[HN Gopher] Antarctic Explorers Wrote Cute, Funny Stories to Hid...
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Antarctic Explorers Wrote Cute, Funny Stories to Hide Dangerous
Stunts
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-03-09 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| walterbell wrote:
| Another piece was a science-fiction story about exploring an
| undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica. It imagines the
| Nimrod's party making their way into the strange land of
| Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of
| giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red
| jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge
| carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers.
|
| A few years earlier, the German science-fiction author Kurd
| Lasswitz published the novel _" Two Planets"_, about a Martian
| colony at the North Pole. It would influence a young Werner von
| Braun, who would later guide the US space program,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571588
|
| More recently, J. Michael Straczynski, creator of _" Babylon 5"_,
| participated in the writers room for the 2021 movie _" Godzilla
| vs Kong"_,
|
| _> Apex CEO Walter Simmons recruits former Monarch scientist and
| Hollow Earth theorist Nathan Lind to guide a search for a power
| source into the Hollow Earth, the Titans ' homeworld. Lind is
| hesitant as his brother died in an expedition to the Hollow Earth
| due to a strong reverse-gravitational effect. He agrees when
| Walter reveals that Apex has developed HEAVs, specialized craft
| able to withstand the gravity field. Lind convinces Andrews to
| let Kong guide them via an outpost in Antarctica. Lind, Andrews,
| and an Apex team led by Walter's daughter Maia board a barge
| escorted by the US Navy, carrying a sedated and restrained Kong._
| jerf wrote:
| "specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field"
|
| I've been noticing an uptick in this in the past few years,
| where a "gravity field" is treated as just another scifi
| technobabble word that the authors don't understand at all.
| Which is weird, because _gravity_ is a plain English word, not
| particularly hoity-toity or "fancy", so it is really becoming
| another touchstone to me of bad writing.
|
| "Oh no! We're experiencing high amounts of gravitometric
| interference!"
|
| You mean you're currently pinned to the floor because you now
| weigh thousands of pounds and you're struggling to draw breath,
| if not simply turned to jelly by all the forces?
|
| "No, I mean our screens are flickering on and off and there's
| some flashy sparks shooting out of the walls! We're totally
| fine, though. It's just our mission at stake!"
|
| My dear sir, are you sure you don't perhaps have
| _electromagnetic_ interference there? Can I interest you in
| perhaps some technobabble word with no real world referent,
| like "high degree of subspace inelasticity" or "the ansible
| field is experiencing a random stellar burst" or "the baryons
| are inebriated again"?
|
| "Oh no! It's definitely a gravity field! Says so right here in
| the script."
|
| Well, then, scrape your fellow adventure's jellified remains
| off of the floor and carry on, I guess.
| vundercind wrote:
| I just assume they've discovered some things we don't know
| yet. I mean, they usually have gravity-creating and gravity-
| neutralizing devices, so they must have learned _some_ stuff
| about it that we don 't know. Maybe we haven't even figured
| out how to "see" the sort of field they're talking about. How
| _would_ it, perhaps, interact with equipment that may include
| gravity-manipulating components for all sorts of purposes?
|
| > electromagnetic interference
|
| "Electromagnetic? LOL. You mean you're being struck by
| lightning? Or some little bits of rock are doing kinda funny
| things? Because that's what electricity and magnetism are,
| and only those things, and they're separate."
| noman-land wrote:
| My friend, if you've studied the literature you'd know that
| gravimetric interference affects the structural integrity of
| the ship's hull by warping spacetime and thereby applying
| sheering forces that can only be sufficiently mitigated by
| activating external shielding. If you encounter a Class Y
| phenomenon without being fully prepared, it could definitely
| cause enough lateral sheering force to damage equipment and
| even cause coupling relays to come out of alignment and emit
| sparks.
| klyrs wrote:
| Wait until they discover quantum gravity!
| Stratoscope wrote:
| A transformative hermeneutic approach would transgress the
| boundaries!
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| But isn't there a net zero gravitational force within a
| spherical shell?
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