CRGreathouse
Community Supporter
Darkness said:
CNIM gives 83.9.
(OT) Request for an answer to a difficult mathematical question
- Thread starter Edena_of_Neith
- Start date
CNIM gives 83.9.
jgbrowning
Hero
matrix
this is one of my big rants
humans cant be batteries unless your breaking them down at atomic level reactions.
the amount of energy we generate is much less than the amount of engery we consume. roughly we use 10% of the energy we consume.
the premise of the matrix is that there has been a nuclear winter type event and the computers are forced to use humans as batteries to survive, but humans need food (and more food than provided by eating other humans) and to have food you have to have the sun (at least on earth, in the amounts we're talking about).
the movie was eye-candy and one of the worst lame *** attempts at justifiying some guys "Wouldn't it be cool if... " thought.
joe b.
Thief of Night said:
this is one of my big rants
humans cant be batteries unless your breaking them down at atomic level reactions.
the amount of energy we generate is much less than the amount of engery we consume. roughly we use 10% of the energy we consume.
the premise of the matrix is that there has been a nuclear winter type event and the computers are forced to use humans as batteries to survive, but humans need food (and more food than provided by eating other humans) and to have food you have to have the sun (at least on earth, in the amounts we're talking about).
the movie was eye-candy and one of the worst lame *** attempts at justifiying some guys "Wouldn't it be cool if... " thought.
joe b.
jgbrowning
Hero
well
the amount of energy generated by such a reaction would require at least an equal, probably greater, amount of energy to control.. asumming the wiz wanted to do more than just blow up.
and its a packet of energy. you cant just split 1/45837537th of an atom for a magic missle spell. you split it you get all the energy at once.
course how do you control the energy that controls the energy? Thats why i think mr. gygax is correct. to control such a massive amount of energy would be impossible.
just me .0002$
joe b.
die_kluge said:
the amount of energy generated by such a reaction would require at least an equal, probably greater, amount of energy to control.. asumming the wiz wanted to do more than just blow up.
and its a packet of energy. you cant just split 1/45837537th of an atom for a magic missle spell. you split it you get all the energy at once.
course how do you control the energy that controls the energy? Thats why i think mr. gygax is correct. to control such a massive amount of energy would be impossible.
just me .0002$
joe b.
CRGreathouse
Community Supporter
Re: matrix
Not really. We're incredibly inefficient (10% is conservative, I'd think less), but if the machines had no way to break down food, 10% > 0%.
The movie's great, but I agree that this premise is unrealistic (an understatement). "Combined with a form of fusion" - if they had fusion, why bother with humans?
jgbrowning said:
Not really. We're incredibly inefficient (10% is conservative, I'd think less), but if the machines had no way to break down food, 10% > 0%.
jgbrowning said:
The movie's great, but I agree that this premise is unrealistic (an understatement). "Combined with a form of fusion" - if they had fusion, why bother with humans?
Edena_of_Neith
First Post
Cheers!
Thanks for the answer, folks.
So, it's around (8 to 9) x (10 to the 18th power) Joules, or around 8 to 9 quintillion Joules.
A lot of energy.
I suppose it will be a joy to all of us Couch and Computer Potatoes to know that the real truth is we can light up the heavens with our energies.
It's just a matter of realizing our potential!
- - -
Now you know why I am not running another Gnomish Industrial Revolution Thread.
I do believe that, were I to start again, the gnomes would discover the secret of magical manipulation of antimatter reactions.
Then, of course, everyone else would steal the secret from the gnomes.
Then, they'd all apply Epic Level spells to improve upon the work of the gnomes, and then ...
Well, ask Anabstercorian what would happen then.
- - -
Note that your typical human being is dumping vast quantities of wasted potential energy everywhere they are and everywhere they go, all the time.
They lose it in the form of dead skin, dandruff, and evaporation of moisture.
Now, if the poor mage could only make use of his magic to tap the energy in these leavings, he would actually be of some use to the adventuring party, once in a while.
Thanks for the answer, folks.
So, it's around (8 to 9) x (10 to the 18th power) Joules, or around 8 to 9 quintillion Joules.
A lot of energy.
I suppose it will be a joy to all of us Couch and Computer Potatoes to know that the real truth is we can light up the heavens with our energies.
It's just a matter of realizing our potential!
- - -
Now you know why I am not running another Gnomish Industrial Revolution Thread.
I do believe that, were I to start again, the gnomes would discover the secret of magical manipulation of antimatter reactions.
Then, of course, everyone else would steal the secret from the gnomes.
Then, they'd all apply Epic Level spells to improve upon the work of the gnomes, and then ...
Well, ask Anabstercorian what would happen then.
- - -
Note that your typical human being is dumping vast quantities of wasted potential energy everywhere they are and everywhere they go, all the time.
They lose it in the form of dead skin, dandruff, and evaporation of moisture.
Now, if the poor mage could only make use of his magic to tap the energy in these leavings, he would actually be of some use to the adventuring party, once in a while.
Darkness
Hand and Eye of Piratecat [Moderator]
Ok, I rounded it up - so sue me!CRGreathouse said:
CNIM gives 83.9.
But if you insist: My calculator (which has a special function for this that I used to get this result) gives a more exact result of 83.91458845 kg. Happy now?
BTW, what does CNIM stand for again...?
Last edited:
Re: Evil Fatwizardry
Odd, I always thought the sacrifice was there for its *soul*, not its body mass. Even if you assume that wizards could only burn organic matter for some reason (instead of say, rocks), it would be easier and not even evil (except if animal rights are an issue in your game) to burn e.g. a pig. There is more energy in your average pig than a maiden or infant, plus, it is easier to come by
BTW, how many chickens are there in Greyhawk?
Feliath said:I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet... Another cool benefit of this system is that it explains why evil wizards want sacrifices. You'd take a feat which allowed you to convert another (helpless) person's mass to spell energy, and use that in your casting. This is completely evil, of course, but that's fabutastic, we want that.
Odd, I always thought the sacrifice was there for its *soul*, not its body mass. Even if you assume that wizards could only burn organic matter for some reason (instead of say, rocks), it would be easier and not even evil (except if animal rights are an issue in your game) to burn e.g. a pig. There is more energy in your average pig than a maiden or infant, plus, it is easier to come by
BTW, how many chickens are there in Greyhawk?Edena_of_Neith
First Post
There is an abundance of Matter everywhere.
That's what those Elementalists are all about, after all - earth, air, fire, and water.
If only they knew the full Einsteinian potential of what they were working with, elementalists might rule the world.
However, if you really want a mage with an almost limitless source of matter to convert into energy, how about those Sunmages from the Spelljammer Setting?
Our own sun, In Real Life, weighs around 7 octillion tons.
I think that's sufficient matter to satisfy even the most insanely greedy mage's desires.
The sun of Athas, from the Dark Sun Setting, is implied to be a blue star.
That is, it was MUCH more massive than our sun In Real Life is, when it was in it's stable blue radiance life.
Now, it's a red supergiant.
I don't know if a mage could pull bits of matter from that colossal mass in order to produce colossal (read: game breaking - it breaks the game when the mage blows himself and the local continent up with his first miscast spell) effects, but I do know this ...
It is stated in Athian Lore that it is the mages who are DIRECTLY responsible for changing the sun from blue to yellow to red, and causing it to swell out.
This means one of three things:
1: The mages of Athias have the power to modify a blue star (which makes the affair of converting matter into energy look pale in comparison.)
2: The sun of Athas is innately magical, to the point that it reacts to the paltry use of magic on one paltry planet in the solar system (in which case magic most certainly has a mighty effect on matter! ), or:
3: The Sages of Athas don't know what they are talking about.
By the way, since the Dark Sun Core Material states that there WAS at least one Athian mage who drew her power directly from the sun, perhaps #1 above is actually true ...
That's what those Elementalists are all about, after all - earth, air, fire, and water.
If only they knew the full Einsteinian potential of what they were working with, elementalists might rule the world.
However, if you really want a mage with an almost limitless source of matter to convert into energy, how about those Sunmages from the Spelljammer Setting?
Our own sun, In Real Life, weighs around 7 octillion tons.
I think that's sufficient matter to satisfy even the most insanely greedy mage's desires.
The sun of Athas, from the Dark Sun Setting, is implied to be a blue star.
That is, it was MUCH more massive than our sun In Real Life is, when it was in it's stable blue radiance life.
Now, it's a red supergiant.
I don't know if a mage could pull bits of matter from that colossal mass in order to produce colossal (read: game breaking - it breaks the game when the mage blows himself and the local continent up with his first miscast spell) effects, but I do know this ...
It is stated in Athian Lore that it is the mages who are DIRECTLY responsible for changing the sun from blue to yellow to red, and causing it to swell out.
This means one of three things:
1: The mages of Athias have the power to modify a blue star (which makes the affair of converting matter into energy look pale in comparison.)
2: The sun of Athas is innately magical, to the point that it reacts to the paltry use of magic on one paltry planet in the solar system (in which case magic most certainly has a mighty effect on matter! ), or:
3: The Sages of Athas don't know what they are talking about.
By the way, since the Dark Sun Core Material states that there WAS at least one Athian mage who drew her power directly from the sun, perhaps #1 above is actually true ...
Last edited:
tarchon
First Post
Xeriar said:
Why? We've been doing it for sixty years with nuclear weapons and reactors, as well as antimatter experiments. Albeit the amount of mass converted to energy is trival (save for total annihalation with Antimatter, but we've barely made milligrams of the stuff) - on the order of 2%.
The reactor in Oslo, Norway, has been working for billions of years now
Anyways, such theories were proposed for all of these things. Simply put, however, it requires a significant amount of energy to create these reactions in the first place, under 'controlled' (word used loosely for bombs, of course) circumstances.
You're confusing energy with free energy; it's a very critical difference. Nuclear energy derives from the fact that most nuclei are not as quite stable as they could be (though not by much), and in fact they all will eventually work their way to the ground state nucleus by hook or by crook, to an iron isotope.
In a broad hand-waving sense, yes, the reason this is a slow and controllable process is chiefly that the difference between the energies of most nuclei and the iron "ground state" is really only a very, very small fraction of the rest mass, so nuclear reactions only overcome the effective activation enery barrier for surrounding nuclei in very special cases, such as stellar cores and fission reactors.
In the real world, antimatter does not allow you to get at any free energy. You have to put as much energy into creating that antimatter (and an equal quantity of matter) as you get out of it in the annihilation reaction. Antimatter technology can thus only produce storage cells, not generators.
Now if there were an easy way to convert rest mass into free energy, that would essentially be the same as having the activation energy for rest mass conversion be quite low compared to the energy stored in the matter. Analogous situations in the real world are things like tanks of gasoline, TNT, and piles of snow sitting on top of mountains. A little bit of energy put into the system in the right way gets a lot out.
Of course it is possible to store gasoline and TNT safely, and not all piles of snow sitting on mountains turn into avalanches, but sometimes accidents happen. Even if the trigger conditions are fairly difficult to achieve, if you throw enough energy at it, it will happen.
In this hypothetical world where rest mass converts to free energy, what you have effectively is a world made out of TNT. Sure, not everything detonates it, and you probably can do some things with the TNT safely, if you're careful, but one day, someone somewhere will goof up. And it just takes that one goof up. Boom.
Edena_of_Neith said:
2a) Our characterization of the use of magic on the planet as "paltry" is incorrect.
You are running into a common mistake when mixing science and magic - expecting the scales magic works on are the same your current science works on. Yes, by our current science, a thing the size of a star should be pretty much inviolable. But the thing that makes it magic is that it doesn't follow science's rules.
