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Population Growth As @c.z. touched on, digital minds are just that - digital minds. If you clone a mind, that's all it is - A clone of the original, or originals. It wouldn't be unique. Adding a bi...
Although astronomers have considered this phenomenon in the past, the data indicates that this isn't how stars are born. That said, yes, your premise works. Here's how you make a star, in a nutshe...
For the TL;DR, see the bottom of this answer. Okay, so first of all, the orbital period of the gas giant around its star is $256 \times 24$ hours, and I'd like to establish the distance from the p...
Introduce your sequence symbols temporally. Instead of broadcasting a single image of a "comic strip", broadcast a sequence of separate images that show the progression of the sequence markers. Fir...
This exists. In Botswana, the Okavango River branches out to create a wide, swampy area called, appropriately enough, the Okavango Delta. To quote the first line from the Wikipedia entry (emphasi...
The planet could have wildly inconsistent gravity. Gravity on Earth is non uniform, though it's hard to tell because of the variations are slight. But if this planet had a large super dense mas...
I think if the planet had an atmosphere that was very thick to keep heat in at ground level, heavy in hydrogen and helium, with a very strong magnetic field to keep solar rays from knocking them aw...
This has indeed been investigated. I found a thesis by Daniel Jontof-Hutter (2012) that did a stability analysis of particles in rings orbiting, among other bodies, Saturn. One important quantity h...
Asimov's laws of robotics are not technical laws; they're societal laws, imposed by humans to ensure that robots don't destroy mankind. You can make a robot that breaks any of them, still using or...
The reason why Earth has seasons in the way it does is Earth's axial tilt relative to the Sun combined with its atmosphere. Earth's moon has a much smaller (about 1.5°) axial tilt relative to the...
You've heard the expression whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger? Well, in some cases, what does kill a few of us, leaves the average of what's left of us stronger. Consider a couple real-l...
Short answer: All of the above. Throw it at all of the walls, see if it sticks. Try to find people who are in-the-know about whatever this discovery is to verify it and use their clout. In reality...
Have you ever heard of the Einstein-de Haas effect? Take a large piece of iron, cylindrically shaped. Now, put it in an external magnetic field. The bar should become magnetized. Given that magnet...
Since your planet orbits a red dwarf, the light hitting it from the sun will be mostly red. And since its atmosphere is quite thin, the light won't be scattered as much and the sky will appear quit...
Couple possibilities: Photonic Matter - It is possible to take photons (light), which are massless, and bind them together so they behave as if they have mass. It may even be possible to arrange t...
Let's look at the two extremes: $\Delta T=15^{\circ}\text{F}$ and $\Delta T=40^{\circ}\text{F}$. In the first case, I'll say $T_{\text{min}}=50^{\circ}\text{F}$ ($283.2\text{ K}$) and $T_{\text{max...
Late answer, just found this article: Nasa Proposes Magnetic Shield For Mars The important bit from the article: Ask scientists why Mars is cold and dead and they'll usually point to the dea...
The best way to study water waves of many sizes is to use Airy wave theory (see also here), a mathematical model using several simplifications that nonetheless produces reasonable results. The line...
My first thought for protecting against hurricanes (or any kind of flooding/wind storm) is something that you can erect between the storm and the city. Obviously in the case of large cities that's ...
So having a man made island that can sink and float isn't hard by having buyancy chambers like a submarine, and having force fields to keep the water at bay could keep it dry and habitable even whe...
In general, the problem with hollow-Earth setups is that objects in hydrostatic equilibrium cannot be hollow - and planets must be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Planets form through collisions of sma...
Does it differ from the early days of the internet - in another sense, would it be possible to handle with any protocols ever developed in the field of computer networks? No, that's not possib...
As other posters noted explosives often work totally independently of the atmosphere since they contain everything needed to explode. How about making explosives much more sensitive because of som...
So a very dense/heavy gas like sulfur hexafluoride has the ability to support the weight of objects, like a boat floating on invisible water. So you could have creatures that live on the surface, a...
A recent Snowball Earth period might help. Heavy glaciation can cause enormous changes to the terrain. There are no longer any glaciers where I live, but there once were, during a recent ice age. ...
