Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: zeke023
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2003 03:24
VIEWED: 21912
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THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 3:59 PM

The artificial gravity thing in Firefly is not really that interesting to me, because it's painfully apparent that it exists because the production companies simply didn't have enough money to simulate accurate artificial gravity or micro- or zero-gravity conditions on TV. This is sort of star trek science and I chunk it up to suspended reality. For that reason, I'm a little weary about going into too much detail on this issue. Anything I say would be fantastic, and its not guaranteed to match with what the producer of the upcoming shows, assuming such upcoming shows.

However, I will point out my biggest problem with this Firefly gravity as it's discussed in this thread. What exactly powers it? On Serenity, one might assume that the engines would generate the needed energy, but on a moon the size of, well, the Moon, am I to believe that the ground is covered in invisible self-powered gravity producing machinery? First of all, how do you generate soch advanced technology over an entire moon, with the (apparent) infrastructure of no more then a couple of primitive villages? And most of all, there is absolutely no presentation of this in the show; this is purely the imagination of the fans. So I have a real problem with this. This kind of thinking will just ruin the show for me. I'd rather just ignore it and hope it goes away.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 6:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Of course, we all knew you were a genius. Eventually, you had to become a genius in this discussion, didn't you.

Comparing yourself to Einstein is just too much. That takes the cake, man.

Actually you compared me to Einstein, I just elaborated based upon the most common estimate of his IQ and pointed that it wasn't that that made him great.

Interestingly you are correct, of the definitions of genius I meet one by 7 points, however this is just stupid as genius is used to refer to Extraordinary intellectual and creative power or extraordinary intellect and talent, note that neither of these is caused by a high IQ.

Your jump from IQ to genius is as archaic as defining idiot as “and inoffensive term referring to people of extreme mental retardation have a mental age below three. Most of the people classified as idiot are unable to learn connected speech.”

When did you go to school? Were they still using these terms then? By the way, when these terms were in wide use the Intelligence Quotient was defined as a person’s mental age, divided by their chronological age, multiplied by one hundred. Now there are ageless IQ tests, so although IQ testing isn’t my strong point I’m guessing that it’s changed, and for this reason the association between genius and IQ is no longer applicable.

By using the IQ-genius association, and the estimate you gave for my age (twelve) we can say that for me to be a genius I would need to have a mental age of 16.8 or greater. Well in that case I am a genius, but somehow I don’t think that that is what you meant, so I urge you again: find out what you’re talking about before you say it.

As to my meds, that is a low thing to attack, now isn't it? Good guess though, dysthymia and chronic fatigue. Sorry, no delusions here.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 6:54 PM

By the way, just got you book, Advanced Quantum Mechanics, J.J. Sakurai.

You're right, light reading. I love calculus, by the way, so it's nice that the first differential equation is on the second page of text. Equation (1.1) Of course it isn’t like that’s a big deal, but some books open with lengthy history of the science introductions, this one had just enough of that.

ZEKE023

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 7:31 PM

*steps in between THEGN and CHRISTHECYNIC to prevent the enevitable fisticuffs*

If we can come up with some specific questions - I can direct them to my friend who's a graduate student in Physics. She's specializing in the study of black holes - I imagine that can relate to what we're talking about in terms of space-time and gravity and such.

(she's hot too - many why did I let that one slip through my fingers... *doh*)

In other news - I'm still going with the executive decision of more than one system. Although it is possible for this to take place in one system - I think it unlikely due to the plethora of terraformable planets. Can we just go with that for the purposes of this conversation?

-Zeke

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 7:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
If we can come up with some specific questions - I can direct them to my friend who's a graduate student in Physics. She's specializing in the study of black holes - I imagine that can relate to what we're talking about in terms of space-time and gravity and such.

There aren't really any questions here. I lost interest in that discussion a long time ago, after that it was just funny.

But the important issue is this:

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
she's hot too - many why did I let that one slip through my fingers... *doh*

Really? Tell your friend to come to this board. Female physicists are extremely rare.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
In other news - I'm still going with the executive decision of more than one system. Although it is possible for this to take place in one system - I think it unlikely due to the plethora of terraformable planets. Can we just go with that for the purposes of this conversation?

You're the boss. What do you want to know?

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:05 PM

It is time that this stop, but I was looking forward to what he was going to say about the book.

I was wondering if he was going to say that I psychically came up with the fact that the first equation is on the second page of text, and that equation is a differential, or if he thought that I simply made it up and was lucky to be correct. Or, and this is the big or, if he would admit that although he is too lazy to do a search on the Internet when I gave him all of the information that he needed to get it on the first hit, I was willing to go down to the library to familiarize myself with new information rather then hide from it and pretend that it wasn’t real like he did.

Oh well, guess I’ll never know. Should probably return it to the library now (it's not really worth the read from what I can tell.)

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:20 PM

I think the one system idea is better if we want to avoid mucking about with the whole FTL travel. But if you prefer multiple, I’ll go with it till we find out for sure one way or the other.

Back to the subject this started with. We have seen that the worlds in the core seem to have water a plenty, but those father out have a western atmosphere (not actual air, just the feel). This could easily be explained if the teraforming creates worlds like this and it requires further teraforming to make it lush and sea like. We can assume that entire worlds are the western like stuff we’ve seen because as Trash shows on worlds where it’s not all that way people don’t live in those bits.

Also assuming that a material that creates gravity (in a way other than mass) were to be found (a graviton emitter perhaps if you follow the graviton theory) then artificial gravity and changing the gravity of moons would be no problem.

The problem is that if this were to be something that was simply laid down that causes of gravity (through mass, the normal way) of earth level (9.8m/s^2) then if it were say a meter below the deck of the ship, when you were up a meter you would be affected by only one fourth of earth gravity. Also a mass to do this would be 146,882,494,005 Kg. Not exactly what you want to tote around in your ship.

It would be likely that something that created gravity via a means other than mass would act like this 147 billion-kilo weight, and thus would weaken as such.

In fact this is a drastic simplification, but I think it shows the problems well.

Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)

ZEKE023

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 2:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Theign
Really? Tell your friend to come to this board. Female physicists are extremely rare.

I know... I know... the ironic thing about that whole situation was the fact that we had sparks - but I was dating someone else at the time. So things got to a point where I avoided her out of respect for my then current girlfriend - who is the bitch who ended up cheating on me with three people! Irony.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Back to the subject this started with.
Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)

My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?

I hate to drive this question into the ground - but beacons? Did I make this up? Can anyone speak to the validity of this?

-Zeke

THEGN

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 3:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
I know... I know... the ironic thing about that whole situation was the fact that we had sparks - but I was dating someone else at the time. So things got to a point where I avoided her out of respect for my then current girlfriend - who is the bitch who ended up cheating on me with three people! Irony.

Yeah, dude. I've been there.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
I hate to drive this question into the ground - but beacons? Did I make this up? Can anyone speak to the validity of this?

I think I heard someone mention beacons too. A beacon is generally something used for guidance, not necessarily transmission. Usually a beacon would be a device that emits a regular pulse or stream which one might use to recalibrate their coordinates, but there's also no reason why regularly placed beacons might not also contain something like loading coils that might be used to boost a signal. This would relate to what we saw in Out of Gas.

-----------
In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 4:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?
-Zeke

No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.

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