Idea: Gravity wells

To clarify about time dilation, the time dilation is only perceptible if you're the one being sucked into the black hole. Time would pass normally to an outside observer.

Oh, neutron stars and black holes would have another effect : they distort space around them, which makes for a nice graphical effect (disclaimer : an actual black hole, even inactive, isn't guaranteed to look exactly like that, but at least it gives an idea)

Actually, the outside observer would perceive the one who is falling into the black hole to first slow down and then fade away as his quantum information slowly gets smeared out across the event horizon.

Well, the person falling into the black hole would observe the people outside the black hole as moving very quickly.

All for pulsars and stuff if you give them a gameplay mechanic, like just a biome transformation e.g. radiation damage creating a uneek biome and each star/nuclear phenomena having it's on type or intensity of radiation.

Worm holes sounds awesome, and are on the 'would be nice' list.
Size of worm holes:
If someone attempts to move an object that is bigger then the diameter of the Worm hole, what should happen?
Would also be cool if Worm holes some where movable.

How did this turn into pseudoscience about magic holes?

It's a Sci-Fi game, pseudoscience is just part of the topic.

It's sci fi insofar as it is in space and has robots. But I think all this science is misplaced. Black hole suck stuff is probably the extent of what you need to know here.

Well, none of this is really pseudoscience. Time dilation and black holes and black-body radiation are all well-known astronomical concepts. Space distortion by black holes could have an effect on the game. Time dilation really wouldn't matter, I don't think. And technically, it's not really correct to think of black holes as 'sucking'. They act just like any other body with gravitational attraction. If our sun was suddenly turned into a black hole with the same mass it currently has, the earth wouldn't be sucked into it. On the contrary, we would continue orbiting exactly as we are right now.

Relativism is entirely pseudoscientific. Black holes are complete theoretical speculation.

I don't care what would be correct, I care what would look cool in the game.

Oh bmb, you should go tell all the astrophysicists in the world that black holes and relativism is pseudoscientific.

You could suprise a couple thousand scientists with your cutting edge knowledge. :mrgreen:

Some would agree.

It doesn't matter what they think though, truth is not a democracy.

And you will still get some doctors who will deny that smoking leads to lung cancers, or that evolution happens or that global climate change exists. Come to think of it, its usually all at once with those cranks.


I'm sorry to have to say this, but you have obviously no clue about modern astrophysics. Get yourself educated about this, even reading some wikipedia pages would help.

Relativity itself is one of the best explored theories of modern physics, shown to work in countless experiments. I mean, even GPS wouldn't be possible without relativity and you don't deny that GPS works I hope. (Read here for why.)

Also, just because black holes can't be seen by definition, doesn't mean they don't exist. There's a shitload of particles in modern physics that can't be observed directly but only through their decay products with detectors. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist and one can't use them for experiments.

And whose to say they are wrong? You're perhaps an expert in all of these fields to tell me this? Still you throw around the word crank like it was candy.

Wikipedia is not education and I don't want to argue about why relativism is insane.

And why the GPS excuse is bollocks.

All I want to say is science doesn't belong in this game. Style does.

It's insane because it's true.

Citation needed.

A valid argument.

It's hard for me to see how black holes would make the game more fun. Would you build thrusters on enemy planets and fall into the black hole on purpose? How would than be better than targeting another planet or the local star? Maybe there could be a galactic war mission where you have to asteroid hop away from the black hole.

Bmb, I would honestly like to see your sources. I enjoy reading unusual perspectives on the universe.

As for black holes? There's tons of material and I honestly can't remember it all. But the thing that really got me into the idea was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlekeH-gzDQ

A well presented and compelling argument I think. The tl;dr of which is basically "we haven't seen any". They're a purely theoretical construct made as a way to patch up mathemathical holes in relativity. And then they go out and look for it and see what they want to see.

So Wikipedia is not an OK source, but some random guy in a youtube video is? And oh, man, I lost some brain cells watching that. Well presented and compelling? We can't directly observe black holes because no light escapes (not being able to directly observe them is seriously one of his arguments). We "observe" it via it's effects. An analogy would be hearing a car go by without seeing it. We can still say "that was a car". At least he looked up NASA, even if his interpretation is completely wrong. The rest of his initial arguments are from some school website that looks like it was from the Geocities era, plus his own (obviously professional) deductions from telescope images.

He then starts inventing. Apparently "space" (void) is a form of matter; apparently all stars > 3 solar masses will definitely become black holes (ignoring the fact that stars loose extremely large amounts of mass when they supernova); Apparently having a lot of artist depictions is also somehow evidence itself of no black holes.

Then, my favourite bit. He says, "My head hurts". It shouldn't, the guy obviously hasn't been using it.

Oh a youtube channel as a source. That's... really something I wasn't expecting. :shock:

But I like your argument from ignorance. We haven't seen it directly so it doesn't exist.

Which is a funny arguments in regards to black holes since they can't be seen by definition. (At least, anything inside the Schwarzschild radius of course. You can see all its other effects, like accretion disks around it and hypervelocity jets from that.)

Doesn't mean you can't take tons of measurements about them and see if they fit the current theory. Which they do funnily.

I mean, thats how science works. You make a hypothesis and then go out in the wild to see if the data fits. It doesn't mean that scientists suddenly start ignoring whatever doesn't fit the theory. In fact, finding stuff that contradicts established theory is huge since it leads to new, exciting science. Take the current higgs boson which was found most likely at CERN last year. Its kind of a disappointing find exactly because it fits with the current model. Lots of scientists would have been happy to find something that can't be explained with the current standard model.


Leaving black holes besides, you haven't said yet why relative is bogus too. I'm curious about that. :mrgreen:



Edit: Oh, raevn actually watched the video? You're a stronger person then I am with much more patience. *bow*

To be able to wind back the clock of time would be such a sweet, sweet thing to do right now.