Sierra Foxtrot 6

SF thoughts.

• Turns out I was apparently overestimating the collective mass of the human species. Our average mass, including children, is 50 kilograms. Since a hefty proportion of our population is not full-grown, we actually mass more like 350 billion kilos. The Earth, for comparison, masses 6 septillion kilos. (Or, humanity as a whole masses 350 teragrams, but the Earth masses 6 yottagrams...meaning the Earth is 17,142,857,100 times the mass of all of humanity.)
  
  Remember that next time a Watermelon Green waxes overwrought about this "tiny" planet. Also, the mass of the Earth's atmosphere is 5 quintillion kilos, i.e. 5 zettagrams. That's relevant not only to discussions of climate, but also (and in my estimation more importantly) to discussions of whether terraforming by any society that we'd recognize as ours (and still recognize as such when it finishes) is good science fiction or rank nonsense.
• There are two shows on Syfy right now that involve space-travel—I know, I'm scared too. One, Killjoys, is fair-to-middlin'; the other, Dark Matter, is (so far) genuinely good.
  
  Killjoys' problem is its bad worldbuilding, basically. You wouldn't be mining in person in that kind of setting, certainly not for yttrium—yttrium being one of those metals it's a lot easier to get from asteroids, when you have the option, and putting boots on an asteroid is a waste of money. Likewise you wouldn't be harvesting crops with migrant farm-workers, certainly not outdoors (indoor farming is a lot more efficient, both in terms of land-use and in terms of crop yield—you grow the crops under magenta light).
  
  We haven't seen as much of Dark Matter's worldbuilding, but that's a good thing: they reveal their setting gradually, and the characters' amnesia justifies their being as in-the-dark as we are. Dark Matter also has a much more likable cast of characters and a more livable setting, since, unlike Killjoys, it's not composed entirely of bad dystopia clichés (piled up without regard for whether they make a lick of sense).
• I wonder if people are going to think that the fact zledo call the space-fold drive "the light-speed bridge" is a Transformers reference, i.e. to the space-bridges. It's not; I had been only very casually a fan of Transformers when I decided that's what they call it (if "those are kinda cool but I can name exactly three of them" counts as even "very casual" fandom).
  
  No, actually, zledo calling their FTL "light-speed bridge" is a reference to Hilaire Belloc's essay "On Bridges". Specifically, to this part:

  A bridge is a violation of the will of nature and a challenge. "You desired me not to cross," says man to the River God, "but I will." And he does so: not easily. The god had never objected to him that he should swim and wet himself. Nay, when he was swimming the god could drown him at will, but to bridge the stream, nay, to insult it, to leap over it, that was man all over; in a way he knows ... that all that he dreads is his inferior, for only that which he reveres and loves can properly claim his allegiance. Nor does he in the long run pay that allegiance save to holiness, or in a lesser way to valour and to worth.

  In the same way, the zledo regard their FTL drives as "a violation of the will of nature and a challenge", except that they don't have the concept of "nature" in our sense of "happens on its own". But they do regard the FTL tech as a defiance of mere brute creation, something proper to man.
• Another show that's out this season is Humans, or rather HUM∀NS (which I prefer to pronounce "Hum-for-all-n̩s"). It's kinda...not good. Actually it's terrible. The thing is a bunch of paint-by-numbers Transhumanist clichés, and none of the characters except William Hurt's (because he's never bad no matter what he's in) is worth a damn. Neither of the parents of the main family seems to mind, or even think it notable, that their kids will not so much as get up to answer a phone; later, when the dad leaves the room so his wife can talk to their daughter, the wife leaves too!
  
  And, seriously, you can't just skim the Wikipedia article on Transhumanism, throw the appropriate buzzwords into your dialogue, and call it a day. Give us an actually original take on the idea of AI, or don't waste the money on a show about it. Of course, this show doesn't actually waste any money on anything, because it is set, in all regards, in the contemporary UK. It's apparently set in 2046, i.e. 31 years in the future, but all their material culture looks just like that now. Because nothing will change in 31 years—everything we have now looks exactly as it did in 1984, right?
  
  Also, come on, 2046? You think we'll have androids that can pass for humans in good light by then, or anyone actually wanting to use them for anything except a novelty? We might just maybe kinda sorta have some specialized applications of robots in some very few things; we might make much more use of automation in countries where the demographic collapse has been particularly harsh. But nobody who understands the problems with the TinmanTypist trope should expect much of that to involve androids, and nobody who plays many video games should be particularly sanguine about the reliability of any androids we do use. (I'll leave to one side the absurdity of anyone making self-aware androids—ever, let alone in 31 years.)
• Supposedly, a tiger can hear a human heartbeat from twenty to thirty meters away. Now, if tigers' ears are as much better than human ears as cats' ears are—five times as good—then that's probably not right, given you can't hear a heartbeat from four to six meters away, but there is more to the story than brute acuity. Cats, and tigers, being solitary predators, are much better at picking certain sounds out from ambient noise.
  
  Another thing they can do is pinpoint a sound to within five degrees, which comes to eight centimeters a meter off—and 2.19 meters, at the aforementioned twenty-five meters (on average) that they can hear your heartbeat from. So, basically, though a tiger can't find you by scent (there's a saying somewhere in Southeast Asia, I forget where specifically, "If the tiger had to find food by his nose, he would starve"), it can find you very quickly by its ears.
• One of the anime out this season, Classroom Crisis, about a voc-tech high school owned by a rocket company (on Mars) that's getting restructured by its parent corporation, was all right for the first two episodes, but then it filled me with rage. You ever hear of the "leftist sucker-punch", where something ideological sneaks into a work that's mostly irrelevant to politics? (The sucker-punch is also found in right-wingers—*cough*Terry Goodkind*cough*—but it was named by a conservative, I think John Nolte.)
  
  Well this show had an "idiot sucker punch". The accountant working for the corporate-shark type who's restructuring them gives their factory to the space-car division, then tells them they have to use the garage where their type of rocket was invented—which has been a museum for the last several decades—instead. And they sit there and take it!
  
  No, sorry. What would really happen would be the rocket-engineer/teacher would turn to her and say, "I'm sorry, what level math did your degree require again? Do you understand that none of this equipment has been used in decades, and to re-attach the utilities, and then run diagnostics, repairs, and replacements on the equipment—to say nothing of the lost time becoming familiar with decades-outdated equipment and the software it runs on—will cost as much as our old facility? To say nothing of whether you can even use this garbage to make contemporary rockets."
  
  It's basically this Dilbert strip. The reason I call it an "idiot sucker punch" is, it's obviously driven by consideration of "what will advance the plot", rather than "what makes sense" or "what is not an expression of open contempt for our audience". That's just as bad of work as that produced by inserting ideology, although it's probably less morally reprehensible.
• The thing (well, one of the things) people forget when they generalize from chimps and bonobos to humans, is that our last common ancestor with that genus (Pan) lived 5 million years ago.
  
  5 million years ago, there weren't any mammoths or mastodons. Yet. I.e., entire lineages of elephant came into being and went extinct in the time separating Homo from Pan.
• A 12-gauge cartridge is 20 millimeters in diameter. A 12-gauge slug, of course, is 18.53 millimeters in diameter—the diameter of a sphere of pure lead that will mass 1/12 of a pound—but, for purposes of military SF, the diameter of the cartridge is more useful (not least since it's a nice round number). So, the upshot? In my setting, 12-gauge is called "20 millimeter". I think the shotgun shells won't be caseless, but made of a material that is entirely burned up and expelled when the round is fired, something like the paper cartridges you'd see in the early 19th century.
  
  It's apparently quite common to use 2.75-inch-long rounds in military shotguns; that seems to be, for instance, what the QBS-09 semi-automatic shotgun uses, as do the US's military-issue Benelli M4s, Mossberg 590A1s, and Remingtom 870s. I don't know that you'd need quite that much room, given you need 42% as much octanitrocubane propellant to get the same performance you get from nitrocellulose propellant, but the biggest factor in how much space a 12-gauge round requires is the nine pellets of 00 buckshot. Packing the pellets as closely as possible—in triangles, not seven-sphere hexagons—apparently means a height of 22.5 millimeters, or just under one inch. The higher-powered loads of 12-gauge 00-buck seem to use about 2.46 grams of (nitrocellulose) powder, which is 1.03 grams of ONC; given ONC's optimal density of 2.06 grams per cubic centimeter, you're looking at exactly 500 cubic millimeters, which, at a diameter of 20 millimeters, is a disc 1.59 millimeters thick. If the pellets simply sit on top of the ONC "powder", you wind up with a shot-shell with a minimum length of 24.09 millimeters. Assume another, say, 14 millimeters, of wad, to bring the whole thing to an inch and a half long—38.1 millimeters.
  
  The QBS-09 has a magazine with a capacity of five rounds of 2.75-inch; the Benelli M4 and Remington 870 go up to seven rounds, while the Mossberg 590 can do eight. That is to say, the QBS-09 has an effective magazine capacity of 34.925 centimeters, the Benelli M4 and Remington 870 both have an effective capacity of 48.895 centimeters, and the Mossberg 590 has a capacity of 55.88 cm. If the rounds for those shotguns were only 3.81 centimeters long, then the QBS-09 could hold nine rounds, the Benelli and Remington could hold twelve, and the Mossberg could hold fourteen.