#info-post

[susen70]

 I will no longer create CC's as there are now many other CC creators. 👋 My (old) CC's are still available for download. 😊 

Thank you!

[inkspill-nebula]

Some Science To Consider For Your Sci-Fi Universe PART TWO!!

When it comes to science fiction, there are a few elements of actual science that often get ignored, distorted, or completely reinvented; from artificial gravity to faster than light travel, to the behavior of a vacuum. These create common misconceptions that lead to the genre becoming more fiction than science. This series is a collection of real science to debunk common myths and inspire ways to bring new scientific discoveries into sci-fi.

Click HERE for part one

1. Faster Than Light Travel. 

This was briefly covered in the video linked in the quantum mechanics section of Part One, if I remember correctly, but I definitely didn’t do it justice. Going faster than the speed of light is not possible in our universe. 

This is because, as defined in Einsteins theory of relativity (partially covered in Part One), space and time are not separate. Instead they are the two components of a much more complex creature referred to as spacetime (creative name). You can imagine space time as a graph with space across the bottom and time across the side, as shown below.

Don’t click away. I promise this gets more interesting.

Just sitting at your desk, you’re moving through space at FANTASTIC speed. You’re on the surface of the Earth, which is spinning at roughly 1,000 miles per hour and dancing around our sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Our solar system is careening through the galaxy at 90,000 miles per hour, and our galaxy is being pushed steadily away from the center of the universe as the universe expands and being drawn toward The Great Attractor at speeds I don’t happen to know. You are also moving through time. 

If you were moving as fast through space as you were through time (which you’re not but it is hypothetically possible) the graph would look like this.

Do you see the problem yet? Here it is. If you were ABSOLUTELY stationary, like the deceptive universe wants you to think you are just sat at your desk, you would only be moving through time and the graph would look like this.

So you can see that in order to only go through time, you cannot be moving through space. Thus it can be inferred that to only go through space you cannot be going through time.

Remember Time Dilation from Part One? The faster you are going the less time you experience? To move through space at the speed of light is the point in this graph where you stop experiencing time. 

Here’s where things get even more fun. I need to remind you again that space and time are not separate. You are ALWAYS moving through spacetime, even when you aren’t moving through space or aren’t moving through time. You are always ON this graph and you are always moving. But what speed are you moving? The speed of light.

You are ALWAYS traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. You are traveling some odd percentage through time and some odd percentage through space, but you are always moving the speed of light through spacetime. 

See THIS VIDEO for a much better explanation of what I just did and an explanation of why this visual representation of spacetime isn’t perfect.

But lets back up a step and address what it would be like to travel only through space, since we have some intuitive understanding of traveling only through time. As you approach the speed of light, from an outside perspective, you will experience infinite mass and it will require infinite force to keep you moving at that speed. Complicated already. However, from your point of view, all of your mass will start to convert into energy according to (E = MC^2) and you and your spacecraft will eventually lose all physical form and become nothing but energy. Probably not a fun way to die.

2. Gravity (Part 5) AKA Inertia

In part one I mentioned simulating the effects of gravity using inertia in a spinning vessel, but I didn’t mention the other way you can use inertia to simulate gravity: Acceleration.

If you’ve ever put the pedal to the metal suddenly in a car, you know that acceleration can push you back, but once you reach the speed you’re going to go, you can pry yourself off the back of your seat. Well, you can actually accelerate fast enough so that the force pressing you into the back of your seat is equal to that of one Earth gravity. The only catch is you have to be constantly accelerating at that rate. What that rate of acceleration you need depends on the mass of the object you’re trying to accelerate and I haven’t yet found an online calculator for that. 

You can also have a 1 gravity deceleration, so when you get half way to where you’re going, you turn the ship around and blast your engines towards your destination and you’ll have stopped decelerating by the time you arrive. (This is how gravity is simulated in the TV show The Expanse). However, apparent gravity will diminish as you approach your destination because again, you can’t decelerate forever without eventually stopping. 

You also can’t accelerate forever. Even if your ship doesn’t have a top speed, you’ll run into the top speed of the universe (the speed of light) eventually and you WILL stop accelerating and transform into pure energy (as explained in the last part). And when you’re talking about interstellar travel you probably will reach the speed of light -from a stationary perspective if not from your own, but that’s just more special relativity strangeness. But, since we are on the subject of special relativity, here’s a cool fact I found that makes all of this pretty much pointless for interstellar travel anyway.

At a constant acceleration of 1 g, a rocket could travel the diameter of our galaxy in about 12 years ship time, and about 113,000 years planetary time.

But what about for interplanetary travel (how it’s used in The Expanse). That could hypothetically work. The limiting factor here is your engine. Above we assumed that you could have a ship that could accelerate forever, but that isn’t something that we can actually manufacture, at least not at the moment, because that engine would need to be running CONSTANTLY and that would require A LOT of fuel. Unless we can come up with a much more efficient engine or a much more efficient fuel source, it isn’t likely to blast off to pluto generating free simulated gravity as you go.

3. Inertia part 2

Inertia itself is another commonly overlooked thing in science fiction that’s worth addressing. In most sci-fi (especially television) you can take your ships from warp speed/hyperspace/whatever to a dead stop in seconds. If you’ve ever been in a car accident or even just stopped suddenly, you know what a load of bullshit that would be. Stopping a ship that fast would liquefy its crew against the walls (this is why my blog is rated for ages 13+) and break the ship apart. Most sci-fi doesn’t even pretend to have a solution for that one, but the simple fact of the matter is that inertia still works in space. If you speed up or slow down too fast, you will be ripped apart.

But that leads to another silly inertia related problem. Remember in the section above where I said that half way to your destination you would have to flip your ship around and constantly burn the engines in order to stop by the time you reach your destination? That’s true. In space, there is no friction to stop you from just carrying on forever. Once you have reached a speed, you will stay going that speed forever. That’s not exactly true because space isn’t a perfect vacuum so you may encounter particulate matter to create some friction, and you will be acted on by gravitational fields, but the fact remains that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, and in space there aren’t so many outside forces. If you wanted to decelerate, you’d have to do it using reverse thrust, and if you wanted to decelerate safely, you can’t do it quickly. Now you can apply more deceleration thrust than you applied acceleration thrust and stop in less distance than it took you to get up to speed, but you still can’t stop QUICKLY. So the fact that ships can come to a full stop in an instant (especially without reverse thrust) is complete bullshit on two counts.

I’m going to cut this one here to keep the post short. Hopefully you learned something new and if I completely decimated your story with science, feel free to just ignore it. You won’t be the first to do so. 

In the next post I’m hoping to start incorporating new sciences that have great sci-fi potential. See you then!

[hurty-vibes]

Information about THK // Vibes au

He is sexed as male and has no gender identity problems. He won’t mind you referring to him by other pronouns than he/him, though he will be internally uncomfortable.

He has PTSD from a recently broken off abusive (mentally, physically and possibly sexually) relationship with The Radiance.

He is not ready to move on and get a new relationship just yet.

He has DID (alter is PV), though he is not aware. He hasn’t been to therapy or seen a psychiatrist, as he doesn’t have the money for it himself and doesn’t want to bother anyone by asking.

Still experimenting with sexuality (but clearly gay)

Very cut off from his family, as The Radiance forced him to be. He wants to get back in contact, but he is rather nervous about it.

Lives in a small cottage in Dirtmouth by himself.

Missing his right eye and arm - poor boy.

[garage-bad-dream-adventure-blog]

The short-lived PC software line of Toshiba EMI has at least one highlight in this point-and-click adventure game by Kinotrope, directed by and featuring the art of Japanese surrealist artist Tomomi Sakuba. The Kafkaesque setup presents the player transformed into a grotesque robot of sorts, seeking to return to your "real" body while exploring the "Garage," an underground society of similarly bizarre robots who live or run their businesses at every corner of town. The game pairs Sakuba's striking art with a legitimate narrative that features puzzles and clues that unravel the inner workings of the Garage.

- via Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/GarageJP/screenshot4.png

Garage has been re-released on Steam on July 7th, 2022 and later re-released on Switch on June 6th, 2024.

The short-lived PC software line of Toshiba EMI has at least one highlight in this point-and-click adventure game by Kinotrope, directed by

[inkspill-nebula]

Some Science to Consider for Your Science Fiction Universe

When it comes to space travel, there are a few elements of science which science fiction tends to ignore. Most of these are elements of physics that would make the story completely impossible and have become acceptable to ignore. So much so that a lot of people don’t even think of them when starting a science fiction story and most don’t even know them.

So here's a collection of ignored science to consider before you start your next science fiction story.

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1. Gravity (Part 1): 

We all think we know Gravity, but there are a few things about gravity that most people don’t actually realize. Problem number one is that we can’t generate a lot of gravity from small objects. Gravity is determined by the mass of an object, which is defined by the amount of matter that it has in it. You need a big thing to have enough mass to generate a significant gravitational field. There's a reason Earth is the size that is is. Even using superdense materials, it would be pretty much impossible to generate 1G (Earth gravity) from anything notably smaller than the Earth. You can get superdense materials that would generate 1G while being smaller than Eart, like neutronium (the core of neutron stars), but that crap is hot, unstable, and determined to destroy the Universe. Tamper with it even slightly and well... unsurprisingly, it will explode with the force of a dying star.

This means you have to find another way of generating Gravity besides mass... 

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Gravity (Part 2)

Lets happily ignore gravity part 1 and say that you can generate gravity artificially in a practical way...

You may have heard the physics of gravity used to debunk the flat Earth myth. Because Gravity reaches out in all directions from an object, it likes to make things into spheres. The problem with gravity in science fiction is un-sphering it. You can’t have a single gravity source on a flat ship without that gravity being strongest at its source and wanting to pull everything to it, which means that gravity will only be down if you’re directly above the source and the further out you get from it the more leanish it will be. I’ve drawn a funky diagram in MS Paint to explain what I’m on about.

To the person at the very front of the ship, the gravity source is next to them, which means that the gravity is sideways relative to the deck of the ship. The person in the nacelle there is clearly being pulled up into the ceiling at an atrocious angle, and the only person who is actually standing correctly on the floor is the person in the middle of deck 2. It also is worth pointing out that the varying directions of gravitational forces here would have some pretty serious effects on the structural integrity of the ship.

Okay, but what if we had multiple gravitational fields? The problem with that is that they would overlap. Gravity doesn’t just stop, so suddenly you have multiple gravitational fields fighting with each other and you would be getting pulled with varying force (depending on your location) in two or more different directions (depending on how many fields you throw down). Problem one is that they’ll cancel out in the spaces between them so if the ship had -say- three equidistant gravitational field generators, it would look like this.

first of all, let’s just say that all of these are 1/3 G, because all of these being 1g is stupid. They’re way too close together to not total up to a 3g force (when you’re not between them) and we need Earth gravity to be the maximum here. The closer you are to one of the generators, the more you’re going to be pulled by it. As you walk away from it, you’ll be pulled less by it and more by the next one. If you’re standing equally between only two generators, you are being pulled equally in two different directions, and then if you move out of that, the direction of gravity changes more towards the next generation. This transition of dominant fields would be absolute hell on your body, especially your heart, which has to figure out how to pump blood in this insanity. If you had three fields (as shown above) shit gets even weirder because the field doesn't just stop when it reaches the next generator. So if you're standing equally between generators one and two, you have the gravity of generator one pulling you 1/3 G to the left and the gravity of generators 3 and 4 pulling you 2/3 G to the right. Also, no down, if you’re between hem like that, so you’d be falling rightish while trying to stand on the bottom deck, or the second deck, or the third. If you're at the aft of the ship, you’ll be falling leftish, and in both cases downish if on decks 2 or 3, WHICH MEANS YOU’RE STILL FALLING TOWARDS THE MIDDLE GENERATOR because that’s the middle of the total field created by all three and therefore where gravity will be the most “stable”. And if you’re standing on this generator, you’re being pulled1/3 down 1/3 leftish and 1/3 rightish.

This will be an even worse hell for the structural integrity of the ship since it's a single surface being pulled in all sorts of directions. Long story short, we’ve made things significantly worse here. 

[I’m just going to tag in here a very brief explanation as to why Star Trek’s gravity plating doesn’t work because it's one of the reasons this didn’t work, and that is that everything will still try to pull into the more stable canter because gravity wants to sphere (because sphere is a verb now). Also, the fact that they put it on every deck means that it would cancel out because the plate on the deck above you would pull up on you. I haven't read the technical manual, so I don’t know how the fictitiously addressed this issue, but the answer is still NO.]

What about less lengthy decks???

(In the diagram below, the ship is sideways because gravity defines down. The decks are vertical in the image, but horizontal to gravity.)

This one actually does solve a bit of the problem, however, the bottom few decks here still have incredibly leanish gravity out by the hulls and so everything will still fall into the middle of the decks. The higher up you get from the field generator, the better this works. This means you really are wasting your bottom few decks of your ship.

The best solution that I know if is the one that Earth uses, which is to be a sphere, keep your gravity in the middle, and not support life anywhere near the center.

This does mean that you have a curved floor, but the bigger your sphere is, the less pronounced that curve will be (which is why the Earth looks flat when you’re standing on it. The circle is so big that curvature is really low). You can also curve the bottoms of your furniture to match. 

You are still wasting the space close to the field generator, but the sphere allows you to maximize your surface area after that gap (and you can still have multiple stacked decks. This drawing just doesn’t).

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Gravity (Part 3)

Yep Gravity is after us with a vengeance. Did you notice in the diagrams above how the gravitational field circles continued outside of the ship? So far as we know, there is not a force or material in the universe which can stop gravity, which means that the gravitational field will continue outside of your ship. The other thing is that if you generate 1G (the gravity of Earth) the field that you generate will be the size of that of Earth. And, as we all know, Earth’s gravitational field manages to keep the moon around. This means that the ships would also collect things as it passes them. Even if it's moving fast enough not to carry them around, it might still drag them a bit. Certainly, it makes it impossible to have a ship in orbit of a planet without tugging it around, and it makes it a bad idea to put two ships close together.

If you reduced the size of the field (I don’t know how that would work) to be the size of your ship, you would have crap for gravity on your upper decks because gravity doesn’t just stop, it weakens the further away it gets from its generator until it eventually becomes unnoticeable. So you would have intense gravity in the lower or central part of your ship and weaker gravity around the top. I guess (if you can control the size of the field) you can have the gravity expand outside of your ship only a certain amount. That way you have all the gravity you need on the inside, but it would still mean having gravity nearing 1G right outside your ship and diminishing gradually the further away you get from it. You’re still gonna pick up things, even if its just dust or asteroids and not entire planets. 

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MORE BELOW THE CUT

Gravity (part 4)

So remember when I said that we had to find another way to generate gravity besides mass and then proceeded to act as if there wasn’t a way. Well, there is: Spinning. That's right, spinning. You see this one all over science fiction, 2001 A Space Oddysee, Babylon 5, and dozens of other appearances that I can't seem to remember right now. 

If you’ve ever been to a carnival, you may have seen a ride called the Graviton or the Starship 3000. In this ride, you get on a big disk with high outer walls and it spins around really fast until you get stuck to the outer edges. This isn’t technically creating gravity, however, it is simulating the effect of gravity.

For a ship (which would have to be a cylinder or a ring), the walls of the Gravitron would be the floor, meaning that Gravity is outward instead of being inward like it is in the sphere used in the last example. 

The reason I didn’t go into this first is that it also has a laundry list of Problems, number one being the Coriolis Effect. Now, what in the high heck is that?

The Coriolis effect is an effect whereby a mass moving in a rotating system experiences a force acting perpendicular to the direction of motion and to the axis of rotation. Good. Science words. What that means, in this case, is that something (let's go back to out Graviton example) thrown from one side of the disc to the other won’t travel in a straight line. it will appear to (from inside the disc) randomly veer off into the spin as soon as it passes the center of the disc. The reason for this is that the object being tossed really wants to take a straight path out and will ignore the spin somewhat to remain straight relative to normal space. 

Now if we change our ring so that the outer edge is the floor instead of the walls, this tendency to veer into the spin will affect you standing there, especially if you’re walking around. If you’re walking with the spin, you are increasing the effect of the spin and this will make you heavier. However, if you walk against the spin, you are, in effect, decreasing the speed of the spin -relative to you- and this will make you lighter. If you’re running against the spin, you may even start to float up.

The other fun effect this has is that, since your feet are moving faster than your head (because the outside of a wheel spins faster than the inside), if you were to do something like stand up from a chair, that spin motion might spin your feet right out from under your head and you’ll fall down. 

There are countless other physiological effects that this would have on your body, including absolutely f*cking your perception of motion on a regular basis.

You can counter the Coriolis effect by having bigger rings, but bigger rings would be more affected by the spin necessary to create the effect of 1G, and could become structurally unsound and rip apart. That means that you have to carefully balance your ring size. If you want a lot of surface area, a cylinder is a great option.

PBS Space Time has an awesome video explaining all of these problems in great detail including the math behind it and how to calculate the effect of 1G from a spin of a ring of any radius. So if you’re interested, I highly suggest checking out THIS VIDEO. 

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2. Time Dilation: 

(yes, we’re finally done with gravity!)

“According to the theory of relativity, time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two observers, either due to a velocity difference relative to each other, or by being differently situated relative to a gravitational field.” (Wikipedia). Basically, this fucker means that if you’re going fast, time moves slower for you than it does everywhere else. My favorite use of this phenomenon is in Ender's Game, where they keep a guy in a really fast orbit around the sun to keep him alive for a few generations until they need him again. Because he's moving really fast, less time will have passed for him than has passed on Earth. 

This phenomenon makes light-speed travel complicated because, in order to get anywhere at a decent speed from your POV, a lot of time will have passed for the rest of the Universe. For shits and giggles, let's use THIS ONLINE CALCULATOR to figure out how long it would take to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri if your ship could fly at 80% of the speed of light.

Okay, to get to Alpha Centauri at 80% of the speed of light, from the point of view of the ship, it would take 3.275 years. However, 5.620 years would have passed on Earth. That’s a difference of 2.345 years. While aesteticaly pleasing, this number is a bit tricky to really understand, so let's make that a bit more standard: it’s 2 years and almost 126 days.

I tried to calculate how long it would take to get to the Andromeda galaxy at 10x the speed of light, just so you could see how much of a factor time dilation becomes at high speeds, but I broke the calculator. I remember once learning that, if you could go fast enough to get to Andromeda in a month, the Milky Way Galaxy would be long dead by the time you got there, but I don’t remember how long dead “long dead” is and I really don’t want to do that math.

There is one way around this that is theoretically possible, and that is separating the ship from the Universe or employ the good old hyperspace trope (I need to clarify: Babylon 5 hyperspace, not Star Wars hyperspace. Star Wars hyperspace isn’t severed from normal space and just ignores time dilation as a thing).

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3. Quantum Mechanics:

Science Fiction writers love to use quantum entanglement or quantum tunneling as a method of sending objects or information across space at FTL (faster than light) speeds. PBS Space Time has a wonderful series of videos explaining quantum mechanics, entanglement, and tunneling as well as probability and other aspects of quantum physics that explain why most of these fictional methods of FTL space travel don’t actually work. There’s no way I could explain it better or shorter than they have. It's complicated shit. 

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I’m absolutely sure that I will think of more, but this is all I have for now. Hopefully, you learned something new and if I completely decimated your story with science, feel free to just ignore it. You wouldn’t be the first to do so. 

[hurty-vibes]

ASK BOX IS OPEN!

Go wild!! THK is awaiting your company

[hurty-vibes]

Tag key

#Info-post - useable information, can be about the blog or the author

#thk-answers - an ask has been answered!

#thk-replies - response to a started roleplay chain

#shift - shift between the two personalities, thk and pv, has occurred! 

#pv-answers - pv seems to be the one to have answered this ask...

#pv-replies - an in-rp shift! What a twist!

#representation-of-him - art post

#can-you-see-me - drawn response