Activity for Olin Lathrop‭

Type	On...	Excerpt	Status	Date
Answer	—	A: Where should my island mountain ranges be, based on my plate tectonics? 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. You'd need volcanic activity to explain mountains there, or even the island existing at all. This would... (more)	—	3 months ago
Answer	—	A: Shouldnt this question be moved instead of closed ? First, moving questions rewards people for asking in the wrong place. That's not something that should be encouraged. Second, that's not a great question because it requires following links to get pertinent points. Information necessary for understanding a question must be in the question itself... (more)	—	8 months ago
Answer	—	A: Analogue Encryption, without converting to digital 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 hardware. That has a lot less flexibility than a digital algorithm, so the encryption needs to be more s... (more)	—	10 months ago
Answer	—	A: Determining a Practical Bridge Design for a Wide River and Heavy Traffic Look around the world to see what is possible with our current technology. The Golden Gate bridge has a deck 90 feet wide (27 meters) supporting 6 lanes, and its main span is 4200 feet (1.28 km) long spanning a major shipping channel. It's obviously plenty high and wide enough to support the large ... (more)	—	11 months ago
Answer	—	A: Could there be a way for a solar system to be very precise, so that the lunar calendar and solar calendar align? 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 rotations of the planet and its orbit around the star to be integer multiples. Yes, that can happen, bu... (more)	—	11 months ago
Answer	—	A: How Would the Sport of Wrestling Change in a Microgravity Environment? 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 turn make the sport very different. The reason pinning against the mat is no longer possible is becaus... (more)	—	over 1 year ago
Answer	—	A: Nuclear energy storage 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 energy, which is how we ultimately get sunshine. It takes energy to result in heavy elements, like... (more)	—	over 1 year ago
Answer	—	A: How to reduce tornados in the US Great Plains? Tornados and the thunderstorms that often spawn them are driven by rising columns of air. Such "thermals" are stronger and more likely in open terrain, like is prevalent in Tornado Alley. Let the area be forested. You said you want more rain anyway. Forest would be a natural development of more... (more)	—	over 1 year ago
Answer	—	A: If this earth were cube shaped would it be possible during Magellanic era using a float ship to figure out that the earth is cube shaped? 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 more than a slightly wrinkled surface for an earth-sized object. Put another way, the vertexes of the c... (more)	—	about 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: How can we grow this community? The issues here are largely the same as with the Outdoors site, including the imported content. My answer to your question in Outdoors mostly applies. A few differences to note: The recent rash of dumb or lazy questions doesn't apply, since we've had barely any questions. It's harder to fin... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: Was the total amount of water on earth ever significantly different? It seems that what is now the earth started as an aggregation of rocky material. Large amounts of water were then added by bombardment of comet-like bodies. These contain a lot of ice. (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: Could a laser using a "light capacitor" rather than a battery work? 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 size of a "large tank". Typical mirrors reflect maybe 90% of the light. Let's say you have really gre... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: Human elytra flying off a cliff This is probably impossible, but your question leaves off necessary detail to know for sure. If the point is to be able to glide for "a few minutes" after jumping off something tall, then we need to know how tall. The taller the cliff, the more potential energy there is to power the flight. You ... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: If the poles ice would melt, would it be critical for human survival to try to bring it back? There are two parts to your question. Humans can certainly continue to thrive on earth whether sea level rises or not. We live in quite a variety of climates now. Some climates shifting more towards the poles wouldn't change that. In fact, polar areas are sparsely populated. The polar areas th... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: The more horizontal a building (on planet earth) is, the more years it can survive a collapse? 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 monolithic structures. Failure by "tipping over" is very rare. Buildings generally fail when the right c... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: Could grow lights on a massive scale replace 100% of sunlight for 100% of the growing season? 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 on a clear day with the sun high in the sky. You probably don't need all that if you focus on partic... (more)	—	over 2 years ago
Answer	—	A: Natural ways to acquire gravity and heat for a colony on earth's moon There seem to be two separate questions here: Would a moon colony need to be deep underground to get more gravity? No. This is basic physics. Going deeper into the a gravitational body reduces gravity. Think of the limiting case where you are in a hollow chamber in the middle of the moon. ... (more)	—	almost 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Composite armor based on diamonds, could it work? 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 against. If you make the individual particles small enough so that their brittleness doesn't matter, the... (more)	—	almost 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Which sciences are welcome? That question was off topic for two reasons: There was no speculation. Paraphrasing loosely, this site is about "what if" questions with a foundation in science. It was about history. This is not what was envisioned by scientific speculation. Historical speculation is a very different field ... (more)	—	almost 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: How would utility fluids move and stay together? You ask about fluids, but have already shown that this works in air or some gasses. If you are asking specifically about liquids (a subset of fluids), then use the right liquids. You need something that won't evaporate quickly, nor wet other surfaces easily. That may be a tough problem. Otherwi... (more)	—	almost 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: How to protect intelligent fluids from heat damage? The Strawberry Jam can freeze parts in place that don't heat up much. Parts of the trigger mechanism would be a good candidate. So is making the lock stuck in safety mode. Also, you don't have a heat problem until the gun is fired. If the Jam prevents that, then there is no heat issue. The onl... (more)	—	almost 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Keratin biosynthesis and human hair straightness/smoothness If ... Keratin ... can make human hair straighter, is it biologically sensical ... that ... Keratin supplements ... could make ... hair straighter? No. Hair is already made of keratin. People with curly hair don't have a keratin deficiency. How straight or curled hair is depends on how exactly ... (more)	—	about 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Is the combination of water and medical skin laser dangerous? 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 already substantially water. Injecting a little bit of water-based liquid isn't going to change how mu... (more)	—	about 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Centripetal Burn in Orbit 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 keep the craft from escaping into the elliptical orbit (or even hyperbolic escape) indicated by the spee... (more)	—	about 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Do we want to consider removing (most) mass-imported questions The search engines see imported posts as duplicate content, and penalize us accordingly. Scientific-speculation.codidact.com is essentially black-listed, and some of that even seems to be spilling over to elsewhere in codidact.com. It's time to get rid of this stuff. Let's not get caught in the ... (more)	—	about 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Why would a race constantly deafened by ambient noises still hear? 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. To deal with the noise, they have evolved the ability to "turn down" their hearing in response to... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Effects of not growing up? This can't be answered because it depends greatly on the details of some drug/process/whatever that caused them to stop growing You made this up. Only you can say what the long term effects are. Stop growing is way too vague, and can imply many different mechanisms, with many different long... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: What good are herbivores in an animal army? Armies need more than just soldiers that fight. Herbivores can easily be more efficient at these other tasks because they don't carry the extra expense of the fighting apparatus (claws, sharp teeth, etc), and often require less support. For example, the same amount of land can support more deer tha... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: How do I manage memetic infection while time traveling? How does this time traveler handle the risks of being infected with a contagious idea then spreading it to his fellow humans on return to his own time? He doesn't. Coming back with a revolutionary idea is no different than having come up with it on your own. Also, you wouldn't be trying to cha... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Question	—	Didn't get notified about reply to comment Some time ago, I wrote a comment to this question. I don't remember the details, but something in the question needed to be fixed. I downvoted and left a comment saying I'd undo the downvote when the issue was fixed. Apparently it was fixed shortly after, but I never got notified. I stumbled up... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: How do I realistically keep my large mammalian predator hidden from other pack hunters. What you are asking for is unrealistic. 3000 kg is huge. That's over four times the mass of a typical rhinoceros, for example. Being really large like that lets it bully its way to some other animal's kill. Even as a carcass scavenger, it will be very tough to find enough carcasses or others' k... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: How to Terraform a Dead Earth Your question makes no sense due to its disregard of basic science. The atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide and methane So did the early Earth's, and life was able to start here. This is clearly not a problem for some types of life. Shallow seas cover 40% of the oceans That's... (more)	—	over 3 years ago
Answer	—	A: Competently Mobile Photosynthetic Animal? 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 distance is 1367 W/m2. About 30% of that gets reflected back into space by the upper atmosphere. That le... (more)	—	almost 4 years ago
Answer	—	A: Black as color of magic 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 ultraviolet are obvious choices, being on either side of the visible spectrum. eyes and brain ... do n... (more)	—	almost 4 years ago
Answer	—	A: What conditions would cause an extremely dense (dark) coniferous forest to grow? Nature does this on its own, given enough time. Different tree species have evolved different strategies. Some require a lot of sun, grow fast, and make a lot of seeds before being overshadowed by taller trees. Others have evolved to tolerate shade, usually in return for being less competitive whe... (more)	—	almost 4 years ago
Answer	—	A: Renaming Researched Q&A This isn't "my" site, so I don't really care what you do. Take this as an observation from a bystander. It seems to me you're trying to put a rather fine point on two broad classes of questions. It's not clear what problem you're trying to solve by dividing the site into ordinary questions and r... (more)	—	almost 4 years ago