Odd one for the Smart people. . .

So what everyone is basically saying is that without mechanical or constant intervention this wouldn't work in a human post apoc dystopia earth? Well not without seriously bending believability. This is rather disheartening though I can still always come up with some other ultra secret left over impenetrable government blackbox facility set in a mountainous and remote region. It just won't float like an out of place Fairy Castle and boggle the mind of the characters who later stumble upon it and will need a different acronym as O.B.E.R.O.N. will no longer be suitable.
 
Sorry MstrTal, I can't think of a way to make a real mountain float without hugely high tech and high power intervention. I have three suggestions though: Does it have to be an actual mountain? Would a left-on hologram or some other illusion suffice? The other one is the null hypothesis: It's not explainable by the characters, they just have to accept it as is, and so does the reader.
 
Well if you want far out. In this future earth, the atmosphere has become partially saturated with Dark Energy. Since it is not in any way discernible to humans it would be invisible.

The reason this works is that Dark Energy wants to pull things apart; the opposite of gravity which wants to pull things together. There is just enough Dark Energy in the atmosphere to effect large, loose solid objects, like Big Rocks!

But not enough force to effect say, people, or water, or anything planted or contructed into the ground.

Watcha think????
 
That's a brilliant idea for a thought experiment. I've got a PhD in physics ( and a large ego, for which I apologise) but I really don't know: we don't know much about what dark energy is, only the effect it has on the universe at a large scale. I don't know if it has the same effect on smaller scales. I'm not sure what effect concentrating it in a tiny area like Earth would have... but straight off the top of my head: The acceleration of the expansion of the universe is caused by dark energy (we think, as best we can tell right now, the evidence suggests, etc etc). The expansion of the universe isn't just objects moving apart, it's driven by space itself expanding. So.. if you levitate a mountain with a huge concentration of dark energy...that means you're making space expand ferociously under the mountains base, between the base and the ground... that'd have some.. very, very weird side effects:time running faster near the mountain, the mountain becoming blue shifted, the mountain being effectively in free fall through constantly expanding space - so if you leave the field going for ten years, then switch it off, the mountain hits thefloor at about 99.999 percent of lightspeed... I think - this actually way out of my league, especially at an insomniac two am.

Although, it's a floating mountain, so weird is already where we're at.

My suggestion was going to be : give the mountain a 'one miracle exception'. Ie, allow you're mountain to do one thing - with a vague explanation - that defies a law of physics, and then make sure everything else it does is inside the laws, as they'd apply if that one miracle was occurring.

But I like Gordian Knots idea better, I'm going to go bone upon dark energy to see what happens if you concentrate a lot of it in one spot.

No,I'm going to bed first, it's almost three am..
 
Sapheron said:
Seeing as measuring the density of rocks filled with gas (or oil, or water, or whatever) is part of what I do professionally and, in theory, therefore understand, I can crush your dreams of gassy rocks. A gas filled rock will never fly. Imagine how many helium balloons you'd need to float a bucket of water. A hell of a lot of them. You're not going to find any rock less than twice as dense, and realistically you'll use one two and a half times as dense, minimum. Thats a lot of balloons now. Somehow, you need to get them all inside this bucketful of stones.

So that means you need huge caverns full of hydrogen or helium somewhere. But then it gets worse; if you want plants, animals, etc, on top of it, that implies things like soil and water, both of which are a huge extra weight, requiring ever larger and thus less stable caverns to support it all. Before you're reaching meaningful sizes, the thing is going to break under the stresses caused by its own silliness. Leaving aside the reality of huge cave ins (or blow outs), even the smallest fractures or natural permeabilty (which will inevitably exist), gas will escape over time and density will increase.

You're going to need a fiction material somewhere. Something ultra light, to provide lift, or something ultra strong, to encase and support vast quantities of something else with very little of itself.
Click to expand...

Pumice is less dense than water (it floats). What if a material even less dense is also shot through with hydrogen, perhaps as part of a natural outgassing in a volcanic origin, while it is very strong due to a unigue crystalline structure.

It also doesn't have to be that incredibly strong in all circumstances. One of the strongest materials there is to an even overall pressure, strangely, is a special type of glass,

Also, there's no reason the floating rocks must float all the time. A planet with extremes of day and night temperature might allow hydrogen inside to expand enough to make it float in daytime and then settle to the ground at night.
 
There are a number of ways to handle this that haven't been covered(None of which are scientifically sound, but still). Were I to do something like this in a book I wrote(most of my book ideas being High Urban Fantasy or Space Opera dealies) I'd have the locations tied to something cataclysmic. The meteor magnet theory mentioned earlier being a good example. Perhaps the locations are where powerful air spirits of some sort died, or a specific type of bomb(anti-matter-Gravity-what have you) went off leaving the area's laws of physics distorted. All of these use powerful handwavium, but they should stand up even in hard scifi without too much work(magic options aside) The key as a writer is to make the explanation seem reasonable enough. Perfect realism makes for boring stories that focus overmuch on science when interesting things happen, or they don't expand much past what we can do today.

Basically find an answer you think is cool enough to fit you, and throw in just vague enough of an answer to make it work. I can think of six or seven more moderately handwavey options, you can find one that will work.
 
JoanDrake said:
Pumice is less dense than water (it floats).
Click to expand...

The solid bits of pumice are far denser than water though, and anything made up of mostly air, like the average piece of pumice, is very unsuitable for building floating islands. You point out that a strong crystalline structure would be useful, and you're right, but that's exactly the sort of thing pumice is lacking.

As for your funky submarine glass; I doubt anyone with sense would dare go down in one bigger than a couple of metres diameter, as I suspect at that point it wouldn't work. To make a dome hundreds of metres across, at minimum, for an island, would be out of the question. So would making something that wasn't a sphere. So would putting the high pressure on the inside, as it isn't meant to cope with that.

The main problem here is the scale. A balloon is pretty simple, an airship is difficult, an island is near impossible. Even with the best of technology and materials, you'll have to break the rules of reality somewhere.
 
Something I remembered. Tethers. Say you have Rocks filled with Hydrogen or Helium. They'll float off an d be unstable. Unless they have a ton of vines tethering them in place. Sure the hydrogen bubbles are unlikely, but if we assume they happen anyway it should be scientifically sound.
 
Sapheron said:
The main problem here is the scale. A balloon is pretty simple, an airship is difficult, an island is near impossible. Even with the best of technology and materials, you'll have to break the rules of reality somewhere.
Click to expand...

So make balloon-plants. And have them rope themselves together with vines. Rope enough of them together, and you have your island.

And with all those seperate gasbags, it would be unsinkable...just like the Titanic. :)
 
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Yep. You could have them be creeper vines that tend to pick up rocks or something(to grab them or resist wind or something and make actual islands of stone)
 
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