/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10367272
Subluminal speeds locked empires sound like a huge pain in the ass to maintain if they go too wide, it would be much better to expand inwards into a virtual world with the resources of your solar system and the relatively close stars to your native system.

700 million light years from Earth there is an enormous black void that defies all explanation. Making up 0.27% of the observable universe, it is a cosmic black spot that only contains a handful of galaxies despite being 330 million light years in diamter.

it is said that if our own Milky Way had been placed in the center of this void, we would have been unable to view anything outside of our own galaxy until the late 1960's.
There is an alien species that lives on a planet in one of the galaxies in that void. For centuries they have been convinced that there is nothing beyond their galaxy - their galaxy is the entire universe. there is nothing more.
t would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, their telecopes can see for hundreds of millions of light years - and all they have ever seen is an endless black void.

Until one day, an astronomer tests the maximum range on the latest deep space telescope, and their world is changed forever. They will see millions of galaxies clustered together beyond the edge of the void, and realise that they exist within a cosmic anomaly.
They will realise that they are completely seperated from a vast universe that eclipses their galaxy in size. The most pressing question for the rest of their species' existence will be: why are we alone?
They will most likely never discover the answer.