User:RelentlessRecusant/Transit measure

"We no longer have the manpower or material to excise remedial measures at a planetary level. I certainly can't justify using the [transit measure] to save my own skin when there are still so many innocents to protect and index."

- The Librarian

"Instead, we ask ... what constraints do the laws of physics place on the activities of an arbitrarily advanced civilization?"

- Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Ulvi Yurtsever (1988), Physical Review Letters (61): 1446-1449

The transit measure was a sophisticated means devised by the Forerunners during the waning years of the Flood-Forerunner War to perform translocations of mass by the manipulation of four-dimensional spacetime.

It was originally conceptualized and generated by The Librarian on Sanctuary as a method to easily transport innocent sentient organisms from their homeworlds to Shield Installations across the galaxy. While typically 37,000-ton Dreadnoughts were used to physically transport these creatures, this later become impossible, as substantial Flood infestation beyond the harried Maginot Line retarded the movement of the Dreadnoughts and threatened their safety.

While manipulation of Slipspace was a complex manipulation of twelve-dimensional spacetime that was predicted by quantum loop string analyses, the transit measure was conceptually far more simple, only requiring the knowledge of four-dimensional spacetime; according to the quantum foam, the near-instantaneous creation and destruction of virtual particles at near-infinitesimal distances generated large fluctuations in the spacetime continuum, as energy deflects the flat topology of spacetime. In the 20th, human physicists would later surmise that wormholes—small "bridges" in spacetime generated underneath the plane of spacetime—could arise as a result of these topological deflections generated by the creation of virtual particles, which is allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

With the usage of scanning tunneling visualization, it was possible to use the quantum tunneling effect to measure the topology of spacetime at near-infinitesimal distances. This allowed for the identification of particularly severe curvatures in spacetime; these are prevented from instantaneous collapse by the employment of Higgs particles, which lend mass. However, the wormhole by itself has been shown to spontaneously collapse; therefore, the negative pressure of the Casimir effect is employed to stabilize the wormhole, lending an outside pressure that prevents spontaneous collapse, while mass transposition is possible to nearby regions of spacetime with the stabilized wormhole.

While obviously, extremely high energies are needed to sustain wormholes with sufficient size to allow for the transport of personnel and materiel, the transit measure is often limited to nearby regions of spacetime, as to prevent the excessive cost of energy. The Librarian, the digitized and preserved essence of the former Librarian, would continue to develop the transit measure technique in the hundred thousand years between the Flood-Forerunner War and the Galactic Era, optimizing the technology to allow for the near-instantaneous travel of Sentinels and other objects throughout Sanctuary.