Activity for Z.Schroeder
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | — |
Hiding a subterranean alien megastructure I need to know if it'd be possible for a underground ring-like structure of immense proportions and alien design to go unnoticed by modern day sonar, radar, and geological surveying. For an idea of size, imagine a tunnel about the width of a football field or bigger (maybe 100-200 meters in diamete... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Ways to cushion an un-augmented human against high, prolonged g-forces? Soft sci-fi uses inertial dampeners. Harder sci-fi uses stuff like advanced crash couches, robotic exoskeletons, or (my personal favorite) drug cocktails filled with stimulants and other medication like the Expanse's "juice". I'm looking for something a little different and a little bit out-there. Id... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Would a river running through a large salt deposit turn red? I've heard that bodies of water boasting high salinities tend to turn red due to seasonal algae blooms. I have a river in a fantasy setting I'm working on that's blood red year-round, and I want to kind of subtly hint to the readers that this is the actual reason the river is red, rather than the loc... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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How to hide the fact that you're in an O'Neill cylinder? Let's say you've either cloned yourself a native population (the ethical option) or taken a bunch of volunteers and wiped all their memories of modern technology and society (the slightly more morally iffy option), then taken your fresh batch of blank slates and dropped them into a closed, simulated ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Could a self-aware bacterial supercomputer start its own ecosystem? I know A LOT of this gonna be a stretch and that I'm probably misunderstanding or exaggerating current real-life trends in science, but that's kind of why I'm asking the question. We know it's possible to use bacteria to form simple logic gates like computers: http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-turn-... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Changing the emission spectrum of the human body Let's say I'm a superhero or a magic space-wizard with the ability to change the color of any object I touch i.e. change what wavelengths of light it emits. If I want to become invisible, I could then theoretically reduce my body's emission spectrum to emit either mostly wavelengths of light invisibl... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Could a cyborg catch a bullet? Let's assume you have access to some pretty crazy tech but that you still have to obey the basic rules of biology. If you build your cyborg so that the only remaining squishy bits are the brain and perhaps a few others like the heart and digestive system (though it is my understanding that everything... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
| Question | — |
Can you have brain uploading without having solved the binding problem? Sort of a jumping-off point from my last question, I speak of the "binding problem" that currently plagues neuroscience and cognitive studies, and which plays a large role in debating AI and whole brain emulation. It has its own wikipedia article, but for those looking for a shorter summation, the bi... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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What purpose could baseline humans possibly serve in a society of digitized minds? I want a story with upload-based resurrective immortality, but this also makes me feel like I need to address the implications of a society that's primarily dominated by digitized human minds. Namely, how they would utterly outcompete even the most radically enhanced baselines. Is there enough ro... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
| Question | — |
How could we clone an alien? Let's assume that sometime in the next year, we receive a transmission from deep space containing what appears to be blueprints of an alien genome. After extensive study and determining that the data packet is indeed a reservoir of (astro)biological and genomic information describing an alien, presum... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
| Question | — |
How fast could you run a human brain? Accelerating a person's perceived sense of time is a fairly common subject in science fiction, and to keep a long story short, I was wondering just how far you could stretch time out when you're working with an organic brain rather than a digitally uploaded mind. Is the limit something like experienc... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Why would aliens design their von Neumann replicators to use nitrogen? I want to contrive a scenario in which 23rd century humanity faces a dire crisis due to an extraterrestrial von Neumann ecology that rapidly consumes Nitrogen as a part of its life cycle. So rapidly in fact that it threatens to deplete Titan's Nitrogen atmosphere in under a few hundred years, potenti... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Effects of nitrogen deprivation on the body? I'm trying to build a designer organism that would prove a threat to all life on Earth. Sort of a semi-organic von Neumann ecology of microscopic nitrogen-eaters that rapidly consume nitrogen to fuel their own growth, which not only threatens to drastically accelerate the depletion of Titan's nitroge... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Could the Molded from Resident Evil 7 exist in real life? The Resident Evil franchise is obviously the last place you want to take away any lessons on biology, pathology or virology from. However the new(-ish) Molded enemies from Resident Evil 7:Biohazard make me curious. Could you really design a bio-engineered fungus that spawns mobile offshoot organisms?... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Increasing the density of the human body A lot of people are probably familiar with this sort of handwavium in fiction when it's asked where a shapeshifter's extra mass comes from. Most choose to ignore that question. In works that pretend to be slightly more credible, they simply state that no extra mass is being created at all and that th... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How big would a fusion reactor need to be to produce a constant triple digit terawattage? And how much fuel would you need to carry? I'm trying to determine what kind of engine you'd need to accelerate a good-size spacecraft (thousands to millions of tons) at a constant 1g in a race across the solar system, and what kind of weight-to-fuel ratio you'd end up with (as well as what ratio wou... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How to cushion the brain from high g-forces Let's say you have a cyborg who's replaced their whole body, everything but the brain, with machinery. Next, you put them on a spaceship pulling dozens or even hundreds of gs. How are they going to survive? What's the best way to protect a disembodied brain from arbitrarily high g-forces? This quest... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Powering the interplanetary trade ships of the 23rd-24th century Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put into making it, making it the Samsung Note 7 battery of future energy solutions. With that out of the w... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Can an entire ecosystem be one giant organism with distributed intelligence? I need someone to fact-check me and tell me if there's anything immediately bogus or physically impossible with the scenario I'm about to propose. Billions of years ago, under the ice of Europa, the first single-celled organism developed. Over time, members of this single species began to differenti... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Could a microorganism possess intelligence? Moreover, could a culture of microorganisms form a collective hive-intelligence similar to ants or bees? I'm trying to design a scientifically plausible hive-mind, and I'm trying to decide whether the best option is to merely utilize tiny aquatic insects with the conventional type of hive-intelligenc... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Could thermal suppression metamaterials be used to create stealth in space? https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11809 With a hundred years of development, could this technology realistically be extrapolated into... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Will interplanetary shipping even be necessary in a future with nanofabricators? 3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtain any given item is simply supply your fabricator with the right raw materials. In a future with ideal f... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Using Europa's geysers as a source of geothermal power? Assuming you already had sufficient money and resources to build a tower stretching from the top of Europa's ice layer down to the bottom of the seabed, could you build it on top of one of its geysers to take advantage of both an easy access point as well as a sustainable source of clean geothermal e... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Could a satellite remain hidden in this day and age? Pretty simple question. Whether you're launching a spy satellite, building a top secret orbital missile weapon, or investigating a mysterious alien artifact in orbit around Earth heralding the return of the Starborn ones, could a large satellite remain hidden from modern humans long enough to do anyt... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Does my ferrofluid party trick make sense? Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse Tyson expy to show off a party trick using ferrofluid that he calls "The Real Corona". What he does is p... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What direction is my asteroid coming from? I have an asteroid. I want it to hit Earth. The best way to hit Earth is from behind the Sun, which makes it harder to detect you if you're an asteroid. Now, I have a basic understanding of things like aphelion/perihelion, semi-major and minor axes, and orbital eccentricities, but not enough that I f... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Are there any elements that wouldn't be useful to a self-replicating machine? I wanna have a scene where the protagonists see the gray goo excreting human skeletons because they can't use the calcium in them for anything. But is this true? Would a self-replicating machine regard any chemical elements as truly "useless" to its goals, or would it endeavor to disassemble atoms an... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How to destroy/destabilize a structure that's been flux-pinned? Flux pinning (also known as quantum locking): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxpinning This technique has been discussed on this site before as a method for creating nearly indestructible super-materials that can absorb as much energy from violent impacts as you can feed into the electromagnetic ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Generating power using a black hole's accretion disk? Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep reading about how black hole starships can harvest the energy produced by the black hole's Hawking radiati... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What power source could accelerate my O'Neill cylinder to fractions of c? An O'Neill cylinder for those not in the know is basically a space habitat consisting of a rotating cylinder 32km long and 8km in diameter. I want to turn one into an actual spacecraft rather than a habitat. Assuming the ones building/retrofitting this enormous spaceship are god-like posthumans, what... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How big/powerful would your fusion reactor need to be to power the engines of a 32km long starship? Let's assume the reactor takes up about 4 vertical kilometers and has the same radius as the ship (4km). This gives you a volume of about 2.01e11 m^3, which given about 3-5% of the reactor's estimated mass means your available reaction mass (presumably mostly hydrogen) at any given time would be a fe... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Wireless power generation in a fleet of spaceships Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter to get the fleet moving at anything resembling a decent speed. Even for antimatter, carrying that much f... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Do the physics of my gray goo scenario check out? Basically what I'm picturing is a slight variation of the usual model that relies on flux pinning (a.k.a quantum locking) to resist damage. The swarm has a macroscopic "core", some sort of electromagnetic field generator with an accompanying power source that directs the movements of simplistic super... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How quickly could a spaceborne missile accelerate? Is there any practical g-limit for unmanned spacecraft, or could you theoretically push a missile to significant fractions of c in hours or minutes while pulling hundreds or thousands of Gs? I need to design a relativistic kill vehicle that can be readily used for ship to ship combat without being in... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What's a safer design for a relativistic kill vehicle? A large railgun mounted on the spine of a mega-scale starship (20-32km) or an antimatter-powered missile launched outside the ship? For clarification's sake, when I say "safer" I'm referring to "safer for the ship firing the weapon" rather than anything else. I figure the railgun has more combat adv... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How do spaceship-mounted railguns not destroy the ships firing them? And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32"‰MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons will know what I'm talking about (https://youtube.com/watch?v=D1GdoUDBsaE) This is less of a "how it's do... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Creating an infinitely powerful weapon that doesn't make you infinitely dead Let's say that hundreds of years from now our posthuman descendants finally do good on NASA's promises and build an Alcubierre drive or a true reactionless drive (either one works for this example). Great! Now we can traverse the stars! And if any uppity aliens show up and try to get fresh with us, w... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Fleeing the solar system It's the height of humanity's space-colonization golden age when casual interplanetary travel has become possible and humans have either colonized or established large space stations around nearly every planet in the Solar System. Then, humanity is beset by the sudden onslaught of an unknown alien ag... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Accelerating a massive spaceship How much wattage would you need to accelerate a four petaton spaceship by 1g for a year? This should be about enough to reach near light speed, which is perfect for interstellar cruising, but I'm wondering how feasible this timeframe is given that it would obviously require a lot of energy (not sure ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Ideal size for a relativistic generation ship? Assuming the ship has access to fusion power, a large volume of solar panels, and crude antimatter power generators (say maybe 1 gram a day per generator, or whatever is reasonable for technological development a few hundred or a thousand years in the future), how big could a generation ship designed... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Using Mars as a waystation for asteroid mining Would there be any benefit to this? At first I was thinking if you had an outpost on Mars you could spend less money on the actual trip to the belt itself, but I'm not sure if having your launch station be closer to the belt makes a difference when, at the end of the day, it still has to make it back... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Ways to make an alien viral plague scientifically hard? Aside from resorting to a grey goo-ish nanoplague that kills indiscriminately regardless of biochemistry, how might an alien virus, bacteria or other pathogen still be dangerous to humans? Could a disease with incompatible biochemistry still cause damage to the human body if a person is exposed to it... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How big would a human have to be to have a full set of redundant organs? I'm trying to design a realistic genetically engineered nanotech super-soldier with a full set of redundant organs. How much more interior volume and thus height/weight/muscle mass would a human body need to support 2 hearts, 3 lungs, 2 stomachs, 3 kidneys, 2 livers, 2 sets of large and small intesti... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What's the fastest a genetically or technologically enhanced human could regenerate? After watching this brilliant video by Shoddycast about Stimpaks in the Fallout universe: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLY-FMxsb2U I started to wonder. Just how many of science fiction's most memorable regenerators, even the ones in supposedly harder sci fi, are complete bullshit? How fast could y... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Would Europa be a logical choice for commercial and industrial ice mining? As we all know, hydrogen and by extension water, gaseous, liquid or frozen, is pretty much everywhere in our solar system besides maybe Mercury. The most abundant source may be the Asteroid Belt, which contains millions/billions of cubic kilometers of water, more than exists on the surface of our own... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Would this megastructure work? Think basically a Jupiter brain (a megascale computer made from a gas giant) but with a Dyson shell surrounding it to act as a threefold nutrient/waste exchange (assuming it repairs itself and adds to its own mass in a manner analogous to "eating" in the loosest possible sense), heat dispersal mechan... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Could negative matter/energy exist in a stable state? As in, could negative matter (N.B. not the same thing as antimatter) exist on the macro-scale as a solid, liquid or gas without the weird effects that cause it to repel normal matter and possibly violate conservation of energy? Or would any story hinging on the existence of negative matter require po... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How long would it take us to notice Pluto disappearing? Self-explanatory. I have a planet-eating entity moving slowly across the solar system towards Earth and I wanna know how long it would take for us to notice its presence once it starts consuming Pluto (assuming we had no prior warning or knowledge of its existence). (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How to make antimatter batteries safe Assuming the wars of the far, far future aren't either fought exclusively by unmanned spacecraft/robots/drones or in ways so incomprehensible to us that comparisons are meaningless, the only foolproof way to increase the power of an infrantryman's weapons are to make the switch to laser and energy we... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Tree volcano? (A "treecano", if you will) Okay, so I have a species of tree that's absolutely enormous, 1-5km tall when fully matured. Its immense size is supported by a large base, bark that incorporates a 2-d carbon lattice for strength (similar to graphene, carbyne and carbon nanotubes), and a fully functioning circulatory system to distr... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |