Olin Lathrop‭

So couldn't earth be odd shaped other than a sphere? No. Something the size of the earth has significant gravity. There isn't material strong enough over large distances to result in anything mo...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Diamonds are hard, but brittle, and not particularly strong. Diamond as a basis for armor doesn't make much sense. Brittleness is bad when sudden impact is exactly the stress being defended again...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

why would such a species have retained their ability to hear Because they still go outside to hunt, gather food and materials, and to interact with others of their species that live in other caves...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

You can hand-wave the right types of lights that produce the right mix of wavelengths, but you can't hand-wave away the power requirements. Sunlight reaching the earth's surface is about 1.2 kW/m2...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

You can't go by the shape of the building alone. No matter what the shape, presumably structural engineers carefully considered how the building will support itself. Buildings are not single mono...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

It seems you want to "store" energy as light by keeping it bouncing around inside a chamber. No, that's not going to work, at least not for more than a few 10s of nanoseconds for a chamber the siz...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

a type of light we could perceive as black because our eyes ... do not That's anything in the EM spectrum other than visible light. So exclude roughly 400 to 750 nm wavelengths. Infrared and ultr...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

It appears you want to go around a planet significantly faster than at the speed of a normal inertial orbit. That's gonna cost one way or another. Something has to create the downward force to ke...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

I speculate that because laser is heat and too much water especially with big/round laser beams can cause injected water to "boil" This argument doesn't make much sense. First, your insides are a...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Yes, nuclear fission is reversible. Actually, it's more like fission is the reverse of fusion. Fusion is what stars do. Mostly stars fuse hydrogen to make helium. Fusing light elements releases...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

First, the fussiness of the people has absolutely no bearing on how their solar system ended up. It is what it is, whether they like it or not. As for the physics, you are basically asking for ro...

posted 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

No matter what mechanism your animal uses for running its systems from sunlight, you still have the fundamental limitation of sunlight power per area (insolation). Solar insolation at earth's dista...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Drastically. For one thing, pinning your opponent's shoulder to the mat is no longer possible. Very different criteria would be required to determine winning. The different objectives would in t...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

It doesn't make much sense to talk about transmitting "keys" when the encryption is analog. Since you want to stay away from digital, the encryption and decryption will need to be done in analog h...

posted 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

It looks like you will have uplift, frequent earthquakes, and volcanos in the lower part of your island where three plates are jamming together. In the northern part, the plates are spreading. Yo...

posted 10mo ago by Olin Lathrop‭