Post by @rk@mastodon.well.com

@rk@mastodon.well.com

2026-07-30 17:40 UTC

Story idea: we discover an anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background that we pull the thread on and discover that it is significantly easier to accelerate in one direction in the Universe and basically impossible over long distances in the other. This leads to one half of the universe being an empty backwater (where we are) and the other end being an overcrowded mess, with a civilizational gradient. Humans being human we decide to attack The Density from The Sparse. #story #writing

Replies (6)

@rk@mastodon.well.com 2026-07-30 17:41

Matter as a whole isn’t clumped on one side because universal expansion is still under the influence of the inflationary epoch. It’s just changing your vector that’s cheap/expensive.

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@muddle@infosec.exchange 2026-07-31 02:24

@rk@mastodon.well.com Nice. Is "The Density" and "The Sparse" a hat tip to "The Expanse," perhaps?

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@muddle@infosec.exchange 2026-07-31 02:25

@rk@mastodon.well.com (though there's also The Dark Forest, I suppose)

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@brouhaha@mastodon.social 2026-07-30 22:32

@rk@mastodon.well.com In one of the later novels of James P. Hogan's "Giants" series, some beings live in a 3-space that has an extreme anisotropy. They are amazed when they learn of our space which does not.

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@evilchili@linernotes.club 2026-07-30 23:54

@rk@mastodon.well.com not entirely dissimilar to Venge's Zones of Thought!

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@AstroHyde@mastodon.social 2026-07-31 03:58

@rk@mastodon.well.com attack it?? now I'm really hooked thinking of any possible mechanism of attack that could exist in physics as we know it 😄

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