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Froghoppers are bugs which live inside cuckoo spit - the
blobs of foam on plants. They are able to accelerate at
four hundred gee. Presumably they only do so very
briefly
because they can only jump seventy centimetres.
But imagine this. Take a shrub of some kind and put it
in
a pot.
Encourage it to become highly infested with
somewhere near a hundred grammes of froghoppers.
Remove them from the plant and stack them up in a
number of multistage structures like a rocket. Then,
place it into some kind of heating device, seal it, and
launch it into the stratosphere by means of a hydrogen
balloon. On reaching its maximum height, gently and
unobtrusively remove the froth without them noticing.
Then, suddenly startle the first froghopper, then the
second, and so forth. There will be a rapid acceleration
of
froghoppers, maybe ten in a row, until the final ten
grammes of froghoppers are travelling at orbital
velocity.
There will then be ten grammes of froghoppers in orbit.
This is the first part of a solution to the N-Prize. The
next
stage is of course to make them telepathic.
Not this kind of froghopper then?
http://www.powerkit...cehopper-orange.htm
[pocmloc, May 28 2012]
No, this kind.
http://www.psmicrog...ence-image/80200239
Froghopper anonymous. [nineteenthly, May 28 2012]
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I cannot believe that NASA didn't think of this
already. It's so obvious now that you've described it. |
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I think "describing" is rather a generous way of describing this. |
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For some reason I read that as Spacehoppers. Not sure how one of those would work in zero gravity? pomloc beat me to the link though... |
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Sadly no, although if they neither exploded nor underwent some kind of problem associated with heating or cooling, you could probably use them on the Moon. |
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It would get them more than seventy centimetres. |
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Why do I have the feeling that this is going to instigate a
math battle? |
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In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics. |
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Imagine a flowerpot in the ionosphere with a froghopper on it. For a brief period at least, that froghopper would be able to jump. If the flowerpot was in freefall and the froghopper had a pile of more froghoppers on top of it, and they all jumped at once, the one at the top would be moving quite fast. My spellchecker doesn't recognise the word "froghopper". |
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Regarding the stacked froghopper concept, I have
to admit to a few qualms. |
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If the stack is ten high, and if they all jump at
once, then the uppermost froghopper will be
trying to jump against an acceleration of 9x400g.
If its body weighs 100mg (under 1 gravity), then its
effective weight will be about a pound. |
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The first experiment, therefore, would be to
place a one pound weight on a froghopper, then
see if it can still froghop as effectively as an
unfettered froghopper. |
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Even a brief gedankenexperiment suggests that
there are potential flaws here. |
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Of course, this problem could be solved if the
froghoppers jumped not simultaneously, but
consecutively. However, questions of reaction
mass are troubling in this scenario. |
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I think the problem, [bigs], is that you're assuming
a standard and uniform size for the froghoppers. |
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Based on the SPCLRBL* theory of invertebrate
architecture, it should be possible to create a
series of froghoppers, each having a mass of e
times that of the previous member of the series. |
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If you plug the relevant numbers into your
calculations, I think you'll find that orbital velocity
becomes feasible. |
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[*shrimp, prawn, crevette, lobster, really big
lobster] |
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You just need to ensure that the first froghopper is
very small. |
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I was thinking of consecutive jumps but take your point. The fact
remains that if the acceleration of a froghopper jump could be
maintained, it would reach orbital velocity in two seconds, so the
question is, what kind of device, biological or otherwise, could
maintain a constant or major ping? |
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Probably the first point to be determined is are they already telepathic. Save a lot of lab time. |
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Suggest double-blind testing, two containers in different rooms, startle one and see what happens to the other. Failure of froghopper 2 to react as expected might just be schadenfreude. |
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The range of their telepathy would also be important. If it can't be picked up by froghoppers in the troposphere, it would be useless unless it could be amplified. |
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What you need is a telepathy megaphone. |
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Do you believe in mental telepathy? |
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Thinking on this, telepathy would be crap. You'd hear all the thoughts, but you'd also hear all the voices other people hear in their heads..so kind of multiplied-schizophrenia... <wonders what voices froghoppers hear in their heads> |
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<...GROG thinking: Hundreds of Telepathic Froghoppers in a Blender...> BAD GROG! NO BISCUIT! |
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Surely a quick experiment with say 4 adult pirates each balancing on top of each others shoulders for example, would demonstrate a fairly fundamental flaw in this theory, without the benefit of [Bigs] fine mathematical endeavors. |
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[UnaBubba] I can hear a booming thought coming across the "ether" saying "this is Telepathetic" |
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Pardon? <inspects ear/mind trumpet, dislodges bird's nest> |
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Anyway, this is from the missing MacGyver episode where he makes a froghopper-powered gun to do something implausible? |
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If you give them a telepathic shock do they still
evince a galvanic response? |
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That gives me an idea. Instead of waiting for their own
reactions, they could just be shocked electrically in sequence,
perhaps not even killing them in the process but relying on their
own startle responses. |
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Where I come from they call it cuckoo spit. (the bubbles inside which you can find froghoppers). I never really liked the parasitic cuckoo, so I am more than happy to help extract gallons of saliva from a large scale cuckoo farm. The enjoyable part being to convince the cuckoo's to lay fake little bird eggs into my fake little bird nests. Whuaaa Ha Ha haaa..! |
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I understand it could be doable, but how do you control the direction of their jump, precisely? |
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//telepathic//
-- this one actually kills the whole idea. |
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I thought the final line was a humorous addition. |
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Telepathy would be much cheaper than trying to rig
up a comms net for them all. |
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It'll probably turn out that telepathy runs on TCP/IP as well..so probably some routers in there somewhere. Getting the froghoppers to remember their own IP address might prove challenging. |
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