That’s what I hear every time the White House Blowfish burbles something out of an orifice.
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Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
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Don’t swim fins cover this more or less? A mono-fin really makes you look, and swim, like a dorky fish.
Don’t forget the flexible glass-like stuff we use to package nearly everything and the thinly streched-out glass we are currently using to communicate.
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You’re probably overthinking it. Transmutation of mineral species has been covered by chemistry for a long while - the ability to isolate compounds from any mixture, or elements from any compound, and then to rearrange those elements and compounds into different kinds of materials. You only need reactors for number 10, the transmutation of metals.
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Mmmmm - fungus.
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A submarine is a fairly unsinkable boat, also, the Coast Guard has boats that are designed to withstand being flipped and right themselves in the roughest of weather. I think that counts.
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There is a modern interpretation…
Man has conscious breath control, where most monkeys and apes do not. It is thought we developed this when swimming, and later used it for speech.
Seals have similar breath control. They can make noises the sound like human speech. If we take something like a harbour seal, we find it can stay underwater for almost 30 minutes. They have extra blubber, but their breathing is not that different to ours. Elephant seals do have some additional ability to trap oxygen, and they can stay down for up to two hours.
Traditional pearl divers used to dive deep, but only stay down for about 3-4 minutes. The current non-oxygen aided records for staying underwater stand at 11 minutes, 35 seconds for men (Stéphane Mifsud, 2009) and 8 minutes, 23 seconds for women (Natalia Molchanova, 2011). This improvement has largely been done by slowing the heart, and learning to suppress the urge to breathe, and particularly the panic reaction when you can’t.
In 2012, German freediver Tom Sietas held his breath underwater for 22 minutes and 22 seconds, after hyperventilating with oxygen.
It therefore seems possible if we increased the volume of our blood volume, and managed to trap a bit more oxygen, we might come close to the performance of a seal.
Seals are not fish, and we don’t know whether Boyle hoped we would evolve gills or what. But it is surprising what ‘custom and education’ can do in this particular field.
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And a century later, Ben Franklin wrote that research should be done on finding a substance with the effect of rendering flatulence “not only inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes”.
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”Transmutation of species”
BAND NAME
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Furniture Made at a Price Attainable by the Common Man Which may be Conveyed in a Flattened Paquette and Assembl’d by Selfsame Commoner.
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People now live a lot longer on average than they did in the 17th C, due to better med care, general access to safe food and water, and vastly improved birth care. I’d say this one is a definite tick.
people now are a LOT larger - in all dimensions - than they were in the 17thC. We would, I suspect, seem gigantick to BB. I’d give this one a tick.
I find this one a bit baffling - what is the specific problem(s) that he’s trying to address here? We mayn’t have managed to make glass malleable (at room temperature … it’s easy enough if we’re allowed to heat the glass), but I strongly suspect that the implied problem here has been addressed (same thing applies to pendulums at sea - maybe we still can’t get pendulums to work at sea, but who cares! We have GPS corrected by quantum mechanics!)
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The Kreigsmarine beg to differ with you there.
Coast Guard has boats that …
A boat is not a ship
Yes, I’m being a little pedantic, however we can make fairly unsinkable small craft, but building unsinkable full-sized ships (I.e., freighters, cruise liners, warships) is still a way aways.
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And be named in exotic Fashion as to bring to Mind the Home of the Norsemen.
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I think @kingannoy has got it - it probably means, more or less, plastic bags, water bottles, lunchboxes and the like
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Perhaps he had small, er, hands?
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As far as I know it is actually possible, just not functionally efficient or economically worthwhile.
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It sounds like something from Lovecraft to me.
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