For purposes of this thread, a “death ray” is a directed-beam weapon that
kills all living things it touches; e.g., if it hits a man, it kills him and all the bacteria and viruses in his body; and
causes no other damage than the cessation of all life functions in its target zone – rather like a neutron bomb in beam form. Ideally, it wouldn’t even leave any visible marks on its victim and a coroner (who was unaware of the death ray’s existence) would be hard-pressed to name a cause of death; it would appear that one second the man and all his bacteria were alive, and then the next second they simply stopped living as though an off-switch had been flipped.
A laser wouldn’t qualify as a “death ray” as here defined. Would anything else? Any theoretically possible weapon?
Classic Charles Addams cartoon: A patent attorney’s office. An inventor is sitting in a chair while the lawyer points some kind of ray-gun device out the office window. Caption: “Death ray, fiddlesticks! It hardly even slows them down!”
As I understand it, as long as the individual parts of a cell are in the same location in reference to each other, the organism can and will continue living. As soon as you change the chemical or physical characteristics of a cell it has the possibility of being fatal, but would also qualify as damage. Life as yet cannot be distinguished from a series of chemical reactions in the body; disturbing those reactions can cause death. There is no “life” that you can stop without also stopping these processes.
My best stab at such a weapon would be something that induced every neuron in the target’s brain to fire at the same time. This would, I suspect, render the target brain-dead for no apparent reason. I doubt it would effect bacteria tho…
As others have pointed out, condition #1 could be met, but I don’t see how #2 could possibly be accomplished. I mean, something has to change in going from life to death.
Um, what the hell is everyone talking about with this 1920s death ray? I’ve been seeing it on the board lately, and I’m completely confused. What’s the joke?
Back to the OP, would you consider a slow neutron particle beam weapon? Focusing the thing would be hard, but at least you’d get your neutron bomb equivalent. I do doubt that you’d get an instant Ming Mongo 1920’s style death ray death though.
Peter Nicholls’ Science Ficxtion Encyclopedia (and the Nichols and Clute follow-up Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) had an excellent take on this. They noted that the “death ray” was a wimpy science fiction conceit that “allowed someone to kill off his opponent with a minimum of bloody pieces to sweep up afterwards” (I’m semiquoting from memory).
This struck me as eminently correct. As a kid I always wondered what would happen if a “death ray” just grazed you, hitting only your pinky, for instance. Would the whole person die? or just the pinky? Writers who used such ideas – usually in SciFi comics or strips, avoided such issues, just as the concept avoided the entire issue of creating and dealing with dead body. Much easier to have your miracle weapon expeditiously dispose of the corpse. In th Real World, we have weapons that have more limited and nasty effects. Even neutron bombs cause a lot of collateral damage.
I recently had an extremely detailed dream about living in a sort of WWII environment; being on the run and a refugee, etc. But this apparently was in a future time or a parallel universe because the weapons weren’t guns. They turned flesh into transparent blue-white jelly. I never saw any weapons during the dream, just lots of hiding in wrecked buildings or under corpses while trying to avoid being killed. But I saw lots of carnage in the form of half-skeleton bodies and piles of skeletons, all covered with blue-white goo. And refugees with horrific wounds, but no blood and guts, just patches of the sky-blue jelly with bones visible inside. And a weird chemical smell saturating everything, sort of like bromine mixed with alcohol odor.
Beware. If you spend years carefully observing way too many of your dreams, your dreamscape eventually changes, and everything becomes far more disturbing NOT because the dreams are incoherent and crazy, but because they’ve become half-sensible and extremely detailed.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but if something tears up the hemoglobin in animal tissue, the major color will be gone (think blue-white anemic skin.) If the tissue structures on the scale of light’s wavelength are torn up, then tissue becomes transparent. But it wouldn’t be totally transparent, it would still scatter shorter wavelengths. It might look dirty jello, or perhaps look like “aerogel” does, i.e. like blue-white translucent goo.
See what I mean? …so sensible that it becomes MORE disturbing. It took days for the creepy images to fade away. How the hell did my brain come up with that stuff. Just like WWII, but instead of mud, bodies, and bloody bandages, we have mud, skeletons, and blue-white jelly everywhere.
Larry Niven, in some of his stories, postulated a beam weapon that suppressed the positive charge on protons on whatever it touched.
Consequently, any atoms struck by the beam became VERY suddenly NEGATIVELY charged, with no counterbalancing positive charge.
Consequently, the atoms tended to repel each other. Violently. Anything that got hit with the beam erupted into monatomic dust. A literal “disintegrator beam.” I’d call that a pretty good try at a death ray.
And, if you’d rather go “reality based,” try intense gamma ray bombardment. I seem to recall that nothing has lived very long after that treatment.
