XKCD: It's more than a comic

As I understand it, it's basically Rocket Science: the Game?

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Pretty much. It's harder than it looks.

Direct all enquiries to Jamie B Good

You havn't yet? You should really go get it. Thre's a demo you can use first that has most of the game in it(just no planets besides kerbin and the mun). try it if your not sure. but it's really a great game.

they did a collaboration with NASA recently, and added asteroids that you can capture.

I'm baaaaaaack

There's a free demo?

brb, off to send little people to their space death.

Oh really when?

Re: What-If?: isn't that how they blew the Earth up in Titan AE or something? I dunno, I have... issues with media that blow Earth up (hence why I can't get into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or 2013 video game Saints Row IV, despite all indications that they'd be right up my alley otherwise), so I'm not exactly eager to do self-research there.

edited 16th Apr '14 10:40:05 AM by ShadowHog

Moon◊

What kind of issues?

What interesting to me is that while earth is obviously toast as a result of that, the rest of the solar system is fine, unless the moon gets unlucky, in which case the resultant damage jumps up a few orders of magnitude. The moon generally isn't the sort of thing you expect to affect things on that scale.

It's hard to say. I caught what I think was the Vogons blowing the Earth up on TV one day - they announce that the planet's going bye-bye, a bunch of people standing outside what appeared to be an entrance to the London Underground scream in protest, then cut to space, where 4-5 red lasers shoot at the globe, it turns red, and boom. It shows a few survivors (presumably Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect) on the ship that did the destroying, being told by guards they're going to be shot out into space, where they'll presumably die like everyone else just did...

Fridge Logic (Fridge Horror?) immediately set in for young me, thinking about all of those people who were basically pleading for their lives, but immediately silenced with ruthless and painful efficiency. Thinking about every place and person and thing I've ever known in my entire life, both good and bad, and that it quite literally wouldn't exist anymore, and that you generally can't remake a planet (and even if you can, you can't bring back to life all those people and creatures you killed - although I think the film version of Hitchhiker did anyway, somehow or another). It makes me feel physically ill, even now.

Hell, took me a while to get around to A New Hope because of this. Good thing Alderaan means sod-all for the series. Leia takes her loss of it disturbingly well. (I know expanded canon explains that she's only not grieving because she knows that she doesn't have time to grieve with the Empire on her tail, but still...)

edited 16th Apr '14 11:38:27 AM by ShadowHog

Moon◊

Well, this is the point when MST3K Mantra kicks in. The premise of the story is that it happens after the destruction of the Earth with Arthur being the only survivor. It's really not important when and how it happened. Anyway, the story contains enough other absurd things that I just can't take this point any more seriously than other parts.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

It sounds lik a ludicrous waste of energy by today's standards

The planet gets remade in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but I don't think the people do. Well, in a later book there's some time travel shenanigans but in the timeline where the planet goes it stays gone.

The book does discuss the anguish felt by Arthur Dent and Trillian, the other surviving human about the end of the Earth, but a lot of it is mostly hinted at - so the narration basically shows you that it (the grief) begins and then it cuts away, IIRC.

I should remember this better; it's one of my favourite books!

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

It discusses his dismay but doesn't dwell on it. He gets over it remarkably quickly considering.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Arthur Dent's default state in those books seems to be confusion so maybe he just doesn't get a chance to focus on it for long enough to properly get it, let alone get over it.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

There's an entire paragraph about him thinking about each of the things on Earth that is now gone and going from the overwhelmingly large to the extremely personal, and only getting it when he considers something very close to himself.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I remember that he can't understand that he can't get a hamburger from McDonald's because the McDonald's near his house no longer exists - and neither does any other McDonald's.

If I was in his position McDonald's probably wouldn't be among the first 1 000 or so things I'd think of missing but of course the fact that it's a sort of mundane and pointless and inconsequentially average thing that triggers it for him does resemble the way we tend to miss things that used to be part of our life. It's a very well-written sequence, actually. (So, yeah, I do remember it - I think.)

But I seem to recall that it's cut short when something distracts him and we never get to know if he properly returns to that thought. (He probably does, when he has the time - but the narration isn't there.)

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

You'll have to understand, it's literally what I came into the program on, and the scene shocked me enough that I couldn't stomach watching any more to discover that it was actually a comedy and not a seriously dark drama. I only figured out a lot of this stuff decades after the fact.

Hell, I'm not 100% sure it was Hitchhiker's, but it seems likely enough.

Besides, I'm sure we all have our absurdly weird triggers. For some it's seeing generally-harmless insects. For me, it's an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. *shrug*

Moon◊

He breaks down sobbing and the scene changes after that, I believe.

Just read the book. I didn't really like the movie, and I heard of several people who didn't like it, both of ones who read the book and those who who didn't.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

I liked the movie, but it wasn't as good as the book by any means.

I hear that the least liked book in the series is #3 - which just happens to be my favourite. That tells me I probably like the book for somewhat different reasons than most of the audience, and thus that I would have different standards when evaluating the movie, as well.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Well, I read the first 3 books, then started the 4th. Since I didn't like it, I stopped there. I think 3 of them were quite enough.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

While I think it's less Earth-Shattering Kaboom and more things dying out in a whimper, Eric Nylund's A Signal Shattered takes an interesting bent on this. An alien provides a teleportation device that uses a "negligible amount" of Earth's rotational inertia to do the teleporting. Said alien steps back and watches, knowing that the nature of sapient beings is such that no one will conserve usage because they believe that it's everyone else that should be doing that. I'm supposing that asking the opposite question of what would happen if rotation stopped, either suddenly or gradually, would be mildly redundant. Ah well, time to submit it anyhow.

The Earth's rotation slowing wouldn't be as dramatic as speeding it up 86,400 times. Longer days would probably have all sorts of ecological and climatic effects; days would be hotter, nights would be colder, etc. If it stopped completely, the side facing the Sun would be baked into uninhabitability while the side opposite would freeze. Humans would probably cling to life in the relatively hospitable band near the terminator.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy-satire, it's not meant to make complete sense or be taken seriously. I mean, this is a series where "Belgium" is the worst swearword in the universe.

edited 17th Apr '14 6:18:19 AM by ashnazg

I'd personally like to know what would happen if the Earth decided to start rotating the other way (magically, so the whole switching directions thing wouldn't cause mass flooding due to oceanic inertia or any issue with having an extra-long day/night during the transition).

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

My first thought on that is that nothing important would change. One wonders, however, how the change in direction would affect climate and weather patterns. There would have to be some effects.

All the time zones would be reversed, for one thing. All computer software that uses time zones would have to be recoded, costing billions of dollars. The west coast of the U.S. would get their simultaneous broadcasts three hours later in their day than the east coast, rather than three hours earlier.

edited 17th Apr '14 6:24:33 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"