'B-field Earth': speculate gas; uranium ore toxic; & can a planet implode? SPOILERS

Factual Questions
1

…as in Battlefield Earth starring (if that’s the word I want) John Travolta in dreadlocks.

Bonzo and I spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon plowing through this turkey, pausing it every so often to argue about its deeper meanings (“huh?” “what?” and so on…), and not being privy to the inner workings of the filmmaker’s mind (if that’s the word I want), we had some questions.

  1. Care to speculate on what the “breathing gas” was? It reacts explosively with radiation, we’re told, so the Psychlos can’t go anywhere near any uranium deposits, and the good guys blow up the Psychlos’ planet by teleporting a nuke to it, detonating it, which causes the whole planet’s atmosphere to go up in a tour-de-force of cinematic explosions. Is there a gaseous chemical compound that will do this?

  2. I wasn’t aware that raw uranium ore was quite that radioactive. I actually thought you could handle it rather safely. Aren’t there people out in Wyoming and Nevada that have lived for years right on top of uranium deposits, with no more birth defects than anybody else?

  3. Can a planet implode? If you managed to ignite a planet’s entire atmosphere, wouldn’t it just burn off, rather than vaporizing the entire world? The F/X were very similar to what happens to Dantooine when the Death Star blows it up, but that involved a death ray, and this was just the atmosphere going bye-bye.

2

Heh, they never blew up Dantooine :). They scouted it and found a deserted Rebel base, but it was Alderaan that they destroyed :).

Need to know anything more, I probably know :stuck_out_tongue:

3

The impression I got from reading the book was that the psychlo home planet was actually located in a different universe. What with variations in the fine structure constant and all, the elements that made up breath gas and the psychlo homeworld were not made out of the same sort of protons, electrons and neutrons that make up earthly matter. These “different” particles reacted violently when the high speed particles of radioactive decay introduced them too intimately to the laws of an alien universe.

4

DDG, your warning about spoilers was courteous, but unnecessary. No one’s going to see that film anyway. :smiley:

Sua

5

Yeah, but someone might consider reading the book (if Vinny Babarino hasn’t killed all interest in it…) which I rather enjoyed…

Even if L Ron Hubbard was a total hack writer. Still, Battlefield Earth was an enjoyable read. And from what I hear, the movie is about as faithful an adaptation as the Demi Moore version of the Scarlet Letter…

6

If I recall correctly, in the book the planet itself didn’t explode, just the atmosphere.

My biggest problem with that was how a planet could have formed with no natural radioactives, since even a tiny bit of radioactive material was enough to cause a chain-reaction in the planet’s atmosphere.

7

From the book (the movie isn’t worth the electrons to store this message), there are few points that contribute to the destruction of the Psychlo homeworld:[ul]
[li]The planet was mined out millennia ago, to an extent unimaginable in our time, riddling the crust with vast tunnels.[/li][li]As Squink observes, Psychlo was supposed to be located in a different universe, with different laws of physics and such. (Why breath-gas works in our universe at all, or even how the Psychlos themselves can survive in our universe are matters left unexplained.)[/li][li]The catastrophic explosion was caused by a whole bunch of dirty nukes in the book, not simply uranium ore.[/ul][/li]I think your confusion comes from the movie script writer maintaining some of the story events, while mangling the (already somewhat dubious) causes from the book.
[sub]And, shouldn’t this be in the Cafe?[/sub]

8

Right, in the movie they destroyed the Psychlos’ planet by detonating a nuke, but they also made a big deal out of the fact that the Terran gold ore that the Psychlos wanted was right next to some uranium ore, which would cause their breathing apparatus to explode, so they had to use “man animals” to do the mining for them.

And in the movie the whole planet disintegrated. Kewl.

No, this shouldn’t be in the Cafe, because I was looking for serious scientific answers, not a discussion of the movie (which would take all of, oh, 30 seconds).

Alternate universes aside, because, anyway, L. Ron can’t have it both ways, can he? If the Psychlos’ breathing apparatus works according to an “alternate universe’s” physics rules, then by definition those rules would be different from our universe’s physics rules, and the breathing apparatus wouldn’t work here, period. Because the physics would be different.

So, eliminating the “left-handed frannistan” explanation of “well, it’s an alternate universe, so it’s got different rules”…

–Is there a gaseous chemical that would react explosively with radioactivity?

–Can a planet implode? A solid planet, I mean, like Earth, not one that had been conveniently riddled with tunnels?

–Any anyway, a planet’s crust is pretty thick, so how could mere miners drill enough holes in it to weaken it? Even given thousands of years of mining. You can only go so deep into the Earth before it gets too hot to mine.

–Would igniting a planet’s atmosphere cause the whole planet to disintegrate?

The uranium ore thing I’m not so interested about, besides I suppose if I really wanna know I can look it up on Google. But I don’t have a clue where to start to look up the other things. I did have a year of chemistry in high school, but all I remember is that sulfuric acid is H[sub]2[/sub]SO[sub]4[/sub].

9

[Café Society]

Yanno what really, really sucks about the movie version of Battlefield Earth?

No, not “the whole movie”. Well, that too, but I’m talking even worse than that.

What really sucks is that that was the good half of the book.

:wink:
[/Café Society]

Anyhow, a minor nitpick: Psychlo breathe-gas didn’t react explosively to radiation. Rather, exposure to Uranium (specifically) caused it to undergo an uncontrollable exothermic chemical reaction; that is, an big explosion. The nukes were just a conveniently easy way of spreading the uranium around very quickly. I dunno exactly what L. Ron was intending for the actual reaction (even in the novel there’s never any detailed discussion of exactly how it works), but the most likely explanation is probably that breathe-gas is a mixture of chemicals that normally don’t react with each other at all, but which in the presence of uranium react with each other in the previously mentioned exothermic/explosive manner. This makes more sense than an explosive reation with uranium itself, simply because it explains how a finite quantity of uranium could detonate the entire Psychlo atmosphere.

Before you ask, no, I don’t have any likely candidates.

10

–Is there a gaseous chemical that would react explosively with radioactivity?
No. Diazomethane is about as explosive a gas as can be found anywhere; contact with ground glass stoppers, as opposed to smooth glass stoppers, has been known to set it off. It is not affected by low levels of radiation. Breath gas would need to be even more unstable.
–Can a planet implode? A solid planet, I mean, like Earth, not one that had been conveniently riddled with tunnels?
No. You’d have to remove or compress the matter at the planets core in order to get an implosion.
–Any anyway, a planet’s crust is pretty thick, so how could mere miners drill enough holes in it to weaken it?
A planets crust is pretty thick, but it’s all cracked and not very strong in the first place. Rock might seem pretty tough over a scale of a few hundred feet, but when you to look at it over a scale of miles it doesn’t hold its shape so well. The miners on psychlo must have used extensive reinforcements.
–Would igniting a planet’s atmosphere cause the whole planet to disintegrate?
Probably not. If you suddenly converted every second atom in the atmosphere into antimatter you could probably bounce the moon off Pluto, but I don’t think nitrogen fission, the most likely scenario, could do much more than boil the oceans.

11

In your thread title, I loved the way you posted “SPOILERS” right after the question “can a planet implode?” Gee, does this movie have a planet imploding?

12

Yes, they have.

In my hometown, just north of uranium mines in Colorado, someone had the bright idea of using uranium mill tailings (the rock and earth that had been next to uranium for a billion years) as fill dirt. So hundreds of homes, schools, and churches were built on this stuff.

Then they figure out that this stuff is radioactive. So they have to examine every building built in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and remove any tailings. (It turns out that my elementary school and church were built on tailings.)

My house I grew up in was built in this era, but didn’t use tailings. But when the gov’t team came to our house to verify, they got increased radioactivity readings near my bedroom window. My dad, a geologist with the Atomic Energy Commission (later the Dept. of Energy), was escorting them around our yard when they got this reading. Curious, he went into my room and moved the huge pile of junk near the window to reveal my mom’s mineral cabinet. Within it was: a uranium ore sample.

So besides going to school and church over tailings, I slept next to uranium ore for 16 years. And I’m OK. And as to my genes, they produced the cutie pie whose page is below. :D:D

13

True confessions time: I actually read the book. The whole thing. (Hey, I was bored that summer). So far as I was able to discern, the only science that L-Ron got right in that book were:

A: Tea is good for an upset stomach
B: Horses don’t use teleporters.

Anything else “scientific” in the book, it’s safe to conclude that the truth is the exact opposite of whatever L-Ron presented.

14

Thanks, guys, I’m happy now. Not much “science” in the “science fiction”, eh? Yeah, I’d already kinda figured that as far as science fiction goes, I’d prolly be better off curling up with the C.S. Lewis Perelandra books.

15

Of course it all is possible, providing the gas didn’t burn but in fact fussed. If the gas was radioactive and the concentrations in the atmosphere where just below critical mass and there was no sun near the planet (as in with-in the same universe, as chances are a stray particle would have already set it off). Then if the planet was under the event horizon of a black hole (thus can not explode), it may be possible that the entire atmosphere going critical might implode the planet.

Yep that would pretty much do it. Don’t hold your breath for the experimental proof though.

16

And that’s a very good thing, too. Detailed discussion might have segued into things like engrams and cellular memory and body thetans.

In retrospect, my favorite bit of the science of the fiction was a very minor scene where they revealed that the Psychlos’ physiology wasn’t based on cellular structure, but on viral structure instead. Even when I was reading that the first time at age 10 or so it made me say, “Er…what?”

17

I read the book, and previous posters are correct, Psychlo breathe-gas was made of elements not found in our universe, and reacted explosively with uranium, not radiation. I remember that Psychlos were trained to turn around and go back whenever they saw tiny flashes of light within their gas masks, because that meant individual uranium molecules were in the area. Why uranium? Probably so the remaining human populations would be plagued by the side-effects of radiation (humans only lived where Psychlos could not go).

18

The best bits(such as they are) in the book are the small touch’s.eg The Psyclones unusually tough armour :-

“Here was a mark where an A-bomb had hit it”.

sticks in my memory.