Posts by Serban Tanasa
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...
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 primar...
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 Lagrang...
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...
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 opponen...
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...
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 Nuclea...
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 ene...
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...
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...
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 civil...
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 sphe...
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 p...
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 radical...
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....
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 a...
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 m...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. Howe...
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....
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 ...
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, t...
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 ...
