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Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  AIUI that level of radiation flux is about what you'd get if you stood within 10 metres of a nuclear weapon when it detonated. You'd have other problems ... You could probably pick up that dose if you stood in the beam line of a serious particle accelerator like the LHC: the amount of energy in a pulse from the LHC is allegedly sufficient to blow a hole in the evacuated cryogenically cooled pipeline it runs in if one of the superconducting electromagnets fails. But most conditions which would expose you to that level of radiation will be very rapidly...
• Bellinghman commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  very rapidly fatal from other causes. Like the person worrying about swimming home after dropping from an airliner at cruise altitude. We're into perfect spherical cow territory here, trying to divorce the pulse's effect on the body from secondary issues like how much induced radioactivity there'll be in the surrounding material. Though there is Anatoli Bugorski: As it was believed that he had received far in excess of the radiation dose that would normally kill a person, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise. However, Bugorski survived and even completed his...
• ilya187 commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  The threat in Bit Rot is not part of the story in Neptune's Brood Turns out, it is. One of the characters in "Neptune's Brood" suffers from the same fate (loss of higher mental functions, ravenous hunger) as the crew in "Bit Rot", and it is mentioned as a known condition. And page 163 of US edition has a direct reference to events of "Bit Rot" -- calling them a "memorable incident". Which means something had survived....
• Trottelreiner commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  Though I guess standing in the path of a magnetar pulse means quite likely fried toast at close quarters, I'm having some problems with the actual numbers involved in the story. First of, I guess we're talking about "soft gamma repeaters", as explained in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_gamma_repeater There is an article about those at: http://www2011.mpe.mpg.de/363-heraeus-seminar/Contributions/3Wednesday/morning/KHurley.pdf As we can see on page 7, there is hardly any radiation left above 300 keV, where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_radioactivity says the minimum for induced radioactivity by gamma rays is 2 MeV, which would mean the gamma rays are not a likely source for transmuting radiation. Of course, there...
• Kirtai commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  The magnetar was offset to their flight path so it's possible that the gamma pulse passed in front of them and they ran into the side of the particle blast following it. The story does mention the ship being hit from an angle that more harshly irradiated one side than the other....