Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Whatever]

The easiest way would be "we're working on it." Magic was discovered, and baffled scientists are struggling to incorporate it into their unified theories. That means you don't have to come up with any specific bullshit, and you just acknowledge everything as working for practical purposes. I mean, it's not like Newton's Laws give the wrong results for everyday physics, and they've been out of date for over a century. Science can keep going even when they know their models are wrong, because the answers are good enough for the engineers.

[shadzar]

So for Bakuhatsu High I want to include a section on "Magic is real, but so is Science". Basically to bullshit a way that the supernatural stuff can happen at all. What with magic not existing in this world (and the game world having "this world" as the past), that's tricky. What with me not knowing much about Physics, it's probably harder.

It includes a single "other world" (spirit realm, ~= the Astral Plane), and has the usual superhuman speed/strength, unleashing of energy attacks, and psychic powers (telepathy/telekinesis) as major things.

What's the easiest way to bullshit this?

just ignore the discontinuity, and let government scientists study what magic is for centuries/millennea without being able to define it or quantify it with science.

[erik]

So for Bakuhatsu High I want to include a section on "Magic is real, but so is Science". Basically to bullshit a way that the supernatural stuff can happen at all. What with magic not existing in this world (and the game world having "this world" as the past), that's tricky. What with me not knowing much about Physics, it's probably harder.

It includes a single "other world" (spirit realm, ~= the Astral Plane), and has the usual superhuman speed/strength, unleashing of energy attacks, and psychic powers (telepathy/telekinesis) as major things.

What's the easiest way to bullshit this?

just ignore the discontinuity, and let government scientists study what magic is for centuries/millennea without being able to define it or quantify it with science.

There would still be some rules that would be discerned. At the very least everything would be rigidly quantified, which can possibly break the atmosphere.

I'd lean more towards DSM's "we don't know... yet" angle. It especially works if the supernatural powers that be don't want it to be understood, and they interrupt or mislead studies whenever possible.

[Ted the Flayer]

But leaves it open enough for a MiB style organization using Megitech weapons to shoot Cthulhu in the fucking face.

[shadzar]

So for Bakuhatsu High I want to include a section on "Magic is real, but so is Science". Basically to bullshit a way that the supernatural stuff can happen at all. What with magic not existing in this world (and the game world having "this world" as the past), that's tricky. What with me not knowing much about Physics, it's probably harder.

It includes a single "other world" (spirit realm, ~= the Astral Plane), and has the usual superhuman speed/strength, unleashing of energy attacks, and psychic powers (telepathy/telekinesis) as major things.

What's the easiest way to bullshit this?

just ignore the discontinuity, and let government scientists study what magic is for centuries/millennea without being able to define it or quantify it with science.

There would still be some rules that would be discerned. At the very least everything would be rigidly quantified, which can possibly break the atmosphere.

I'd lean more towards DSM's "we don't know... yet" angle. It especially works if the supernatural powers that be don't want it to be understood, and they interrupt or mislead studies whenever possible.

science can theorize all day long, but until a proof is made or proof itself is made to the calculations then it is only a theory and not that important to the common man.

science can say magic doesnt exist all day long cause they cant prove it, or say it is electricity, but when sen by onlookers, the magic wins over scientific proofs or disbelief in it.

one of the VERY first things science would have to do in light of magic, would prove the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy is wrong, or somehow fit magic into the equation so that it remains true in ALL cases, even when magic is NOT involved. ergo, let science be baffled by magic forever, and the problem goes away.

for example, Higgs-Boson is a theoretical particle, not a proven one.

science proving magic with scientific data, would equate to teleportation, and time travel.

science would more easily prove or disprove God, or in honor of the movie i just finished watching, prove or disprove Santa Claus.

[DSMatticus]

I'd lean more towards DSM's "we don't know... yet" angle.

Wait, did I make a post I can neither remember nor see? Because that would be creepy. It sounds like you meant Whatever.

I was going to post a response, but then I got lazy. It was going to be something like "given your source material and inspiration; it's magic and you ain't gotta explain shit. Not even why when superpowered highschoolers start fighting in the middle of the street causing massive collateral damage, no one bothers to stop them. Be true to the genre; anything that needs to be explained, shouldn't be. Anything the viewer doesn't need or care to have explained or can explain on their own, explain in a way that makes no god damn sense and is totally different than what they expected."

[erik]

I'd lean more towards DSM's "we don't know... yet" angle.

Wait, did I make a post I can neither remember nor see? Because that would be creepy. It sounds like you meant Whatever.

Shit. My brain is broken. That's what I get for reading and posting after a 5 hour drive home. I meant Whatever. I don't even know

[...You Lost Me]

"Be true to the genre; anything that needs to be explained, shouldn't be. Anything the viewer doesn't need or care to have explained or can explain on their own, explain in a way that makes no god damn sense and is totally different than what they expected."

This.

[Cynic]

So one of my desktops has decided to cut on me again.

It freezes during the first bios screen.

It does a memory check, detects the legacy keyboard and enables he USB Legacy. and then freezes with the options to "press f2 for bios" & "f12 to boot from network"

If I try to boot from bios it freezes while trying to enter bios.

[Juton]

You mentioned a USB legacy item, try booting without that, it might make a difference. Another thing that you can try is replacing your CMOS battery, usually if it wears out it only means your system clocks goes wrong, but it may affect the BIOS as well.

[tussock]

I want to run this by you guys to see if this passes for reasonable sci-fi. It is for a setting in a game I'm running.

The main planet the game starts on is a semi earth-like moon orbitting a gas giant. The giant has no rings, and most of the other moons are barren and rocky.

The planet is technically outside the habitable zone, but increased geothermal activity combined with the amount of radiation the gas giant puts out makes the planet hotter than it normally would be.

Problem: Brown Dwarfs produce large flares thanks to the unstable internal structure. That shit will rip the atmosphere right off your moon, magnetic field and all. It's a known problem for finding habitable worlds around anything much smaller than Sol, as is larger stars blowing away the accretion disk before rocky planets can form. Goldilocks is us.

Said geothermal activity correlates with a likewise stronger magnetic field, which takes out the worst of the background radiation.

I'd go for an inert gas giant closer to the star and strong greenhouse effect. Geothermal on earth is still half radiative cooling from gravitational collapse, and half radioactive. The tidal components are tiny, and would be much smaller on your moon.

Due to being close to a large planet, there are tides

Wrong! Due to being close to a large planet, you are tidally locked to said planet. One face of the moon looks on the planet, the far side looks away from it, the smaller body always is. "Tides" on Titan are from interactions with the other moons, and only "large" because the planet has a very deep liquid shell with no land to constrain them.

The strong greenhouse effect should produce some interesting winds though. More storms, less routine coastal effects. Big tropics, big warm arctic zones, no temperate zone, makes all the atmosphere rotate the same way (which would be very slow, only powered by orbital speed).

One month out of the year, the "Red Star" covers the "White Star", and there is a month of winter and darkness. The aurora displays are immensely powerful compared to our world,

Note that you can see the big planets' magnetic effects on the moons in daylight (or the probes we have out there can). The field produces planetary-scale eruptions of on the ice-balls, large enough to coat nearby moons in the debris (leading face on closer moons, trailing face on more distant ones), and likely what keeps the rings full of bright material.

Uh, but moon orbits are fast. Titan orbits Saturn every 16 days and it's a looong way out. Ganymede orbits Jupiter every 7 days. Luna is one of the longest due to it's strange relative size, small planet, growing distance, and still only 29.5 days.

And you're tidally locked. So most of the face sees the sun half of it's 168 hour days (shorter orbit is better there), and the inner face sees less and less of the sun before and after the daily eclipse as you get closer to the dark centre. Orc and Drow territory.

The orbit of the planet around the star should take decades, so your "seasons" will be more like our 10-year wet-dry cycles in some temperate parts of Earth, as any eccentricity effects kick in.

Oh, and don't forget resonant orbits with the other moons when you're close in.

[Cynic]

I turned it off this morning and then let it sit until now. So about 12 hours or so. Then i turned it on and then it worked.

My only guess was something overheated and had to cool off. Of course this is rather strange because this is my computer with 6 fans on it.

[name_here]

Did it make horrible screeching noises at any point? You might have a damaged or malfunctioning fan, in which case take it into the shop right away. Otherwise you might burn the expensive components and need to take an empty box into the shop.

[fectin]

If Frank Sinatra or Steve McQueen wouldn't beat your ass after seeing you drink it, it's fine to drink.

Brown Liquor is good, but if you want to be classy mix it with something either sour or bitter. That's how to drink.

Those are mutually exclusive.

[fectin]

U.S. flight regulations are latitude indiscriminate.

That's because there is a huge safety margin on every flight regulation ever, except right at takeoff and landing. Unless you're military, and the rules do not apply to you (because most FAA rules specifically do not apply to military).

Most of the stuff I can find on human safe altitudes is latitude indiscriminate.

That's because it's all SWAGs anyway. Barometric altitude varies pretty widely to start with (e.g with temperature changes), and "safe for humans" is actually a weird standard. Is that safe for an emphysemac or smoker, with lungs with poor gas exchange properties, or for a mountain climber with working lungs?

There's also some weird effects with the mechanics of breathing: high CO2 in your blood is what actually triggers you to breath; low partial pressure of CO2 lets it get out easier. So if you go high enough, you'll feel no need to breath as you slowly go hypoxic. IIRC, there's some pressure band where there's plenty of air; you just don't feel the need to breath it (that's exactly the issue with helium too). However, lactic acid (from your muscles working without oxygen) also triggers breathing. So as long as you're hiking about in that band, you're probably fine, but sleeping there will kill you.

Also, people do very, very well at short term exposure to low pressure. The first Russian spacewalk didn't account for how much the space suit would inflate, so the cosmonaut could not fit back through the hatch. He solved that by popping off his helmet, then quickly getting back in his space capsule. Obviously not ideal, but "space" is pretty low pressure, and everything worked out pretty well for him (further reading on that guy here ).

So long story short, it really depends what exactly you're asking.

[tussock]

@altitude, don't forget is already measured from local sea level, where local sea level is dependant on the same large factors that influence the equatorial bulge of the atmosphere.

Longitudinal air pressure changes more by the weather systems and atmospheric rotation than by atmospheric depth anyway. High-low-high-low-high, or something like that.

[Cynic]

No, the fans seemed to work fine. If one of the fans stops working or malfunctions, I'll probably would just change it. Going to the shop to repair a fan often is more expensive or less cost-effective than just buying a new one to replace it.

[LargePrime]

Also, people do very, very well at short term exposure to low pressure. The first Russian spacewalk didn't account for how much the space suit would inflate, so the cosmonaut could not fit back through the hatch. He solved that by popping off his helmet, then quickly getting back in his space capsule. Obviously not ideal, but "space" is pretty low pressure, and everything worked out pretty well for him (further reading on that guy here ).

So long story short, it really depends what exactly you're asking.

That is not really what happened. He "burped" his suit for a second to let it deflate a bit so he could squeeze through the hatch in the less inflated suit.

A human exposed to zero pressure passes out instantly. NASA has film on this.

[RadiantPhoenix]

A human exposed to zero pressure passes out instantly. NASA has film on this.

I've heard otherwise.

Project Rho says that you would pass out in "about ten seconds"; NASA says fifteen. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_a ... 70603.html

[name_here]

No, the fans seemed to work fine. If one of the fans stops working or malfunctions, I'll probably would just change it. Going to the shop to repair a fan often is more expensive or less cost-effective than just buying a new one to replace it.

Check the CPU fan as well as the exterior fans, if you haven't already.

[LargePrime]

A human exposed to zero pressure passes out instantly. NASA has film on this.

I've heard otherwise.

Project Rho says that you would pass out in "about ten seconds"; NASA says fifteen. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_a ... 70603.html

If you get a chance to see the video in question I think you will disagree on the suggested timeline.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8L9tKR4CY
That is a crappy vid, as it does not have a untouched shot of the full event, but I have found no better.
also note this was not hard space. it was a relatively small chamber pumped to vacuum. Jim only felt that vacuum via that small leak in his small suit. An air hose disconnected, so the chamber was being partially re-pressurized by that hose, and the adjacent larger partial vacuum chamber also pressurized it, once it was open.

[RadiantPhoenix]

From the URL I gave:

At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

(Bold mine)

This seems to be the same incident as in the video, and he clearly was conscious for a nonzero period of time while the pressure was (near) vacuum, because if he wasn't, he wouldn't have been able to feel his saliva boiling.

[DSMatticus]

@LargePrime, the incident you are referring to is one of the ones NASA cites as the reason for its fifteen second estimate. He doesn't even pass out instantly on camera, nor is that continuous footage. And a lot of the things you said are very silly:

1) "It's just a vacuum chamber, not hard space." The dangerous part of space is the vacuum, and the difference between that vacuum chamber and hard space is probably measured in nanopascals. That difference simply won't matter; for all intents and purposes, there was nothing different between that chamber and space.

2) "It's only a small leak in his suit." The suit is a sealed environment. When the seal is gone, the entire suit depressurizes. He did not just "feel" the vacuum through a small leak, he felt the vacuum with his entire body, because the entire suit was depressurizing.

3) "It was being partially repressurized by that hose." No. That hose is tiny, and it was meant to pressurize the suit, not the vacuum chamber. The volume of space in the suit is tiny, the volume of space in the vacuum chamber is huge. In the fifteen seconds it took him to pass out, the effect of that hose would have been negligible. And they didn't open the door until after he was already out.

The most dangerous thing about a vacuum is not the pressure, but anoxia. There's no breathable air, because it's a vacuum. There's also the double fuck you that trying to hold your breath will cause it to expand in your lungs, potentially popping them like a balloon. So you have about five to ten seconds of consciousness and then anoxia knocks you out. Jim's depressurization probably took somewhere between five and ten seconds, with the remainder being time he spent conscious feeling the saliva in his mouth boil (which he distinctly remembers, being a case and point that he was conscious for at least a few seconds in a very near vacuum). Also, Radiant ninja'd me here.

But yeah. There is nothing that happens to the body at zero atmospheres that is faster acting than anoxia. If you didn't need oxygen, you could probably survive a vacuum for hours; after all, there is a case of someone's hand being exposed to near vacuum for several hours. It swelled impressively, completely stopped working, and he was otherwise functional and responsive. His hand made a full recovery and he's fine.

Now, rapid decompression is always dangerous. But in terms of speed of decompression, going from two atmospheres to one is just as dangerous as going from one to zero. If it happens faster than air can escape your lungs, they'll probably explode. If you drop at least eight atmospheres in a few tenths of a second or less, your entire body might literally explode because gases cannot escape your body faster than they are expanding inside you.

[Ted the Flayer]

I want to run this by you guys to see if this passes for reasonable sci-fi. It is for a setting in a game I'm running.

The main planet the game starts on is a semi earth-like moon orbitting a gas giant. The giant has no rings, and most of the other moons are barren and rocky.

The planet is technically outside the habitable zone, but increased geothermal activity combined with the amount of radiation the gas giant puts out makes the planet hotter than it normally would be.

Problem: Brown Dwarfs produce large flares thanks to the unstable internal structure. That shit will rip the atmosphere right off your moon, magnetic field and all. It's a known problem for finding habitable worlds around anything much smaller than Sol, as is larger stars blowing away the accretion disk before rocky planets can form. Goldilocks is us.

Said geothermal activity correlates with a likewise stronger magnetic field, which takes out the worst of the background radiation.

I'd go for an inert gas giant closer to the star and strong greenhouse effect. Geothermal on earth is still half radiative cooling from gravitational collapse, and half radioactive. The tidal components are tiny, and would be much smaller on your moon.

Due to being close to a large planet, there are tides

Wrong! Due to being close to a large planet, you are tidally locked to said planet. One face of the moon looks on the planet, the far side looks away from it, the smaller body always is. "Tides" on Titan are from interactions with the other moons, and only "large" because the planet has a very deep liquid shell with no land to constrain them.

The strong greenhouse effect should produce some interesting winds though. More storms, less routine coastal effects. Big tropics, big warm arctic zones, no temperate zone, makes all the atmosphere rotate the same way (which would be very slow, only powered by orbital speed).

One month out of the year, the "Red Star" covers the "White Star", and there is a month of winter and darkness. The aurora displays are immensely powerful compared to our world,

Note that you can see the big planets' magnetic effects on the moons in daylight (or the probes we have out there can). The field produces planetary-scale eruptions of on the ice-balls, large enough to coat nearby moons in the debris (leading face on closer moons, trailing face on more distant ones), and likely what keeps the rings full of bright material.

Uh, but moon orbits are fast. Titan orbits Saturn every 16 days and it's a looong way out. Ganymede orbits Jupiter every 7 days. Luna is one of the longest due to it's strange relative size, small planet, growing distance, and still only 29.5 days.

And you're tidally locked. So most of the face sees the sun half of it's 168 hour days (shorter orbit is better there), and the inner face sees less and less of the sun before and after the daily eclipse as you get closer to the dark centre. Orc and Drow territory.

The orbit of the planet around the star should take decades, so your "seasons" will be more like our 10-year wet-dry cycles in some temperate parts of Earth, as any eccentricity effects kick in.

Oh, and don't forget resonant orbits with the other moons when you're close in.

First off, defining "days" as sleep cycles (16 hours of wake, 8 of sleep). Just going to let clerics pick one time every rest cycle to meditate and not sweating it.

Tweaking things a bit to take that into account. Orbits the main planet in about two weeks; 7 days of darkness, 7 days of light, one day of eclipse in the middle of the "day". The "Red Star" orbits the "White Star" every 20 years. I was going to make an argument about how not all moons are tidally locked, then saw that the ones that aren't are small and irregularly shaped. i.e., not anything remotely like the one I'm trying to write.

There would be a ten year period of rain and ten years of dry season. Also making a note that there are auroras at all time of day.

The moon orbitting the planet is a bit slow, but a 20 year orbit would put it somewhere between Saturn and Jupiter assuming equivalent physics and whatnot. Which is consistent if nothing else.

I'm still pretty adamant on having the moon be a satellite of a brown dwarf, but I probably should think of something. Considering that the big bads are beings that stuck a fusion candle in a gas giant in their home system and took it on a joyride to the PC's system, that could be a plot hook (A wizard fixed it in the ancient past, and now the Mi-go are trying to undo it to scour the life in the system! Or something. I could make it work if I think of something...)

[LargePrime]

Ima go all Socratic on your ass...

1) "It's just a vacuum chamber, not hard space." The dangerous part of space is the vacuum, and the difference between that vacuum chamber and hard space is probably measured in nanopascals. That difference simply won't matter; for all intents and purposes, there was nothing different between that chamber and space.

1) Given a vacuum chamber of ~15m^3, entirely evacuated.
2) Given Hard Space
3) Dump ~20 pounds of air into both
4) Would there be a pressure difference?

I posit the difference is that Space will not notice your local air dump, but It is a huge difference in a confined space. Make Sense?

2) "It's only a small leak in his suit." The suit is a sealed environment. When the seal is gone, the entire suit depressurizes. He did not just "feel" the vacuum through a small leak, he felt the vacuum with his entire body, because the entire suit was depressurizing.

If he had of "popped off" his helmet would he have felt that depressurization slower or faster then a small hole in his suit.

If one has a small hole in there space suit, assuming pressurized to 1 ATM, how long would it take to depressurize to ~0ATM?

Its not about him feeling vacuum, its about the suit going from 1 ATM to ~0.1 ATM at which point he immediately passed out. It took about 10 Secs for the suit internally to get to that pressure. Also note that AS he LOST air, the chamber was pressurizing due to that lost air. So he never really felt hard vacuum.

3) "It was being partially repressurized by that hose." No. That hose is tiny, and it was meant to pressurize the suit, not the vacuum chamber. The volume of space in the suit is tiny, the volume of space in the vacuum chamber is huge.

But the hose, which you can see on the film, is about 4cm in diameter, and goes through the chamber wall to the outside? Or a tank out side the chamber? That Chamber, at near vacuum is gonna suck a lot of air out of that pipe quickly, and again, it doesn't need much to pressurize the chamber to keep it off hard vacuum.

If you didn't need oxygen, you could probably survive a vacuum for hours; after all, there is a case of someone's hand being exposed to near vacuum for several hours. It swelled impressively, completely stopped working, and he was otherwise functional and responsive. His hand made a full recovery and he's fine.

Joe Kittinger would disagree. Yes his hand expanded over twice its normal size, and that sealed his suit and saved his life, but it took a long time for it to heal and it is still damaged, to hear him tell it. But he is 82, so i imagine it all hurts.
BBC just made a documentary "Space Dive" which covers this. Can't recommend watching it, but Joe tells the tale.
But also note here, in the longest case of low pressure exposure, he was only exposed to very low pressures, and moved very quickly into partial atmosphere ( falling to earth).

Jim's depressurization probably took somewhere between five and ten seconds, with the remainder being time he spent conscious feeling the saliva in his mouth boil (which he distinctly remembers, being a case and point that he was conscious for at least a few seconds in a very near vacuum).

That's hard to say. We know personal accounts are typically rather inaccurate. But his account raises interesting questions. Like why the saliva and not the tears of his eyes, say? Probably the tongue is far more sensitive? Perhaps he had already lost vision and had his eyes closed? Or perhaps the air rushing out of his lungs over his tongue, in an already low pressure and rather warm, started the saliva boiling off? I imagine if the bulk of the free air in the suit was gone, and finally the pressure had dropped enough to start pulling out of his lungs, he had a weird moment of boiling saliva, and bam he was out.


But the point here is that we have not really had someone exposed to hard vacuum, And certainly not a vacuum large enough to see the effect on a human.