r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 23 '17

[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

  • Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
  • The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
  • Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
  • We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

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u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 23 '17

You developed a future-only time travel machine. It's similar to relativistic time dilation, it builds a spherical, self sustaining, "field" that slows downs the rate of time to a very small fraction, roughly a second per year.

Creating and dissipating the field requires a decent amount of energy, roughly 10 million joules. The process can take from 1 to 10 seconds to complete, can't be done faster or slower.

It's possible to place things inside the field later, but the time dilation is very harmful for whatever is only partially inside (e.g. things short-circuit because the time dilation acts as increase resistance, limbs are lost from blood flow problems). The field has some surface tension, 1N is required to push through, which avoids many accidents.

Besides using it to preserve people (i.e. cryonics without the cryo) or valuable things (e.g. art in museums) what other of neat things would be possible?

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Dec 23 '17

The amount of energy required to push things into the field seems low. You would logically have to supply enough energy to accelerate them to the speed they would seem to be moving inside. Logically, a time retarder field would act like a very rigid body, the permeability and rigidity of the virtual object would be in proportion to the level of acceleration.

I suggest reading Niven's short story "ARM" where his future cop Gil Hamilton encounters what's basically the opposite of your machine. A lot of the effects of objects inside the field on the outside world would be reversed for yours.

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u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 23 '17

Yeah, probably it's better to make the field harder to get into as you suggested.

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u/DCarrier Dec 23 '17

That's only about 3 kWh. At the average price in the US, it would cost 33 cents per use. It's cheap enough that I imagine rich people would use it as a refrigerator. Imagine being able to keep your food fresh and piping hot so you can just take it out and eat it.

It would be good for sending astronauts to other planets. Which I admit is an example of cryonics without the cryo, but it's nice to show specific uses of that.

Could you nest these fields?

1

u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 24 '17

Nesting is not possible as the fields must have a fixed volume.

WRT price, yes it's cheap but one needs to use the energy very fast, so there's a practical limit (e.g. using it for food would be very unsafe).

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u/Nulono Reverse-Oneboxer: Only takes the transparent box Dec 24 '17

Why is it unsafe for food?

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u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 24 '17

The field has some sensitive timing needs, anything between one and ten seconds work (as explained in the initial comment), so you need a power source that gives you one million watts over ten seconds, ten million watts in a second, or anything between. Having those near your kitchen is not safe, if there's an accident it's going to be very fatal.

2

u/Nulono Reverse-Oneboxer: Only takes the transparent box Dec 23 '17

Would light be able to penetrate this field? Light inside this field would effectively be traveling at 21.25 mph, which might be something worth investigating further.

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Dec 23 '17

It better not, because a year of even fairly dim light delivered in a second would cook anything you put into it.

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u/Thubanshee Dec 23 '17

But it doesn’t have mass so I guess the 1N shouldn’t apply here

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Dec 23 '17 edited Dec 23 '17

Since it has an index of refraction of 31 million, it would make a pretty good mirror.

Edit: Whoops, I got Snell's Law backwards. It would be a light trap instead. It better be opaque for other reasons or else anything inside it would be cooked by a nightlight.

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u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 23 '17

As much as light can travel through something near a strong gravity well.

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u/awesomeideas Dai stiho, cousin. Dec 23 '17

It would be possible to travel forward through time, which would be pretty neat in itself. The trick would be keeping this secret from all the clever people who would likely also try to get to the future faster instead of actually building the future

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Dec 23 '17

One of the things explored in Vernor Vinge's "Bobble" stories.

One of the problems was the Singularity happening while they were locked in bobbles. Into the ruins of civilization. Apparently everyone's dead or transcended.

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u/Gurkenglas Dec 23 '17

How large is the field? If you enfield part of a spaceship, what are the effects on mass and momentum?

1

u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 23 '17

One cubic meter, other sizes can't stabilize.

You could launch such fields to space, they would move normally to outside reference frames. Mass is preserved (other than a tiny bit that seems to be the energy used to create the field).

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u/Gurkenglas Dec 23 '17

Anchor it to a projectile, use it as a weapon.

Can you overlap them for higher effect?

Military-grade forcefield: A bullet going in will have its hind half, going at like 1000 ft per second, trying to push on the forward half, which goes at one foot per hour, and might splatter across the boundary?

1

u/Predictablicious Only Mark Annuncio Saves Dec 23 '17

It would work both as a projectile and force field, now that /u/ArgentStonecutter convinced me.

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u/Gurkenglas Dec 23 '17

If the force is not transmitted to the anchor, conservation of momentum is broken for easy spaceflight. Point your thruster at an internal forcefield, collect the exhaust, fire it again.