Wednesday, June 11, 2003
What does Nick do with the 40 minutes driving to and from church? He thinks about stuff; Odd stuff as is fitting for the Nick to think about...
Tonight on the way back I began thinking of time zones and the international date line. I then began to think about space travel and colonizing other planets.
What sort of problems would we encounter if travel between planets were ever to be made as quick as it is in the worlds of Star Trek and Babylon 5?
There are a number of things I thought of. One, the idea of being in space where the rotation of a planet does not effect your time. What time zone would you be associated with? The obvious answer is GMT since it’s pretty much a standard for lots of things.
HOWEVER, what if we colonized a planet with a completely different rotation? Days could end up being 22 hours or 30 hours, or any amount of hours, this would also cause the planetary time zones to be different.
So I suppose in the future when we have discovered FTL travel (If we don’t have FTL travel you can have the ship adjust the passengers slowly to the new rate of day/night passage) and start colonizing other planets with various rates of day/night rotation we will have to adopt some sort of universal time measurement.
But the problem of traveling between worlds would still be there. We experience jet lag when traveling a few time zones over; what would it do to us to travel from a planet to 24 hour days to one with 20 or 30 hour days?
Ah the questions never end. Perhaps we just only colonize worlds with rotations and sizes similar to our own. I suppose we could colonize a larger world with a faster rotation and a smaller one with a slower rotation, so long as the distance from the star the same relative to the star’s size as our planet’s distance. Of course then you would also have some problems with slower and faster rotation and the temperature of the night side of the planet.
Ach, it never ceases!!!!!
More dreams with nick, and tonight's are even more strange than the last one!
First dream: I was James Bond for some reason, trying to land in a tiny one person submarine on the shore of what I assume to be Germany. They were going to shoot at me but these large ships offshore with FRICKING HUGE GUNS started shooting at them and I made shore and checked into a crappy hotel.
In this hotel there was an elevator that took like ten minutes to go up TWO FLOORS, it was like going up twenty floors for each floor, I could have walked faster! I got to the floor I was on and got off, walked into the room which was like a suite of rooms. Inside were people from the WCC theatre and music departments. There are a couple of notes to me on the table and I read them and they would surely give me away if anyone from the authorities found them so I warned everyone not to leave me such notes.
Then I went to my room which was tiny and only had a table in it, it had bare walls which the paper and sheet-rock were falling off of. In the corners was trash and dirt. The room looked as if it had not been used in years. My family was there and we began to have dinner around the table. As we ate and talked I heard a rustling in the corner and looked and saw the biggest freaking rat I'd ever seen there in the debris. I was about to say something when he ran up my leg and I screamed like a girl. I don't know if I really screamed or not but it felt to me like I screamed in real life.
This is the most frightening dream I have had in a long time. Other than the rat it was not scarey at all even when the Germans were shooting at me. But that rat... man, it got my heart racing.
Dream two: It seemed to be a continuation of dream one, I was still a secrete operative of some sort but I was now in what I assume by all the snow to be Siberia. We were in a large warehouse with about two feet of snow on the floor.
I was next to two other guys and we were in a shootout with some other people across the
warehouse. In the middle of the battle I shot the guy between us with the entire clip in my machine gun.
The second guy and I left, apparently we were supposed to have done that. We also made sure it would look like he did it and I tried to apprehend him but he got away. Then I jumped forward a bit, the snow had been cleared from the warehouse and the gang I was with was trying to piece together what had happened. Then a large man came in with a large gun and was trying to shoot us.
Dream three: I was at my grandmother's with a bunch of people from school. Carpenter's wood was trying to rehearse but everyone wasn't there yet. I went to use the bathroom but couldn't find one empty because of all the people from school.
In the process of looking around I ended up in the study, there was the large man from dream two trying to shoot me. He chased me around the room, which was suddenly rather large, for a bit before throwing some sort of timed mine at me which did not go off. I stood there amused and he came over and tried to set it off a number of times, even using a dog once to try to get it to go off, none of that worked.
I ended up going outside where this guy had a whole army trying to get me. Some random girl helped me escape and we were hiding in the stairwell to the basement (this is an outside stairwell and would work well for a foxhole type thing I guess, we were trying to get into the basement workshop but neither of us had our key, not that I know why she was supposed to have a key to something at my grandmother's house!)
Then a number of planes began making low passes over looking for us, one came so low he ran into the corner of the house and was trying to figure out how to get airborne again (dunno how he got that low there's trees and stuff... but it's a dream why must it make sense?) He ended up doing some odd tricks in the backyard and got airborne again without even seeing us, we were laughing at him for hitting the corner of the house.
Then we saw like 50 jets coming around to make a pass at the place, we panicked and ran to the house. As I ran into the hallway there was the big man and he grabs me and has me by the neck, his hands could fit around twice I think, he is so large. He tells me he's going to kill me if I don't join up with some group that has something to do with making a movie, he's going to kill everyone who doesn't join up and help make this movie. I told him that if he killed everyone except those on the movie crew there would be no one left to WATCH the stupid movie for it to make money. He agreed and let me go.
I laughed at him.
Monday, June 09, 2003
Another odd dream:
Some of my dream seems to have happened before I actually started the dream, but where it starts I'm some sort of police officer and we are going into the woods near town to investigate some strange occurrences at a place up there involving supposed werewolves.
We get out of our vehicles on a dirt road in the woods and are heading to this place. Most of the other men are not taking any kind of weapons with them but one guy has his handgun and I have that and grab a double barreled shotgun as well with plenty of ammo. Some of the other guys smirk at this.
Then in standard Nick-dream format things change a bit. I'm in a auditorium filled with close to three hundred people, most of them kids. I find a seat next to some kids; I still have my shotgun but no one seems to care. The other officers are here too in various spots around the building.
Another random change: We are in a large cabin in the woods, there are about 40 children there and probably 10 adults. There are four rooms to this cabin that I know of: The main room which was large, a basement below it which I didn't actually go into but I knew was the same size as the main room, a bathroom, and a kitchen behind the main room which was open on two sides.
There was this fear in everyone, and especially in me; it was like everyone was scared but wasn't taking it seriously and I was taking it seriously. Oh, and I still had the shotgun. I wasn't TOO comfortable with the shotgun around all those children but I knew I might need it.
I went out to the kitchen and was talking with the girl who was there when a strange animal ran by, it was furry and really weird looking, I went out onto the porch thing to look at it and it was gone. Then this HUGE wave was coming towards us, the girl and I both grabbed onto posts holding the roof up as it hit; the amount of water in this wave was amazing (especially for a wave in the woods on a mountain far away from the ocean and it confused us both to no end) and just didn't seem to stop coming at us, it was like being hit with a minute long blast from a huge fire-hose. We managed to hold on and get completely drenched in the process; Somehow I kept my gun with me.
After the wave subsided I ran into the other room and saw everyone getting into the basement. I told them not to do that (waves, after all, are made of water, and with a wave that big there must be some pretty high water table and I was worried that the basement might flood and trap them all. Also I knew that it's always bad to go into a situation like this (remember: werewolves) with only one exit.) and they all got out of the basement for me.
I set my gun down at one point and then something happened that scared me even more and I knew I had to go get help. I ran out to my car with this fear that if I was outside for long I would die and I was suddenly in New Orleans without a car. (Or the gun)
In New Orleans I was walking around and it was near downtown. I needed to get home (the seminary where I used to live) but I didn't quite know the way. I ended up in this odd street marked selling water testing supplies of all kinds. They had things to test your tap water, sewer water, septic tank, and fish water just to name a few. One guy tried to sell me stuff but I didn't want it. I asked him for directions and he gave me some. I still was lost and I ended up passing a guy who gave carriage rides, he tried to sell me that and I asked how far he went. It didn't seem like he would help much for getting me home so I just declined and asked for directions. I ended up getting very near some bad parts of town and decided to turn around and go back to the carriage driver and get him to take me some place instead of getting robbed and killed.
I was then back in the cabin and everyone was scared, I grabbed the girl from the kitchen and we ran out to the car to go get help as we all knew something was very wrong; a wave like that isn't natural and neither was that animal we had seen and apparently in my absence they had gained more proof of werewolves. I also grabbed my gun.
We got in the car and started driving. Soon we were on a road in a small town driving like a bat out of hades. Then a car in front of us suddenly swerved and began to flip and we almost hit it but I swerved out of the way at the last moment. Cars kept swerving and almost hitting us or exploding and almost hitting us and such; it was all that I could do to keep us on the road and not dead.
Then I woke up.... Dangit... I wanted to know the end of the dream. Did we all die? Did we find help? What was going on up in those mountains? Just who WAS this magical carriage driver who put me back in the mountains? Did I ever get the cup of tea I went to the kitchen for before getting drenched in tons and tons of water?
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)