The Importance Of Checking Your Numbers · 1:36pm Jul 24th, 2016
One of the fun things about sfnalizing magic (at least in relatively firm SF) is all the unanticipated consequences that you need to look for, carefully, before you decide that that's how that works. Because whatever physical principle you come up with, the odds are that someone will have thought of other interesting things that could be done with it, and if they don't, then your readers will.
This morning's example of that would be the observation that one particular translation of canonical magic to ontotechnology, no matter how convenient for explaining things away, would also let any moderately talented unicorn blow up the sun. And not because of any special quality of the local sun, either. Basically any star that's still got hydrogen burning going on. With the force of a supernova1.
"Um, Twilight? Maybe let's not write this particular discovery down. Or speak of it again. Ever."
...I'm gonna say that that's definitively not how transmutation works.
1. If you were wondering, the operation in question would let you jigger the strong force coupling constant enough to make the diproton (i.e. 2He) stable. This causes hydrogen fusion to accelerate just a tad, with unfortunate consequences in things kept stable by the delicate balance of fusion and gravity.
I think we just found the Great Filter. This is the kind of thing you only get wrong once.
Maybe that's why they have a 'sun' they need to move around, now.
Is that where "A Hypothetical Simple Method For Exploding the Sun" comes from?