"So what is our plan with drilling?, We can't just keep on going, structural integrity of asteroid is of utmost importance, especially at this speed", The Traveller instructed Wania the AI. 171Please respect copyright.PENANAkBnYnN2YN3
They were now moving at 0.99 of speed of light, and needed to immediately apply full thrust in reverse, so that they could come at full rest at Alpha (1), or Proxima Centauri (2).
"Remember, our destination will more likely be the red dwarf, because of its planets (3), I would not like to get gravity bound to the larger stars, and never be able to break free. Otherwise, I would have loved to visit the رِجْل القِنْطورُس (4), one of the brightest stars in the southern hemisphere". The Traveller then gave his explicit instruction to Wania for manual direction setting towards Proxima Centauri, which was otherwise the closet star from Sun.
"I have tried to judge the composition of Rock at best I could, but below accumulating ice, there are many unknowns", informed Wania. "We are trying to drill in a manner as not to reduce the structural integrity of the Rock, which could be easily a pile of rocks and metal. Or it could be a really large metal slug underneath. So far, it's easy going", she continued, referring to the astroid which was their home on this unwilling journey.
The reverse thrust circuits had been printed anew from the backup schematics using many makeshift materials as replacements, this posed the additional danger of circuits inefficiency, and increased possiblity of failure in a mission critical situation. However they tried to do best out of existing situation.
On his instructions, the reverse thrust of 1g was applied.
Before that they had shifted his room arrangements accordingly, otherwise the reverse thrust would have made things fall in the reverse direction. Things falling to the ground would have fallen to the ceiling. So the robots took a day to arrange his belongings and bolted everything again. He had to wait in his chair, strapped till the time the reverse thrust was not applied.
"On my mark, 3, 2, 1, Allah o Akbar", the Traveller gave the customery go ahead for this momentous occassion, long adopted by the Pakistani Scientists as far back as the original detonation of the 1st Atomic Bomb tests.
Finally, he took a sigh of relief, and opened his straps. He could again move normally in the usual 1g gravity of earth. The illusion was further eased with the Holographic Generator unit, now showing his room in Rawalpindi, where he spent his teen years.
After a few minutes, his mind was able to adjust to the new sensation and fool him into accepting up from down.
"What if the Proxima Century has life on its planets", asked Wania.
"Yes, it is a real possibility, I must say, or it can be total disappointment. Only time will tell", he replied. " In any case, life in the galaxy, let alone all the galaxies in sure to be abundant"
"I wonder how much life is possible in all the known universe", she was showing the typical inquisitive nature of latest AI firmware.
"I can assure you that we don't have a clue of the enormosoty of God's total Creation. Take for instance of theory proposed by Niayesh Afshordi (5) in early 21 Century. Before that there were a lot of gaps in the big bang theory. He was the 1st one to propose that out 3D universe might have formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions" , the Traveller loved to recount his favourite scientist from early 21st century". He continued, "Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole. In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand. The authors postulated that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion."
"Wow, imagine how many Black holes we have in our own universe, it may mean that each one may be a universe in its own right", Wania speculated.
"Why to stop there, my dear, why not continue in the same direction upwards....", His eyes were shining explaining his favourite hypothesis.
"Now combine this theory with the 11 dimensional M Theory (6), which was a favourite amongst the 20th century scientists, but was too mathematically complex to handle at the time.
"Imagine, a top-most, 11 dimensional universe, where a star collapses to form a 10 dimensional universe, where inside it, a 10 dimensional star collapses to form a 9th dimensional universe, and so on, till we reach at a 3 dimensional universe, where we are living , and can observe all the stars and galaxies and wonder who could have created so much, not realising that the true scale of His creation is beyond our wildest imagination. At the end I will just say this , 'Al-ḥamdu l-illāhi Rabbi l-ʿAlamīn' (6) and not ever forgetting the link through which we were fortunate enough to recognize Him, our beloved Prophet (Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon Him), about whom equally meaningful words are used as well (8), 'The Mercy to the Worlds'". His eyes became moist, understanding the implication of this one sentence.
"Now, that is a God worth searching and striving for, the God of the Multi Verse, and His Mercy for the same", all of her processors were trying to understand the scale of this theory.
Finally she said, "By your calculations, I assume 7 overlapping universes, but we can never be able to experimentally prove any of it".
"Yes, it might be the 7 Heavens mentioned again and again in Quran (9)", he agreed.
"Actually, we don't know, where our wormhole is pointing, I have a hunch that we might have the other end in the 4th Dimensional Universe", he was thoughtful, talking to himself.
Wania's mouth fell open with surprise.
He smiled thinking of all the effort behind the Emotional Intelligence Engine at work which had made this gesture possible.
References
(1) Alpha Centauri A and B are Sun-like stars (Class G and K), and together they form the binary star Alpha Centauri AB. To the naked eye, the two main components appear to be a single star with an apparent magnitude of −0.27, the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus and the third-brightest in the night sky.
(2) Alpha Centauri C, or Proxima Centauri, is a small and faint red dwarf (Class M). Though not visible to the naked eye, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun at a distance of 4.24 light-years (1.30 pc), slightly closer than Alpha Centauri AB. Currently, the distance between Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri AB is about 13,000 astronomical units (0.21 ly), equivalent to about 430 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.
(3) Proxima Centauri has two planets: Proxima b, an Earth-sized exo-planet in the habitable zone discovered in 2016; and Proxima c, a super-Earth 1.5 AU away, which is possibly surrounded by a huge ring system, discovered in 2019.
(4) Rigil Kentaurus, which is a Latinisation of the Arabic name رِجْل القِنْطورُس Rijl al-Qinṭūrus, meaning 'the Foot of the Centaur'.
(5) Niayesh Afshordi. An Astrophysicist. Associate Professor in the Astrophysics and Gravitation group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Canada. Founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA). Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physic (PI). Finished his PhD at Princeton University Observatory in August 2004. He was then a fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2004-2007), and a Distinguished Research Fellow at PI (2008-2009).
(6) 11-dimensional spacetime, which appears in M-theory, a proposed "master theory" that unifies the five superstring theories.
(7) Al-ḥamdu l-illāhi Rabbi l-ʿAlamīn (Arabic: الحمد لله ربّ العالمين) is the first verse of the first surah of the Quran. It is also one of the sentences most commonly repeated by Muslims in their lives, in a variety of situations. The English translation of this verse is "Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds".
(8) وَمَاۤ اَرۡسَلۡنٰكَ اِلَّا رَحۡمَةً لِّـلۡعٰلَمِيۡنَ(الأنبياء :١٠٧),
Translation: "And We have not sent you, [O Muhammad, (Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon Him)], except as a mercy to the Worlds".
(9) "And built above you seven mighty ˹heavens'", Al Quran 78:12
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