Like I said I just got done watching season 3 and it was so excellent. Now I'm looking for something to watch that I would like just as much. I started watching the Americans but it just doesn't have that same vibe. Any rec I started watching the Americans but just doesn't have that same vibe. Any recommendations?ommendations?
Absolutely wonderful gentleman. Super polite and respectful.
The dude sat in economy! Didn’t put himself in delta-one on the 6-hour transcon. I have lots of respect for that.
Spoke to him briefly by just saying “hello, congressman” (which to me is funny as this is second show he played a congressman on) and he was excited to say season 4 is going to be absolutely mind blowing.
I’ve worked with many actors, Brandon Fraser included, and many of them are absolutely delightful and respectful of others. Other celebrities, not so much, and I hate meeting a celebrity only to find out their a complete ass to everyone. So I just wanted to share that Ash is a man of good character. This makes me even more excited for the Silo show to support him.
Just something that popped in my head while cleaning today. Full disclosure I haven't read the books, but I know the first one is titled 'Wool'. Why? I've rewatched season 1 and I don't remember any plot points revolving around wool. My rewatches are more casual than initial viewing, so I might have just missed it, but I don't think they mention wool at all in season 1, or ever for that matter. Does the title of the book make sense if you read it? What's the deal with wool?
I just finished the first season, and oh my gods, frakkin good show! Slow start, but can't wait to keep going. Thank you!
Maybe I missed it, but what is it, or what do we think the “syndrome” is?
Nanos?
Medical disorders?
Is it as simple as living in an unnatural environment for so long?
I did not read the books (and likely won’t because of a mix of personal reasons) but keep hearing about characters not being in the books or being super different from the books.
Curious to know who’s invented and changed a lot for the show?
also if there’s any whole storylines that were made up in the show? I guess i just have to assume none of the show is accurate to the books?
Up to date on the show but needless to say please don’t spoil anything past the show.
First Reddit post, so be gentle. 😅
I haven't read the books, but what follows is full of TV spoilers. Read on only if you've finished watching through S3E10.
Per Stenson = Per Son of Sten.
Sten comes from the Old Norse word steinn, meaning “stone.”
Therefore: Person of stone | A person with a strong bond to the earth | A stone-hearted person | A stone idol, a man who has made himself into a god.
There's just something about being a trillionaire that makes you think you're exceptional and above everyone else, a god among humans. In Per's case, his God complex manifests as a need to control everything and everyone.
He takes control of vehicles (fighter planes, cars); controls the circumstances of the nuclear war; controls who survives; and ultimately builds a system controlling knowledge, memory, reproduction, movement, technology, and even rebellion.
After Per is done developing and perfecting his nanotechnology to be used as a weapon, for memory erasure, and in cryogenic preservation and revival, he decides he wants the end of the world to happen on his terms.
Not: I built the Ark because the Flood was coming.
But: I built the Ark, and I decided when the Flood would come.
(I love all the flood references in the show. When we first encounter the nanotech weapon chronologically, it is in the form of a cloud or cloudburst. The nanotechnology in the water floods your system. The flooding in the silos. The flooding of the airlock with the nanotech mist. The liquid and later aerosolised compound. "Target area is saturated with the compound." The flooding back of memory when one comes across a relic from one's past.)
After he is done manipulating events to end the world, Per begins his eugenics project. He controls which human traits survive (obedience, conformity) and which get purged (curiosity, free will, dissent). He will then perhaps repopulate the Earth with this kind of humanity: the last remaining silo of stable, docile members subservient to the Founder and his religion, the Pact.
Per fears people's unity and collective power. Therefore, he scatters them in isolated silos so they won't contaminate each other with knowledge and eventually come together and reach heaven (Silo 1).
Control and surveillance go hand in hand, and we see this in the silo system, which is essentially a giant panopticon. Per restricts and controls people's access to technology, their history, and even their own memories.
When Helen and Daniel rejected Per's invitation to participate in the Silo Project, it was the first great challenge to his authority. This must have infuriated him.
So he did what Per does: Take away people's choice and have his way by bringing them under his control.
His taking control of Daniel and Helen's car (and trapping and surveilling them in it) foregrounds how he later controls their lives, when he drives them into the silos.
Per is an Ozymandias-wannabe—both the historical Ozymandias and the one from Watchmen. But there's an important distinction (Watchmen spoiler): >!Ozymandias kills the many to save many more!<; Per kills the many so that his chosen few will survive to awaken him from his “stone” sarcophagus and ultimately deify him.
Again, these are just my theories. Don't come at me. 😅
The more I think about Charlotte’s story, the more horrifying it becomes.
Before everything happened, Charlotte was clearly a deeply moral but also rebellious and curious person. She actively sought out a journalist who shared her ideals, contacted her, and was willing to risk a court-martial for treason because she wanted answers about the war. She was someone who questioned the system when something felt wrong.
So seeing how obedient and passive she eventually became is heartbreaking.
Victor isolated and manipulated her. Anna was sent to spy on and control her. And Daniel was too overwhelmed and passive to really question what was happening to his sister. Even after Helen opened his eyes, he still let it happen.
And Anna's role is especially disturbing to me. She was sent to Charlotte clearly to spy on her, yet she eventually seduced and married her. Whatever genuine feelings Anna developed later, Charlotte entered that relationship without knowing that the person she trusted had originally been sent to monitor and manipulate her. That's an incredibly disturbing power imbalance.
The dinner scene in Episode 8 really captures the whole dynamic. Helen realizes that Charlotte was essentially sent to her death by the government and says it out loud. Charlotte is devastated, yet Helen is blamed for “upsetting” her, while Victor and Anna, the people involved in controlling her, are the ones comforting her. Daniel just stands there watching from a distance, like a stranger, while the people who are actually strangers to her are the ones “taking care” of his sister.
They really stole Charlotte's body and mind. They altered her memories, rewrote her history, and reshaped her personality into something useful to them. They also isolated her for her brother and relatives. She was made into a scapegoat, manipulated into becoming involved with her enemy, and potentially used to help destroy the world.
And yet, 350 years later, some part of the old Charlotte seems to still be there.
We're starting to see that rebellious, morally driven person again, the woman who is willing to disobey when something goes against her principles.
And that's such an interesting contrast with Daniel. Charlotte probably was always the rebellious one, while Daniel was the gentler, more passive sibling. Now Daniel has become a ruthless killing machine, while Charlotte seems to be slowly waking up.
I really hope Season 4 gives Daniel a chance to finally save his sister. Charlotte deserves to remember who she was, reclaim her identity, and finally have the chance to live as herself. And honestly, I hope she wakes up and destroys every last one of them in silo 1.
I completed the books years ago - I believe I started them right after watching the first two episodes of Season 1 and quickly read everything. I really enjoyed them with some ups & downs and I won't go in any discussions about the actual books in this thread.
I didn't enjoy Season 2 - probably the entire mid-section of the season felt really slow and I was just hoping for things to start picking up speed. However, Season 3 was an absolute masterpiece!
I binge-watched the entire season last week in just 2 days and so much was done better than before:
Lastly, I honestly think that this show is one of the few cases where the changes in a TV or Film adaptation are better than the books. Obviously I'm not going in details, but I believe that the author's involvement in the development has been very successful.
So yep, that's it - just came here to praise the show. Can't wait to see how they land the ending!
I was interested in the thermodynamics and power requirements for the hive, so I started doing some quick estimates of what it would take to heat, cool, and power a Silo. There are a lot of assumptions here, but if you're the sort of person who likes numbers, it's a fun afternoon's exercise. The goal here isn't to say 'this is how it must be done' but to present a plausible mechanism to solve the problem.
[If you're more of a 'it's not that kinda show' sort, that's fine. This is probably not the post for you. 😄 ]
My main assumption is that the Silo is a quasi-closed system. We know that liquid water comes in (groundwater infiltration), steam comes in (for the turbine-generator), and water gets pumped out. Every bit of energy added to the Silo eventually becomes heat, and the only way out for that heat is conducting out via the walls or being pumped out.
My main findings:
Here are the more detailed estimates for the baseline silo (normal crops). These are the average constant heat production numbers:
| System | Thermal Dissipation |
|---|---|
| Food Production & Processing | 268.9 MW |
| Industrial, Commercial, Residential Power | 7.8 MW |
| Air Handling | 3.6 MW |
| Water Handling | 1.3 MW |
| Amenities, other | 3.6 MW |
| Conductive heat flux | 0.8MW |
| Electricity Thermal Waste | 58.9 MW |
| Total | 345.1 MW |
Air handling includes ventilation, intra-silo cooling, dehumidification, and odor removal. Water handling includes infiltration pumping, water purification, 'local' plumbing, sewage and wastewater treatment. Amenities includes things like IT, lighting, and a 2MW 'misc.' allotment. Conductive heat flux is the heat that is conducted into the silo from the warm rocks deep in the ground (or out for the cooler rocks near the surface). Electricity thermal waste is mainly generation losses outside of the steam path (e.g. gearbox, bearings, turbine casing, etc...) and also in distribution (wire losses, transformer losses, etc...).
Food is by far the dominant factor. The basic analysis is, each person needs about 3500 Calories (or kcal, about 14.6 Megajoules) per day. With high-efficiency LED grow lamps and a selection of efficient, nutritionally complete plants, an average electricity-to-edible-calories ratio of about 1.5% is reasonable. We also know they have some food animals (cows, rabbits, chickens, etc...) which can provide meat, eggs, milk, and Sims' leather jacket. But, you have to feed animals, and the feed-calories-to-edible-animal-calories adds more inefficiency. And there are some crops like fruit orchards that are probably less efficient, but help bolster morale (and are a source of wood and provide juice for Anthony Sims). And, mushrooms can be used and are very 'power' efficient. Making some assumptions about those (12% of calories from animal sources, 15% from 'luxury' crops, 4% mushrooms) and its about 25.3MJ per person per day (+ a bit for mushrooms). At 1.5% electricity-to-calories efficiency, and we're at 1.68 GIGAjoules per person per day. We also need about 20% more to run condensers to collect transpiration water and I assumed another 15% for non-cooking processing, hydroponics pumping, waste, etc... and that comes to about 26.9 kiloWatts per person, or 269 Megawatts for the whole silo. For comparison, that's about the residential power requirements for a US city of 214,000 households or about 540,000 people - ~50x more than the Silo's 10,000.
Figuring out how much water flows into the Silo would require a detailed geological survey and numerical simulations, but we can estimate something reasonable from Silo 17. Assume the silo has a radius of 75m (about 250ft), and is 85% empty space *Note1*. The Silo 17 rebellion was ~30 years ago. 100 of 144 levels have flooded. Putting that together (and adding some extra volume for the mines and digger void), we get an average of about 21kg of water per second since the pumps were blown. But, the water infiltration rate should be slowing down as the existing water creates backpressure. Based on Darcy's Law, I'd estimate the 'normal' (unflooded) infiltration rate to be about 40kg per second. But, that also wouldn't work. It is not clear if it rains anymore, and with all those silos clumped together, it would quickly deplete the local ground water *Note2*. To maintain a steady waterflow, water pumped out of the silo would have to be moved somewhere, cooled and then injected back near the silo at near Atlanta ambient temperatures. When the pumps stop (as happened in Silo 17) the ground water partially depletes and within a few years it reverts back to steady 'natural' state. But, when the pumps are running, the infiltration would be about 55% higher, or about 63kg per sec. [Note: this is the weakest part of the analysis since there are a lot of assumptions piled on each other, but I think these numbers are plausible.]
Atlanta is in the Piedmont geographic region. The first ~300m of subsurface are more fractured and have more water permeable rocks and soils. The 300-1600m region is less permeable and made from hard stones which are good insulators. I assume that most of the groundwater is coming from the top 300m which is cooler, but a substantial part comes from the lower, warmer regions. Averaging across, I assumed the average infiltration water is about 22C.
If we heat the incoming water from 22C to 35C, at 63kg per sec we can carry away about 3.4MW of heat. That's about 1% of the energy we need to remove from the silo.
Since the water's heat capacity is our limiting factor, the best thing to do is boost it. There have been several studies proposing to use heat pumps to boost the output temperature of cooling systems, mainly for lunar space colonies. It's a tradeoff - a heat pump increases the output temperature, so you can make your radiator smaller, but it adds complexity and you have to use more electricity to run the heat pump, which means you have to remove that from the system as well. The higher the temperature 'lift' the less efficient the heat pump gets.
But, if we boost the output temperature of the water to 105C steam, we get a phase change (i.e. boiling) which means it can carry a lot more heat. Now our 63kg per s can carry about 163MW of power.
But... we need another 221MW of power to run the heat pumps. So now we have our original 345MW + 221MW of heat pump power and only ~163MW of water-steam heat capacity. Fail.
To fix this ~3x shortfall requires some sci-fi elements. Per Stensen is a nano-tech and genetics expert who can hire a lot of good engineers and scientists. I think we can make some plausible assumptions about what he might do to improve things.
The biggest change has to be to agriculture - it consumes by far the most power. The figure of merit here is the electricity-to-edible-calories efficiency. Currently, 1.5% is reasonable for well selected crops. But, if you can tinker with plant DNA and nanoelectronics enough, there are some things that could improve that. Developing slightly more efficient deep-red LEDs, decreasing the amount of blue light required, Far-red photosynthesis via cyanobacteria cross breeding, better carbon fixing, better light harvesting, hydroponic adaptations like smaller stems and roots, and larger fruits, seeds, and tubers might sort-of feasibly (in a sci-fi sort of way) boost electricity-to-calories to about 7%. And, he can probably boost high-temperature heat pumps from 45 to 50% of the Carnot efficiency (heating COP).
This decreases the food production power (direct power and condensers), makes the heat pumps more efficient, helps air handling a bit (less ventilation power), and brings our total power:
| System | Thermal Dissipation (Old) | Thermal Dissipation (Improved) |
|---|---|---|
| Food Production & Processing | 268.9 MW | 58.1 MW |
| Industrial, Commercial, Residential Power | 7.8 MW | 7.8 MW |
| Air Handling | 3.6 MW | 3.1 MW |
| Water Handling | 1.3 MW | 1.3 MW |
| Amenities, other | 3.6 MW | 3.6 MW |
| Conductive heat flux | 0.8MW | 0.8 MW |
| Electricity Thermal Waste | 58.9 MW | 13.8 MW |
| Heat Pumps | 221 MW | 45.3 MW |
| Total | 556.1 MW (345.1 MW wo pumps) | 133.8 MW |
About 18% under the 163MW heat capacity of our outlet water, making it sorta-kinda feasible.
Some notes:
- There are probably additional savings to be had by using plants to process waste water, clever use of waste heat for cooking, using microbes or yeast for food, thermocompressors instead of electrical heat pumps, superheating the turbine exhaust, better management of transpiration water, etc... I think that adding some of those optimizations will improve the margin, but not change the main conclusions.
- I don't explicitly model cooking, but assume it fits somewhere in residential and commercial energy use. Probably more is cooked in cafeterias, which would be more efficient than residential cooking, which might save a little.
- Per could also probably make cows, chickens, and mushrooms a little more efficient too and boost some of the efficiency of local condensers and such, but I'm not adding that in.
- I am neglecting the waste heat from the turbine that is carried away in the exhaust steam (from e.g., isentropic inefficiency, blade friction, leakage, partial admission, throttling, disc windage, etc...). I assume this heat can be vented along with the heat pump steam. I don't think the turbine system was condensing, so the hot output steam from the turbine could combine with a 105C exit temp from the heat pumps and just convect upwards.
- I am neglecting stuff going on outside the silo (condensing and cooling water, generating power for IT, etc...) since they happen outside the silo and doesn't impact its thermodynamics.
- Because I'm assuming some reinjection of water into the ground in 'normal' operations, it could be argued that the Silo could just have a pipe directly in with cooled water. This would be a completely reasonable design, but because the text doesn't specifically mention a 'magic water cooling pipe' like the 'magic steam pipe', I thought it would be safer to assume indirect reinjection. The specific 55% boost comes from picking a reinjection site that is equidistant from neighboring silos (assuming the '200 foot' rule for the limitation on the mines)
- 3500 Calories per day is a lot compared to modern diets, but I'm trying to be conservative. Also, there are a lot more stairs to climb in the silo and probably a lot more manual work. 3,000 is probably a more defensible number, but I don't think it changes the overall conclusions.
- To decrease the temperature 'lift' of the high-temp heat-pumps, the input can be boosted by direct cooling of 'hot' things (e.g. hot side of condensers, turbine gearbox, etc...). So rather than lifting from the Silo's ambient 20-30C internal temperature, the average input is closer to 38-41C.
- There are going to be issues with scale removal on all these heat pumps and boilers. A more clever and complete design might have some blowdown mechanism built in. Maybe the scale is collected and pumped out in a high-speed jet of water? This might also be a good way get rid of the mine spoil and tailings. Either way, its beyond the scope of this analysis.
- Mushrooms: The 4% of calories from mushrooms is assuming it is limited by the amount of waste inedible organic residue (e.g. stems, leaves) from the staple crops. Because some of the genetic modifications reduce these things to make plants more 'hydropoics friendly' and efficient, the final case has only about 2% of calories from mushrooms. If that were not a limit, people can consume 10-15% of their calories from mushrooms without digestive difficulties.
*Note 1*: Width of the silo. It is not specified and various clues seem to be inconsistent. The Relic Hard Drive makes it look like a 75m radius, the blue prints Troy was looking at seem like ~110m radius, others have suggested 160m. I went with 75m to be conservative.
*Note 2*: I'm not a hydrologist, but based on a simple deep pit water infiltration estimate I found, the 'radius of influence' (distance at which a well impacts the level of groundwater) would be almost 900m, so Silos would have to be almost 2km apart to avoid depleting each other's groundwater. They don't appear to be that far apart.