Well, for one, the surface of the Earth is rotating at 465 meters/second at the equator, which means your “earth sized mass directly over head” would have to be flown around the Earth overhead at a rate to maintain position. Furthermore, the presence of such a mass would pull the barycenter of the the common system right up to your waist, and the resulting system spinning so wildly to maintain angular momentum that you’d instantly exceed the Earth’s Roche limit. If you are not at the equator, you’ll immediately experience precession and nutation effects that will make the strongest of iron stomachs motion sick, except you’ll be flung around so energetically into the seismic catastrophe that is the release of stored strain and potential energy in the crust that you’ll be far too busy being pummeled by rocks and/or burned by lava and steam that you won’t have time to vomit. In short order, both the Earth and the countermass will elongate and then lose enough angular momentum to crash into one another, forming a new and larger planet, while the previous Earth’s Moon will ramble around waiting for things to settle down before finding its new orbit or wandering off to find a nice stable relationship with a well-behaved gas giant.
Sure. I recommend the same team that helped Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank tunnel their way to the Earth’s core, or Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz who made a horizontal toilet that generates ‘free’ hydrogen.
Something like that. Regular comic books were 10¢. I don’t remember how many pages but they were a lot longer than the regular books so 25¢ sounds right. The was a Giant Superman book that had several Brainiac stories and the tiny Kryptonians that lived in a bottle in the Fortress of Solitude.
Have a look at Robert L. Forward’s very interesting novel Dragon’s Egg. It’s full of interesting concepts, but one of them involves the use of several large and dense bodies (much smaller than planetary size) arranged around a position to create engineered gravitation.
I also wonder about MCU’s Scott being able to control that. The first film seems to indicate that one button shrinks to a predetermined point (the unbroken regulator?) and the other hand’s button grows to a predetermined point. I assume the quick ending in that movie was he shrunk smaller with a broken regulator, fixed it (let’s not go into how), and then went back to predetermined points of size/height.
In Civil War, he had “tried something” and could grow large. Presumably a constant point of the giant that he becomes. Hmm. Now I’m wondering, as I explain this out if they were internally consistent?
In Quantummania, then, they are pulled into the quantum realm. But they have suits. Why not just grow back to the established point? I know, I’m overthinking it, and Pym Particles are magic particles. It seems to me that having defined points means some sort of measurement that suit can make to know what to do. Why wouldn’t it take them to that point, of either being an ant sized in our world, or regular sized in our world? How did it become relativistic in the quantum world? How did they happen to shrink right where everyone was? I mean, if you are a human shaped person smaller than an atom, wouldn’t walking across the room the machine was in be years?
Of course, in Endgame, a plot point of Antman was his ability to learn how to grow and shrink and control his mass to do punches. While they can probably wave away that Tony can build the suits, how long did they train in them? Also, not like their were road signs in the quantum tunnels, so how did they know which ones to take for the correct time and space coordinates?
I want this to be true. Granted, the episodes we see are the conflict ones, and they do hint at long boring scientific ones. In any case, now I see starfleet as this big holodeck program set on earth in some remote location. Maybe they connect real ships to the controls in the holodeck but make up what the crew sees in each new system to let them think they overcame great odds when the ship itself does scans and reports it back. If it’s remote enough, maybe they Truman Show it so that they can go to the surface of a “new” world but it’s just a replicated set.
I have. It’s a fantastic book IMO. I don’t know if that was any influence on my suggestion, which I make only for entertainment purposes. I’m completely serious about my time machine. I’m sure I’m only 20 years away from a working version which will correspond with the development of practical fusion energy required to power it.
I had Superman annual #1 (2 copies in fact.) It was 25 cents, though I think regular comics had gone all the way up to 12 cents by then.
If I had held on to all those things, I’d be rich today.
To a certain degree, is that much different from how actual militaries work? No disrespect to our servicepeople, but the military tends to often recruit for that sweet spot of people who maybe don’t have much else going on post high school but are not so screwed up that they are actually drug addicts and criminals. Then they go off on adventures that the general public are largely indifferent to.
People in the military are not necessarily the “best and the brightest” outside of certain disciplines, such as piloting an aircraft. Which is not to say that the best and brightest in society don’t often have military background that maybe helped them get there. But objectively speaking, there are plenty of people who are considered “best and brightest” in fields such as engineering, athletics, management/leadership, even physical combat who have never spent a day in the military.
But I digress.
But other than that, your theory is not supported by several decades of movies and tv shows. Not to mention that it’s a pretty boring one. Stories about characters living in a constructed reality like The Matrix, The Truman Show, or Westworld are only compelling if those characters start to encounter evidence that questions their reality. If they (or the audience) never see such evidence, then what they experience is just the story (given that it’s all a constructed reality by the writers and producers anyway).
Even worse, if there is some big reveal at the end where “it was a dream / VR / hallucination the whole time” at the very end, the audience can feel cheated. It renders everything that we just went through with the characters as completely irrelevant.
The blasters, phasers, disrupters, in the future have no sights on them, it is just point and shoot. And everyone is a lousy shot. See Star Wars, but it is every other movie too
I would think that in the far future the guns would be smart guns that hit whatever you point them at. Even today jet fighter pilots don’t have to aim accuratly enough to hit their target, just close enough and weapons guidance does the rest. And even though you have a very high energy weapon, and you miss, they don’t seem to even put a mark on the wall or harm anything. Blaster marks on the wall?
Yes; as I mentioned in an earlier post, Stephen Baxter’s novel Timelike Infinity has a craft with artificial gravity created by a mesh of very small but very heavy black holes beneath the floor. One big problem with this sort of arrangement is that it increases the mass of your vessel significantly- so much so that the mass of the gravity generators far exceeds the mass of the rest of the ship. This reduces your acceleration and causes problems with inertia too.
I always mention to my mom what my old Spideys would be worth “if you hadn’t thrown them out… wait, you must’ve just hidden them somewhere, right?”.
But to be honest, none of my friends took care of their stash… we rolled 'em up and stuffed Avengers #1 in our back pockets.
Ha, I remember when comics went from 10¢ to 12… the publishers ran an editorial in each comic, apologizing!
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One episode of The Mandalorian had a battle going on in a desert town, and the view cut to two storm troopers in the desert, just sitting on their speeder bikes, bored. They were chatting and trying to shoot stuff. They both missed with almost every shot.
(I had to check out the credits… it was written/directed by Taika Waititi)
Right, other than some oddities like Action Comics 1, collectors expect their purchases to be at least near mint. Not as pTerry put it-It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”
Our old comics would be worth some money, maybe - Avengers 1, in GOOD is $2200 or less, but Near mint is just under $90,000. I suspect our Fair copies could bring a few hundreds.
Not necessarily; any time travel device based on a Gödel metric will not be able to take a path that goes back to a point in time before the machine was activated.
It seems clear that the first use would not to go back and record historical events or buy a sports almanac or prevent/facilitate the assassination of various historical figures, but instead to acquire/recover early issues of various comic books in pristine condition.