A Signal 2015-01-06

[illiad]

have you not seen MiB 3?? the problem with a 'seer' is that they see *many* futures, the smallest thing can change it.... Even a FLIR will change the outcome...

[sheik]

I suppose it is my job to state the obvious.
The Mapimi site was notorious for its radio silence.
Now that silence is over.
It stands to reason that the facility's function, at least in part, was to suppress the signal that is now detectable due to the destruction of said facility.
I'm dying to know now what was so important and why.

[donoho]

Just to mention that was not a meltdown. It was the uranium below the storage depot reaching critical mass and then destroying the storage facility. Or shattering the crystals and the Nu Gui stated. So it did not melt down, it exploded from the heat and steam generated by the mass. That means it did not set off a china syndrome.

If the signal is coming from below the site it must be a long way below it. The explosion would have severely shattered the surrounding geologic formations. This implies either the signal sended is very, very durable. Or it is a long way below the site. It could be another storage facility, maybe the back up site for the original?

Or maybe there are more Golems down there who where in storage like Bud was. One of them woke up for some reason.

I spent FAAAR longer than I intended, refreshing myself on the context of the explosion, followed by even more time reading up on critical mass, fission and nuclear weapon design, all in hopes of guessing how they could go back without being irradiated. Despite being interesting reads all around, I've still got nothing.

[oldmanmickey]

Getting back in is not a problem at all when you have poit and voip available as transporting. With a signal to lock onto and knowing there is an open space problem solved. the real kicker is going to be when grandma says "well excellent on you remembering your going to be a lot of help with your little bear sear buddys visions.
I was also wondering if Atsali might have been changed by her previous visit. That chest of her did spring up real suddenly after that adventure. Maybe they might be magical data storage areas. That could sure be a LOT of data stored there.

[AnotherFairportfan]

(Speaking of... it seems that there's a Cats Laughing reunion concert planned for this year's Minicon convention... the Kickstarter is more than fully funded. Makes me want to fly back east for the concert, then do a Wapsi / War For The Oaks walking tour around Minneapolis!)

If there could just be a Boiled in Lead show the same weekend, i might.

[DilyV]

My guess is that her status as a seer makes Nadette MiB reserve anyway, because of the difficulty in hiding things from seers. Even if you take the target aside from a seer as soon as the target gets within eyeshot they See what is going on anyway, so why try to hide anything from a seer? It would be like trying to hide a heat signature from a FLIR.

A space blanket and a dozen rolls of 100 mile an hour tape and you CAN hide a heat signature from FLIR.

[zachariah]

Just to mention that was not a meltdown. It was the uranium below the storage depot reaching critical mass and then destroying the storage facility. Or shattering the crystals and the Nu Gui stated. So it did not melt down, it exploded from the heat and steam generated by the mass. That means it did not set off a china syndrome.

If the signal is coming from below the site it must be a long way below it. The explosion would have severely shattered the surrounding geologic formations. This implies either the signal sended is very, very durable. Or it is a long way below the site. It could be another storage facility, maybe the back up site for the original?

Or maybe there are more Golems down there who where in storage like Bud was. One of them woke up for some reason.

I spent FAAAR longer than I intended, refreshing myself on the context of the explosion, followed by even more time reading up on critical mass, fission and nuclear weapon design, all in hopes of guessing how they could go back without being irradiated. Despite being interesting reads all around, I've still got nothing.

They cannot go back to the location at all, or anywhere near it due to radiation unless they are immortal and immune to the effects. Lily may very well immune to the effect but I doubt Sali and Nadine are. Neither have shown a regenerative capability. Now MIB might have tools that will prevent beign effected. We know Spinx are immune. (Remember Shelly in Spinx form was not affected by the extreme radiation that did kill Shelly number 1. But the sheer destructive power means there is nothing there to go back to. Where ever the signal is coming from it is below, far below, the chamber site, at least a mile or more. It could be closer but it better be built of something REAL durable. So I doubt they will be going back.

It also appears as though Sali may have retained more information about things than we thought. True her brain was drained but I get the feeling it was not emptied. So a fair amount of information was retained. By coming to Sali I suspect MIB is hoping she might have knowledge about other hidden shelters and their location in that area. That race was experimenting with making Golems! The Nu Gui and Brandy set out to hide that knowledge from the world. Maybe this is a lab where they performed their experiments and it surevived. So I kinda like the idea this is a few of those golems waking up.

[oldmanmickey]

intresting idea, there may even be other copies of the ones we know.

[Thor]

Considering all the things you can do with magic--I'm sorry, I mean "sufficiently advanced technology"--getting rid of the radioactivity on-site doesn't seem like a deal-breaker.

[jwhouk]

I actually thought Bud "ate" all the radiation - or did she just turn it into plasma?

[Catawampus]

ETA: Wait, hang on, that would include max six parent's stepmothers at any given time. Apologies! (… or hang on, Lily may also have had partners. (Does Suzy count?) And if we don't consider couples only, but account for multiple partners as well … I've quite underestimated the potential grandmotherly proliferation, haven't I?)

Assuming that everybody had normal human-like fertilisation and pregnancies, or at least something analogous to that, Atsali could have at most nine grandmothers and nine grandfathers. And the least amount (depending on inbreeding on Atsali's biological family side, one guy getting frisky with Lily and five other woman, and Katherine being raised by a single parent) would be two grandfathers, seven grandmothers, and one undetermined.

Any of those numbers could increase, of course, if something weird went on in the family tree. Perhaps incubi require their mothers to be fertilised by eight different males to give birth, or the Etheitians artificially inseminated the mothers with DNA from a whole host of other men and women, or who knows what else.

Castela's family tree is probably much weirder. And more treeish.

Just to mention that was not a meltdown. It was the uranium below the storage depot reaching critical mass and then destroying the storage facility. Or shattering the crystals and the Nu Gui stated. So it did not melt down, it exploded from the heat and steam generated by the mass. That means it did not set off a china syndrome.

Well, it probably wasn't a nuclear detonation or meltdown, but we don't really know for sure how the whole thing was set up and worked.

Atsali and Brandi/Nu Gui both said that it was a natural uranium deposit. That means it must have been relatively stable for a good many years before people ever came along. Uranium ore isn't really all that dangerously radioactive, releasing big fat particles of radiation that basically just bounce off of your skin. The biggest danger is inhaling them, so a filtered mask would be about all that you'd need for safety. Other byproducts of uranium (radon, for example) would be more dangerous, but there's nothing really there that's going to instantly cook you.

The simplest way to make a stable deposit of natural uranium do something spectacular would be to flood a large enough scattered deposit with deuterium. That would let the isolated bits of otherwise-stable uranium communicate and react with each other and go critical, building up heat until you potentially got a nice big steam explosion as Zachariah said. Building a good strong containment vessel around the deposit would magnify the blast power and direct the blast upwards so as to ideally launch a Bud on a nice ballistic trajectory. Plus, uranium tends to get rather feisty when it gets hot or broken up into fine bits. The heat and the explosion would dry up the deuterium, shutting down any further nuclear reaction.

You'd get a gradual buildup followed by a fair-sized bang (which fits with what the comic shows), but no big burst of radiation or much in the way of nuclear fallout. Since it would be a conventional explosion, there would be no EMP to fry sensitive electronics hidden away deeper below ground in good sturdy bunkers.

If the Etheitians worked out some method of making the ore deposit suddenly go supercritical, perhaps very quickly compressing a very large amount of the deposit, then you could have a Hiroshima-style explosion. But that would be a lot harder to do (especially with the probable isotope ratio in a natural deposit) and doesn't really fit in with the context of what we were shown.

All in all, then, the site is probably only somewhat radioactive, and of a radiation type that can be easily avoided by minimal protection. They might need sturdier protection against the giant mutant radioactive ants that come crawling out of the hole, though. . .

Nadette may be a paranormal, but WHY is she being told about things that should be on the "Top Secret, don't share with ANYONE!" list? Especially since it sounds like something ominous is going on there? Is her association with Atsali enough to make her privileged, or are she and her sister ALREADY MiBs?

My guess is that as the best friends of a somewhat loner teenaged girl, the MiB figure that they already know pretty much any secrets that she has. And Atsali's "family" would probably not take kindly to Atsali or her friends being pressured and intimidated by agents trying to police them. I expect that Bud and Brandi's personal judgment might have some slight influence on MiB policy. . .

A space blanket and a dozen rolls of 100 mile an hour tape and you CAN hide a heat signature from FLIR.

Until the blanket has absorbed enough heat from the heat source to show up as a heat source itself.

Years ago I got to see the sight of hundreds of disembodied floating hands trying to sneak up on an outpost I was in. The people doing the sneaking knew that we had infra-red sensors, so they got some cheap survival blankets and held them up in front of them as they crept along. They forgot about their hands, which were up over the top of the blankets to hold them. It was kind of hilarious to see, though for the first moment we were rather confused as to just what the heck we were looking at.

[zachariah]

Before we get sidetracked what make a nuclear explosion is not the purity of the material but the rate of fission. Even low grade material will fission if the conditions are correct. U238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years so this deposit is probably mostly U238 with some U235 thrown is. To make it fission no matter what its purity all that is needed is an intense neutrino source bombarding it with a huge stream of neutrons. Once enough atoms start to fission and the rate of fission is kept high enough the process will grow until the energy released is great enough to explode. Heck for all we know all they needed to due was provide a strong localized gravity pulse to compress the U238 from a cubic mile maybe to the size of a marble. Fission will proceed from there.

Maybe that is where the signal is coming from!! A golem was made and ordered to hold a 500 lb chunk of pure U238. If it received the correct signal it would then compress this lump down to the size of a marble, like Bud does all the time. Then the resulting explosion would occur. The golem would survive and be ordered to send out a signal requesting orders after a set amount of time passed after finishing its task.

[oldmanmickey]

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php ... st-africa/

we had one already in our world whats to say they didnt have another in tiers

[Dave]

To make it fission no matter what its purity all that is needed is an intense neutrino source bombarding it with a huge stream of neutrons. Once enough atoms start to fission and the rate of fission is kept high enough the process will grow until the energy released is great enough to explode.

Minor nit: neutrinos != neutrons. You could hit any amount of U238 with a truly amazing number of neutinos, with no perceptible effect... there're trillions of neutrinos passing through our bodies (from the sun) every second, and they almost never interact with matter in any way at all. I think the figure I read, was that a neutrino has about a 50:50 chance of passing through a light-year of solid lead without interacting with any of the lead atoms... and I'm not sure quite where you'd find a light-year-long slab of lead.

I imagine that a sufficiently intense neutron beam, from a high-power neutron source, would have the effect you suggest. Not terribly easy to generate, though, since neutrons are electrically neutral.

I like your idea of a golem-powered implosion bomb. If our technology can achieve explosive fission using explosive-lens implosion (and then trigger a fusion reaction via X-ray/plasma pressure) a Bud-class golem certainly ought to be able to provide the necessary squeeze to some uranium.

Of course, a Bud-class golem could destroy the whole planet all by him/herself

[AnotherFairportfan]

I imagine that a sufficiently intense neutron beam, from a high-power neutron source, would have the effect you suggest. Not terribly easy to generate, though, since neutrons are electrically neutral.

But what if you reverse the polarity of the flow?

[MerchManDan]

I actually thought Bud "ate" all the radiation - or did she just turn it into plasma?

Neither. She used a plasma blast to cleanse herself and/or the surrounding area of rads to make it safe for Atsali & Kath.

I suppose it is my job to state the obvious.
The Mapimi site was notorious for its radio silence.
Now that silence is over.
It stands to reason that the facility's function, at least in part, was to suppress the signal that is now detectable due to the destruction of said facility.
I'm dying to know now what was so important and why.

HOLY SMOKES, that's right!!

I imagine that a sufficiently intense neutron beam, from a high-power neutron source, would have the effect you suggest. Not terribly easy to generate, though, since neutrons are electrically neutral.

But what if you reverse the polarity of the flow?

That would be bad.

[jwhouk]

Nope, not gonna go quoting Ghostbusters, sorry.

[MerchManDan]

Aww, you're no fun.

[lake_wrangler]

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing... What do you mean, bad?

[oldmanmickey]

Total protonic reversal.