Mathematical Absurdity (RB Vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 11) · 5:20pm Apr 30th, 2021
Previously, on Empress Theresa:
A chapter that wasn't totally boring!
And now:
Guess who's back.
Back again.
Theresa's back.
Tell a friend.
Gues who's back, guess who's back, etc. etc.
A month has passed since the Paris trip, and, I quote, 'the oppression of being trapped in this luxurious prison' is getting to Theresa again. Remember how I said that maybe Theresa might solve the wind thing this chapter? Yeah, no. Crops are still dying, folks. Keep that in mind.
Theresa compares what she's doing to shooting an arrow without a bow, having to account for every force involved in three dimensions by herself with a being that can't count. I just saved you a page-worth of explanations for that simile. Be grateful.
She also bemoans having to grow up. Don't we all? And then she starts crying. So she decides it's time to get out of the house, picks a direction, and begins walking through the woods. Without alerting anyone. Mind you, the woods are filled with surveillance cameras, so there's little chance of any of those thousand assassins getting to her, but it's still pretty inconsiderate.
She wanders her way out of the woods and towards a local village, now with an escort of 'Humvee convertibles', which I'm pretty sure are not a thing that exists, and also the British army doesn't use Humvees, which are an American product.
Theresa gets spotted. People start coming out of their homes to see her. A crowd forms. The crowd decides to throw her a picnic, as dictated by an older woman named Juliet Graham. She's referred to here as a 'grand dame', which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be 'grande dame', but apparently Mr. Boutin just hates French.
In ten minutes, there are a hundred people packed into Mrs. Graham's backyard. This is apparently a common occurrence, here. Mrs. Graham starts telling stories of her life. Then people start performing music, including Greensleeves, here misspelled as 'Greensleaves'. I guess Mr. Boutin thought it was about trees or something. Even Theresa calls this 'cliché upon cliché'. Eventually, Theresa is forced to leave as too many people have come to see her.
It is now August 30, two months since Theresa's interview with the Prime Minister on live television. The crops continue to die. In particular, America's crop for the year is announced to be a 90% failure. People are flocking to religion as a means of coping with their impending doom. Atheists are, of course, cast as villains and idiots. Theresa approves.
So it is that Theresa finally decides to test her powers. She sets up the parameters she wishes to communicate to HAL in the form of wires, which represent alphanumeric triplets in a code that only Theresa understands and purportedly cannot be broken by anyone anywhere because each wire represents an action or a location. Plus she threw in some fake parameters and dummy symbols. Just in case anyone is trying to figure it out. Why this is necessary is not discussed.
The basic thing to understand here is that Theresa has taught HAL to interpret something along the lines of machine language; he takes instructions in order and executes them. How she got him to this point is also not explained; I assume it involved coins and cans somehow. Also, the idea that gravity pushes instead of pulls is brought up. I have no idea where Mr. Boutin got that one, as it is complete nonsense, and technically speaking, under Einstein's relativity, it neither pushes nor pulls, so... yeah. That's a weird one.
Anyway, the end result of all of this is that Theresa has HAL locate a specific spot off the coast of Massachusetts (triangulating the position using landmarks in Boston, Cape Cod, and Long Island), and has him raise a ten-foot wide column of water ten miles into the air at a speed of two hundred miles per hour. At that speed, it would take three minutes to reach its full height, assuming instantaneous acceleration, as we aren't given such. Additionally, this column would weigh about 258,890,967 pounds, if my math is right, which is a fucking lot. Little fun fact for you there.
Of course, the big question here is why she would do something like this, particularly given that it is later pointed out that if this column were to fall, it would cause massive flooding, but whatever.
She then decides to do it again. With six columns. 100 feet wide. Climbing to 150 miles high. Without warning anyone.
Cool move, there, Theresa. This does introduce some water into the atmosphere, but probably not enough to solve anything.
Now, let's do some more math. A cylinder 100 feet wide and 150 miles tall has a volume of 6,220,350,000 cubic feet. A cubic foot of water weighs about 62.43 pounds, putting each of these columns at a total weight of 388,336,450,500 pounds. That's three-hundred and eighty-eight billion, folks. In total, across six columns, that's 2,330,018,700,000 pounds!
The book describes this as 'the weight of a five million Boeing 747s'. That's actually an underestimate! By over 300 million pounds!
And again, these are being lifted simultaneously, at 200 mph. That's the equivalent force of 1,009,600 tons of TNT. 1,173,400,000,000 watt hours.
What I'm trying to say is that this is a fuckton of energy being used, here.
So what I want to know is: in a world where energy is neither created or destroyed... where the fuck is HAL getting all this energy from?
Anyway, that's enough math for the moment.
Prime Minister Blair is on his way back from his weekly meeting with the... King of England? We haven't had a king since the fifties. Anyway, he's on his way back when all this happens. He's amused.
The president of China, however, is not. He wants to know what Theresa's plans are. He wants her to go to the UN and give a statement. Which is, honestly, pretty reasonable. I mean, some warning would have been nice.
So they decide to do that in the next chapter.
See you then, folks.
Maybe it's just that she's a dame, and that's grand. :B
Wait, hang on a sec. These columns of water: are they really pulling from the surrounding body of water? I had initially assumed that they were just ocean-depth cylinders carved out and levitated, which is still a lot of energy. But if you're telling me that we're talking about actual, 15 meter radius, 240 km height (!!!) cylinders of water...
Well, using your calculations, that's about 10^12 kg of water, moving upward at about 100 m/s, under gravitational acceleration 10 m/s^2. Multiply that out, and you get 10^15 watts (or 1 petawatt) of power (this is actually an upper limit, as only at the end will there be a full column of that height). For comparison, the Earth receives a few hundred petawatts from the Sun, so it's at least mathematically conceivable for HAL to generate that level of power. Of course, that completely ignores the thorny questions of how that power would be captured, directed, and distributed by something contained within a human-sized package. Not to mention that, once these pillars reach their full height, we'll have expended 1.2 x 10^18 joules of energy to loft all that water. That's the equivalent of 287 megatons of TNT, or more than 5 Tsar bombs, worth of gravitational potential energy. If HAL were to drop those water columns, the catastrophic worldwide tsunamis would be the least of your problems.
I like overthinking things. Can you tell?
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They appear to be continuously being raised, like a fountain. A really, really big fountain.
Oh, and if you think this is bad, just wait until a couple of chapters from now. Things get worse.