Some more of my mad science

[Souper]

1. I want to test the limits of the Armstrong limit. What's the lowest pressure the human body can adapt to? And if we can adapt it to a vacuum, why not strap on a breath mask to get it breathing?

2. What if two black holes crashed into each other?

3. Is it possible to get anything to survive a 500 m/s impact towards the Moon? (aka extreme lithobraking)

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

5. What if Earth was instantly transformed into the shape of a cube? How hard would it collapse?

6. Can we make a new element by playing around with the electron & nucleus configurations of the atoms?

[Souper]

whoops wrong category

[Kryten]

1. I want to test the limits of the Armstrong limit. What's the lowest pressure the human body can adapt to?

That's literally what the Armstrong limit is. At that pressure the moisture in your lungs will boil off, and dry lungs simply will not work.

2. What if two black holes crashed into each other?

They'd become one larger black hole.

3. Is it possible to get anything to survive a 500 m/s impact towards the Moon? (aka extreme lithobraking)

Probably not. People have designed instruments intended to survive hard impacts, but they top out at about 100m/s.

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

Dead is dead. Brain probably isn't repairable after death, regardless of what other organs you can grow.

5. What if Earth was instantly transformed into the shape of a cube? How hard would it collapse?

Pretty hard.

6. Can we make a new element by playing around with the electron & nucleus configurations of the atoms?

We make new elements pretty frequently, but they're not remotely stable. As an example, the most recent (Ununseptium) has a half-life of about 140 nanoseconds.

[lajoswinkler]

1. I want to test the limits of the Armstrong limit. What's the lowest pressure the human body can adapt to? And if we can adapt it to a vacuum, why not strap on a breath mask to get it breathing?

2. What if two black holes crashed into each other?

3. Is it possible to get anything to survive a 500 m/s impact towards the Moon? (aka extreme lithobraking)

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

5. What if Earth was instantly transformed into the shape of a cube? How hard would it collapse?

6. Can we make a new element by playing around with the electron & nucleus configurations of the atoms?

1. Armstrong limit, for short term exposures. Long term adaptation, not even on the top of Mt. Everest.

2. Insane gravitational waves and a larger hole.

3. Yes. Small spheres made out of tough metals won't vaporize in such conditions.

4. You can't bring back a brain dead patient. Never ever. Its delicate network collapses forever. You might bring up some poorly executed reflex systems, that's all.

5. Enough to spill lava everywhere. On the scale of a planet, Earth is a fluid ball, not hard at all. The whole surface would slosh, melting everything. Total destruction of lithosphere and everything above except stuff that doesn't melt at those temperatures.

6. Playing with electrons doesn't make new elements. Number of protons does. We can and we do it, but it's not useful outside theoretical physics. We've never even made proper atoms. Ions at best, but mostly just nuclei. Few of them for very heavy elements.

[peadar1987]

Actually, how close are we to "brain in a jar" technology? I know we can keep people alive more or less indefinitely on life support, will it ever be possible to hook someone's brain up to an artificial circulatory and nervous system and keep it alive?

[Monger]

1. I want to test the limits of the Armstrong limit. What's the lowest pressure the human body can adapt to? And if we can adapt it to a vacuum, why not strap on a breath mask to get it breathing?

Apart the fact that water starts to evaporate in a vacuum: space-suits also keep you warm or cold, which is also a big issue in space.

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

Apart the fact that the connection between head and body is really complicated: without any blood flow, brain cells die off really fast. The problem is not the missing body, but that you will have trouble keeping the brain cells working while being decapitated.

5. What if Earth was instantly transformed into the shape of a cube? How hard would it collapse?

Nice question!

My guess is: pretty hard. A cube is basically a set of big pyramids. Even if they were able to stand on their own: tectonics would break them up pretty fast. The outer crust of earth is just a few kilometers thick, and is probably unable to carry a rock pyramid with a height of several thousand km.

6. Can we make a new element by playing around with the electron & nucleus configurations of the atoms?

Particle accelerators do that all the time. We also know that mirrored to our own elements it should be possible to create all elements from anti-matter particles. Unfortunately, anti-matter is really difficult to create and isolate.

[magnemoe]

6. Playing with electrons doesn't make new elements. Number of protons does. We can and we do it, but it's not useful outside theoretical physics. We've never even made proper atoms. Ions at best, but mostly just nuclei. Few of them for very heavy elements.

Note that plutonium, tritium and some other is stable enough to be useful and is produced. its mostly done in nuclear reactors.

[KerikBalm]

1. I want to test the limits of the Armstrong limit. What's the lowest pressure the human body can adapt to? And if we can adapt it to a vacuum, why not strap on a breath mask to get it breathing?

The armstrong limit is a hard limit... to get any lower would require hypothermia - but you won't even get to the Armstrong limit

You can't adapt the human body to a vacuum, and still have it be recognizable as human.

2. What if two black holes crashed into each other?

bigger black hole.

What if a semi truck hit a parked airliner.

I'm naming a new number, called the whatifimber it is pi * e to the power of 12

How is this biology?

Can I ask more random questions?

What is the most random question I can ask?

3. Is it possible to get anything to survive a 500 m/s impact towards the Moon? (aka extreme lithobraking)

I'm sure its possible to get something to survive such an impact, a single atomic nulceus surely would

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

Given technology we don't have, can we do things we can't do?

BTW, this is the 2nd time you've mentioned electricity in one of your questions about bringing things to life, as if you got your biology knowledge from watching frankenstein

5. What if Earth was instantly transformed into the shape of a cube? How hard would it collapse?

Harder than if you had transformed it into a dodecahedron.

6. Can we make a new element by playing around with the electron & nucleus configurations of the atoms?

By playing around with the nuclear configuration, you cna make nuclear isomers, but its not a new element.

You can put the electrons into a higher energy state, and have them fall back to the ground state and emit light... but thats pretty much all you can do just playing with configurations.

Unless you're talking about unlimited manipulation, then sure, you can take a neutron out of the nucleus, have it decay into a proton and an electron, and then smash the proton into the nucleus to cause fusion into a new element, or you could just remove a neutron or two, and make an unstable isotope... and then fission will happen, transmuting the element.

[Seret]

3. Is it possible to get anything to survive a 500 m/s impact towards the Moon? (aka extreme lithobraking)

Depends on lots of factors. What distance is the deceleration carried out in? What are the mechanical properties of the impactor and impact site? What angle is the impactor coming in at? What do you call "surviving"?

[lajoswinkler]

Note that plutonium, tritium and some other is stable enough to be useful and is produced. its mostly done in nuclear reactors.

The point was talking about superheavy nuclei. Once the Z goes above 99 or so, current technology and pretty much physics don't allow for the collection of macroscopic samples of compounds of those elements. At best you can study their dilute solutions and in most cases just try to detect a significant ray shooting out of the target sample and then employ statistics. Basically useless stuff except for narrow niche theoretical physics. No chemistry can be done with those things.

[magnemoe]

Depends on lots of factors. What distance is the deceleration carried out in? What are the mechanical properties of the impactor and impact site? What angle is the impactor coming in at? What do you call "surviving"?

One interesting point is that artillery grenades comes inn so fast and can be set to explode after impact/ penetration, however its only a matter of millisecond delay and is an simple mechanism.

As I understand it have been some work on impactors who can do stuff, mostly analyze the soil down where they penetrates, shaped a bit like the cones you put the golf ball on, the equipment is mostly on top and the long spike will penetrate and slow the impactor and reduce g load. Not sure how fast they was supposed to hit but don't think 500 m/s

[Seret]

500ms^-1 is actually pretty slow if you're talking about weapons projectiles. Rifle bullets travel about twice that speed. But they will deform during deceleration into a solid target, hence my question about what the mechanical properties of the impact site are. Sand will stop bullets with fairly minimal deformation, granite won't.

[NERVAfan]

Artificial elements are very short-lived, but they aren't just nuclei.

4. Given enough nanobots, stem cells & electricity, can we bring a decapitated man back to life? (generating him a new body from basically nothing)

I'm skeptical of nanobots being able to do big things (like create a body) quickly - by the very nature of being incredibly tiny, nanobots would probably have trouble surviving high energies. If they ever exist, viruses are probably a closer analogue to how they'd work than the kind of do-anything transformations you see in some fiction (IE specialized to a specific function, requiring a very specific "host" or at least environment).

However, if you had the ability to regenerate nerves, you could transplant a severed head to a new body if you did it fast enough (before the brain died). Dog and monkey head transplants have been performed, but the head wasn't able to control the new body.