Activity for Z.Schroederâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | — |
Would an alien forest look similar to some of our own? To elaborate on the title, can alien plant life on an Earth-like planet look similar to ours, or would plants on an alien planet be radically different, unrecognizable, or incomparable to Earth plants in the eyes of a human traveler? I've heard things about different pigmentation based on what wavel... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Reasons to not allow an uploaded brain to be conscious? My story has brain uploading, but in practice it serves a purpose more like reincarnation, recreating the original recorded state of the scanned brain in a pre-prepared clone of the deceased. I need a reason why these people's uploaded consciousnesses wouldn't be able or be allowed to be conscious wh... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Would the totality of all living human brains be valuable to an alien superintelligence? I have a scenario where, thousands of years ago, an alien AI is imprisoned in a human body in place of a traditional AI box to limit its mental capacities (it's being punished and not expected to do anything). It wants to escape so it can reclaim its former intelligence, which is being stored in a ma... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Side-effects of speeding up the Earth's rotation? Let's say the Earth suddenly and jarringly accelerates to the point where day becomes night in a few seconds (assuming it was originally noon at the point of observation and that equal time was taken to accelerate and decelerate). What kind of undoubtedly apocalyptic effects would this have? (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
What would happen if you suddenly moved the moon to the other side of the Earth? Like, if you massively accelerated the Moon's orbit or propelled it somehow so that it moved from one side of the Earth to the other in a very short period of time, what effect would that have on the people down on Earth? A lot? Any? (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Would people living on different ringworlds around the same star measure time differently? Okay so I have a sci-fi world masquerading as a fantasy world where numerous different genetically-engineered humanoids live on nine different ringworlds orbiting an artificial Earth-mass black hole (which they see as a "black sun"). The black hole's accretion disk provides light to the ringworlds mu... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How long does it take for a prominent trait to evolve out of a population? Could something like, say, elephants losing their trunks or avian species losing/gaining the ability to fly happen in just a couple hundred thousand years or would it take millions? (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How to keep a machine running for thousands of years How would I future-proof a complex machine or set of machines so that they will still be running 2000-3000 years from now? Is this possible with our current level of engineering and we just don't do it because it isn't practical/economical, or is this just straight up wishful thinking? What about a m... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Could complex life evolve after planetary catastrophe in just 120 million years? Imagine a gas giant orbiting Sirius B, a hot Jupiter. 120 million years ago give or take, the star reaches its final stage as a red giant then collapses into a white dwarf, ejecting countless billions of tons of hot gas and plasma at high speeds. The death of the star and its subsequent release blast... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Feasibility of a gene bomb? Let's say you're an alien and you want to make sure your species outlives your planet or whatever disaster you currently face, whether it be natural or engineered. You load up a bunch of self-replicating spacecraft to seed any planets they pass that have complex life with a highly infectious retrovir... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
What would night look like on a planet orbiting Sirius B? Assume the planet's orbit around Sirius B is much closer to its parent star than we are to the sun so it still receives enough light and heat to form an Earth-like environment. What does night look like on this hypothetical planet? Would Sirius A shine brightly in the night sky like a full moon? Woul... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Sending some people into the far future And I mean faaaaar future. Like, twenty thousand years minimum. 13 million years at maximum. Let's say the Earth is doomed and to avoid the impending extinction of the human race, we throw most of our eggs in the space colonization basket and then set a few thousand people aside for the crazy, last... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Different ways geographically distant cultures might measure time? Okay so in my world, I have two pre-industrial societies that live thousands of miles apart from each other on their ringworld. One lives in a desert climate similar to India or the Middle East while the other lives in a more Northern European climate, like England, Germany or Norway. I want to empha... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Realistic limits to the transforming abilities of nanomachines? We all know how fiction likes to play fast and loose with nanomachines. But really, what would they be capable of in real life, assuming you had an utterly arbitrary amount of them? What would the timescale be? Would you ever be able to shapeshift or use nanomachine-based superpowers, or is that all ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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How plausible is this as a corporate motivation? 250 years in the future, humanity has colonized Mars and the Moon, and built thousands of orbiting outposts and hundreds of O'Neill cylinders in the zone between Venus and Jupiter. The key enabler of this development along with the associated population boom that comes with all this free space is the... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Which of these traits would Europan fish evolve? Bioluminescence and/or extremely large eyes to take in the almost nonexistent light beneath Europa's ice sheet, or eyeless sockets and a transparent body with senses better equipped to detect minute changes in water pressure? (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How close could a binary pair be to our solar system without having already been detected? Self-explanatory. After my previous question about a sextenary star system and a black hole, I decided to dial back to just two parent stars and a planet. How close could they be if we in the real world still haven't detected them by the early to mid-21st century? The 23rd? I'm assuming they'd have t... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Are space stations like Sevastopol (Alien Isolation) realistic? Like this: If we were to build stations in deep space meant exclusively for human habitation, would chunky floating cities like this be a feasible design or would we be more likely to create something like an O'Neill cylinder instead? (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Ways to "kill" an AI? Let's say two super-intelligent, self-improving AIs have, for whatever reason, decided "THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!", and are now trying to kill/delete each other. How would they conceivably go about doing this? And I don't mean like in the Avengers with the Vision and his "I'M EXORCISING ULTRON FROM THE ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How to maintain artificial gravity in an upside-down city Let's assume that sometime in the far future, ice-mining on Europa has become a very profitable business venture due to dwindling fresh water on Earth and the growing demand for more water from the Mars colonies (yes I know that Europa is primarily saltwater and would thus require filtering at additi... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How to build a tank equipped with a 1 GJ railgun Not a tank that could survive being shot with a 1 GJ railgun (pretty sure nothing can survive that), but a tank that can withstand the recoil of a 1 GJ railgun that's been mounted to it. Obviously, a way to anchor it to the ground is in order to keep it from flying away is required, but what about ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
How plausible is an Alcubierre drive, really? Like on a scale of one to ten, how plausible are Alcubierre drives in terms of our current understanding of physics? Plausible enough to be considered "hard sci-fi", or are they just another form of handwave like hyperspace? This isn't asking about how the science behind the Alcubierre drive works ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Could this stellar system exist within 10-20 light years from Earth, undetected? After reevaluating my sense of perspective on sublight interstellar travel, I'm thinking of moving my planet closer to Earth to cut down on travel time and fuel costs. However, the planet my colonists are traveling to and the solar system it presides in have some very specific conditions. Firstly, t... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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What would an interstellar economy bound by relativity look like? The type of economy where your mining operation takes years just to start yielding marketable product, let alone generate revenue, because the speed of light makes the economic feasibility of interstellar voyages to obtain otherwise valuable resources significantly more complicated. (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Why would an animal need six legs? And I'm not talking about insects. In what kind of environment could a large number of different species all develop six legs/limbs/appendages the same way most vertebrate species on Earth have four? Could it just be up to chance or is there a reason all animals on Earth have = (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Super-intelligent fungus? How scientifically plausible is this? A giant, self-aware fungal supercomputer made or evolved from something like the Blue Mountain honey fungus or maybe a slime mold of a similar size? Could something like this ever exist in nature as an example of distributed intelligence, or would it have to be c... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
And I think it's gonna be a long long time... (relativity question) So I've got a bunch of freeze-dried colonists traveling in torpor to a solar system 55 light years away at 92% c. From an outsider's perspective it takes them sixty years to get there, but how long would it feel like for the people onboard the ship? How long would they be in suspended animation, and ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Scientifically-plausible alien telepathy A caveat I will begin this question with is this: this system MUST be entirely organic. In fact it must be EVOLVED. Therefore Ghost in the Shell or Metal Gear-style nanocomms or cranial implants are a no-go, because they rely on man-made technology. With that out of the way, here's my idea. We alrea... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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The stars are going out! (a question about vacuum metastability) So I had an idea earlier today and was wondering. Most sources you consult about the supposed "vacuum metastability event" say that the bubble would begin expanding at NEARLY the speed of light, not exactly the speed of light. How much slower would it really be? Would it give us enough time to see it... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Nailing the physics of a negative mass planet Another question about my exotic matter planet. I mentioned floating landmasses via anti-gravity and exotic matter mining, but I recently read this: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/fact-and-fiction-about-negative-mass And was thusly educated. Turns out nothing will float, negative mass or ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Safe distance from a black hole? Okay so we all know that one planet from the movie "Interstellar" that orbited the black hole Gargantua. How do I NOT get that? What's the minimum safe distance for a planet to be from a black hole ("safe" as in no funky relativistic time dilation and no megatsunamis)? (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Shake 'n bake colonies So here's my rough idea for how you could basically send one large ship with a crew of a few thousand (at least ten thousand, maybe forty) to establish a colony on an Earth-like world: First step is to build a ship. For the purposes of this thought experiment it will be an FTL ship but this is hones... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Is a habitable planet in a sextenary star system possible? So I want my planet to have six suns, but I'm not sure how far apart these stars would have to be from each other to not produce adverse effects on the planet that would prevent life from developing. What's a safe distance between each of the stars that would result in a sort of eternal daylight on t... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
| Question | — |
Would complex life evolve on this planet, and could humans survive on it without much outside help? Okay, as an extension of my previous question, I'm just going to lay bare all the details I've written down about this planet (including corrections from my last question), and ask the big question that needs to be answered about this planet. Can it support life, and if so could humans colonize it wi... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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