Yeah, if you have to put song credits on the screen then you’re doing scifi drama wrong. We don’t need Zeppelin (not that Zeppelin isn’t great), we need coherent plots.
Another character needs to die, that’s the only thing that would make sense. They are getting away with far too much to be believable. Food just isn’t a concern, where are they getting food from? It never snows or rains any more either.
And I was confused, who was the prisoner that Charlie’s mother tried to con into revealing the location of the necklace? Was he the DOD guy? Who was in the silo/collider with the short-haired black lady? Wasn’t that the DOD guy?
I haven’t watched the show since about the second week, so can anyone tell me if the characters still have perfect, shampooed hair and clean clothes? And are they any closer to revealing the big secret about how the pendants can be used to restore electricity?
I was interested in the show until it became obvious that they were going to tease out stuff like the bit with the pendants over many episodes.
I assume there is some kind of Earth-wide field that dampens electricity and the pendants block/repulse that field. I don’t think they are “teasing out” anything, it’s just going to be some made up science that won’t affect the plot at all. All we need to know now is whether these pendants’ area of effect can be expanded or the field permanently cleared.
I was pleasantly surprised at the reveal of what was actually causing the worldwide blackout. I mean, it was still sci-fi nonsense, but at least it was unexpected (to me) sci-fi nonsense.
They had made billions of microscopic nano-machines that consume electricity and reproduce. I think they were only supposed to deploy in Iraq but they got out of control and now they blanket the Earth, blonde mom said they are breathing them in as she speaks (wouldn’t that be bad for your heart and brain?) Anyway there is a facility called The Tower that used to have some sort of control over them, so blonde mom and beard guy are going on a suicide mission there. Charlie made a half-hearted attempt to go with her but didn’t persist for some reason.
Let’s face it. It’s hocus-pocus. Magic. Voodoo. Whatever. But taking it at face value, Rachel told Aaron (I had to google those names because this is pretty much a background noise show for me) that there were “two hundred quadrillion” (i.e. 200 × 10[sup]15[/sup]) bots in the Earth’s atmosphere which meant that he was likely breathing them as they talked. This sounded dubious to me as the Earth’s atmosphere is really, really big so I crunched the numbers (correctly I hope):
The “effective volume” of the Earth’s atmosphere is about 4.2 billion cubic kilometers. This figure is the surface area of the Earth (509 million square kilometers) times the “effective thickness” of the atmosphere (8.2 kilometers, or about 27,000 ft). The effective thickness and volume are what the thickness and volume of the atmosphere would be if the entire atmosphere were at sea level conditions.
200 quadrillion bots / 4.2 billion cubic kilometers = 47.6 million bots per cubic kilometer.
Tidal volume: that volume of air moved into or out of the lungs during quiet breathing. This is about 0.5 liters for an adult human, male or female.
There are 1 trillion liters in a cubic km, i.e. 2 trillion breaths. So if the little suckers were evenly distributed…
2 trillion breaths / 47.6 million nanobots ≈ 42,000 breaths per nanobot.
Let’s assume 24 breaths per minute. A bit on the high end of range, but Aaron doesn’t seem particularly fit.
42,000 / 24 = 1750 minutes ≈ 29 hours. So a little less than one bot inhaled per day assuming my math is correct. (It’s early morning here on the west coast.)
I believe I heard that they were already dispersed (propagating?) in the atmosphere and then got switched on or activated somehow. As I said earlier, I don’t pay close attention unless something interesting happens so have they explained how the [del]midi-chlorians[/del] nanobots suppress electricity in things like cars and radios but not in biological systems?