Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Acalio-Laron-Jaham on December 25, 2009, 06:52:31 PM
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If you were able to morph, how screwed would you be if you were sucked into zero-space due to some ship dragging your extended mass in its weight?
I use to think it would be so cool to morph, especially morphing something small and sneak into places/spy of people. But now, after rereading #18 again, its got me thinking - 'oh sh*t, what if this happens?'
We won't happen have Ax there to hail any andalite or other ships with his thought-speech. It would terrible to just be stranded there in Zero-space, slowly suffocating.
We know that according to Ax, it is supposedly and apparently an extremely, extremely, extremely rare and unlikely event/occurrence - but it did happen. And in the words of Ax himself, I quote -
"Once, some time ago, I explained to my
human friends about excess mass being pushed
into Zero-space. They asked whether some ship
traveling through Zero-space might not hit these
matter bubbles.
I'd laughed. After all, the odds were ...
Well, obviously it now seemed the odds were
pretty good. The Andalite ship had come too
close and had pulled us into its magnetic
field. It was now dragging us in its wake as it
blasted through Z-space."
So, in light of this, if morphing was possible and I was given the power, I would refrain from morphing small creatures. (btw, was it just because of morphing small creatures that they could get sucked into z-space? or can it be any morph, no matter how large of small? cuz if you morph something bigger than yourself, your human organs would still be sent to z-space for storage anyway, waiting to return to you when you demorph - so it could still be dragged off by some ships magnetic field. yes/no?)
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I honestly think that could happen with any morph of a mass smaller than yours--she just picked mosquitoes so we got full complete Animorphs rather than scary half-complete Animorphs.
And I think he first talked about it in #5, and said the chances of that happening were pretty remote. We're never explicitly told how "big" Zero-Space is but it really didn't seem like much of an issue, just a really compelling plot. More on par with getting killed by a falling asteroid than getting into a car crash, you know? It was the first time the Andalites themselves had heard about it, after all, and morphing had been around for a good 30 years by that point.
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We're never explicitly told how "big" Zero-Space is but it really didn't seem like much of an issue
well z-space is antimatter. nothing at all, according to marco's dad. so how would you even be able to call it any size?
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lol right?
and how could you "travel through it"?
lol if you wanted to start a thread about exactly how Zero-Space works, or if it was just a faster-than-light plot device that didn't actually break any physical laws of the universe, I'd be down with that.
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no thanks. I'm sure I'd get a headache from that discussion...
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Here's the thing, though.
If your extra matter gets killed in Z-space, wouldn't you 'come back to life' when you demorphed, or at least when the giant-space-rubber-band snapped you back to your own time? I wouldn't think it would matter whether your extra matter was 'alive' or not, since it all gets re-shuffled every time you morph, anyway.
Otherwise, wouldn't they die every time they morphed something smaller than they are? Nearby space-ships or not, their extra matter is still hanging out in the utter vacuum of z-space, still suffocating, whether or not your consciousness happens to be inhabiting it at that moment.
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I honestly think that could happen with any morph of a mass smaller than yours--she just picked mosquitoes so we got full complete Animorphs rather than scary half-complete Animorphs.
And I think he first talked about it in #5, and said the chances of that happening were pretty remote. We're never explicitly told how "big" Zero-Space is but it really didn't seem like much of an issue, just a really compelling plot. More on par with getting killed by a falling asteroid than getting into a car crash, you know? It was the first time the Andalites themselves had heard about it, after all, and morphing had been around for a good 30 years by that point.
I believe it was first brought up in #10.
Yeah I think it's safe to say we aren't truly supposed to understand how Z-space works. Anyone capable of understanding it probably wouldn't be able to put it into words we could understand, at least not without an advanced degree in astrophysics or something. :P
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There was that thing in 45, where Marco's dad describes it as the tip of a conic section, which would imply that z-space isn't space so much as an intersection of space, kind of in the Einsteinian sense, or like Hawking with his wormholes.
If anything, then, you shouldn't really have to travel through it at all. We know it shifts, so maybe the pieces of space that intersect shuffle in and out? If that's the case, then staying in it seems kind of pointless, just send a probe that records what parts of space are currently accessible and wait till the one you want pops up to use it.
And of course we can't accurately decipher it, because IT'S NOT REAL but I think it's fun to try anyway :)
and damn, I think you're right. I knew it was an early Marco book, I just didn't know which one.
As far as your thing, Dino...I think that's actually a plot hole. Because you're right, as far as I can tell the discovery made in #18 was not the whole rubber band thing but that extruded mass in z-space is not fundamental and incoherent, but the actual tissues and organs of the base body. If that's the case, it should die whether the morpher is conscious of it or not, unless the mass became specialized when the consciousness shifted, because of how the technology works, or...something...yo u know what I am just confusing myself so I am going to stop.
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marco's dad didn't it was the tip of a cone. he said it was the middle of the cone or something; basically where all the lines meet.
in normal space, we travel on the edge of the cone. in z-space, we travel through the cone.
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I honestly think that could happen with any morph of a mass smaller than yours--she just picked mosquitoes so we got full complete Animorphs rather than scary half-complete Animorphs.
i've always wondered that when the extra matter is sent to z-space (as in the mosquito incident), even when morphing something way smaller than yourself, what's the reason for it being a perfectly-formed human?
morphing isn't exactly pretty, i'd assume that the matter would just be sent to z-space in random parts. why would it be assembled as it was on earth?
...or am i completely missing something?
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marco's dad didn't it was the tip of a cone. he said it was the middle of the cone or something; basically where all the lines meet.
in normal space, we travel on the edge of the cone. in z-space, we travel through the cone.
Okay, I'm not going to lie his whole description was half sci-fi mumbo jumbo and half...actual maybe something real. I'll just post the important parts:
We've discovered what could be thought of as a whole new dimension, yet not a dimension at all. It's sort of like...Marco, you've studied conic sections, haven't you?
...You know what a cone looks like, right? Well, the surface of a cone is the two-dimensional analogue to the five-dimensional space we inhabit.
...While the surface of the cone is two-dimensional, the surface exists in three dimensions.
...The cone contains a singularity...a place where all lines intersect. The place where you can head out in any direction, or in all directions at once. Where you can move in any direction without moving anywhere at all.
...We live our lives on just one line on the cone, in a mere four dimensions, including time
...We've been stuck on the surface of the cone all this time. When we want to go anywhere, we have to travel on the line. But now, imagine someone notices the singularity. A point with no size, no breadth, no extent. The physical representation of nothingness. By itself, it's nothing. Yet it's the starting and ending place of everything! A multiplier of real space!
...What could you call it? Zero, I suppose. Zero-Space.
All right, so all of that jazz about five dimensions and the two-dimensional surface of the cone somehow adding with the three-dimensional space the cone inhabits makes no sense to me. But the stuff about the "singularity" does.
Here's my interpretation, and feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong:
[img width= height=]http://i49.tinypic.com/2whmolu.png[/img]
All right, so like Marco's dad said, we live our lives on just one line of the cone. I've indicated that by the dotted line, Earth. Earth inhabits one specific vector on the cone. In real space, if you wanted to travel to another vector, say, the moon, you'd have to travel on the outside of the cone. Now, how far down from the tip of the cone you'd have to travel, and the width of the angle between vectors, I mean, ****, I don't know. This is a children's book series. Maybe the distance from the tip is real-space distance, the angle...ugh idk. But what it LOOKS like he's saying is that at the tip, all lines converge. That is the "nothing" point, where both nothing and everything exists simultaneously. And that, as I take it, is Zero-Space.
Now, like I said, if this was how it worked, then you could get anywhere in the galaxy instantaneously, assuming everything in our galaxy is part of the same "cone." But it really seems, through the series, the time it takes to get somewhere is still dependent on how far away you are from that place. So either that's inconsistent or I'm not understanding this right. Or this is a vast simplification of a *very advanced* scientific principle, much like Schrodinger's cat.
BUT IT'S FICTIONAL SO WHY SHOULDN'T THAT BE EXACTLY HOW IT IS?
i've always wondered that when the extra matter is sent to z-space (as in the mosquito incident), even when morphing something way smaller than yourself, what's the reason for it being a perfectly-formed human?
morphing isn't exactly pretty, i'd assume that the matter would just be sent to z-space in random parts. why would it be assembled as it was on earth?
...or am i completely missing something?
It's an *n-dimensional* human, all twisted and nasty and inside-out and right-side in, from what I remember. The Andalites reintegrated the bodies into 3-dimensional space when they brought them aboard their ship.
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who do u suppose would be the foremost expert on z-space? and do u think it is a concept which one day may be real?
would it be K.A? since she.......basically created it right? im curious, does she have any background in physics? or astro-physics?
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marco's dad didn't it was the tip of a cone. he said it was the middle of the cone or something; basically where all the lines meet.
in normal space, we travel on the edge of the cone. in z-space, we travel through the cone.
Okay, I'm not going to lie his whole description was half sci-fi mumbo jumbo and half...actual maybe something real. I'll just post the important parts:
We've discovered what could be thought of as a whole new dimension, yet not a dimension at all. It's sort of like...Marco, you've studied conic sections, haven't you?
...You know what a cone looks like, right? Well, the surface of a cone is the two-dimensional analogue to the five-dimensional space we inhabit.
...While the surface of the cone is two-dimensional, the surface exists in three dimensions.
...The cone contains a singularity...a place where all lines intersect. The place where you can head out in any direction, or in all directions at once. Where you can move in any direction without moving anywhere at all.
...We live our lives on just one line on the cone, in a mere four dimensions, including time
...We've been stuck on the surface of the cone all this time. When we want to go anywhere, we have to travel on the line. But now, imagine someone notices the singularity. A point with no size, no breadth, no extent. The physical representation of nothingness. By itself, it's nothing. Yet it's the starting and ending place of everything! A multiplier of real space!
...What could you call it? Zero, I suppose. Zero-Space.
All right, so all of that jazz about five dimensions and the two-dimensional surface of the cone somehow adding with the three-dimensional space the cone inhabits makes no sense to me. But the stuff about the "singularity" does.
Here's my interpretation, and feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong:
[img width= height=]http://i49.tinypic.com/2whmolu.png[/img]
All right, so like Marco's dad said, we live our lives on just one line of the cone. I've indicated that by the dotted line, Earth. Earth inhabits one specific vector on the cone. In real space, if you wanted to travel to another vector, say, the moon, you'd have to travel on the outside of the cone. Now, how far down from the tip of the cone you'd have to travel, and the width of the angle between vectors, I mean, ****, I don't know. This is a children's book series. Maybe the distance from the tip is real-space distance, the angle...ugh idk. But what it LOOKS like he's saying is that at the tip, all lines converge. That is the "nothing" point, where both nothing and everything exists simultaneously. And that, as I take it, is Zero-Space.
Now, like I said, if this was how it worked, then you could get anywhere in the galaxy instantaneously, assuming everything in our galaxy is part of the same "cone." But it really seems, through the series, the time it takes to get somewhere is still dependent on how far away you are from that place. So either that's inconsistent or I'm not understanding this right. Or this is a vast simplification of a *very advanced* scientific principle, much like Schrodinger's cat.
BUT IT'S FICTIONAL SO WHY SHOULDN'T THAT BE EXACTLY HOW IT IS?
huh my interpretation of what marco's dad said is a bit different from yours...
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how did you interpret it?
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well I imagined it like the entire surface of the cone, base, side, even tip, was normal space, and everything inside the cone was z-space. traveling in normal space was traveling along the surface of the cone, and traveling through z-space was traveling, through the cone along the straight line between two points.
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that's more along the line of Einstein/Hawking, I think, but that doesn't explain why Zero-Space "shifts" any better than mine does.
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I don't even get what shifting means. I can't even recall when they ever mentioned z-space shifting in the series actually.
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shifting, like how it takes months to get to Earth and then Zero-space shifts and it takes years to get to Earth. It's unpredictable, it moves, or something.
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Oh, that's the easy part! :D
Right. Z-space is the zeroth dimension, neh? That means it is an infinitely small, infinitely large POINT. It is fixed.
Thing is, everything in greater-than-zero-dimension is MOVING. Constantly. Energy, lines of force, matter itself vibrating, the orbits of things because of gravity and EM and the nuclear forces: everything moves.
It's not z-space shifting in relation to where you are,
it's you shifting massive distances in relation to z-space's nonlocation.
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always wondered how that "mass" was kept that alive during it's time into zspace..
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Oh, that's the easy part! :D
Right. Z-space is the zeroth dimension, neh? That means it is an infinitely small, infinitely large POINT. It is fixed.
Thing is, everything in greater-than-zero-dimension is MOVING. Constantly. Energy, lines of force, matter itself vibrating, the orbits of things because of gravity and EM and the nuclear forces: everything moves.
It's not z-space shifting in relation to where you are,
it's you shifting massive distances in relation to z-space's nonlocation.
that makes a lot of sense
but it still doesn't explain why it takes different amounts of time to reach the same place based on that "shift"
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What if your time spent traveling in zero space is not actually spent at the "zero space" point, but merely traveling through the area of the "cone" to the "zero" point, and then back to real space? My guess would be that the Andalites don't actually reach the zero point doing it this way either- they just get close, but still have to travel some real distance too- that explains not only why it takes time to travel through z-space, but why it seems to take longer in z-space to travel a greater real space distance. Honestly, calling what Andalite ships travel through "zero space" is a bit presumptuous if you look at it this way (I'd go with "condensed space" or "condensed sweetened space" =P).
Then, of course, the shifting of z-space is pretty easy to explain. Visualizing it as a perfect cone is a bit flawed. It would have to be a cone that's constantly rippling and twisting with the changing energies of the universe. If a ripple happens to fall along the condensed space line of travel between you and your destination, it could severely alter the travel times between those two locations. Space, even n-dimensional space, is far from "smooth."
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What if your time spent traveling in zero space is not actually spent at the "zero space" point, but merely traveling through the area of the "cone" to the "zero" point, and then back to real space? My guess would be that the Andalites don't actually reach the zero point doing it this way either- they just get close, but still have to travel some real distance too- that explains not only why it takes time to travel through z-space, but why it seems to take longer in z-space to travel a greater real space distance. Honestly, calling what Andalite ships travel through "zero space" is a bit presumptuous if you look at it this way (I'd go with "condensed space" or "condensed sweetened space" =P).
Then, of course, the shifting of z-space is pretty easy to explain. Visualizing it as a perfect cone is a bit flawed. It would have to be a cone that's constantly rippling and twisting with the changing energies of the universe. If a ripple happens to fall along the condensed space line of travel between you and your destination, it could severely alter the travel times between those two locations. Space, even n-dimensional space, is far from "smooth."
it's official. I have a headache...
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Einsteinian space is very smooth at everything above quantum-mechanical scales, making interstellar travel impractical. Actually, according to currently-known physics it's possible to travel between two stars in a matter of hours with sufficient energy and acceleration.
Of course, when you get there, many years will have passed for the universe at large. Relativity makes my brain hurt.
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It's likely less than a one in a trillion chance due to the vastness of space, and only happened in 18 because it's a fiction story, and was a plot line KAA could follow.
If morphing was in real life, you'd have a higher chance of dying from a baseball sized meteor crashing into your head than being sucked to Z space.
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hmm... re-reading what ax said about that in book 10...
ax said, the ship wouldn't hit them, but the ship's shielding would disintegrate them. guess that was just theory too...
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Einsteinian space is very smooth at everything above quantum-mechanical scales, making interstellar travel impractical. Actually, according to currently-known physics it's possible to travel between two stars in a matter of hours with sufficient energy and acceleration.
Of course, when you get there, many years will have passed for the universe at large. Relativity makes my brain hurt.
I don't tend to put a whole lot of stock in currently-known physics. It hasn't even come up with a way to reconcile quantum physics with classical physics ::)
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I must break into the conversation, if only a moment, to squeal and dance about the board.
Why?
Somebody else here is speaking sense-making physics.
Weathel and Aluminator, I must now hug you.
*hug*
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Well... two things... I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot here but I don't care!
Have space as the "two dimensional surface area of the cone" sound bit ridiculous to me... because space itself isn't in two dimensions is it? We aren't in two dimensions are we? No we're in three, four actually (time). So how could you twist space around and have it a cone? Maybe have the surface be "thick"? Maybe you can't get into Z-space from every point of space... or maybe there are more than one cone? There couldn't possibly be only one cone now that I think about it. If you could leave Earth via space ship you couldn't just good in a certain direction you could go any way you want, so maybe its a bunch of cones, maybe they over lap? I don't know I'm sounding like an idiot, even to myself xD
Maybe Z-space is more like what happened in "A Wrinkle in Time"? I don't know, its a thought. Of course both are only books.
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About morphing itself about dieing technically every time you morph because the extra matter is sent into Z-space. Maybe that is why their is a two hour limit. Maybe the morphing technology can only bring back the matter to life within the time limit and once it passes the matter losses its connection completely with the morpher? But what happens when you morph somehting larger than yourself?
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um... Damien, I'm not sure how to explain it properly to you about that, but yes, to me, you're sounding like an idiot. :-\ sorry
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Hahaha, it sounds logical in my head, but I don't know how to put it into words... basicly I don't how explain it without sounding stupid... maye I could draw it but...
You see I understand the concept Z-space but it doesn't add up. In the theory space itself is the surface area of the "cone". But the surface of the cone is only two dimensional, hence it being a surface but space isn't two dimensional it is in four dimensions (length, width, height, and time?) So how could space, a four dimensional "thing" (can't think of a better word) fit onto a surface, a two dimensional object? It doesn't make sense. In theory space expands endlessly in all directions. I think the only way to make sense of it would be to have multiple cones for certain parts of space. That itself is stupid, isn't it? Of course I can't put my ideas into words without them sounding stupid at all huh?
I could try sketching my ideas down but... is it really worth it? Maybe then I could make sense of it...
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the cone isn't a theory. the cone is just a (very) simplified model so our puny human minds can somehow comprehend it.
it's like on a map, you say a square is a building. buildings are 3-dimensional, but the square on the map is 2-dimensional
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That makes a lot more sense now xD. Still the idea of Z-space... its possible I suppose. Maybe its an alternate space where everything is condensed so things "travel faster" but other than that... never mind I'm sounding stupid again. Carry on.
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hey i thought z-space is opening a hole in normal space and when u go in it, it condenses the space between where you are and your destination :huh:
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Nah, that would be too similar to every other sci-fi FTL plot device out there. Z-space seems to be equivalent to traveling in higher dimensions, but in a way that's somehow still grounded in our universe and dimensions.
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hey i thought z-space is opening a hole in normal space and when u go in it, it condenses the space between where you are and your destination :huh:
I think you're thinking of a wormhole...
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According to einstein what we percieve as space and time are acutally the same thing Space-time. Objects with mass cause the bending of space time what we know as gravity. This is why they have to keep reseting GPS satelite timers because time passes at a different rate in outer space.
Stretch a thin sheet out in mid-air and throw an object on to it. The object will bend the sheet like the way a planet bends Space-time. Anyway imagine this sheet is in a cone. It would take alot less time to travel around the top of the cone then the bottom and the area at the top is Z-Space.
Anyway that's how I percieve Z-space.
As for morphing Z-Space is probably so vast that two ships almost never meet in Z-Space. To be honest I don't think in the grand scheme of things that a larger mass (in human terms) would make much difference. The fact that the animorphs came across a dome ship in Z-Space was astronomical luck.
Or as Dr.Mcoy put it. "It would be like shooting a bullet with another bullet while riding a horse."