Escafil Device

[MoppingBear]

Remember, data transmission through Z-Space is instantaneous, movement through it is not.  The mind is able to maintain contact and control because it's just data, whereas morphing and demorphing constitutes movement through Z-Space.  Then again, due to Z-Space shifting, that would make the limit random, so maybe they figured out a way to keep the mass in the same relative space, but the nanite's ability to do so is strenuous on their supply, and after two hours, they can no longer do it.  But then, if morphing a larger animal borrows mass from Z-Space, it shouldn't matter...

KAA should have just avoided the whole thing and had morphing change the spacing of the atom the same way Honey I Shrunk the Kids did.

Visser 3 knows what he looks like, and is able to incorporate himself into the morph the same way the Animorphs do with the suits.  They did not know what the chips looked like, so they couldn't incorporate them.

[BaronConall]

This theory has some potential.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Oh god...
Here it comes... The "Time is relative" discussion where time is tethered to the self, not the form, and how time is self-healing, allowing any temporal disruption/delay to be ignored by temporal continuity...

*head a'splodes*

Man, I second that...

Actually, do we ever hear about them morphing any solid objects? I can't recall a single instance of morphing jewelry, for example. The Yeerk "sinks into the crevices and contours of the brain" and we know from when Cassie morphed a Yeerk that they have no bones or solid structures at all. Maybe morphing is just incapable of transforming solid objects. That would explain the Yeerk thing. The Yeerk is essentially spandex, the chip is closer to shoes. Probably has to do with how far into the object the nanites are able to project a Z-space field or whatever we're calling it when they send/receive matter from Z-space.

Remember, data transmission through Z-Space is instantaneous, movement through it is not.  The mind is able to maintain contact and control because it's just data, whereas morphing and demorphing constitutes movement through Z-Space.  Then again, due to Z-Space shifting, that would make the limit random, so maybe they figured out a way to keep the mass in the same relative space, but the nanite's ability to do so is strenuous on their supply, and after two hours, they can no longer do it.  But then, if morphing a larger animal borrows mass from Z-Space, it shouldn't matter...

That's actually a good point about transmissions being instantaneous. If you look at the mind of the morpher as being nothing more than data that is somehow stored in Z-space itself, it doesn't have to be tied to mass at all. If you say that the mass of the morph in real space and the mass of the morpher in Z-space occupy the same location, that would also explain the consistency of the time limit, though it does make me question Andalite Zero Space navigational techniques- they were passing THROUGH Earth on their way to the Leeran homeworld?

KAA should have just avoided the whole thing and had morphing change the spacing of the atom the same way Honey I Shrunk the Kids did.

Y'know, I've always had a problem with that. If you did that, wouldn't you have the same mass? Those eighth-inch-tall kids should still have weighed like eighty pounds, and Rachel's elephant would be much less useful if she didn't gain any weight in the transformation.

[BaronConall]

I can see this discussion unintentionally solving the problem of long distance thought-speak communication.

Andalites using a method of talking that's tethered more to self than the form implying a deeper understanding that all minds and consciousness are present in Z-Space rather than what we percieve to be the physical universe...

In which case... Did Z-Space just become Zen-Space?!

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Holy balls. That would solve basically every thought-speak anomaly I can think of...

[Gafrash]

Hahahah! This is gold!

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Hey, points raised in the http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=4996.30 thread lately raise an interesting question. We've decided that the majority of the nanites follow the morphed mass into Z-space upon morphing, so it makes sense that they're not losing morphs when they bleed out nanites in a battle, but the nanites would have to stay mostly in their blood stream while they're demorphed, right? Does that mean that if Cassie cuts her finger preparing a meal, that she could bleed out the nanite containing the data for her ****roach morph and lose the morph? How do you get around that? Is it as simple as just saying there are redundant copies of the information for each morph, or is that too silly and inefficient?

[Hunter]

Hey guys, I've just read through all four pages of this thread and i reckon you should go into Theoretical Physics!

Anyway, on to my point:

I'm not 100% sure which book, but in one, the Animorphs are going though the forest as wolves and Tobias notices that they are over their time limit, yet they still manage to morph back.

Any theories on that one?

[INH]

Well one possibility is that the clock that Tobias saw was just set to the wrong time.  However, a discussion about the morphing time limit recently came up in the "Things the Animorphs would Never Say" thread and I had an idea.

Basically, my idea was that there really isn't an exact morphing time limit.  It's not like at 1:59:59 in morph you can demorph easily and one second later you can't demorph at all.  Rather, demorphing gets harder the longer you stay in morph.  It starts to get really hard around 2 hours (hence why the Anis have a hard time demorphing when they cut it close) and at some point after that it becomes impossible.  Though I would guess that it becomes practically impossible long before it becomes theoretically impossible.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

(book 3, I think, Hunter)

Yeah, and the temporal displacement between the Z-space and real-space mass of a morpher lends itself well to that theory. If that's how it works, it should just get more and more difficult as time goes on, becoming 'practically impossible' somewhere around the 2-hour mark.

[MoppingBear]

Hey guys, I've just read through all four pages of this thread and i reckon you should go into Theoretical Physics!

Anyway, on to my point:

I'm not 100% sure which book, but in one, the Animorphs are going though the forest as wolves and Tobias notices that they are over their time limit, yet they still manage to morph back.

Any theories on that one?

Cassie is both an estreen and a subtemporally grounded anomaly, maybe she used her "powers" for both that and to help marco get out of half flea mode?

[A ghost you know]

Cassie is both an estreen and a subtemporally grounded anomaly, maybe she used her "powers" for both that and to help marco get out of half flea mode?

What exactly is a subtemporally grounded anomaly? I know it's got something to do with alternate timelines (that was particularly important in MM4, if I recall correctly), but I don't know exactly what. Judging from the books where this comes into play, Cassie's subconscious never really accepts alternate timelines but tries to revert to the original one?

Back on topic, I've got some questions. I'm looking forward to explanations...

Clearly, the host's brain can't be brought into the morph's body, or tiny morphs (e.g. roach, fly, or flea) wouldn't be possible. Others have suggested that the host's consciousness is stored in nanites in the morph's body, but I have a couple of problems. First, how would the host control the morph's body if the host's entire consciousness is "embedded", if you will, in a bunch of molecules? Next, how can the host's full mental capacity come into the morph if the host's brain isn't even there? We can count out the brain areas for sensory perception, since the host is using the morph's brain for that, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume all the host's memory and mental abilities (thinking, decision-making, etc.) fit into tiny molecules. If that was possible, why do we have big brains when tiny molecules would suffice?

DNA can't store learned information, so where are the hosts getting, say, the hawk's ability to fly? Sure, some of that is the hawk's instinct, but a significant part is the hawk's learning. When the Animorphs morph, their morphs always "know" exactly how to do certain things (going back to the hawk example, the hawk morph knows exactly how to fly). So, are the nanites storing more than just the morph's DNA? That doesn't seem realistic, particularly for animals with big brains or animals that live a long time - storing DNA + memory is likely to require a lot of nanites, or very powerful nanites. Both ways have problems.

[BaronConall]

A lot of it is speculation.
None of us can say that we know exactly what a Hawks instinct consists of, since the only mind we've ever known is a human one.

Secondly, brain size isn't relative to intelligence. By that logic, the Helmacrons and the Nesk (each being the size of/smaller than ants) should posses no intelligence at all. It is also scientific fact that women (sorry to get into the gender thing) have slightly smaller brains than men. This doesn't mean that they're any less intelligent, in fact women posses a greater natural affinity for mathematics and a faster rate of mental maturation than men.
It's wholly reasonable for anything with a brain smaller than ours to be as smart, if not smarter, than humans.

As for the "Subtemporally Grounded" question, you basically have to interpret it on the face value of the meaning of the word.
Temporality usually refers to Time, while 'Sub' comes from the latin word for Below, meaning Cassie is anchored to/beneath time.

That would mean that Cassie, kind of like the Nanites, is tethered to the timeline she orginates from. Any changes to her timeline/universe of origin that Cassie herself is not directly responsible for would result in the revelation of Cassie as a paradox within the altered timeline, causing the fractured timeline to begin to destabalize/heal.

I guess an analogy would be that Cassie is like Time's white blood cell, subconsciously recognising invasions in time and combating them in order to maintain the fragile structure of time itself.

[A ghost you know]

A lot of it is speculation.
None of us can say that we know exactly what a Hawks instinct consists of, since the only mind we've ever known is a human one.

That was just an example; sorry if I wasn't clear. My question was "how can the morph's brain come complete with learning, etc. since that isn't encoded in DNA?" Nanites might be able to store that information, but it would probably be fairly difficult.

Secondly, brain size isn't relative to intelligence. By that logic, the Helmacrons and the Nesk (each being the size of/smaller than ants) should posses no intelligence at all. It is also scientific fact that women (sorry to get into the gender thing) have slightly smaller brains than men. This doesn't mean that they're any less intelligent, in fact women posses a greater natural affinity for mathematics and a faster rate of mental maturation than men.
It's wholly reasonable for anything with a brain smaller than ours to be as smart, if not smarter, than humans.

Yeah, I know, but I don't think that explains how a person's entire mental capacity could be "compressed" into a bunch of nanites.

As for the "Subtemporally Grounded" question, you basically have to interpret it on the face value of the meaning of the word.
Temporality usually refers to Time, while 'Sub' comes from the latin word for Below, meaning Cassie is anchored to/beneath time.

That would mean that Cassie, kind of like the Nanites, is tethered to the timeline she orginates from. Any changes to her timeline/universe of origin that Cassie herself is not directly responsible for would result in the revelation of Cassie as a paradox within the altered timeline, causing the fractured timeline to begin to destabalize/heal.

I guess an analogy would be that Cassie is like Time's white blood cell, subconsciously recognising invasions in time and combating them in order to maintain the fragile structure of time itself.

That's a bit hard to get my head around, but I think I understand. Thanks for the explanation!

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Baron, you are awesome...

ghost, the hawk knowing how to fly is a good point... the acquiring process must take at least part of the animal's memories as well. The animals having memories in some of the early books (Homer and Fluffer both recalled the people around them) has been described as a KASU, but I don't think it has to be. I like to think that the morphing technology always stores some of the memories of the animal, but it cuts out more and more of them the more morphs you have to save on space.

As for being able to store an entire human brain inside a system of nanites- I'm all for the concept of quantum storage. Theoretically, if you were to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (since we're talking about Andalites here, why not? ), you could store and retrieve information from the states of quarks themselves, allowing a single molecule to store a decent amount of information. Our brains may be the most impressive information storage devices yet seen, but the neurons in which we store our information are still a heck of a lot larger than quarks. I'm not sure how much you could compress the information in our brains if you were to store it in this way, but it would be a significant decrease in space.

On the other hand, I'm kind of starting to like the idea of the morpher's brain somehow being imprinted on the fabric of Z-space itself, though how that would work is way beyond me... and not aided at all by my lack of knowledge as to the nature of Zero Space...