowledge of it first hand but that knowledge is unobtainable.
This also would allow GM's that ran pathfinder why what happened in their game didn't happen , because it did and did not at the same time.