#teratomatastic

A lot of things would have to go wrong for the Moon to go boom.First off, stable rocky planets rarely just explode. Even violently active ones (like Earth or Io) aren’t going to just up and explode.Unless you’re Praxis - the moon of the Klingon homeworld. But, I like to think the Klingons were experimenting with some very *interesting* stuff when that happened.

If you want to be sure the Moon explodes, you’ll have to do one of two things.

You can hit it with another body approximately the same size of the Moon going pretty fast. That’ll make them both go boom, and the resulting rain of rocks is going to be really, really bad for Earth.Or, you can pump a large amount of energy into it by using explosives. Mind you, you’ll need a large amount of them to make the Moon really go boom - more than have ever been made in the history of Earth - or a huge amount of antimatter.

Antimatter is the evil, opposite of matter. When an atom of matter and and atom of antimatter collide, both atoms disappear into a flash of energy. Einstein’s equation E=mc^2 tells us how much energy a given amount of mass has. 

So, how much would it take to blow up the Moon?Every solid body has what is knows as it’s gravitational binding energy. This is the amount of energy that must be added to a body for it to fly apart and not pull itself back together. It’s how much energy you need to make it explode completely.

For the Moon, that’s 1.2 x 10^29 joules. Or, in other words, 29,000,000,000,000 megatons. You can get that much energy out of about 1,300,000,000 tons of antimatter. If it was an antimatter asteroid, that would be a rock about 1 km in diameter. Smash that antimatter rock into the Moon, and boom!

Result - no Moon, and a very very ripped up Earth full of dead things.

Constant deja vu like that can actually be a sign of a neurological disorder. Anon needs to see a doctor.

Hey there! Y’know, someday I’m gonna have to write up a post on a teratoma, they’re amazingly cool :)

No, it’s not safe. If by some miracle they vomit, you have now allowed vomit to clog their airway, choke them, and potentially kill them.

Plus.... I mean, you don’t really need to duct-tape them. They’re very much sedated, at least for a while.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

In the modern military,alcoholism is taken very seriously, but soldiers often won’t reportthemselves or others. We have lectures and classes on it all thetime, and people aren’t (supposed to be) punished for it. They’resupposed to be enrolled in group therapy and have open access to ashrink and/or coach who can help them overcome their addiction. Wewere always told the threshold for alcoholism was EXTREMELY low. Iwas considered an at-risk soldier (for alcoholism) because at somepoints I drank two or three times a week and on those days I had morethan two drinks, (yes, two! Three beers was alcoholic territory!) butbecause it never affected my ability to work and I never expressedthe feeling that I “needed” the alcohol, (even though some days Isure as hell did) I was never forced to do anything about it.

Heads up: this answer may not be what you want it to be. I’m sorry about that.

In my experience, most writers look to coma as sort of anultimate plot device, a way to remove a character from the world ofinteraction. They try to turn characters on and off like lightswitches, whichsimply isn’t the case in the real world.

Let me tell you, friend, if your character has been in acoma for months they are permanentlybrain damaged. Healthy brains might take short breaks; anything from a fewseconds to a minute or so (fainting) to a few hours (sleeping), but brains thatcannot be conscious for months at a timeare damaged brains. Your character may have speech impairments, severecognitive deficits, the inability to remember basic skills like brushing theirteeth and using the bathroom. They may have damage to areas of the brain thatcontrol speech, or language, or motor function. They may have severepersonality changes due to damage in the frontal lobes.

This is a brain that has justbarely survived some terrible tragedy. Your character won’t just wake uplike a lightswitch one day. It will be slow, and take weeks.  They’ll have to relearn almost everythingagain, but this time with an older, less plastic brain that might have seriouswiring problems.

As for the physical rehab, as you asked… That’s going todepend a lot on the patient. How much they can move, how their fine motorskills are. Depending on what caused their coma, walking may be possible, or itmay not. Being still for so long causes issues. Expect them to likely havediaper rash, potential bedsores. They might or might not actually lose weight,because their feeding will be very careful—no munching on Big Macs in the neuroICU!—but the muscles will atrophy significantly from lack of use. Physicaltherapy will be done to start getting strength back, very slowly. They’ll startoff with very short distances on a walker (if they’re able), then further andfurther, typically with a nurse or a PT. Eventually they’ll be able to walk 20feet, then 50, then 100, and more.All of this is also going to be modified based around what their brain is capable of, and whatever injuries their body took when they got into the coma in the first place.

I am not a physical therapist, so beyond that I’m not reallysure. I’ve heard a lot of good things about working in warm baths withpatients, because the water helps with buoyancy and increases resistance alittle bit while people are walking, but I don’t know what the inclusion/exclusioncriteria are, how much/how often it might be done, etc.  

I realize all this is probably not what you were hoping foras a writer. I don’t mean to make this all sound crazy bleak, but the outcomefor patients with prolonged coma IS bleak. I hope you, and other writers, havethe courage to convey it that way.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

 Thank you! And…hmmmmmmm is this a Final Fantasy XV reference?

Script family disclaimer: You break it, you bought it. Anything that bends reality is completely up to you. 

I hate to give you a non-answer but “warfare” in general is a really vague term, as is “teleportation.” Here’s a short list of things you should consider when implementing this: • Individual soldiers or entire units? When you say “combatants” that could mean one soldier or an entire army• Can they take weapons with them, and what’s the limitation on those weapons – only ones they themselves can carry or ones they’re simply touching? • Can vehicles teleport? • Is there a portal they have to go through or a spell they have to cast or can they just sorta… BOOP! teleport! • is the teleportation instantaneous?•  Can you teleport anywhere or only somewhere you can see? Only somewhere you’ve personally been? • Can you teleport injured soldiers? Dead bodies? • Can you teleport aircraft?• Can you teleport missiles, especially mid-flight?• Is there a limit to how much teleporting can be done? Does it cost physical or mental energy?• Can you teleport under duress, say panic, in shock, in extreme heat or cold, underwater, etc.• Does the enemy have access to teleportation?• Do they require special attire in order to teleport?•Is this set in the past, present, or future? What kind of weapons are you contending with? • What KIND of warfare are we looking at? Trench? Mechanized? 

As you can see there’s perhaps a FEW too many variables to this question for me to actually give you an answer, but cheekily I’ll go ahead and say my answer is “a lot.” If you wouldn’t mind asking yourself the above questions and narrowing some things down a bit, I might be able to be more help!