Time Portal Campaign D20 Future

[Thomas Bowman]

The powers of the future made a time machine, this is not a portable time machine, it uses wormholes or time portals. On the way towards building this time machine, a terrible accident occurred, the time machine turned into a black hole and swallowed the Earth, it was a very tiny black hole, smaller than an atom, it was meant to facilitate communication across time a space, but unfortunately something went wrong. The black hole was created on the surface of the Earth and it escaped containment, it sank through the crust of the Earth and settled in the core swallowing matter around it, as it accumulated mass it grew larger. Fortunately there was time to evacuate the Earth and build an artificial structure around the black hole on which people can live, this was a Banks Orbital.

https://thomasbowman767.deviantart....Orbital-728405177?ga_submit_new=10:1517353884
This diagram shows the Banks Orbital and a portion of its surface. Much of the life of Earth was lost when the planet got swallowed by the black hole, but the development of time portals gave the builders of the Orbital access to the past. The builders are no longer human, rather they are machines that live in the substrate of the orbital, which is a vast computer network, but they value life and the desired to bring some of it through the portals from the past and resettle them onto the surface of the Orbital. So this campaign is about what happens when portals open up onto our world leading to the future on this orbital where other portals lead to other periods further into Earth's past. Oh by the way, Venus and Mars have been terraformed.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Let me explain a little more about what's going on here. I wanted to create a World on Venus where dinosaurs exist, and Mars with canals, there is magic as well, this is not our Solar System. Not yet. Next task is to get the people of our modern World into this setting. That is where the time portals come in. Time portals are made by bending the fabric of space with gravity creating wormholes. Most of the wormholes here are too small to send actual objects through, but information can go through. Wormholes the size of an atom would be sufficient to send information through. This works in many ways like a Star Trek transporter, you have the sending platform, which deconstructs the object to be sent, here we do that with nanotechnology - molecule sized machines to take things and people apart atom by atom recording the information as deconstruction continues, the information is sent through a tiny wormhole about the size of an atom. Molecular machines on the other side of the wormhole receive the data and using that information reconstruct that which was sent. A person or object is sent through a membrane, much like in Stargate, the membrane consists of nanites, and the object or person is sent through, the part which enters the membrane passes through and is deconstructed entering virtual space, nerve ending entering the membrane still receives information from the deconstructed part - now in virtual space, so it appears the part is still attached as far as the brain in real space is concerned. Travel through the membrane is slow. One much push past it as if passing through molasses. The membrane appears as a silvery fluid that resists passage through. Some of the portals lead to past eras, other portals lead to purely virtual and hence imaginary worlds, in some worlds magic exists, and in others it does not. In the year 2020, a series of portals appear on our world.
These red cross hatches are the portal locations in 2020 AD, the lead to corresponding locations on the Banks Orbital Earth projection.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This Julian Date converter has the range of dates this Time Portal Campaign has access to.
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php
The earliest possible date is at noon Universal Time on Monday, 4713 B.C. Jan 1 12:00:00.0 (on the Julian calendar), the latest date is on Saturday, A.D. 10000 Jan 1 00:00:00.0 (on the Gregorian calendar). The gates open to the Banks orbital on this date.
Here is a map of the Portal Locations connecting Earth in the near future, 2020 AD.

https://orig00.deviantart.net/e6b6/f/2018/032/9/9/portal_locations_by_thomasbowman767-dc1u5aq.png
As you can see, the portals are evenly distributed, each one is a mile-wide circular opening vertical to the surface of the Earth and half below it. Each portal is 30 feet thick. I think I'll do away with the membrane, you can just travel through them at normal speed, even fly an airplane through them. Since a mile is 5280, a plane would have 2640 feet of clearance between the top of the rim and the surface. As you can see, many of these portals appear on Ocean surfaces. Each nation claims its corresponding territory on the other side, and that territory starts out as wilderness. As you can see by the way the poles are distributed, I'll explain how climate works. On the underside of the ring floor are radiators, heat is absorbed through the ground and radiated into space, that is why the polar regions are colder. As seen from the surface of the North America map, the Sun appears to rise in the north and set in the south. All regions get approximately 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night just as in the equatorial regions of Earth, the pseudo northern and southern hemispheres experience season produced artificially by the ground absorbing more and less hear according to a seasonal cycle.

 

[Dandu]

But wouldn't the black hole's gravitational pull depend on the mass it was created with? A sub-atomic black hole would be on the scale of what is called a primordial black hole, which would have so little mass that it would not be able to substantially disrupt the Earth.

Even under the scenario outlined, wouldn't radiation emission from the black hole after it swallows the earth be a tremendous hazard for people living on the Banks Orbital?

 

[Thomas Bowman]

But wouldn't the black hole's gravitational pull depend on the mass it was created with? A sub-atomic black hole would be on the scale of what is called a primordial black hole, which would have so little mass that it would not be able to substantially disrupt the Earth.

Even under the scenario outlined, wouldn't radiation emission from the black hole after it swallows the earth be a tremendous hazard for people living on the Banks Orbital?

Yes, but the Banks Orbital could have been built after the black hole finished swallowing the Earth. An Earth mass black hole has a Schwarzschild radius of 9 millimeters, after it finished swallowing the Earth, it would be quite cool, as there would be no more mass within reach falling into it, the Hawking radiation of a black hole this size would be quite insignificant as well. So the scenario is the Earth was wiped out, but by this time humans had evolved into something else, electronic beings on a computer matrix. At some point this civilization came into contact with aliens from a much older civilization, the Earthlings borrowed one of their wormholes, and created some of their own, and sent them through the larger wormhole into the past, thus they had access to Earth's history, or at least Earth's history that goes back to 4713 BC. From that history, they were able to extract Earth life forms that had otherwise been lost to the black hole. The time periods connected to by the wormholes are not casually connected to the timeline where these wormholes were actual created, so changing history though them doesn't actually cause time paradoxes, but other than massively interfering with the timeline connected to 2020 AD by introducing all these gates, the other timelines have been minimally interfered with and thus has minimal deviation from the original timeline. 2020 AD was considered an optimal period to obtain humans from as this era was right before the first true Artificial Intelligence programs came online, it was the last period where humans were masters of their own planet and were the only intelligent technology using life form on it. There are other portals to time periods before this. There is a similar set up as in 2020 AD for the time period 4713 BC, and some humans have migrated through the gates from that time period, and 4713 BC has been altered as a result, but there was not much recorded history in 4713 BC anyway so it matters little. the humans that inhabit the Orbital when the modern humans arrive, date from that period, each inhabiting their respective continents.