SPHERE

2050:

In 2050, Humans-thermometre readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial revolution. The average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8 degree Celsius since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20 degree Celsius per decade.

Glaciers in the Himalayan ranges started to melt and the water scarcity further threatens humanity’s survival. Ashwath Adarsh, a widowed engineer and former ISRO pilot turned farmer, lives with his father-in-law Raghava Rajan, his 15-year old son Jagadeesh and 10-year old daughter Roshini in Semanampathy, Pollachi.

Their farmland is very much like a forest. They have coconut trees on the either side and grew mangoes, vegetables, etc. Their farmland was just like a dustbin, when he was working in the ISRO. After he quit the job and came here to the land, the land was completely changed to a farmland, with his wife Anjali’s support, who have died before few years due to prolonging illness.

Their entrance have mud road, through which cars come for giving some important materials. His daughter Anjali is feeding the cow and she is very fond of farming, aiming to study Agricultural science in her future, to which she is getting trained from Ashwath.

ISRO LABORATORY, HYDERABAD:

“But why should we care about one degree of warming? After all, the temperature fluctuates by many degrees every day where we live sir” said Shruthiga, a high-ranking ISRO member. She wears steel-rimmed spectacles, have a tiny eyes and looks timid.

“Shruthiga madam. That’s not to be taken light hearted. The global temperature record represents an average over the entire surface of the planet. The temperatures we experience locally and in short periods can fluctuate significantly due to predictable cyclical events and hard-to-predict wind and precipitation patterns. But the global temperature depends mainly on how much energy the planet receives from the Sun and how much it radiates back into space-quantities that change very little.” An young aspiring scientist of ISRO Siddha Shasank Swaroop explained his point.

Hearing all this, Dr. Aditi Sri, the Assistant supervisor of ISRO taps up her mike and says: “Ok. All discussions over. You know? A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere and land by that much. In the past, a one to two degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.”

After the meeting gets over Aditi meets her father Rajendar Reddy, the head of ISRO and a high-ranking ISRO scientist, who have invented some missiles and rockets, that have benefitted the Indian Army in various ways.

Meanwhile, a black body appears in the room of Anjali, which she assumes as ghost. Ashwath deduces that, the black body appears black at room temperature and most of it’s energy is infrared, which cannot be perceived by the human eye. They represents photoelectric effect while doing technological applications. Ashwath follows the coordinates to a secret ISRO facility headed by Rajendar Reddy.

Rajendar Reddy was Ashwath’s former mentor and a professor. He says to Ashwath: “Ashwath. 48 years earlier- unknown beings placed a wormhole near Sphere, opening a path to a distant galaxy with 12 potentially habitable worlds located near a supermassive black hole named Spectrum. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to survey the planets and three- Dr. Rajan, Joseph Williams and Muhammad Askar- reported positive results stating- Although planets and stars are neither in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings nor perfect black bodies, black-body radiation is used as a first approximation for the energy they emit. Black-holes are near perfect black bodies, in the sense that they absorb all the radiation that falls on them.”

“Sir. Can Humanity survive this sphere?” asked Ashwath Adarsh, to which Professor Rajendar reveals two plans to ensure humanity’s survival. Plan- A involves developing Stefan-Boltzmann Law, to propel the fourth power of black body’s temperature. Plan- B involves launching the Photon spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to settle a habitable planet.

Ashwath is recruited to pilot the Photon. Before leaving, Ashwath prepares a wristwatch and gives it to his 15-year old distraught son asking him to check the relative time, when he returns to the earth.

This test is done to check the efficiency and intelligence of Jagadeesh. Since, he aims to join a big university in Bangalore in order to become an Aeronautical engineer in ISRO.

After traversing the wormholes, Dr. Aditi studies the black holes while Ashwath, Shruthiga and Siddha Shasank Swaroop descend in a landing craft to investigate Shiva’s planet, an ocean world covered in water. When going, Siddha shows some signs to Ashwath saying: “Ashwath sir. Look at there. A wreckage of Shiva’s ship is seen.” However, when observing it, Ashwath hears the sounds of Shruthiga shouting: “Ashwath. Something messy is going to happen here. Please be safer.” However, before they can do something, Shruthiga gets killed by a gigantic wave, which have already rounded her. Distraught and depressed, Ashwath and Siddha return to Photon and find, Black body radiation provides insight into the thermodynamic equilibrium state of cavity radiation. Due to Black body’s proximity, time is severely dilated: 23 years have elapsed for those on earth.

According to the special theory of relativity, time intervals are also affected by relative modals between two frames of reference. It means an interval of time observed in a moving frame of reference will be less than the same interval of time observed in a stationery frame of reference. It shows that the clocks in the moving spaceship will appear to go slower than the clocks on the surface of the earth.

Ashwath decides to use their remaining fuel to reach Photon’s planet, where they revive him from cryostasis. Meanwhile, Jagadeesh, now a scientist working with ISRO, transmits a message announcing Professor Rajendar Reddy has died. He further learned that Plan A, which requires fourth power of its absolute temperature’s total energy had radiated in one day to 9 MJ(mega joules), or 2000 level. He additionally learned that Conduction is negligible because the Nusselt number is much greater than unity. Also Evaporation via perspiration is only required if radiation and convection are insufficient to maintain a steady state temperature. One of his subordinates revealed: “The spectrum of the Sun’s solar radiation is close to that of black body with a temperature of about 5,800 K. The Sun emits EM radiation across most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Although the Sun produces rays as a result of the nuclear fusion process, these super-high-energy photons are converted by internal absorption and thermalization to lower-energy photons before they reach the Sun’s surface and are emitted out into space.”

Angered, Jagadeesh accuses Siddha Shasank and Ashwath of knowing that those left on Earth were doomed. Ashwath subsequently declares that he will be returning to Earth while his team members Arjun and Adhvik will remain on Photon’s planet for permanent habitation. While Arjun and Ashwath explore the planet, Siddha reveals to them: “Sir. The planet is uninhabitable” and explains: “The planet is massless. Sun Light would travel through transparent matter does so at a lower speed than c, the speed of light in a vaccum. There are problems of cyclones, sudden storms and poor weather conditions due to energy transitions and high resolution microscopy.” He attempts to kill Ashwath. Siddha then takes a lander and heads for Photon. Arjun is killed by a booby trap left by Siddha. Ashwath and Rajendar chase Siddha in another lander before he dies during a failed docking operation, severely damaging Photon.

“Sir. Now, what to do?” asked Ashwath to which, Rajendar said: “No time to chatter. Do something to revive the Photon man.”

Ashwath revives the Photon using Planck’s energy formula E= hv, which is often used by chemists and engineers in design, both to compute the change in energy resulting from a photon absorption and to predict the frequency of the light emitted for a given energy transition.

“What are you doing Ashwath?”

“Sir. We have insufficient fuel. However, I have somehow revived our Photon” said Ashwath to which, Rajendar asked: “Now, how shall we reach so close to Sphere?”

Ashwath reveals his plan to him when travelling by explaining how they can reach the place: “Sir. In some cases, two energy transitions can be coupled so that, as one system absorbs a photon, nearby system steals its energy and re-emits a photon of a different frequency. Through this method, we can reach the place safer sir.” (This is the basis of fluorescence resonance energy transfer a technique that is used in molecular biology to study the interaction of suitable proteins.)

After a difficult docking manoeuver, Ashwath regains control. They use a slingshot manoeuver so close to Sphere that time dilation adds another 51 years. In the process, Ashwath and robot Ram jettison themselves to shed weight and propel Photon to ensure it reaches Vishnu’s planet. Slipping through the Equator region of Sphere, they eject from their respective craft and find themselves inside a massive four-dimensional structure called the tesseract, which is located far from the singularity. Across different time periods, Ashwath sees through the bookcases of Jagadeesh’s old room, weakly interacting with it’s gravity and realizing that he was Jagadeesh’s ghost.

Speculating that the tesseract was conducted by humanity’s far-future descendants who can provide access to infinite time and space but cannot communicate through it themselves, Ashwath realizes they have been brought there to relay information critical to humanity’s survival to Jagadeesh.

Ashwath uses black body law and human body emission to encode ISRO’s co-ordinates in the dust patterns in Jagadeesh’s room before manipulating the second hand of Jagadeesh’s wristwatch, using Morse Code to transmit data collected by Ram from within Sphere. On Earth, Jagadeesh realizes the ghost is his father and deciphers the Morse Code. Ejected from the tesseract, Ashwath is picked up and awakens on a space habitat orbiting Earth, where he reunites with an elderly Jagadeesh. Using the quantum data(depicting Stefan-Boltzmann law) sent by Ashwath, the younger Jagadeesh successfully creates the fourth power for Plan A, enabling black body’s temperature successfully and now, the sun emits that power equally in all directions. Because of this, the planet is hit with only a tiny fraction of it. The power from the Sun strikes the planet. The high temperature makes the Sun to emit a large extent in the ultraviolet and visible frequency range. Even though the planet only absorbs as a circular area, it emits equally in all directions as a sphere. If the planet were a perfect black body, it would emit according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law.



Nearing death and with his own family, Jagadeesh urges Ashwath to return to Rajendar Reddy. Ashwath and Ram take a spacecraft to fly to Vishnu’s planet, where Rajendar Reddy, having discovered and buried the deceased Vishnu, has begun to build Photon’s spacecraft to implement Plan-B, that they have planned to execute simultaneously once implementing Plan A.

Before leaving, Ashwath tells to his son: “My son. All the best for your career as an Aeronautical Engineer. Study well and become good. You are really talented. Bye.” Jagadeesh sends his father emotionally.

INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES:

In order to write this story, I watched several of Hollywood films such as: Inception, Avatar series, Star Wars series, The Prestige, Interstellar, The Shutter Island and Tenet. Among all these films, the main film that gave me an inspiration to write this story was Christopher Nolan sir’s epic science fiction film Interstellar. Deeply and fluently inspired from this film, I wrote this story.

However, in order to write this story, I researched about the important concepts of Quantum Physics and Classical Quantum. The main among them includes: Wormholes, Black holes, Time Dilation, Photon, Solar Spectrum, Wavelengths and Stefan-Boltzmann law.

There were other important concepts that includes: Cosmetics, Human Body Emission and Blackbody radiation. I did minimum of three months research before completing this story.