October/November Lite Challange Entry: Post-Boson
<How bad could it be? Pretty bad ... >
Galactawiki article "Terra", redirected from "Earth"
Categories: Dead_Civilizations, Boson_Incidents, Planetary_Singularities
In 267781GR (mid-2014, Terran reckoning), scientists at Earth's Large Hadron Collider succeeded in observing a true Higgs boson. Several false positives had happened before that, notably when the LHC thread on a discussion board called the Cartographers' Guild passed fourteen thousand posts and achieved a critical mass. Encouraged by the LHC success, amateurs and professionals alike began the pursuit of the related Magnum boson (Dr. Tomas Magnum was a contemporary and antagonist of Higgs, and had drastically different ideas about particle physics).
Where the Higgs boson had required decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, and billions of dollars of investment, the Magnum boson was both anticlimactic and climactic.
Anticlimactic because the LHC work resulted in some rather specialized math that made the search easier. Indeed, when Rutgers University Associate Professor of Physics Singmon Tsu produced his fateful few dozen Magnum-epsilon bosons, scores of other researchers were nearly as close to success.
Just as well only Dr. Tsu succeeded. We term the Magnum boson fateful, and climactic, because as we all know when one creates multiple Magnum (any of the -delta through -theta variants) high-mass particles, they tend to coalesce... themselves and all other particles within their influence.
ALL others.
Had Terrans Yimling Chi, Brendan O'Rourke, Siriah Srimnesitan, or Jorge Hernandez di Vorsela succeeded with their own Magnums within the initial growth phase of Dr. Tsu's boson-agglomeration, the resultant singularity could have encompassed the entirety of Terra's solar system instead of "merely" the Earth and its moon.
That would've been a shame.
As it was, the Earthlings' "success" joined the other six or seven thousand planetary-mass black holes throughout our galaxy -- most, tombstones of civilizations that attained a knowledge of high-mass boson production, without a stabilizing knowledge of their danger and inhibition. At least they did not emulate the long-vanished people near the galaxy's heart who some centuries of aeons ago collected nearly a trillion Magnum-eta bosons -- now a four hundred seventy-five million (and growing) stellar mass singularity.
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All that to set up the simplest post-apocalyptic map of Earth possible:
-----> . <-----
... a geometric point. Suitably generalized, per good cartographic practice - this symbolization being a Times Roman 12-point 'point'. If you'd like I can blow that up a bit. Here it is magnified 625 million times:
-----> . <-----
Looks a lot like the first one, right?
Now, if that isn't "mappy" enough I may add a view sometime during the week or so after Dr. Tsu's "success". It did after all take eight days for Earth to fully coalesce.
I do love these typographic maps. The one-dimensional side-view of 2-D Flatland, this singularity. Mind you, this one is three-dimensional, just all three dimensions are pretty much zero.
Oh. Even though a single ascii character is an extremely efficient map, I suppose I'll follow the rules and post a graphical version.
### LATEST WIP ###
<caveat - scant real science is expressed or implied - this is a Fantasy Map after all>
