I can’t wait. My eyes are getting very weary of the 2-3 year old prescription in the ones I found in a drawer.
Just got the advance jacket proof on Protector, btw, and it’s good!
The glasses are here: they must have lit a fire under the lab…
by CJ | Jan 12, 2013 | Journal | 24 comments
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Life is so much better when you can see properly. That’s good news.
I remember hearing a commentator “of that certain age” once saying she preferred to go without her glasses–not out of vanity, but because her friends suddenly acquired lines and wrinkles which she preferred not to know about. 😉
Got to thinking about how many minutes it takes for radio communication to get from here to say, Mars, and how odd and tricky carrying on a conversation would be with the minutes of time lag in between each person speaking. (especially with someone with ADHLAS*, like me. . ) Waiting for the next Foreigner novel is kind of like that, only like there’s about a year of time lag, which makes a “conversation” a pretty unwieldy idea. (Maybe you’d keep a daily video journal and send a year’s worth of it in one big data burst, and wait for the data burst from the person you’re talking to, to find out what they’ve been up to during the past year.) (story idea there?) I’m waiting for the latest data burst from Bren (Protector) to get here, and waiting and waiting. . . .
*Attention Defici. . Hey, Look! A Squirrel!
It’s about 12 minutes, lightspeed, I think. Writing the space battles in Downbelow Station was interesting, because you had to remember which ships were in which temporal packet, and who could talk to whom; plus the action of the longscan guys who are one part radar operator, one part espionage department, and 8 parts prophet. You get a real feeling for how vector and speed might operate to distort ‘reality’ if you get into trying to figure this out, and you can even see why, from your viewpoint, an approaching packet at a v that amounts to violation of lightspeed in realspace, sort of flattens out to smear across your horizon. Can you fire into it? Yep. But you better brake, then, real soon. Did they do the same? That’s what your longscan operators are supposed to feed you…
Trust the guy with ASD to get pedantic about it. 😉 But a laminated card I’ve had in my wallets, in spite of armed robbery, since college has a 1963/4 calender on one side and solar system parameters on the reverse. And presuming concentric circles, the time lag for Earth-Mars communication depends on whether they are, for example, nearest or farthest from each other in their orbits. Here are the numbers:
———km—–sec—-min
Earth 124.5E6 0498.33 08.31
Mars- 227.8E6 0759.33 12.66
Sum– 377.3E6 1257.67 20.96
Diff- 078.3E6 0261.00 04.35
(I hope that lines up somewhat closely in your font. That’s the best I can do.)
So CJ is right, Mars is 12 light minutes from the Sun, but the lag time could be anything from 4:20 to 21 minutes from Earth to Mars.
That’s one thing most video science fiction gets wrong in favor of moving along the story. Even better shows are guilty. Offhand, maybe the most realistic treatment of the time lag was in Outland or the Alien movies. I understand why movies and TV do this, but at some point, the storytelling needs to hinge on how it would really be. As a reader and viewer, I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring or forgetting the com delay.
BCS, let’s not forget how well Kubrick handled the communications lag in “2001:A Space Odyssey”. Everything they sent back to Earth for confirmation, evaluation, etc., required a significant wait for a response. Note they referred to each message from Discovery by a number and/or a time received notation.
I’m amazed at how quickly sound travels in a vacuum. Such as in “Star Wars”, when the Death Star explodes, the camera view is at least several hundred miles away. Yet, when the thing blows up, you hear the sound instantaneously. And all these years, I thought that sound did not travel in a vacuum. Maybe there’s a special means of transporting sound through a vacuum. Maybe, since the story occurs long ago, space was more dense than it is today, and the hydrogen molecules were closer together and could carry sound.
CJ, is the prevailing theory for lightspeed scans proposing that it gives a “tunnel vision” to the scan? It would seem that as objects got closer, the speed at which they move out of the field of vision increases, and only the objects directly ahead of the scan are clearly visible (well, not necessarily as clear as normal vision) as a blue shift?
“It would seem that as objects got closer, the speed at which they move out of the field of vision increases, and only the objects directly ahead of the scan are clearly visible (well, not necessarily as clear as normal vision) as a blue shift?”
You can also view it as flattening or spreading, since your ‘vision’ is now concentated on what is becoming your only horizon.
I’ve seen on “science shows” what it would look like if one travelled down a road with telephone poles along the side at very near “C”. (There must be something like that somewhere on the web!) It gets very strange indeed! For one thing, the telephone poles appear to bend over!
I *think* that might’ve been on the episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos where he talks about Einstein as a young man, who theorized about red/blue shifts while riding his bike. It seems like there was footage of poles and comparison with a train.
(Most people think of “regular stuff” when bike riding. Einstein thought of lightspeed and perception shifting because he was extraordinary and it was on his mind. Must’ve been some bike ride.)
Sound is transmitted in vacuum? That’s news to me! How? 😉
Our friendly galactic E.T.&T.?
(Yeah, really bad pun, Mea culpa.)
That’s so bad it’s even funny. 🙂
I always accepted noisy explosions in space as allowed by dramatic necessity. Until I watched the Firefly episode “Bushwhacked”, where a ship is blown up in utter silence.
Note to SF film directors: The noise is not only bad science, but actually detracts from the dramatic impact.
Off-Topic:
I now have Fontographer via download, and I’m awaiting physical shipment of the backup CD and a couple of books. Meanwhile, it looks like I’ll have a few ebooks (manuals) to read through.
(And yes, about 2001 and 2010. Kubrick was supposed to have worked closely with Arthur C. Clarke to get the science right.)
CJ that throw away comment about the new cover art is such a tease. Cos you’re not set up for pictures on here we need to wait until it goes on book sites in coming soon books to see it. Once you approve the cover art will you share? I’m sure I am not the only one on here that hopes so.
I need to go in and get my eyes recalibrated. The screen is getting hard to read…
It’s still what they call a rough, so in the case the artist has a few more touches he wants to add, I won’t post it—yet. But I think you’ll like it.
Thank you I am looking forward to seeing the book that will be on the bookshelff at home soon. After we both read it of course. Had to get the kitteh’s foot off the keyboard before posting this and edit out the keys pressed by his foot.
Its a good thing that Bren is a Pro – tector. Imagine if he was an Amateurtector?
Sorry.
*facepalm*
Ow!
If he were a Contrector, would that mean he’s Harry Mudd or Cyrano Jones? …I think I just strained something…