Posts by 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 b...
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...
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 teet...
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 ...
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 ...
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 somethi...
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 wi...
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. ...
If the alternative economics is sufficiently well specified and can be at least somewhat scientifically analyzed, then I think this is OK without seeing the specific question. An easy pitfall woul...
I like Lundin's answer, but with a few changes. Lots of categories are confusing to people. They also spread out the posts of a low-volume site so that any one place looks even more abandoned tha...
