Sandbox Discussions

[Alicorn]

Flicker's powers are currently undefined relative to these experiments. My aesthetic for her power is that she cannot use it to start moving except by putting herself somewhere where she'll begin to fall, but obviously that loses a lot of meaning IN SPACE.

[Nemo]

She demonstrably doesn't get splatted by Earth's rotation every time she does her grocery shopping, so it must be stationary with respect to Earth. If were relative to her former position, her speed-relative-to-Earth could change by up to Mach 2.8.

Being stationary relative to Earth also allows for all kinds of usually-fatal shenanigans, but most of those involve space. It does mean she definitely shouldn't under any circumstances teleport into a spacecraft.
Maybe I should look up how far out you can go and still noticeably be falling to Earth. It's definitely going to be farther than one would think.

Do you have an estimate for how fast she has to be falling to count as inside the gravity well? The lowest acceleration that a human can notice is a tiny fraction, I think one multiple-hundredsth, of what Earth's gravity causes. That probably doesn't count as falling very "actively."

[Alicorn]

She can only visit destinations that are stationary with respect to the same gravity well she starts out in. She cannot hit a moving-relative-to-reference-object target.

If she can't tell that there is falling happening then we're on or past the boundary according to which there is falling happening.

[jalapeno_dude]

If she can't tell that there is falling happening then we're on or past the boundary according to which there is falling happening.

For reference, the acceleration due to the sun's gravity (at the Earth's orbital distance) is less than 1/1000 the acceleration due to the earth's gravity at its surface. So this rules out most space-based shenanigans. Messing around with satellites might still be possible though--acceleration at geostationary orbit is about 2% of acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the earth.

[DanielH]

If your intuition says she can’t use her power to start moving, then I’ll assume until further evidence that this means she retains her momentum if there’s no gravity well to define a “stationary” (that is, if nothing else defines “stationary”, it’s stationary with respect to herself). I think that’s the only way to capture the intuition behind not starting moving.

I keep wondering how she knows that her power is “within a gravity well”, and only remembering much later that she has a sense of reachability and knows the Moon isn’t. That doesn’t seem quite enough evidence, but perhaps enough is known about geminii powers and/or they actually experimented with somebody else teleporting her to the Moon and/or Mars.

Since her rotation matches the Earth’s where she lands, I think she couldn’t reach as far as geosynchronous orbit. If she managed to get that far, she’d never reach the ground.

[Nemo]

According to some Googling, minimum detectable acceleration is not a constant but is about .01 to .04 m/s^2. Which is smaller than the acceleration from the Sun's gravity, so she may be close enough to count as in its gravity well. But since that doesn't mean she's not in Earth's, it doesn't affect that restriction.

Her maximum reachable height should be a bit over half the distance to the moon, if my tweaking your equations without paying much attention didn't go horribly wrong. Very possible. If basics improve her perception enough that she can detect 3.3mm/s^2 (compared to an unprepared human's 10 mm/s^s) then good things would happen. Too bad they probably don't.

And I just saw Daniel's post. Good point; even though that is in the gravity well it would feel to her as if she's "falling" away from Earth. So she can't teleport past there, and there's a nice hard cap regardless of how well she senses acceleration. Although a fixed boundary does have side effects. That should allow her to teleport to just below that level and cross the boundary more mundanely.

Proposed shenanigan: Put Flicker in orbit, so that she's still falling (albeit missing the ground) but she can't feel it. Does this count as outside the gravity well?

[Alicorn]

aaaaaah I majored in philosophyyyyyy

[DanielH]

Ok then, a non-physicsy question. Given that leap year isn't actually every four years (and there won't be one in 2100), what happens to twins born on February 29, 2084? What about if a twin is born on a leap second, for whatever instant in time is the moment of being born?

I am also assuming that you do need to adjust for timezones. Flicker didn't, because Arizona doesn't do daylight saving, but if she'd moved to Colorado (one hour ahead of Washington) instead of Arizona would she have needed to wait until 2:15 (even though she was born at 1:15 in Washington)?

[Aestrix]

I think in that particular case, even if the date technically doesn't match Feb 29 on 2100, after sixteen years have passed for them, the power activates, whatever the date says or no. I assume this is incentive for people to have really good clocks. Same answer for how it handles timezones, the clock is a thing that measures time, it does not decree when important things happen.

[Marri]

I have been attempting to follow this thread but man xD I like physics! I was good at physics! I asked so many weird black-hole related questions in my sci fi phase in eighth grade that my teacher gave up and sent me to the high school teacher to ask questions! And this is still way too much physics xDDDD