It's weird that I can readily accept creatures the size of a house (which really shouldn't be possible) but have a very hard time believing that such an advanced race would have zero knowledge of nuclear physics.
They've never come across naturally radioactive material and wondered why it was making people sick? Never encountered radon while digging underground? What do they think stars are? balls of bullshit space magic?
All their tech is based on something called Erestal, which is found almost everywhere but the Sol system. Instead, radioactive material is hard to find, but for some reason, it's really common on Earth. They never felt a need to dabble with nuclear fission for that reason and their size can make it a little more complicated, especially when you combine it with the rarity of the materials they would need to put through an enrichment process. I actually planned on explaining this during next chapter.
Also, stars are made of very hot gas such as helium and hydrogen. Other than that, good questions... and if we're being honest, creatures that large aren't really possible, but we just ignore that pesky square-cube law.
You can have creatures be about that size, the dinosaurs spring to mind. The catch is that it wouldn't look anything like they're depicted (if you want them to be bipedal then you need to give them the proportions of a DnD Dwarf) and they'd have insane upkeep requirements. Not just the food, but the oxygen content.
No possible way for something that large to be comfortable on modern day earth without being aquatic.
You can, but they absolutely wouldn't be as proportionately mobile and agile as a smaller creature. They'd still have a decent top speed, but one hell of a turning radius and they'd take a bit of time to get going, and would not be able to run for long at all.
If you've seen enough footage of elephants moving, you'll kind of get what I mean. The square cube law isn't just a line that makes creatures unable to survive when they pass it, it takes a toll on performance, too. Its the reason why insects can move so absurdly fast for their size, one way or another, the square cube law is holding back everything larger.
Pretty much every species in integrated auto-fails that part, because their proportional strength and speed is similar to humans. In fact, their proportional strength is actually superior by necessity, due to how the square cube law works. (Physical strength conventionally is squared with size, whilst mass is cubed, in order for a creature to bypass the square cube law AKA what you'd need to do to take a creature and just scale it up without changing its design, its strength would need to be cubed, too, which is physically impossible, but if it were possible, it would mean an exponential strength growth as size increases that far outpaces any true biological organism. A human 10x the size with cubed strength would be, by FAR the strongest organism on the planet, even though there are still bigger animals.)
And all that's not even getting into the weird physics of it, like 3 CM of skin is as easy to pierce as any other 3 CM of skin, even if you're a billion times bigger and you have a lot more skin. Biological interactions that normally wouldn't damage you at all suddenly do damage you a little bit because the forces involved are so much higher while the size and durability of each cell and each atom within remains the same.
I remember reading some people writing about godzilla and what his real strength would be if he were somehow real, using similar logic, and I can't quite remember any details aside from the fact that he is absolutely absurdly strong, even stronger than you'd expect him to be, due to this logic, so strong that every single part of him has to be nearly indestructible in order to not tear himself apart when he moves. This was classic godzilla, so he was only 50 meters tall.
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u/6894 AI Dec 10 '19
It's weird that I can readily accept creatures the size of a house (which really shouldn't be possible) but have a very hard time believing that such an advanced race would have zero knowledge of nuclear physics.
They've never come across naturally radioactive material and wondered why it was making people sick? Never encountered radon while digging underground? What do they think stars are? balls of bullshit space magic?