>>The problem with sucking the air out of a room, is that most rooms aren't air-tight. (although I can see why that would slip your mind.)<<
1) You don't need to remove anywhere near all the air from a room in order to drop below human breathing capacity. People need oxygen to climb Mt. Everest.
2) Sudden changes in pressure kill humans very effectively. It takes surprisingly little change and time for someone to get lethally bent.
Granted, this won't work in a large space or highly ventilated space. But even a casual glance at fire science shows that many rooms are sufficiently isolated to sustain substantial differences of pressure, temperature, gas/smoke, etc. Poor homes will be more permeable, wealthy ones better sealed for heat efficiency, and places like labs or government buildings have excellent to airtight sealing.
>> Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. <<
You just need to connect gravity with electricity and magnetism. We already have decent control over the attract/repel functions with electromagnetism.
>>I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.<<
The planet-cracking accidents are things like that time a guy released a ton of radiation because he was holding two halves of fissionable material apart with a screwdriver. It's not so much the human generating the power, as controlling something that has or could have the power ... and at the bleeding edge of science, they don't always even know what that is.
>>And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.<<
*laugh* You just described the whole of existence: little whizzing bits of energy pretending really hard to be things. Solid matter isn't solid at all, but it behaves as if it is.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 02:43 am (UTC)1) You don't need to remove anywhere near all the air from a room in order to drop below human breathing capacity. People need oxygen to climb Mt. Everest.
2) Sudden changes in pressure kill humans very effectively. It takes surprisingly little change and time for someone to get lethally bent.
Granted, this won't work in a large space or highly ventilated space. But even a casual glance at fire science shows that many rooms are sufficiently isolated to sustain substantial differences of pressure, temperature, gas/smoke, etc. Poor homes will be more permeable, wealthy ones better sealed for heat efficiency, and places like labs or government buildings have excellent to airtight sealing.
>> Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. <<
You just need to connect gravity with electricity and magnetism. We already have decent control over the attract/repel functions with electromagnetism.
>>I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.<<
The planet-cracking accidents are things like that time a guy released a ton of radiation because he was holding two halves of fissionable material apart with a screwdriver. It's not so much the human generating the power, as controlling something that has or could have the power ... and at the bleeding edge of science, they don't always even know what that is.
>>And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.<<
*laugh* You just described the whole of existence: little whizzing bits of energy pretending really hard to be things. Solid matter isn't solid at all, but it behaves as if it is.