Season 5 - Episode 6 - Fari Station 11

LIU Atlas - Fari Station 11

There are billions of stars, millions of planets, but there is only one man,Terrance McDoogal. Welcome to LIU Atlas.  About this creation 


                                                       LIU Atlas - Fari Station 11

The Ludgonian Industrial Union's galaxy contains billions of stars and billions of planets. Unfortunately, most residents of the LIU could only name a handful of these worlds. In order to improve astronomy grades across the LIU, TV2 has started a new program called LIU Atlas. Follow our host, Terrance McDoogal, as he takes you on a tour across the LIU and some of its more obscure worlds.
 

Note: This episode is presented in full screen. The corresponding dialogue is underneath each photo.

Doog: “Welcome to another episode of LIU Atlas. I’m your host, Terrance “Doog” McDoogal. Today we are visiting one of the LIU Galaxy’s Fari Stations, station number eleven to be exact. The Fari Stations are essentially high-tech lighthouses. Using light and more advanced sub-space signals, the Fari Stations warn ships of navigational dangers, like black holes, unstable stars, or high radiation supernova remnants. Fari Station 11 and its counterparts, 12 and 13, warn travelers of a small black hole known as HC-514. Despite the warnings blaring through the Magellan’s navigational computer, we’re headed to Fari Station 11 for today’s show.”

Doog: “Alright folks I’m now inside Fari Station 11. Generally, these stations have a one man skeleton crew for maintenance purposes. So it’s safe to assume, the man in the corner is my guide. Uh, excuse me sir? Are you ready to get started?”

Noland: “Hehehe. They’ll never find me up here! Hehehe!”
Doog: “Uh, I see you plain as day right there.”
Noland: “Shhh! Not you. Hehe! I’m playing hide-and-go-seek with my friend. She never thinks to look up here!”
Doog: “Aren’t you alone here?”
Noland: “Hehe…wait. Are you real?”
Doog: “Uh, yeah…”

Noland: “A real person! Flesh and bones and all!”
Doog: “Uh…”

Doog: “Whoa, chill out man! What are you doing?!”
Noland: “Please just hold me for a little while! Maybe just a hug?”
Doog: “What! No! Get off me! What’s your malfunction man? How long have you been alone here?”

Noland: “Sorry about that. I guess I lost it there for a minute. I’ve been alone here for so long.”
Doog: “How long?”
Noland: “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve lost track. Maybe five years?”
Doog: “Five years!”
Noland: ‘Yeah. I was supposed to be relieved after a six month tour, but no one has ever shown up until now. Every once in a while, I come down here to the hangar and find that someone delivered more supplies, but there’s never any people. Thank goodness you are finally here to relieve me.”
Doog: “I hate to burst your bubble, but I’m not your relief. I’m here to do a show about the station. When the tour is over, I’ll be leaving. Preferably sooner rather than later…no offense.”
Noland: “Oh…I see. Well, let me grab my friend and we’ll get started.”
Doog: “What is the friend you keep referring to? I thought we established that you’ve gone crazy after being alone for so long?”

Noland: “Oh, there’s no people here, but I’m not alone. May I present my friend, partner, and love of my life…Mrs. Box.”
Doog: “Are you consorting with a box with a face drawn on it?”
Noland: “A beautiful face drawn on it, but yes.”
Doog: “My crazy detector is going off the charts.”
Noland: “ Hehehe. Well, if you’ll follow me, we’ll get started. This is the base of the station. It holds the hangar, airlocks, and cargo.”

Noland: “To proceed to the next level of the station, we must take this ladder.”
Doog: “Seriously? There’s not an elevator? That’s a bunch of crap!”
Noland: “You’re preaching to the choir Doog. Mrs. Box doesn’t even have arms. I have to carry her up. It’s so discriminatory!”

Doog: “How far a climb is it?”
Noland: “Maybe sixty feet, give or take 20 feet. I don’t know. I haven’t seen a ruler in five years.”

Doog: “Do me a favor Noland, and put Mrs. Box at the base of the ladder. If I pass out, I want something to cushion my fall...”

Noland: “The second level of the Fari Station has equipment to monitor the black hole. Mrs. Box and I like to come up here and watch all the pretty lights. It’s sort of romantic.”
Doog: “Uh…you can skip details like that.”

Noland: “Yes, yes, Mrs. Box, I’m getting to it. Stop interrupting me. Anyway, as you know, a black hole’s gravity is so powerful, even light can’t escape it. The black hole itself is impossible to see in any spectrum, but we can image their accretion disks, especially in the infrared and x-ray spectrum. Hehehe. Yeah honey, me too. Huh, oh, where was I? Oh yeah. With that, we can determine the hole’s event horizon and make proper warnings to passing ships.”
Doog: “Cool. What‘s next?”
Noland: “I guess we‘ll head up one more time and check out the warning beacon.”

Noland: “You could really afford to lose some weight honey. Carrying you up these ladders is exhausting. What! No I didn’t say your were fat. Don’t give me that look! I haven’t…”
Doog: “Perhaps we can set aside this lover’s quarrel until we finish up?”
Noland: “Oh…sorry. I forgot you were here. Uh…as promised, the warning beacon.”

Noland: “The beacon emits warning signals in both real space and hyperspace. Visible light and radio signals warn ships in real space, while subspace signals warn ships traveling in hyperspace. Of course, any signal, real or hyperspace, that passes the event horizon gets sucked into the black hole, and never makes it to its intended target. So, if there was just one Fari Station here, it wouldn’t be able to warn travelers on the other side of the black hole. That’s why there is three Fari Stations around this black hole.”
Doog: “Anything else to add? Are we finished?”
Noland: “I can’t really think of anything else. Unless you want to hear about how me and Mrs. Box met?
Doog: “Maybe another time.”

Doog: “Well folks, the Fari Stations are important navigational tools. Without them, you take the risk of flying your ship into all sorts of dangers. Now if they could just invent a warning beacon for crazy people. Well, see ya!”
Noland: “Do you think you could hit the lights on your way out? Mrs. Box and I have so making up to do!”

Doog: “I really don’t get paid enough for this crap. I swear this galaxy is populated by a bunch of crazy people. Look, now I’m starting to talk to myself. I guess the crazy is wearing off on me. I mean, it was just a matter of time.”

Tempus: “Psst! Hey Doog! Wait!”
Doog: “I’m not having a threesome with you and Mrs. Box, Noland. Just leave me alone.”
Tempus: “No! Turn around. This isn’t Noland.”

Doog: “I thought Noland was alone here. Who are you?”
Tempus: “No time to explain. Hurry up and get down here before Noland sees us.”

Tempus: “I’m Dr. Tempus, Director of Project Chronos. My research facility is hidden within the asteroid that the Fari Station rests on.”
Doog: “Why are you guys avoiding Noland? That guy’s going crazy up there. A little human contact might go a long way.”
Tempus: “Actually that’s part of our research. Follow me.”

Tempus: “My esteemed research assistant and I are studying the effects of long term isolation on the human mind.”
Assistant: “You boys are lucky you just missed that show. Their session in the beacon room got weird. Real weird. It looks like they‘ve moved down to the hangar bay now.”
Tempus: “Bring it up on the big screen.”

Tempus: “Turn on the audio.”
Noland: “…hehe. I comb the pretty hair. Hehehe. I need you to look good for round two. Maybe this time you can be on top…”
Tempus: “Cut audio.”
Doog: “You guys watch this all day? What’s the point?”
Tempus: “Not all day. This is just a side project related to our main goal. Time travel.”
Doog: “Time travel? You’re joking right?”
Tempus: “Surely not. Time is the last great frontier. The last great mystery in the universe. We are unlocking its secrets day by day.”
Doog: “And the secret to time travel is isolating people for so long that they start making love with boxes?”
Tempus: “What! No. It will make more sense later. Follow me.”

Tempus: “This is the heart of Project Chronos, the Time Dilation Rings. Using this new technology, we’ve been able to make small jumps in time. Limited to just hundredths of a millisecond for the time being. But progress, none the less.”
Doog: “Sweet. How does it work?”

Tempus: “It’s quite complex, and it requires a good deal of advanced physics. In laymen’s terms, we use spinning magnetic rings to create powerful magnetic fields. We then utilize the nearby black hole’s immense gravity to bend these fields into magnetic loops. As the spinning rings approach the speed of light, time dilation occurs, and time within the ring nearly comes to a stop. Temporal waves are then forced into the magnetic loops causing a feedback scenario. After that, it’s simply a matter of utilizing Grenfar’s Law, which states that time is equal to the sum of…”
Doog: “Those are laymen’s terms? Just forget how it works for now. Tell me what the implications are. Are you going to go back into the past and change stuff? There’s a few things I’d like to change…”
Tempus: “Actually, it appears that travel to the past is currently impossible, at least with our current understanding of physics. Causality and all that good stuff. What we are trying to do is send someone into the future.”

Tempus: “If you’ll excuse me for a minute, it’s time for today’s test. Let me get the ring spinning and then we can continue. Ah, there we go.”
Doog: “What does travel to the future do for us?”
Tempus: “We don’t really know, yet. It is our hope that we can send someone far enough into the future where they solved time travel to the past. The tempornaut can gather this technology and use it to travel back here to this station. Or perhaps they will discover a way to communicate with the past. There’s no reason to worry about that until we actually make progress on sending someone to the far future. Of course, no one really knows what the distant future holds. We may be sending our tempornaut into a vast nothingness. That’s where the isolation study comes in handy. We need to know if the tempornaut will be able to continue his duties even with no human contact after years and years.”

Tempus: “Alright, the ring is approaching light speed. You’ll start to notice some environmental distortions. They are normal. Read-outs on the tempornauts chair indicate the environment inside the ring is within safety parameters. Preparing to make the jump. In 5..4..3..2..1. Engage.”
Doog: “Send a postcard from the future!”

Doog: “Hey…wait. Nothing happened.”
Tempus: “Something most certainly did happen. Look at the clock on the chair! Half a millisecond! That’s our best ever! A few adjustments to the resonance feedback frequencies and we’ll be seeing multi-millisecond jumps before the end of the week! Muhahah!”

Doog: “Well folks, I guess there was a little more to this station than I originally thought. The only thing left for me to do now is to decide who is crazier, Noland - who’s in love with a cardboard box, or Tempus - who’s trying to send his coworkers off into the distant future. Who knows? See ya!"
 


Note: 
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein


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