austenandrews

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Interesting related videos of a car crash occurring at 7mm per hour: Week 1: Week 2: Week 3: This is thousands of times slower than real speed, much slower than what I have in mind, but kind of fun anyway.

Re: Creepy Pics.

Re: Creepy Pics. I think the eyes are glowing due to static electricity. Judging from the guy, anyway.

Re: Creepy Pics. That's so wrong and yet so right.

Re: "Neat" Pictures D'awww! That's adorable.

Re: "Neat" Pictures That looks about right. A 10k meter well drilled 1200 meters under water.

Re: Human bird wings

Re: "Neat" Pictures Do people call Jessica Rabbit a Disney Princess these days?

Re: Human bird wings Right, my question is whether there's some kind of theoretical hard size limit above which flapping wings can't work at all, based on air density or whatever. Or is it all a proverbial "matter of engineering."

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Good point. At this tech level I assume synchronizing everyone would be trivial, but when two people's subjective time rates get out-of-synch, there might be a moment of adjustment.

Re: Human bird wings If we assume high-tech ultralight materials, is there a theoretical upper limit to how big a flapping object can be to fly?

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Right, I get you. My point was that a constant 1G would look something like a constant 360G based on the velocities involved. If you were watching the Earth, it would zoom around the sun in a day. But again, that's a fairly trivial effect. Mostly computers would do the watching and you'd play it back at whatever speed you wanted. I doubt many celestial objects visible out the window of the starship would move fast enough to notice a difference even at 360x speed. (If it was 360,000,000x speed, I guess you could see the stars shifting in relation to each other.) In fact I'm thinking, as an energy-saving measure, that "light" inside the ship comes in low-frequency flashes. One flash per real second would be 360 flashes per slow second - too fast for the eye/brain to notice a flicker (under non-computer-enhanced conditions). So if a character operates in real-time while the rest of the ship is in slow time, he only sees his surroundings in brief flashes. Which sounds nicely creepy to me. In terms of engineering, that might be less energy efficient than a very low constant illumination. If the difference isn't tremendous, though, operating in ambient strobe lighting might be cool enough to handwave it.

Re: Human bird wings

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Heh, since I'm the OP, I think I've got the idea. What did I say that didn't match up? This stuff can be a little mind-bending and I want to be sure I don't get something wrong.

Re: History of Space Opera, aka Finally an io9 article that doesn't suck. I dunno, personally I think "space opera" has come to describe a loose collection of tropes, much like "pulp." I wouldn't hesitate to call the movie Enemy Mine space opera, for example, even though its scope is ultimately very small. Or Alien:Resurrection, if more of it involved space. But, semantics. No biggie.

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Angular momentum is calculated based on the center of gravity, right? So moving around a spinning ship would make it wobble, even though the system travels at a constant velocity and angular momentum. I guess you're right; you'd have to fire the engines to maintain constant gravity and orientation. And since that would change the actual angular momentum, eventually you'd have to counter-fire them to keep the whole system in line. Man, centrifugal gravity is a pain! Who's got the fuel for that? I once ran a pulp space opera game that did the whole accelerate-flip-decelerate thing for artificial gravity. The physics made sense though the fuel numbers were complete nonsense, of course. I guess they're nonsense with almost all interstellar science fiction, when you break it down. In this slow-time setting, I'd love it if the energy numbers could be in the same ballpark, or at least the same county, as reality. (I suspect running a supercomputer for a thousand years will by itself make this impossible, but if I rubber-science that part, maybe it's not an impossible dream.)

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Conveniently it makes distances seem shorter. If you send a probe a light-year ahead of you, it only takes two days to send it a command and receive a response. I guess it also makes everything seem brighter. A one-second exposure to the faint light of a distant object would actually gather six minutes worth of photons. Objects that move or change too slow for the naked eye to detect would be obvious to someone in slow time. And it would make the gravity of celestial objects look 360 times stronger, and their physical properties seem much more robust. Though one presumes the crew would rely on computers for such distant observations. (I wouldn't recommend flying in slow time too deep in a large object's gravity well.) I'm aiming for humanoid bodies, so the characters and environment aren't too alien to tell a story. Some technobabble about the brain in suspended animation needing to exercise the proper neural pathways for arms and legs and whatnot, lest you thaw out at your destination a millennium later and not be able to control your real body. But I would like to have some cool android features humans don't, because hey, robot bodies! Skin that sticks to surfaces at will would be handy in zero-g. Tool-fingers could be nifty.

Re: "Neat" Pictures The one I saw had an old man bringing the waitstaff at his favorite diner a lottery ticket every week, meant to be split among everyone. When it hit, the waitress holding it kept all the money for herself. Didn't even give the old man a cut. Sheesh.

Re: "Neat" Pictures It's like living on a giant pair of green corduroy pants.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Gotcha.

Re: "Neat" Pictures The videos I googled from recent episodes of his show looks more like this. Not as lean as when he was younger, but hardly what I'd call fat.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Huh. I don't watch his show, but a quick google doesn't turn up any fat pics. His neck's kinda thick now, but hardly in a "the years have not been kind" way. He was always fairly beefy. To each their own, I guess.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: "Neat" Pictures Mother Nature is so obsessed with orange and teal.