Grrl Power #416 – Meta analysis
It bothers me in science fiction when someone analyzes an object and says “It contains no known elements.” It sounds exotic, but that’s just not how chemistry works. The periodic table is pretty much set. There are probably a few elements left to discover at the extremes, but all the ones we’ve recently found in particle colliders with atomic masses nearing the 300’s are hilariously radioactive and only exist for nanoseconds. No one is making a spear tip or a phaser or body armor out of them. I’m not saying we’re done with chemistry, just that the elements are pretty nearly sorted at this point.
You could learn a lot about something by studying the egg it came out of, but if you’d never seen a bird before, could you tell what color feathers it had, or even what a feather was? Maybe if there was some sort of DNA left in the egg, but it’d be a lot of work.
Edit: Here’s a shot of Deus’s desk without all the word clutter.
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I generally agree about the irritation with “no known elements”, but having said that, there is a possibility in real life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability.
“Estimates about the amount of stability on the island are usually around a half-life of minutes or days, with some optimistic predictions expecting half-lives of millions of years.”
Those ‘stable’ isotopes are still going to be radioactive. At best they’ll be relatively stable.
Still not suitable for manufacturing
Half-lives of millions of years are plenty stable to manufacture things out of, unless the decay is particularly nasty. Of course, that is the optimistic prediction.
Plutonium has a half life of 80 million years. They still aren’t going to be building anything with it
And usually these super heavy elements decay into other, equally radioactive things
Yes, but…here’s the thing. Uranium 238 has a half-life in the billions of years. It’s radioactive, yes, but not very. Uranium 235 has a half-life in the low millions of years. It’s still not very radioactive, but the addition of just three neutrons makes U-238 something like 100,000% more stable than U-235. The longest half-life of a plutonium isotope (Pu 244) is 80.8 million years. The second longest (Pu-242) has a half-life of 373,000 years. The least stable forms have half-lives of less than a half-second. Now, I’m not a nuclear physicist, but it strikes me that there is a pretty huge difference between eighty million years and a half-second…so why couldn’t there be another, even more stable isotope out there? And, if we found such an isotope, are we completely sure that we’d recognize that we had done so?
Then we have things like depleted uranium, which is made from regular U-238, but somehow has something like 40% less radioactivity–enough to be pretty much completely safe as long as it isn’t applied directly to one’s internal organs (to give you an idea, there are more problems arising from the toxicity of uranium than the radioactivity). This comes from a known and understood isotope of uranium, mind you–but one of the chief characteristics of uranium has been very noticeably altered. Somehow, a simple manufacturing process has altered one of the chief characteristics of a known substance. If that characteristic were to be altered still farther…how would we identify uranium as uranium, if it were no longer radioactive? Aside from spectrographic imaging, or some other means of destructive testing? Wouldn’t it show up as an “unknown element?” Something missing some of the properties of what we know exists, but still having others?
Then you start to get into the question of just what properties the trans-uranic elements have. So far, we know the physical and chemical properties of only a few of those elements, partly because producing them has such an astronomical price tag, and partly because the half life of the known isotopes is short enough that we can’t really conduct systematic experiments. If an alien race were to create stable isotopes of those elements, and do so cheaply enough to be cost-effective, than how would we identify those elements with non-destructive testing?
Of course, all of this assumes that we don’t run into an element that appears to work according to principles we don’t yet understand. Photons apparently have the same mass as electrons–what if we discovered an atom made entirely of photons and neutrons? How in tarnation would you describe that to your commanding officer. “I’m sorry, sir, but this thing is impossible, and must be purged from the galaxy lest it contaminate us all?” Or would you say that it appears to contain “unknown elements?” Things you don’t really understand, and can’t classify, but that you have to describe somehow seems to me to be a much better response than declaring scientific blasphemy, and demanding the offending substance be purged with cleansing fire.
I can understand why “unknown elements” drives people absolutely wild, and it is generally used as a cop-out for a lot of stuff. For that matter, anything made entirely out of unknown elements would be something to be treated with enormous caution, if for no other reason than because you have no way of ensuring that it won’t go “BANG” unexpectedly (not to mention that whatever it is would almost certainly be expensive enough that whomever made it would likely want it back sooner or later). But the fact remains that there is still a LOT we don’t know about the universe, and only 30$ of all matter can be classified into one of the known elements. There’s still a lot of stuff we known nothing about out there, and it’s not beyond belief that something could show up that defies classification.
Natural uranium has 0.72% of U-235 by weight. U-238 makes up the majority of what remains in nature on earth. Give U-238 a neutron (U-239) and let it decay twice, and it becomes Pu-239. Pu-239 can be used in nuclear reactors, this is the concept behind breeder reactors. (You can also use U-233 produced in a thorium breeder reactor.)
Take natural uranium and enrich it, (raise the percentage of U-235), and you get an American nuclear reactor, or bomb material if you raise your percentage high enough.
Take natural uranium and de-enrich it, (Usually by removing the U-235 to make reactor or bomb fuel) and you get Depleted Uranium.
“How would we identify uranium as uranium?” Simple, with chemistry. It’s how we’ve identified most of our elements, and why they’re arranged in a periodic table of elements. All isotopes of an element react the same in a chemical experiment. It’s why heavy water is such a contamination issue. It can’t be chemically/physically separated from regular water at a standard city water treatment center.
Chemically, all isotopes are the same; because chemistry pretty much only relies on protons and electrons. Change the protons and you get a different element. Change the electrons and it reacts different with other elements. Some reactions act a little funny in a neutron flux, but if your unobtainium is stable, it’s not decaying, and thus not producing a neutron flux.
There is a table of isotopes, but it would cover most of your bedroom wall even if each isotope was the size of a scrabble tile.
I’m gonna need a source on that 30% thing. Do you mean the Discworld Auditors?
He’s probably referring to dark matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
I figured that might be the case, but wanted to be sure. Even the wiki page counters what he said, unless I’m missing a different method of breaking down the matter/darkmatter/energy/darkenergy ratios.
And no, I’m not a physicist either. But I am a nuclear engineer.
Which makes you a lot closer to a physicist than a lot of people.
Say, I noticed that your name changed since I last saw you comment. What’s with the sfy?
I actually am a physicist, but what we need is a chemist. However, Soranic is basically dead-on except for one thing: we do not identify elements with chemistry anymore. We use a mass spectrometer. Chemical tests showing radically different results from a mass spectrometer is indicative of an isotope, which as Soranic noted are many.
Unknown elements are still possible, as extensively discussed on the first page of comments.
Thank you. For the support and the correction.
We had a lab or two where we had to ID an isotope by measuring its emitted particles (energy and proportion) and it sucked. (Guy next to me had a good one, he just had to look at his sample to tell he had U235. After that he just had to backtrack.)
I can’t imagine using a spectrometer and getting results that don’t match any of my charts. Are we out of calibration? Is the program wrong? Is there contamination?
Depleted uranium has less radioactivity because most of the more radioactive U-235 has been removed, leaving behind a higher proportion of U-238. It’s less radioactive than natural uranium which contains a combination of isotopes, but it’s not less radioactive than pure U-238.
The correct response to such an heretic piece of matter is obviously an Inquisition ordained Exterminatus! Glory to the Omnisiah!
> Photons apparently have the same mass as electrons
I cringed hard. Do you even physics? Photons do not have mass. They have kinetic energy only. And if you amassed enough photons in one place, only ‘solid’ object you could produce would be black hole. By default anything made out of light would need to travel at the speed of light, which excludes having any mass, or it would need to have infinite mass (hence collapsing into black hole, instantly evaporating, and making an explosion that would wipe out universe).
That said, photons can carry kinetic energy way bigger than electrons. Extremely high energy photons in form of gamma rays from space carry as much energy as a solid punch to the face.
But mass energy equivalence makes photons act as though they have mass.
That’s why light can be trapped in a black hole; without mass they would be unaffected.
While there is some special interactions due to mass being a form of energy, that is not the reason they are sucked into black holes.
The technical reason they are sucked in, is based on general relativity, where gravity is a change in the space-time, which changes the dirrections of which way things go. This means that anything traveling through an area with gravity will be affected the same way (until we start accounting for that objects own gravity, and other more complicated phenomena), and in particular we have that light will also be affected in the same way. From a mathematical point of view, black holes and their event horizons are places where our normal look on how space works breaks down, which is why you can only go one way through it. It should be noted that there still are some very technical ways to deal with this, but as seen from the outside time will effectively stand still at the event horizon.
“Those ‘stable’ isotopes are still going to be radioactive. At best they’ll be relatively stable.
Still not suitable for manufacturing”
Perhaps not suitable for manufacturing, but definitely suitable for creating superpowers.
Er, I mean, that’s what I heard, from someone.
If they’re stable, they’re not going to decay. If they don’t decay, they’re not radioactive.
Some elements have multiple stable isotopes. If the stable isotope is the end result of a decay chain, it’s naturally occurring. If it can only be made in a particle accelerator, it’s not naturally occurring.
And yeah, even if stable, it might not be usable for manufacturing. Boiling point, freezing point, hardness, and especially chemical reactivity and price can all make it useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance
Last millenia, I had some college physics courses, and one of the labs we did this sort of thing. I reached a conclusion that if you can get this to work, you can *figure out* what the “no known substance” really is. Science, for the win.
There is a game called Improbable Island that you should google. Not because gameplay but because game backstory.
Used to play that game, was real fun, may have to find the time to play again :(
“Matter” has certainly not been sorted out. You have the whole issue of antimatter, for example, or dark matter. While it’s true that according to our understanding, an “unknown element” composed of antimatter would just be annihilated by existing in an environment of matter, and dark matter can’t be observed by any human senses, it’s not unreasonable for science fiction to suppose that you could create, say, a stable crystalline structure to house antimatter particles (as in Star Trek warp drives) or do something to dark matter to make regular (baryonic) matter able to interact with it, in which case we’d have a whole new periodic table to work out.
tl:dr “It contains no known elements” is not nearly as unreasonable sci-fi technobabble as you might think. There are certainly vastly less reasonable claims that sci-fi writers make, like going faster than light, and we accept that one without blinking.
I suspect that FTL is not nearly as impossible as physicists currently claim, if only because we already suspect (but cannot prove) the existence of at least two particles that are faster than light. If this is indeed the case, than there is a rather large hole in the theory of relativity, meaning that FTL travel is not only possible, but may even one day prove to be practical.
Of course, moving faster than light does raise its own problems, particularly if one wishes to avoid crashing into something else. Even simple navigation starts to pose enormous practical problems–I don’t even want to think about what would happen if we didn’t detect something and smacked into it.
Attended a lecture in college about FTL travel and possible ways to achieve it using principles of physics at the time. Option one was dropping into the event horizon of a black hole and somehow using the spin and the gravity of the black hole to temporarily adjust a cosmological constant, then restore it once you got where you wanted
I sort of got stuck at “dropping into the event horizon”. Information theory aside, I asked who was going to volunteer for this mission to test the prototype. The prof said with a straight face, “Well, obviously, there is an issue there. But we feel that once the technological issues are resolved, options other than people should be available.” :D
Well, then what’s the point? Humans want US to travel faster than light, so we can get places. Using AI only would mean that only robots could do it, which means that we’d still be stuck twiddling our thumbs at sub-light.
I think he meant “Get the monkeys to test it for us first”
Robots.
Seriously, once we’re flying to black holes, and able to get back *out* of an event horizon (possibly using the same cosmological constant?), robotics will have advanced.
Nah, by that time, the robots will have taken over and will be using humans as test subjects.
Pretty crappy test subject. Once current stocks are depleted, you’ll need to wait 15-20 years for a given subject to be useful for this sort of work. Plus their genetics are all over the place, what works on one genetic stock may be ineffectual on another genetic stock. You’ll have to spend generations breeding a line of humans that will allow for human experimentation with reproducible results.
maybe use robots to use that method, they then build a teleport chamber at their destination, and we can expand across the galaxy
Drop into the event horizon in order to travel faster than light? So, the black hole would have to be pretty close to Earth in order to be useful.
My understanding is that the current version of that uses a charged, rotating singularity, which doesn’t actually have an event horizon. But I may be several generations out of date.
Honestly, FTL nowadays is a lot less crazy seeming than it used to be. Things like the Alcubierre drive and the possible inertialess drive suggest that it might even be seen within our lifetime.
I’ve always preferred the sci-fi technique where “FTL” travel wasn’t really faster than light, but functioned more like the Tesseract from a Wrinkle in Time.
Rather than traveling through our space at a theoretically impossible velocity, they found it simpler to just shorten the distance, either via folding space (Robotech, Dune), or sub-space travel (Dragonball, Nightcrawler, Ramona Flowers), or travel through alternate dimensions where time and space have no meaning (Animorphs).
*psst* Check out “Alcubierre drive”…
So, the way I’m understanding this, it’s basically a theory that could lead to the Inertialess drive.
….or as in Futurama, instead of moving the ship, move the entire universe around the ship.
The Enterprise is in this category of “Subspace travel” users. The warp drive pulls a bubble of subspace around the ship and propels the ship in this shell, basically moving faster than realspace physics allows…
We, physicists, are claiming that actual FTL travel is impossible, yes, but we are working on several shortcuts. Several have been mentioned above, but I work on wormhole theory. We’d get pretty far pretty fast if we could find one to study.
From one physicists to another.
As far as I remember it, the main problem is going from the sublight speed region to the superlight speed region and back again. There might exist things in the superluminar region, but we have seen no evidence of such particles as far as I know, and their interactions with other particles would be very limmited. That said, it is a fairly unexplored area for good reason, and it is an area one might consider formulating theories for if we find suitable phenomena in the future that might warrant a description. The extra acceleration of the universe’s expansion is a phenomena one might imagine that there exists some theory linked with this region that can explain it (In other words, a explaination for dark energy), as matter that have moved beyond the visible universe could have slight attractive interaction with space-time, streaching it out, while acceleration would happen to be based on timing and positioning of such matter. Such a theory would then allow one to generate predictions on how the acceleration of expansion would happen in the future, so that it may be tested.
Concerning FTL drives, I personally prefer the idea of manipulating the spacetime to get faster from A to B than light would normally have been able to. This comes from the problem with light speed is linked to local space, but we can bypass this by not moving faster in local space, but instead make us move faster in non-local space by doing something to the space-time to make the local space not be exactly as the non-local space. Note that some of the drives proposed for this requires negative mass, which would be more plausable if there exists some polar opposite of the Higgs particle with reference to mass. Note that such particles would also be something that could be linked to dark energy, as generation of such particles in the central region of the universe would effectively push everything out.
Given that contraterrene matter is composed of subatomic particles of the same general variety as terrene matter, and that all of our experimentation indicates that, e.g. a positron behaves exactly like an electron except for the reversed charge and spin, it stands to reason that an antimatter world would possess the same periodic table as a matter world, just with charges/spins/etc. reversed. Chemically, it would behave the same. Ergo, no new periodic table.
I’m no chemist, but I believe chemical behavior could be radically different simply from spin. However, we would definitely need a new periodic table. It would just be exactly the same as the current one, but with “anti-” in front of all the element names.
I hear where your coming from, but please don’t bring ST’s Dilitium crystals into this discussion.
FYI: In Star Trek, “Dilithium” is the stuff that allows them to travel at warp speed. More specifically, it is described as a rainbow-colored crystal which exists slightly out of phase with our dimension. When energy is directed at the crystal, it is not absorbed, but reflected and amplified.
Combine this with a controlled matter-antimatter reaction, and you have near-infinite energy with an output that can push you into warp.
Theoretically, IF we could find something akin to dilitium, all of our energy problems would be solved. But, yeah…Sci-Fi. There is no Maguffinite on Earth.
Hmm well it is starting to become more apparent that its from space, but can’t think of what it might be then. It popped open for Max so its got to be sentient at some point, that or it wanted a host that meets specific criteria.
This geode seems to be a basic panspermian delivery system.
No mysterious object is complete without nano-sized particles of Handwavium.
Is that bending pipe thing in the upper left hand corner next to the filing cabinet an emergency chemical shower and eyewash station like your see in chem labs, or something else?
NSFW https://img.rarebdsm.com/galleries/charlotte/perfect_wife/pic/pic_6.jpg
And where would you get one of those? ;p
Or would you need to make one?
A quick search for “extreme bondage restraints” should work. It won’t be cheap though.
Good catch. I’d have never figured that out.
DaveB, you dirty man.
Good in Deus for being proud of the things he likes though
Makes you wonder whom it’s configured for? The obvious guess is Vale, so I guess I have to guess that it’s Vale… ;)
The twist would be if it was for Deus, but then it would probably have to be a bit beefier.
And then there’s the possibility that he just got it for the shock value…
If it’s for Deus, who would be the one to put him in there, and then take him out? o_O
And again the first guess would be Vale..
Also Deus.
He’s so awesome that he’s the only person that can dominate Deus. He’s also so nice the only person he could risk harming by accident is Deus. (Ok, it was really hard saying that with a straight face)
If you look at the base, the one in his office has adjustments so it can be made to fit whomever goes in it. Many things like that are either made to order, or self made. A little metal working experience and you can make your own (and lots of other toys for your own dungeon, or for other people who will pay for them). Most of the time, those types of toys are made of wood because it is easier to work with if you are not a pro builder.
Haha – that suddenly makes the orgy relief carving on the front of his desk look tame.
Thank you, thought it was something like that (mentioned it on the first page) but believed the arm bindings would have been too high
I think I am really starting to like Deus. I met the model in that photo at a convention where she was modeling for Geoff Gord. The man was the definition of diabolical engineer, though his pursuits were more oriented towards kinky fun rather than world domination. Sadly he passed away a year or two ago and will be missed :( If your interests tilt that way and you like your kinkiness to be more fun than hardcore (his stuff is hardcore, but the models always come out smiling and laughing, not crying), then google Gord or House of Gord.
Ohh myyy…
Definitely something else.
Is it like a Cat Tree or Cat Tower?
Catgirl Tree maybe…
That’s, a disturbingly appealing thought…
You couldn’t even really tell with a DNA analogue if you hadn’t seen it before. It’s more like a save file than a blueprint.
But, if it IS normal DNA, you could just stick it into a simple genome and see what happens, with human genome you get a semi-stable tisue.
Source? I am dubious of what results you can get from random genome combination. I’m sure you get something, I’d just be surprised if it develops into anything recognizable.
As I recall, this is a fairly standard method of figuring out genetic expression, using a simple genome we know well, starting with something like C. elegans, or D. melanogaster (both model animal genomes) and splicing them in between expressive traits. It won’t tell you everything right off, but it will give you clues of further combination capabilities so you would have a better idea where to put it into lab mice to get a useful expression that will tell you a lot more. But of course, you’d have to do this process with almost every viable genetic sequence and sequence set in the sample you are testing. That’s going to take a lot of time and financing to get any useful data when we are starting with such an unknown. Now, if we have some of the proteins, then we can better predict which sequences or sequence sets might actually work speeding things up quite a bit because we then can match that to the DNA triads necessary to assemble that protein. But if it’s been in space for a long time and gone through reentry, the heat and radiation have probably denatured the proteins such that we would then need to figure out their proper folding through years of brute forcing their mathematics, trying every possible fold.
No. I work in this area, and random DNA basically doesn’t work. (Genetic engineering would be so much easier if it did!) What’s more, since DNA effectively codes for proteins (strictly it codes for RNA which can be translated into proteins if you’ve done your stuff right) you’re left with a bunch of interacting chemical reactions. Even after you’ve solved the problem of what those proteins do by themselves, figuring out what they do together is astoundingly difficult. Extrapolate from the DNA sequence directly to the phenotype changes? At best we’re many decades away except in the very simplest cases (which is my group’s research area). It’s also hugely more difficult to do for mammalian cells than for bacteria; our cells have a lot of complex internal structure which matters a lot (allowing more complex chemistry and so far more things that can happen).
Sit back and enjoy the science fiction. It’s fun, but waaaay beyond what we can do…
Thank goddess! We’ve been needing a chemist in the “unknown elements” discussion, but we have a physicist and a nuclear engineer. A genetic engineer in the “symbiote” discussion? Perfect!
I invite you to comment on page 1, sir.
Ok, so he has just about everything… does he have the MacGuffin?
He has the Maltese Falcon, if that’s what you’re asking.
While he doesn’t yet have the MacGuffin. He is in ‘negotiations’ to get the MacGuyver.
Am I the only person who suspects that Deus’s comment about what could happen if the other fragment fell into the wrong hands is more than just random silliness?
Plus, I’d just like to repeat that Deus is shaping up to be one of my favorite comic characters, ever. He’s complex and difficult to predict and exists as a power that can be helpful, harmful, or something in between…even while he’s obviously very closely connected to Max emotionally. It wouldn’t strike me as an enormous surprise at this point if he’d been one of the driving forces behind the creation of ARCHON, and that strikes me as massively cool.
Honestly, the last time I saw a character I liked this much, it was Narses, from David Drake’s Belisaurius series.
He hasn’t existed long enough to say that he’s unpredictable. What are you on about? :v
Well, he is basically making the tech the Archon uses, or at least a good portion of it, so there is that.
Why not both? :P
Still ‘shipping them!
“Sydney is waiting in the elevators” is probably more like “Sydney was deliberately herded into the elevators in order to prevent her from screwing with everything in the lab and Deus’s office.”
“And then the power was cut to the elevator to keep her from getting off.”
And then there were chaos!
Wait until she finds out how to adjust the intensity of the PPO. The shield has an adjustable size, and given the utility of some of the orbs, it would make sense if (perhaps not yet unlocked) the PPO is adjustable. Sydney with an orbital-scale weapon that can be adjusted to a blowtorch–and anywhere in between–is really a lot more frightening than Sydney with JUST an orbital-scale weapon.
You couldn’t trap her in an elevator without using a forcefield at that point.
Also, I suspect she’d use it as a table knife.
I am in love with that desk. Want so bad…
Wonder why Max would even sit in front of that desk. Think he bought it from Larry Flint?
Right! I know people call it an orgy desk, but from the full photo they’re not having sex, it’s just a desk with naked women on it! I can’t see Max not calling him out for it or not thinking it’s a dick move.
One comment about today’s art style. Sometimes the colors come out as over-saturated and very contrasty. This may just be how a metal Max is correctly drawn, so I could be wrong.
I am not seeing any problems, or inconsistencies to previous pages.
That’s just the difference between DaveB’s and Keith’s coloring styles. I always notice the change even without reading the blurb at the bottom. I think it’s because Keith’s shading style is so different from DaveB’s.
A better way to talk about previously unknown material is as “unknown compounds” or “unknown nuclear structures.” We’re still learning new ways to slam the elements we know together in novel nuclear and chemical formations to create useful stuff. Scientists studying alien materials are likely to be able to break it down into recognizable elements, but have no idea how they were manipulated to create X Material.
That’s not exactly unknown is it? Even in your description, we know what it is, just not how to make it. It’s a big jump from there to “unknown”.
Unknown compounds is quite reasonable. The combinations are literally endless, and while a mass spectrometer could list the elements it contained, if we don’t know how they’re put together, then the compound would be unknown.
I take issue with people who say we’ve covered the periodic table. Sure we know the common earth elements. All serious though have any of us been EVERYWHERE? For all we know there is a basic building block of matter we on earth just missed that’d change everything. Like being sandless on the top of a rock in the middle of a desert and shouting from the rooftops “There is no sand anywhere in existence because nowhere on this rock is sand!”. To be fair it’s also possible that the periodic table is indeed correct so far but nobody can know for sure and assuming there isn’t more makes it that much more likely we’ll try to ignore information proving there is more.
Except from the existence of rock, and the properties of rock, you can deduce sand, which is small pieces of rock.
Except, if you have never before encountered sand, you wouldn’t even know to be looking for it: we only know that ‘sand’ is little pieces of ‘rock’ (or, is it the other way around: rock is simply solidified piles of sand) because we have found both and are able to compare them
We’re discovering lots of new things about “matter” all the time, but at this point they’re all quantum mechanics stuff. Things up at the atomic level (electrons and protons and neutrons, the stuff elements are made of) haven’t changed in decades.
Part of the issue is what an “element” is. Technically, it is only defined by its protons, so the discovery of a fourth fundamental particle (besides making absolutely no sense how we’ve gotten by without it so far) wouldn’t change much. Electrons aren’t a big deal, because those normalize to the number of protons more or less, and the difference is an electric charge (look up “ions”). Neutrons serve no function other than the hold the nucleus of the element together. They *can* change a few properties of the element (Uranium-235 vs uranium-238 is a good example) but they aren’t a new element, just a different isotope.
“Elements” are actually incredibly well-described, so we’re not likely to find anything new that’s too impressive in the elements field. And by not likely I mean one to several trillion against would be optimistic odds of this occurrence.
Sometimes changes to the number of neutrons can make a huge difference in terms of chemistry. The classic example of this is with hydrogen versus deuterium and tritium: they only differ in terms of the number of neutrons, but they’ve got different chemistry, enough that that the wrong kind is actually toxic to us in high enough concentrations. Basically, only standard hydrogen really undergoes normal hydrogen bonding; the extra mass of deuterium messes that up.
We’re still learning lots about the behaviour of elements. Graphene is elemental carbon, but it’s really different to graphite, diamond and buckminsterfullerene, and it is interestingly different as we probably can make metamaterials with it. Eventually. Metamaterials are where real matter gets what might as well be weird superpowers (impossible lenses, invisibility cloaks, that sort of thing).
We’re not going to find any new small elements, because we have seen every single number up until the higher, stupidly unstable ones.
The only ‘new’ elements that we haven’t found yet are the heavier ones, which are stupid unstable, and would never form in nature
They do form in nature.
It’s just that the conditions in which they form were so far away (and so long ago), that they’re not found on earth anymore. For instance, once upon a time it was possible for natural reserves of uranium ore to undergo a selfsustaining nuclear fission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo So if we were to travel to a ‘younger’ planet than earth, or one with a different origin, we may actually get hints about elements/isotopes in the Island of Stability.
There’s also the issue of where the elements on Earth came from. Once upon a time, the solar system was a cloud of elements. Why weren’t they all hydrogen? Because that cloud came from the explosion of a star which had fused a lot of them. Hydrogen gets fused into helium, and even our star produces small amounts of helium fusion, which produces carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. If a star survives helium flash, it starts producing small amounts of iron, nickel, and copper (mostly) from carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen fusion.
This continues until the heat of a runaway fusion reaction overcomes the gravity of the star and you get a supernova (or one of the alternatives, like gravitational collapse into a neutron star or black hole, but eventually the star either dies or loses most of its mass in an explosion). A very large and very old star eventually starts fusing things into uranium and plutonium…that’s how those elements got into Earth in the first place.
An even older and larger star could fuse things into elements we’ve never even seen in a laboratory. If the star eventually explodes, it won’t be long before you have a planet with those elements, and the most common isotopes would rapidly be the most stable.
No, no star can ever fuse elements beyond Iron. Fusing iron (or heavier elements) together costs energy instead of producing energy, so iron is where the fusion stops. Always.
After that, the radiation stops, gravity takes over the balance , and the star collapses. During this collapse, the heat in the core grows again, until the star explodes in a supernova (and if it’s heavy enough, a core remains that can form a black hole)
During this supernova is when all the elements heavier than iron are formed
Well, you have your isotopes, which break down into bosons and fermions. Which are where helium-II gets so interesting – you cool helium-4 (a boson) down to about 2.17 K and it goes super fluid (believed to be a Bose-Einstein condensate). You can cool helium-3 (a fermion) to 0.0025K and get a similar result – probably from helium atoms pairing up to form bosons. I expect if we create any room temperature superconductors they will involve specific isotopes of high purity.
Then you have your nuclear isomers, which are different from isotopes, and usually fiercely radioactive, but a few of them are fairly stable… And figuring out you are looking at isomers is probably difficult
I expect there’s some room in there for new and fancy stuff, especially if we wrap it up properly into molecules… (Isotopic ally pure graphene probably conducts heat faster than the same stuff with mixed isotopes…)
What are you talking about? Helium-4 is 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Bosons and Fermions are completely different things
Feel free to look it up.
Bosons follow Bose-einstien statistics.
Fermions respect the Pauli-exclusion principle.
Goes into integer spins, yada-yada mambo jumbo.
Generally bosons have an even number of component particles, and fermions have an odd number. Helium 3 is a fermion, helium 4 a boson. This becomes most evident by their different behaviors at low temperatures where the differences are most apparent.
“It’s actually made of unobtanium, Macguffinite, fakeium, and the stuff that was in Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase.”
So, wait, it’s made of:
a substance that makes interstellar travel more practical,
the material used to make a tool for hunting lions in the Scottish Highlands,
whatever the heck “fakeium” is (sounds legit though),
and… Diamonds?
huh… I guess that mostly makes sense.
The cast has said that there was gold in that briefcase
In an interview Roger Avary, the co-writer of the script, said that in the original version it contained diamonds. But since the last movie (Reservoir Dogs) also used a briefcase full of diamonds as a macguffin and they didn’t want the audience to think it was a cheap repeat. By the time they had funding to make the movie they had removed all reference to what was actually in the case.
So, maybe the cast (having not seen the original script) thought it was gold? maybe due to the yellow light? maybe the cast was told it was something different to keep them guessing because what was in it didn’t matter? (just that whatever it was, it was valuable) I don’t know.
Speaking of the light, that was added last minute but the prop department as a technique to let the audience know it was important and should be held with high regard, a classic theater trick. Avery said he though it was a mistake.
A fairly common legend is that it’s be Marsellus Wallace’s soul, retrieved by the boys after Wallace made a deal with the devil.
Other theories include Pulp Fiction’s Oscar, a human head, the ear from Reservoir Dogs, O.J.’s other glove, Micheal Jackson’s other glove (this one studded with gold instead of diamonds), the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs, and Rudolph’s nose.
Get your facts straight. It contains The Holy Grail. ^_^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q2FIbGXPz4
Between the chair and the speech bubbles we still don’t know what’s in the bottom left of his display case.
The Holy Grail. Ni!
He bought it from Marsellus Wallace.
He bought it from Marsellus Wallace.
It’s a Guyvver unit.
At once summer job I had the company president had a desk that was the exact same shape as Deus’s that one didn’t have the naked women on the front though.
It always bugged me because it looked like it should snap together with the back piece but they didn’t bother to install rails to make it close back up.
I think Deus should give the rock to Sydney just to mess (more) with Maxima.
No, Deus respects Maxi
Well likes her and isn’t stupid enough to push her buttons in ways that would get him killed.
That, to me, equates to ‘respect’
Giving it to Sydney gets it into ARC’s hands without connecting it to Maxima. Just have Deus say that it should be looked over by ARC because he thinks it’s ‘weird’ – Maxima then seconds the idea on the way out.
Sydney of course forgets and falls asleep with it on her dresser only to wake up to a new Orb. Or maybe a missing one. 3:)
The whole “no known elements” thing is pretty dumb when it’s merely extraterrestrial, yeah. If they’re playing with different dimensions, foreign realities…. Then it can be justified with a bit of mental work, but at that point there’d be much bigger issues to work with, if the fundamental building blocks of their reality were different.
Sigh. What’s wrong with me? Everybody – what aninteresting, complex character. Me – he is smug annoying asshole. He seems to be plot-important. Oh great. At least this scene is ending.
Well, maybe i’m just stupid.
Don’t apologize for your opinion; it’s not ‘wrong’ to interpret a character differently.
One part of that which makes him an interesting character, is that he is a smug asshole :D
But as Sir Scarfie said, nothing wrong with having a different opinion (plenty who still don’t like him)
Speaking as somebody who liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and thinks Batman is a huge asshole in the comics, it is not stupid to have a differing opinion from “everyone else”.
If Deus doesn’t do it for you, that’s cool. It’s a good thing to have your own opinions.
OMFG, speaking of superheroes who are total assholes in their comics, google “Superdickery”. Superman is SUCH a dick.
Like a strip I saw that had Lois pretend to trip and fall out a window. Clark doesn’t have time to change his outfit in order to be able to save her. She says ” I knew it Clark, I knew you were Superman!’. Next panel has Clark working at his desk and Olsen asks Clark where Lois is. Clark replies “Lois? Oh she fell out the window.” .
Agree with you on both counts: liking KotCS and believing Batman is a dick :)
Of course Batman is a dick! It’s even in the title of the comics he debuted in back in 1939, Detective Comics #27. :)
What if… it isn’t an “Island of Stability” but instead and “Archipelago”? 300Ubn isn’t likely to be very stable, but maybe something higher?
Wouldn’t be the first time that something proved to be far more complex than originally anticipated. The History Of Science is full of that sort of development.
I’ve been giving this a degree of thought and maybe things like Max’s “geode” and Sydney’s “orbs” are like what was referred to in ancient mythology as a God-Head. The fluid from inside the “geode” could have been the elixir of the gods (Mesopotamian), divine ambrosia (ancient Greece), the well of wisdom (Norths), etc. An aspect that when found grants “godhood” upon a worth vessel. Sydney’s “orbs” could be something like the eyes of Tiamat (the seven headed Mesopotamian dragon god that Marduk killed and used her body of to create the world; particularly the seas) – seven heads and seven “orbs” (its a possibility).
Before anybody completely attacks me on this, it’s just a thought. I don’t know what the author is going to do with the story. I could be right, I could be so far off it’s laughable, the author may have not decided, or may choose to never go into it – at the end of the day it’s his choice.
well you’re not going anywhere crazy with this theory, the archon press conference mentioned that superpowers have, apparently, existed for a very long time and may be the spark from which certain legends and myths where started. What you’re talking about is mythology, ergo yeah, quite possibly the case.
After all we know the orbs have a big skilltree to fill out… there’s no telling really just how powerful they could become once you max everything out…
Well, no more crazy than any other ‘theories’
As I was visiting the page, there was an add for medical freeze drying on the right…kinda creepy.
And I just watched a playthrough of the Freize mission(s) in Batman: Arkham Origins….
LOL! I love the pirate chick (I’m bad with names) from Girl Genius! She reminds me of my best friend. XD
So yeah, I like your Gravatar. And your taste in comics. ;)
That’s Bangladesh DuPree, by the way. Apparently the reason she works for Baron Wulfenbach is that she USED to be a pirate queen until somebody (she doesn’t know who) wiped out her entire band of pirates and her secret base, and the Baron is helping her find out who was behind it.
However, I would not be surprised at all if Wulfenbach himself did it so he can keep an eye on someone who would otherwise be a destabilizing influence on the fragile peace he’s managed to establish in Europa…
One hopes your best friend is not as bloodthirsty as Bangladesh is. Her idea of interrogation seems to be “kill people until everyone’s dead, or until someone starts answering questions so she’ll stop killing people.” (Until her questions are answered. Then she might kill them anyway.)
Here is a little about the back story of Bangladesh DuPree. It’s kind of spoilerish so I’ve treated it like that…
No, the Baron didn’t have anything to do with that. It was Zeetha who killed them off. It all started with Zeetha being sent on a mission to check out what was going on outside Skifander, her home country. It’s probable that she also intended to try and find Chump, her father, who happens to be the Baron, but that’s beside the point.
Zeetha got sick early on and was almost comatose when the airship was attacked by pirates. She was captured and brought to the pirate stronghold to be sold as a slave. When she got well enough to stand up she broke out and killed them. All of them. And then she burned their ships and set fire to their fort. Only then did she realize that she had no idea where she was, or what was worse where Skifander was or how to get there. One of the pirates might have known, or at least they would have known where they attacked her ship. Unfortunately they were now all dead. And so started Zeetha’s hunt for anyone who might know how to get to Skifander.
Some time later Bangladesh DuPree returned with her airship only to find the fort laid in ruins, her pirate fleet destroyed and not a living soul who could tell her what had happened. She’s been working for the Baron since, and is still planing to hunt down whoever it was that destroyed her pirate fleet…
Note to self: The spoiler tag on this site does not do what I think it should do…
I would like an Orgy Desk, please.
I’m surprised Max wasn’t seized by a sudden biological urge to consume her symbiote’s cocoon.
Max: [crunch crunch]
Deus: Would you like some Grey Poupon to go with that?
The male Holly from Red Dwarf? ^_-
So…many…things…I’m not saying.
Original Holly thankyouverymuch
I really like the lighting and colours on the last panel, with the backlighting, and the first panel, with the shadows.
OK I have a question. What the hell is that image on the front of his desk? It is partly obscured by the speech bubbles but there is enough to suggest a ready warped sense of humor if nothing else. Or am I just seeing what should be “just a cigar”?
And what is the “lamp” thingy in the top left corner?
That ‘lamp’ is a bondage tower (someone posted one in use further up the page)
As for the desk front, at first thought it looked like Harem’s Playboy spread, but it looks more likely to have been inspired by ancient Mediterranean art
Looking at the color and assuming texture. I get the feeling the desk is made from rock and likely pulled out of a cliff/cave wall and that it is a ancient rock carving
Doesn’t explain the legs extending to the top of the desk though
Oh, Max…
He never stopped being one.
hmm what the periodic table says is true for a given set of known physics. for example is the geode was formed on a cool neutron star the elements might be bonded in fascinating new ways due to the gravity well. or a different physics entirely might be the rule in a universe next door and the weak laws might all be different making our common list of elements stable and unstable no longer hold true. just saying that our math says it is possible that our rules, as we know them may not be constant even in our own universe much less the multiverse. any one notice that we have now gotten “pictures” of light exhibiting the wave and particle behaviors? not so very long ago, it was considered that light could not be both at the same time, that was cannon, 40 or so years of life and a life time interest in the sciences and i have found, the more we say something is impossible the more likely it is to be the part of the reality and we simply didn’t have the instruments to observe the phenomena.
As a quantum physicist, I have to agree with you regarding your opinion of “science”, since one of the fundamental rules of quantum physics is that everything is not only possible, but true…somewhere. That being the case, though, I still feel the urge to smack you regarding the periodic table. The periodic table defines only elements, and uses an extremely narrow definition of “what distinguishes between two elements” to ensure that it cannot be wrong. It’s merely incomplete.
Bonding elements together in different ways in no way changes the elements involved.
Also, a neutron star is made entirely of neutronium, which isn’t an element, as it has 0 protons.
Debatable, really, whether or not “element 0” belongs on the chart…but your first two sentences do not belong together. I’m sorry, but this has become a temporary pet peeve after all the discussion on “unknown elements” on the first page of comments.
lol i do believe you caught what i was trying to get at. the table is narrow and we have no idea of what is on the surface of a neutron star. i used it because it just might be one of the things we could potentially get close enough to optically observe in detale. just what we can detect so far. base elements under extreams might be all we see in our spectra. whats to say we know? what makes it fun is the math points out that we might not actually have found the fundamentals. we could be looking at the product of an even more basic system that has few limits to what it produces. dont know to many atom smasher that haven’t taken elemental bits mouons, up, down, and all those and imagined different ways of assembling them to make different atoms. so today we have the elemental table but we have only just now begun to see the real basics and we dont yet know if we can work with those building blocks. I believe the analogy is trying to fix a pocket watch with your thumb. our tools are still to big.
just read a paper today that changes how we understand water. Water the single most studied thing on earth and we are discovering new things about it as our instrumentation gets better.
i am not always the best at explanations.
Anything formed on a neutron star will explode the microsecond it gets out of the gravity well.
Why is deus’s desk pornographic? I mean… its hard to tell, but there are definately nudes carved into that wood.
Why is deus’s desk pornographic? I mean… its hard to tell, but there are definately nudes carved into that wood.
Not all nude art is pornographic
Hey Dave, just wanted to say if you happen to come down to Scarborough Faire in Waxahachie to stop by the Baron’s Bavarian Boarhaus and say hi. We’re open wknds through Memorial day.
*Voice comes from the rock, ‘Return me to my brethren.’
You are forgetting the name of this comic. It would be ‘sistren’.
Or perhaps ‘rockren’?
All this talk of ‘transuranic’ and ‘heavy elements’ makes me think of Sapphire and Steel
Transuranic always makes me think of Schlock Mercenary, because of PTUs.
Didn’t mean to submit that so soon. Was going to add “What the hell is a POST transuranic, anyway?”
A fence post made out of a transuranic element?
I have always liked to refer to unknown materials as “plot-tonium” i.e. a material whose properties, though mostly unknown, contain the necessary structures needed to resolve a seemingly insurmountable problem faced by a main character in the story.
Side note: What the heck is red matter and why do Vulcans carry so much of it around with them? Do they always shop in bulk at some future version of a Costco?
Watch the movie again. Specifically, observe what will happen if the red matter is in smaller chunk. Apparently, it’s stable in big amount.
Will we ever learn the fates of Maxima’s parents and brother??
We saw her brother in a flashback to Maxima’s “Stacy Gwenn moment”, and it looked like they were still living with at least one of their parents. There’s no reason to think that her entire family isn’t fine. Given that she’s giving out her full name on television, she’s probably using a modified first name and fake last name. Who names their daughter Maximilia? Her birth name is probably Maxine.
That being said, it would endanger them if she ever visited (she can call though, if they have a secure line), so probably at most we’ll get to see her calling her family. Food for future panels, DaveB!
Sorry, that should be Gwenn Stacy, shouldn’t it?
What exactly is wrong with the name “Maximillia”? Maybe they were expecting a boy and were already calling him “Maximillian”, but when Maxi emerged they simply dropped the ‘n’
I too am going to voice my dissent on the “no known elements” issue. To my mind, it is a fallacy to presume that conditions on Earth or even our solar system mimic conditions everywhere. For example, spurred on by a story that light may not travel at the same speed in Andromeda, I came across a whole treasure trove of stories from respectable scientific journals that basically said that the speed of light is not the universal constant that we thought it was.
In 2005, Stephen Hawking, in an admirable show of honesty, admitted that he had not “carried the 2” (so to speak) on his theories of Hawking Radiation and was revamping the theories.
Sure, it’s often either a matter of economy in writing to say “no known elements” but I just don’t buy into the notion that the periodic table is the final word on everything in the universe, especially when it involves geodes whose goop-water turns people into gold-skinned superheroes.
Why did you post separately and not join one of the existing discussions? I only read this far in the comments because this topic is of particular interest to me.
Because I’m kinda going off on a tangent from the other discussions and I feel it would be kinda rude to bust in on a discussion about islands of stability with examples that are drawn from other areas of science.
Plus, while math was always incredibly natural for me to understand, chemistry was a topic that I didn’t really achieve any great understanding with. As such, my input on the existing discussions would be minimal.
Ok, but unless these unknown elements are made up of things that aren’t protons and electrons (possible I guess) then all the possible configurations are known up to the no real purpose other than naming something Californium, Livermorium, and Lawrencium.
There can be unknown compounds or alloys but they are made of known stuff and expressible as a formula.
Everyone is talking science and I’m here like “Did Sydney just get an angry birds text tone?”
No, Maxima’s tone for Sydney is a bit more….appropriate.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1859
Ah, but that’s her ring tone not her text tone
Yeah, figured her text tone would have been the shortened “Nelson Laugh” going by it having just those two notes
All I could hear was the “ha ha” doll from the angry birds movie
Maybe, if the comic wasn’t still set firmly in 2011 :P