299 — Terraforming Mars, Part 5

DIARY ENTRY SOL 27,202

The ṺberCollider is, officially, the Upside Prisn Collider, “upside” because of the flavor—or spin—of the "Prisn" used in the collider collisions. There are two ṺberColliders.

The one on Earth sits in a place devoid of natural disasters—Tucson, Arizona. Tucson enjoys the absence of earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, tornadoes, or floods. It’s the largest collider in the world, circling many square kilometers of hot dirt, with nine times more real estate than the CERN Large Hadron Collider has in-ring. It goes through more than its fair share of Earth’s BTUs just for air conditioning, what I consider a terraforming of sorts. The ṺberCollider’s circumference is three times larger than CERN’s.

But where CERN had to chase the once elusive Higgs particles, they literally fell out of the ṺberCollider just during calibrating. From there, further generations of particles begot the prisn, then the graviton; then, the chronoton, the particle that acted as the state vector which assigns the arrow of time to quantum fields.

The scientific explanation involves recognition that everything isn’t just in space or in time, but in space-time and, since space-time is expanding, our arrow of time always points outward to the future. I certainly wouldn’t look forward to the past—an engineering joke.

Retrieving different times simultaneously is now possible, since the temporal paradox of putting two times, in place of one, has been reconciled on paper with new formulas. With enough power, the breadth of the overlap of temporalities could be cautiously increased to larger tempconciliation areas and subsequently focused spatially and temporally.

At first, the power needed to focus and then maintain such an area fell short of what was available to rein in the expanding temporal paradox; then an unexpected bonus saved the day. I mean that literally, since without this rescue the day might not have ever ended.

There was a new value in a new formula.

With collective sighs of relief, this bonus manifested itself to the ṺberCollider’s scientists: the speed of is.

By the time it had all been sorted out, the Chronarchy realized how lucky our present had been, since the present continued. Nice of them to share this little tidbit after the fact.