Nothing delivers unrequested adventures quite like normalization of deviance. It works like this:
Suppose one has a safety protocol. Suppose one decides that this protocol is onerous for some reason: it consumes extra time, it requires extra effort, or worst of all, it costs money. So, one shaves a step here and a precaution there. And nothing happens! Clearly, the whole shebang was not necessary in the first place. Clearly the thing to do here is to keep skipping steps until circumstances line up wrong and you’re looking at a trip to the emergency room or a burning pile of expensive rubble.
The end results of normalization of deviance are undesirable in reality. But…the process is oh-so-irresistible for authors looking for ways to drop their characters neck-deep in a pig lagoon. Take these five examples:
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
Precisely what makes Hill House so remarkable is a matter of debate. Perhaps it is the odd architecture that disorients and confuses. Perhaps its bloody history has left the building psychically tainted. Perhaps it is home to one or more honest-to-god ghosts. Those who have tried to live in the cursed mansion agree that there is one safe way to deal with the place: a swift exit and an unshakeable determination to never, ever return. Thus far this solution has proved fully efficacious.
What is for most people a psychic Superfund site that should be shunned is a glorious opportunity for Dr. John Montague. He’s going to study the notorious haunted house up close and personal, supported by a hand-picked team of purported psychics. His study of Hill House may settle the long-vexing question: Are paranormal phenomena real? If the initial foray produces disquieting results, that’s all the more reason to do what his predecessors were too cautious to do: remain and push a little harder at whatever it is that makes Hill House so eerie and foreboding.
Any survivors will learn just how costly hubris can be.
* * *
The Far Call by Gordon R. Dickson (1973)
Putting the first team of humans on Mars is far too important a goal to allow small-minded folk to hobble the project with petty concerns about things like workloads and equipment tolerances. Surely margins of safety can always be trimmed a bit; one can always squeeze out a little more labour given sufficient suasion; equipment specs are but mere guidelines, after all…
Would-be whistleblowers like Undersecretary for the Development of Space Jens Wylie are fuddy-duddy naysayers who don’t understand that anything can be accomplished (regardless of guidelines and specs) if there is sufficient will.
It all works until it does not work. Communications failure sets off an avalanche of calamities as bad luck collides with poor judgement. One astronaut is killed by a solar flare while carrying out repairs. His companions soon realize they may no longer have the equipment they need to salvage the mission. Indeed, survival itself is in question. At least they still have the means to return five astronauts to Earth. It’s a shame that there are six of them…
* * *
The Prometheus Crisis by Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson (1975)
The twelve thousand-megawatt Cardenas Bay Nuclear Facility will be the largest nuclear reactor complex on the planet, once it is up and running. The project has been plagued with delays and mishaps. General Manager Parks, obsessed with irrelevancies like “proper procedure,” wants even further delay to hunt down all of the bugs before the facility comes online. It is unlikely he will get his way in the face of political pressure from the Oval Office itself.
Politically adept people innocent of Parks’ toxic inhibition rooted in technical expertise point out that none of the issues at Cardenas Bay are original to Cardenas Bay. Every piece of sub-standard equipment, every shoddy practice was pioneered in other nuclear reactors. They never led to a large-scale nuclear disaster before. Why would they now?
It’s a question to which the congressional subcommittee investigating the horrific Cardenas Bay Incident would dearly like to know the answer.
* * *
Alien, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon
En route to the Solar System, commercial space tug Nostromo detects what seems to be a distress signal. Protocol requires a check. The ship wakes its slumbering crew to investigate further. In short order, they make two intriguing discoveries: first, the signal may have been a warning beacon; and secondly, within the enigmatic ruins of an alien craft there remains at least one lifeform viable enough to latch itself to the face of an insufficiently cautious human.
There are extremely clear-cut protocols for biological contamination, step one of which is not bringing the contaminated person back on board to spread contagion further. Warrant Officer Ripley is determined to follow protocol. Her fellow crewmates, blinded by concern for their ailing friend, shout her down. This proves to be both a fatal error and also the beginning of a long-running franchise about explorers unfamiliar with basic safety procedures.
* * *
Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer
Terrified that her ex-husband will find them, Steph’s mother has dragged Steph from town to town. Forbidden to stay in contact with school chums once mother and daughter have moved on, Steph turns to CatNet, an online forum whose denizens share pictures of cats (and other animals), as her virtual social circle.
Eventually Steph begins to doubt whether her mother’s obsessively complete security measures are necessary. Surely, a little covert investigation cannot hurt? After all, her online activities have had no ill effects thus far.
…Or perhaps her researches will attract the attention of a man who is every bit as bad as Steph’s mother says he is, a glib sociopath determined to hunt down and punish people he regards as his property.
* * *
If there is anything these essays have taught me, it is that for any example that I can think of, the audience can think of ten or twenty more. Have at it in the comments below!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol series is entirely driven by astronomical (literally) construction projects whose failure modes destroy most of the Solar System. Spoiler: one of these projects does indeed fail
Gordon Dickson had a hotline inside NASA at the time. In December of 73, during Skylab 4 there would be a strike/mutiny/controversy brought on by overworking the astronauts and arguably unsafe conditions. And like all good capitalist employers, NASA refused to let them fly again for daring to do what was right.
In almost any SF movie or TV show: seat belts, fuses or circuit breakers, fire suppression systems. In many (especially Star Wars): guard rails.
“Adam and No Eve” had a propulsion system that works admirably well in getting its passenger safely to space and back. Its lack of safety features does cause difficulties, though, eventually leading to the creation of NASA…
Lax safety standards are fundamental to Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, which, after all, has to deliver a disaster every week. The first episode featured an atomic-powered plane which had radiation shielding (naturally enough) – which would fail, fatally for everyone aboard, after five hours of flight. The whole show was like that.
With all the talk of quarantines this year, the clip I keep coming back to is Ripley very calming explaining to everyone why they need to follow procedure, and being ignored for pointing out quite rightly that doing so could endanger everyone. And she doesn’t really even say “I told you so” when given the chance!
It feels like something by Crichton should be on this list, although his novels are usually better at presenting how even when you try to take all precautions something will likely go wrong. Maybe Swarm, given how (spoilers?) the scientist endangers her own child at the beginning of the novel?
I think we can all agree the TOS episode “The Naked Time” deserves a mention, considering the entire ship is endangered because a member of the crew decided he couldn’t wait to scratch his nose while investigating a dangerous environment. Even that might be more excusable if he had been willing to speak up once he heard about corpses in showers and the potential that something caused everyone on the planet to experience delusional insanity. His death is sad but for once it feels completely earned.
Thinking back on the Jurassic Park franchise, I think the one that really shows a lack of basic safety precautions is the first Jurassic World movie. Not because of inappropriate footwear or even mixing up dino DNA cocktails without fully thinking through the consequences. No, as a person who did an internship with the Mouse directly out of college AND had to evacuate a ride on Christmas Day (whew!), my first reaction when things went south was “Where are the attraction managers, and why hasn’t anyone practiced their evacuation procedures?”
Claire is way to high in the park’s management structure to be running around trying to single-handedly get people to safety. Each attraction should have several team members assigned and a specific area manager responsible for overseeing whatever little emergencies arise during the day (guests get sick, they fall, there could be a small fire, you name it, it can happen). There should be drills and training for every possible procedure, and shelters spread out around the park in case people need to bunker down (my own ride at Disney functioned as a storm shelter in case of hurricanes or tornadoes). So it seems to me Jurassic Park 2.0 was doomed even if they’d kept from meddling into freaks of nature: any run-of-the-mill emergency could of crippled it.
It might have been as long ago as the golden age of comp.risks that I read a diatribe about how the correct reaction to discovering one’s lead computer programmer is both dissatisfied with his job and suffering financial distress is neither berating the fellow for financial short-sightedness nor leaving him in his current position.
Safety measures have to take into account human behavior.
As in every movie that has an emergency incineration of the lab and everybody inside it, which doesn’t get triggered when it should.
Reminds me of announcing to students that I wouldn’t give them credit for a correct answer if they didn’t show their work.
Of course, on the next test, 99% of the correct answers showed no work. I chickened out.
Spaceship movie:
“OK, now set the selfdestruct timer”
“What selfdestruct timer?”
“You know, the selfdestruct timer every spaceship has”
“Why the hell would we want to have a selfdestruct timer?”
Every Star Trek episode that takes place in the holodeck. Why are safety protocols even allowed to be turned off???
Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series starts with medical corner-cutting, which results in two treatments which should have remained safely behind closed medical doors getting loose and becoming something worse than the sum of their parts.
Seanan tells a delightful anecdote of how she got access to talk with some CDC doctors, and how she then kept coming up with new ideas for the mechanism and spread of a zombie apocalypse and running them past her advisors. When they stopped saying “That wouldn’t work” and started saying “… D-don’t actually do that,” that’s when she knew she had a winning idea.
Subverted in The Andromeda Strain, where the atomic sterilization device self-activates under the circumstances it was supposed to. The problem then becomes how to turn it off, because it turns out detonation will make the problem sterilization is intended to contain much worse. Luckily for the people in the facility, the contingency plans also included needing to turn the nukumatic sterilizer off before it went off but this is not exactly convenient to do.
Why wasn’t “The Cold Equations” on the list?
I can think of 4 separate precautions, any one of which would have prevented the final bad thing. Precaution 2, for example: glancing inside a closet that should be empty. (Though Precaution 1, a cheap combo lock on the NO ADMITTANCE door, mighty be defeated if everybody knows that the usual combination is 12345, say.)
Because it got its own full essay.
I have a feeling that Michael Flynn’s The Wreck of The River of Stars belongs with these stories. An old, and worn-out spaceship, crewed by a bunch of no-longer cutting-edge spacers and operating one failure away from disaster has the failure. And then it goes downhill from there.
Is The Haunting of Hill House the source of the you-know-it-will-end-badly line “Let’s split up!” That’s become a cliche, but it had to have started somewhere.
I submit that the entire plot of LotR was only resolved successfully because Sauron didn’t follow OSHA. He didn’t need more guards on Mt. Doom; he has an entire country already doing that, and the Ring is a perfectly adequate guardian of its own self-preservation anyway. It was destroyed because of a lack of anti-slip matting and guardrails allowed Gollum to pitch off a cliff.
For spaceship movies, SpaceCamp (1986) always got me. Everyone at the camp just let that little robot Jinx roll all over the place, and his unfettered access plus his dangerously naive AI leads him to initiate the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch (“Max and Jinx… Friends… For-e-ver!”) WHILE A GROUP OF KIDS ARE ALLOWED IN THE SHUTTLE during an engine test.
An American Werewolf in London begins with the locals telling the American backpackers, “Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors.” So what’s the first thing they do?
@7: Heh.
19: If people were sensible in horror movies, horror movies would look like this.
Since we’re doing good books, fantasies, and errors-of-immaturity as well as turkeys, science fiction, and people-who-should-know better: getting drunk enough that you have the nerve to drag a boy you barely know out of a party for your first sex will not lead to happiness — but if you’re also one of a group of self-taught mages with no real idea what you can do (and you aren’t the only one who has been documenting), the results could be very messy. That’s the first paragraph of Sarah Gailey’s When We Were Magic; much of the rest of the book involves proving the truth of the grim joke about what real friends will do.
And hexing an abusive jerk by symbolism (because you don’t even know their name) without scoping out whether he (and his pack) can hex back isn’t the best idea either, but the heroine of Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers has a background sufficiently harsh that her lashing out is unsurprising. Opinions vary widely on this one; a tor.com reviewer loved it, a Locus reviewer (possibly older) disliked the writing and was appalled by the number of bad decisions, and I was annoyed that it was only half a story with the other half most of a year away.
How about a real life example? A couple of decades ago I was a programmer doing industrial automation for a company that built processing lines for the circuit board industry. We made large tanks out of plastic that was welded together. So the sheets of ½” plastic had to be cut and fitted. The guy that did the cutting was older, experienced, and in a hurry. There was a tabletop router with the bit pointed up that was used to cut channels so that one piece of plastic could be slotted into another. The bit rotated at a few thousand rpm. There were all sorts of safeties, plus push sticks, so even a computer programmer could operate it safely, if slowly. Well, Experienced Guy was, as I said, in a hurry, so he disabled the safeties. Didn’t use a push stick as it cost him the fine control he needed. And one fine day, while pushing a sheet through the machine, it hung up a bit so he pushed a little harder. It came unhung. He routed out his hand right through the middle down to the wrist. A fine most of blood, bone, and tendons spread evenly on the wall.
He was, of course, fired for ignoring every safety procedure. Not that it mattered since he now only had one functioning hand and couldn’t work anyway.
A couple weeks later OSHA showed up and went over the place with a fine toothed comb looking for issues and didn’t find any. They were measuring the tread height on the stairs with a ruler. Their inspector told us that the clean room (we manufactured quartz crystals for use in timing applications, using hydrofluoric acid) was a textbook example of the way things ought to be done.
One of the common ways for farmers around here to get injured is reaching into snow-blowing equipment to clear obstructions. We have lots of trees and expendable poking sticks are easy to come by but some people seem to feel finding one would take too much time.
The sign on the BIG laser cutter used for cutting steel plate read “Do not interrupt laser beam with remaining fingers.” I wondered sometimes why, given the guards, shields and interlocks around the Goldfinger-type spy-splitting device someone had found it necessary to add this warning.
@25- It’s the ‘remaining fingers’ that amuses me. It makes me think this warning was specifically designed for someone who’d tried it once.
It’s never good to be the person who inspired a very specific, odd rule [1]. Security guard training for Burns Security 40 years ago had a section on why it’s not helpful for guards to spontaneously turn off machinery for the client, inspired by the guy who considerately destroyed a chocolate factory by shutting it down during what he figured had to be off hours. As a consequence, all the liquid chocolate solidified in pipes that were very hard to clear once obstructed.
1: Except when it is hilarious, like my former high school’s trebuchet rule, which I am delighted to report is still in effect thanks to me.
@25: I’ve seen “do not look in laser beam with remaining eye” as a reported sign — but also as a T-shirt, button, bumper sticker, etc.; I suspect yours, like this, was intended as a warning that gets its point home by humor, rather than an indication that somebody was both smart enough to disable the safeties and dumb enough to actually do so. “He who’d make his fellow creatures wise/Should always gild the philosophic pill.” (the jester in Yeomen of the Guard)
@24: I almost lost the tip of a thumb through reaching into a heavy-duty paper cutter with an unguarded blade — just brushing against it while it was “retracted” was enough for a deep cut. (I was young enough to be unthinking and hurried; when I worked with a powered cutter some years later I was more careful; I wonder whether the hand-in-the-blower is a habit people pick up when they’re young and …quick … and don’t change.) The first reaction from the art teacher (Barry Moser before he went freelance) was to ask whether I’d gotten blood on his cutter.
@27: there’s a saying in SCA circles (mostly martial arts, but sometimes also in other areas) that every rule has somebody’s name on it. Sometimes it’s a misattribution; e.g., the rule requiring that Worldcon bids present letters-of-agreement with the facilities they’re bidding was sometimes known by the chair who was fired for not having signed contracts ~8 months out — but the rule was already in progress before that particular mess.
Do tell us more about the trebuchet….
In retrospect, I am very impressed by how the shop teachers in my old schools guided legions of adolescent kids through shop class with very few serious injuries.
For reasons I no longer remember, one history course involved a project where students had to construct a scale model of the historical item of their choice for class. Maybe this was so kids who were weak on academics but strong on practical skills could engage with the material in a way they enjoyed. Model building is not my deal due to poor eyesight and lousy coordination. But then it occurred to me 1:1 is a scale.
I couldn’t source the materials for a full sized working trebuchet but I could for a 1/3rd sized one. The teacher came in to find a siege engine capable of hucking a shot put the length of a football field parked in the school lot. He gave me a good mark but after that all models had to be liftable by a single human.
It was only the second most lethal project that year. Someone else built a foot-tall ballista that could sink a dart into a wall the length of the classroom away.
How about Spider Man 2, where Otto Octavius builds an experimental fusion reactor in the middle of NYC, has the press corps and assorted other hangers-on watching the festivities without any shielding, and didn’t bother to install a fuse in the electrical connection between an experimental AI and his brain?
My college had an experimental tokomak reactor on campus (which never caused any safety incidents, as far as I know). It was off in a corner of campus, with large earthen berms between it and anything else.
5: That atomic-powered plane in the first Thunderbirds episode was called Fireflash. I can only suppose Flying Deathtrap was already taken.
In the Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men, there’s alien planet with a SF power generator. Colossus can go into metal form, walk into it, and destroy the entire planet. He says it’s ridiculous to depend on such a dangerous source of energy, and a native says that humans have traded safety for efficiency too. It took me a while to realise Colossus is Russian, and would be familiar with a clear example of this.
Comp.risks is alive and well! Its archive is at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/
There seems to be a strain of human who is firmly of the belief that safety procedures are for incompetent schmucks. Of course, these two groups tend to be largely congruent.
@17,
Of course, Sauron lost because of his refusal to implement safety procedures.
Experimental reactors — a long time back I worked in a Place with more than one nuclear reactor within its heavily guarded fenceline. The swimming-pool reactor was relatively benign — if you ever get the chance to see one in operation, take it. Cerenkov radiation is like nothing you’ll ever see in movies, TV or pictures. But I digress.
One of the other reactors on site was more… Nicollian in technology, consisting of an slug of Pu-239 sparkly stuff flying at great speed through the hole in the middle of a doughnut-shaped piece of Pu-239. Yes, children, the mass and geometry did add up to a more than sensible amount, at least for a very short period of time if all went well. This reactor was meant to be used multiple times though to produce a lot of neutrons unlike its offspring which were one-time use only. To ensure “great speed” a charge of black powder was used to propel the slug on its way, a surprisingly medieval material to use in the furtherance of modern siegecraft. It was important, let me rephrase that, IMPORTANT! that the black powder supplied by our Explosives group to the utter nutters in that small unassuming reactor building in a far-off corner of the site was of the finest and freshest and bestest quality.
Some folks, when they heard that Nucleonics had indented for half a kilogram of FG corned black powder would book a day’s holiday so they could be 200 miles upwind when it was fired off. Just in case.
What would have happened if the slug got stuck in the target hole?
I think Poul Anderson’s Orion Must Rise probably qualifies, given that it’s about people defying ludicrously obsolete safety and environmental concerns and a hopelessly conservative world government which oppose their entirely justified desire to set off hundreds of nuclear explosions in Earth’s atmosphere.
@5 – Gerry Anderson always did have a nice way with vehicle names. In one of the later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels there’s a visit to Britain’s spaceport, and mention of the spaceship Fireball XL5. Why is it called Fireball XL5? Because the XL4 blew up in a fireball – it was preceded by the Pancake XL4, Shrapnel XL3, and Mushroom Cloud XL2.
Phil Masters once speculated that the Thunderbirds world was an accidental creation of the Technocracy from the RPG Mage, a world where everything is FOR SCIENCE!!! regardless of practicality and safety.
Of course a fairly major industrial accident is also the driving force behind Anderson’s Space 1999, some minor and completely unpredictable carelessness with nuclear waste which accidentally blows the moon out of its orbit and destroys Earth’s environment almost in passing.
James Nicoll asks: What would have happened if the slug got stuck in the target hole?
Bad Things. Probably not a low-yield nuclear explosion, maybe, perhaps, but a metric shit-tonne of neutrons, heat, gamma rays and maybe X-rays. Think “Demon Core” and then some. A failure mode that was considered in the risk assessment was “fuel vapourisation” which gives one pause for thought. Slight error in my earlier comment, it apparently used highly-enriched uranium, not Pu-239. The boiling point of uranium is, Google Google, 4131 deg C.
@40
Sounds like the dragon tickling experiment at Los Alamos that only actually killed one experimental physicist.
@@@@@Austin #10
My assumption is that the holodecks are also used for more directly practical things which require the ability to damage real objects. So, when you are using a holodeck as a machine shop you put it in a mode where actual damaging forces are applied, not simply simulated by changing the shape/appearance of a virtual object.
My dad was a high school wood shop teacher for a while once he got too old to be doing contracting work anymore. The insurance carrier mandated saw-stop blades, the kind that eject the cartridge when they encounter anything conductive like your finger (side note: if you have one of these systems, carefully check for any old nails if you’re using recycled lumber or you’re going to be buying a lot of new cartridges) but he never trusted them. He had an entire decade of kids he taught trained, like spinal-reflex kind of no conscious thought required trained, that if he yelled STOP they were to immediately either a) freeze or b) step back and put their hands up, depending on which tool they were using. He ran drills regularly, and by drills I mean he’d just yell STOP whenever he wanted to check if they were listening. (He was usually nice and made sure no one was at a critical moment in their project.)
High school wood shop teachers *do not fuck around*.
A former landlord got the money he used to buy the property he rented out from a settlement after another kid let a lathe chisel slip out of his hands. Got flicked across the room into my then future landlord’s head. Happily, handle-first and not sharp end first, so he just ended up in a coma for a while.
@43: sounds like my first chemistry lab professor in college. He was very proud of having gotten the gas shut off — experiments requiring heat used electric mantles — but he still had to be vigilant about eyewear; he warned us in advance that if he saw someone wearing ordinary eyeglasses without goggles over them he’d make the student smash the eyeglasses on the (stone) countertop to prove they were made of safety glass.
@9. GERALD ZUCKIER
Spaceship movie:
“OK, now set the selfdestruct timer”
“What selfdestruct timer?”
“You know, the selfdestruct timer every spaceship has”
“Why the hell would we want to have a selfdestruct timer?”
…………………………
This sounds like Something Is Out There, a 1988 TV movie. Alien starship officer Ta’Ra
(played by Maryam d’Abo) is talking to Earth police detective Jack Breslin (Joseph Cortese).
Since they actually do need to destroy the orbiting ship to kill the deadly xenomorphs
on board they finally set the controls to crash the ship on Earth, what Mr. Nicoll calls
a lithobraking maneuver.
Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist
Related, Vinge’s side-story of a Slow Zone civilization that had hyperoptimized itself up to the very limits of what the physics allowed, then suffering a cascading collapse when a few nodes in the vast network of Just-In-Time economy failed.
@37: Have you ever read A Glimpse of Hell, about the insane safety violations leading to the USS Iowa explosion? John Hemry fictionalized it in one of his Space JAG novels.
When I was in the aircraft industry, one of the flight test engineers, a generally bright person, had lost a thumb working on his car. Later, working with a circular saw, cut off two fingers. These were re-attached. A while layer, using another power tool, he cut off the same two fingers again. The same surgeon did the second replant surgery and told him to stay far away from power tools. These accidents resulted from a basic absence of knowledge about tool safety, rules he may have learned had he ever used power tools or been around people who did.
Violating basic rules doesn’t just injure the violator; there are innocent bystanders. See, for example, https://www.csb.gov/videos/after-the-rainbow/
@9: Why would you want your spaceship self destruct function NOT to have a timer? Or other suitable control mechanism e.g. making sure that, hmm, ninety per cent of the crew have evacuated (allowing for discrepancies) or the enemy has got onto the bridge before the explosion. You probably need a fairly smart computer, really. Or an extremely loyal officer, and then, indeed, you don’t need a timer.
“The Lost Fleet” author knows how Star Trek does things but… How his starships move isn’t entirely clear; I think it involves “energy cubes” as fuel (or for crew, “ration bars”) and a “power core” which can easily explode if not managed properly, converting the ship to vapor… or shrapnel. A ship may be intentionally “scuttled”, or alternately “decommissioned”, by a pre-arranged power core explosion. It also can be booby-trapped, damaged in combat, the bad guy ships can be detonated at very short notice by remote control if the crew mutinied, and at least one bad guy crew “did something” to their own core, locked the officers on the bridge (or the officers did that) and then fought over access to their lifepods, which are provided on a basis that evacuation is normally ordered when a substantial number of crew are dead. Of course there also had been officers in the engine room, initially. Another consideration is that if your lifepod is off the doomed ship, but not very far from it, it still may be not your lucky day.
A reliable timed self-destruct function is preferable to some of these alternatives.
@49, personally I am completely terrified of power tools and prefer to keep a considerable distance from them. 😁
In high school the theater arts shop teacher wasnt THAT obsessive about safety after explaining proper use…but behind the circular saw was a prominent splatter trail of brown droplets running up the wall and across the ceiling. I’ve been informed it was probably fake; nevertheless, students were unusually careful using the thing.
@50. Robert Carnegie
@9. GERALD ZUCKIER
Spaceship movie:
“OK, now set the selfdestruct timer”
“What selfdestruct timer?”
“You know, the selfdestruct timer every spaceship has”
“Why the hell would we want to have a selfdestruct timer?”
@9: Why would you want your spaceship self destruct function NOT to have a timer? Or other suitable control mechanism e.g. making sure that, hmm, ninety per cent of the crew have evacuated (allowing for discrepancies) or the enemy has got onto the bridge before the explosion. You probably need a fairly smart computer, really. Or an extremely loyal officer, and then, indeed, you don’t need a timer.
If the quotes are from the 1988 TV movie Something Is Out There, the discussion was not
so much about whether the self-destruct mechanism should have a timer as whether
a ship should have a self-destruct mechanism at all. To the Earth police detective,
whose knowledge of spacecraft design came from watching TV and movies, a
self-destruct mechanism was a common plot device. To Ta-Ra, who actually lived
and worked in a starship, a self-destruct mechanism would be an invitation to disaster.
Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist