| General > General Technical Chat |
| SciFi movies and pathetic misconceptions of tech failing for the story line. |
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| coppice:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on April 19, 2023, 07:39:43 pm ---I suppose a time machine remains geo-effective because it makes a kind of temporal vacuole in the space time continuum? Well that's how I'm explaining all of that Star Trek, go find a Humpback Whale in the 1980s, garbage. Another thought regarding time travel, what about the microbes riding shotgun with the traveller? A time traveller from 1989 << "Excellent" >> arriving today to pick up their sure bet copy of Greys Sports Almanac 2022, might transport the Covid Arcturus variant back to the valley - causing the timeline to skew into an alternate tangent; resulting in Donald "Biff" Trump not becoming US President. When travellers from Europe arrived in the new world carrying influenza, syphilis and smallpox, their pathogens decimated the indigenous populations. So what diseases from the future might cause issues for the ethical time tourist? --- End quote --- Biohazards aren't generally well handled in any kind of science fiction. More serious writers, like Artthur C Clark, point them out, but mostly handwave a solution. In reality these would be really tough issues. Most time travel tales have someone appearing on the same spot at another time, like that place was just a vacuum moments before. In reality the air would need to be moved out of the way. A few tales address things going horribly wrong when someone appears at a spot that now has, say, a building, but the general issue of atmosphere is completely ignored. |
| AndyBeez:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 19, 2023, 07:50:38 pm ---... A few tales address things going horribly wrong when someone appears at a spot that now has, say, a building, but the general issue of atmosphere is completely ignored. --- End quote --- Terminator does it by burning a landing sphere in the target space. Not very practical :( |
| TimFox:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on April 19, 2023, 06:34:49 pm ---Larry Niven had fun with his JumpShift teleportation machines, e.g. if you teleport from the equator to a pole, or change altitude, the kinetic and potential energy has to come/go too. That was also the first time I came across CamelCase typography for names. It is common now, but I think Niven might have invented it. --- End quote --- If I remember correctly, Niven's teleportation system conserved momentum by having a heavily-loaded barge anchored in Lake Michigan to absorb individual impulses, which approximately cancelled out over the week. |
| David Hess:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on April 19, 2023, 07:39:43 pm ---Another thought regarding time travel, what about the microbes riding shotgun with the traveller? A time traveller from 1989 << "Excellent" >> arriving today to pick up their sure bet copy of Greys Sports Almanac 2022, might transport the Covid Arcturus variant back to the valley - causing the timeline to skew into an alternate tangent; resulting in Donald "Biff" Trump not becoming US President. When travellers from Europe arrived in the new world carrying influenza, syphilis and smallpox, their pathogens decimated the indigenous populations. So what diseases from the future might cause issues for the ethical time tourist? --- End quote --- With those small differences in time, the disease is still a contemporary of the life it infects. Part of the Red Queen effect is that parasites and diseases are adapted to the life they encounter and not the life of the past or future, so it is not a given that a "modern" infectious disease would be well adapted to the distant past, or the reverse. Countering that, the most deadly diseases are ones which are *not* well adapted. I think a more interesting aspect is the Red Queen effect itself between predators and prey. Would a modern animal simply outclass its distant ancestors? In some cases this will absolutely happen, which brings a whole new angle on introducing an invasive species. How good were the dinosaurs really compared to a mammal that evolved 250 million years later? |
| David Hess:
--- Quote from: TimFox on April 19, 2023, 08:36:20 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on April 19, 2023, 06:34:49 pm ---Larry Niven had fun with his JumpShift teleportation machines, e.g. if you teleport from the equator to a pole, or change altitude, the kinetic and potential energy has to come/go too. That was also the first time I came across CamelCase typography for names. It is common now, but I think Niven might have invented it. --- End quote --- If I remember correctly, Niven's teleportation system conserved momentum by having a heavily-loaded barge anchored in Lake Michigan to absorb individual impulses, which approximately cancelled out over the week. --- End quote --- Eventually the momentum transfer and energy difference was dissipated like that, but not all booths supported it, which led to interesting locked room mysteries. As Niven points out in his Theory and Practice of Teleportation, you can make a space drive for Earth by teleporting something like iron filings uphill so that they fall back into the transmitter. Of course this needs to be put at a pole or the iron filing will precess and miss the transmitter. Also use a vacuum. In 30 days, the mass of the iron filing has doubled ... |
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