2800: Down

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Down

Title text: It's just that I get nervous about heights.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by TenGolf flipping upside down. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Megan states that down was redefined to be relative to Mars. Down is relative to gravity in actuality (in this context, that is), not to a fixed "coordinate center". If this was actually true, then they would be falling towards Mars, which would not be good. ^{[citation needed]}

In the title text, Cueball states that he gets nervous about heights, and rightfully so- Mars is about 34,000,000 mi (55,000,000 km) away from Earth at their closest approaches (on the extremely rare occasion that Mars is at perihelion and opposition (relative to Earth) simultaneously).

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Megan is seated at a desk, in front of a laptop. The scene is rotated by 150° clockwise, so she appears to be upside down. The gravity still seems to be relative to the ground, not the bottom of the image.]

[Cueball enters the scene from the right side, behind Megan. He has three question marks below his head, oriented relative to the frame.]

Megan: They announced that "down" is relative to Mars today.

Cueball: Ugh, I hate when they make another planet the coordinate system origin.

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Discussion

Shouldn't it be geolocated, to be rotated accordingly? 172.71.160.110 12:35, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

You need to know where and when you are. Taking the 220 degrees (why not 140?) currently in the transcript as correct, that means Mars is at 50° azimuth, which a versatile but overly-fiddly astronomy app I have (why doesn't it remember I do manual orientation? ...it's flat out wrong when it tries to do it from device settings/current orientation!) suggests that Mars will reach 50° 'up', for me, at about 16:30 local time (could have checked when it fell back down to that again, but I didn't) at which point I could easily be sat facing whichever direction puts "Mars down" at a similar angle to the one seen in the comic. But it will change throughout the day, every day that it applies. 172.70.162.244 13:05, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I guess that's why Randall hates it so much, it changes continuously. Although he missed a great opportunity for a clever animated comic -- it could calculate the rotation of the scene based on the reader's location and time. Barmar (talk) 14:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Why didn't Orson Scott Card get cowriting props for this one?

I'm TenGolf and I started the explanation! 172.70.131.6 15:03, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about the "relative to gravity in actuality" - there's no objective reason why "down" must follow gravity. (Take Ender's Game - "The enemy's gate is down") DownGoer (talk) 15:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

That's not the directional sense of "down". When it's used as a direction, it's towards the center of whatever body currently exerts the most gravity -- if you're on Earth it's towards the Earth's center, if you're on the Moon it's towards the Moon's center, etc. "Down" has other senses, like "the computer is down" that just refers to whether it's functioning. Barmar (talk) 17:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

241:_Battle_Room Relevant here? —Purah #126 (talk) 00:41, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

For the case of Ender's Game, it isn't a matter of ignoring/spiting gravity, but the disorientattling lack of gravity in the arena makes tactics difficult to maintain when everyone has a different 'up' (when going concentrating on 'forward to the enemy').

Rethinking it as being 'down to the enemy' (and perhaps revisualising as cylindrical/spherical coordinates as you are looking 'down that well') gives you a better resilience of comprehension whenever you get spun around and need to make sure you're still singing to the same (directional) hymnsheet as your team.

Though, if I recall the film correctly, they re-established the "single orietation standard" whereby (whatever the script said) there seemed to be the obligatory common (and perpendicular to the line of attack/defence) 'up', just for the sake of the audience's own 2D-plane (with maybe 0.5d of 'elevation') sensibilities. 172.70.162.109 07:54, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

This may be a reference to the band named Down Left Forte. 172.71.154.156 23:37, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

When I first tried to access this comic, Explain XKCD's server didn't respond. For a second I thought it was some sort of joke page in the same vein as 404. --172.70.85.111 10:49, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I am over 2 bottles of wine deep tonight. This comic looks like I feel.

In the space opera board game Twilight Imperium, one of the factions, the L1Z1X, has labelled their home planet "[0.0.0]" and their flagship "[0.0.1]". This would imply that their coordinate system, both orientation and distance, is dependant on the relative positions of these two objects. --172.68.146.77 11:17, 13 July 2023 (UTC)