Posts by Logan R. Kearsley
In the story Wang's Carpets (and part of the novel Diaspora), Greg Egan sketchily describes a high-dimensional universe which contains no analog for light, such that the aliens who inhabit this uni...
Properly ventilating a deep mine is a significant engineering challenge. Ergo, you don't want to be carrying around torches that use up some of your precious breathing oxygen if you don't absolutel...
I am attempting to design aliens that live in a universe with a 4+1 space-time--i.e., a universe with four orthogonal spatial dimensions, rather than three, in addition to a fifth time dimension. I...
This is a follow-up to Neutron Star mining. Assuming that problem can be solved, it would eventually degenerate to something similar to this case. And if it can't, white dwarfs seem like the next b...
Postpartum depression among humans is a thing that is "normal" insofar as it happens a lot, but it is not "normal" in the sense of "a thing that we don't worry about"; it doesn't happen to absolute...
So, mechanical computers are a thing, as are pneumatic and hydraulic actuators. Combining those ideas, it's not that hard to design simple purely-pneumatic/hydraulic robots--provide them with a so...
The song Diggy Diggy Hole makes some questionable assertions about dwarven anatomy. Specifically: Born underground Suckled from a teat of stone Raised in the dark The safety of o...
For background: I have some sci-fi technology based on sci-fi physics which depends on some fictional forces that interact differently with up quarks vs. down quarks. So, to get certain types of ef...
Aquatic races are usually assumed to be stunted in technological development by the inability to create fire or forge metals. But what about doing chemistry at all? The development of chemistry i...
Boules is a range of relative games played with small, heavy steel balls thrown on a court, such as the French Petanque and Italian Bocce. While there is variation between games in terms of how an...
The Wikipedia page on sewer gas states that Sewer gas can be used as a power source, thus reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. However, no references or further details are provided. So, s...
Technological approaches to refrigeration tend to involve either high compression ratios of fairly exotic (from a biochemical point of view, anyway) volatile substances, or high-power, low-efficien...
I'm trying to work out some really basic biochemical details for cold-world aliens whose bodily fluids are based on liquid methane rather than water. I figure they have to be hydrogen breathers, be...
Given an arbitrarily long time to do so, what is the maximum depth too which a dwarven civilization could practically extend their mines / cities? And what would be the final limiting factor preven...
Mammals live in some fairly extreme environments, but the most heat-tolerant ones all seem to cheat: e.g., they dig burrows to stay cool during the day and come out at night, avoiding the heat, or ...
The fixedness of body plans varies widely across different types of Earthling organisms. At one extreme, you have things like tardigrades, for which every individual of any given species has exactl...
Despite the wide variety of movement strategies employed by Earthling animals, up to an including curling their bodies into circles and rolling, there is one mode of locomotion that is glaringly mi...
The universe so far: If charged lepton fields are eliminated from the universe, charged pions become stable (having no decay path that preserves charge), replacing electrons to form bound "atomic"...
Some follow-up thoughts on this question... Hydrogen isn't very soluble in water. Oxygen is more so, but still sufficiently insoluble that most oxygen-breathing Earth creatures use special oxygen ...
There are exactly 2 force laws that can produce stable closed orbits: proportional (spring force) and inverse-square. The inverse square law occurs naturally for monopole central forces in 3 dimens...
So, we've gone off to another star system and decided to build a Dyson bubble--a continuous statite, supported by radiation pressure, surrounding a star--with a surface gravity of 1g to live on. N...
Consider a universe in which leptons & quarks (every fundamental particle that possesses electric charge) all have twins with magnetic monopole charge instead, resulting in two parallel kinds o...
Supercritical CO2 has been suggested as a potential alternative bio-solvent, replacing water, at high pressures and modestly elevated temperatures. But what about supercritical N2? ScCO2 is an ind...
Suppose you have a planet covered in a deep layer of supercritical CO2, and animals evolved to live in it. Discounting the ones who crawl along the bottom, would their method of locomotion be more...
