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134-596: Stargate Universe (often abbreviated as SGU ) is a military science fiction drama television series and part of MGM 's Stargate franchise . It follows the adventures of a present-day, multinational exploration team traveling on the Ancient spaceship Destiny several billion light years distant from the Milky Way Galaxy . They are now trying to figure out a way to return to Earth, while simultaneously trying to explore and to survive in their unknown area of

268-578: A Strategic Defense Initiative in which satellites would be set up to shoot at nuclear missiles. The two authors were Larry Niven , the author of the Ringworld series, and Jerry Pournelle . Along with like-minded colleagues, they formed a committee to lobby the United States on space issues and influence Reagan's space policies. Pournelle advocated a "robust, technocratic military state". In addition to Pournelle's science fiction writing, he wrote

402-457: A "more disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of weapons they might use". In many stories, the usage or advancement of a specific technology plays a role in advancing the plot, such as deploying a new weapon or spaceship. Some works draw heavy parallels to human history and how a scientific breakthrough or new military doctrine can significantly change how war

536-556: A "paper for the Air Force on stability's role in national security". President Reagan read the space advice that Niven, Pournelle, and their colleagues prepared, which influenced Reagan's 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative . "Niven and Pournelle saw an opportunity to shape the great void in their political image, and Reagan viewed space as yet another tool to defend America against the communist superpower...". Science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov criticized

670-496: A 2008 premiere possible. Since their ambitions with the previous live-action Stargate series were often restricted by the low budget and risked coming across as silly, they pitched the show as "an expensive series" to the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy) in the last quarter of 2007. Although the pitch was well-received, the project was put on hold because of the ongoing work on Stargate Atlantis and Stargate: Continuum , and

804-587: A Dicke radiometer that they intended to use for radio astronomy and satellite communication experiments. The antenna was constructed in 1959 to support Project Echo —the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's passive communications satellites, which used large earth orbiting aluminized plastic balloons as reflectors to bounce radio signals from one point on the Earth to another. On 20 May 1964 they made their first measurement clearly showing

938-515: A brief paper by Soviet astrophysicists A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Novikov , in the spring of 1964. In 1964, David Todd Wilkinson and Peter Roll, Dicke's colleagues at Princeton University , began constructing a Dicke radiometer to measure the cosmic microwave background. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in nearby Holmdel Township, New Jersey had built

1072-609: A captain, and are armed with semi-automatic rifles . Eventually, as science fiction became an established and separate genre, military science fiction established itself as a subgenre. One such work is H. Beam Piper 's Uller Uprising (1952) (based on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny ). Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is another work of military science fiction, along with Gordon Dickson 's Dorsai (1960), and these are thought to be mostly responsible for popularizing this subgenre's popularity among young readers of

1206-458: A desert planet" in "Air (Part 3)". The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette summarized their review by saying that, "given time, Stargate Universe may become worth watching if it develops its characters and continues to mine its premise for stories." David Hinckley, a reviewer from The New York Daily News gave the episodes four out of five stars, saying that "Eli's not the only one playing a high-stakes game here." Among reviewers who were negative towards

1340-412: A factor of 10 less strong than the temperature anisotropy; it supplements the temperature data as they are correlated. The B-mode signal is even weaker but may contain additional cosmological data. The anisotropy is related to physical origin of the polarization. Excitation of an electron by linear polarized light generates polarized light at 90 degrees to the incident direction. If the incoming radiation

1474-480: A form of faster-than-light travel in order to facilitate the enormous scale of interstellar war . The long spans of time (e.g., decades or centuries) required for human soldiers to travel interstellar distances, even at relativistic speeds, and the consequences for the characters, is a dilemma examined by authors such as Joe Haldeman and Alastair Reynolds . Other writers such as Larry Niven have created plausible interplanetary conflict based on human colonization of

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1608-527: A future mercenary tank regiment . Drake's series which "helped initiate a fashion for sf about mercenaries", including The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold . A twist was introduced in Harry Turtledove 's Worldwar series depicting an alternate history in which WWII is disrupted by extraterrestrials invading Earth in 1942, forcing humans to stop fighting each other and unite against this common enemy. Turtledove depicts

1742-453: A galactic empire is sometimes a "core world," such as a planet relatively near a galaxy's centrally-located supermassive black hole, which has advanced considerably in science and technology compared to current human civilization. Characterizations of these empires can vary wildly from malevolent forces that attack sympathetic victims, to apathetic or amoral bureaucracies, to more reasonable entities focused on social progress. A writer may posit

1876-605: A heterogeneous plasma. E-modes were first seen in 2002 by the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI). B-modes are expected to be an order of magnitude weaker than the E-modes. The former are not produced by standard scalar type perturbations, but are generated by gravitational waves during cosmic inflation shortly after the big bang. However, gravitational lensing of the stronger E-modes can also produce B-mode polarization. Detecting

2010-475: A lack of "intelligent" and "surprising stories" and was overall negative towards Stargate Universe . The show has also been criticized for its similarities to the reimagined Battlestar Galactica . In its second season, SGU had declined in viewership ratings. Series co-creator Brad Wright attributed this decline to its change in timeslot (from Friday night to Tuesday night, and then again to Monday night), stating: I don’t think if we, for any reason, go away, it

2144-458: A law enforcement setting. Some examples include Richard Morgan 's Takashi Kovacs book such as Altered Carbon (2002) and Elizabeth Bear 's Jenny Casey books, such as Hammered (2004). Precursors for military science fiction can be found in "future war" stories dating back at least to George Chesney 's story " The Battle of Dorking " (1871). Written just after the Prussian victory in

2278-575: A markedly different shooting style for more reality and immediacy with inspiration from Cloverfield , as if "a documentary crew were to ride along on this adventure to outer space". Sci Fi Wire published concept art of the Destiny in October 2008. The first promotional picture of the cast (out of costume and in casual clothing) was released on March 20, 2009. The same day, Syfy began airing thirty-second trailers of Universe , showing various clips of

2412-406: A measured brightness temperature at any wavelength can be converted to a blackbody temperature. The radiation is remarkably uniform across the sky, very unlike the almost point-like structure of stars or clumps of stars in galaxies. The radiation is isotropic to roughly one part in 25,000: the root mean square variations are just over 100 μK, after subtracting a dipole anisotropy from

2546-530: A military science fiction story can speculate about war in the future, in space, or involving space travel, or the effects of such a war on humans; at the other, a story with a fictional military plot may have relatively superficial science fictional elements. The term "military space opera" may occasionally denote this latter style, as used for example by critic Sylvia Kelso when describing Lois McMaster Bujold 's Vorkosigan Saga . Examples that feature aspects of both military science fiction and space opera include

2680-572: A science consultant. The projected film start of Stargate Universe was initially slated for February 4, 2009, but was moved to February 18, 2009. The show was filmed on stages 2, 4 ( Destiny set) and 5 (Icarus Base set) at The Bridge Studios ( SG-1 and Atlantis had been filmed at stages 5 and 6) and on location in and around Vancouver, British Columbia . "Air (Part 3)" was filmed in and around Alamogordo, New Mexico from late April through early May 2009. Stargate Universe showed computer-generated worlds filmed in digital sets. Stargate Universe had

2814-515: A series of peaks whose angular scales ( ℓ values of the peaks) are roughly in the ratio 1 : 3 : 5 : ..., while adiabatic density perturbations produce peaks whose locations are in the ratio 1 : 2 : 3 : ... Observations are consistent with the primordial density perturbations being entirely adiabatic, providing key support for inflation, and ruling out many models of structure formation involving, for example, cosmic strings. Collisionless damping

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2948-465: A space colony requiring defense against attack out on the frontier. Gene Roddenberry described Star Trek: The Original Series as a Space Western (or more poetically, as " Wagon Train to the stars"). The TV series Firefly and its cinematic follow-up Serenity literalized the Western aspects of the space Western subgenre as popularized by Star Trek : it features frontier towns, horses, and

3082-452: A subject were collected and marketed as such. The series of anthologies with the group title There Will be War edited by Pournelle and John F. Carr (nine volumes from 1983 through 1990) helped keep the category active, and encouraged new writers to add to it. David Drake wrote stories about future mercenaries, including the Hammer's Slammers series (1979), which follows the career of

3216-453: A thermal spectrum. The cosmic microwave background was first predicted in 1948 by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman , in a correction they prepared for a paper by Alpher's PhD advisor George Gamow . Alpher and Herman were able to estimate the temperature of the cosmic microwave background to be 5 K. The first published recognition of the CMB radiation as a detectable phenomenon appeared in

3350-461: A visual style evocative of classic John Ford Westerns. Worlds that have been terraformed may be depicted as presenting similar challenges as that of a frontier settlement in a classic Western. Six-shooters and horses may be replaced by ray guns and rockets. A "thematic subdivision" of MSF are works where "ex-military protagonists [are] drawing on their battle experience for tough and violent operations in (more or less) civilian life", typically in

3484-610: Is flat . A number of ground-based interferometers provided measurements of the fluctuations with higher accuracy over the next three years, including the Very Small Array , Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), and the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI). DASI made the first detection of the polarization of the CMB and the CBI provided the first E-mode polarization spectrum with compelling evidence that it

3618-430: Is "that sort of fear and terror of a tragedy combined with the sense that there is hope for us in the basic ways in which human beings survive". The planned increased levels of drama were balanced with humor to avoid pretentiousness. The differences between good and evil were meant to be less apparent, as the ship was populated with flawed and unprepared characters who are not supposed to go there. According to Brad Wright,

3752-476: Is an emission of uniform black body thermal energy coming from all directions. Intensity of the CMB is expressed in kelvin (K), the SI unit of temperature. The CMB has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature of 2.725 48 ± 0.000 57  K . Variations in intensity are expressed as variations in temperature. The blackbody temperature uniquely characterizes the intensity of the radiation at all wavelengths;

3886-430: Is an issue necessarily of the quality of the product that we’ve been making. I think getting moved on the schedule has hurt us. And the fact that some of the fans that liked SG-1 and Atlantis were so angry that they have deliberately hurt us, which is unfortunate. After the cancellation of Stargate Universe , Stargate fans reacted angrily towards Syfy. On May 12, 2011, Syfy released a letter explaining its reasons for

4020-525: Is caused by two effects, when the treatment of the primordial plasma as fluid begins to break down: These effects contribute about equally to the suppression of anisotropies at small scales and give rise to the characteristic exponential damping tail seen in the very small angular scale anisotropies. The depth of the LSS refers to the fact that the decoupling of the photons and baryons does not happen instantaneously, but instead requires an appreciable fraction of

4154-405: Is determined by various interactions of matter and photons up to the point of decoupling, which results in a characteristic lumpy pattern that varies with angular scale. The distribution of the anisotropy across the sky has frequency components that can be represented by a power spectrum displaying a sequence of peaks and valleys. The peak values of this spectrum hold important information about

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4288-503: Is fairly static, and weapons that would be familiar to present-day soldiers are used, but other aspects of society have changed. Technology may not be emphasized in such stories as much as other aspects of the characters' military lives, cultures, or societies. For example, women may be accepted as equal partners for combat roles, or preferred over men. When the "extravagan[t]" depictions of war in space operas faded along with pulp fiction more generally, military science fiction developed with

4422-427: Is fought, the outcome of a battle, and the fortunes of the combatants. Many works explore how human progress, discovery, and suffering affect military doctrine or battle, and how the protagonists and antagonists reflect on and adapt to such changes. Many authors have either used a galaxy-spanning fictional empire as a background for the story, or have explored the growth and/or decline of such an empire. The capital of

4556-414: Is isotropic, different incoming directions create polarizations that cancel out. If the incoming radiation has quadrupole anisotropy, residual polarization will be seen. Other than the temperature and polarization anisotropy, the CMB frequency spectrum is expected to feature tiny departures from the black-body law known as spectral distortions . These are also at the focus of an active research effort with

4690-591: Is known quite precisely. The first-year WMAP results put the time at which P ( t ) has a maximum as 372,000 years. This is often taken as the "time" at which the CMB formed. However, to figure out how long it took the photons and baryons to decouple, we need a measure of the width of the PVF. The WMAP team finds that the PVF is greater than half of its maximal value (the "full width at half maximum", or FWHM) over an interval of 115,000 years. By this measure, decoupling took place over roughly 115,000 years, and thus when it

4824-489: Is not necessarily set in outer space or on multiple worlds, as in space opera and the space Western . Both military science fiction and the space Western may consider an interstellar war and oppression by a galactic empire as the story's backdrop. They may focus on a lone gunslinger , soldier, or veteran in a futuristic space frontier setting . Western elements and conventions in military science fiction may be explicit, such as cowboys in outer space, or more subtle, as in

4958-466: Is out of phase with the T-mode spectrum. In June 2001, NASA launched a second CMB space mission, WMAP , to make much more precise measurements of the large scale anisotropies over the full sky. WMAP used symmetric, rapid-multi-modulated scanning, rapid switching radiometers at five frequencies to minimize non-sky signal noise. The data from the mission was released in five installments, the last being

5092-570: Is powered by large naquadria deposits throughout the core. The team, led by Dr. Nicholas Rush, postulate that the power from that core could allow them to use a 9-chevron address to "dial" into the Stargate, allowing them access to locations far remote from their galaxy, but lack the means to translate the writing of the Ancients to understand how to dial this properly. Dr. Rush designs a video game used across Earth to find brilliant minds to interpret

5226-561: Is science fiction which is written about a military situation with a fundamental understanding of how military lifestyles and characters differ from civilian lifestyles and characters. It is science fiction which attempts to realistically portray the military within a science-fiction context. It is not 'bug shoots'. It is about human beings, and members of other species, caught up in warfare and carnage. It isn't an excuse for simplistic solutions to problems. In 1980 and 1981, two science fiction authors inspired President Ronald Reagan 's vision for

5360-535: Is similar in design to the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) and the Very Small Array (VSA). A third space mission, the ESA (European Space Agency) Planck Surveyor , was launched in May 2009 and performed an even more detailed investigation until it was shut down in October 2013. Planck employed both HEMT radiometers and bolometer technology and measured the CMB at a smaller scale than WMAP. Its detectors were trialled in

5494-449: Is still a matter of scientific debate. It may have included starlight from the very first population of stars ( population III stars), supernovae when these first stars reached the end of their lives, or the ionizing radiation produced by the accretion disks of massive black holes. The time following the emission of the cosmic microwave background—and before the observation of the first stars—is semi-humorously referred to by cosmologists as

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5628-646: The Battlestar Galactica franchise and Robert A. Heinlein 's 1959 novel Starship Troopers . A key distinction of military science fiction from space opera is that space operas focus more on adventurous stories and melodrama, while military science fiction focuses more on warfare and technical aspects. The principal characters in a space opera are also not military personnel, but civilians or paramilitary . Stories in both subgenres often concern an interstellar war in which humans fight themselves and/or nonhuman entities. Military science fiction, however,

5762-436: The 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike . The series was given the official greenlight for a 2009 debut by Syfy on August 22, 2008, shortly after the cancellation of Stargate Atlantis had been announced. It was given an initial order of 40 episodes across two seasons. Joseph Mallozzi explained that a new series would have lower salaries and licensing fees than a new sixth season of Atlantis would have had. MGM co-funded

5896-530: The Dark Age , and is a period which is under intense study by astronomers (see 21 centimeter radiation ). Two other effects which occurred between reionization and our observations of the cosmic microwave background, and which appear to cause anisotropies, are the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect , where a cloud of high-energy electrons scatters the radiation, transferring some of its energy to the CMB photons, and

6030-502: The Doppler shift of the background radiation. The latter is caused by the peculiar velocity of the Sun relative to the comoving cosmic rest frame as it moves at 369.82 ± 0.11 km/s towards the constellation Crater near its boundary with the constellation Leo The CMB dipole and aberration at higher multipoles have been measured, consistent with galactic motion. Despite

6164-554: The Franco-Prussian War , it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country in which the Royal Navy is destroyed by a futuristic wonder-weapon ("fatal engines"). Other works of military science fiction followed, including H.G. Wells 's " The Land Ironclads ". It described tank-like "land ironclads ," 80-to-100-foot-long (24 to 30 m) armoured fighting vehicles that carry riflemen, engineers, and

6298-618: The SG-1 cast was also quite young in their first season. The producers were "looking for people who are a little more identifiable and contemporary," with an "everyman on the street point of view" after being challenged by the situation. Martin Gero considered Stargate Universe as an ensemble show, more than the previous two Stargate live-action series were. Auditions were held in Los Angeles. The producers were looking for well-known names for

6432-734: The Sachs–Wolfe effect , which causes photons from the Cosmic Microwave Background to be gravitationally redshifted or blueshifted due to changing gravitational fields. The standard cosmology that includes the Big Bang "enjoys considerable popularity among the practicing cosmologists" However, there are challenges to the standard big bang framework for explaining CMB data. In particular standard cosmology requires fine-tuning of some free parameters, with different values supported by different experimental data. As an example of

6566-595: The Universe team aboard the ship and the SG·U Stargate with the first visual effects. MGM revealed its revamped Stargate Universe website on July 8 with an interactive virtual set tour of the Destiny , interviews with the cast, character profiles and videos. Joseph Mallozzi began posting concept art and behind-the-scenes photos of the SGU set on his blog afterwards. Brad Wright, Robert C. Cooper and most members of

6700-653: The asteroid belt and outer planets by means of technologies utilizing the laws of physics as currently understood. Several subsets of military science fiction share characteristics of the space opera subgenre, concentrating on large-scale space battles with futuristic weapons in an interstellar war . Many stories can be considered to be in one or both the military science fiction and space opera subgenres, such as The Sten Chronicles by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch , Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card , Honorverse by David Weber , Deathstalker by Simon R. Green , and Armor by John Steakley. At one extreme,

6834-475: The expansion of the universe . The surface of last scattering refers to a shell at the right distance in space so photons are now received that were originally emitted at the time of decoupling. The CMB is not completely smooth and uniform, showing a faint anisotropy that can be mapped by sensitive detectors. Ground and space-based experiments such as COBE , WMAP and Planck have been used to measure these temperature inhomogeneities. The anisotropy structure

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6968-551: The inflaton field that caused the inflation event. Long before the formation of stars and planets, the early universe was more compact, much hotter and, starting 10 seconds after the Big Bang, filled with a uniform glow from its white-hot fog of interacting plasma of photons , electrons , and baryons . As the universe expanded , adiabatic cooling caused the energy density of the plasma to decrease until it became favorable for electrons to combine with protons , forming hydrogen atoms. This recombination event happened when

7102-422: The observable universe . With a standard optical telescope , the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost uniform and is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object . This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The accidental discovery of

7236-437: The photon – baryon plasma in the early universe. The pressure of the photons tends to erase anisotropies, whereas the gravitational attraction of the baryons, moving at speeds much slower than light, makes them tend to collapse to form overdensities. These two effects compete to create acoustic oscillations, which give the microwave background its characteristic peak structure. The peaks correspond, roughly, to resonances in which

7370-461: The two decades. The sensitivity of the new experiments improved dramatically, with a reduction in internal noise by three orders of magnitude. The primary goal of these experiments was to measure the scale of the first acoustic peak, which COBE did not have sufficient resolution to resolve. This peak corresponds to large scale density variations in the early universe that are created by gravitational instabilities, resulting in acoustical oscillations in

7504-458: The 1970s numerous studies showed that tiny deviations from isotropy in the CMB could result from events in the early universe. Harrison, Peebles and Yu, and Zel'dovich realized that the early universe would require quantum inhomogeneities that would result in temperature anisotropy at the level of 10 or 10 . Rashid Sunyaev , using the alternative name relic radiation , calculated the observable imprint that these inhomogeneities would have on

7638-454: The 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery. The interpretation of the cosmic microwave background was a controversial issue in the late 1960s. Alternative explanations included energy from within the solar system, from galaxies, from intergalactic plasma and from multiple extragalactic radio sources. Two requirements would show that the microwave radiation was truly "cosmic". First,

7772-555: The 2013 data, the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter , 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy . On 5 February 2015, new data was released by the Planck mission, according to which the age of the universe is 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years old and the Hubble constant was measured to be 67.74 ± 0.46 (km/s)/Mpc . The cosmic microwave background radiation and the cosmological redshift -distance relation are together regarded as

7906-460: The Ancients' mission for Destiny is discovered in " The Greater Good ". Dr. Rush cracks the ship's master code, gaining control of the ship's systems and discovering that the Ancients found an artificial pattern to the cosmic microwave background radiation said to be a remnant of the Big Bang . This discovery suggested the possibility of life before or immediately after the Big Bang, and Destiny

8040-667: The Antarctic Viper telescope as ACBAR ( Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver ) experiment—which has produced the most precise measurements at small angular scales to date—and in the Archeops balloon telescope. On 21 March 2013, the European-led research team behind the Planck cosmology probe released the mission's all-sky map ( 565x318 jpeg , 3600x1800 jpeg ) of the cosmic microwave background. The map suggests

8174-434: The CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s. The CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. In the Big Bang cosmological models , during the earliest periods, the universe was filled with an opaque fog of dense, hot plasma of sub-atomic particles . As the universe expanded, this plasma cooled to

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8308-409: The CMB as a function of redshift, z , can be shown to be proportional to the color temperature of the CMB as observed in the present day (2.725 K or 0.2348 meV): The high degree of uniformity throughout the observable universe and its faint but measured anisotropy lend strong support for the Big Bang model in general and the ΛCDM ("Lambda Cold Dark Matter") model in particular. Moreover,

8442-454: The Stargate aboard Destiny to board that ship when it was far enough out into the universe, but they eventually abandoned the project after looking into ascension and other endeavors. To reach this ship, an address would have to be dialed consisting of nine chevrons , a possibility that had been unknown in the previous Stargate series, due to energy constraints and the lack of any nine-chevron addresses recorded anywhere until Destiny's address

8576-537: The Strategic Defense Initiative. After the 9/11 terrorism attacks, a group of sci-fi authors called Sigma, including Pournelle and Niven, advised the "Department of Homeland Security on technological strategies for defeating terrorist threats." In 2021, Worldcrunch reported that the French military has hired fiction writers to develop futuristic warfare scenarios, including situations that

8710-569: The Vietnam War's influence can be seen indirectly in novels such as Joe Haldeman 's The Forever War (published in Analog over 1972–1975) and Lucius Shepard 's Life During Wartime (1987). The Vietnam War resulted in veterans with combat experience deciding to write science fiction, including Joe Haldeman and David Drake . Throughout the 1970s, works such as Haldeman's The Forever War and Drake's Hammer's Slammers helped increase

8844-417: The age of the universe up to that era. One method of quantifying how long this process took uses the photon visibility function (PVF). This function is defined so that, denoting the PVF by P ( t ), the probability that a CMB photon last scattered between time t and t + dt is given by P ( t )   dt . The maximum of the PVF (the time when it is most likely that a given CMB photon last scattered)

8978-484: The anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. The CMB spectrum has become the most precisely measured black body spectrum in nature. In the late 1940s Alpher and Herman reasoned that if there was a Big Bang, the expansion of the universe would have stretched the high-energy radiation of the very early universe into the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum , and down to a temperature of about 5 K. They were slightly off with their estimate, but they had

9112-438: The author can extrapolate what might have occurred. Traditional military values of courage under fire, sense of duty, honor, sacrifice, loyalty, and camaraderie are often emphasized. The action is typically described from the point of view of a soldier in a science fictional setting of or near battle . Typically, the technology is more advanced than that of the present and described in detail. In some stories, however, technology

9246-408: The background radiation with intervening hot gas or gravitational potentials, which occur between the last scattering surface and the observer. The structure of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is principally determined by two effects: acoustic oscillations and diffusion damping (also called collisionless damping or Silk damping). The acoustic oscillations arise because of a conflict in

9380-533: The base back to Earth, and instead redials the Stargate with the ninth chevron, successfully opening a wormhole. The surviving Icarus Base members flee through the wormhole before the planet explodes. They find themselves aboard an old abandoned spacecraft made by the Ancients, which Dr. Rush finds was named Destiny . Around eighty survivors begin to assure the safety of their team, Senator Armstrong injured and realizing he might not have long, sacrifices himself to seal an air leak in one of Destiny ' s shuttles. As

9514-642: The best available evidence for the Big Bang event. Measurements of the CMB have made the inflationary Big Bang model the Standard Cosmological Model . The discovery of the CMB in the mid-1960s curtailed interest in alternatives such as the steady state theory . In the Big Bang model for the formation of the universe , inflationary cosmology predicts that after about 10 seconds the nascent universe underwent exponential growth that smoothed out nearly all irregularities. The remaining irregularities were caused by quantum fluctuations in

9648-439: The color temperature of the background radiation has dropped by an average factor of 1,089 due to the expansion of the universe. As the universe expands, the CMB photons are redshifted , causing them to decrease in energy. The color temperature of this radiation stays inversely proportional to a parameter that describes the relative expansion of the universe over time, known as the scale length . The color temperature T r of

9782-566: The conflict, belligerents (which may involve extraterrestrials), tactics and weapons used for it, and the role of a military service and the individual members of that military organization form the basis for a typical work of military science fiction. The stories often use features of actual past or current Earth conflicts, with countries being replaced by planets or galaxies with similar characteristics, battleships replaced by space battleships, small arms and artillery replaced by lasers, soldiers replaced by space marines, and certain events changed so

9916-478: The cosmic microwave background. After a lull in the 1970s caused in part by the many experimental difficulties in measuring CMB at high precision, increasingly stringent limits on the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background were set by ground-based experiments during the 1980s. RELIKT-1 , a Soviet cosmic microwave background anisotropy experiment on board the Prognoz 9 satellite (launched 1 July 1983), gave

10050-458: The decoupling event is estimated to have occurred and at a point in time such that the photons from that distance have just reached observers. Most of the radiation energy in the universe is in the cosmic microwave background, making up a fraction of roughly 6 × 10 of the total density of the universe. Two of the greatest successes of the Big Bang theory are its prediction of the almost perfect black body spectrum and its detailed prediction of

10184-415: The episode four-and-a-half stars out of 5, saying Universe accomplishes what Stargate Atlantis was not able to, and said it was "exceptionally well made" compared to other shows. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette both praised the show, calling it "intriguing", for not abandoning its premise as Star Trek: Voyager did and criticized it by pointing out that the characters spend "far too much time wandering

10318-428: The final 10 were shown beginning on March 7, 2011. Syfy announced on December 16, 2010, that it would not be picking up Stargate Universe for a third season. The second season of SGU ended as a semi- cliffhanger . There is an ongoing comic book series set after the end of season two, but the original creators and writers are not involved. Stargate Command (SGC) created Icarus base on a remote planet whose Stargate

10452-594: The fine-tuning issue, standard cosmology cannot predict the present temperature of the relic radiation, T 0 {\displaystyle T_{0}} . This value of T 0 {\displaystyle T_{0}} is one of the best results of experimental cosmology and the steady state model can predict it. However, alternative models have their own set of problems and they have only made post-facto explanations of existing observations. Nevertheless, these alternatives have played an important historic role in providing ideas for and challenges to

10586-516: The first upper limits on the large-scale anisotropy. The other key event in the 1980s was the proposal by Alan Guth for cosmic inflation . This theory of rapid spatial expansion gave an explanation for large-scale isotropy by allowing causal connection just before the epoch of last scattering. With this and similar theories, detailed prediction encouraged larger and more ambitious experiments. The NASA Cosmic Background Explorer ( COBE ) satellite orbited Earth in 1989–1996 detected and quantified

10720-473: The fluctuations are coherent on angular scales that are larger than the apparent cosmological horizon at recombination. Either such coherence is acausally fine-tuned , or cosmic inflation occurred. The anisotropy , or directional dependency, of the cosmic microwave background is divided into two types: primary anisotropy, due to effects that occur at the surface of last scattering and before; and secondary anisotropy, due to effects such as interactions of

10854-678: The gap is not too wide for the humans to bridge. For example, the invaders have more advanced tanks, but the German Wehrmacht's tank crews facing them – a major theme in the series – are more skilled and far more experienced. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists three notable women authors of MSF: Lois McMaster Bujold ; Elizabeth Moon (particularly her Familias Regnant stories such as Hunting Party (1993)), and Karen Traviss . Several authors have presented stories with political messages of varying types as major or minor themes of their works. David Drake has often written of

10988-411: The hope of a first measurement within the forthcoming decades, as they contain a wealth of information about the primordial universe and the formation of structures at late time. The CMB contains the vast majority of photons in the universe by a factor of 400 to 1; the number density of photons in the CMB is one billion times (10 ) the number density of matter in the universe. Without the expansion of

11122-489: The horrors and futility of war. He has said, in the afterwords of several of his Hammer's Slammers books (1979 and later), that one of his reasons for writing is to educate those people who have not experienced war, but who might have to make the decision to start or endorse a war (as policymakers or as voters) about what war is really like, and what the powers and limits of the military as an instrument of policy are. David Weber has said: For me, military science fiction

11256-406: The intensity vs frequency or spectrum needed to be shown to match a thermal or blackbody source. This was accomplished by 1968 in a series of measurements of the radiation temperature at higher and lower wavelengths. Second, the radiation needed be shown to be isotropic, the same from all directions. This was also accomplished by 1970, demonstrating that this radiation was truly cosmic in origin. In

11390-516: The internet on September 17, 2008. Joseph Mallozzi explained the largely negative initial fan reaction as a passionate response to the preceding cancellation announcement of Atlantis . Brad Wright dismissed negative comments as a sole reaction to the wording of the network; character breakdowns are written to aid casting directors and agents in the selection process, and "always sound shallow, and if they're written to appear 'deep' it's just ridiculous". Robert C. Cooper replied to concerns of young age that

11524-668: The large scale anisotropies at the limit of its detection capabilities. The NASA COBE mission clearly confirmed the primary anisotropy with the Differential Microwave Radiometer instrument, publishing their findings in 1992. The team received the Nobel Prize in physics for 2006 for this discovery. Inspired by the COBE results, a series of ground and balloon-based experiments measured cosmic microwave background anisotropies on smaller angular scales over

11658-447: The lead roles, but intended to mostly cast "either new faces, or people you've seen in other stuff but maybe aren't as aware of". BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award -winning actor Robert Carlyle was the first announced series regular in mid-December 2008. The casting of Louis Ferreira, David Blue, Brian J. Smith, and Jamil Walker Smith as series regulars was announced in mid-January 2009. The casting of Alaina Huffman and Elyse Levesque

11792-460: The leading theory of cosmic structure formation, and suggested cosmic inflation was the right theory. During the 1990s, the first peak was measured with increasing sensitivity and by 2000 the BOOMERanG experiment reported that the highest power fluctuations occur at scales of approximately one degree. Together with other cosmological data, these results implied that the geometry of the universe

11926-422: The live-action Stargate franchise – as opposed to Stargate Atlantis , which was created as a spin-off from the first series Stargate SG-1 . They wanted to produce a stylistically and totally different TV series with a more mature and fresh story approach so as not to get too repetitive. Wright and Cooper originally planned to write the pilot script for Stargate Universe during the summer of 2007, making

12060-536: The main cast appeared at an SGU panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, 2009. Behind-the-scenes material was shot for future online and DVD use. Stargate Universe is set on the spaceship Destiny , which was launched by the race known as the Ancients from the Milky Way galaxy several million years ago. Several ships were sent ahead of it to seed the universe with Stargates . The Ancients had planned on using

12194-527: The means to dial the ninth chevron, just as the base is attacked by members of the Lucian Alliance . Colonel Telford aids in the defense with F-302 fighters with Colonel Samantha Carter in command of the George Hammond , while the base starts dialing Earth into the Stargate, finding that the planet's power core is about to explode. Dr. Rush realizes that the explosion would follow them through

12328-410: The military become "more resourceful." The German military is also using science fiction to help its military but in its approach, they do not hire science fiction writers to develop scenarios. Instead, they "use existing science fiction" to help the army "predict the "world's next potential conflict." The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) hired two science fiction writers to pen short stories about "what

12462-481: The military cannot directly study for "ethical reasons, such as Autonomous Lethality Weapon Systems (ALWS), or augmented humans." The French military says the authors are asked to imagine warfare situations that "destabilize us, scare us, blame, or even beat us", in order to provide the army with a "fresh set of practice scenarios". Military planners use the science fiction authors' scenarios to "prepare for previously unthought of situations", "boos[t] creativity" and help

12596-555: The new installments was Maureen Ryan from the Chicago Tribune . The reviewer wrote that the "gloomy, underwhelming Universe seems to have ditched many of the elements that the previous "Stargate" shows had, notably camaraderie and a sense of adventure, without adding much in the way of narrative suspense or complexity." The only characters she felt were "worth following" were Eli Wallace and Nicholas Rush. Vince Horiuchi from The Salt Lake Tribune , while not overall positive to

12730-514: The nine year summary. The results are broadly consistent Lambda CDM models based on 6 free parameters and fitting in to Big Bang cosmology with cosmic inflation . The Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) was a telescope installed at the U.S. National Science Foundation 's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica . It was a 13-element interferometer operating between 26 and 36 GHz ( Ka band ) in ten bands. The instrument

12864-496: The outermost layer of a nearby star and collecting energy from it; the first time the Destiny did that, the crew feared the worst, until they understood why it happened. The crew is able to remain in contact with Earth via the Ancient communication stones that Dr. Rush brought, and are told to continue the Stargate mission of exploring that galaxy, while searching for a way to return home. The team's mission adapts in season 2, when

12998-534: The peaks give important information about the nature of the primordial density perturbations. There are two fundamental types of density perturbations called adiabatic and isocurvature . A general density perturbation is a mixture of both, and different theories that purport to explain the primordial density perturbation spectrum predict different mixtures. The CMB spectrum can distinguish between these two because these two types of perturbations produce different peak locations. Isocurvature density perturbations produce

13132-408: The people aboard the ship. SGU was also more serialized than its predecessors, although the writers attempted to resolve each character story within the episode. There was a conscious effort to avoid making SGU too serialized, with the serialization stemming mainly from character development. The industry described the show as "dark and edgy". According to Robert C. Cooper, the essence of the story

13266-435: The photons decouple when a particular mode is at its peak amplitude. The peaks contain interesting physical signatures. The angular scale of the first peak determines the curvature of the universe (but not the topology of the universe). The next peak—ratio of the odd peaks to the even peaks—determines the reduced baryon density. The third peak can be used to get information about the dark-matter density. The locations of

13400-426: The physical properties of the early universe: the first peak determines the overall curvature of the universe , while the second and third peak detail the density of normal matter and so-called dark matter , respectively. Extracting fine details from the CMB data can be challenging, since the emission has undergone modification by foreground features such as galaxy clusters . The cosmic microwave background radiation

13534-460: The plasma. The first peak in the anisotropy was tentatively detected by the MAT/TOCO experiment and the result was confirmed by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiments. These measurements demonstrated that the geometry of the universe is approximately flat, rather than curved . They ruled out cosmic strings as a major component of cosmic structure formation and suggested cosmic inflation

13668-431: The point where protons and electrons combined to form neutral atoms of mostly hydrogen. Unlike the plasma, these atoms could not scatter thermal radiation by Thomson scattering , and so the universe became transparent. Known as the recombination epoch, this decoupling event released photons to travel freely through space. However, the photons have grown less energetic due to the cosmological redshift associated with

13802-518: The popularity of the genre. Short stories also were popular, collected in books such as Combat SF , edited by Gordon R. Dickson . This anthology includes one of the first Hammer's Slammers stories, as well as one of the BOLO stories by Keith Laumer and one of the Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen . This anthology seems to have been the first time these stories specifically dealing with war as

13936-465: The presence of the microwave background, with their instrument having an excess 4.2K antenna temperature which they could not account for. After receiving a telephone call from Crawford Hill, Dicke said "Boys, we've been scooped." A meeting between the Princeton and Crawford Hill groups determined that the antenna temperature was indeed due to the microwave background. Penzias and Wilson received

14070-546: The project. According to co-star Robert Carlyle , each episode had a budget of $ 2 million US dollars. Brad Wright pitched the series and its first five episodes to the Stargate Atlantis writers and producers in mid-September 2008. Wright, Cooper, and Carl Binder produced the show, while Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie served as writers and consultant producers. Stargate Atlantis writers Martin Gero and Alan McCullough contributed scripts, but were not part of

14204-672: The puzzle, which Eli Wallace, a young mathematics genius, is able to solve. Although Eli is reluctant, he is brought to the Icarus base along with a contingent of guests of honor aboard the Hammond , a Daedalus-class starship battlecruiser; the guests include Senator Armstrong, who funds Icarus Project, and his daughter Chloe. They are introduced to the base's military staff, led by Colonel Everett Young, Colonel David Telford, First Lieutenants Matthew Scott and Tamara Johansen, and Master Sergeant Ronald Greer. Dr. Rush and Eli work together to discover

14338-463: The reduction in viewership. The episode "Time" won a Writers Guild of Canada Award for best one-hour TV series and both "Air" and "Space" were nominated for Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series at the 2010 Primetime Emmy Awards . Robert Carlyle won Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role for the first-season episode "Human" at the 2010 Gemini Awards . Military science fiction A detailed description of

14472-448: The regular writing staff. New writers were initially sought for freelance scripts and possible staff positions. Author John Scalzi was hired as a creative consultant, "a background rather than foreground sort of job". Most of the Stargate Atlantis crew, such as stunt coordinator James Bamford and composer Joel Goldsmith , moved over to Universe . Short character breakdowns for the series regulars (created for casting calls) leaked on

14606-408: The rest of the team works to make the ship habitable, Dr. Rush, Eli, and other scientific members of Icarus Base start to understand the function of Destiny ; they are not able to directly control the ship, and find that it will drop out of faster-than-light travel to allow its Stargate to connect to a number of nearby worlds for a fixed period of time before it continues; it fuels itself by diving into

14740-431: The right idea. They predicted the CMB. It took another 15 years for Penzias and Wilson to discover that the microwave background was actually there. According to standard cosmology, the CMB gives a snapshot of the hot early universe at the point in time when the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. This event made the universe nearly transparent to radiation because light

14874-519: The series' cancellation. The letter discussed the fact that ratings during the first season had fallen significantly on the Friday timeslot, dropping over 25% of its viewership during the long hiatus between the first and second half of the season. This prompted Syfy to start the second season in the Tuesday slot making room on Friday for wrestling, the change from Friday to Tuesday being a major factor in

15008-494: The series, said the cast and characters were a "little more likable and interesting" than previous entries in the Stargate franchise. Reviewer Laura Freis from Variety concluded her review with "Sure, SGU is grittier, darker and psychologically deeper than previous versions. But so far, it's also a lot less fun." While negative towards the show, she called Robert Carlyle an "excellent" actor. The Hollywood Reporter noted

15142-427: The ship, and sustain human life. The writers have discussed the possibility that each season represents a voyage of the Destiny through a different galaxy. Stargate Universe was intended to appeal to both veteran fans and newcomers, being firmly entrenched in established Stargate mythology without relying on it too often. It retained the familiar Stargate themes of adventure and exploration, but focused mostly on

15276-449: The show would "hopefully explor[e] the truly alien, and [avoid] the rubber faced English-speaking one[s]". There were aliens, but not a single dominant villain race like SG-1 's Goa'uld and Atlantis ' Wraith . The series holds a score of 58 out of 100 on the review aggregator website Metacritic . Stargate Universe was well received by several major media outlets upon airing of the pilot episode. Mike Hale from The New York Times

15410-425: The standard explanation. The cosmic microwave background is polarized at the level of a few microkelvin. There are two types of polarization, called E-mode (or gradient-mode) and B-mode (or curl mode). This is in analogy to electrostatics , in which the electric field ( E -field) has a vanishing curl and the magnetic field ( B -field) has a vanishing divergence . The E-modes arise from Thomson scattering in

15544-401: The tactics and strategy of this new course of the war in detail, showing how American, British, Soviet, and German soldiers and Jewish guerrillas (some of them historical figures) deal with this extraordinary new situation, as well as providing a not unsympathetic detailed point of view of individual invader warriors. In the war situation posited by Turtledove, the invaders have superior arms, but

15678-444: The temperature was around 3000 K or when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old. As photons did not interact with these electrically neutral atoms, the former began to travel freely through space, resulting in the decoupling of matter and radiation. The color temperature of the ensemble of decoupled photons has continued to diminish ever since; now down to 2.7260 ± 0.0013 K , it will continue to drop as

15812-751: The time. The Vietnam War led to the "polarization of the sf community", which can be seen in the June 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction , in which one page of pro-war sf authors listed their names and on another page, anti-war sf authors put their names. The Vietnam War has been noted by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as having impacted anthologies such as In the Field of Fire (1987) and novels such as The Healer's War (1988) by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and Dream Baby (1989) by Bruce McAllister . The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states that

15946-407: The universe expands. The intensity of the radiation corresponds to black-body radiation at 2.726 K because red-shifted black-body radiation is just like black-body radiation at a lower temperature. According to the Big Bang model, the radiation from the sky we measure today comes from a spherical surface called the surface of last scattering . This represents the set of locations in space at which

16080-441: The universe is slightly older than researchers expected. According to the map, subtle fluctuations in temperature were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was about 370 000 years old. The imprint reflects ripples that arose as early, in the existence of the universe, as the first nonillionth (10 ) of a second. Apparently, these ripples gave rise to the present vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter . Based on

16214-458: The universe to cause the cooling of the CMB, the night sky would shine as brightly as the Sun. The energy density of the CMB is 0.260 eV/cm (4.17 × 10  J/m ), about 411 photons/cm . In 1931, Georges Lemaître speculated that remnants of the early universe may be observable as radiation, but his candidate was cosmic rays . Richard C. Tolman showed in 1934 that expansion of the universe would cool blackbody radiation while maintaining

16348-495: The universe. The series, created by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper , premiered in the United States on Syfy on October 2, 2009. The series featured an ensemble cast and was primarily filmed in and around Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada. A second season of 20 episodes was announced by Syfy in December 2009. The first 10 episodes of the second season were aired in the United States beginning on September 28, 2010, and

16482-404: The use of Fictional Intelligence ( FicInt ), which they define as "useful fictions". FicInt, a concept developed by Cole in 2015, combines "fiction writing with intelligence to imagine future scenarios in ways grounded in reality." Cosmic microwave background radiation The cosmic microwave background ( CMB , CMBR ), or relic radiation , is microwave radiation that fills all space in

16616-400: The very small degree of anisotropy in the CMB, many aspects can be measured with high precision and such measurements are critical for cosmological theories. In addition to temperature anisotropy, the CMB should have an angular variation in polarization . The polarization at each direction in the sky has an orientation described in terms of E-mode and B-mode polarization. The E-mode signal is

16750-544: The volume of the intergalactic medium (IGM) consists of ionized material (since there are few absorption lines due to hydrogen atoms). This implies a period of reionization during which some of the material of the universe was broken into hydrogen ions. The CMB photons are scattered by free charges such as electrons that are not bound in atoms. In an ionized universe, such charged particles have been liberated from neutral atoms by ionizing (ultraviolet) radiation. Today these free charges are at sufficiently low density in most of

16884-581: The volume of the universe that they do not measurably affect the CMB. However, if the IGM was ionized at very early times when the universe was still denser, then there are two main effects on the CMB: Both of these effects have been observed by the WMAP spacecraft, providing evidence that the universe was ionized at very early times, at a redshift around 10. The detailed provenance of this early ionizing radiation

17018-485: The wars of tomorrow will look like." The MOD hired Peter Warren Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories about threats from "emerging technologies" including " artificial intelligence (AI), data modeling, drone swarms, quantum computing and human enhancement" in a battlefield context. The MOD hired sci-fi writers because they have a "unique ability to imagine the unimaginable." As well, both authors know about "security subjects and modern warfare." They advocate

17152-453: Was announced in late February 2009, along with other actors whose status as regular or recurring cast has not been established. The cast is American (Blue, B. Smith, J. Smith, Wen), Canadian (Ferreira, Levesque, and Huffman) and British (Carlyle). The writers started drafting stories for the first season in mid-November 2008. The United States Air Force and Marine Corps reviewed the scripts, and disaster geophysicist Mika McKinnon served as

17286-470: Was complete, the universe was roughly 487,000 years old. Since the CMB came into existence, it has apparently been modified by several subsequent physical processes, which are collectively referred to as late-time anisotropy, or secondary anisotropy. When the CMB photons became free to travel unimpeded, ordinary matter in the universe was mostly in the form of neutral hydrogen and helium atoms. However, observations of galaxies today seem to indicate that most of

17420-487: Was discovered in Atlantis' database. The series begins when a team of soldiers and scientists from present-day Earth escape through the Stargate and arrive on the Destiny after their base is attacked. Many of its primary systems are damaged or failing, and they are unable to return to Earth or even maneuver the ship. However, the Destiny periodically stops to dial the Stargate to planets with necessary supplies to repair

17554-518: Was generally positive towards the pilot episodes, saying the Stargate franchise was "catching up" with the long-running Star Trek franchise . Hale also agreed with Syfy 's promotion of it being an "edgier" Stargate . The Boston Globe reviewer Joanna Weiss also reacted positively towards the pilot episodes, saying it felt like "early Lost ", while the story arc followed the patterns of Battlestar Galactica . Mark Wilson from About.com gave

17688-455: Was launched millions of years ago to study and gather data regarding this possibility. While Destiny has not solved this riddle after millions of years of research, the series ends with the team continuing its fight for survival while also dedicating itself to researching this possibility of an originating intelligence. Stargate producers Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper conceived Stargate Universe as "a completely separate, third entity" in

17822-440: Was no longer being scattered off free electrons. When this occurred some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was about 3,000 K. This corresponds to an ambient energy of about 0.26  eV , which is much less than the 13.6 eV ionization energy of hydrogen. This epoch is generally known as the "time of last scattering" or the period of recombination or decoupling . Since decoupling,

17956-475: Was the right theory of structure formation. Inspired by the initial COBE results of an extremely isotropic and homogeneous background, a series of ground- and balloon-based experiments quantified CMB anisotropies on smaller angular scales over the next decade. The primary goal of these experiments was to measure the angular scale of the first acoustic peak, for which COBE did not have sufficient resolution. These measurements were able to rule out cosmic strings as

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