There’s a novel I read that uses this - people can create clones of themselves (with varying but normally short lifespans) that will perform tasks for them. Causes a lot of society problems because the best plumber/actor/prostitute/etc can clone themselves for hire, and the not as good people all end up unemployed.
I read a similar story decades ago. Someone here on the Dope reminded me that it was Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budrys.
Dr. Edward Hawks runs a top-secret project for the United States Navy investigating a large alien artifact found on the Moon. Hawks has created a matter transmitter which scans a person or object to make a copy at receivers on the Moon. The earthbound person is placed in a state of sensory deprivation which allows him to share the experiences of his doppelgänger . The copies enter and explore the alien labyrinth, but are killed for violating the unknown rules in force within the structure.
Because the more powerful would just spend all of their time bullying and humiliating the less powerful, like they did in that episode? I know I would.
We know it wears off. Just have a carefully screened and psych evaluated assault team standing by. Hey, look. It’s the Borg. The team gets the drug, they proceed to rip the cube apart like tissue paper without leaving their bunks. Drug wears off. No hu-hu.
This is all S.O.P. in the Eclipse Phase role-playing game. People also regularly back themselves up, because they would be stupid not to. For dangerous missions, clone(s) can be prepared without sensitive knowledge (in case they are captured and hacked or interrogated), may be equipped with self-destruct devices (with or without the option for a final data transmission), etc.
It’s no fan wank. It’s literally in the script.
BEN
Yes, indeed. If it's a fast ship.
HAN
Fast ship? You've never heard of the
Millennium Falcon?
BEN
Should I have?
HAN
It's the ship that made the Kessel
run in less than twelve parsecs!
Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with
obvious misinformation.
HAN
I've outrun Imperial starships, not
the local bulk-cruisers, mind you.
I'm talking about the big Corellian
ships now. She's fast enough for
you, old man. What's the cargo?
Yes he did say it exactly as written.
The fan-wank is in working out why he used a measure of distance instead of a measure of time.
2001. Arguably 2010. I don’t recall if the late 1950s TV show Men Into Space was accurate in this regard.
it doesn’t make sense for a space pilot to make this mistake, even a bad pilot who is lying. We should just note it down as an error in the script writer’s part and leave it at that.
I have never argued that Star Wars showcases good writing.
As an Optics guy, the visibility of phaser beams has always bothered me. I understand the reason for it – you want the people at home to understand what’s going on. And if you realistically just show the guy pointing the phaser and something it’s pointed at glowing or blowing up, it doesn’t look or feel right. (Forbidden Planet, although it’s one of my all-time favorites, and almost certainly an inspiration for Star Trek, is even worse – you can see the “Blaster” beams being emitted in short bursts of light that travel at eye-trackable speed) H.G. wells got this aspect of “ray guns” correct, way back in 1895-7 in War of the Worlds. The Martian heat-ray isn’t visible as it travels through the air – you just see its effects where it strikes. But even the illustrators in the 19th century didn’t draw it that way. They showed visible beams coming out of the Martian Heat Guns. The only ones I know who did it right were Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. II . But Alan Moore always was a stickler for correct interpretation of details of the 19th century source material. But I digress.
You see this sort of thing with hand phasers and the big ship phasers. You even see phaser beams “bouncing off” of things, like the Doomsday Machine. But what bothers me the most is the depiction in the third season episode Wink of an Eye . There are plenty of things that bother me about that episode and the notion of really speeding people up (an idea that goes back at least to H.G. Wells’ “The New Accelerator”) , but it’s the phaser that really stands out. When Kirk fires a phaser, you can actually see the beam shooting out Ver-r-r-ry slow-w-w-l-l-ly, so you can simply walk out of the way. If people can evade the beam like that, and the beam is moving at lightspeed, then people can walk around at speeds faster than the speed of light. Or maybe phasers move more slowly than light speed, which seems ridiculous.
But then, how can they even see that phaser beam moving so slowly. Presumably the light from the phaser is getting to their eyes virtually instantaneously, while the beam itself is moving slowly enough to see its transit. And if the phaser is moving at lightspeed that’s grotesquely inconsistent.
You see my problems?
Well, having the beam be visible is good from a user interface view - it lets the person firing it know what is being hit (similar to tracer rounds in a machine gun). How you make that happen is another issue (and I’d want it to be an option - a phaser sniper rifle would of course have it turned off).
I guess it could be visible because all the molecules in the path are being turned to plasma? Although that does lead to a question about how ‘stun’ works, and probably another about why everything nearby doesn’t immediately ignite from the heat of the plasma.
It could be visible for a lot of reasons, most likely scattering. But that isn’t my main concern – it’s seeing the beam visibly progress that’s wrong. Also, when Kirk is speeded up, he can’t really be speeded up enough to see the beam progress so slowly that you can walk away. And then, how are they seeing that slowly-advancing beam? The light generated by/scattered by the beam is magically getting to your eye instantaneously.
Hollywood and comic books have similar inconsistencies when they grow or shrink things. In one 1960s comics The Atom gets so small that he’s on the level of atomic particles, and he sees a photon. How can you see a photon, when seeing involves the absorption of photons? You can’t see a photon by photons reflected from it – photon-photon scattering is an extremely low-probability event. And you can’t see it by photons emitted from it, because photons don’t emit more photons.
I’m certainly overthinking this.
Well, it’s apparently not shooting/emitting EM radiation (no idea what it is though). And once you can see the beam moving with normal human vision, then fast Kirk being able to walk away from it is actually consistent (and how often can you say that something in ST is consistent?).
Except they made it canon in Solo.
I just wish the movie writers would “middle” think it. At least try. How are people that can see photons even breathing,
But hey, hollywood writers won’t even look at a map, so expecting smart science is asking too much.
In another comic The Atom is depicted literally inside an atom, thinking “I can breathe inside this oxygen atom.” Riiiiight. It’s clearly a sort of inside joke by the writer (Gardner Fox, I think, who generally strove for scientific accuracy) in which he’s effectively saying “I realize that this makes absolutely no scientific sense, but here’s a BS rationalization.” God forbid the Atom should take refuge in a Xenon atom. He’d go to sleep.
There is a point t this sort of thing – Einstein is supposed to have thought about Special Relativity by imaging what he would see if riding on a photon. In one Green Lantern comic I recall his using his Power Ring to see what happened when something shrank away, and couldn’t watch any further because the object got smaller than the wavelengths of light – Gardner Fox actually using that scientific accuracy, for once. Reading that as a kid opened up new understanding about science. One of my big question is why people depicting photons do it by showing them as perfect, hard-edged spheres. That model can’t be even approximately right, for various reasons. But that’s a wjhole thread in itself.
We can just toss that into the pile of all the stupid stuff that happened in the movies since 1983, along with the concept of “canon.”
In regards to shrinking powers and other superpowers it can take me out of a story if the authors try over-explain everything with techno-babble instead just accepting the premise that the powers just exist.
Because explain it too much just makes me think of all the inconsistencies and usually introduce plot holes.
So do the Star Trek writers, as that’s why they had to create Heisenberg compensators. They know that it would take more than molecular resolution to copy a working system so completely. You’d need to know where every subatomic particle was, along with its velocity and momentum.
One such story that really bugs me (and is still for some reason highly regarded by some) is the 1936 novella He Who Shrank by Henry Hasse. Even aside from the idea that ingesting a chemical agent could somehow induce something to shrink down into the subatomic realm (far beyond the reach of the molecular forces chemicals affect) is what happens afterwards. This is one of those “atoms within atoms” stories where each atom is a miniature solar system, and our hero finds himself shrinking down into the vacuum between atoms. So he just scootches himself along, like he’s on a floor, as if he’s using some kind of interatomic friction to push against. What ought to be happening is that he simply wriggles about and gesticulates while is center of mass remains fixed and unmoving (at at most drifting with whatever velocity he had).