Activity for JDługosz
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | — |
Environment suit design for ultra-cold temperatures What would be the design of a near-future extreme-cold environment suit? Consider a protective suit that is not a space suit because it doesn't need to augment the pressure felt by the body. It does, however, need to protect against extreme cold. While the lack of pressurization makes a lot of thi... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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What other skills/affectations would be found in someone with heightened Proprioception? I want a character who has a highly developed ability of empathy. She knows what others are feeling, and often thinking. This story does not have any supernatural or non-hard SF elements, so it needs a real-world backing. I figure it works like the theory of Somatic empathy which probably uses mir... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Alternate "smart home" control In real life, "open mike" terminals are becoming popular, that listen for commands addressed to them and answer questions, perform online actions, or operate compatible smart-home controllers or an ever growing number of IoT devices. In ten years (when my story is set) they may even work as well as ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Economic system to support Kessler Remediators, with maximum drama After reading this question by Nick M (now closed) and exchanging some comments with him, I have some ideas related to the scenario. I realized that the comprehensive design covers several distinct topics and is not what the question asked, so I'm posting the questions I did answer, as new questions... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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Economic systems for micronations in space What are possible economic systems for use within a space-based industrial settlement? The different approaches are to be weighed by the competitve advantages they offer to their respective communities. Many science fiction stories are written about the space industrial settlement or colony as a "c... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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Abstract Graphics for indicating emotions What kinds of abstract colors, shapes, and other compositional elements could be used to indicate various emotions? My story features an artificial intelligence that's embodied in an industrial practical body design, not a humaniform body. The head is an ellipsoid with a grey zone for the eye regio... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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Humanity's first effort at moving a planet What technology will humanity use the first time it moves a planet? In the near-ish future, humanity has colonized Mars which has since become self-sustaining and independent, as well as various other solar system bodies. The asteroid belt is a principal source of resources, and a mature infrastruc... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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How can Bronze Age people make hazmat gear for chlorine trifluoride? How can Bronze Age people make hazmat gear for chlorine trifluoride? The ClF₃ is produced biologically, just as fruits produce acid or capsaicin. This alternate world just happens to have bacteria "” and later, plants "” that hit on the trick of using fluorine to produce toxins and novel organic ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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How to realistically build a time machine? In 1890's H.G. Wells famously takes a "science fiction" approach to time travel by building a machine that can move freely through time as a dimension. It was made of clockwork "” mechanical gears and such. Gears can perform ordinary motion in precise ways, but nothing about that enables doing some... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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How could public key cryptography evolve in a biological system? Pssst! Come here! Imagine an ecosystem where animals have evolved highly developed mimicry of each other's calls (perhaps they have the universal vocal apparatus discussed in earlier questions). So predators lure prey, prey confuse predators, and rivals confuse prospective mates and each other... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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How could a biological loudspeaker work and naturally evolve? In this Answer I suggested that an animal could have a tampani acting as a loudspeaker, as in Vernor Vinge's The Blabber, later featured as the race called Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep. In the original Blabber it was shown that the animal could reproduce any sounds it had collected, like a mockingbi... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Does gravity converge in a wrap-around universe? This is a follow up to What would physics be like in a wrap-around universe? PyRulez commented, "Will gravity still make sense? (Namely, will it converge or not)?" This was bantered about in the comments and one idea was mentioned briefly in one of the answers. But I'd like a more in-depth explanat... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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How can a teen-age mad scientist create polonium? Start with present day "maker" culture. People, including youngsters, play with microcontrollers and machine parts, with synergistic technology like 3D printing, shoebox-sized robotic milling machines powered by a Dremel tool, automated jigs that cut plywood into complex shapes, etc. In a slightly ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Alien message: arrows and sequence order This is part of my Alien Message series: Recognizable natural numbers for alien message? Alien message: "Invitation" I recall a TV show featuring a discussion on the design of warning messages for deep time, the little cartoon had dots in each panel (â—, â—â—, â—â—â—) because if the read ri... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Alien message: "Invitation" A message arrives from several light years away. It is a complete prepared document, not a two-way communication. The document can contain line-drawings and diagrams, both 2D and 3D, plus movies (a time dimension) and overlays. Now it's straightforward to teach the syntax and encoding through care... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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Why would a colony need to relocate? In this Answer I came up a scenareo under which Eriek's concept makes sense. I rather like this idea: an expedition or colony on another world has to, for some reason, pull up stakes and move. They can't build large-scale high-tech machines from scratch, so they go all steam punk. They make simple... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How does the "space drive" conserve momentum? The readership of science fiction gets smarter over time, so making your SF "smart" (even if it's not hard SF) is an ever-moving target. This earlier question makes me think about Conservation of Momentum. Just as every modern reader understands that there is no air on the moon and we need that to ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Why do the users of the space bridge need to walk? After reading Is it possible to build a bridge between planets?, I wonder: what situation would provide technology support that enables them to make the trip, but limits them to walking speed? The voyagers will need some way to make use of provided energy in order to produce food. They need to tak... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How could scents develop into a full language? Human (spoken) languages have a great variety in terms of grammar and what the basic elements are, but they have essential features in common in terms of being a time sequence of phonetic primitives, which are sounds involving both AM and FM modulation of basic sounds that the vocal apparatus can mak... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How do you beat a star like a drum? Guran's comment Perhaps they are tinkering with the solar activity, turning stars into Yotta-watt, nano-bit/second beakons. (We would see the pattern eventually, but not before we looked at century-spanning data) makes me think of astroseismology which is a newly available field of study since ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Are there any other colors to radioluminescence? Certainly. I've even seen a product in different colors, powered by tritium. At the very least, you can use common florescent pigments (available in many glo-colors) and mix with UV-producing radioluminescence material, if you can't get the color you want to work "directly". But the above Wikipedia... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Circulation patterns on a tidally-locked binary planet A targeted hard-science spin-off from this question: In a tidally-locked planet that rotates about a barycentric point that's located outside of its own sphere, what would the coriolis forces be like? What would the circulation patterns look like, how similar or different might they be from those of... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Order of Solar System Colonization (alternate version) Noting that this question is specific to human colonization, and Thucydides's answer is explicit that driving concerns are to support life, and I notice that the story I'm working on turns this on its head because the premise is different in a fundamental way, I thought I'd ask a new question with t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Non-magical protective talisman (or, sapient money) There are two societies. One highly advanced with AI, posthumans, post-scarcity economy and off-Earth resources. So gold and platinum is what a Mercury base resident just calls "rocks". They have emerging nanotechnology of the full-blown utility goo variety developed a few years in, analogous to w... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How to "set" the lightsail? Suppose a starship is being powered by a lasers beamed first from the departure star, and then from the destination which is a moving base. The ship is moving in the regime of 10"“30% of light speed. Picture a letter "T". The ship is accelerated up the vertical line from the source at the bottom of ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Basics of designing a lightsail? We all know (or know how to find) the "rocket equation" that drives the design of a conventional rocket, and we've gone over such things as "specific impulse" and the difference between fuel and reaction mass for more advanced rockets. There are books and blogs about it. But what about photon sails?... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Can a magnetic shield be effective for interstellar ships? Superconductors will be a revolutionary enabling technology for many aspects of space construction. One such use is a magnetic field to protect a craft from solar activity, in the same manner that Earth is protected. But interstellar space is filled with hydrogen atoms and dust, which are not charg... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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When will uploaded minds be a reality? The Premise Setting a near-ish future world, where people live a full life and then upload their minds into different hardware and continue on. Setting a timeline for this, when (what year) are we looking at? Note that the development is an ongoing process so initially it becomes technically possi... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Why build a datacenter with an awsome view? An uploaded personality, after spending 100 years as a biological human and 40 years as a post-human brain made of silicon (and later carbon) semiconductors plugged into a rack, decides to emigrate to a space-based polis (a word I borrowed from Greg Egan). Our protagonist, living in a simulated real... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Nomenclature for software beings I've seen the terms posthuman and transhuman used in fairly generic ways. But given a setting with several types of beings, what consistent naming convention could be used? I suppose the vulgar terms might be less neat and careful than the official and legal names. I'm interested in both. 1 Human ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Why would a planet be spinning fast enough to fly apart? In a comment to this question imallett brought up the idea of a gas giant spinning so fast that the air is moving at near orbital velocity. In Mission of Gravity Hal Clement has Mesklin spin so fast that it's strongly oblate and has 700G at the poles and 3G at the equator. That's most of the way to... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How would animals "see" in a superdense atmosphere? The obvious hitch with a superdense atmosphere is that, even without being super deep as well, it absorbs light. Just as the bottom of the ocean is dark even just miles deep, an atmosphere as dense as water(even if actually in the gas phase) would block out light from the sun. How might we get aroun... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How to avoid FTL as a plot device? Many SF stories feature faster-than-light travel as essentially a trope: Roddenberry has stated☡ that the Enterprise travels at the speed of plot. As an allegory of the south seas, or some throw-away method to introduce people to a place to have an adventure or meet a different culture, it's just ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How does paradox-free FTL travel affect the details of my story or gameplay? It is understood that a way to prevent causality violation and time-travel while still having faster-than-light travel is to introduce a specific reference frame. This is explained in detail in this answer, in Hinson's Relativity and FTL Travel §9.5.4, and others. To summarize, all FTL transits oc... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How big can we make a telescope? I've mentioned in earlier posts that it will be much cheaper to build immense space-based observatory instruments than to even come close to launching an interstellar expedition. There are several figures of merit including total light gathering area and separation of light gathering points. Imagin... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Faux-natural barriers between environments in a world-sized zoo Suppose a K-II civilization built a terrarium or zoo, featuring life and ecosystems from different worlds as it travelled through the universe. (By K-II I mean in terms of resources and energy budget required. I don't mean technology indistinguishable from magic, as that's a cop-out in a hard SF sto... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Re-organize meals in a 32-hour day? The idea of adapting to a longer day is not new. Besides other recent questions here, I recall it in When Worlds Collide (or its sequel). As I'm rewarming half a pizza for a late meal, I wonder how society will change in this specific manner? What do you call the different meals? What traditions a... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How to resupply a starship? Consider a hard-SF (slower than light) starship. Boosting it up to speed takes enormous energy. There are good reasons to want to not take all the fuel with you, but to collect energy on the run. Current thinking is that the Bussard ramjet, as popularized by the fiction of Larry Niven, would not ga... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How to build a "cloud city" in a gas giant? Another question made me remember this. Consider a sizable base (building, station) in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. It should hold a staff of a couple hundred, with supplies and scientific instrument for the mission. One mission it has is to lower things on a loooong cable. I mention this ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Must life be molecular/atomic scale nanotechnology? Whether life is carbon based or something else, we are presuming that the fundamental units are extremely tiny. We need metabolism where parts are made or modified (by existing parts), which (if naturally occurring) probably gets booted up through a synergy of auto catalysis and self assembly. In te... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How can you have dualism in Hard SF? Note that the distinction between science fiction and fantasy breaks down when you add rigorous rules. If you have dragons or hovercraft is beside the point, if the distinction of being "hard" is what's important. And if you really had intelligent spirits as part of the natural world, figuring out h... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Why (else) would an animal species be polymorphic? I'm inspired by the comments discussion on a (now deleted) question by XandarTheZenon. We're preconditioned to think in terms of a 2-sex lifeform, which is natural with diploid genetic material, and sexes that specialize with different reproductive strategies. This often leads to species that have se... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What else is involved in "silicon based" life? Silicon is often brought up in science fiction as being very similar to carbon, just below it on the periodic table. The silicon-based "organic" molecules are more tightly bound and thus would find a higher temperature to be appropriate. Being too hot for liquid water, what would it use as a solve... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What if criminal behavior was "cured"? Suppose technology becomes available that allows bad people to be "cured". Instead of going to prison for decades or being executed, for example, a murderer has his brain adjusted. Now cured, there is no reason to punish (beyond the forcible mind surgery). These people are released into society. How... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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How can a jet-propelled horse work? I was reading more Laundry stories and just went through Equoid. The humorous "Procurement Specification" got me thinking. In a rational SF approach (as opposed to magic), imagine a civilization developing biological based technology. They don't build machines like we do, and never thought of a hors... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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What if androids out-perform humans at interpersonal relationships? Some of the answers to this question got me thinking: Customer service, emergency services, and doctor's bedside manner can be programmed and tuned for the task rather than having whatever-we-got from different individual people. It makes sense that they will be optimized and improved, and be free ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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What happens at the interface between two universes with opposite thermodynamic arrows of time? I saw this old closed question on Physics.SE and thought it would be perfect for here. The original author is long gone, so I thought I'll just have to post it myself. We can consider factors of plot and literature, not just hard science. But I do intend for it to be hard-SF. In Greg Egan's The Arr... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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Great Flying Cthulhu I know, it sounds like a geek swearing at Windows 8 on his work-owned computer. But actually I was just reading Peter Clines (Fold and then had to order 14 for instant delivery), and when I got to the monsters in the alternate universe I was distracted by them— by the biomechanics actually. (... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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What would physics be like in a wrap-around universe? This question has some close votes but has been edited/clarified, and has attracted more comments and discussion over the possible answers, and the geometry has overshadowed the actual question being raised. There are prerequisites! There have been other questions to work out details and reality-... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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What would a hard boundary mean in physics on the quantum-mechanical level? In this question I asked about the possibilities of what a boundary might be like, with emphasis on the storytelling. Now I'd like to investigate what a hard boundary would mean in quantum mechanics, in a more "hard science fiction" manner. Imagine a bubble of walled-off spacetime that occurred... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |