In the game destiny the traveler is a mysterious alien sphere that’s protecting the last
city, but what if the traveler were real?
The actual dimensions of the traveler are a lot harder to find than you might think
and from some promotional art it is depicted at varying sizes.
Anything from 300 km diameter to 30 km diameter.
From some promotional information, the traveler is described as a “city sized entity”
and looking at the top largest cities across the world, let’s say the traveler is about
100 km across with a mass of around 114 quadrillion kilograms and taking up about 524 trillion
cubic meters.
Next to the tallest mountains, deepest trenches, and human built objects, the traveler would
be quite the sight to see.
Though in astronomical terms, the traveler is rather inconsequential.
In fact, seeing the traveler so close, it helps put a scale on the solar system in a
way humans traditionally have a hard time doing.
So how does an object this big simply hover above earth?
With a mass of 114 quadrillion kilograms you could imagine it can get pretty difficult
to manage.
You would need about 63 million SpaceX Falcon 9 heavy rocket systems, each with a lift off
thrust of 4 million lbs.
Considering the exhaust would exit at a velocity between 2250 and 4500 meter per second with
a temperature of a couple thousand degrees celsius, if the last city was directly below,
it wouldn’t be a city for very much longer.
***Nuclear energy, dark energy, or space magic would be the prefered***
If there were any movement of the traveler, it would likely be impossible to stabilize.
This is because rockets are extremely difficult to stabilize and require sophisticated algorithms
and processing for even straight vertical paths.
On Earth it would be an amazingly easy target for really anyone who wanted to cause issues.
Sitting anywhere from 600 meters to 23 km from the earths surface, if the thrusters
were to burn out, ***neglecting drag*** it could smash into the earth at a peak velocity
of 715 meters/second with a force of 1.2 quintillion newtons.
The scary part is that it would take just over a minute to actually impact with 7 million
megatons of energy which is only about 7% as much the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs
contained.
Because of the geometry of the traveler, the force would be distributed equally around
the outside ribs.
In space there are no drag forces, spacecraft typically are made as light as possible and
under these forces, it would likely fold up pretty easily.
If the traveler stayed relatively intact, the Earth would prevent the traveler from
sinking too much, therefore the full radius of the traveler would not be the area of destruction.
BUT, if the earth was extremely hard such as mountainous or compacted dry desert, the
object may begin to roll.
It all depends on the distance the traveler sinks into the ground, the friction between
the traveler and the earth, and the inclination of the landing area.
With the traveler being so big, it’s likely that with earths gravity acting on the body
alone, it wouldn't be able to sustain it’s own weight anyway.
Because alien technology is something in which I know nothing about, it might be more important
to concern ourselves with what the human impact would be from alien life as opposed to proving,
or disproving, space magic.
So far, humans have not come into contact, communicated, or even found evidence of alien
life anywhere.
The world of Destiny is a much different place.
Humans have colonized the solar system and were almost forced into extinction by a multitude
of different alien species.
For our case, that is all fantasy but the traveler is “real”, it’s sitting on
our doorstep.
Humans may simply not be capable of understanding the traveler.
We would probably be able to understand what it was made out of but it’s highly unlikely
we would understand its purpose or function.
We wouldn’t understand its motives or technology any more than an ant would understand the
motives of rocket ship.
Is the traveler autonomous or is there life aboard?
There would be so many questions that nobody would know how to answer.
How would this affect everyday life on earth?
Would wars continue?
If the traveler traverses the cosmos from planet to planet, it would likely pick up
microbial life along the way.
A big thing you hear about in science fiction movies and books are the lethality of bacteria
and viruses.
Viruses evolve specifically to attack a particular type of cell or organism.
Earth born viruses know human cells very well.
They know where to attach, how to attack, and how to take over.
In humans, we may not have the same cell material, cell structure, or cell vulnerabilities alien
viruses would be accustomed to.
And this is only concerning the case in which this alien viruses attack in a similar way
native viruses attack.
Life on earth formed in a very particular way to survive in the conditions presented.
On an alien planet there would be different conditions and therefore different biological
structures.
It isn’t fully known how universal life is across the universe, but from small changes
in the types of life on Earth, we would likely not have to worry about microbial alien life.
It’s the life that has the abilities to follow the traveler to earth that would pose
the bigger problem!