I didn’t think I had anything to write about for Misconceptions, but then i realized that I had a common misconception staring me in the face. I’d planned on putting three books out in 2016. I’ll be lucky to get one. I think that’s due, in part, to a common misconception by writers and readers; for some insane reason, we believe that life will go as planned. Even though it’s proven to us again and again, that life will NOT go as planned, we still seem to believe that it will.
Take my story for instance. I already had Moon Shadows written, the first in a series of six, and so I was sure it would go out in 2016. Nope. Taking a closer look, I realized this is a series that needs a publisher. It has great potential as a YA novel, but changes need to be made and it needs the marketing and backing that a pubolisher, even a small one, can give it. So nope, not coming in 2016.
I was partway done with two other novels, but medical issues within my family and extended family took time as well as money. I needed to get a consistent income which meant getting a regular job. Now, most authors work and write so what’s the big deal? Most aren”t the mother of five, active in their church and community, and spending 3-6 hours a week with dr. appointments. Is that an excuse? Yes! I should manage my time better, get less discouraged, and I should make writing more of a priority. I watch TV to escape the stress, I worry about things I can’t change then can’t focus on my stories, and my priorities occasionally get completely screwed up.
I’ve gone off on a tangent a little bit here, but I think the point is valid. Life happens. Excuses happen. Recognize it, deal with it, and keep writing. Let your readers know that you’re still working. Change timelines. It’s okay. And if you can only get a book out every other year for a while, or even longer, that’s okay. After a couple of those, you may be able to get four out in one year. Will missing self-imposed deadlines affect your career and your fan base? Maybe, but not detrimentally. Don’t believe the hype that you HAVE to have X number of books out per year. Believe in your fans, believe in your art, and believe in yourself.
O’ Death, Won’t you spare me over til’ another year But what is this, that I can’t see, With ice cold hands taking hold of me.
– traditional American folk song
Take the nihilistic assumption that humans are in the process of dying the moment they are conceived. Everything our bodies do is to maintain the process of surviving through creating, maintaining, and eliminating. Start messing with the supply chain, the fuel,the equipment, or the director, and the body has a problem.
If you can get it back up and running, good. If you can’t…things don’t shut down right away. Death is a process.
But how what exactly IS death? What does that look like? The line between “alive” and “dead” is getting more and more blurred as we advance in technology. At this moment, different countries and different people define death differently. Ultimately, if the person in your story isn’t moving, breathing, and has no pulse, they’re probably going to go in the ground after a few minutes of being like that, since the brain damage sustained and the medical technology available is probably not going to get them to any livable state. But what if you could? What would that look like? “Not breathing.” I can hold my breath; Am I dead? I can be choking or in laryngospasm when drowning; Am I dead yet? No? I can still have a pulse even if I’m not breathing, right?
“No pulse!” Through chest compressions I can pump your heart for you and give you a pulse. I can run it through a machine and pump it indefinitely.
“No…self-initiated pulse?” No pulse doesn’t mean the heart isn’t working at all, and you need an EKG (electrocardiogram, or a “heart strip”) read by a trained person to tell the difference between “ineffective pumping” (therefore not producing a palpable pulse) and “heart isn’t showing any electrical activity at all” (asystole, or ‘flat line’).
You could be in atrial fibrillation, which is basically the heart jiggling itself like jello. It could be persuaded to pump again, given a good shock to reset it. Why do you think they call those chest-paddles “DE-fibrillation”?
Note: You cannot use a defibrillator on someone who is “flat-lined”, or in “asystole”, where there is no electrical activity in the heart. You can’t de-fib when there’s no fib. You can’t reset a rhythm that doesn’t exist. You start CPR when you hear that flat-drone, or don’t get a pulse. Put the paddles down your doctors would know better.
In some countries, death is defined as no self-initiated pulse. Even in the US, if you can’t get the pulse back after CPR (if the patient didn’t have an Advanced Directive against it and weren’t considered “DNR: Do Not Resuscitate”), the doctor will generally call it (and the doctor has to call it, not the nurse). There’s some wiggle room though. Even in asystole, the brain may still have electrical activity. …Remember how I said that everything is breaking down, and that this is guaranteed?
Well you can slow it. You can delay it. You can even potentially reverse it (for the most part).
Since all things are made of cells, and cells are made of parts, and those parts are made of chemicals, and those chemicals are made of atoms, and those atoms are made of….well, they’re always moving. Even solids, like a table, are always constantly shaking. In place, but, moving. Everything is in motion in some way. If you slow that down, reactions don’t happen.
If you heat up a body, things start to break down faster. Fever can be dangerous because it can “denaturate proteins”, which means, it’s so hot, hot means moving fast, moving fast means shaking apart, breaking down.
So what happens if you cool a body, such as in cryogenics?
Yes, the ‘freeze them in time’ for future revival’ thing but that’s more cryonics.
Things slow down. Do it too slow, such as hypothermia, the damage won’t be stopped. The body is mostly water, so ice crystals can form and burst cells, circulation is cut off, essentially leaving the limbs for necrosis (and gangrene to set in).
But in people who have been cooled quickly, instantly almost, the process the body goes throu-…
Okay let me back up even more. Oxygen is required for a lot of the body’s processes. There is such a thing as a “reperfusion injury”, where oxygen is introduced to an area deprived, and suddenly it has all this…currency with which to pay the men to start destroying things.
“But it has oxygen! I thought that was a good thing! Shouldn’t it be happy?”
Yeah, but remember, the body is a jerk, and runs more like a bureaucracy. The paperwork had already gone through, they just ran out of ‘money’ on the project. So no oxygen, no currency, no processes. This can cause damage.
But if the body is cooled properly, it’s too slowed to actually do anything even if it has the currency of oxygen. It’s stuck in a stasis.
Some success has been made with patients who were quickly frozen by the environment or strategically frozen when in critical condition. We pull them back with slow warming and controlling and staying ahead of the destruction. One step back, two steps forward.
Imagine this for your story:
“Red” triaged patients who would normally be tagged ‘black’ (“don’t bother”) frozen to halt the death process until an appropriate level of care can be arranged.
A hospital that is overrun with casualties that can’t reasonably stabilize everyone without putting a few ‘on hold’.
A cryogenic chamber that flash-freezes and slowly warms the patient up to bring them back after space-travel or ‘until we have the technology to treat your condition’.
So here’s the million dollar question:
If we can pull them back, if CPR, cryogenics, and just…act of god for all we know, can make them alive again, were they really dead? And where is that line?
This month’s topic is almost too good to be true. For an engineer, popular culture is like an endless fountain of improper physics to pedantically complain about. Seriously, it’s like crack to us. The best examples of physics in stories get most things right or are well-written enough to make us forget to look too closely. The worst examples are Armageddon.
Before I get into more specifics and insight a flame war, please view this post as seeking to educate, not ruin anyone’s fun. I’m willing to forgive quite a lot of bad physics provided the story itself isn’t cringe-worthy. That being said, there’s stuff we see in movies, shows or books that, given our current understanding of technology and physics, just wouldn’t work in real life. I’ll be focusing primarily on human beings’ tendency to go squish when confronted with sudden acceleration.
One of the questions I get a lot from non-engineers is why we don’t have flying cars. Over the years, I’ve come up with an only slightly snarky standard answer to this question. “Imagine if every car accident was fatal.” It generally gets the message across.
With that in mind, if someone asks why we can’t have an suit like the one Tony Stark wears, one problem (of many) is the number of high-speed impacts Iron Man sustains in that suit. If we assume the suit is made of super-light advanced alloys that could sustain high speed impacts without damage, that’s great news … for the suit. But if the suit is staying pristine, that means that it’s not absorbing the energy of the impact, it’s merely transmitting it. Sooner or later that energy must be absorbed, and if the suit isn’t doing it, the squishy human body wearing the suit is.
A great example of this phenomenon is with cars. Did you know that cars didn’t used to get all crumpled up in accidents? The invention of crumple zones, parts of the car intended to dramatically deform, was implemented as a safety feature. Again, something has to absorb and dissipate the energy of an impact. Crumple zones represent the car absorbing it and directing it around the driver. Even then, seat belts and airbags are required to keep the driver from getting slammed into something hard and unyielding. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Either the car is getting wrecked, or the driver is. If Tony falls from two hundred feet up and is brought to a sudden stop by the ground, the suit (aside from some scratched paint) might well be fine, but poor Tony … not so much.
Which brings us to the reason that all of this is forgivable. I’ve just spent several hundred-odd words telling you all the ways your favorite movies, shows and books are screwing up physics for the sake of excitement. But stories need characters, and most of them need human characters, or else they’ll suffer problems with relatability. While a real-life space-dogfight of the future would likely be fought at speeds too fast for humans to perceive, much less participate in (see Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks for a great example), most of the time such a battle would result in a story without any real stakes.
So what’s a science-discerning author to do when reality gets in the way of story? When possible, acknowledge the issues and try to make overcoming them integral to the worldbuilding or plot. James S.A. Corey’s series The Expanse does a great job with this, placing its human pilots in “crash couches” designed to absorb the energy that would crush their bodies and injecting them with “the juice,” a fictitious cocktail of drugs to prevent them succumbing to sudden, massive acceleration. These are great details that really enrich the setting and trigger enough of my engineering reward centers (presenting a problem and offering up a plausible-ish solution) that I’m willing to forgive them their stretching the laws of physics.
Above all, do the research. Treat your audience–and their intelligence–with respect. Always try to be aware of the rules you are breaking, and understand why you need to break them. Better yet, treat the rule as a storytelling constraint and try to use it to find a better way to tell your story. Many of your readers might not care, but you’ll make some future engineer reader very happy.
About the Author: Gregory D. Little
Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls, Mutagen
Deception, and the forthcoming Bell Begrudgingly Solves It series. As
a writer, you would think he could find a better way to sugarcoat the
following statement, but you’d be wrong. So, just to say it straight, he
really enjoys tricking people. As such, one of his greatest joys in life is
laughing maniacally whenever he senses a reader has reached That
Part in one of his books. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, it doesn’t matter. They
all have That Part. You’ll know it when you get to it, promise. Or will
you? He lives in Virginia with his wife, and he is uncommonly fond of
spiders.
Quick, how do you normally see a character portrayed in a visual media as ‘drowning’?
Very visible, loud behavior, right? Arms up, head potentially bobbing, screaming for help?
“Help me! Help me I’m in aquatic distress!”
Alright, maybe. Getting there. That’s called “aquatic distress” and may precede drowning. If your character has gotten to the ‘face down float’ you’ve missed a bit. But there are several things that happen when you lift your arms to wave in water: Firstly, you will sink. Going vertical is actually a technique to put yourself under the water because it reduces the surface tension. Sinking of course means your head goes underwater. Head going underwater means you’re not breathing. So your character may do this. Sure. But I hope you weren’t attached to them, and what did you teach the readers drowning looks like? Drowning is the third most common unintentional death in the world and has been a major cause of deaths throughout history. We like to live near water. Very likely the signs of drowning are more subtle: *You may not see them at all, not unless the water is very clear *Their head may be tilted up, but if they can’t keep themselves afloat or coordinate enough to roll on their back, their lips and nose may still fill with water. This is a response not under conscious control. *Arms be out to the side, possibly paddling down, to increase buoyancy, but coordination is very hard and not likely to happen. They may also appeal to be “climbing an invisible ladder” similar to a non-productive “doggy-paddle”. *They may look fearful and unable to focus. *They may not be able to call out because of the whole ‘not breathing’ thing, and may instead gasp. This can be misinterpreted as ‘playing’ in the water. But then it gets weird as your body tries to ‘help’. See, when I say that a drowning person is panicked, I don’t just mean they’re overcome with fear. I mean the compulsion to breathe has become an all-consuming obsession. It is the one and only thought they may have. I mean you could take the kindest, gentlest person on the planet and they still will very likely hold you under the water to give themselves a chance to breathe. I mean a drowning person will pull the person down trying to save them. This is why it’s recommended you throw objects they can grab onto, or extend poles. It is also entirely possible to be at risk for drowning in very shallow water, or even water that you can stand in. How? I was at the waterpark the other day with a friend, enjoying some time in the wave pool. Now I’ve experienced the sensation of drowning about…four times now, because God doesn’t seem to love me and no matter how strong of a swimmer I get, things can still come up. You get knocked out falling off a jet ski. The air you were holding so carefully gets knocked out of you when you come up and hit an object that moved over you, and now you have to move without just the oxygen remaining. The waves keep coming, and coming, and you can’t catch your breath before the next one. In the wave pool there was a child around early elementary school age who had fallen off the inner tube he shared with his sibling. At first he seemed like a kid playing in the waves, but he wasn’t keeping his head above water. Was he getting air? Who knows. But he wasn’t coordinated. The waves pushed him towards the shallower end where he could stand during the trough, but the waves were coming right after the other. The little one turned his back to the waves and walked as best he could, but he was crying without saying anything. His lungs weren’t expanding. I was already working my way towards him at this point, but all these signs indicated that possibly his lungs were spasming to keep more fluid from coming in. You cannot breathe like this. You cannot pull air in, exchange the gases, and exhale it as needed. Your body has decreed that in order to save you, nothing is coming in for now. This can be considered a form of ‘dry drowning’ and is the sensation of suffocation. This is called “laryngospasm”, and as fearful as it can be to experience, someone who is rescued with a sealed airway that protected the lungs has a higher chance of recovery. Which means, panic. Your character will generally have about 20-60 seconds of tolerating this autonomic response before they risk passing out. Another response they may have is the hyperventilation of gasping, of trying to constantly pull air in but being unable to expel the CO2 in their system. Too much carbon dioxide within the system can also shut the body down. Once they pass out, they then risk pulling water into the lungs, which, even if they are revived, can have lasting effects on the body and still risk killing them 24-48 hours afterwards from pulmonary edema, difficulty breathing, and ‘drowning in your own body fluids’. The actual sensation of drowning past this response is often quick and quiet as the brain is deprived of oxygen. With hypoxia, everything shuts down, and a great feeling of peace can overcome them as the systems that scream to react shut down. But this often means that even a strong swimmer character who is doing their best to make it through the maze of tunnels may suddenly pass out without warning. Oftentimes one way to determine if someone died before or after being submerged in water is if there is water in the lungs. Water in the lungs indicates the person was alive at the time of submersion.A sample of the water can then be matched to local water sources to determine if they were drowned in the water they were submerged in. Thankfully the child wasn’t ever to any of those points yet. I lifted him out of the water and pulled him closer to shore, where his frantic sibling helped him back on to the inner tube. With some encouragement he was able to coordinate his breathing enough and, being the resilient thing little kids are, was back out in the water laughing and smiling and waving at me.
I didn’t think I had anything to write about for Misconceptions, but then i realized that I had a common misconception staring me in the face. I’d planned on putting three books out in 2016. I’ll be lucky to get one. I think that’s due, in part, to a common misconception by writers and readers; for some insane reason, we believe that life will go as planned. Even though it’s proven to us again and again, that life will NOT go as planned, we still seem to believe that it will.
