NONLOCALITY: hard sci-fi in two pages

A free, two-page, d6-only futuristic RPG about space exploration, written by an actual physicist (that’s me, hello!) for PocketQuest 2023! Inspired by Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, I have created a game set in a speculative future, decades ahead of the first half of the 2020s, in which space colonization is a reality. I classify this game as hard science fiction, incorporating state-of-the-art knowledge of science and technology, as well as hypothetical topics that are currently debated in academia. If you enjoy thrilling military sci-fi experiences with elements of grounded realism, then NONLOCALITY is the game for you!

To create a 21st century version of ficticious spacefaring, I had to come up with physically reasonable explanations for two puzzling problems in contemporary physics: the apparent destruction of information trapped by black holes (a.k.a. black hole information paradox) and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. After reading the first section of Chapter 8 in Sabine Hossenfelder's Existential Physics, I stumbled upon the theoretical idea proposed by Markopoulou & Smolin in 2007 (https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702044) of nonlocal connections scattered across spacetime. They could link incommensurably distant positions in the universe through tiny wormholes, allowing information to escape from black holes as Hawking radiation and enabling standard matter and energy to influence different parts of the universe, thus providing an explanation for what dark matter and energy are. As I was already planning to use Morris-Thorne wormholes for effectively faster-than-light travel and signaling, just like Sagan did in Contact, I found a simple, “Occam’s razored” justification for my conjectural cosmic journeys and also a name for my game from an actual physical phenomenon, the nonlocality, whose properties Einstein described (indirectly) as “spooky actions at a distance” in a letter to Max Born in 1947 (he was actually referring to the wave function collapse in quantum mechanics when he wrote that, which is known to be a nonlocal feature).

As cool as they sound, nonlocal connections in spacetime and wormholes are still in the field of speculative physics, with no support from experiments and empirical observations. On one hand, wormholes and black holes aren’t so different from each other, and we now know the latter exist – we have actual images of them! On the other hand, even if wormholes are proven to exist, traversing a traversable one is still tricky; the material used to hold a Morris-Thorne wormhole’s throat open is exotic, having a negative mass-energy density to a sufficiently fast observer (which is the case for someone traversing a wormhole). In hard science fiction of old, negative energy generators were constructed using the Casimir effect, a real phenomenon predicted to exist back in 1948, in which really tiny amounts of negative energy can be generated due to fluctuations in quantum vacuum (also called quantum foam, and for your information, at this scale is where the nonlocal connections mentioned before are claimed to exist). More recently in 2017, negative effective mass (https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04055) was created in the laboratory using atomic clouds of Bose-Einstein condensates - a field I happened to work on years ago during my master’s (https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/2/311), another reason for mentioning it! Despite all those breakthroughs, the scientific knowledge about negative mass and energy is still very narrow, and any applications and technologies using those concepts are merely imaginary....

NONLOCALITY is a sci-fi hack of my OSR game HAGHEX, a two-page tabletop dungeon crawler that follows the “less is more”, “rulings over rules” and “play wherever you are, whenever you want” maxims. If you feel particularly generous after playing and enjoying my games, buy me a coffee. :)

I would like to acknowledge the free version of ChatGPT for being my editor!