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Basically I agree with @Kys; but will expand a bit: Intelligence (with or without sapience) is effectively the ability to learn predictive patterns. Whether they predict the future, or the unknow...
How about "The Meek Inherit The Earth"? They could be the only large animal species left on their planet; so they eat plants and invertebrates like worms. There were aggressive species at one time,...
I work in the AI field. The fictional shows are not realistic, the authors do that for the sake of creating a powerful enemy that seems unstoppable, so the puny humans can be heroic in the eyes of ...
@Amadeus' answer is incredibly in-depth, but I'd like to look at it from the opposite direction. Let's say we did program our AI like you suggest, taking the feelings of humanity and the needs of t...
I think it is fair to assume that the more time there is before a random event, the more likely it is the random event will turn out differently. Why? Because the world is governed by Quantum Mech...
Yet another alternative is to have a weapon more effective than primitive guns. Remember the first guns were muzzle loaded balls with a packet of gunpowder, the barrels were not rifled to create sp...
You have solar power, I presume you have reasonably intelligent robots, the solution is to take a clue from biology: Constantly, whether it is needed or not, replace every molecule of the space sta...
A lot of these answers talk about how colors and shapes can mean different things based on region. But if it's a standard schema across all robots, then that doesn't matter as much, because people...
You mention "oceans", certainly we have huge aquifers in the world (Ogallala in the US is a big one; 174,000 square miles, bigger than the Caspian Sea (at 143,000 sq mi). Here are other aquifers). ...
I'd go with mad-scientist chemistry, better living through better drugs. You train them the same way we train other animals; with sticks and carrots. But instead of getting physical (electric shock...
I'm not sure where you are looking, but first look here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23a96x/could_an_earth_sized_object_orbit_jupiter/ The answer is Yes; any two objects can orbi...
I'm reasonably sure that the $5\text{ G}$ there refers to $5$ Gauss. The Gauss is a unit of magnetic flux (named, of course, after Carl Friedrich Gauss). The $5\text{ G}$ figure makes sense, too; i...
You are in luck! Six variations fits quite nicely into the genetic code; look here at the DNA to Protein Table. There are four DNA 'letters', ATCG. It takes 3 letters to specify a code for one of...
The Pole and Barn paradox exists even at sublight speed. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/polebarn.html That is not an issue of causality; it is just a disagreement about when ...
An alternative writing approach: If two observers are NOT traveling toward or away from each other at relativistic speed, then there is no problem. Make that a feature of your wormhole: It is impo...
Religion. The horse is a beautiful and holy creature, sacred to the great god OoomphaLoompha, who once incarnated as such and impregnated the Great Turtle Goddess Iki, who took a couple minutes of...
Did a little reading and I think what you're looking for is the corona effect. This is caused when the voltage is high enough to cause ionization in the air surrounding the line, which is caused "...
Okay, I'm going to take a stab at this, and run the risk of having to delete this answer if it turns out my assumptions are wrong. Given what's in the question thus far, though, I think that an obv...
Unpredictable weather with lots of microbursts, wind shear, tornados, and other unfavorable winds. Wind shear is one of the most dangerous things for an aircraft. Thankfully they are generally r...
There are (at least) four species that we know of that actually photosynthesize for energy Sea Slugs borrow genes from the algae that they eat through horizontal genetic transfer, and incorporate ...
Since it is specifically for one set of wires, and carbon monoxide is caused by burning, then this set of wires could have a coating that is slowly burning when the power is on. It could be an insu...
My grandson is autistic, through him I know a dozen other autistic children. A major problem with autistic children is a failure to understand the needs of other people, the pain of other people, ...
Earthborn people are of lesser value because they were born on a planet that's almost depleted its resources leading to less genetic modifications They may be similar to Starborn people, but their...
It might be for the same reason that someone with a home, good job, and family, might feel superior to someone who lives in the ghetto. Earth is the birthplace of humanity, but in this future it...
It is not plausible for a self-destruct to have a count-down by purely mechanical or chemical means, especially one that could be stopped at the last second. HOWEVER, it makes a great deal of sens...
