Subject: So I see...
Author:
Posted on: 2020-02-25 18:58:53 UTC
That the argument against sanity has returned!
Ahem.
That the werewolves, like the elves, must be protected!
Well-argued, fellow humans (or are we 'humans'?); I shall join your cause!
Charlie Stross asked the following on Twitter
The flight of Apollo 11. Postulate that Mike Collins is a werewolf. At what point during trans-Lunar injection does he go furry? And how many times during the mission profile is he forced to shapeshift by the light of the full Moon?
This, and the general problem of what happens when you get a werewolf off of Earth, was the sort of thing I could see a few folks on here speculating about for paragraphs on end, and so I thought I'd pass it along.
Moonlight is literally sunlight, and photons are photons. If that was really the trigger for lycanthrope transformation, then werewolves would be in wolf form nearly all the time: from sunrise to sunset every day, and any part of night with a risen moon, except during a new moon.
But then, what causes the transformation? Why, the tidal cycle, obviously. We already know that human bodies are affected by the tide cycle just as standing water bodies are. Lycanthropes clearly have a more severe reaction to it than the rest of us, perhaps due to some genetic blood disorder that's transferable through fluid contact. (I'm not saying it's definitely prions, but I am saying that it's probably prions.)
"But doctorlit," you say, already dismissing this as nonsense in your head, "the tidal cycle isn't dependent on the phase of the moon or even whether it's night or not, and also there are sometimes two high tides a day rather than just one." To which I can only say, "Yeah, I didn't actually look anything up until after I came up with this cockamamie theory and started writing this post." BUT. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. Just as aspects of the vampire legend developed in such a way as to give common folk faith in everyday cheap things like crosses and garlic to protect themselves, so too did the werewolf legends. Why do werewolves only transform during a full moon?
They don't.
That's just what they want us to continue believing.
Because no one is watching over their shoulder for a werewolf attack in broad daylight.
And that's the way, uh huh, uh huh, they like it.
So you see, not only would Mr. Collins transform on the way to the moon, as its gravitational pull became stronger and stronger on him, he would transform far more dramatically than any lycanthrope heretofore known on Earth. What would that entail? Would he just keep growing more and more swole, until he became the most wolfy wolf that ever wolfed, the most sturdily muscled werewolf possible? (This would of course be deemed reaching "Peak Black." #TeamJacob) Would the wolf body just keep growing larger and larger, until the entire ship was filled with wolf mass, pressing his unfortunate crewmates against the walls until their return? Or would he become an entire pack of wolves, just kind of mitosising wolf after wolf after wolf, until the space shuttle becomes wolves all the way down? My point is, we won't actually know until NASA desegregates and starts allowing lycanthrope astronauts on their crews. It's 2020, NASA, it's time for equal rights for wolf-Americans. Support our cause on Instagram, Twitter, and Vine, and reblog so we can spread the word. Please like and subscribe, and the link to my Kickstarter fund is h
—doctorlit, founder of the Society for the Protection of Wolf Lycans
...in that moonlight itself isn't what triggers the werewolf transformation. However! It is not the tidal cycle that causes it, either.
Think about it. The werewolf transformation is involuntary, right? And werewolves in their transformed state wouldn't have enough of their wits about them to even flip a switch, let alone keep themselves from attacking humans in the daytime to maintain the Masquerade. So if werewolf transformations were really caused by the tidal cycle, don't you think we'd know by now?
But if it isn't caused by moonlight itself or the tidal cycle, then there must be something else that's triggering the transformation every full moon. But that's not a possibility, because there is no one thing that can regularly be counted on to happen every full moon, besides the... full moon... coming out...
Hol up, take a step back, rewind. What if it isn't the moonlight itself that triggers the transformation, but something in the moonlight? Some new form of radiation it's being doped with, or some magic cosmic rays being sent down from the- EUREKA!
Maybe the werewolf transformation is caused by the Men on the Moon! Using their highly advanced lunar radiation technology, they dope our moonlight with lunons (those are the force carriers for the lunar force, by the way) and send it down to the Earth, without anyone suspecting! On normal nights, there aren't enough lunons to trigger a transformation, although werewolves may find themselves craving increasingly undercooked meat as the moon waxes. However, on the night of a full moon, there is a very large amount of lunons, well above the threshold, because these aliens know that this is the perfect opportunity to hit us with their waves. It's this overly-high dose of lunons that triggers the werewolf transformation!
But not only that. If lunons are strong enough to trigger the expression of a genetic mutation, then by the Phlebotinum Causality Law, they must be the ones that caused the mutation int e first place. Because the fact is, every time there's a supermoon, NASA's secret lunon detectors measure record-high levels of lunons (causing some serious trouble for the werewolf community). And those record-high levels of lunons are what cause new werewolves to be born!
But why? Why are the Men on the Moon doing this? Are they trying to make furries/wolfgirls/what-have-you real? Are they just testing out their technology so when the time comes, they can mutate us all into Men on the Moon and invade our planet? Are they just doing this because they can?!?!
But we will never know. We will never know until we overthrow the American government and establish Communism in this land! A Communist government, one TRULY run and owned by the people, wouldn't have anything to hide from its citizens. Then we'd finally get some public access to all those secret documents we failed to get out of Area 51 depicting the Men on the Moon threat. It's time, people, for this land to undergo a revolution! Then the workers will take over, and the Secr3t Lizardment Illuminati will be broken forever! VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
And then, after that, we can take our true blue American military right up to that moon and shoot those aliens in the face. Cause those are OUR citizens those ILLEGAL ALIENS are corrupting with their secret alien technology, turning them into dirty, filthy werewolves. And I will not rest until the Lunar threat to American government, to American freedom and America democracy, is wiped off the face of the Earth. So I say, NASA, let's go back to the moon and get those aliens for good.
– TRUTHSEEKER, signing off
[Collins] would transform far more dramatically than any lycanthrope heretofore known on Earth [while approaching the moon]
In Norse mythology, Hati Hróðvitnisson... is... a wolf that... chases... the moon across the night sky,... until the time of Ragnarök, when [he] will swallow [this] heavenly bod[y]. Snorri also gives another name for a wolf who swallows the moon, Mánagarmr. Both of these wolves are often combined with Fenrir.
'Managarmr' starts with the same letter as 'Michael Collins'.
Collins = Fenrir, the Wolf who Eats the Moon: confirmed.
hS
That the argument against sanity has returned!
Ahem.
That the werewolves, like the elves, must be protected!
Well-argued, fellow humans (or are we 'humans'?); I shall join your cause!
I'm assuming from the tweet that we're treating Collins as being directly affected by the light of the full moon: that is, if he stays out of direct moonlight, he's fine, regardless of whether it's full moon tonight or not.
But that doesn't actually establish the mechanism for his change. I can come up with three hypotheses:
1) The 'full moon' has to be the illumination of the entire Lunar nearside. You could split this into various sub-reasons (perhaps it's due to a wolf-goddess only possessing her chosen at full moon, or perhaps it's actually a calendar thing, with any light reflected from lunar rock at the right time prompting the transformation), but the result is the same: Michael Collins transforms if he's in a moonlit area during the full moon on Earth.
Which means it's good news for Apollo 11: their mission ran 16-24 July 1969, but the full moon that month was 29th July. By that time, the astronauts had splashed down and been taken to JSC, where they were safely inside the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Provided no-one bounces light off any of their samples at Collins on the 29th, he should be fine.
2) The 'full moon' is any sight of a fully illuminated lunar disc, nearside or farside, it doesn't matter. This, again, can be split into two sub-hypotheses:
2a) Collins has to be able to see the entire illuminated area. This keeps him safe while he's actually orbiting over the moon: at only 100 km up, the moon would easily overflow his field of vision.
The human field of vision can contain the entirety of a circle spanning 150 degrees of arc. With the moon roughly 1800 km across, you can draw a triangle with Collins at the apex and the moon at the base; chopping it in half and plugging in some trig, we get sin(75) = 900/[distance], and ultimately [distance] = ~930 km. Once Collins is inside that range of the Lunar surface, he's safe.
So, did he see a 'full moon' at any point beyond that distance? That would take a lot of maths to figure out for sure, but I'll give it an estimate.
-On approach, I think no: the new moon was on the 14th, and Apollo 11 began its lunar insertion burn on July 19th, only just past it. At that point they were directly 'behind' the moon, and only 80 nautical miles from it; my intuition is that, whichever side they came in on, they would have been too close for Mike to 'see' the disc by the time it was visible.
-On departure, things might be a little dicier. Apollo 11 left lunar orbit on the 22nd, the night of the first quarter moon. Did they come out around the lit side? Could their 150-second burn mean they pulled away fast enough to hit that magic 930km before they passed safely back into partial darkness? I think they're probably still safe, but would want to play around with Celestia to check.
2b) Okay, but what if Collins only needs to be able to see part of the full moon? Perhaps it's just that the 'full moon' needs to be able to see him (makes about as much sense as anything else). In that scenario, he goes furry the first time Apollo 11 crosses onto the 'full moon' side - which is just before or after the translunar injection burn.
Which? Well, the diagrams of the orbit are fairly consistent in showing Apollo 11 orbiting clockwise around the moon. The first quarter moon illuminates the right-hand side (as seen from the northern hemisphere); the moon was progressing towards first quarter as Apollo 11 entered orbit, which I think means Collins would have come in from the left, and only hit the 'full moon' after the injection burn.
Which, uh, means that a very confused werewolf manifested in a confined space, with two other people, in an elliptical orbit over the moon. I... don't think that would end well. Assuming it does, he's going to transform again, once every orbit, which he made once every two hours. For three days. That's a lot of shed fur.
Moving on!
3) What if, instead of any of this 'full moon' nonsense, it's actually the light intensity causing the change? In this hypothesis, Collins transforms any time the amount of moonlight hitting him equals the amount that would hit him during a clear full-moon night. That means that, at some point approaching the crescent moon, he'll hit that threshold and morph.
How much light does he need? Moonlight is about 0.1 lux. I... don't really understand units of luminance, so let's fudge this:
Two lightbulbs hit me with twice as much light as one light bulb. Therefore, every square degree of arc that is illuminated will hit me with roughly the same amount of moonlight, whether that illumination is at 100 km or 100,000 km.
On this picture, the full moon (day 15) occupies 42,000 pixels. The day 5 crescent occupies only 8000. 42/8 = 5.25, therefore each pixel on the quarter needs to look roughly 5 times larger to hit me with the same amount of light.
Going back to trigonometry, a 1 km object will cover 1 degree of arc at 57km, and expand to 5 degrees of arc at 11km. So I need to be five times closer to get the same light from an object five times smaller (makes sense!). The moon is about 385,000 km from the Earth, which means Michael Collins hits the danger zone at 77,000 km up.
... which was well after the mid-course correction (which took place around halfway to the moon, some 180,000 km up), meaning that even if he goes crazy and kills his fellow astronauts, the ship will still follow its free-return path and fly back to Earth orbit without any further crew intervention. I think Ground Control would then be able to land the command capsule, and drag a likely-traumatised Collins out of there.
Heaven only knows what they'd do with him.
hS
I ended up having a quick chat with my roommate about this, and one thing that came up in our speculation was how things could go horribly wrong if werewolf transformations had a significant energy requirement. After all, a lot of mythical werewolves seem to get ravenous - maybe it's just that turning into a wolf takes a lot of energy? And even if we're dealing the nicer sort of werewolf that isn't liable to chow down on crewmates indiscriminately, maybe because they're not as hungry, there's still likely trouble if Collins's furry little problem wasn't accounted for in mission planning.
From what little I could find with a bit of Googling, there's a few ways this could turn nasty. A single good source is being a pain to find at this hour (or in general), but we do know things were planned for 2800 calories/person-day and that there reserve food supplies for use in the event of cabin depressurization. It's not clear how big said reserve was, or how much extra food the astronauts had along (at least not from this bit of official NASA history). However, given the tight weight limits on rocket launches, I think it's safe to guess that the extra food amounted to "enough for people to not die as they limped back to Earth".
And so, if we're in one of the suddenly furry astronaut scenarios, we have some issues.
If we're in your 2b, with three days worth of cyclic werewolf transformations, I'd expect Armstrong and Aldrin to very likely come back to most of their supplies torn through, either by a wolf or a human frantically trying to fuel the next transformation before it's too late. (Or a Collins who starved to death, or a wolf who's feeling extra-lethal because there hasn't been any food).
In 3, with only one transformation, we have the problem of keeping a werewolf fed in space. This paper is quoting me energy requirements for wolves ... somewhere in the 5000 kcal/day range, assuming I'm interpreting the numbers (which were in kJ) they're citing right. So, speculating wildly here, that probably needs Collins needs somewhere between 1.5x-2x as much food as a human.
If Collins turns out to be a well-behaved fluffy fuzzball, this might work out OK? You'd likely want to switch the mission parameters to "turn right the heck back around, one of the crewmembers has turned into a wolf", it seems like, between the lunar module food, reserves, and folks willing to be a bit hungry (and this is all said without much knowledge of the space stuff, folks should feel free to jump in and correct me), you could probably get everyone back alive from this scenario. Things'll get dicey if you can't shave any time off the flying, because no one was prepared for the arrival of a 4th crew member, effectively.
(I'm figuring that between Armstrong, Aldrin, and NASA, hacking together a way to get space food into a wolf isn't a particularly hard problem.)
The alternate scenario, where Collins needs food now and those other people look like reasonable is looking somewhat survivable for Collins. Humans are apparently estimated to be 125000 kcal each if you go through everything, so our wolf in a spaceship should be fine, though, as you said, "I turned into a wolf and killed my crewmates" is going to be rough.
And to your last comment on scenario 3, somewhere between involuntary manslaughter or murder, depending on if Collins knew he was a werewolf going up, whether transformed werewolves can meaningfully have mens rea, and how the precise details of premediation work out.
