Mr Boutin Doesn't Know How Gases Work (RB Vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 16) · 5:07pm May 5th, 2021
Previously, on Empress Theresa:
Theresa causes more problems than she solves? Who woulda guessed!
And now:
I spent a sleepless night. The unfairness of my position kept the tears flowing.
Thus opens the chapter. Theresa is having a hard time supporting all the weight on her shoulders.
Y'know, we could always try throwing Theresa out of an airplane again. That might fix the problem. Worked last time.
After a lot of moping around in bed, Steve gets up to do some 'internet research'. A little while later, he comes up with a plan.
This is his plan:
“I’ve been thinking. Do you know what xenon gas is?”
“Yeah. It’s used in lights.”
“It’s an inert element. It’s nearly four times as heavy as air. If there was a lot of it in the atmosphere there wouldn’t be hurricanes because the warm air on the ground couldn’t go up fast.”
“Where is there a lot of xenon?”
“On the sun. The sun has all the elements. They can be separated by their melting points.”
Oh my lord, would you please stop playing god? You're both terrible at it.
So there's a couple of things here, the lesser of which is that the sun does not contain all of the elements, and in fact xenon is actually relatively rare in the sun (relatively being the key word).
The more major one is—as I'm sure most of you have already gathered—that xenon is significantly heavier than air. In fact, it's about four and a half times as heavy! Meaning that, rather than making air heavier, the xenon they introduce into the atmosphere will sink, displacing the lighter, breathable air upwards. Put enough in, and you could, in fact, suffocate us all! And even ignoring that, this means that this doesn't even fix the problem they're trying to solve!
Anyway, to do this, they'll need Mr. Blair's help. Theresa needs to be able to monitor the temperature of the sun, and can't triangulate positions in space. So, they decide to build a series of sixteen satellites around the sun, as well as one for observation and temperature monitoring that they decide to call 'Sky Spy', a name which is in no way ominous at all.
And then something curious happens: a general from the RAF asks them to add a bunch of helium, as well. Why?
“If helium was plentiful we could send up thousands of miniature dirigibles over territory invaded by terrorists groups. They would be lighter than air drones surveying the land for weeks at a time. We could put the terrorist organizations out of business.”
Steve and I looked at each other. What a great idea this was!
Uh... what? You're just gonna... let them do that? With no thoughts to the potential other uses of such a thing?
That aside, it's also kind of a bizarre request. It's true that the Earth does have a relatively low quantity of helium; we're actually going to run out of it eventually. That said, helium isn't the only gas that's lighter than air. If you wanted to, you could do this with (admittedly, more flammable) hydrogen, and you can produce that from water with a twelve volt battery. Hell, you don't even need that anymore, we've had heavier-than-air drones for years. You can buy kits in toy stores these days. And, hell—spy satellites exist, why not use those? You already have some up there!
But anyway, they agree to it without a second thought. The satellites get built, Theresa uses HAL to move them close enough to the sun that they can get into position themselves, Sky Spy is described as a monstrosity for some reason, etc. etc. Soon enough, HAL is grabbing xenon and bringing it back to Earth. After a month, two ounces of atmospheric pressure (since when is pressure measured in ounces?) are xenon. This apparently has the intended effect of negating natural weather patterns. Whoopie. Theresa is happy she didn't have to kill half a billion Asians. That's a quote.
They also do the helium thing. It's described as 'a sad day for terrorists'.
The atmosphere was soon a tenth of a percent helium which didn’t sound like much, but it was a million times what it had been.
Not true, it's actually only 200 times.
Theresa explains that this is the end of her problems with the natural world. Good. I guess that means you can't fuck it up any worse.
Now involved, the scientific community has some interesting propositions for Theresa and her ability to effortlessly move matter hundreds of thousands of miles. Like putting a telescope on the moon, putting satellites in orbit around Mars, and getting a sample from Europa. Theresa says yes, yes, and 'I'll put it into orbit around Mars'. Which would, like, negate the point of it maybe supporting life, since you'd kill all that life getting it here? But anyway, Theresa has other priorities. Like getting rich.
Strap in, folks.
Theresa brings 'trillions of dollars' worth of gold down from space in the form of ball beside Fort Knox. The current price of gold is $1,750.59 an ounce at the moment, meaning she brought down at least 1,142,471,966.6-ish ounces of gold. That's about 71,404,498 pounds. That's heavier than the Statue of Liberty. That's a lot of gold!
Theresa's selling it at $50 an ounce. And there's more on the way. She promises to do the same for silver. This somehow fixes every economy on the planet.
Theresa hires Jan Struthers as her financial manager, for some reason. Within a month, Theresa's a billionaire.
I wondered what my old BC boyfriend Jack Koster was thinking of all this!
What a weirdly vindictive thing to say at such a moment. Way to be kind, Theresa.
Anyway, that's it for today. See you next chapter, folks.
I also find the claim of "The sun has all the elements" highly dubious. <.<
So the lesson of this chapter is, "Terrorism bad, breathing air unimportant".
5513225
Y'know, now that you point that out, I'm pretty sure you're right.
Funny enough, xenon is actually more abundant in Jupiter's atmosphere than in the Sun, not to mention much more easily accessible and harvestable. Even so, adding xenon to the atmosphere wouldn't do a whole lot. Assuming that the "two ounces of atmospheric pressure" is relative to the 14.7 pounds *per square inch* of normal atmospheric pressure, that's a change of only one percent. Turbulence and convection would likely be more than capable of keeping the xenon mixed throughout the troposphere, and hot air would still be less dense than cold air, because that's how gases work. But I'm not a climate scientist, so don't quote me on that last bit.