Posts 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...
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 ge...
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...
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) l...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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.
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...
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 ...
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 tow...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 n...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
