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[Putnam]

1. Fastest acting? An explosion, obviously. Nothing more toxic than completely brain rearrangement.

Seriously, though, probably polonium or something along those lines.

2. Completely and utterly impossible unless they have some fuel on hand to cease their rotation. Then again, they won't begin falling sporadically after disengaging from a platform unless something weird is happening.
3. Yes.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

1: the one in the movie killed someone in a few seconds

2: she is in a space suit and her white is not opened, she is just about a kilometer under satelite orbit height.

3: the business suits look like normal business suites not sure if that changes anything.

4: jammed into your arm? If it's from the gun part people have been known to carry around things like it without them being hard to use, though they aren't as strong. If it's from the bullets hitting it, the movie depicts them as grassing or deflecting off

5: it may be an electric signal or some other thing. It didn't sound like something that could happen so ya....

[alway]

In terms of modifying how you think and such, we can do that pretty easily, and have been able to for years; though you need special medial equipment and such to do it. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100329152516.htm
In the linked example, they used essentially a targeted zap to temporarily shut down the part of the brain involved in judging intent. They then found a greatly reduced judgement of wrongdoing by someone who had intended ill, but had simply failed in pulling it off.

So you can, but the precise targeting involved would limit it to some sort of on-the-person device or a specialized medical lab. It would not last after such devices were no longer present, and would not work on random passers-by from a remote station (though a device like a metal detector or airport microwave scanning thingy, you might be able to get working if you could get them to stand still long enough to get everything calibrated).

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Why would she be dead?

People have jumped from those heights before in similar ((acctualy lower grade)) equipment


Unless you mean lossing control



I'm not anywhere near knowledgeable on this so please correct me if I'm wrong

At those heights wouldn't she pick up greater speed because less air resistnance so it would be harder to control her fall but when she hits the thicker atmospheric layers would it not slow her down enough to give her a chance of getting into a stable fall? I mean she does have a few minutes before she absolutely needs that chute to survive

[alway]

Firstly, you specified in low earth orbit. Orbits, by their very definition, are themselves free-falling. To drop out of orbit requires thrust.

Orbital velocity is very high. To put it in perspective, if your sideways velocity was vertical velocity, you would reach the surface from LEO in 30 seconds or so, not taking into account the deceleration. So that's much faster than simply the downwards pull of gravity would accelerate you to. To deorbit, you typically just skim into the atmosphere, since to do anything else would require a vastly larger fuel supply. So if we take that definition for 'falling out of LEO', you hit the atmosphere at around 7-8km/s. This is what makes spacecraft recovery hard: you need shielding from the large heating effects of slamming into the atmosphere at those speeds. Fall from orbit like that, and there won't even be a body to recover, regardless of your angular velocity.

[ChairmanPoo]

I dont know if it's the fastest acting per se, but the one with the lowest lethal dose is botulotoxin.

[Scoops Novel]

That makes me sad

To give some closure to the discussion amidst the misinformation:

Heat death appears to be the most likely end scenario for the universe, since the cosmological constant does appear to be constant (gravitationally bound systems will remain bound).

A big rip scenario has been given way too much press since it was proposed circa 2003. It is currently not taken seriously anymore for the reason stated above (thanks to the recent WMAP and the ongoing PLANCK missions providing ever-improving measurements).

For those interested, here's a lightweight analysis of the heat death scenario by John Baez - a respected mathematician and cosmologist (also known for the crackpot index):
http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/end.html

Isn't another theory that the universe wil continue to expland forever? And it will just die because everything is so far apart

I'm sure that in 100 years our view of universe's future will completely change and people from that age will consider us stupid for even believing this.

No.

We don't believe this, for one. The Heat Death is currently considered the most likely fate of the universe, but if you told a scientist to commit they would refuse. It is known that we do not have enough data to come up with a reasonable conclusion. We also know every possible ending of the universe given the data so far, and we have a lot of data. Unless something completely and utterly weird happens within the next 100 years, our ideas of the fate of the universe will be less broad, but not completely different. The argument that "everything we know today will be seen as idiocy in 100 years" works for medicine and psychology, but not physics.

99 years ago, the theory of General Relativity was discovered. It hasn't been overturned since; in fact, all evidence points to its truth. Quantum Mechanics happened just ten years later and it's still going strong. Physics is not medicine. The universe is not nearly so complex as a human body.

So is heat death likely to remain the go-to theory even when dark matter discoveries and big bang revelations and so on come around? The site you linked to pallazo also had this to say:
 

However, Leonard Susskind has recently pointed out that in thermal equilibrium at any nonzero temperature, any system exhibits random fluctuations. The lower the temperature they smaller these are, but they are always there. These fluctuations randomly explore the space of all possible states of your system. So eventually, if you wait long enough, these random fluctuations will carry the system to whatever state you like. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration: these fluctuations can't violate conservation laws. But conservation of energy doesn't count here, since at a nonzero temperature, a system is really in a state of all possible energies. So it's possible, for example, that a ice cube at the freezing point of water will melt or even boil due to random fluctuations. The reason we never see this happen is that such big fluctuations are incredibly rare.

Carrying this thought to a ridiculous extreme, what this means is that even if the universe consists of more or less empty space at a temperature of 10-30 kelvin, random fluctuations will occaisionally create atoms, molecules... and even solar systems and galaxies! The bigger the fluctuation, the more rarely it happens - but eternity is a long time. So eventually there will arise, sheerly by chance, a person just like you, with memories just like yours, reading a webpage just like this.

In short: maybe the universe has already ended!

However, the time it takes for really big fluctuations like this to occur is truly huge. It dwarfs all the time scales I've mentioned so far. So, it's probably not worth worrying about this issue too much: we don't know enough physics to make reliable predictions on such long time scales.

How seriously should i take this? And is "death" an accurate description?

[Helgoland]

@Scoops: Infinity does funky stuff - it accounts for ~70% of interesting things that mathematicians do, after all. The argument presented is sound, but it would involve truly ridiculous timescales.

[Osmosis Jones]

@Scoops: Infinity does funky stuff - it accounts for ~70% of interesting things that mathematicians do, after all. The argument presented is sound, but it would involve truly ridiculous timescales.

It strikes me that it's neglecting one rather important point; for matter to appear out of a quantum fluctuation, there also has to be an anti-particle produced, and produced nearby at that. So, sure, an entire galaxy may spontaneously appear... but it will be overlaid almost exactly with it's anti-galaxy and annihilate instantly.

[Helgoland]

Unless both particles randomly fly away from each other - improbable, but possible (and that's all we're going for here).

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Sorry I didn't mean to say orbit.
I get orbits and heights mixed up, this is not my field :p
She was using a platform with balloons, floated up to about a kilometer lower than an orbiting satelite, on of the two balloons burst making the platform she was on unstable and slowly descending at an odd angle, finished what she was sent to do, other balloon burst so she started falling, and she flailed about for a bit ((I think part of the suit she was wearing was one of those that jet pilots wear to keep the Gfirces from knocking them out)) but after hitting thicker atmosphere she regained control

[Il Palazzo]

So is heat death likely to remain the go-to theory even when dark matter discoveries and big bang revelations and so on come around?

For now, sure. There's always a possibility of a major paradigm shift, especially in a field so quickly evolving as cosmology. But with every passing year it becomes less probable.
The way it works, is that once you find a new observable, a range of explanations pop up, which are then pruned by further observations.
Twenty-plus years ago the question of whether we live in a forever expanding, bound to re-collapse, or asymptotically approaching a steady state universe was a valid one. Ten years ago so was the behaviour of the acceleration of the expansion. Sure these questions could be rekindled, but not without a major new discovery/rewrite.

How seriously should i take this? And is "death" an accurate description?

I wouldn't take it too seriously. As Helgoland said, it's one of those things that make absurdly wonderful sense mathematically, but for all intents and purposes are impossible. It's like that improbability drive from Adams' novels, or quantum tunnelling through a wall - fun to think of, but not really worth considering in reality.

[Helgoland]

t's one of those things that make absurdly wonderful sense mathematically

Oh, the propositions I've proved, the theorems I've seen, the concepts and thoughts, how strange they all seem...

[Frumple]

Not with sound, but electrical signals possibly. As said above, though, it's not something you can just shoot at someone and they'll go homicidal. I mean, you could try to simulate an adrenaline rush (so the decision making part of the brain is running on minimal) then just do enough stuff to really piss them off.

Uh, maybe not specifically with odd frequencies, but almost certainly with sound. Sound is a physical phenomena that interacts with other physical objects -- it being able to reshape or alter your brain is certainly a viable possibility. Surviving the process, or the relative cost efficiency of that process compared to just cutting open the skull and tinkering, is another question, but eh.

[Sergarr]

At this point it technically stops being sound and starts being a blast wave.