Should we remove "What would X sport in space look like ?" questions
Do posts like (What would X Sport look like in space?) belong in this community? It has nothing to do with science, some physics at best, and even then, only to a certain degree.
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I've refrained from vote for the following reason, science is too broad for ANYTHING to be out of scope, Physics is science, biology is science, rocks are science, food is science, everything is science, so nothing can be off-topic.
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Let's look at the (rather poorly named) FAQ page in the help center which tries to specify in a bit more detail than the few words of a site name what the site's scope is:
Scientific Speculation is for questions that arise from worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science. We focus here on *plausible science* in all its myriad forms, including extrapolating to developments that haven't happened yet. Topics don't have to be *real* but they have to be *realistic*. Faster-than-light travel, shapeshifters, life on other worlds? All fine. Pure magic with no science-based rules? Not a good fit.
SciSpec Codidact began as an attempt at a community which caters to worldbuilders who are more interested in a scientifically sound answer (even if it's about a subject we can't really know the answer to, or which starts out with a question positing something that doesn't or as we understand the world cannot exist) than they are interested in answers that basically boil down to "just use magic" or "it's magic, you can do whatever you want". (We've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work regarding starting up Codidact communities since; that's a different question which has been discussed a few times already.)
So the question isn't really "is Sport X science?", but rather something closer to "can we reason in a scientifically plausible way about Sport X, given the reasonably specific question that this person wants an answer to?".
To which I think that the answer is yes, we can, given that the question itself is sufficiently constrained.
The particular question you link to is constrained in several ways:
- It asks a fairly specific question: "Other than longer drives, how could the sport of golf change in the future, as the sport spreads across the solar system?" It's not open-ended: the set of possible answers is potentially fairly large, but it is clearly bounded; and each possible answer can be judged based on how well it answers the question and how plausible it is.
- It's limited to our own solar system, which means that we have a decent idea of the limit values of some of the parameters involved; gravity, atmospheric pressure, and so on.
- There's also an implied restriction to players largely similar to present-day, real-world humans, which gives us a decent idea of limit values for some other parameters; in this case, things like player height, physical strength, range of motion, and so on.
- Since the question is limited to golf, that tells us about the mechanics of the sport, the size and weight of the ball, and so on.
So, given all of that, is it possible to reason scientifically about what golf might turn into, or what sport similar to golf might end up being played on those other planets?
My opinion is that yes, it is possible to reason scientifically about that. Maybe not in a way that would hold up as a PhD thesis (certainly not without a similar level of rigor), but certainly well enough for a plausibility check and laugh test.
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I vote on deleting sports questions for the following reasons :
- We can speculate about it, and anything we get from it will be based off of physics, not on biology, geology or the methodology used by science.
- Sports from earth would be so modified in space they would have different names and largely different objectives and rules, making them different sports, not the adaptation of one. As time passes what once was football in 2 planets will be completely different as culture evolves
- It is borderline brainstorming. There's no correct way for Golf or Football to exist in other planets
- Most of the correct answers for those are "It would be just like earth, all you have to do is increase artificial gravity".
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