Posts by dmckee
Any mechanism for generating a neutrino beam starts with a way to generate neutrinos, and there is only one underlying means right now: weak decay (including beta decay in radioactive nuclides). Th...
Dung Charcoal A staple fuel for grassland people is dried dung. It generally doesn't burn particularly hot, but if you a assume a source of dung that is both unusually dense and comes in cohesive...
Practical issues with the whole cut-a-planet-with-a-beam idea. Your fundamental problem is that if you dig the trench by sequential applications of a beam with shallow penetration the time scale i...
Any light source is a propellant-less drive (often called a "photon drive"), it's just extremely energy inefficient. With perfect conversion efficiency, the impulse of the device is (energy suppli...
Using thermal energy for power generation is a thing, but you need a temperature difference to make it work. You implanted device is likely to be essentially uniform in temperature meaning that it ...
Preconditions Bank's The Algebraist and many other works feature galactic scale civilizations connected by wormhole networks, but with only relativistic (i.e. slow and expensive; possibly very slo...
Convert mass density to energy density, to get $9 \times 10^{-11}\,\mathrm{J/m^3}$ which isn't very much. After all, an adult human is on order of one eighth to one quarter of a cubic meter. So, a...