Reaction Time

[SaxonViolence]

This comes up in my thoughts relatively frequently.

 

You know that we have a reaction time. It takes time for nervous impulses to travel the length of a nerve.

 

Sometimes an impulse has to go from the retina to the brain, bounce around the brain a half-dozen or so times, and then travel part of the length of a leg or arm before satisfaction can even truly begin.

 

Monty Hall's $100 bill trick shows this. If the fingers are spaced properly, the bill--dropped at random--will be gone before your fingers even start to close.

 

(There is a hypothetical way to beat the challenge--if you'd already started a "False Start" precisely the moment the bill started to drop. This would create all sorts of Rancorous accusations of "Cheating" from both sides, so you'd better have plenty of Electronic data to back you up.....

 

Or maybe, Monty would smile and pay up. It isn't his money after all.....)

 

Lead times in Traffic are one other area of life where we can show the effects of Reaction Time.

 

Ken Kesay once gave a speech where he claimed that the most wired and fastest among us is .32 Seconds behind "The Now".

 

We might quibble about fractions of a second--but the point is clear.

 

Did any of you ever hear of "Bill Jordan"?

 

You wouldn't unless you're into Guns.

 

Old Bill was just about one of the Last proponents of the "Fast-Draw-and-Shoot-from-the-Hip" type Shooting that used to be the rage among both Laws and Outlaws.

 

Bill wrote a book about learning how to learn the "Fast Draw" called "No Second Place Winner". Its well worth reading, though I'm firmly in an another Camp on Gun Techniques.

 

Bill was really fast. There are probably Western Quick-Draw Shooters (One federation shoots Blanks; I Think there is also a "Live Ammo" set still around...) There are also a bewildering array of "Action" and "Combat Shooting" Federations and Schools extant.

 

Suffice it to say that Bill was very fast--and when shooting tossed Aspirin became too Blase' for him, he moved on to Saccharine Tablets.

 

Bill could draw and fire in about .68 seconds--been years since I read the book.

 

He broke this down into something like .34 Seconds to React and about .34 Seconds to Draw and fire.

 

When he Self-Started the Draw, he did it in about .34 Seconds.

 

This demonstrates, Amongst other things, that if you insist on staring fixedly on your Client, and not drawing until you see him start to draw--you have spotted him an insurmountable advantage. Even a relatively slow draw will beat you, if you spot him a .34 Second Handicap. The one who starts his draw first, should "Win"....{But then there are misses, and people who aren't greedy and who demand to be shot more than once.....}

 

But I want to examine a theme common in SF--Jacking up the ole Reflexes.

 

Just how big a divident can we reasonably expect to get, by whittling away at this .32 Seconds--or .34--or whatever?

 

Lets say that we could cut the reaction time.....pull a number out of my Bass.....57%.

 

.34 X .57=.1938; .34-.1938=.1462 Seconds.

 

But that's just reaction time--the neural impulse going out will be a bit faster too.

 

What have we achieved? Bill is a wee mite faster. Can he afford the foolish handicap of letting the Client draw first--like the Hero of a 50s Western?

 

Maybe--Depends on just how fast his Client is.

 

Have we created an unbeatable Duelling Machine--Hardly.

 

So let us suppose that we can Hardwire somehow. Traveling at "C" over the tiny distances involved--for all practical purposes, all Neural impulse times might as well be Zero.....Nichts.....Nada.

 

Más pequeño que el pequeño final de nada, tallado a un punto.

 

I'll bet, all else being equal, our dude would be a cracker-jack race car driver.

 

I wonder whether a Boxer or Wrestler with Zero Reaction time could ever be successfully Feinted out of position.....

 

Maybe yes, maybe no.

 

Anyway, I think that jacking up Neural impulse speed would net no more than a razor thin advantage.

 

What do y'all think?

 

Saxon Violence

Edited March 30, 2012 by SaxonViolence

[CraigD]

SV, you’re a wealth of ideas and speculation! I’m really enjoying what I think of as your recent “cyberpunk” series of posts. :thumbs_up

 

But I want to examine a theme common in SF--Jacking up the ole Reflexes.

 

Just how big a divident can we reasonably expect to get, by whittling away at this .32 Seconds--or .34--or whatever?

 

Anyway, I think that jacking up Neural impulse speed would net no more than a razor thin advantage.

 

What do y'all think?

I agree.

 

SF has a long tradition of bad science, and some surprising champions of good. One I knew, was L. Sprague de Camp, as a writer well known for swords and sorcery fantasy. The estate of Robert E Howard, famous for his Conan the barbarian character, contracted de Camp to write continuations of the Conan stories. Surprisingly, at the many writers’ workshops where de Camp spoke, he used a particular scene from one of Howard’s Conan stories, in which Conan lifts a roughly spherical stone with circumference nearly twice his armspan, as an example of bad physics, pointing out that no matter how strong Conan is, the best he could do in this scene is lift himself or roll the rock, as unless he has freakish telescoping legs, he couldn’t have planted his feet near enough the stone and his center mutual center of gravity to lift it.

 

Though many of his stories had overt supernatural magic in them, except for an occasional slip-up, de Camp’s story’s physics, at least, was always accurate.

 

“Jacked up” nervous systems are somewhat, IMHO, to the 1980s-present, what physics-defying physical strength were to the 1930s-‘60s, superfast cyber-ninja assassins the successor to the previous generations super-strong characters. I could go on volumes about the sociological implications of this shift, but don’t want to stray any more off topic.

 

While SV’s example above shows, I think, that artificially sped-up nerves likely would be only marginally useful to a gun dualist, I can imagine situations, such as a reduction of 0.1 sec in sensing and reacting to an incipient skid during competitive driving, where they might give a more dramatic advantage. However, I can’t think of a situation where speeding up human perceptual and motor speed, accuracy, or strength grants an advantage that can’t be better granted using a machine.

 

My vision, then, of a SF cyber-ninja is not that far from present day military planners’ “future soldier” vision, elements of which are already deployed among the better-funded national militaries and mercenary companies. Key to these systems is allowing humans to do what we do well – make guesses, judgments, and tactical decisions – while allowing sensors, computers, and other artificial component to do what they do well – sense things, keep track of data and present it in user-friendly forms, perform high-precision tasks, protect our soft human bodies, etc.

 

I’ve noticed a cliché in SF, mostly comics, movies, and TV, where hapless squads of soldiers with equipment like this are just fodder to allow a biologically-enhanced hero of villain to show off their elite abilities, which usually involves gymnastic leaping to avoid gunfire and ends with the soldiers all dead and the hero/villain unscathed. This is a silly cliché, I think, propped up by bad science.

 

Which bring me back to Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #B-782, AKA a “rat thing”, former known Fido the pit bull puppy and good doggie, who I first mentioned in this post from the 1992 novel Snow Crash. The fictional Fido is super-fast, able to disarm and disable well-armed mobs without incurring a scratch to his robotic metal hide, but not, I think, an example of bad speculative science, or an example of the cliché I describe above.

 

First, the strong, moving parts of Fido body aren’t biological, but purely mechanical. They’re not powered by biological metabolism, but electromechanically, via a small radiothermal reactor. In order to be able to move very fast, he doesn’t have padded feet, but sharp metal claws designed to dig into special artificial matting that looks like grass. In a pinch (important later in the plot of the book), they can get similar traction by digging, destructively, into ordinary asphalt and concrete. Although it has efficient extendable radiators resembling stubby wings and the spine plates on a stegosaurus, Fido’s body is too small for the power of his RTG to allow him to stand still or move slowly for more than a few seconds, even when the RTG is damped to its lowest power, except when he’s resting in a “doggie hutch” that sprays him with refrigerant while a fan-powered duct exhausts the resulting steam. Encased in this mechanical body is at least the head, perhaps the entire body, of the original pit bull Fido was born, cushioned and richly connected to the body’s control and communication systems. Like an ordinary dog, Fido plays at running and catching Frisbees, but he does so without actually moving his mechanical body, in an immersive video game simulation designed to keep him a happy, content doggie. Fido is part of a system consisting of his biological and mechanical body, his refrigerated hutch, the yard over which he can run when actively protecting it from intruders, and various remote communication and control systems.

 

Fido knows via his terrier instincts, and is aided by the computers that translate his nerve impulses into control signals for his mechanical body, to always have one or more leg claws dug into the ground, because at the speeds he moves, were he to lose this contact, he would travel in a howitzer shell-like ballistic trajectory until hitting a fence or wall. In Fido’s power domain, gravity is not a very important force.

 

Contrast this with an example of the cliché I describe above, the scene starting with this panel from David Coacci’s beautifully digitally drawn webcomic, Renaissance. In this scene, Nyoko the mercenary ninja elf kills 4 trained super-soldiers armed with better-than-our-present-day automatic rifles by dodging their bullets with a series of leaps, flips, zigs, zags, sword slashes and point-blank pistol shots (her non-point-blank shots are ineffective, as the last super-soldier, also cypberpunkishly enhanced, can dodge handgun bullets).

 

Overlooking the implausibility of a human size and shaped biological organism able to leap 3+ meters high, the physics absurdity of scenes like this is that such leaps can be no faster or slower than those of an ordinary human gymnast aided by equipment such as a trampoline. Once the gymnast or super-ninja is no longer in contact with the a solid surface, the speed and path of her trajectory is exactly determined by physics. So shooting a super-ninja performing a 3 m high backflip would be no more difficult than shooting a trampolinist doing the same.

 

In summary, if you intend to write scientifically plausible scenes involving human-size and shape (or large dog sized, rat-shaped) characters moving so fast they can’t be shot with a hand or longarm gun:

1) give them more than flesh-strength bodies (eg: Fido’s metal and plastic external body);

2) more than metabolic mechanical power (eg: Fido’s RTG);

3) and don’t have them lose contact with floor, wall, or ceiling, unless to swiftly jump from one surface to the other.

 

Putting the last point another way, consider movement this fast to be occurring in zero gravity.

 

Physically plausible super-human combat action scenes has some visually appealing consequences, which, to my regret, I’ve only rarely, and then inconsistently and omitting some of the best, read or seen rendered graphically. To the best of my knowledge, the great hard SF transhuman gun fu action story/comic/movie has yet to be made – encouraging for all us aspiring writer/manga ka/moviemakers of the hard SF geek persuasion. ;)

[SaxonViolence]

Another theme that is continually brought up is Superhuman Strength.

 

It seems to me that the Human body is somewhat underpowered.

 

Doubling or tripling the strength per pound should pay some big dividends.

 

First we have to determine what we're talking about.

 

Take a 200 pound man. A good Strong fellow should be able to Bench Press twice his body weight, and Squat three times his body weight.

 

Triple his Strength and he can Bench Press 1200 Pounds and Squat 1800.

 

{However, if the best our everyman can do is Bench a Shaky 250 and squat maybe 350; and if we only double his strength, then he still isn't as strong as some Champion Power-Lifters in his Weight Class.}

 

But, Champion Lifters only peak once or twice a year--at most. Their performances use a number of rather specialized aids (Its reputed that a "Super-Suit" adds 120 pounds to one's Squat...); and the lifters require much "Psyching-Up" to come anywhere near their best.

 

So our fellow can do his lifts without any special gear; on any given day; four or five times in a day, with 30 minutes or so between attempts; and without getting particularly worked up.

 

At 3X, our Superman will already find himself drastically over-powered for most tasks. Only rarely will he find himself with enough traction and leverage to bring more than a Fraction of his power to bear.

 

Think of a World Champion High Jumper--to come anywhere near his potential, he needs a nice level surface and spiked shoes. He's already over-powered in street shoes, on Asphalt. What will tripling his Strength get you--in "On-The-Street"

Performance?

 

That's why both Sumo Wrestlers and Olympic Weightlifters; Shot-Putters; Strongmen Competitors, etc. all go to some length to "Bulk-Up".

 

Our 200 Pounder with the 1800 Pound Squat would probably find himself losing Sumo matches again and again to well trained 365 Pound Sumos.

 

If you Tripled the Power of two men--and made their bones, joints, ligaments, etc. all three or four times as Injury resistant--and even jacked their reflexes up 57%.....

 

And turned them loose to fight. It would probably look a lot like two normal men fighting on a frozen lake under lunar gravity.

 

I have mulled over the idea of a Novel with Super-Strength Humans in it. In addition to their Strength--which can be rigorously measured; each Superhuman also has a quality known as "***", which is a measure of how much Pseudo Inertia he can Generate for stability.

 

If a man had 500 pounds of "***", then in a Pushing Contest, he could make himself as hard to move as a 500 Pound Sumo.

 

While there's no way to verify it (Short of some very advanced computer simulations), a man with 3X Strength and 750 pounds of "***" would probably win repeatedly against a fellow with 10x Strength, but only 350 pounds of "***".