Posts tagged electricity
I feel like this is the most noobish question ever. Anyway, imagine an asteroid hits Earth and the atmosphere is now full of particles, successfully blocking the Sun from Earth. There are people st...
I'd like to create a land-based mammal that uses its electricity NOT for navigation or hunting, but only as a defense (enough to stun creatures approximately its own size or marginally larger, with...
If the earth's oceans were electrocuted (from the ocean floor), not worrying about how the energy is gotten to electrocute it, what would happen too everything in the ocean,( fish, algae, etc.) wha...
Photosynthesis has an abysmal efficiency with regards to converting solar energy into useful fuel for a plant, and I was wondering: 1) If it would be possible to engineer a plant to accept electri...
Since gamma radiation consists of photons, just like visible light does, albeit on a different frequency, isn't there a plausible way that in, say, 200 years into the future, we could harness the p...
I am thinking of copying the design of an electric eel to create the horn, however as air is not a good conductor of electricity it cannot discharge any electrical shock unless there is a physical ...
I was having a discussion with several people on whether or not a lightning dragon can be biologically plausible, without any magic involved. We came to two main possibilities and I'd love to see f...
I have a character that can produce electricity. Would he be able to stick to things and move around on walls and ceilings using his electricity power in some way? It would need to be able to suppo...
Now that we know about the electric nature of the cosmos, the question arises: "How much are planets affected by electric forces while moving through the universe?" We have been taught that the mov...
Is it possible for an organism to evolve a capacitor if the conditions were right (carnivore that stuns fish, living in complete darkness, etc.)? What kind of challenges would there be to evolve so...
The universe so far: If charged lepton fields are eliminated from the universe, charged pions become stable (having no decay path that preserves charge), replacing electrons to form bound "atomic"...
Superhumans in my setting work based on advanced technology (but not clarketech; no violations of physical laws, no FTL). My question is, how can a superhuman direct electricity? From my under...
The details don't matter, just that a large fraction of people have died (let's say 90%) and society has completely collapsed. It's only a year or two later, and people have started to gather toge...
It's possible to have lots of electric charge while having only a small amount of mass, and a black hole with a significant electric charge has properties that are different from one with no electr...
Larry Niven's "Known Universe" (KU) features "The Outsiders" as one of its most prominent alien races. As per KU canon, the Outsiders evolved in a frigid moon (similar to Nereida) and they sustai...
In a world like ours in the 1980s, but which for whatever reason does not use any form of electricity. (Either it does not exist or batteries and generators etc have not been invented.) For purpos...
With specific attention to national electricity power grids. Some pertinent details needed to answer the question might be. What parts of the power grid get damaged by such an event How do they...
The most popular type of stars are red dwarves, which regrettably tend to be flare stars. Yes, I know that geomagnetic storms and power lines do not like each other. Technology level: More or less...
My protagonist is in a sticky situation: floating in space (fortunately in a spacesuit) and about to be attacked by an alien avatar made from smart matter; tiny specks of dust which share a distrib...
I'm not sure if it's even feasible, but I have a server farm in my book, of a size that puts it on par with Google's. I want to wipe out all the data stored on the hard drives, without destroying ...
In the scenario I'm envisioning, my group is in a city. They've got a source of hydroelectric power, but a few downed power lines/utility poles are making it difficult for them to transmit the ele...
PREMISE The zone will make all electrons disappear. QUESTIONS If a person walks in that zone with his whole body, would he die from heart failure? What happens if he just sticks his hand in? H...
In the course of designing fictional species I often find myself wishing to use exotic senses which we humans lack. This poses a unique and interesting challenge as without possessing the sense mys...
I'm designing an alien plant soecies that has evolved to produce electric shocks, as a way to keep insects away from it. My question is, how would it produce electricity in the first place? Also, c...
Assuming the moon is the same size as ours and its core is generating a magnetic field, and the copper deposits are quite large, consisting of a tectonic plate containing huge deposits of native co...
Imagine someone from the modern day somehow gets transported back in time around the same time of WW2 without warning ahead of time. He has with him a laptop, graphing calculator (and a hand full ...
I previously asked a broad enough question about designing a fictional gas but it was advised by two users to split it into smaller questions. So here I am. The main property I want this gas to ha...
Here's the problem I'm having. I need a solution for the following situation. I have a sci-fi starship drive that needs 140TJ of energy every 6 hours. I have a Fusion Reactor that can produce 200T...
I've prefigured a specific setting as being middling in technological progress when compared with its neighbors. This setting does not have access to hydrocarbons, has severe cultural and politica...
Previously on the same setting (: How close is too close for a human habitation to be near an erupting volcano? What factors could delay the rescue of a small group of survivors on a Pacific volc...
Looking for someone with meteorology/physics knowledge to help with this one. Let's say I've got an island that floats in the sky--nothing special, these are a staple of fantasy these days. For ar...
My time traveller has a maybe 20-minutes-into-the-future smartphone and laptop. They can store large amounts of data, on the Petabytes level or higher. The time traveller can effectively store the ...
As the title suggests, this is a conceptual physics kinda question. What is the feasibility of using an electrically charged (as in not neutral) plasma as the working fluid in a turbine where the...
This is my first post on these forums, sorry if I've accidentally overlooked any rules or etiquette. Please let me know if more detail is necessary or would be helpful. This question is about a spe...
What could be reasons to use direct current in the distribution of power? I know that it is more efficient to distribute current at high voltages to reduce heat loss and that it is easier to step ...
Is it possible (either through genetic engineering or evolution) for a biological creature to be able to detect and absorb electricity from power sources like batteries or other animals? I know th...
This is the first question in my Arctic Airships series of questions. The second one is Arctic Airships, Part 2 - Navigation. The premise: An Earth-like planet plunged into an ice age roughly 2,0...
Could a untethered blimp be built strong enough to with stand a thunderstorm? Could wind generators be placed on it to transfer turbulence of shifting wind into wind power? Rain could be collected...
This question about time dilation got me thinking. The speed of an electron through copper is a whole heckofa lot slower than the speed of light, but if I understand the limits of relativity corre...
The Volt Dragon is an incredibly dangerous beast that reeks havoc on any attempted air travel. This dragon generates many small but powerful magnetic fields whose strength can be varied voluntarily...
Mains power electrical systems on Earth supply a fixed standardized voltage to a number of devices, which are all wired in parallel with each other. However, on the planet I'm writng about, they d...
So I'm thinking about having my race of lightning wielding rabbits wear metal armour. The first one that came to mind was gold. And then a quick Google search later told me gold is one of the best ...
Can using blimps to hold power lines and implement laser filamentation of ablout 7 meter span from the source of power for a contact free power supply to power an electric engine (designed to run o...
I have a character who ends up jumping backwards in time by 24 hours. Essentially nothing else changes, but the character has their jPhone in their pocket at the time of the jump. How functional sh...
Imagine we had an easy way to produce antimatter, we could use it for interstellar travel, deadly weapons or more; but I've thought: How could we use it to produce electricity? As Antimatter annih...
So I've created this planet that's about 90% the size of Earth, orbits a binary yellow dwarf star and has an extremely electrified atmosphere. Cloud plumes coming from volcanoes contain various con...
I want my world to contain a fruit that electrically shocks you to the point where it's painful, whenever you bite into it. Now, there are many organisms in nature that produce sensations similar t...
Really can't believe I have to edit this in, but this question has no bearing on our current use and generation of nuclear energy on Earth. There are dangers to nuclear energy generation, or we...
Are gases altered by live electricity, such as might be found along a humming electric fence? They could be formed directly or indirectly through effects on EM field, ionization, or hydrolysis - My...
I've been mulling whether the local gaseous makeup of air is changed by electricity running along a wire. My previous question is on hold, and this one is different anyway. I couldn't find exactl...
