Posts by rwallace
I'm looking at a science fiction scenario similar to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness where buildings are exposed to the elements for millions of years. I have a feeling they wouldn't be qui...
I'm working on a science fiction story which includes the following premise: Tony Stark invents an unobtainium reactionless engine, and the protagonists want to build a spaceship around it, big eno...
On Earth in 2017, finding oil or coal deposits is a tall order. However, consider a science fiction scenario where we find a habitable planet that hasn't hosted an intelligent species in at least a...
On a timescale of 1e11 years, all uranium and thorium will have decayed, but planets will still exist, orbiting red dwarf stars. Would it be possible to use lead as a nuclear fuel? In principle, t...
Sci-fi setting where cargo is being shipped to colony worlds. If a spaceship has to land and take off again, that costs a lot of money, so that mode of transport is reserved for people and urgent, ...
I'm trying to figure out whether spacecraft could see explosions occurring on the surface of a planet, or under what conditions they could. To be specific: Given a spacecraft equipped with a dupl...
I'm writing about a setting where building technology is quite advanced, but elevators have not yet been invented, so the limiting factor on height is ergonomic. What would be the maximum practica...
In a setting where portals can be opened between one location and another, Suppose you open a portal of area one square meter, with one end at the surface and the other end at the bottom of an oce...
Working on a future history setting; the question arises, since the world cannot run on fossil fuels forever, one way or another, something must end up replacing them; what will that something be? ...
Setting: a mining colony on a distant world, exporting rare-earth minerals. As in many space opera stories, the world is a shirtsleeve environment with a reasonably pleasant biosphere. Tech level:...
Magnetic core memory was a critical innovation in the development of computers. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory it was the most advanced form of memory from about the mid-fif...
A launch loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop is a proposed way to put lots of things into space at lower unit cost than rockets (only need to pay the energy cost in electricity for each ...
How long can objects made of hard material last at room temperature in otherwise ideal conditions? If left outdoors on Earth, over the course of millions of years, any material will be eroded by w...
