Ahhh well the hubby didn’t add that bit when explaining it to me. I still think it’s unrational in view of war you’d be executing as many of your own soldiers as the enemy soldiers.
The problem with that calculation is that they assume each survivor kills 10 zombies a month, but it doesn’t factor in how many survivors the zombies kill each month.
Back when I was an undergraduate, they did a vampire/victim scenario as part of course on differential equations*. It’s a weird case of predator/prey relationships where the prey gets added to the predator population after it’s been preyed on, and the system can rapidly escalate to pure vampires if your rate of Van Helsing’s staking the vampires isn’t aggressive enough.
*The class had lots of wonderfully weird examples, including a banking problem with a dishonest banker embezzling off the accumulation from compound interest. It’s the course that gave me the phrase “constant rate of embezzlement”
Shields are only shown being used in warfare. You’d have to at least simulate a conventional attack to get your enemy to take it seriously enough to activate shields so that someone can use a lasgun. That means you’re not just endangering one martyr or a small group of them, you’re looking at committing a large portion of your forces to make an attack seem believable. Sure, you could try deploying them so that the possible explosion doesn’t kill everyone, but then you’re also tipping off your enemy as to your probable strategy, and taking much higher casualties in the feint attack because you don’t have enough of a concentration of forces.
The effect described is highly variable and may or may not destroy both sides of the contact. Even if you “win” with such a strategy, you’re likely to cause enormous problems for yourselves in the process. The Fremen under Paul used atomics because they were probably less destructive than a Holtzman effect interaction, more predictable and controllable, and were also an unexpected strategy.
While Herbert may not have clearly predicted suicide bomber tactics — which wouldn’t become common until at least 20 years after he wrote Dune — the “rules” he set up work pretty well. I didn’t remember this (the last time I read Dune was at least 10 years ago) but when I looked up the name for the Holtzman effect, I found a note that in the first novel Duncan Idaho deliberately allows Shield-lasgun contact to scare the shit out of the enemy. That means that Herbert definitely did consider what would happen if someone tried to exploit the effect for a tactical advantage.
Yes, suicide by lasgun is a possible tactic for asymmetric warfare, but I think it would not be a good one. All the enemy would have to do is turn off their shields, which would still leave them with a numerical and logistical advantage; an inconvenience, but not a game-changing one. Even if there were a series of successful attacks, on a world less important than Arrakis it would probably have resulted in the planet being cut off from trade and let die.
You’re too blasé about this. If the possible outcome is catastrophe for the shieldee, it’s only a matter of time before the Suicide Squad manages to get the shieldeess to unwisely have their shield up at a time when they’ve got someone willing to fire at it. After all, they only have to get one shot to succeed.
None that involve the other factors HG presents - for one thing, they have widespread communication technology. A few years, following an era of devastating war? Maybe. 75 years, while 12 oppressed zones with all the resources watch a privileged zone live off their efforts and amuse themselves by slaughtering their children? I don’t think so.
I just finished watching Dollhouse for the first time and, while I loved it unabashedly, world building clearly was secondary to story telling:
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Airy, open plan buildings with large glass windows and sliding doors is not how you build a secure facility! The number of times characters see or hear information they weren’t meant to through the by default open doors and large plate glass windows exceeded my ability to count. To be fair, they did lampshade the issue during the episode where they discover a chip in the imprinting room and the head of security asks who has access to the room and the answer is, basically everybody.
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It makes no sense for actives ever to be in a blank state. In one of the later episodes, several actives were imprinted to be scientists to help Toper with his research. Well, no duh, why can’t they all be doing that or something of the equivalent? Dr Saunders was imprinted to be a Doctor, have actives imprinted to be the cooks and massage therapists and security detail as well.
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The 5 year contracts make no sense if your goal is to keep the dollhouse secret. The LA house had, what? 50 - 100 dolls? That means you’re releasing 5 - 10 people a year who have concrete knowledge that the dollhouse exists? In fact, a lot of the dollhouse’s activity seems very much at odds with trying to keep the dollhouse secret. For example, dolls apparently frequently have public marriage ceremonies with their clients. You don’t think any guest at the party will start to wonder why they’ve never heard of the bride and why they never see that person again?
In any case, I understand stylistically why all these choices were made and how they serve the larger story. It’s still a world I have to avoid thinking about too hard though, lest my brain fries at the improbability of a lot of it.
They don’t have open communication in the Districts. The government-installed TVs carry the official propaganda channel and that’s it. (Officials like the mayor have an eyes-only channel). Katniss and Rue didn’t even know the basics about life in each others’ districts.
Still, they broadcast the Games, which show kids being killed in horrible ways and the leadership having a decadent lifestyle.
I believe televising the Games makes sense given what backstory we know. The rebellion 75 years earlier had been put down apparently in large part by using genetically engineered “muttations” as bioweapons. A big part of the Games is showing off what clever new things the Capital’s labs have hatched, as a dire warning of what the Capital could unleash on the Districts. And afaik, what the people in the Districts see is the opening triumph parade, the tribute interviews, the Games themselves and the victor’s propaganda tours. More of a pageant of the Capital’s might and glory rather than its decadence.
Babylon 5, “Believers” (1st Season, Episode #10).
It’s an interesting but unrealistic premise… since, as you point out, there are many ways for your integument to get unintentionally damaged. Seems like there should be very few who survive to old age (or even reproduction) in that culture.
But that’s just the McGuffin, setting up the philosophical tension between scientific (medical) practice and religious practice. And don’t forget that there are real world religions that are almost as extreme regarding medical treatment. The main difference is that they aren’t a majority of our species’ behavior.
No. Why would it?
No, not completely. As others have pointed out, there is enough moisture for dew and polar caps to form. There is a lot of water on the planet not tied up.
The main point is that any amount of standing water attracts worm larvae, that then bind the water up. So the planet can’t have any *standing *water. As soon as rain falls in amounts that will pool on the surface, it becomes lost.
It isn’t sea of sand + sea of water. It’s sandswimmers on Earth + sandswimmers on not-earth. the sandworms themselves are descendants of interstitial lifeforms, not benthic lifeforms.
And it is hard to swim through water too. Nonetheless we have plenty of creatures that do exactly that. Even massive creatures that could quite happily swim on the surface, such as whales. There’s a reason for that: it’s easier to swim through your planktonic food supply constantly than to try to travel over the surface and dive down into it t intervals.
We also have quite a few sand swimmers on this planet. they don’t get much over rats sized because we don’t have deposits of sand that are much more than a kilometre across and a hundred metres deep, so that’s a limit imposed by environment. If we had sand deposits that were tends of thousands of kilometres across and miles deep, the sand swimmers would get larger. There is such a huge advantage to being able evade predators in three dimensions while obtaining food that it would be all but inevitable.
That seems like a total non-sequitur. Who would buy a recreational sand-burrower, what would they use it for, and where would they use it? The biggest unstabilised sand deposits on earth are only a few kilometres across. Who is going to build something that needs to have submarine quality life support when they can only use it for a few minutes of travel in complete blackness?
Your statement is equivalent to saying that deep-sea life can’t exist because we don’t have recreational deep-sea submarines.
Yeah, because the laws of physics state that the energy need to move through rock is greater than the amount of energy that an organic lifeform can ever obtain by doing so.
The fact that numerous sand-swimmers exist on this planet rather proves that this is not true of moving through sand.
That might actually explain why that species—or at least, that religious/cultural group within that species—doesn’t seem to be very influential on the galactic stage; with no “prime directive” to speak of in the B5 universe, we don’t even know if they even developed spaceflight independently. They might essentially just be Space Pandas—only able to exist, if not thrive, in a narrow thread of conditions, or on the sufferance of the more powerful.
In addition to the factors already mentioned, there’s the fact that such a detonation is indistinguishable from an atomic explosion - and the use of atomics against civilians, as per the Great Convention, is grounds for planetary annihilation.
The Forms must be obeyed.
The Japanese did, to an extent. Once the Sengoku Jidai was concluded, guns were marginalised partly because it was inconvenient having a weapon which any random peasant could be shown how to operate and which could kill a Samurai in full armour from well outside sword range.
That and there wasn’t really a need for them as such; they certainly continued making arquebuses but mainly for hunting purposes, apparently.
To put it another way: When Commodore Perry showed up in 1854 (a time in which European firearms had rifled barrels and percussion-cap actions, and revolvers like the Navy Colt and Adams were readily availabe), the Japanese guns were still matchlock arquebuses, despite them being perfectly aware of Western arms developments thanks to the Dutch trading mission at Deshima.
Similarly, the crossbow was outlawed (at least for use against other Christians) by at least one Pope during the Middle Ages, largely because it was ludicrously simple to use (unlike the Longbow which took years to master) and its bolts could punch through a knight’s armour without too much trouble at close range.
IIRC, Shepherd comes across a Krogan mechanic at one point in Mass Effect 2 and expresses surprise that such a thing exists, to which said Krogan points out someone has to keep all their military gear working.
It’s also alluded to that a lot of the Krogan problems (not counting the horrible genetic plague which has annihilated their birth rate) come from the Salarians (or it might have been the Turians, I forget which) showing up and giving them advanced technology like atomic weapons and laser guns.
If you ever played the original Civilisation, there’d inevitably be one civ in the game that just never got its shit together and was still derping around in the Bronze Age while you were in the modern era cranking out tanks and fighter jets and nuclear missiles because you had more production than you knew what to do with and you’d clocked out the tech tree ages ago.
So, for the sheer hell of it, you might decide to give this pitifully backward civ a nuclear missile*, at which point you’d be told your gift had caused a scientific breakthrough and the benefactors of your largesse had now discovered writing or masonry.
I imagine that’s what happened when the Krogans got nukes too, except they also decided to use them on each other, which is why their planet now looks like the Frogstar** .
*Purely in the interests of anthropology and science, you understand.
**Read or listen to *The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; it’s explained there.
One of my favourite bits in Baldur’s Gate 2 was being thrown into a dungeon infested with the undead and having to fight your way to freedom. Except that you still had Recall Potions, so every so often you had to teleport out of the dungeon and into the city to sell all the treasure and weapons you’d looted on the way out, before teleporting back to resume your escape.
The way I understand it, the Salarians uplifted the Krogan because they needed to use them as soldiers in the Rachni War. After the Krogan saved everyone’s asses from the Rachni, they turned their attention on conquering them. Then the Salarians introduced the genophage to stop the Krogan from supplanting the Rachni as Monster of the Week. The genophage caused their miscarriage rate to skyrocket, and the Krogan society to collapse in upon itself. Females were viciously fought over and all that nice technology was used for infighting. So they did ultimately end up using all that future tech on each other, but they were kind of pushed in that direction. If the Salarians hasn’t been able to pull off the genophage or something like it, it’s probable that the Krogan would have been using those weapons on everyone else instead of each other.
The problem with almost every zombie apocalypse is the zombies, which no one has done a sensible, realistic version of because an even remotely realistic version of a zombie apocalypse would have the zombies die off in droves all by themselves after the initial outbreak.
There are stories that deal with this obliquely - in some stories an enclosed community is duped into thinking the outside world is still unsafe when the zombies died off long ago - but then you’ve got another story, a pretty typical one.
That explains nothing. That presumes each zombie makes 3 new zombies each day, every day. But clearly they can’t meet their quota. And the survivors kill a lot of zombies each day, too. Plus, humans apparently keep giving birth.
Additionally, at the end of season 3 (I think), Rick tells the prisoners that only half the population is dead/zombified. So there are still 200,000 survivors in metro Atlanta alone.
The real failing is not the lack of resources, but the lack of survivors. Where are these 200,000 people hiding? That, and the sudden disappearance of ladders. Why can’t they just live in tree houses and rooftops?
As another person mentioned earlier in this thread, that’s the same problem with Stephen King’s The Stand. Given a 99.4% mortality rate and assuming that 1/2 of the survivors would somehow off themselves in the first week or two, that still leaves about 6,000 people on Manhattan. But Larry only sees 3-5 people (Rita, monster shouter, some others), though you would expect him to see more.
But those numbers in The Walking Dead… if true, there’s not a lot of thought behind that.