From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos
From Address: nope{at}noway.com
Subject: Re: IDW Does Harlan Ellison
In article , David Goldfarb
wrote:
> 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.
Neat. Thanks for all of that.
The story itself says that all 70 billion humans were reduced to
"electrical impulses" and stored on a "thin strand of
gold-copper alloy
wire" wrapped around "an insulating coil inside [Trent's] central
thorax control solenoid." Electrons have mass, but it's beyond me how
much 70 billion peoples' worth of them might weigh. Of course, this
mass thing is not what the story is about (although it's exactly the
kind of thing Ellison would pick on mercilessly if someone else had
written the story), and I'm not pretending it's important.
The mass of 70 billion electrons equals 6.38 x 10^20 kg. Multiply that
by however many electrons it takes to form a unique "electrical
impulse" for each human, and that'll be the answer. We're beyond facts
at this point, but it seems to me that you ought to be able to do the
whole deal for less than a single gram.
I'd agree that the "science" works better if Trent serves merely as a
key to retrieving the human race from some U-Stor-It dimension, but the
wire thing is much more dramatic and makes for a better story.
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