From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos
From Address: goldfarb{at}ocf.berkeley.edu (David Goldfarb)
Subject: Re: IDW Does Harlan Ellison
In article , A Friend wrote:
>In article , David Goldfarb
> wrote:
>
>> In article , A Friend
wrote:
>> >With regard to Demon with a Glass Hand, you
>> >could -- theoretically -- reduce the entire present-day human race to
>> >the size of a sugar cube, because atoms are mostly empty space. The
>> >cube, however, would weigh five billion tons.
>>
>> Assuming the average person weighs 150 pounds, I make that more like
>> 500 million. Have you slipped a decimal place?
>
>
>Oops. Thanks. That's still pretty freaking heavy, though.
>
>We're back up to 5 billion tons for the 70 billion humans.
True enough. Still, if we're going to imagine super-duper future
magictech that compactifies all humanity -- reversibly! -- into such
a small space, it's not that much more of a stretch to imagine even
more super-duper magictech that copes with the immense mass.
(I just checked, it's nowhere near the Swarzschild radius.)
Several possibilities:
The cube really does weigh that much, but antigravity and neutralization
of inertia make it act like something that weighs and masses much less.
The cube doesn't really have the compressed bodies. They're stored in
a pocket dimension somewhere, and the cube is just the machinery for
getting them out.
The cube again isn't the bodies, it's just a storage container for
information on how to recreate them from surrounding materials.
Someone smarter than me could probably come up with a bunch more ways
that this could be made to work.
--
David Goldfarb |"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I
goldfarbdj{at}gmail.com | craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a
goldfarb{at}ocf.berkeley.edu | meaningful vision of human life -- so I became
| a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop
| so you can meet girls." -- M. Cartmill
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