Posts by JDługosz
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, an...
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 spee...
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 d...
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 n...
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 re...
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...
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 th...
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 bud...
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 h...
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....
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 scientifi...
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 na...
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 w...
When I was a kid, I read an essay by Asimov describing an inside-out asteroid: (summary from Wikipedia) The Bubbleworld or Inside/Outside concept was originated by Dandridge M. Cole in 1964....
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 fin...
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...
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 d...
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 ...
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 p...
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...
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 bei...
An earlier question here concerning a cube-shaped planet got me thinking. Suppose an artificial world-sized engineering project as described in this answer The K-II civilization that built it ...
In an earlier question I shared the idea of Bill, the stranded alien that has a challenge getting the attention of local humans because he's the size of a mosquito. He needs to re-establish contac...
One answer to the question of "Why don't we see any aliens?" prompted me to consider: The computer was a comparatively simple design, what the natives would call "single core" Von Neumann arch...
There are lots of posts speculating about a planet (or whatever) where life evolves intelligence and goes on to produce technology, under different differences lacking something or another that is ...
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