Random Questions Thread

I think those surgeries smokers get are, well, surgeries, so everything is carefully done so that you wouldn't die of blood loss. And I think the surgery is for infections and throat cancer, so if you cut your own neck, blood will just come out and you'd die. I don't think you can cut deep enough into your throat without hitting a few blood vessels and arteries before air can get in. So... Not recommended.

This is more of my reasoning rather than hard facts, but still.

edited 1st Oct '14 1:44:15 PM by electronic-tragedy

How long would it take for a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of a few millimeters (or micrometers, an answer for either or both is fine) to consume 1.2 million tons of human flesh?

electronic-tragedy: hmmm will keep in mind. thanks.

On tracheotomies, theoretically yes but the neck has a ton of very important blood vessels like the carotid arteries along with the thyroid gland right in front. In a surgical situation it is a comparatively safe procedure but in the field it would be very easy to cut in the wrong place or depth especially if someone is trying to vigorously choke you.

The normal outcome I would imagine would be nicking an artery and drowning in your own blood, your airway collapsing due to the force on the trachea and severing of muscles and cartilage. Of course in writing anything can happen but such an occurrence might strain Willing Suspension of Disbelief on the more medically inclined.

Emergency Tracheotomy. It would be very tricky, especially for someone to do to themself.

For the record, something similar to what you're describing happened in Saw V. A character had his head trapped in a glass box slowly filling with water, so he jammed a pen into his throat, unscrewed it, and breathed through the tube until help arrived. It seemed plausible to me, especially since he needed medical attention after he was broken out.

edited 1st Oct '14 10:13:57 PM by TeraChimera

Thanks muchly! a little superhuman force + only needing about 10 seconds of more time, should make it slightly easier to swallow.

I'd find it... plausible enough in a fairly extreme setting, although there'd be a definite aspect of dumb luck. But I would think you'd need something to keep the hole open (like, yeah, a tube or reed).

Does your character have any medical knowledge?

edited 2nd Oct '14 2:44:22 AM by LoniJay

Not Doctor levels, but above average, yeah. Mostly in terms of survivalist emergency stuff.

edited 2nd Oct '14 6:55:30 AM by MrAHR

Would a government chemical weapons manufacturing plant have anything resembling a reinforced safe or vault like a bank? Anything that could serve as a substitute?

I imagine the whole place would be reinforced but maybe some super heavy place for storing the scary stuff.

Nerve gases and modified anthrax or something.

And this would have been standard protocol 80 years ago? Wait, stupid question. This is already alternate history anyway, I can do what I want

If a lizard that sheds its skin gets a scar, will the scar remain after its next shedding?

Depends on how severe an injury. Small nicks and scabs will come off but deeper ones stay. Also depends on the individual animal, just like people! After all we shed too, just as individual flakes rather than a massive piece.

How fast would an iron "bolt" have to be traveling before it turned into an incandescent stream of plasma?

edited 6th Oct '14 5:20:57 AM by KSPAM

Actual plasma? Very nearly the speed of light: see here

How would someone have to wield a two handed great sword in order to decapitate someone else with a single swing.

At that point it's less about the technique and more about how good your upper body strength is.

Really? Because I've heard you only have to accelerate a human to a few dozen times mach before they sublimate completely into plasma

edited 6th Oct '14 5:50:48 AM by KSPAM

That what-if doesn't actually establish a minimum speed, it only states that a relativistic-speed baseball would rapidly become plasma. :P I'm not sure what the minimum speed would be, though.

Well, if you hit a person hard enough, they would go poof in a spray of plasma, so your source was technically correct.

Also, remember that the definition of plasma encompasses two states: one is ionized gas, and that's easy enough to generate: set something on fire. Compression heating against the air sets in at a few Machs, and air friction will do the rest. The other, "hard" plasma, requires that you hit the target with enough energy to literally induce atomic fission, and if you've been paying any attention at all to what we've been saying you should be able to guess the results were you to discharge that kind of energy in an atmosphere.

I was assuming the "hard" version of plasma. Simply ionizing the atoms, yeah that probably is similar to Earth orbital re-entry or something. Let's say in the 10,000 miles per hour ballpark?

Off-topic, but that relativistic baseball link has ruined my schedule tonight. How can xkcd be so based?

Much less, actually. Compression heating was a real problem for the MiG-25, and that topped out at a practical speed of Mach 2.8. Also, that was at high altitude, where there's less air to get in the way and to cause heating. Space shuttles and reentry pods hit the atmosphere much faster than that, of course.

In practical terms, if you accelerate a human body to something in the area of 2000 miles an hour (which is well within the reach of modern jet aircraft), atmospheric heating will do serious damage to it. (The damage would start much, much earlier than that, of course...) To turn it into hard plasma, though, would quite literally require enough energy for a nuclear device, and possibly a thermonuclear device.

edited 6th Oct '14 10:52:58 AM by SabresEdge

What about a gun that fires iron slugs fast enough to form a trail of plasma/possibly ionize the entire bolt?

As I understand, the ionization generated by reentry is actually caused by the high amount of heat. This in turn means that you need something that will accelerate something to the point where it's hot enough to cause some ionization effects to occur. Depending on how much of it you want, that effect starts at high supersonic. (Nobody has yet measured the ionization around an M829E4 kinetic energy round, which travels at approximately Mach 4, but there will likely be some effects.)

Actual plasma cannon physics work separately and will require you to look them up separately, since they've been widely discussed just about everywhere.