• What if the Earth's rotation was knocked on it's side by a solar flare? A novel idea.
    123 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Arkanj3l;16028189] Thanks, it means a lot to me.[/QUOTE] Make sure to make a thread if it ever goes into print, if not, you should upload an E-copy for us. :)
The entire world would likely be sterilized. Also, go watch [i]Knowing[/i]. Same shit, different mediocre actor.
I don't think a solar flare could impart a significant moment on the Earth. The most I suppose could happen is that if an incredibly intense electro magnetic storm propagated through space basically turned the Earth into an electric motor. Besides, wasn't this already explored in Neon Genesis Evangelion?
[QUOTE=Cathbadh;16031368]I don't think a solar flare could impart a significant moment on the Earth. The most I suppose could happen is that if an incredibly intense electro magnetic storm propagated through space basically turned the Earth into an electric motor. Besides, wasn't this already explored in Neon Genesis Evangelion?[/QUOTE] Oh shit, you're right. Well, nothing is original, I suppose. :v: I think my take is sufficiently different, though, and much more "western".
The majority of us (by us I mean EVERYONE) would be fucked.
No, Earth will be destroyed by the huge gravitational black hole on the other side of our galaxy
I don't think the two guys above me read the thread... ? Also [img]http://imgkk.com/i/wPdlHfon.jpg[/img] Lastly, I've finally decided upon the narrative. There will be two perspectives: the man and his wife. The man is stuck on Sunside and the woman was stuck on deep Darkside during the event. They are both looking for each other, and I will write two stories -- one for the woman's journey to get to the Sunside for refuge, and one for the man's quest to find his wife and risking it all to get to the Darkside. Although it won't be a multi-layered story with alternating chapters (but who knows), I think it would still sufficiently have an intertwining element to it. I'd be writing the Darkside to Sunside novel first, then the Sunside to Darkside novel, as I want the reader to be mislead on the true nature of the Sunside, be shocked when it's established, and then I'll start doing the Sunside story so I have the best of all the ideas about the narrative that have been brought up in this thread. As for the time setting, I've settled on it being almost twenty years since the incident (placing the story into around 2050, and like Benf199105, society would be technologically stagnant so it's fine), and both hemispheres do not have a very good track of time for obvious reasons. This gives sufficient time for the Sunside to start being mythologized as a generation grows up without sun, this gives time for habitations to be formed, and this also gives time for a dystopia to set itself up. Plus, because the two main characters would have been developing in completely different environments (yet still have memories pre-incident), it'd make their reactions seem fresh to whatever happens but they'd still be fine to relate to. Well... now that I've decided on writing two books, and I have the initial premise locked in, finally, what should I call the duology?
From the way you just described it about the man and his wife, and the light and dark sides, i thought this symbol was rather poignant: [img]http://z.about.com/d/taoism/1/0/0/-/-/-/yinYang.gif[/img]
[QUOTE=Kade;16036366]From the way you just described it about the man and his wife, and the light and dark sides, i thought this symbol was rather poignant: yingyang[/QUOTE] That's the point actually :v: Good ear, it's what I had in mind but it didn't stick out in my head.
[QUOTE=Arkanj3l;16036283]Well... now that I've decided on writing two books, and I have the initial premise locked in, finally, what should I call the duology?[/QUOTE] From the sounds of it, you could go with something as simple as calling one Darkside, and the other Sunside. I'm not exactly sure what the duology itself would be called though. I would leave that until after the framework of the story is in place; then you can probably think of something subtle that encompasses everything the books stand for.
The Earth would still have to rotate, because it revolves around the Sun. If it didn't rotate, then it would be dark for 6 months in one place, then bright for 6 months. It would need to make a full rotation each year.
Definitely no expert here, but, wouldn't it work like this?: [IMG]http://i29.tinypic.com/24o7ghw.jpg[/IMG] some parts of the year, everyone would get sun in the same day. that moon was really unneeded... my bad.
[QUOTE=Madman_Andre;16025947]Second Impact.[/QUOTE] I was fixing to say, have the solar flare bring Lovecraftian horrors that can only be fought by emo kids in giant robots... but you ninja'd me.
Read Remnants, it's similar to this idea, except they get sent out into a space ship before a meteor (not solar flare in this case) hits the earth and it is told from vary perspectives of the people that were on the ship. After 500 years of being in a comatose state, they end up landing on this trippy ass space ship and a fuckton of events transpire that leads to them conquering 3 different armies of alien life forms (idfk how though, the aliens were better equipped and more advanced in general. Oh, and numbers help too.) and control the ship. Then they pilot it back to earth though a wormhole thingy and find the world, missing a huge chunk. Because of the missing chunk, Earth's rotation was fucked up, and it rotated in a way that the same side always faced the sun, similar to what the moon does to us. One side is hundreds and hundreds of degrees all the time, where the oceans boil and absolutely no life is sustainable, and the other side, which is basically just a giant fucking glacier at this point. And in the middle is a small slit of land, only a couple miles wide, covered in ash, that can still sustain life. They find out that humans have moved underground, and over the 500 years that have passed after the meteor hit Earth they have adapted to live on almost no water or food. They learn the customs and lifestyles of these people, and help to [sp]rebuild the planet. I forget if they actually do. I think either they do, or they take them back onto the giant ship thing.[/sp] [highlight]FUCKING CHRIST,[/highlight] I get off topic WAY too easily!
[QUOTE=trent_roolz;16091089]Read Remnants, it's similar to this idea, except they get sent out into a space ship before a meteor (not solar flare in this case) hits the earth and it is told from vary perspectives of the people that were on the ship. After 500 years of being in a comatose state, they end up landing on this trippy ass space ship and a fuckton of events transpire that leads to them conquering 3 different armies of alien life forms (idfk how though, the aliens were better equipped and more advanced in general. Oh, and numbers help too.) and control the ship. Then they pilot it back to earth though a wormhole thingy and find the world, missing a huge chunk. Because of the missing chunk, Earth's rotation was fucked up, and it rotated in a way that the same side always faced the sun, similar to what the moon does to us. One side is hundreds and hundreds of degrees all the time, where the oceans boil and absolutely no life is sustainable, and the other side, which is basically just a giant fucking glacier at this point. And in the middle is a small slit of land, only a couple miles wide, covered in ash, that can still sustain life. They find out that humans have moved underground, and over the 500 years that have passed after the meteor hit Earth they have adapted to live on almost no water or food. They learn the customs and lifestyles of these people, and help to [sp]rebuild the planet. I forget if they actually do. I think either they do, or they take them back onto the giant ship thing.[/sp] [highlight]FUCKING CHRIST,[/highlight] I get off topic WAY too easily![/QUOTE] I never really liked KA Applegate.
[QUOTE=Arkanj3l;16091163]I never really liked KA Applegate.[/QUOTE] Remnants was good, except for when they're at war with the aliens, because anyone with half a brain (Faith the baby anybody?) can tell humans would lose due to technological dependancy. It's cool when they go back to Earth and find the trippy shit, and also when Billy is fucking around in the ship building stuff for people and he is playing with what is basically a modelling program in real life. I liked that part. Imagine how much cool shit you could make with that.
Pretty sure a solar flare will never get big enough to do cause any disaster to earth. But if it could, it wouldn't "knock it on it's side" that's just silly.
[QUOTE=trent_roolz;16091189]Remnants was good, except for when they're at war with the aliens, because anyone with half a brain (Faith the baby anybody?) can tell humans would lose due to technological dependancy. It's cool when they go back to Earth and find the trippy shit, and also when Billy is fucking around in the ship building stuff for people and he is playing with what is basically a modelling program in real life. I liked that part. Imagine how much cool shit you could make with that.[/QUOTE] It's just that anyone who uses ghostwriters (I'm looking at you, Clancy) loses merits in my book. It's so easy to tell. Did Applegate do everything herself this time? [editline]01:36PM[/editline] [QUOTE=Oecleus;16091244]Pretty sure a solar flare will never get big enough to do cause any disaster to earth. But if it could, it wouldn't "knock it on it's side" that's just silly.[/QUOTE] Yeah, I know, which is why I abandoned it.
[QUOTE=ThePunisher1;16016885]Um, north pole towards the sun, pretty obvious, global sea levels will rise dramatically, kill a load of people, remaining countries will war with each other over lack of space, etc.[/QUOTE] South pole freezes?
The Knowing did it [editline]03:32AM[/editline] I read more of the thread and this seems like an awesome idea.
[QUOTE=ThePunisher1;16016885]Um, north pole towards the sun, pretty obvious, global sea levels will rise dramatically, kill a load of people, remaining countries will war with each other over lack of space, etc.[/QUOTE] Actually, just doing some rough calculations, most of where I live, which is still fairly close to the coast line is at about 100m above sea level. For the sea levels to rise that much, there would have to be 500 quintillion Liters of water in the polar ice caps. Try to imagine 500 trillion olympic-sized swimming pools and you'll see how bizarre that sounds. Certainly, there would be widespread destruction of coastal cities, which is a lot of them, although I seriously doubt in such a land shortage that people will be killing each other over the last scrap of dry land they can find.
[QUOTE=Arkanj3l;16036283]I don't think the two guys above me read the thread... ? Also [img]http://imgkk.com/i/wPdlHfon.jpg[/img] Lastly, I've finally decided upon the narrative. There will be two perspectives: the man and his wife. The man is stuck on Sunside and the woman was stuck on deep Darkside during the event. They are both looking for each other, and I will write two stories -- one for the woman's journey to get to the Sunside for refuge, and one for the man's quest to find his wife and risking it all to get to the Darkside. Although it won't be a multi-layered story with alternating chapters (but who knows), I think it would still sufficiently have an intertwining element to it. I'd be writing the Darkside to Sunside novel first, then the Sunside to Darkside novel, as I want the reader to be mislead on the true nature of the Sunside, be shocked when it's established, and then I'll start doing the Sunside story so I have the best of all the ideas about the narrative that have been brought up in this thread. As for the time setting, I've settled on it being almost twenty years since the incident (placing the story into around 2050, and like Benf199105, society would be technologically stagnant so it's fine), and both hemispheres do not have a very good track of time for obvious reasons. This gives sufficient time for the Sunside to start being mythologized as a generation grows up without sun, this gives time for habitations to be formed, and this also gives time for a dystopia to set itself up. Plus, because the two main characters would have been developing in completely different environments (yet still have memories pre-incident), it'd make their reactions seem fresh to whatever happens but they'd still be fine to relate to. Well... now that I've decided on writing two books, and I have the initial premise locked in, finally, what should I call the duology?[/QUOTE] Sounds awesome. I think a title will be hard to come by. You've already got Pink Floyd and Star Wars conspiring against you in that department. Maybe for the Dark Side book - "Search for Sol" ?? Something like that? xD IDK lol.
I'm sorry, did anyone read my post? I know it was a bad picture but I think you can get the rough idea from it, right? I mean, if that's how it would work, then I don't see any way you could continue the dark/sunside story, as everything would flip in a year. wow, it would have saved me a lot of time if I just found this earlier. [img]http://odin.physastro.mnsu.edu/~eskridge/astr102/uranus_orbit.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=Makh;16097817]I'm sorry, did anyone read my post? I know it was a bad picture but I think you can get the rough idea from it, right? I mean, if that's how it would work, then I don't see any way you could continue the dark/sunside story, as everything would flip in a year.[/QUOTE] I'm perfectly aware of that, unfortunately, and I have a pseudo-scientific explanation that gets around it, but it's a cheap trick to play on the reader and I'm not going to reveal it. [editline]12:09AM[/editline] [QUOTE=Benf199105;16097787]Sounds awesome. I think a title will be hard to come by. You've already got Pink Floyd and Star Wars conspiring against you in that department. Maybe for the Dark Side book - "Search for Sol" ?? Something like that? xD IDK lol.[/QUOTE] No, the two books are being called "Darkside" and "Sunside", respectively. I just need to think of a name for both of them.
There is a way you could get the permalight and permadark hemispheres without having each side getting a few months of day and night each year. Just explain that one of the effects of THE EVENT was that the Earth was tidally locked into facing the Sun, like many other satellites in the Solar System. Our moon, and all the Galilean moons are forever locked with one side facing the Earth and Jupiter respectively, and there are many more objects like this throughout the Solar System.
I think he's going for some sort of Fallout 3 esque, Truman Show, The Game, twist, where it was all a government plot. That's what i think anyway. I got my eye on you Arkanj3l. :tinfoil:
Sorry for the shameless plug of a bump, but I posted the prologue and the first chapter in Creationism. I want to know what you guys think. [url]http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?p=16536698[/url]
Very nice. I still don't like the idea of a solar flare causing it. I think that it makes more sense if a moon-sized asteroid comes close to the Earth. They never colide, but they become entwined in each others gravitational fields, at first the asteroid almost breaks away, and in doing so, it turns the Earth, which then becomes gravity-locked with the Sun. Then you have two options: it breaks free on the back swing, or it becomes a second moon (and thus an eternal reminder of how things used to be). The second option would be more chaotic, as a second, much closer moon would wreak havoc on the tides. Let's say the turning took almost a day. That makes it sudden, but not enough to rip off buildings.
I think you should really try to work out the science behind it before you discuss the science behind it, as has been said before, a solar flare large enough to effect the earth's axis would also kill everything on earth, which wouldn't make for an interesting book. It also seems unrealistic that people would have such a sophisticated knowledge of what the fuck is acutally going on, if some huge disaster happened that almost immediately destroyed the infrastructure of the world's governments, how would we know what had happened? All things aside, from what I've read you've got a good style to your writing and I know you're not supposed to be writing a fucking textbook, so I'll probably pick it up just as an entertaining read. If anything I'd suggest that you do an hour of brainstroming about the name, Darkside, Dark side, and innumeral variations have been done to death, something more ominous and unknown would be better. I like the idea of someone being effected by the radiation, it changes how their nanomachines work, blinds them etc. It's good to have a character who's got a flaw that they have to deal with.
You don't even have to explain what happened, just take the entire story from the perspective of the main characters- add in some strange lights, and there you go. Just remember to never have them meet a scientist.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.