Talk:Bioship

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Square-cube rule

What "square-cure rule" is this article alluding to? It's not Kleiber's law, nor any of the other allometric laws currently covered in Wikipedia. Uncle G 01:12, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

My guess would be the mass/surface relationship described in Square-cube law. --Alvestrand 05:14, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

I think his description and resulting critique of the 'bioship' concept may be off somewhat. The article implies the ships are completely organic and if that was the case, I would tend to agree. My understanding is all the BIO ships in B5 verse are quasi-organic. An important distinction. A hybrid mechancial\Bio Vessel that incorporates the strengths of both extremely advanced sythetic as well as organic techniques. Power plants,\drive systems and weapons systems for example would be impossible to 'bio'. Organic\Synthetic hull yes, life support systems-yes, even computers could in principle, be organically based. His square cube rule I believe refers to a principle in biology(whoes exact name escapes me atm) where the larger a organism becomes, the greater its heat loss and caloric intake needed to support itself rises exponentially. The same principle is used to explain why giant mutant spiders and ants(a staple in attack of the giant xxx movies) or the 50foot woman(!) would not be able to support there own weight, much less survive. The way he describes it however, it appears he thinks B5's bioships are 100% or nearly organic, which I believe to be in error. A current , tho primitive example would be the Cylon raiders in the re-imagined BSG series(2003) However some series\authors posit organic ships that are in effect, space-fareing lifeforms in there own right are opposed to technilogical artifacts. In that case I would aggree that sort of bio-ship is less plausible. Since we are not even 100% sure at this point if anything organic CAN survive in outerspace, organic molecules, yes, but I am not sure if we have even tested if something as basic as a cell can survive in space, much less a complete organism. Since Shadow Battlecrabs and Vorlon Cruisers etc do not fall into this catergory, subjecting them to mass\surface rule or simply calling them handwavium is pre-mature imo.

Does the Square-cube-rule apply in a zero gravity vacum?

As I understood it, a lot of the bioships in fiction weren't completely biological, instead being

• an artificial hull with organic systems grown inside it to control and maintain it

(eg cylon raider)

• an organic hull grown around an artificial skeleton (Bio destroyer from B5)

making them more cyborg ships than bio ships

perfectblue 13:02, 6 October 2006 (UTC)