The idea of a worm being able to move through the sand is ridiculous. And the idea of someone riding the worms when every time you see a worm it is first seen moving underground is even more so. I love Dune when I read it as a kid, but it's about as realistic as Lord Of The Rings.
shareKinetic sand?
shareBobbit worms can reach up to three metres in length. With only a small portion of their bodies typically visible, Bobbit worms may initially appear unassuming — yet in reality, they’re anything but.
“They hide in their burrows until they explode upwards, grabbing unsuspecting prey with a snap of their powerful jaws,” Pan and colleagues described in their paper. “The still living prey are then pulled into the sediment for consumption.”
Similar species have existed since the early Paleozoic era. However, scientists today know relatively little about these fearsome predators’ burrows, their behaviour, or their evolutionary history. Their bodies are composed of soft tissues that rapidly decay after their deaths, meaning that the fossil record for these species is incomplete.
What’s more, modern-day Bobbit worms typically only extend a small portion of their body above the sand, and the uppermost regions of their burrows often collapse inwards when the worms retreat. This means that the burrows of living Bobbit worms are also difficult to study.
Thanks to the team’s discovery of a trace fossil of one of these burrows, however, scientists are beginning to piece together how ancient Bobbit worms may have lived and fed.
The team went on to find a total of 319 similar burrow specimens preserved in the 20-million-year-old sedimentary rock in the surrounding area.
Why can't a worm move through sand? Is this some existential truth? There are worms at the beach which live in sand.
Can you explain this law of biology? Seriously, I've never heard this.
> Look up biological scaling and read.
The reason a little ant can lift 10 times its own weight, but an ant as big as a dog could not breathe enough oxygen to stay alive.
Okay, I looked it up. Duh wuh wuh uh.
Can you explain it to me? 🤣
Real life worms can burrow through sand.
shareWell everybody seems to be going along with him. Lol.
Brux is a decent guy. And I wasn't exactly a physics major in college. Lol.
I'd like to hear his reasoning.
But you're right, Darth, there are sand worms, sea worms, all sorts of worms and they move through sand.
He already moved the goalposts from no burrowing to size issues.
So, I think I'm done arguing with him.
I'll give it a shot.
Things scale weird.
A spider has no problem walking on walls and ceilings, or a web. If you scaled that spider up to be the size of a cat, it couldn't do any of those things.
Here's why.
Let's look at length (1D), area (2D), and volume (3D).
If you have a 1 inch cube, and you scale it up to be a 2 inch cube, the length increases 2x, the area increases 4x (from 1 square inch to 4 square inches) and the volume increases 8x (1 cubic inch to 8 cubic inches).
Something's mass is determined by its volume. As you scale, mass increases 4x the rate of length. But the surface area of its foot increases half as fast - 2x the rate of length.
You may recall that pressure is force/area. Bullets work because the have a lot of force and a small area where they make contact. Similarly, spiders can attach to walls and ceilings because the have an acceptable weight (volume) to foot surface area (area) ratio. But once you scale it up, they scale at different factors and the ratio quickly gets unacceptable.
Physics scales weird.
Please see insect wings, model airplanes, architecture, etc.
However, the comparison of a giant worm to a beached ocean liner is a fallacious one.
I suppose as has been said, a giant ship of metal would slowly sink in the sand.
But a living breathing organism is mobile and can move and stay afloat without sinking, just like it can in water.
Floating is different.
Floating is a question of weight of a thing (roughly a 3D measurement) and the weight of the displaced water (definitely 3D). If the displaced water weighs more than the thing, it floats. 3D vs 3D- so it scales.
But pressure is different. As I explained above- pressure is force/area. And where force is a product of mass or weight, then it's 3D/2D. At a small size, like the one inch cube, the force is 1 "mass x gravity" / 1 square inch. Which equals a pressure of 1 mxg/in2. If we double the length of the cube, then it's 8 mxg / 4 square inches, or 2 mxg/in2- double the pressure. If we 10x the length, we 10x the pressure. That might sound like it scales, but it doesn't. Pressure is already a ratio, so if it scaled it would stay at 1x. Not only are the square inches getting 10x'd, but the pressure for each square inch is 10x'd.
All of this is admittedly silly on the Dune message board.
Complaining about the physics of the sandworms is similar to complaining about sound or explosions in space, or the way X-Wings fly. If you're going to do that, then movies are probably just not for you.
Also, we don't know the details of this Arrakis sand, the weight and particle size.
But damn it, Xhonzi, I'm a production scheduler, not a physicist!
The Navigators in Dune use the spice created by the worms to bend space for starship travel. Who's to say that the worms can't use the spice in some fashion similar to the navigators?
shareExcellent point, so many what ifs, who’s to say that the worms don’t emit ultrasonic waves which facilitate their fluid travel through the sand. Maybe they use a form of telepathy… OP doesn’t have a problem with the Bene Gesserit, mutated/evolved navigators, the folding of space time, suits that collect and turn sweat, urine and fences to potable water…., but he opines about how worms digging through sand ruins his film experience, good grief.
shareFunny, the only occurrence of the word ruin is in your post.
If you want to fill your head of fantasy nonsense, that is your opinion.
If you will go to any extent to fantasize about how to make a story work,
fine, but it is not science fiction, it is fantasy fiction.
This thing from the web described my opinion.
What type of science fiction is Dune?
It's set on a distant planet and involves space travel, yes, but it's definitely not "hard" science fiction. It is essentially a fantasy novel, or at the very least a "science fantasy" novel.
Is there something wrong with me having an opinion that other people have that is backed up by physics and not made up fantasy nonsense?
And, there's nothing wrong with science fiction that is not hard... unless somebody wants to pretend it is hard.
shareYou have no earthworms where you live? Amazing! I do believe it's more likely that you are an idiot.
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