Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

  Another piece was a science-fiction story about exploring an undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica. It imagines the Nimrod’s party making their way into the strange land of Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers.

A few years earlier, the German science-fiction author Kurd Lasswitz published the novel "Two Planets", about a Martian colony at the North Pole. It would influence a young Werner von Braun, who would later guide the US space program, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571588

More recently, J. Michael Straczynski, creator of "Babylon 5", participated in the writers room for the 2021 movie "Godzilla vs Kong",

> Apex CEO Walter Simmons recruits former Monarch scientist and Hollow Earth theorist Nathan Lind to guide a search for a power source into the Hollow Earth, the Titans' homeworld. Lind is hesitant as his brother died in an expedition to the Hollow Earth due to a strong reverse-gravitational effect. He agrees when Walter reveals that Apex has developed HEAVs, specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field. Lind convinces Andrews to let Kong guide them via an outpost in Antarctica. Lind, Andrews, and an Apex team led by Walter's daughter Maia board a barge escorted by the US Navy, carrying a sedated and restrained Kong.

"specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field"

I've been noticing an uptick in this in the past few years, where a "gravity field" is treated as just another scifi technobabble word that the authors don't understand at all. Which is weird, because gravity is a plain English word, not particularly hoity-toity or "fancy", so it is really becoming another touchstone to me of bad writing.

"Oh no! We're experiencing high amounts of gravitometric interference!"

You mean you're currently pinned to the floor because you now weigh thousands of pounds and you're struggling to draw breath, if not simply turned to jelly by all the forces?

"No, I mean our screens are flickering on and off and there's some flashy sparks shooting out of the walls! We're totally fine, though. It's just our mission at stake!"

My dear sir, are you sure you don't perhaps have electromagnetic interference there? Can I interest you in perhaps some technobabble word with no real world referent, like "high degree of subspace inelasticity" or "the ansible field is experiencing a random stellar burst" or "the baryons are inebriated again"?

"Oh no! It's definitely a gravity field! Says so right here in the script."

Well, then, scrape your fellow adventure's jellified remains off of the floor and carry on, I guess.

I just assume they've discovered some things we don't know yet. I mean, they usually have gravity-creating and gravity-neutralizing devices, so they must have learned some stuff about it that we don't know. Maybe we haven't even figured out how to "see" the sort of field they're talking about. How would it, perhaps, interact with equipment that may include gravity-manipulating components for all sorts of purposes?

> electromagnetic interference

"Electromagnetic? LOL. You mean you're being struck by lightning? Or some little bits of rock are doing kinda funny things? Because that's what electricity and magnetism are, and only those things, and they're separate."

My friend, if you've studied the literature you'd know that gravimetric interference affects the structural integrity of the ship's hull by warping spacetime and thereby applying sheering forces that can only be sufficiently mitigated by activating external shielding. If you encounter a Class Y phenomenon without being fully prepared, it could definitely cause enough lateral sheering force to damage equipment and even cause coupling relays to come out of alignment and emit sparks.

If you haven’t read it, you may enjoy Red Shirts a book about the lives of extras from sci fi shows.

https://www.amazon.com/Redshirts-John-Scalzi-audiobook/dp/B0...

Thanks for the recommendation. I will check it out.

The audio book is narrated by Wil Wheaton!

Wait until they discover quantum gravity!

A transformative hermeneutic approach would transgress the boundaries!

Sailing on the SS Sokal...

What you're describing is someone who is unable to prevent change in the gravity 'field'. It seems ridiculous because we are unable to do so, but imagine a hypothetical case where we had not figured out how electric fields propagate or are attenuated and then imagine a equally hypothetical jerf scoffing at the wildly implausible idea of not being saturated by radio waves in an energetic field.

For a realistic scifi usage of gravity as dramatic plot device, see Starquake by Robert L. Forward[0]

https://mdpub.github.io/cheela

That's one of the better "username checks out" that I've seen.

That is certainly an author who knew what was what with gravity fields.

A few days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583437 ) I ran across technobabble from ~2'400 years ago.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... et.seq.

> Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,—one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births.

It's generated a lot of commentary over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_number

but Plato's Socrates even explicitly lampshaded the technobabble a few paras beforehand:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

> ...say that these goddesses playing with us and teasing us as if we were children address us in lofty, mock-serious tragic style?

So I doubt it had ever been intended to denote: merely to connote.

But isn't there a net zero gravitational force within a spherical shell?

Calculus? In my science fiction? Who would’ve thought.

Well then a craft should be able to withstand it, they're not wrong.

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