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| Warp drives, Soviet Moon water & hidden Kirby | Sep 19, 2012 8:50 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I saw a funny article today about a warp drive being more feasible than initially thought--the point the article doesn't really make is that more feasible than impossibly unfeasible is still pretty much impossibly unfeasible! The "warp drive" in question is the physics concept for what would be in effect faster-than-light travel made by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994; the Alcubierre drive is, in principle, a ring of "exotic matter" around a space ship, of such energy/mass that it compresses space/time in the desired direction of travel, and expands it behind--and this would supposedly allow the ship to move much faster than normal, relative to the unwarped idea of space--up to 10 times the speed of light.
Well that's a fun concept to think about, maybe, and supposedly fits some mathematical models of physics and so forth--we do know that mass/energy can stretch spacetime; or at least, Einstein's equations say it can, and various things like the measured apparent expansion of the universe, measurements of time dilation due to velocity and gravity (time slows down for those moving faster, or closer to a larger mass), and so forth, seem to back the notion up--but there is no actual way to construct such a "drive."
That first article, for instance, was saying that a breakthrough idea has been made for the concept: by altering the shape of the warping ring, instead of requiring the equivalent of all the energy in a mass the size of Jupiter to warp space, the thing would only require an energy equivalent of a mass the size of the Voyager 1 probe. And gosh, that's just a tiny thing!
But the energy even in a tiny thing is vast, as Einstein and nuclear bombs have taught us--and nukes are even relatively inefficient in terms of matter to energy conversion, as opposed to something like the pure conversion of a matter/antimatter collision, which is something like 1000 times more efficient. So let's do some E=mc^2 on this Voyager 1 mass and see just how much energy that is:
Voyager 1 is 721.9 kg--that's our mass, "m." Now we multiply that by the square of the speed of light ("c") in meters per second: 300,000,000 squared is 90,000,000,000,000,000, times our mass 721.9, gives us 64,971,000,000,000,000,000, and the unit for that is Joules. So all the energy they say we need now to power this "warp drive" is about 65 quintillion Joules.
That sounds like a lot of energy. Is it? Oh yes. It's about 16 gigatons of TNT--ie, the equivalent of the combined explosive force of 16 billion tons of TNT; that's over three times the combined destructive power of all the world's nuclear arsenals (which clock in at about 5 gigatons altogether).
So that would be a tough amount of energy for puny humans to come up with. But that's the most feasible part of the idea, really.
Don't forget that the ring has to be composed of exotic matter, which is a fancy way of saying that it has to be made of extremely powerful magical stuff that we don't really understand or are even sure exists. The closest we come to knowing about something that would qualify as "exotic matter," maybe, is theoretical, unconfirmed quark-gluon plasma that may be generated in trace amounts in the 4 trillion degree C quantum conditions seen for split seconds at the center of particle collisions in really powerful particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Good luck coming up with enough of that stuff for a ring big enough to surround a spacecraft--much less being able to hold it together, or keep it from spontaneously decaying, for that matter. Or zapping it with 65 quintillion Joules. Or having a spacecraft survive in the middle of all of that. Or of somehow causing that to warp space-time in the direction you want.
But those kinds of petty considerations needn't bother theoretical physicists much, thank goodness!
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I saw something about a US scientific group making a deal with China to get some experiment time with the robotic lander that China plans to land on the Moon next year as part of their Chang'e 3 mission. They already got an unmanned orbiter around the Moon a few years ago; if they can get this robot on the Moon, it'll be the first "soft landing" on the Moon in 37 years, since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 touched down there in 1976.
A "soft landing" means not a crash--we've crashed loads of things into the Moon for various experimental reasons, like the rocket piece smacked into the poor Moon a few years ago to kick up lunar dust for studying how much water ice was in it. In an interesting coincidence, one of the experiments conducted by the Luna 24 probe in '76 returned data that Soviet scientists used, two years later, to conclude that the lunar soil they studied was 0.1% water by weight--the first real measurement of water on the Moon, but it was ignored and forgotten somehow; today, measuring water on the Moon, as something that would considerably enhance the feasibility of a manned lunar base, is a pretty hot topic!
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Thanks to Checkpoint Interviews for posting a notice about A*'s new-ish subscriptions and e-books! I was interviewed by them before, and they've also got interviews with other comics folk--most way better known than me!
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Brian Bendis, who as far as I can tell writes at least half of Marvel Comics these days :P, is pretty active on tumblr, and I piggy-backed on a post of his of some Jack Kirby pencil art from Fantastic Four #49 (the classic series, you have to say in these latter days of reboots argh), to compare it against the same artwork once it had been inked and colored by the rest of the team of artists working on FF at the time. That combined photo post is here on my Tumblr, and I did it because I wanted to show just how little we really got to see of Kirby's art, which was far more subtle and refined than the inked pages we see ever showed. Because if you look at that post you'll see in his pencil work that he had all kinds of intricate, subtle variation of tone--the rocky faces on the back of the Thing's carapace, for instance, fade beautifully through a range of grays as they curve away from the light source, and the folds of the Watcher's cloak are rendered in a delicate selection of cross-hatched gray patterning, not to mention the delicate feathering of reflected lines on Galactus' armored body. Yet all of that marvelous detail was completely obliterated under the care of the inker--in this case Joe Sinnott, but they all did this--all of Kirby's tones, feathering, crosshatching and so forth were simply turned to flat black.
Even the fairly isolated, incredibly hard-working Kirby must have caught at least glimpses of the finished Marvel products from time to time, so I'm sure he knew of the massacre that was being inflicted on his art; and pencils I've seen from later in his career have seemed to streamline most of that detail, so perhaps he got used to it and stopped bothering to do the lovely touches that would always be totally blacked out by the inkers. But it makes me wonder what he thought of it, and why it was done, and what his art might have looked like under the hands of an inker who was actually interested in capturing the true range of his pencil work; Kirby's mystique was such that, at least today, all the inking talk I've seen about him is obsessed with this idea of his art's "power"--this was based at least in part on low-quality copies of his pencils that did not preserve the intricacies--and nobody even thinks about inking him with anything more refined than the inking equivalent of a sledgehammer. Sheesh.
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Speaking of inking with sledgehammers, today's page was an interesting one for me because I ended up more or less re-drawing it piece by piece. I knew it was a scene of Selenis rushing down a hall, and my sort of default take on this was, apparently, to put her in the typical cartoonish, super-actiony running stance drilled into my impressionable youth by Marvel comics; you know the one: arms cranked up and down in opposite directions, body leaning almost horizontally forward, one knee cocked up almost as high as the chest, with its foot bent all the way back up under the hindquarters, the other leg shooting straight out behind and down into the floor, foot fully extended, knee not bent at all, exaggerated foreshortening everywhere, and so on.
It came out all right as far as those things go, but it was bothering me, and as I started to fiddle with parts here and there, it eventually dawned on me that the problem I was having with it was that nobody actually runs that way--or could run that way. Not even in the relatively low gravity of Nena's moon! So I started re-drawing the sections of the body that seemed the most egregious violators of kinetics, and eventually I had redone all of them. In comparison to The Marvel Run, a more realistic running position looks almost like at most a fast walk--especially here, where the gradual straightening up of the body resulted in the legs eventually trailing off the bottom of the page, so I couldn't get in one of those typical "this is a run" tricks of like making both feet slightly off the ground--which is somewhat unrealistic in its own way. But all in all I think it's a better way to go for A*, and hopefully I'll get used to it and start to do it right from the initial sketch so things fit on the page and flow a little better. :P Anyway I find it kind of funny that now my main concern with an action scene is controlling it enough to make it actually believable--and that the one that's given me the most tricky time in that respect in recent memory has been something as seemingly commonplace as a running pose...but I suppose I really haven't had one of those come along in quite some time, now that I think about it.
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