Snippets 3 - Void Galaxy
(crossposted from Mastodon) I'm watching this old 60s Outer Limits episode and it has me hungering to write that sci-fi story I keep meaning to write about that Earth-like culture in its sixties that's in a void galaxy, and just discovered other galaxies exist, and is theorizing what they are on a sorta speedrun. See, MCG+01-02-015 is a void galaxy, and according to some pop science articles it's the one we've seen that's furthest from anything else. For purposes of the story I'd write, I don't need strict accuracy; they wouldn't call their galaxy by that name anyway. One of the articles indicated that the technology needed to see their nearest neighboring galaxy wouldn't have been available until our 1960s. We knew of the Andromeda Galaxy for a long time before then. An island universe, a spiral nebula, we called it, and knew of others too before then. Finding so many more in the great distance was a surprise, but not the shock of seeing our first neighbor in the void for the first time in the middle of the Cold War. They'd all be redshifted so much, and it wouldn't take long to figure out that's what it was: everything is moving away so fast, so far away and also all closer to each other than to this world, forever. Mostly I think people wouldn't care. The redshifted galaxies would be a big news story, schools would have to change curricula to reflect the new knowledge both of the shape of their own galaxy and of its miniscule importance but also its seemingly unique situation. Cheesy science fiction aliens would suddenly often be from other galaxies, and would be red-skinned, because of course everything is red. (That it's doppler shift would be known, but how people internalize scientific information is not always sensical.) There'd be speeches, there'd be announcements, there'd be discoveries, and life would go on. And a few people would be deeply, profoundly shaken by the intense loneliness of it all. I don't really know what to do with this idea.
