New answers tagged survival
0
As FlyingLemmingSoup mentioned above, stretching out the time for falling is probably the best way to go if you can't reverse the direction of the portal.
Artificial cushion
One solution relies on clear-headedness while falling, really good timing, and the ability to rapidly make new portals.
If you're in an area without anything to cushion your fall, ...
3
Can the character open a portal which points in arbitrary directions?
If falling, the character only has to open the portal so that the exit points upwards. Then then enter the portal, and come out going upwards. Gravity slows them down, and when they reach the highest point and start to descend again, they open a portal directly under them with the exit ...
2
The power he has to create portals also lets him create an energy field around his body that acts like a full-body airbag, causing the deceleration to begin slightly before he impacts a surface, decreasing the deceleration to a survivable level.
Alternatively, his power might simply make him momentarily invulnerable during decelerations once he reaches a ...
2
The human body can be very robust and there are known situations where people have survived free falls. In any scenario, what you want to do is reduce the impact, or better yet, the rate of deceleration your body will experience when it hits the ground and inevitably stops moving.
So here are a bunch of things that you could do
Landing Environment
There ...
11
There's a YouTube channel called Today I Found Out that occasionally asks and answers questions like this, and they recently did one on falling out of an airplane without a parachute.
And the answer to the question of what you need for a fall at terminal velocity to be at least theoretically survivable turns out to be: 'Not a whole lot.' At terminal ...
0
You can make it believable
As a writer you get to make a few assumptions about the environment in which your story happens. Clearly you're not intending to write a futuristic Sci-Fi novel in which humanity has already colonized the galaxy; the question makes it clear that humanity is still earth-bound.
But how earth-bound is humankind's technology? To make ...
2
The AI and the rocket are both relatively easy compared to making a sustainable colony which isn't on earth.
Regardless of which rock you stick it on, or even if you just put it in orbit, you are looking at building an enormous green house able to sustain a human population large enough to be genetically viable. It would be HUGE. It would also be ...
2
It's a tall order...
Based on OP's description of the AI, it has no prior knowledge of space travel, engineering or how to sustain life. While I believe that this knowledge could be gained over time, it would require extensive human assistance to interpret and filter the available data. The crux of the issue is that the AI needs feedback on whether it did a ...
5
Maybe, it depends on the AI
L. Dutch already pointed out everything there is to say about a lone mans chance for space colonisation. But you mentioned that he has a "life-like AI". I'll assume for the purpose of this answer that it is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) and not an artifical narrow intelligence (ANI) like we got today. The protagonist ...
10
Could the characters use a pre assembled rocket to escape Earth and colonize Mars?
At best it is very dubious, for reasons that L. Dutch already enumerated. If space travel is much easier in your setting, this might be more plausible, but it is basically impractical from a present-day or near-future point of view.
the virus [has] no cure, meaning that ...
4
The general problem will always be supplies. Be it in earth orbit or on Mars, you will need food, water, oxygen, power. In orbit you will also need a supply of mass for keeping in orbit. The ISS for instance is not self sufficient, based on this answer. it needs resupplies about every 120 days. Now that is for a space station with more than 1 person on it, ...
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Could the characters go to the space and colonize Mars or stay in a sustainable orbit around earth?
NO, for several reasons:
As of today, we are not yet capable of even sending a human to Mars, let alone keeping him/her alive there
Non-military rockets are fueled with highly unstable chemicals. One doesn't simply fill their tanks and leave them parked for ...
0
There will be enough preserved, canned food available to survive for some months, maybe years. During this time the survivors will need to get a solid supply of electricity going. Wind and water turbines will still function quite well. The survivors will need to locate themselves where there are waterfalls and height differences, and build lots of water ...
0
In the middle of your society.
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https://www.petaluma360.com/news/9749709-181/29-surge-in-number-of?sba=AAS&artslide=1
The fact that you are homeless does not mean you are a rugged individualist, just as the fact that you are a cowboy does not mean you are a rugged individualist. But you can have someone living in the middle of a society and detached ...
4
As already discussed in other answers, pure, self-reliant individualism just won't work since whatever you do alone in the wild, you´ll use products others produced. The axe or clothes being great examples. But if we decide to go full-on sci-fi, here a possibility for a self-reliant and extremely individualistic lifestyle comes up, at least if you are ...
3
If I understand your question, I think the answer is:
During and immediately after a breakdown of civilization
The primary weakness of cooperative/collectivist approach is that eventually you wind up with most of your population being specialized for specific activities. If you've got a hundred people, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand and you want ALL ...
-3
Put them where you like. In every environment, collectivism is inferior to individualism. This has happened every single time collectivism has been tried, and every single time individualism has been tried.
For example, the first Plymouth colony nearly died out the first winter because they had instituted a collectivist model. The colony took all the ...
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The place of an individualist, self-reliant guy in fluxes
In western literature, this niche is usually filled with explorers and loners. In recent media, "The ballad of Buster Scruggs" puts forward several good examples, the best one for me the prospector in "All gold canyon", as we can see him basically living-off the land for long periods of time.
At a ...
1
The way you describe them, your individuals remind me of hikikomori, at least from the point of view of withdrawal from society.
In Japan, hikikomori (Japanese: ひきこもり or 引きこもり, lit. "pulling inward, being confined", i.e., "acute social withdrawal"; colloquially/adaptive translation: shut-in) are reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from society ...
-1
People often replicate their surroundings. This is suggested by the 'nature vs nurture' idea, as well as in both real-life and in stories. As you yourself pointed out, the Wild West was actually collectivist-leaning, not filled with macho gunmen living by their own rules, which indicates that there's no strength to being solitary in an environment built to ...
2
How long can 400 people survive in an underground facility if they had to seal off their heat vents?
Look at what happens when miners or speleologists get trapped underground with no supplies: lack of oxygen is the main risk for their survival.
Death by starvation happens in weeks.
Death by dehydration happens in days.
Death from lack of oxygen can happen in hours or even minutes, depending on the amount of air contained in the environment when the ...
12
How long can 400 people survive in an underground facility if they had to seal off their heat vents?
There is a lot of unknowns in your question and this is one of those questions where the devil is likely in the detail, but the key point is that unless you're VERY deep underground, you don't need heat vents in the first place. Being underground is actually good for your populace as it acts as natural thermal insulation. In point of fact, in a town called ...
0
It's not possible to make this happen, because of power output.
An object falling must release its potential energy. This usually occurs by transferring it into kinetic energy, but there are other options. A skydiver at terminal velocity bleeds his or her potential energy into thermal energy of themselves and the air around them.
A falling planet has a ...
2
Survivable
I absolutely agree with the other answers declaring this to be unsurvivable. But I'm going to try and make the case it could be survivable, just because I don't think anyone has tried sufficiently hard at thinking of ways it could be done.
Firstly, everyone has assumed the planets would inevitably approach at escape velocity. This does not have ...
4
The only sensible way for two planets to collide at low enough relative velocity not to vaporize a substantial fraction of their combined masses is by orbital decay of a binary planet system. Unfortunately, planets aren't rigid balls; at some point before crustal contact, one or both planets would begin to fragment as the combination of tidal forces and ...
15
This scenario results in the sterilization of both planets even if they don't collide in any situation that you could reasonably call a "near miss."
No matter how slowly the planets collide, tidal effects will cause massive heating and disruption of their crusts. These effects come into play long before the planets even touch, and by the time they do touch, ...
3
As the other commenters have mentioned, surviving a collision would be impossible: one aspect of the definition of "planet" is that the celestial body must have enough mass to gravitationally reshape itself into a sphere. If the peanut were to reshape itself (as it must, because it's made of two planets, which even on their own can turn in to a sphere) ...
15
Not Survivable.
I am going to ignore gravity's demand of 2 planet masses becoming 1 sphere - Tim B II covered that. And I am ignoring the energy requirements and the resulting lash-back of getting 2 planets close enough together to do 'peanut' that Ryan_L covered.
Even considering that, 'peanut' would not be survivable due to earth is rotating around its ...
7
Tim B II's answer is really good, but I have another, different reason it can't happen. Let's say you do have some way to slow the planets down so they don't collide at escape velocity. Let's also say your planets are mostly made of some fictional material that actually is strong enough to stay a contact binary planet, a "Peanut planet" as Tim put it. So ...
52
Gravity isn't going to let that happen
I'm not the resident orbital mechanics specialist so I don't have specific figures in front of me but as I understand it, there's no way that two planets, both of Earth mass, are going to collide slowly. The reason for that is that they're going to be attracted to each other by gravity. Even if they could collide ...
1
The One True Fact is the answer to all of your questions. If your world is similar to ours then there is only One True Fact. Everything else that is "true" is merely emergent behavior when the one truth is taken to enough iterations (time) and with the proper seed (initial conditions).
Our understanding of physics today is that the world is composed of a ...
2
You want Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms
to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they
can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between
the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along ...
5
You have presented your story "factually", but I can't help thinking about it "metaphorically"...
You are basically dealing with our real world but from a higher understanding.
To the gods, it is all though-forms, ultimate truths and unfounded opinions; with no real threat to your immortality. You understand the underlying purpose of all things.
From ...
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