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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3121 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was kicking around a story idea for a super hero setting where all powers are based on speedster type powers. I went to ChatGPT to flesh out the idea a little, and get a condensed list of human cell types. I was originally going to have the list of cell types and then work out how the speedster powers applied to those cell types, but then I just went one prompt further and had ChatGPT do it for me. And I maybe accidentally ruined the whole exercise for myself. I realized I was basically outsourcing the fun part of creative writing and world-building. ChatGPT also did a good job at what I asked it to do, that its hard not to use it.

I also have an old story I wrote and never finished. I've been thinking about feeding the story into ChatGPT and seeing if it can drastically clean it up and then finish the story.

Are you going at this from a soft sci-fi angle or hard? I struggle to think how speeding up any cell types locally results in anything but disease states. Any rapidly dividing cell: tumors, CNS neurons: seizures, cardiac myocytes: arrhythmias, any endocrine cell: hormone imbalance. Not to mention, the increase in metabolic rate means your characters would need to be eating non-stop to keep up with energy demands. I could maybe see an argument for having all cell types uniformly and globally sped up might work (if you also locally distort time so things like diffusion rates for gas exchange in the lungs also increase), but going into specific cell types seems like a hard sci-fi coating on a concept that fundamentally only works as soft sci-fi.

More of a fantasy angle. But I like rules and limitations to power systems. Not sure if that counts as soft sci-fi.

There is bleed over for the "speed power". Its more that a specific cell type is regulating the use of the speed power, rather than the only thing being effected by it. Skin is one of the easier examples I'd thought of. Skin gets hit by something, the skin in that area can call on the speed power and be locally sped up so that the force of the impact is dissipated over a longer time period. So a bullet traveling 2,500mph with a time differential of 100x would hit the skin like a bullet traveling at 25mph. If it was literally just the skin cells it wouldn't really save anyone, it would just preserve a patch of skin on the surface while the force of the bullet travels through to the underlying flesh and does a bunch of damage anyways. So there is bleed over in the speed power. Anything that needs to get sped up by the skin can get sped up. There was also going to be some mechanism that intelligently applies the power without input from humans.

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