Those of you who are familiar with Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry have heard of the butterfly effect. Even those merely loosely familiar with these subjects such as myself have heard of this effect where it has been suggested that perhaps a butterfly flapping its wings in just proper way would result in mezoscale air turbulence which would then be amplified in local weather patterns which in turn could result in the formation of a hurricane pummeling the Eastern United States several weeks or months later. It is interesting to consider an analogue for the interstellar gas and dust which includes a rich assortment of elements, isotopes, cations, anions, molecules, and solid dust particulate, along with magnetic and electric field gradients and electromagnetic and gravitational radiation. And wait; don’t forget to toss in Cold Dark Matter and Hot Dark Matter, as well as high energy massive cosmic rays. I am not interested in making an interstellar weapon from this plausibility, but instead am musing on the potential for applying sensitivity on initial conditions and judicious manipulations of so-called strange attractors to cause tailor made stars and planets to form over millions if not billions or more years of very small scale artificial perturbations of the interstellar and intergalactic medium. The development of tailor made ultra-massive black holes would be interesting as well. A strange attractor, not to be confused with the term strange matter or strange quarks, is simply an effect for which a broad range of initial states end up being funneled to a common final state. Think of the phenomena of major snow storms in some years always diverting around the Washington D.C. metropolitan area where I live. Accordingly, in some years, just about every other Nor-Easter is initially predicted to hit the D.C. area very hard to my delight. Then, I will be increasingly disappointed every time a storm diverges from the metro area. Thus, a broad range of conditions can result in certain strange attractor weather patterns setting up from initial conditions for which the end result would not be initially within the error cone of initial forecast probabilities. It is plausible that interstellar dust-lane highways could be artificially produced to enable high gamma factor interstellar fusion ramjet flights. Another application would involve interstellar masers which are the microwave analogue of a laser. Here the stimulated emission of microwaves would result from a chain reaction of emissions from vibrationally and rotationally excited molecules. Natural and/or artificial reflectors made of plasma, or microwave reflective carbonaceous nanowire grids would set up the lasing action in a manner similar to the mirrors at the end of conventional lasing tubes. Such an interstellar maser might provide for an awesome microwave sail powered starship. Note that there would be an opening or transmissive section in the center of one end of the maser tube just as there is within conventional laser tubes. Just how small an initial perturbation can be is a mystery compounded by the specifics of the local interstellar or intergalactic medium for which the effect is sought. Perhaps quantum computers and related algorithms could solve such problems at least for modeled simulations. Quantum computer algorithms are being developed for purposes not previously thought practical for quantum computer programs.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 22:22:29 +0000