austenandrews

Re: Creepy Pics.

"No" what?

No way I'd go anywhere near that thing.

Re: Creepy Pics.

No. Just, no.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Then' date=' once the pecking order is established, they can relax and be friends and never have to bother with that whole stupid "what if" scenario again.[/quote']

Right, 'cause that's always what happens after one competitive person beats another competitive person.

Re: Creepy Pics.

Awww, Sam is such a cutie!

Re: "Neat" Pictures

I wanna levitate while vacuuming.

Re: More space news!

And "Riding the Booster": From launch to landing, a space shuttle's solid rocket booster journey is captured, with sound mixed and enhanced by Skywalker Sound.

Wow, that'd make a cool dark ambient track.

Done by Benny Burtt, awesome.

Re: More space news!

A paper in Nature two months back (12 January issue' date=' volume 481, pp. 167-169) says that the results from gravitational microlensing suggest an average of more than one planet per star, on average, in the Galaxy. They have enough detections (and have done some statistical analysis and simulations) to claim this down to a mass of 5 Earth masses, in the orbit size range 0.5 - 10 AU.[/quote']

Sweet! Even if we never get to visit any of them, that gives us a large dataset to which we can apply future analysis. If it's possible, I'm guessing we'll find signs of life sooner or later. Of course signs of civilization would be amazing. More planets = more hope.

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

A body in motion stays in motion' date=' unless affected by an outside force. Rotation is jsut a different form of motion, so one little nudge could work for the entire voyage. Unless I miss anything here.[/quote']

You're correct, a rotating body in space will continue rotating essentially forever. But if you hollow it out and fill it with loose, self-motivating objects, doesn't the constant change of internal configuration affect the rotation? Would you have to regularly compensate for wobble? Maybe it'd be a measurable effect, maybe not. I've not looked into that side of things much.

 

In any case I was more thinking of minimizing energy use and wear & tear over the centuries-long travel time. If you have to exert energy just to stand up and move around, that's a constant leakage of the overall energy in the system. I'm aiming for a setup that could handle a thousand-year voyage without any external power source, even if the primary power plant fails.

 

It does mean a certain narrative overhead in setting up the zero-g environment, alas. But hopefully not too much.

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

That is indeed an interesting point. Since we never excert much force when moving, we also never aquire much momentum.

 

In Zero G our ability to decelarte would be increased. However, accelerating might be akward:

Normally we can complete the repel-movement before we loose contact to the surface that we repel us form. But in slow time the first bit of pressure (the one that overcomes our interity) might already seperate us from the surface. Picture jumping from a kneeling position, where you "lift of" after barely starting the movement.

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. I imagine that would be a function of the elasticity of the surface you're pushing off from. A very elastic surface might push you away with even a tiny initial contact. The question is, would the movement you gain from that tiny push make you travel faster than the rate of extension of your leg? If not, I don't think it would be very different from a real-time experience. The surface might seem a little squishy, as a fraction of your momentum will be absorbed by the tiny separations.

If the movement is enough that you float away from the surface faster than you can extend your leg, then basically any contact with a surface will send you quickly floating away in sub-time. It'd be like living inside a pinball machine, where every surface is a bumper. I'm not sure that much velocity would be imparted, though.

If there is any gravity, people will be unable to jump (they try as normaly, but their upward momentum can't overcome gravity).

If gravity was weak enough in proportion to the slowed time, the physics should work out the same. For sure though, anything close to normal gravity would prevent you from breaking contact with the floor. It would be similar to a normal person living on a high-g planet, but having a body strong enough to stand up.

May you should have a little gravity/coriolis force. Just about 1/360 of earth gravity could help a lot.

Hmm, if my ballpark numbers are correct, in a 1 km-wide ship, a 35 rpm spin would simulate 1/360 Earth gravity on the outer edge. Would the extra energy expendiature be worth it? That seems like a lot of added friction across many centuries. I'm aiming for a low-energy system.

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

The usual trick is to give it a spin' date=' so the centrifugal force acts as fake gravity.[/quote']

Would the Coriolis effect scale along with everything else? I guess it would. In any case I can't think of any particular need for gravity. It was just an amusing thought that some tiny g-force would register as Earth gravity.

 

They have to be very carefully when moving everything, guiding it from a resting postion to a resting position.

It depends on the object, but without gravity or air currents, I figure most objects will appear to move normally.

 

One difference that comes to mind is the effect of static friction. Imagine I'm trying to slide open a door. In real time, my muscles can provide a quick force that overcomes the static friction between the door and its bearings. In sub-time, I can't provide a quick force. I'm steadily exerting a small force over a long period of time. But that force may be too small to overcome static friction. Instead of jerking open the door, I find it to be immovable and I wind up flinging myself away from it instead.

 

Another example of the same effect: Imagine a paper wall, say in the old Japanese style. When moving in real-time, even in zero gravity I can readily punch my fist through it. In sub-time, though, I can't. My very slow fist can't tear the paper, so I just push myself away from it. However if I brace myself against something solid - more solid than the paper - then the paper will give first and my fist will punch eventually through.

 

Subjectively the paper wall will seem quite sturdy, but if I brace myself, it will rip easily. Does any substance behave that way in real time? Some analogous material that it could be compared to?

 

And apperntly, there was a similar TOS episode:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Wink_of_an_Eye_(episode)

I remember this one from my Trekker days. Amusingly, I found the premise rather goofy when I was a kid.

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

Another handy feature of sub-time is reducing the signal delay to communicate with their (very) distant recon/relay drones.

The interesting part is, that with a lack of a "natural" environment and the android concept, people might not even notice it that much:

There are no sunrises and sunsets.

No moving clouds.

No flowing water (they don't even have to use the bathroom).

Nothing acting on a "normal" scale, but the ocassional self-moving object.

 

It could be so bad, the only thing by witch you notice it is somebdoy palce a clock there that runs "normally".

Exactly, that's the concept. They're traveling at a constant speed through the interstellar void. There's effectively nothing present that they didn't bring along, which can be restricted to items that behave themselves in sub-time. (They do encounter the occasional rogue planet - intentionally, of course - but from a sufficient distance that their enormous relative velocity isn't a factor.)

I considered having their starship be large enough that its natural gravity would seem like normal Earth gravity in sub-time, but that would require a ship as massive as Mars's smaller moon, which sadly is way too big for what I have in mind.

Every natural process would would look like a fast motion video:

If you drop a ball, it impacts instantly (less than 1/360 subjective seconds) and is rolled half across the room to a resting position before you even realised that you dropped it.

Recharging your body does not needs much time - subjective.

Energy conservation is a primary motivator for this system. In fact I intend for the temperature to be extremely low, as close to absolute zero as is feasible, not that they particularly notice with their incredibly slow android bodies. I haven't run any napkin-numbers on the idea yet though, to get a ballpark low figure for a feasible temperature.

The ship needs a strong computer. The androids are simply not able to react fast enough to any problems. Unless they have a "normal time" switch.

I was thinking there'd be an emergency "thawing" procedure. The trick is to turn up the heat in the android bodies to allow them to move faster. But it would only be done in emergency situations and high-risk scenarios (such as when passing a rogue planet).

If they have a normal time switch, this could be used to for everything from pranks to "quikies" whiel being out of slow-time (5 seconds, very fast these yound people )

Naturally a story would probably involve times getting out of sync.

Any physical impulse that doesn't comes from another android would be very abrupt. Maybe even to short to notice, if it has no direct effect.

That's part of what I'd like to brainstorm - what interactions in ordinary life involve an impulse that wouldn't translate into intuitive sub-time behavior? I'm positive there are a ton of little things I'm overlooking.

Though I admit a lot of it is distorted by the liquid surroundings' date=' there's a lot to this idea that recalls the kind of world that starfish and gastropods live in. Their movements are really slow compared to what we're used to, and a lot about their surroundings change rather faster than they can react. If you can watch the time-lapse videos from that sub-environment, you might get some ideas.[/quote']

That's a cool idea. I will do that.

I had a setting idea one sleepless night: An STL starship is on a centuries-long voyage. The passengers are in cryofreeze, with their brains connected to android bodies. To conserve energy and sanity over the long trip, the subjective time of the androids is slowed down by a factor of 360. That is to say, an hour of real time feels like ten seconds to the passengers. A year feels like a day. An observer in real-time would see them moving excruciatingly slow. However the passengers mostly experience the world normally, as basic Newtonian physics doesn't much care about the rate of time passage. (Note that there's no gravity and their android bodies require no air to breathe.)

My question is, what wouldn't be normal about this experience? For example, if you opened a can of Coke in this environment, in real time the expulsion of gas means you'd tumble backwards until you gently bumped into the wall. In subjective time (sub-time) it'd be like an explosion that hurls you instantly backwards. (You wouldn't be hurt though, because the impact is actually low-speed.)

Probably any liquid would "explode" into blobs if released, since in real time the slightest movement could send it drifting from its container and gathering into blobs, that would eventually find a nearby surface to cling to.

The elasticity of surfaces would seem very different from normal.

What else would be different in this sub-time environment?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Riding a unicycle in a kilt must be either very uncomfortable or very liberating.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Shouldn't that artist be doing Marvel characters instead?

I wanted to draw that when Disney bought Marvel, but I never got around to it.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

And how.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Monowheels are awesome.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Please be real. Somebody make them real.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

*science*

Oh, I see, you're assuming it's a laser or some kind of particle beam or something. I wasn't.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

The amount of energy being split away from the beams as visible light for the observer to see. That's all lost energy' date=' from a weapon point of view.[/quote']

Right, my question was, what says that loss is in any way significant?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Who says that uses a significant amount of energy?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

I believe she pulls off the look well.

Is that Scarlett Johansen?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

"I can't go out tonight. I'm having a bad hair lizard."

Re: "Neat" Pictures

What's the story behind that picture?

Re: Creepy Pics.

I'm not a zombie fan.

Re: Creepy Pics.

Cool. I may need to start watching it. (I need to find something cool to watch. Alcatraz is starting to be a bit underwhelming.)