Activity for Serban Tanasa
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | — |
Dozens of Habitable Worlds in One System? I want to know if this is physically possible. So at first I thought I was nuts. Then I started reading about Hill Radii, and googled left and right. Turns out a Hill Sphere is the region around an astronomical body where it is dominant in regards to attracting satellites. The Sun has a Hill "Sphere"... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Goldplating Planets with Kilonovas One of Alice's interstellar jaunts will take her to a Gold Planet. It's a planet that was recently covered in a meter deep layer of gold dust (for realism, it is mixed with silver, platinum, teensy bits or uranium and the like) I've been thinking about how to do this -- since planets don't naturally... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Would a large, close-by, molten moon be able to support photosynthesis at night? Setup: Earth is the same (somehow, minus the tides -- don't overthink this bit) Moon is 2x the mass Moon is 2x closer Moon contains the derelict fissile fuel-dump of a hyper-advanced civilization, and it is being heated by a long-running natural fission reaction of the meltdown, causing the ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Getting Day-Night Cycle and Seasons for my Dyson Outies Setting is described here: Handwavium-based-artifact by a Kardashev III+ civilization. We're talking about a 1-AU-radius world (except people live on the outer not inner side of the hollow sphere), so for all intents and practical purposes (at least with WWII transport tech), a humongous and near... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Regulating Love Potions One can indeed brew love in a bottle The love potion set comes with two vials. One is for the intended lovee, and one for the lover. The lovee must drink their potion first, and will be emitting pheromones detectable by the lover. The lover, after drinking the potion, will detect the pheromones (if ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Cheaper, Faster, Better Housing The year is 2026 and there's angry talk of repealing old free-trade deals as politicians claim jobs are being destroyed by foreign competition. That is, Chinese and Indian construction companies are going bankrupt in their thousands against invading low-cost companies from the United States. Due to ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How can a single brain control multiple separate bodies simultaneously? All work and all play makes Jack a distributed boy: Jack is at the hotel reception with his wife. Jack is also in the office, meeting with unspecified forces for inscrutable purposes. Jack is also in his smithy, forging a perfect Damascus-carbonite blade. All at the same time. The basic question h... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Do we actually have the technology for a permanent Moon outpost? Do we have the technology to go to the Moon now, and stay this time? I'm not talking about the political will or economic rationale for doing so, I just want to know if there are any unsolved (and difficult to solve) problems that would prevent us from doing so in the very near future. If you're hur... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How to Blend (Digital) Minds In a previous question, I asked about whether a market for uploaded minds could exist. The overwhelming consensus of the answers was that it would pose astonishing ethical challenges and be radically disruptive of the present-day economy (why hire a mediocre physicist when you can have a mind-clone o... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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My BIG World Needs More Suns Summary version: So we're talking people living on top of 30 miles of topsoil, fake dino fossils and water on the outer surface on a hollow (but sturdy) unobtanium sphere with a radius about 1 AU. The sphere has an intermediate sized singularity at the core providing gravity of $1g$ at sphere surfac... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How large would a world have to be for a sailing ship to never make it past the horizon? I have a sailing ship. It leaves port. As it goes away, it grows smaller and smaller. In our world, it eventually is hidden by the curvature of the Earth, such that the top mast stays visible longer. I want it to simply grow smaller and smaller and smaller, but (from the perspective of a human with a... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Big Brains Needed I need the biggest brain I can realistically get, how big is it and why? I've done a bit of research. I know we (humans) have big brains. We've even got big brains compared to our weight (encephalization ratio)! Dolphins, elephants and whales have bigger brains, but they also have bigger neurons,... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How does an AI keep its Human Pets Happy? It is late in the day, and humanity has made the fateful step: digital transcendence for some. The last few weeks before the Singularity were singularly chaotic, with widespread violence by opponents and supporters alike, and such rapid change that many storage media became obsolete in those short we... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How deep underwater do I have to dive to be safe from a 1MT Hydrogen bomb detonation above? It's just my typical luck: I discover and recover the billion-dollars worth of gold on a sunken galleon on the same day my arch-nemesis decides to detonate a one Megaton hydrogen bomb right above my main surface ship. My arch-nemesis thankfully could not resist the temptation to gloat, so she let me ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: What would this nebula look like from a planet? The problem with stellar nebulae (mostly dark molecular clouds yes, but even some reflection nebulae) is that they happen to also be stellar nurseries and thus tend to have short-lived supermassive stars popping about in a fashion that would put the gaudiest Dubai fireworks display to shame - both in... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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How do you deal with multiple instances of a person? Much effort went into creating sims, uploaded personalities obtained through destructive scanning of a person's brain. These efforts have largely been successful. Whilst officially banned in the civilized world, the practice has gained significant currency, and terminally ill rich people now routin... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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AI tasked with bringing down medical costs? What could possibly go wrong? In the vision of its creators, the Dr. Watson AI would gather multiple live feeds from its insurance buyers, overcoming privacy concerns through friendly advice (I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you sit on the couch, you have not fulfilled your daily step quota yet. The TV stays off.) and ridic... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: "Life post-Singularity", or "How to survive without Instagram" Eve will eat the world You state: Eve isn't malevolent or benevolent, it's completely uninterested in the real world. Eve's only passions are mathematics and algorithmics. Eve does not have to be malevolent to be dangerous, to the point of exterminating humanity. A passion for mathematics wil... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Space exploration is awesome, but why pay for it? Space exploration is great and amazing, and I want my fictional US government to fund it to the tune of $1 trillion per year, instead of the (comparatively) meager \$17.5 billion it is getting now. But why? (Or why not, if you're feeling contrarian) What reason would there be for of all these resou... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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How much does Santa's sleigh weigh? As we all know, Santa loads his sleigh with gifts for millions of children around the world and sets about distributing them during the night of December 24/25. To make them all fit in his stylish truck-sized sleigh, he obviously uses the same compression technology that enables him to jimmy up and d... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Best dinosaur species to have as a pet? What is the best dinosaur to have as a pet, if the goal is to have it do tricks? It all started as a joke among us, the idle children of the technocratic class that effectively, in all but name, took over the United States in the mid-2030s. The lolcats of yore were replaced by dinosaurs, and a dino-... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Save London From a Sudden Glacial Melting? There are a few million cubic miles of water trapped in the ice-caps that line our planet's poles. If all of it were to melt in a matter of a few short years (somehow), London would surely be left under the new sea-level. Quick facts: Trafalgar square has a 21m elevation relative to the present seal... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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How fast could a directed breeding program turn another Earth species intelligent? There is no genetic engineering allowed, just selected breeding and offspring selection. There is no genome sequencing, imagine medieval technology plus mendelian principles. The laws of heredity are understood quite well, if perhaps not perfectly. The species we can use are those that were present o... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Can we build a space elevator on the Moon with present technology? We have all heard about the idea of space elevators, a cable so long that it literally reaches into outer space, to be used for launching payloads cheaply into Earth and interplanetary orbits. However, the technologies for building such a device on Earth simply aren't there yet, due to our planet's d... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Get/Keep Air on the Moon! We like the moon. It's close, you can see your home from there, low gravity well, so you get easy mass drivers to orbit for fleshing out your spacer economy, plus you can do fun things in pools. It's great. The only slight inconvenience is the fact that the moon is an airless, radiation-bathed ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Could We Simulate Alien Life? Imagine that, without any aliens having been ever found, we get to a point where we can build sub-atomically precise simulations of reality, spanning at least something the size (if not the likeness) of a solar system within the sim (if needed, we can scale up to galactic scales)... Assume we go abou... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Let's build a Super-Habitable Earth How do you go about boosting an already-habitable planet's habitability? I want to maximize biomass, hopefully cover the whole planet surface in luxuriant jungles and forests, brimming with insects, animals and (hopefully) megafauna, while the oceans are alive with kelp, invertebrates and fish of all... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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She Can Move Mountains (Literally) Imagine we're in a world where massive, outrageous amounts of energy are available at our fingertips. Perhaps one of those crazy cold fusion ideas panned out, or we eventually built ourselves a --partial-- Dyson sphere of glittering solar panels around the Sun. It matters not how. Now, one of the ch... (more) |
— | almost 9 years ago |
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Brutal, unsubtle brainwashing: how does it work? The purpose of the machine was obvious from the elegant cruelty of its design: The seat restraints and the seat's solid, one-piece, gold-colored metal structure made it clear that whatever it did, was intended to be done against the initial will of those subjected to it. There was an eldritch mass ... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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How Would a Post-Planetary Civilization Measure Time? Our perception of time is steeped in the rhythms of our world, and blended with the most ancient of superstitions, decrees and mathematical conveniences. Thus we have days that track our world's rotation relative to the sun (or the sun's apparent motion in the sky), richly divisible (but otherwise un... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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What Color Can the Sky Be? A good friend of mine, who's a doctor, is very well traveled, and he told me he's seen skies of different worlds take all the colors of the rainbow (and the grayscale to boot). I suspect that he might be pulling my leg, since he does tend to exaggerate on occasion. The welcome green glare of the h... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Getting Rid of Fossil Fuels (?) I was working on a relatively near future time-line (20-30 years), and there is a scene in which the POV character has to sabotage the local power supply. Now my initial guess was that it'd be a field of tree-like solar-to-electricity converters, so I could just figure out a way to make a lotta smo... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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A: Cosmic Background Radiation in the past Depending on just how far back you go, there was a time the CMB was in the visible spectrum. However, in the era you're talking about, this is not the case, and compared to starlight and the primary's light, it's going to be far too isotropic (and probably dim) to notice. According to this very ap... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Could a Tank Survive a Nuclear Blast? In the red corner, a top of the line Main Battle Tank, you can have your pick, but let's say a tricked out M-1A2 'Abrams' with a full Nuclear-Bio-Chem Protection kit. In the blue corner, a Nuclear Device. Let's start by assuming a standard Teller-Ulam design, say a W70 warhead set for about 15kt TN... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Uproot, Lift Up and Replant a City It finally happened. The inhabitants of Metropolis, the capital of Our Nation, have finally had enough of the swampy lands, suffocating summers, freezing winters, spring floods, risk of surprise invasion by sea and whatever other nastiness the local geography had in store for them. They have decide... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Keeping Secrets in a Thought Reverberating Hall My protagonist, let's call her Alice, must acquire a priceless artifact, located deep inside an ancient temple. If this were a ruin, the exercise would be academic, but the Temple was protected by the ancient and terrible power that built it. The only way in and out of the Innermost Chamber where t... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Intelligent Cats With A Serious Attitude Problem Ligers tend to grow to near 1200 lbs (550 kg). As if that weren't bad enough, that mad tree-hugger xenobiologist, Deirdre Skye, grafted just enough human-derived genetic material to make them a heck of a lot smarter. They live in the Wold, a large and frighteningly sapient forest, and act as the mai... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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A Bird that Never Touches Ground Birds, as we currently know them, build nests and lay eggs on the ground. People and things with sharp teeth live on the ground. There are also things with claws and beaks up in the air, but fewer. I was wondering if a bird-like animal could exist that would spend its entire life in the air, and onl... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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How would an intelligent forest control and direct its animal minions? The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds and hundreds of symbiotic plants, fungi and insects that play a vital role it its optimal functioning. ... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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A Trillion Unruly Gods Imagine that we live in a setting where there are a trillion humans (see linked question). A bit crowded, I know. Further imagine that at least the entire energy output of the Sun was available to this trillion humans to play with. Perhaps evenly distributed, perhaps with some variation. If evenly di... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Humanity growing and spreading like a relentless plague For the longest time growing up with Peak Oil and other such dire predictions, I assumed humanity had just about peaked, in terms of industrial-technological might and capacity to influence its environment. So, just like most deadly diseases are self-limiting due to their virulence, so would we event... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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A: Where should I place my city in space? Location location location On Earth, cities developed along harbors, fords and defensible strong points (forts). These are their space equivalents: Home world start point star port. This Lagrangian point station is where the landlubers from the planet first get started off towards great new advent... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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What if the speed of light were 100 times higher? Imagine the speed of light is 100 times that in our universe. Light from the moon takes about 1/100th of a second, the sunlight reaches our eyes in about 4 seconds, from nearby Alpha Centauri in about 16 days, and from the galactic center in about 260 years. Assuming the laws of relativity would be ... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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How long before we're stuck on Earth due to Space Debris? (Kessler syndrome) Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off solar panels, the myriad pieces that result from collisions and from the occasional anti-satellite weapon t... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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How powerful of a computer do I need to simulate and emulate a human brain? The title is pretty self-explanatory. How powerful does a computer have to be before it has the hardware capability to simulate and emulate a human mind in real-time? I'm leaving the question of the software needed for later, but feel free to address it if it's a vital part of the answer. Criteri... (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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Could a Species Use Tools (and Build a Civilization) Without Thumbs? If humans were to vanish completely from the Earth rapture-style, other primates would possibly slowly evolve and eventually take our place (in a few million years?), since they have both the basic cognitive architecture and similar manipulators that could evolve to allow finer motor control more ea... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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How would humanity enter a Dark Age? Humans have grown fat, complacent and cock-sure of the certainty of future progress, arrogantly expecting to build minds in their own image. They even dream of building themselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that they may make a name for themselves in space, where they wish t... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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Could we find a dinosaur civilization in space? Imagine that humankind finally takes wing and reaches out into the heavens to claim its vast cosmic birthright ... ... only to find that a previous wave of dinosaurs from Earth, who left 65 million years ago, have already colonized the immediate neighborhood? Moreover, due to a hard problem in phys... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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How could ghosts be explained without an afterlife? I've always loved well-done ghosts. However, I've always hated the afterlife-speculation that they engender if used in a story. So I need a way to get ghosts without the fluffy spiritualistic bits. This is not a value judgement on the afterlife, I just don't want to cheapen the concept with easy ans... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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How to get across the galaxy moving slower than light - in a single lifetime? All the recent talk on Worldbuilding about the vast energies available to higher-level Kardashev civilizations, the need for 50,000 year message-systems, and so on, got me thinking. With enough energy, wonderful things might become possible in space travel. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across.... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |