Story Bone

Just in case you've ever wondered, "how did they ever think of that"? Well, now you know. Also, if you've ever asked, "Where do authors get their ideas"? This is how. This is also why offering an author an idea that they can just write up and you'll share the profits makes those authors giggle with glee thinking of how they could probably get away with a good retort at that moment. We always have ideas. The hard part is writing them. And because the Muse demands, the latest idea.

I'm processing an image for one of our HALO/HAHO products and thinking, "You know how you can get the bends by coming up from depths too quickly? Since the atmosphere is just an ocean with looser organization of the atoms, I wonder if you would get the bends by rising up in the atmosphere column too fast? And at depths divers use helium mixed into the oxygen, is there something other than nitrogen that you'd use at altitude?" I think it's possible. We don't know it because we've never been able to rise faster than a ballon to any great height without also wearing a pressure suit or in a pressurized cabin. Which in this scenario is cheating. You don't get the bends on the way down (well, really you do, that's when the nitrogen seeps into your blood stream in higher than normal concentrations, but it's compressed so not gas bubbles, yet), so parachutists wouldn't have them. What if we or an alien were moving in an atmosphere with a different density, would that cause problems?

Unfortunately I don't know the answers here. If you use this, you'd have to do the research. Or ask your neighborhood rocket scientists.