Activity for Olin Lathropâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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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 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280677 |
Hmm. That sounds rather dangerous for the command center. It may move fast, but it's location would be highly predictable. Tossing a rock at the right time and angle from the canyon rim would make quite a mess, I expect. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283561 | Initial revision | — | over 3 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 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #283359 |
Winter wheat doesn't grow during the winter. It's called that because it is planted in the fall, so the seeds are in the ground during the winter. That way they are ready to sprout just as soon as conditions allow. All growing still happens during the growing season, and requires light other than ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #283382 |
Oops. Fixed. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283382 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283382 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283382 | Initial revision | — | over 3 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 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #282490 |
How is digging a depression supposed to create an island? What mechanisms are you imaging at work? There is a lot of context missing here. Sustainable how? All real islands eventually erode away, once whatever forces formed them stop. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282177 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #282177 |
@John: This is the *scientific* speculation site. Some minimum level of science is required to ask good questions and understand answers here. I'm not saying your understanding of gravity is below that level, but is nonetheless rather basic as Newtonian mechanics goes. This might make a better que... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282177 | Initial revision | — | over 3 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #282175 |
There seem to be two separate questions here. While you're at it, fix the *"is ... must be"* too. I had to read that a few times before getting past it to see the apparent questions. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281984 |
This still leaves open what the intensity of the resulting radiation is. If even after shifting the CMB to 570 nm you only get a few Watts per square meter, you still don't have anything remotely like Earth. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281885 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281858 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281727 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281727 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281727 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281708 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281708 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281157 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281067 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281067 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281067 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280633 |
It's been over two weeks since there was any activity here. Where is this at? (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280633 |
That's 47,330 no-brainers. Go for it. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #280677 | Initial revision | — | almost 4 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) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #280655 | Initial revision | — | almost 4 years ago |
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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) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279977 | Initial revision | — | almost 4 years ago |
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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) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279725 |
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— | almost 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279725 | Initial revision | — | almost 4 years ago |
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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) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279498 |
@Peter: Good point. And the large animal that kills the most people in North America is the moose. (more) |
— | almost 4 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) |
— | almost 4 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) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279499 |
This depends a lot on what the device actually *does*. Is it a really fast computer you can run arbitrary code on? A communications device? A really fast computer that runs specific apps only? If so, what apps? Does it provide a view of some remote location? Able to spy on anyone anywhere in re... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278155 |
That explains why I didn't get pinged. However, the removal of the comment prevented me from seeing what I had asked the OP to do. To use your words, the comment wasn't really deprecated since I still needed to see it despite the original problem having been fixed. The moderation was a bit too agg... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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