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Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Pharmaskittle posted:

Neat! So barfights on Ceres, for instance, would be less dangerous until weapons got involved. And even then you'd have to grab-n-stab someone prison style to be quite as effective.

I would expect fewer black eyes. In addition to being harder to punch them while standing, it would be harder to pin them and beat them while they’re down.

Glassings are about equally dangerous since you’re swinging down on someone.

Bar fights might actually be more deadly due to chokings/strangulations. It’s not any easier in low gravity, but it becomes more attractive when a fist fight feels like a slap fight.

Tackles could be interesting. If you got some speed, maybe from launching off a wall, you and your target would go flying.

e: I think you could get like a minute of Ceres gravity in the Vomit Comet. NASA needs to organise a martial arts tournament.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Feb 13, 2017

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Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



Milky Moor posted:

That's just the injection point. Amos gives Miller some meds when he meets him in the bar.

Yeah, that's just a portable delivery mechanism so they don't need to sit in an auto-doc every day or so. They still have to top it off every now and then.

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?
Yeah, it kind of seems like fights where you couldn't get in a quick haymaker actually have the potential to be a lot more dangerous. Most fights that aren't serious end after a punch or two, but your options to quickly end a fight are way more limited if you're reduced to rolling around and wrestling. Lots more gouging, choking, scratching, or other tactics that might cause serious damage.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
I never really thought about how dangerous an Earther like Amos would be in a fight, beyond “he’s stronger”.

If anything, low gravity magnifies an Earther’s advantage vs. a Belter.

Lightweights have some advantages in fights on Earth, but those advantages evaporate in low gravity.

You can’t run circles around your opponent. You have to move the same body mass as on Earth but you have a fraction of the friction to do it with.

But if Amos comes running at you, he’s still going to hit like a tonne of bricks. And as always, being built like a bulldog is great for grappling.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Feb 13, 2017

Rocksicles
Oct 19, 2012

by Nyc_Tattoo

Platystemon posted:

I would expect fewer black eyes. In addition to being harder to punch them while standing, it would be harder to pin them and beat them while they’re down.

Glassings are about equally dangerous since you’re swinging down on someone.

Bar fights might actually be more deadly due to chokings/strangulations. It’s not any easier in low gravity, but it becomes more attractive when a fist fight feels like a slap fight.

Tackles could be interesting. If you got some speed, maybe from launching off a wall, you and your target would go flying.

e: I think you could get like a minute of Ceres gravity in the Vomit Comet. NASA needs to organise a martial arts tournament.

With the muscle loss and bone density, they'd probably have a lot more.

Svaha
Oct 4, 2005

Platystemon posted:

Holden and Miller ought to have straight‐up died from acute radiation sickness.

Surviving that is a medical miracle on its own.

It's a fair enough conceit though. Dealing with radiation and its effects is right up near the top of the list of prerequisites for having people living and working outside of the protection of earth's magnetosphere. So you don't have to suspend your belief too far.

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009


ITT people who didn't pay attention in high school science

Svaha
Oct 4, 2005

Josh Lyman posted:

ITT people who didn't pay attention in high school science

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Calling out people for being ignorant is fine, but at least take the time to correct them instead of just sitting there all :smug: and proclaiming everyone ignorant while contributing nothing.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Having really good technology for dealing with ionizing radiation's one of the things you'd expect in the Expanse setting. Making radiation cancer just a mildly annoying chronic illness makes sense.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Grand Fromage posted:

Having really good technology for dealing with ionizing radiation's one of the things you'd expect in the Expanse setting. Making radiation cancer just a mildly annoying chronic illness makes sense.

It’s not hard to imagine better cancer treatments.

Acute radiation syndrome just wrecks all your cells, though. Treating that is like treating someone who has been cooked all the way through.

That’s not to say that it will always be impossible, but you can live in space without having the technology to treat bad cases of acute radiation syndrome.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Platystemon posted:

It’s not hard to imagine better cancer treatments.

"Good enough" is the general theme of Expanse technology other than the Epstein drive.

Phobophilia
Apr 26, 2008

by Hand Knit
Well, the chase to the Roci was basically running off adrenaline and stims to keep basic functions going, and it took them getting into the MMC med bay for proper care. It could probably flush out dead cells, keep tissues oxygenated, and stimulate stem cells to repair* Holden and Miller to some resemblance of their former selves.

*This is the really hard thing to imagine, by rights they should all be dead. Maybe the radiation drugs could stop the stem cells from all dying, but they'd be shredded cancerous monstrosities. Whatever, just imagine they had the tech after the PCs failed their perception rolls in that gaming sesh.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Radiation exposure is weird though. You can be fried immediately, but you can also receive a lethal dose and be bleeding from everywhere and falling apart for a bit, then you recover and feel fine for days. It's called the walking ghost phase. Then your insides basically liquify and you die horribly. We can't treat that but who knows what future medical tech could do. There's no reason they'd have to be instantly dead just because they got a lethal radiation dose.

WhiskeyWhiskers
Oct 14, 2013


"هذا ليس عادلاً."
"هذا ليس عادلاً على الإطلاق."
"كان هناك وقت الآن."
(السياق الخفي: للقراءة)
Your cells are still completely hosed. And being able to fix them with fairly routine ship-board first aid strays pretty far from the 'good enough' feel of the rest of the setting. It's not something that particularly bothered me though.

Svaha
Oct 4, 2005

Platystemon posted:

It’s not hard to imagine better cancer treatments.

Acute radiation syndrome just wrecks all your cells, though. Treating that is like treating someone who has been cooked all the way through.

That’s not to say that it will always be impossible, but you can live in space without having the technology to treat bad cases of acute radiation syndrome.
Fair enough. I did say you don't have to stretch your suspension of disbelief *too* far, implying that there was some disbelief being stretched.

We have no idea what sort of radiation it was, (other than "a mega dose" and "the blue-purple kind",) or what those autodoc armband things actually do, and we probably never will, so the whole thing is a bit of a big shrug for me.

I can let a little vagueness and hand-waving go in a series that does other science-y stuff so well, I guess.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Your cells are still completely hosed. And being able to fix them with fairly routine ship-board first aid strays pretty far from the 'good enough' feel of the rest of the setting. It's not something that particularly bothered me though.

Cells can be replaced. The problem is they won't replicate properly/at all anymore after that kind of exposure, but if you had the ability to manipulate DNA at will and repair it with nanites or something you could fix the damage. Only allow the repaired cells to replicate and the wrecked ones will gradually be pruned out.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Grand Fromage posted:

Cells can be replaced. The problem is they won't replicate properly/at all anymore after that kind of exposure, but if you had the ability to manipulate DNA at will and repair it with nanites or something you could fix the damage. Only allow the repaired cells to replicate and the wrecked ones will gradually be pruned out.

With the Power of the Protomolecule®

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Platystemon posted:

With the Power of the Protomolecule®

We will remake humanity. :buddy:

Svaha
Oct 4, 2005

It's a bit weird what with everything we have known about space for so long that the subject of exposure to radiation doesn't really come up at all in science fiction outside post nuclear apocalypse stories, and those are a bit iffy most of the time.

I'm trying to come up with an example and I'm drawing a total blank. I think most of the time they just pretend that cosmic radiation isn't a thing, or you just take some magic pills to make it go away. Maybe someone else can think of an example of it being depicted realistically?

Platystemon posted:

With the Power of the Protomolecule®
Holden: "Hey, did anyone else notice that there autodocs were manufactured by Protogen®? Well. That certainly explains some things in a convenient way"

Svaha fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Feb 13, 2017

Dancer
May 23, 2011

Svaha posted:

Fair enough. I did say you don't have to stretch your suspension of disbelief *too* far, implying that there was some disbelief being stretched.

We have no idea what sort of radiation it was, (other than "a mega dose" and "the blue-purple kind",) or what those autodoc armband things actually do, and we probably never will, so the whole thing is a bit of a big shrug for me.

I can let a little vagueness and hand-waving go in a series that does other science-y stuff so well, I guess.

I don't necessarily consider this a massive deal, I can keep watching this cool show without going "omg immersion ruined", but radiation is kindof a different beast from almost everything else that gets you sick, and we can tell how bad the dose was from the dudes' reactions, and it is almost certain we will *never* be able to treat radiation sickness like that, short of consciousness transfer (lol) or some other method of giving the victims literal new bodies.

The radiation will basically have literally broken a shitload of molecules in their bodies. A great deal of the proteins in their body can't do their job anymore, and are probably actively toxic. The system that's supposed to break them down is a massive complex, that's also been compromised in a significant number of cells. These cells can do nothing except kill themselves at this point, hoping that the neighbouring cells' systems for cleaning up suicided cells still work.
Then there's the DNA damage. Which also comes with all sorts of complications, a bunch of which can only be fixed by the cell being replaced using some nearby intact stem cell, which is unlikely.
While attempting (and almost certainly failing) to deal with this damage, every system of the body will collapse. Most of the body could theoretically be pushed to continue to function mechanically, and we can maybe imagine a future where the autodoc legit can do that, but the degree of radiation shown will make it certain that bringing the body back to being functional is monumentally hard. There's just too much garbage that needs to be cleaned, and too much information (in the form of patterns and structures) that's missing.

I still take greater issue with the protomolecule :V. First, lol at the captured scientists job title of "nanoinformatician". Secondly... jfc biology doesn't work this way. This one is I guess more forgivable because I assume theyre going to make it necessary for the plot (I'm assuming the loving bonkers biological definition is in there to justify the protomolecule giving rise to sentient organisms, like the one we saw on Eros in the last scene of S1. Which also fely like a big dissapointment to me, but that's life)

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Thing with the protomolecule is it's technology from a civilization that was able to build that and sling it at Earth in a big iceball billions of years ago. They're advanced in ways that are beyond comprehension.

Dancer
May 23, 2011
To the person who mentioned nanites: I can see nanites moving and doing stuff in a fluid environment. It can fix cell membranes for instance. Getting to the DNA and working through all the molecules associated with it with machinery big and complex enough to correct stuff like chromosome translocation, and chromosomes simply being broken in bits and pieces (and doing this before "cell clean-up" gets rid of the bad-looking DNA first") is a really hard sell.

Kassad
Nov 12, 2005

It's about time.

Svaha posted:

It's a bit weird what with everything we have known about space for so long that the subject of exposure to radiation doesn't really come up at all in science fiction outside post nuclear apocalypse stories, and those are a bit iffy most of the time.

I'm trying to come up with an example and I'm drawing a total blank. I think most of the time they just pretend that cosmic radiation isn't a thing, or you just take some magic pills to make it go away. Maybe someone else can think of an example of it being depicted realistically?


In Red Mars, the spaceship gets hit by a solar storm during the initial trip. There's a radiation shelter consisting of a cylinder split in half along its length: one half for the crew, the other half is filled with water and lead (IIRC) as a shield. The cylinder is designed to keep the shield between the crew shelter and the source of radiation at all times. There are smaller shelters in other parts of the ship for animals and plants brought on the trip. Oh, and sensitive electronics too. They get warned in advance by NASA and pack everything up in about an hour. Once on Mars, the first few settlements are built underground to limit exposure. After a while, they start building tent cities using a material that absorbs radiation IIRC. And a group of scientists invent an anti-aging treatment that repairs DNA damage, which also helps with long-term radiation exposure as long as people get the treatment every few years.

Toast Museum
Dec 3, 2005

30% Iron Chef

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Your cells are still completely hosed. And being able to fix them with fairly routine ship-board first aid strays pretty far from the 'good enough' feel of the rest of the setting. It's not something that particularly bothered me though.

To be fair, an auto-doc like that is fancy high-end MCRN hardware, not something widely available, and (I forget if this detail made it into the show) Holden and Miller were cooked enough that the thing basically had to be tricked into attempting actual treatment rather than hospice care.

Dancer
May 23, 2011

Grand Fromage posted:

Thing with the protomolecule is it's technology from a civilization that was able to build that and sling it at Earth in a big iceball billions of years ago. They're advanced in ways that are beyond comprehension.

I'm not eloquent enough to make the proper case, but how I see it, the level of science is not "close to lightspeed travel" (who the gently caress knows it might work somehow, we're just way too stoopid to do it), but "infinite motion machine" (I.e. It just can't happen). The protomolecule's stated ability to assume "function and structure" off the bat, really feels like it's just not how (bio)chemistry can work. It's gonna be even crazier if (and I hope to god they won't do this) we encounter protomolecule organisms who've retained some human personality. I can totally see them justify it ("hey when the PM invaded his body, the structure of the brain was preserved. Now it's just using that structure to attain its own eeeevil ends").

Gonna stop now. I really do think it's a great show :v: . I just wished it stopped at cold war politics and oppressed peoples rising up and cool space fighting and grey goo instead of... this.

Svaha
Oct 4, 2005

Kassad posted:

In Red Mars, the spaceship gets hit by a solar storm during the initial trip. There's a radiation shelter consisting of a cylinder split in half along its length: one half for the crew, the other half is filled with water and lead (IIRC) as a shield. The cylinder is designed to keep the shield between the crew shelter and the source of radiation at all times. There are smaller shelters in other parts of the ship for animals and plants brought on the trip. Oh, and sensitive electronics too. They get warned in advance by NASA and pack everything up in about an hour. Once on Mars, the first few settlements are built underground to limit exposure. After a while, they start building tent cities using a material that absorbs radiation IIRC. And a group of scientists invent an anti-aging treatment that repairs DNA damage, which also helps with long-term radiation exposure as long as people get the treatment every few years.
I haven't read that series yet. Nice example, especially since it's supposedly being made into a tv series itself.
(I say supposedly, because it's being made by spikeTv and the show-runner quit. If it ever gets made it will likely be an atrocity)

Svaha fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Feb 13, 2017

gohmak
Feb 12, 2004
cookies need love

Accretionist posted:

Power comes from your legs. You'd need mag-boots or something to plant your feet against. Also, the recipient wouldn't have as much inertia so they'd move with the blow to a greater degree, robbing you of impact force.

I expect low-G hand-to-hand would be even more about grappling/gouging/etc. than it is in full-G.

Which brings me to my only regret about season one. Robbing us of Miller visiting Julie Mao's space BJJ class.

gohmak
Feb 12, 2004
cookies need love

Kassad posted:

In Red Mars, the spaceship gets hit by a solar storm during the initial trip. There's a radiation shelter consisting of a cylinder split in half along its length: one half for the crew, the other half is filled with water and lead (IIRC) as a shield. The cylinder is designed to keep the shield between the crew shelter and the source of radiation at all times. There are smaller shelters in other parts of the ship for animals and plants brought on the trip. Oh, and sensitive electronics too. They get warned in advance by NASA and pack everything up in about an hour. Once on Mars, the first few settlements are built underground to limit exposure. After a while, they start building tent cities using a material that absorbs radiation IIRC. And a group of scientists invent an anti-aging treatment that repairs DNA damage, which also helps with long-term radiation exposure as long as people get the treatment every few years.

Seveneves all the males die.

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009


Svaha posted:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Calling out people for being ignorant is fine, but at least take the time to correct them instead of just sitting there all :smug: and proclaiming everyone ignorant while contributing nothing.
My point is a lot of complaints in this thread about tactical realism and what not are based on bad science.

Subyng
May 4, 2013
It's possible the dose of radiation they received wasn't actually that lethal. After all how would they know if they didn't measure it.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Dancer posted:

I still take greater issue with the protomolecule :V. First, lol at the captured scientists job title of "nanoinformatician". Secondly... jfc biology doesn't work this way. This one is I guess more forgivable because I assume theyre going to make it necessary for the plot (I'm assuming the loving bonkers biological definition is in there to justify the protomolecule giving rise to sentient organisms, like the one we saw on Eros in the last scene of S1. Which also fely like a big dissapointment to me, but that's life)

Pellisworth
Jun 20, 2005

Dancer posted:

I still take greater issue with the protomolecule :V. First, lol at the captured scientists job title of "nanoinformatician". Secondly... jfc biology doesn't work this way. This one is I guess more forgivable because I assume theyre going to make it necessary for the plot (I'm assuming the loving bonkers biological definition is in there to justify the protomolecule giving rise to sentient organisms, like the one we saw on Eros in the last scene of S1. Which also fely like a big dissapointment to me, but that's life)

It fits with actual biology just fine, and bioinformatics is a major field of research right now.

You're familiar with the RNA world hypothesis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world RNA is unique in that in can both store information (like DNA) and catalyze chemical reactions (like protein enzymes). The protomolecule works just like that, it replicates and adapts to its environment. It makes perfectly good sense that aliens would sling the protomolecule to another solar system, it's self-replicating so you just need to "seed" the protomolecule somewhere it can grow, and it adapts to whatever conditions it encounters.

edit: like just imagine it's an exotic silicon-based DNA-like thing. Carbon is actually really scarce in the universe while rocky planets like Earth are absolutely lousy with silicate minerals. Like, 90% of the crust.

I almost did a post-doc with the lady scientist that thought she'd discovered arsenic-based life (arsenic is another carbon analogue), thankfully I didn't because it turned out to not be true and kind of sloppy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1 But, there's such a thing as the shadow biosphere hypothesis where there might be wildly different forms of life on Earth that we just aren't aware of or looking for.

The protomolecule is not really that outlandish, I've been impressed with most everything the Expanse has done in terms of science and being fairly "hard" sci-fi.

Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Feb 13, 2017

Toast Museum
Dec 3, 2005

30% Iron Chef

Subyng posted:

It's possible the dose of radiation they received wasn't actually that lethal. After all how would they know if they didn't measure it.

In the books, radiation detectors appear to be a standard feature of hand terminals, and theirs basically give them a "you're hosed" signal.

quote:

While the ex-cop leaned against the corridor wall and coughed, Holden took out his terminal to shut off the buzzing. But the alarm flashing on its screen wasn’t an air-contamination alert. It was the venerable three wedge shapes pointing inward. Radiation. As he watched, the symbol, which should have been white, shifted through an angry orange color to dark red.

Miller was looking at his too, his expression unreadable.

“We’ve been dosed,” Holden said.

“I’ve never actually seen the detector activate,” Miller said, his voice rough and faint after his coughing fit. “What does it mean when the thing is red?”

“It means we’ll be bleeding from our rectums in about six hours,” Holden said.

NmareBfly
Jul 16, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!


Toast Museum posted:

To be fair, an auto-doc like that is fancy high-end MCRN hardware, not something widely available, and (I forget if this detail made it into the show) Holden and Miller were cooked enough that the thing basically had to be tricked into attempting actual treatment rather than hospice care.

They mention having to switch off hospice mode but it's a single quick line. If I recall correctly, there's also stuff in the book about the auto doc NOT being a standard piece of equipment. Remember that the crew stole salvaged a completely top of the line boat from the flagship of the entire fleet. It's not too surprising to me if it has a crazy advanced medical system, because it might need to shuttle high risk VIPs and poo poo.

That said the realest depiction of rad sickness in space is probably Seveneves. There's some really good stuff in there in terms of people dying slow, depressing deaths.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Platystemon posted:

Acute radiation syndrome just wrecks all your cells, though. Treating that is like treating someone who has been cooked all the way through.

No, that'll just flat out kill you, no ionization required.

Radiation is going to break a lot of DNA. It doesn't do this directly by smacking into DNA molecules and breaking them (well, it does, but that's a comparatively minor effect. What it mainly does is smack into water molecules in your cells, knocking electrons loose and creating hydroxyl free radicals, which create a chain reaction of of various reactive oxygen species that eventually chemically damage your DNA by breaking bonds and leading to various cross-linkages where there shouldn't be any. If enough damage accumulates, either the cell undergoes apoptosis and gracefully kills itself, or the cell can't divide successfully and will die the next time it undergoes mitosis. And cells already in mitosis are hypersusceptible to the effects of radiation in the first place (for reasons unknown, chromatin in cells undergoing mitosis is way more susceptible to breaking strands than in regular cells, and broken strands that wouldn't lead to cell death wind up killing mitotic cells instead of being repaired by ordinary cellular mechanisms).

That's why radiation sickness has the effects it does: the damage is going to show up first in cells that undergo rapid cycles of reproduction. The cells making up your intestinal lining, your hair follicles, the stem cells in your bone marrow that sit there doing nothing but dividing rapidly to generate blood cells, sperm, all that stuff takes the brunt of the damage. There are more cells undergoing mitosis at any time, so more of them are susceptible and die right away, and ones that survive but are too damaged to replicate themselves are going to die shortly. Cells that don't divide much at all aren't affected much. Not much happens with your muscle tissue, or your central nervous system (you'll get nervous system involvement at huge doses, but that's not so much a direct effect on the nerve cells themselves but rather the death of endothelial cells leading to vascular leakage, which leads to edema and increased intracranial pressure).

Miller and Holden start puking within a few minutes of exposure, which means they took a dose of around 8 grays. With today's medicine, that's going to kill virtually anyone within a month, at most. With intense medical care, well, it'll still probably kill you, but it might not. To get someone though that, in the very short term you need to prevent them from dying due to the hypotension and electrolyte imbalance from all the fluid loss and GI hemorrhaging that's going on. In the slightly longer term, you need prevent them from dying from the infections they're now hugely susceptible to due to their severe leukopenia. Once you have that under control, you can worry about getting their bone marrow working again, maybe with massive doses of hematpoietic stem cell growth factors or bone marrow transplants. And if they got into treatment quickly enough (which given the timeline I don't think they did), you might be able to mitigate the severity by getting enough antioxidants into the cells to scavenge the free radicals and prevent the DNA damage in the first place.

So we can take it as a given that med tech in the Expanse if capable of doing all that, and that's the first phase of treatment Miller and Holden got. If you can keep someone alive through all that, and get the bone marrow working, the person will live. And then all you have to deal with is all the other cells that were damaged insuffiicently to cause apoptosis, or to prevent replication, and are sitting there with latent DNA damage that will show up as cancers. The pills that they give them for that purpose are really way more of a sci-fi tech then getting someone through the acute phase. I mean, we really can't do either today (there was a guy at a medical irradiation facility in Russia who went through some seriously concerted efforts to disable all the safety systems and inadvertently dosed himself with 11Gy of gammas, and they were able to keep him alive for almost six months with intnsive treatment before he died of acute respiratory distress, that's about the best we can do with a dose like that), but I think the anti-cancer pills that prevent cancer no matter what the cell type is *or* the actual cellular defect that causes it are way more of a stretch.

NmareBfly posted:

That said the realest depiction of rad sickness in space is probably Seveneves. There's some really good stuff in there in terms of people dying slow, depressing deaths.

For the really real stuff, check the IAEA publications. Like if you want to read about my parenthetical above, here's the report.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1010_web.pdf

It is still amazing to me everything that guy had to do in order to very slowly and painfully kill himself.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Feb 13, 2017

gohmak
Feb 12, 2004
cookies need love

NmareBfly posted:

They mention having to switch off hospice mode but it's a single quick line. If I recall correctly, there's also stuff in the book about the auto doc NOT being a standard piece of equipment. Remember that the crew stole salvaged a completely top of the line boat from the flagship of the entire fleet. It's not too surprising to me if it has a crazy advanced medical system, because it might need to shuttle high risk VIPs and poo poo.

That said the realest depiction of rad sickness in space is probably Seveneves. There's some really good stuff in there in terms of people dying slow, depressing deaths.

And put the otherwise pretty good book down before the third act.

Dancer
May 23, 2011

Pellisworth posted:

It fits with actual biology just fine, and bioinformatics is a major field of research right now.

You're familiar with the RNA world hypothesis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world RNA is unique in that in can both store information (like DNA) and catalyze chemical reactions (like protein enzymes). The protomolecule works just like that, it replicates and adapts to its environment. It makes perfectly good sense that aliens would sling the protomolecule to another solar system, it's self-replicating so you just need to "seed" the protomolecule somewhere it can grow, and it adapts to whatever conditions it encounters.

edit: like just imagine it's an exotic silicon-based DNA-like thing. Carbon is actually really scarce in the universe while rocky planets like Earth are absolutely lousy with silicate minerals. Like, 90% of the crust.

I almost did a post-doc with the lady scientist that thought she'd discovered arsenic-based life (arsenic is another carbon analogue), thankfully I didn't because it turned out to not be true and kind of sloppy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1 But, there's such a thing as the shadow biosphere hypothesis where there might be wildly different forms of life on Earth that we just aren't aware of or looking for.

The protomolecule is not really that outlandish, I've been impressed with most everything the Expanse has done in terms of science and being fairly "hard" sci-fi.

Bioinformatics is a legit thing, but "nanoinformatics" sounds like they just picked up some random-sounding prefix and stuck it there. It's the application of computational tools to... really small things :v: . That kinda happens a lot already, and will keep on happening. Xenobioinformatics might have worked. But yes, language is not necessarily always logical and unambiguous and it is not crazy that some field, related to biology, will come to be named nanoinformatics.

About the PM (protomolecule) I don't think those things you are referring to can be it. I'm going off that scientist's quote, saying that the protomolecule can pick up "form and function" (and he also lists a bunch of organs). This chemical entity would need to be similar enough to our own biochemistry to basically insert itself in the middle of it all. It either needs to replicate a significant part of the chemical reactions that happen in the human body with its own biochemistry, or leave those reactions alone and I guess replicate the signalling? (which is also a bunch of chemical reactions that function within the relatively strict parameters of life as we know it). Think of all the inherent information that exists in a molecule, not in any readable form, but in the consequences of atomic arrangement and interactions. This is not something you can copy-paste, or randomly interact with because it's kinda encrypted, and an interaction only works because the two partners evolved together, or got really "lucky" at some point. Scientists can sorta make inferences, because they have massive tools like atomic force microscopes, and they have a lot of context like evidence on interaction partners, but the PM doesn't exactly have those tools.

I could accept your hypotheses if "get seeded and grow" was the only thing the PM did. Or if the organisms it formed were purely alien. But the scientist makes it very clear that they're not.

Rocksicles
Oct 19, 2012

by Nyc_Tattoo

Josh Lyman posted:

My point is a lot of complaints in this thread about tactical realism and what not are based on bad science.

Sounds like most Star Citizen threads.

Thunk
Oct 15, 2007
I'm currently working my way through the Expanse books and would like to try the TV show. It looks like the first and second season together make up basically the first book. Do I have that right? There are some characters from the second book added in, Avasarala and Draper, but they're basically being retroactively grafted onto events that precede their own story?

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Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Thunk posted:

I'm currently working my way through the Expanse books and would like to try the TV show. It looks like the first and second season together make up basically the first book. Do I have that right? There are some characters from the second book added in, Avasarala and Draper, but they're basically being retroactively grafted onto events that precede their own story?

I think the idea is that the show will have covered the plot of the first book by S02E05.

Seems to be on track for that.

If you read the first book right now, it will “spoil” some things that haven’t been shown on‐screen yet.

I can’t think of anything that the show has covered that the first book didn’t, other than the character introductions you mentioned.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Feb 16, 2017

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