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Comment by Jerrrrrrry | Hacker News Reader

  "My breath froze into pink pretzels."

The temperature in the synthetic atmosphere wasn't precisely enough to prevent the character's exothermic respiration from condensing, inconveniently.

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It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.

But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?

The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.

Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.

I never understood why the spaceplane had an atmosphere with helium in it, though. Either Crichton messed up or got confused about the mixing issues there (as well as the massive logistics problems, the plane was huge).

The spaceplane had an completely imcompressible hull, no synthetic atmosphere was required - in fact, serendipitulously an overkill herring, was the perfect atmosphere for humans.

It was the underwater habitat that had the possibility of extreme temperature gradient fluctuations.

It was at standard pressure (sea level ish)? And the nitrogen's fine for coming and going to the habitat as you wish (without the bends) because the pressure's so much lower? What about the oxygen toxicity from breathing normal air? Is that also fine because of the low relative pressure of the oxygen containing gas?

I'll have to revisit the chapter but I believe there was a few pages about the door, and a large hiss.

I assume the spacecraft detected and matched the artificial habitats - that's what I had meant, not surface atmosphere.

The atmosphere in the habitat is specified to be 33 atmospheres, mostly helium and oxygen.

The characters need to use "talkers" because their voices would be too high pitched to be understandable otherwise.

I think the author either forgot about the talkers when the characters were in the plane, or left them out. How he describes a voice "echoing" in the 96+ percent helium of the plane does not really make sense. Also, why does the plane have enough helium and oxygen gas to pressurize up to 33 atmospheres? Helium leaks like hell, right? It lasted that long? And it can't really have switched from something else, based on how the "wacky events" are claimed to happen in the book. If the ship has an AI, it's probably just standard control loops attached to an expert system (based on Crichton's other books, is that a fair assumption?), I doubt it would detect people outside and then adapt.

Wouldn't it get crushed before it had the opportunity to be pressurized in the first place? I doubt the mission planners knew it would jump into water, but I guess it was in shallower water and then sunk/the seabed collapsed or something?

If that's the explanation, it must have been pressurized according to an algorithm the entire time, not based on the habitat. The habitat was never connected to the plane before the characters went in, they walked over in suits.

I can't really see how something like that would last that long. Current soft plastics don't, and I don't really think that's solvable with incremental improvement, but incremental improvement is what's shown in the book.

Sure, you can add antioxidants to polymers, but that competes with dyes/carbon black for UV resistance, and flame retardants, for the filler percentage. Too high a filler percentage and the mechanical properties go in the trash, you can quite commonly see this with plastic parts that attach to circuit boards, they're really brittle. With soft plastics, you usually need plasticizers too, and those leach out/degrade over time, and I have no idea how to to fix that.

I'm thinking a fluoroelastomer with antioxidant/carbon black/some flame retardant as fillers, but fluoroelastomers don't have very good mechanical properties in the first place. I think that's really pushing it.

Sphere was so unnverving and good of a read that any plot holes, scientific inaccuracy, or iota of poor writing was somehow Jerry's affect on the narrator itself.

As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:

Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)

(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)

Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".

Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".

This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.

I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.

So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.

I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.

I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)

Don't forget the the, uh, pink widows? _Rosencrantz_ ("they're pinkish and make you dead, like him and Gildunstern"). Venemous ambush predators, low density (mostly made of this aeogel with hydrogen bladders). About an inch across and 8 inches long, like pink hovering snakes. They float, hiding in the exhalation contrails, waiting for prey to blunder into them.

mosquito eels with diseases

Sounds like something Peter Watts might have invented. I like it, sort of; almost plausible, barely survivable, and deeply unpleasant.

I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine

Confirmed by promo video footage

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