canopus

Bravo, bravo! Might be your best one yet. And some wonderful world-building to go with the memorable characters.

Half the volume of ejaculate comes from the seminal vesicles, another third from the prostate. Very little comes from the testes. He'll still be shooting like a champ, just shooting blanks.

Fifteen miles in fifty minutes is 3:20 a mile. The world record for running *only* a mile is 3:43.13. A half marathon is 13.1 miles, and the world's record is 57:31. No way is this kid running 15 miles in 50 minutes.

It's not taking the "high road" to give in to the demands of someone already demonstrated to be a thief in pursuit of their ambitions, and who runs roughshod over those to whom they had a duty of care. How can such a person be trusted in administering philanthropy, particularly abroad where there is little transparency or accountability for their actions? The story is excellent, but this particular choice of the author, intended to reflect nobility on the part of Marc, actually communicates quite the opposite: very poor and hasty judgment.

Echidnas (all four extant species), together with the platypus, are the five mammalian species that lay eggs. Echidnas can't be pregnant any more than a chicken can. Also, panadol (paracetamol) and ibuprofen are toxic to many animals. One tablet of paracetamol would be a fatal dose to a cat weighing as much as a small echidna, and a possibly fatal dose to a similarly sized dog. One tablet of ibuprofen would make a cat ill and probably kill it, while not affecting a dog. It's a terrible idea to give these medicines to an animal without medical advice.

I just wanted to add that so far, it's a remarkably gripping story, and the atmosphere you are creating in the unstable and shifting reality surrounding the characters is very well drawn and quite effective -- chilling even. I look forward to the next chapters with great anticipation.

Tomorrow (the evening of May 9 for U.S. dwellers) while it's dark in our hemisphere, the total eclipse passing over Queensland which Shane and his mother had planned to watch together, and which Trevor had promised to watch with Shane, will take place. Let's hope everyone, Queenslanders and our brave crew, get a good view.

What about stationary oil platforms along the path of the eye? I can't find a map of them but certainly parts of that area have them, and while I'd hate to weather a cat 5 storm in one, it's far better than being in a cat. One could even imagine it being the basis of a plot point to keep Atlantis intact post-storm.

hh5: Dark matter is spread smoothly through galaxies, we know that because stars orbiting a galaxy measure its mass, and there's a lot more mass than the stars and gas account for. It presumably permeates our whole solar system, even our Earth, and our bodies. But it doesn't interact --- much. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the space station is far too small to detect dark matter directly, because of the proven rarity of interactions. Much larger volumes of mass have been instrumented deep under the Earth (including deep under the antarctic ice in a cube a kilometer on a side) to look for such interactions directly. Instead, the AMS looks (among other things) for positrons, a type of antimatter, produced by one possible type of dark matter interaction, which would produce electron-positron pairs. Electrons are everywhere and common, but positrons are pretty rare, as antimatter in a matter-dominated universe. Many things can create small populations of positrons, though, so interpreting a positron signal from the AMS is difficult. Is it "excess" to what is expected? What is expected? You have to consider the trajectories of incoming positrons at different energies and try to figure out how many can be made by different mechanisms and how many survive to reach low Earth orbit. The Large Hadron Collider can in no way make this measurement because positrons cannot penetrate the atmosphere -- they are annihilated very very high up through encounters with ordinary electrons. It generates its own debris (including lots of positrons) through collisions, but these are not signatures of a cosmic production process. Since Dark Matter is uniformly distributed on the scale of the solar system it should play no role in the local deceleration of Voyager. If such a deceleration were found, it would indicate that gravity behaved somewhat differently at small than at large scales - or that dark matter indeed tended to clump somewhat around solar-sized masses. So people look carefully. The force of gravity has now been measured on scales as short as 0.06 millimeter (University of Washington) and they are working on still shorter tests. So far, it's the good ol' inverse square law.

Antimatter is made in small amounts through energetic collisions all the time. The tiny amount in the Earth Van Allen belts would make 10 kilowatt-hours if fully tapped and annihilated. But it was all *produced* in collisions of ordinary matter particles accelerated through magnetic fields in the solar system. If there were a region of the universe that was dominated by antimatter, the "interface" with the ordinary matter-dominated regions of the Universe produce a *lot* of 511 keV gamma rays. Satellites have been launched to look at this line -- not really to look for it in the Universe at large (because it's just not there in the amounts it would be if segments of the visible universe were antimatter-dominated) but to study energetic happenings in exotic objects in our own galaxy. You can search for things like 511 kev positron or the INTEGRAL spacecraft to find out more. The complexity of the vacuum just keeps growing. In the 1930s physicists figured out that the vacuum wasn't really empty but was filled with "virtual" particles, an infinity of them, just waiting to get the energetic kick to make them real. The recent papers aren't saying there aren't an infinity of particles, just that they come in a finite number of types and that there may be hope of explaining some properties of the vacuum in terms of this spectrum of virtual particles. Maybe. As for the speed of light "variability", I gather than these discussions are at *extremely* small length scales, and that the random fluctuations rapidly smooth out over macroscopic distances.. but it's always possible that a tiny amount remain, and please fund efforts to look. As far as gravity affecting the speed of light, one of the postulates of both special and general relativity is that the speed of light is *constant* for all inertial observers. The enormous success of relativity in describing fairly exotic situations in the universe gives great support to the validity of this hypothesis. In the geometry of relativity, a "light connection" between two points in spacetime (A shines a light at B, both events have a separation in space and time), the "proper length" in spacetime of such a connection is *zero*. This is deeply connected to causality, that events can be connected by a light cone, or else lie inside it(timelike) or outside (spacelike) -- causality preservation is the result of this separation of regions appearing invariant to all observers.

*MUCH* bigger. Escape velocity this far out in the galaxy is about 330 miles/second. Voyager 1 is now at 11 miles/second and will only slow a little bit more down in leaving the Sun's gravity well. But it's not a factor of 30 in difficulty -- the energy scales with the square. So Voyager 1 has insufficient kinetic energy by a factor of *900* to escape the galaxy.

I just want to say that I wouldn't mind if it takes a dozen more chapters to wrap things up -- the point isn't the ending, it's the journey, and what a journey. It's of heavenly length. I think that the Goat has really achieved a new level of work with this story, in which the meticulous research adds depth to the human dimensions, which come across as even more genuine and layered in this story than in his previous ones. Granted, the human development is primarily among the four: Trevor, Shane, Joel, and Lisa -- Bridget is less a character than a type. But there are some fine novels, like the Wooster and Jeeves novels of Wodehouse, in which one or two characters are fully realized as characters, by being surrounded by even major figures who are types. So take your time. Continue to let the characters breathe their own air. Don't take shortcuts. Work out your meticulous plot twists, but don't forget the breathtaking characterizations you've drawn for the primary characters. We haven't really heard the inner worlds of the four primary characters since the flight to the Falklands. I'm sure in the three months since, Trevor and Shane have really grown in each other's care, and Joel and Lisa have absorbed some transformative life experience they encountered in Australia. And thank you, thank you, for giving of your time, creativity, and humanity to craft such artistry and share it with us as a gift.