Mildly amusing idea

[james_davis_nicoll]

(Inspired by a recent post in rasfs, in which someone's wormhole network links the interior of stars)

As in books like Galactic Derelict and Gateway, humanity stumbles over a long abandoned transportation network that offers the possibility of extremely fast access to the stars. Unfortunately the builders were very alien. They weren't even at the right temperatures for chemistry to be a factor. Conditions that were shirt-sleeve for them are like dancing naked in a blast furnace for us. The two species have very different criteria by which they judge interestingness for network nodes.

Comments

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I recall reading a book which used that premise to explain why so many human colonies were on marginal worlds...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

In my scenario, the presence of planets would be entirely coincidental. The network builders didn't think about solid matter much at all, more or less the same way we don't take into account whether or not a given region in California could give rise to Bose–Einstein condensates [1].

1: Maybe that's a bad analogy since as far as I know there is no region in the universe where BECs can arise naturally.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This could be a very short story if the gateways link to areas where, say, the physics precipitates BECs naturally.

"They opened the gateway. There was a great sucking noise, then everywhere in the universe -- silence. THE END."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Dave Duncan's Strings has a system for opening what are effectively short-lived wormholes to other places. They tend to connect us to the hearts of stars, which has done the power-generation industry no end of good. Luckily for Earth, they are not such that the Earth is drawn in through the hole, nor can much of the star escape or the book would have been much shorter.

TYR (http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com) says..

[(Anonymous)]

So the aliens would be as to us as the actual bits hurtling through a real router are to the sysadmins sitting around its cage, drinking coffee. At most, we might be able to detect their activity in the sense that you, knowing nothing of internetworking, could attach a multimeter to one of the RJ-45 ports...

"This device is putting out only a fluctuating 0.0003 of a volt; clearly, whatever intelligence created the router has long since been and gone.."

[dsrtao]

It's more amusing if the builders are so alien that we don't even recognize that they are still around and making use of the network.

Extra points if the builders like short-lived stars and are continually building out the network as older stars drop off into unusability...

Humans: "So why does 95% of the network go to neutron stars, gas clouds and protostars?"

Builders: "That's what red giants become when we're done with them."

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Gee, humans, why are you so interested in traveling down our sewers anyway?"

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Keith Lynch is an alien?