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A living whale is transformed into a submarine.
Lungs are stripped and replaced by compressed air and pump.
Heart: replaced with much smaller pump.
Etc.
Until there is enough room inside for a crew.
Computers are linked to brain for steering.
The first step in the evolution of living
space ships we know from scifi like farscape.
This idea came to me in a dream I had this morning.
Story of Jonah
http://en.wikipedia.../wiki/Book_of_Jonah
[xandram, Mar 04 2008]
Where to get an estimate.
http://www.serve.co.../ThePetShopSketch-2
[Amos Kito, Mar 04 2008]
Can't go wrong with Christopher Moore
http://www.chrismoore.com/books.html
[normzone, Mar 04 2008]
whale mover
http://www.youtube....watch?v=TpqnMtWXJ6Y
You start by anaesthetizing your whale... [jaksplat, Mar 04 2008]
Whale Rider (the movie)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298228/
Not much like this [csea, Mar 05 2008]
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I'm sure there's plenty of room inside a whale. Also, biological machines tend to be more efficient than mechanical ones. More importantly, whales don't have windows (so there's no vista, hehe). |
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Actually you need to fire the therapist that told you to listen to whale song. |
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Do you need to remove the lungs? You already have to create a pressure vessel, so the brain would seem a better and weirdly humaner choice, though I don't know what kind of room that gives you. If you want to be nice, go with the stomach. Maybe train a bulemic whale to first swallow and then puke you out at your destination? |
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I'm sure that you'll have a whale of a time. |
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Have you been reading Fluke? (link) |
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Yucky. The lungs are not air pumps, they are blood/air interface areas. You'd need something just about as big, and very complicated, to replace them. |
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There's a much easier way to do this.
You start by anaesthetizing your whale,
obviously. Then you implant a dermal
expander. This is basically a balloon
which can be inflated with saline. In
this case, the balloon wants to start as a
tube about 30ft long and 1-2ft across.
I'm assuming it will run down the belly
of the whale (for symmetry), or could
have one down each side. |
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Over the coming months, you inflate
the balloons with saline (fairly readily
available), until each is about 10-15ft in
diameter. The whale's skin will grow as
the balloons expand, of course (that's
why they're used in plastic surgery;
expanders, that is, not whales). |
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When the chambers are the right size,
you need to send in a couple of divers.
You'll need to inject them in through a
huge airlock/syringe structure, into the
saline-filled balloon. Each diver carrys
a supply of two-pack water-curing
epoxy, and plastering equipment. The
divers line the inside of the balloon with
epoxy. |
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Once complete, the balloon can be
emptied of saline, and will form a
spacious, dry watertight compartment.
You'll have to make some kind of stoma
as an access hatch, but any fool can do
that. The inside can then be equipped
as necessary. |
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It will probably (certainly) be necessary
to provide the whale with some ballast
to counteract the bouyancy of the
chamber. It should be possible to raise
plankton on a mercury-rich diet, then
feed these to krill, then get the whale to
eat the dense krill. Eventually, the
whale itself will become denser.
However, don't let it dive too far without
first reinforcing the inside of the
chamber. |
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I don't normally do this, but [marked-for-tagline] "You start by anaesthetizing your whale, obviously..." |
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Better off carving out a giant peach. I don't think we have anything like the cyborg technology required for this. |
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And your dream? Your subconcious really was just riffing Farscape. |
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Ah, [unabubba] has already found a good use! And I got two whole buns. |
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The whale has to be alive because the idea is to create a living submarine, a creature that is a friend of the crew and allows the crew a unique whale experience. |
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The whole thing is unethical, I know. But in my dream I was not aware of such tecnicalities and could only see the beauty. |
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With present echnology I think we could go a long way in transfiguring the whale into a submarine. Next we try again and study untill we have perfected it in the far future and people and whale become one. |
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Call it the Jonah project. I have major moral objections. Is there some rational for why this would be more desireable than a conventional submarine? The animated corpse of the whale would still need to eat, do we really believe that we would be able to keep the whale healthy? The submarine would be limited to areas where food is dense and would need to constantly migrate. A depressing and pointless exercise in amoral science. |
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wouldn't it be better to just strap a small sub to the outside of a whale? |
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Honey? Do I look fat in this whale? |
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Let's just turn Wales into a submarine instead. |
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Excellent idea. Put the access hatch in
Cardhiff. |
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//You'll have to make some kind of stoma as an access hatch, but any fool can do that// |
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You'd be surprised, but this is not so. In my college "Principles of Stoma Hatch Design for Biosubmarine Access" class there were several students who had trouble keeping up. You wonder how some of these kids get past admissions. |
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You were in that class too? The one taught
by Professor Haemmorhage? God, those
were the days. Remember when we hid
the Prof's false ear inside his false leg? |
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Yes, I know. Yet I think it is also a beautifull idea if you manage to strip it of the hideousness, as I did in my dream. |
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//This is a hideous idea!// Aww, c'mon -
the prof. saw the funny side. Or he would
have if it weren't for his false eye. |
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