Something that occurred to me...
10-17-2007, 07:52 PM
One of the funny things about Handwavium as a potential environmental disaster is that it grows. You add (mostly) organic material to handwavium, you get more handwavium. There's no particularly established way to turn handwavium into not-handwavium. The really scary thing about handwavium - the thing that I'm sure has the environmentalists terrified - is that if you flush enough of it down the toilet, you're pretty likely to wind up with a strain that runs on sewage. Shortly after that, you'll get a colony of the stuff that isn't possible to get rid of without *extreme* measures, and shortly after *that*, you'll see almost every critter that lives down there sprouting a biomod. Handwavium pollution is potentially very scary indeed - and since it can only be created, not destroyed, the degenerate endstate is with every lifeform on the planet sporting a biomod, and everything on the planet being modified to one degree or another, along with a sea or two of the goop itself.
Given that the original investment might well have been a small spore-bearing pod or something, that would be a *remarkably* efficient way to xenoform a world. A plausible theory for the Overfan, no?
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Re: Something that occurred to me...
10-17-2007, 07:58 PM
Handwavium that creates biomods and wavetech is destroyed in the process.
Likely what would happen to a massive handwavium spill is either that it would cause a large-scale handwave effect then stop. That is, it would start biomodding and reformating faster than it can reproduce. This is especially the case because growing the stuff takes days (or weeks) and biomodding and wavetech creation takes minutes or hours.
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Epsilon
Not that this would stop people from worrying.
Re: Something that occurred to me...
10-18-2007, 04:23 AM
Yeah - I know that handwavium that creates biomods/devices is consumed. It wouldn't be grey goo, anyway. The really scary thing about gray goo is that it consumes the stuff you care about. You know - your house, your car, your pets, your family, your body below the waist, and so forth. Even a completely runaway version of handwavium wouldn't do more to the stuff we care about (people, cities, ecosystems) than alter things in bizarre (but largely nuetral-to-moderately-beneficial) ways. I'm not even saying that it should or would necessarily be happening at any given point in the plot - just that there are people who might worry about it happening, and that those worries aren't entirely unreasonable.
In terms of intent, I always figured the handwavium was generally guided by intent to a degree, but not always. Sure, maybe 99 out of 100 times that handwavium gets thrown away, it goes mostly inert. It's still not necessarily a good idea to hand out 1000 Happy Fun Balls to the children of NYC and wait for them to get bored. It's also a Really Good Reason for some people to worry about handwavium contamination (even if it *usually* doesn't go much of anywhere) and lets some of the handwavium-unfriendly governments of the world be a bit more on the Decent Human Beings Who Disagree side of things, rather than just being a bunch of power-blinded fearmongers or whatever.
