probably my last contribution to the iron lung fandom (for now, at least) because im into the witcher now LOL. this is also unfinished but. Um. Ahem. not in the mood 2 finish it. scorn/HR giger inspired simon, in the flesh contraption
Mark is not a masochist, he just wanted to be flung around multiple times, break his nose, get hospitalised from getting blood in his eyes and almost drown in a pool of blood to see how much he can handle for a film.
I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world
I love you complex puppets requiring multiple puppeteers. I love you giant spaceship set. I love you zero gravity wiring rig that was apparently hellish to be hooked up to. I love you rotating lighting apparatus that emulates the changing lighting of the centrifuge portion of the ship. I love you chicken wire and fairy lights petrova line shot. I love you practical effects enhanced WHEN NECESSARY by CGI. I love you project hail mary.
Idea: Both Grace and Rocky get annoyed that the other cannot experience the world like they can and try to come up with ways to compensate for the other’s lacking senses.
For instance Grace desperately wants Rocky to be able to experience color so as not to think so many motionless sights are boring. To reveal the hidden beauty afforded by human sight. So he starts working on a higher definition version of Rocky’s flat image to textured surface visualizer. He devises to use micro-textures to stand in for color, interviewing Eridians to come up with pleasing patterns to simulate colors based on the emotional associations those patterns evoke, like synesthesia in humans. For instance how red is “warm/passionate/exciting” blue is “calm/cold/deep” and so on. Gathering enough patterns to make a beginner palette and then finding ways to interpolate and blend between them to come up with enough colors to fill the entire spectrum. It takes several tries and misses but when Grace gets it nailed down and the Eridians can “see” they are THRILLED by it. The whole world takes on hidden depths. They would all immediately want to know what colors they are. They would probably extrapolate off the existing microtextures to start coming up with new “colors” all their own. Adding patterns to see in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Incorporate them into fashion and entertainment media. Have a field day with the new way of experiencing the world.
Meanwhile Rocky is stricken by Grace having such a narrow pinhole view of the world compared to what his echolocation awareness affords. Grace can’t feel the expanse of everything. Or see the tiny microfine details. Grace’s sense of sound and of his surroundings is so FLAT. So Rocky brainstorms to find some way to express the volume of it all and arrives at Haptics to let touch make up the difference. Before Grace knows it he’s got pads strapped to his chest, his shoulders, arms, head, back of the neck, belly, groin, all the places. Wherever he has sensitive clusters of nerve endings that will help him feel the topography of the noise against his skin. The first time Grace gets the full effect of it it’s like WAY too much and he has to quickly escape and convince Rocky to dial it back majorly before he can go again. It takes some time to work up to, but when he manages, Grace marvels at how different soundscapes FEEL different ways, some perceived more across his back or his scalp or in his chest and others better distributed across the whole of him in ways that elicit anxiety or calm. Neutrality. Intensity. Joy or sorrow.
But ESPECIALLY it would give him a newfound appreciation for the Eridian’s musical language. How different intonations elicit unexpected emotions and certain words and names just FEEL good across your skin or carapace. How unexpectedly powerful and even intimate speech can be when you feel it so pervasively.
Inspired by @ctrl-shift-alt-9 's headcanon about Simon mining asteroids as a convict I decided to headcanon a design for a four convict mining unit. I'm not the most comfortable in photobash but it really felt like the perfect medium for this one.
Portable mining units
As I envision it this MS's would be a small part of C.O.I's mining operation. Leaving prisoners inside mostly on their own for better or for worse, with not much guard oversight in terms of rationing or behaviour, the shittiness of the circumstance would depend mostly on who you are stuck with. And considering the relative autonomy, being considered for MS work would be the kind of thing you get for good behaviour.
Otherwise you just get to work in the bigger supervised mine or the refineries (which I might also concept out later).
(Also I would consider it funny that the C.O.I owns both an SM and an MS 13 and both had the same unlucky convict inside at some point.)
More headcanons
- The mining stations are all equipped with a radio that is supposed to only serve as communication with nearby tow ships, but there is a way to jail break/jerry rig them into taking external signals. The convicts that can do that are valuable in prison society. The jail broken communicators are mostly used to listine in on passing vessels, or sometimes even far away eden scavenger transmissions or something like it. If a mining operation is all made out of previous eden brothers, that is most likely what they do in their free time.
- a sub headcanon to this is an actual pirate radio station in the iron lung universe, but I think I'll make a separate post for that.
-All the mining suits are numbered, and since Korean culture might have survived in space I think number 4 is still considered unlucky. Simon always gets the number 4 suit
-The crews are usually chosen at random but you can cash in favours to be with the same people twice in a row, I wouldn't say it's common, but there are reoccurring crews that are somehow bonded on these missions (I don't think a cosmic misery universe is complete without a little bit of hope)
Drugs in Space: Pharmaceutical Therapies in the Post-apocalypse
A lot of work goes into keeping a human alive. As large predators, we have complex nutritional needs. Protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals. Much of this is covered by our diet, and whatever isn’t can be supplemented with, well, supplements.
How do you get a multivitamin in space?
Big, MASSIVE POST WARNING. This thing was 7 pages in my word doc. Please brace yourself for dubious science.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station use a surprising number of medicines. The ISS has nearly 200 medications available, and the astronauts use an average of four drugs per week. Most commonly, these are analgesics (pain relief), decongestants, and sleep aids.
As I’ve gone into in my other post blabbing about space, the ISS has regular resupply missions throughout the year, and the astronauts aboard generally spend less than a year in space. Even a colony on one of our neighbors, like the Moon or Mars, would be exponentially more difficult to resupply. So, the more the colony can produce themselves, the better.
This is doubly important for a space station with no planet to resupply from.
We’ve gone over what the Consolidation of Iron has, but it bears repeating: 3 space stations, 2 spacecrafts, 257 people, and 2 moons covered in human blood. Plus any asteroids that are still bouncing around after the Quiet Rapture. What kinds of medications would a relatively small society need?
The World Health Organization has 667 medications on their list of Essential Medications. Of these, I am going to focus on four categories: preventative, curative, sanitation, and nutrition. I’m also going to operate under the assumption that the stations in the COI’s possession have some artificial gravity. This is particularly important, since zero-G or microgravity can affect drug absorption. Digestion slows in low gravity, and drugs enter the bloodstream at unpredictable rates. Drugs are rigorously tested for specific absorption rates, half-lives, and therapeutic thresholds, and their efficacy is based on that.
So what kind of ailments can you expect on a space station?
In zero gravity, astronauts are commonly afflicted by things like hypertension (high blood pressure), osteoporosis (brittle bones), nephrolithiasis (kidney stones), cancer, immune system depression, regular depression, sleep disorders, and motion sickness.
Some of these can be prevented, such as kidney stones, with improved diet and water intake, but in an environment of extreme scarcity, water isn’t exactly free flowing. Having gravity would also improve rates of osteoporosis. Cancer and immune system depression are directly related to the prevalence of gamma radiation. Ideally a space station would shield its population from the majority of radiation, but that takes a lot of resources that a PA may not have available. Depression is more complex, but anyone in the COI has more than enough reasons to be pretty depressed. It’s treatable, with reliable drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.) Whether a post-apocalyptic governing body would find mental health drugs worth the trouble to manufacture and store depends on those in charge, but I would argue that citizens with treated and managed disorders are more likely to contribute to the continued survival of the group. Even if that makes me sound like some kind of capitalist. If the goal is to keep people alive, then the logical choice is to give them the tools to succeed.
Sleep disorders and motion sickness are particularly important in zero-G environments, because of the effects on our digestive and vestibular systems. As someone with Crohn’s disease, ask me how hard it is to sleep while nauseous. Anti-emetics and sedatives are versatile, and leads me to one of my favorite drug classes: antihistamines. She can do it all. Allergies, itching, anxiety, insomnia, depression, heartburn, nausea, dizziness. A few different antihistamines can cover a LOT of different conditions a space station citizen may encounter.
First-generation antihistamines are the ones generally used for sleeplessness. That’d be your Benadryl, Phenergan, Unisom, etc. There are way better meds for insomnia available, but if you’re talking about a limited amount of space, you want your supplies to be as versatile and useful as possible. First-gens cross the blood-brain barrier easily, so they are more likely to cause drowsiness. If you need to get to sleep quickly, or happen to have an anxious dog with allergies, good old diphenhidramine is your weapon of choice.
Second-generation antihistamines are more for allergies. They block the histamine receptors H1 or H2, and prevent the body from reacting to an allergen. This category would include loratadine (Claritin), cetirizine (Zyrtec), fexofenadine (Allegra), and drops/sprays like azelastine (Astelin.) Second-gen H2 antihistamines are also approved for use in gastric conditions, since the stomach lining has H2 receptors. For this, you’d reach for my best friend famotidine (Pepcid), or something like cimetidine (Tagamet.) There are third-generation antihistamines, such as levocetirizine (Xyzal), which block the H1 receptors more effectively and have fewer side effects than their predecessors. However, we want versatility, not necessarily specialization. Levocetirizine is great if all you’re treating is allergies or hives.
Meclizine (Dramamine) and hydroxyzine (Atarax or Vistaril, depending on the salt form) are first-generation antihistamines, with specific uses. Meclizine is used as an anti-emetic, and hydroxyzine can be used for many things: anxiety, insomnia, hives, itching, nausea, vomiting, even some symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. So our hypothetical medkit would definitely need a mix of first- and second-gen antihistamines.
With artificial gravity, antihypertensive meds would be a little less important. Some people would definitely still be predisposed to HTN, but without the effects of microgravity on the blood vessels (and being in a resource scarce, starvation situation) it would likely be less prevalent. We treat high blood pressure with ACE (angiotensin-coverting enzyme) inhibitors, ARBs (angiotensin II receptor blockers), and calcium-channel blockers.
ACE inhibitors are the -pril class, like lisinopril (zestril), enalapril (Vasotec), and benazepril (Lotensin.) These work by preventing the body from producing angiotensin II, a hormone that causes blood vessels to narrow.
ARBs are the -sartan medications, like losartan (Cozaar), olmesartan (Benicar), and valsartan (Diovan.) These prevent angiotensin II from binding to the receptors and relax the blood vessels.
Calcium-channel blockers prevent calcium from entering the muscle cells of the heart and arteries, and have two categories: dihydropyridines and non-dihydropyridines. The former (CCB D) target the blood vessel walls, and don’t significantly affect heart rate. These would be the -pines, like amlodipine (Norvasc.) The latter (CCB ND) affect the blood vessels and the heart. They slow heart rate and reduce the force of contractions. Examples of this class would be diltiazem (Cardizem, very annoying to prescribe and fill), and verapamil (Calan.) CCB D drugs are better for blood pressure, while CCB ND drugs can also be used for chest pain or arrhythmia.
Ideally, hypertension would be managed by reduced salt intake and improved diet, but an antihypertensive or two would be good to have. I’d probably use a calcium-channel blocker or a beta blocker (we’ll get to that) for versatility.
Mental health is a massive, sticky topic here on Earth. In a high-stress, low-resource, isolated environment like a space station? I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone aboard needed a therapist. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, antianxiety meds… a lot of these do treat multiple conditions. For a personal example, I take two antidepressants and a beta blocker. Sertraline (SSRI, Zoloft), bupropion (atypical antidepressant, Wellbutrin), and propranolol (beta blocker, Inderal.) All of these have multiple indications. Sertraline is the heavyweight champ, the first line of defense, for depression. If a doctor diagnoses you with depression, at least here in the US, chances are they’re gonna try sertraline first. It’s well tolerated with a relatively small side effect profile, at least compared to its cohorts, and it’s been extensively studied. It’s reliable. Like most antidepressants, it takes a few weeks (4-6 weeks) to reach full effect. Not only does this treat my depression, but it also improves anxiety, and helps chill out the OCD. Bupropion is a supporter. Atypical antidepressants work on different reuptake receptors, with bupropion specifically affecting norepinephrine and dopamine. It’s used for major depressive disorder, but also for things like seasonal affective disorder and smoking cessation. It can even be combined with naltrexone for weight management.
Propranolol is a beta blocker, or a beta-adrenergic blocking agent, and these work by blocking the binding of neurotransmitters to stress hormones like adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. They lower the heart rate, relax the blood vessels, and can calm physical affects of anxiety like shaking. I use it for migraine prevention, but it’s also used for HTN, angina (chest pain), heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and even helps protect the heart after a heart attack. Cardioselective beta blockers, like metoprolol, are specifically for blocking the B1 receptor. These affect the cardiovascular system more than nonselective beta blockers. With many uses and a VERY small side effect profile (generally just dizziness due to lower heart rate or blood pressure, dry mouth/eyes, and fatigue), they are extremely useful.
The most important category of meds, I’d say, would be the curative. An infection on a space station is an easy way to die. Antibiotics are wide and varied, with many types, indications, and side effects. But let’s start with the grandfather of them all: Alexander Fleming’s penicillin.
Penicillin was the first biologic antibiotic. We had experimented with antimicrobial agents before, like Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s Salvarsan (arsphenamine), which was created in 1909 to treat syphilis. Before that, American Civil War field physicians used sugar paste, regular table sugar, to treat wounds. And this worked! It killed bacteria and improved wound healing. Honey is known to be extremely shelf-stable and antibacterial, and we still use it to treat burns. Penicillin is the first time we’ve used a mold to kill a bacteria.
The story goes that after returning from vacation, Dr. Fleming began sorting through petri dishes containing colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria. Each dish was dotted with colonies, but one dish had something unusual: a different organism, with a ring of blank agar around it. This is known as the zone of inhibition, and the organism responsible was the mold Penicillium notatum.
Fleming found that this mold seemed to be killing off the Staph around it, and after testing, it was effective in killing a lot of the harmful bugs of the era: gonorrhea, streptococcus, meningococcus, and diphtheria. Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their colleagues at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford would later purify penicillin into the very first antibiotic, which was first administered to the police officer Albert Alexander in 1943. Since then, we’ve synthesized hundreds of antibiotics, and penicillin remains a widely used, widely prescribed drug.
Penicillin is a Gram-positive affective antibiotic, meaning it targets bacteria that give a positive result in the Gram stain test. This is one of the quickest ways to determine therapy for a bacterial infection. Penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring, which binds to enzymes that cross-link murein (a mesh-like molecule that makes up the cell walls of many types of bacteria) and essentially pops the bacterium open. If you’re only going to take one antibiotic with you, I’d make it a penicillin. I’d also take something for Gram-negative bacteria, or a newer antibiotic like cephalexin. Maybe not fluoroquinolones. Fluoroquinolones are a last-resort sort of antibiotic, the -oxacin class. They are rough on the body, and have a lot of side effects. I mean, they can rupture your tendons. Not ideal. Penicillin isn’t without side effects, and it is the most reported antibiotic allergy. However, anywhere from 95% to 99% of reported penicillin allergies aren’t actually true allergies. Patients will often experience gastrointestinal side effects like diarrhea or vomiting (common among all antibiotics) and interpret that as an allergy. So it’s unlikely anyone on the station is going to experience anaphylaxis while their infected hand is being treated. There is another enemy penicillin has, though, one that has haunted us for decades: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Overprescription of penicillins and poor antibiotic stewardship caused a strain of staph to become resistant to cillins, and if it gets aboard a space station, it’s going to be nearly impossible to get rid of.
Antibiotics, antihypertensives, antidepressants/antipsychotics, and sanitation like alcohol would be some of my top priorities if I were packing a medkit for a station. But there is another category: supportive. This would be your analgesics, your pain relief.
Pain relief comes in several forms: APAP (acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol, also an antipyretic/fever reducer), NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen), and opioids. Acetaminophen is appropriate for use in children (though so is morphine, pediatric dosing is complicated), and doubles as an effective fever reducer. NSAIDs can also reduce fever, depending on the cause. They target inflammation to reduce pain. Opioids block the sensation of pain altogether. Ideally you’d want a mix of all three types, as well as steroids like dexamethasone (Decadron.) Steroids suppress the immune system, reducing inflammation as a result. In a PA survival situation, you could probably use morphine as a currency. I’d put it as one of the most important drugs you could have on a station. Nothing stops someone from working like pain.
So we’ve gone over some common maladies for astronauts, as well as drugs I’d choose and how they work/some of their drawbacks. But how would they get them up there in the first place?
This is where my research got especially interesting.
There are two sources of drugs: natural and synthetic. I guess that’s pretty much the two ways you get anything, but I digress. Penicillin was naturally derived, and we still use two natural forms of it (Pen G and Pen V.) Sertraline, conversely, is synthetic. There are two ways you can get something in space: bring it with you, or make it yourself. We’ve theorized for ages about how we might manufacture drugs in space. Using a 3D printer to just print pills, or storing the raw ingredients and compounding them as necessary. But an article by Megan Tatum of the Pharmaceutical Journal brought up an even more clever scheme: genetically altering plants to produce the therapeutic chemicals needed. This concept is currently being studied in lettuce, which I think is a perfect candidate. Lettuce is relatively easy to grow, and tends to grow pretty quickly. We’ve already grown three types of lettuce in the ISS’s garden (affectionately known as Veggie.) Right now, this is a purely theoretical method, but I think it shows real promise. Pick the most common drugs you need and engineer quick-growing plants that produce the necessary chemicals. After that, it’s a matter of extracting and purifying the compounds to ensure therapeutic efficacy. But we know how to do that already! So many of our drugs come directly from plants: aspirin from willow, opium from poppies, digoxin from foxglove, and more. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for a far-future society to synthesize drugs directly from genetically modified plants. I haven’t really addressed Eden, but they could have an advantage in this department, considering they are/were in possession of the only tree left in the universe.
We’ve gone over supportive and curative, with a brief nod to sanitation (you can get a lot done with plain water and alcohol), so now it’s time to talk about preventatives, particularly nutrition.
What kind of nutrition do you need on a space station?
It’s rather similar to what we need on Earth, but with increased protein, calcium, and vitamin D demands.
[Source: Astronaut Nutritional Needs]
Even on our current station, you want to keep intake ALARA: as low as reasonably achievable. You want to keep people alive and healthy, but you don’t want to run out of food! The COI’s definition of “healthy” may be a lower threshold than we’re used to, closer to “able to work.” Their priorities would likely focus more on macronutrients and the bare minimum to keep people going. This comes with some HEAVY risks: scurvy (vitamin C), beriberi (vitamin B1), rickets (vitamin D), pellagra (vitamin B3), and others. These four are probably the most well known, as well as the most preventable. A diet of simple carbs and protein will keep someone alive for a while, but once their scars disintegrate and teeth fall out (scurvy), their heart fails and nerves die (beriberi), their bones soften or break (rickets, osteoporosis), and they start to lose their mind (dementia caused by pellagra), the cost of vitamins may not seem so high. All of these are horrible ways to die.
I brought this up in my other miles long post, but the blood moons do present a possible source of fat-soluble vitamins and protein: bone marrow. Calcium could be synthesized from bones, and the bones could also be used to make activated charcoal for water filtration or poison control. Since traditional active charcoal is made from things like wood or coconut husks, bone char (charcoal made from bone) is a great alternative.
Other than GMO lettuce, keeping the raw components of common drugs would be a fairly efficient method of producing medicine. Bulk components would be a better use of space than a 1000ct bottle of ibuprofen, especially since certain binders could be used across different drugs. Storage is also an issue, since drugs and their components are sensitive to temperature and humidity. The USP outlines that drugs should be kept between 20 C and 25 C (68 F to 77 F) and 40-60% humidity. Space stations are pretty cold, and very dry. Good to know I’ve got some job security in the future, because to compound drugs, you need a few things: recipes for the drugs you need, and someone who knows how to read and follow them. Plus some binders, suspensions, mortars, pestles, spatulas…
Compounding may be more feasible for the COI, since it wouldn’t be impossible for a member of the medic team to multiclass in pharmacy. The sourcing of the raw materials would be more difficult, however. It’d be easy to write it off as “future technology.” But let’s think about it in the basic building blocks: for example, sertraline’s chemical formula is C17H17Cl2N, and its medical form is sertraline hydrochloride, so that’d be C17H17Cl2N*HCl. So that is carbon, hydrogen, chlorine, and nitrogen. These base compounds are easier to source: carbon is easy to find, especially if you happen to have a couple blood moons knocking around. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the universe, so even after the QR, we should be able to find it somewhere. Nitrogen is the majority of our atmosphere, and chlorine floats around the universe, both as free chlorine and as hydrogen chloride, HCl. Once you find the ingredients, it’d be a matter of ramming them together. I’m not a microbiologist or a physicist, so this is where my knowledge on the subject ends. But that’s how I think a space station with no resupply missions would best find the compounds they need: break it down into base components, and look for those. You could apply this logic to pretty much any synthetic compound, and all you’d need to know is the chemical formula to follow. In theory, you could isolate the needed compound in this way, then put that into the GMO Lettuce, and then you have a renewable source.
It doesn’t have to be lettuce, either. There is one canonical plant in the world of Iron Lung, and with the idea of making plants grow drugs, well, the COI now has a concrete incentive for confiscating pendants from Eden captives. If you can extract them safely from the resin and encourage them to grow, you’d just have to introduce the compound you want them to make. Getting a fresh body to mine asteroids or throw into the blood ocean is a bonus. Or you could eat them. Cannibalism comes with its own risks, like prion disease, and it’s not a perfect solution, but I can’t deny that a human body is a viable source of protein and vitamins. Just cook it thoroughly and maybe avoid eating the brain.
I didn’t even get into my thoughts on how Eridian drugs would differ. I need to sleep on that, think real hard about how an ammonia-based atmosphere would affect plantlife and what kind of drugs an Eridian might even need. So I will be back… in a separate post.
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