Activity for AndyD273
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A poison that only works if you know it is there In the book He Drank and Saw the Spider, a poison is talked about in a metaphorical way: A person can be poisoned by putting a specific kind of spider into their cup, but the poison only works if you drink and then see the spider. If you don't see the spider, then nothing will happen. The book used... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Abstract Graphics for indicating emotions A lot of these answers talk about how colors and shapes can mean different things based on region. But if it's a standard schema across all robots, then that doesn't matter as much, because people will learn what that means. If I'm from the US and go traveling through Europe and Asia, I don't want ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How would it be possible for an island to sink into the sea? So having a man made island that can sink and float isn't hard by having buyancy chambers like a submarine, and having force fields to keep the water at bay could keep it dry and habitable even when submerged. But then the whole "island" would just be a big ship/sub. Being connected to the mines b... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What would be best way to re-melt Mars' mantle and core to revive its magnetosphere Late answer, just found this article: Nasa Proposes Magnetic Shield For Mars The important bit from the article: Ask scientists why Mars is cold and dead and they'll usually point to the death of its magnetic field some 4.2 billion years ago. Without that protection, solar winds gradually st... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Sci-fi Science: Physics of Impossibru: "Force fields" Couple possibilities: Photonic Matter - It is possible to take photons (light), which are massless, and bind them together so they behave as if they have mass. It may even be possible to arrange the photonic molecules in such a way within the medium that they form larger three-dimensional structures... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Build a better cold trap I think if the planet had an atmosphere that was very thick to keep heat in at ground level, heavy in hydrogen and helium, with a very strong magnetic field to keep solar rays from knocking them away, and an orbit on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone so things get cold up high. Having a lot of me... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What conditions would prevent the possibility of human-made satellites orbiting a habitable planet? The planet could have wildly inconsistent gravity. Gravity on Earth is non uniform, though it's hard to tell because of the variations are slight. But if this planet had a large super dense mass (from a foreign body impact?) in one area then you could have a spot where the gravity is much higher ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What to do with all the heat in a Dyson Sphere? A heat pipe system should be able to handle what your load. The advantage of heat pipes over many other heat-dissipation mechanisms is their great efficiency in transferring heat. A pipe one inch in diameter and two feet long can transfer 12,500 BTU (3.7 kWh) per hour at 1,800 °F (980 °C) with ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why would many future interstellar spaceship designs come with a self-destruct button instead of an EMO button? You might not want them following you home You never know what you might run into out in the deep of space. If you come across a new civilization that would pose an imminent threat to humanity, such as the xenomorphs from Alien, the Prime from Peter F. Hamilton's commonwealth, etc. then you'd be bet... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Energy Transfer Through Space Without Adverse Affects There is one way that we know of that can make this happen, which is tidal energy. Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa both have a lot of water, as does Saturn's moon Enceladus. As they orbit their planets and spin on their axis they have tides that slosh around, break up the surface ice, and erupt ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why would a colony need to relocate? Keeping it on mars, one easy reason is flooding. If they are there teraforming, things start to warm up, a lot of permafrost will melt. That water has to go somewhere, and the most likely place is the Borealis Basin which is very low ground and covers 40% of the planet. Water could be brought in w... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What would wind currents and water cycle look like on a tidally locked planet? So wind wise, you'd have Hadley cells that extend around the planet. Basically hot dry air on the sunward side would cause the air to heat up, rise, and make a low pressure area. Meanwhile on the far side you'd have air cooling down, falling, and causing a high pressure area. Because the air will the... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Can there be a planet with no dust? So start with a planet that is mostly made of a metal with a low melting point, say lead. It's set close enough to a star that during the day the surface becomes liquid, but it also has a low rotation speed so during the night it's cold enough that sufficient heat leaks out and it becomes a solid aga... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Ejectable heat sinks for spaceships? Use the vacuum to help cool the ship. Specifically, have several enclosed/mostly enclosed spaces that are transparent to IR and that is pumped to a vacuum. Use water to absorb the heat, and then spray the water into this vacuum chamber. Because water boils at a very low temperature (-67 C) in vacuum... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Plausible Original Concept For High-Fidelity Apocalypse? So I think a two prong attack. First prong is to remove all the defenses, and an easy way to do that is with EMP's. Launch nukes on SCUDS from container ships 25 miles up over the continents and set them off. No radiation, no one dies right away (for a few minutes until the planes fall out of the ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Why would a fire dragon still be afraid of torches? Learned behaviour. Like staking an elephant or Pavlov's dogs. When the dragon was young and more fragile it had a bad experience with some trappers who thought it would be fun to hurt it with fire. Mama dragon tracked it down, rescued it, and ate the trappers, but the image of the torches stuck with... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Single biome (hot) desert planet, possible? So in general terms, if the planet was like Earth in size and atmosphere, but had an orbit of .8 AU's instead of 1 AU, then the planet would have an average surface temperature of Kelvin: 322, Celsius: 49, Fahrenheit: 120 At the orbit of Venus (0.723 AU) the average temperature would be Kelvin: 338,... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Giving a Planet Sunburn Start with pulsar planet like the ones that formed around the pulsar Lich, but a little further out and tidally locked so that it becomes something like a hot eyeball world: Set the planet at just the right distance from a pulsar, which are very hot, but not very bright, and most of their energy... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: A pill to enable super/psychic powers? So you set it up like a drug trial. First phase is really small, maybe 10 people to get dosing figured out. Maybe use some underprivileged people who would like a place to sleep and some money. If they talk after the effects wear off no one will pay much attention. Wait for the powers to manifest ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: A Blue, Drenched Mars This interesting planet temperature calculator might help you answer this question. I filled it out with guesses based on your description. 1 solar mass Distance of 1.524 AU (Mars orbit) Bond Albedo of 32.00 (little higher than Earth) Greenhouse Effect: 4.00 (little higher than Earth) The averag... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Making a Planet Seem Uninhabitable The gate could be deep in a frozen arctic wilderness, like it is near the north pole, where there is just snow and ice and nothing else. No minerals, no land, no plants or animals. Natives could still trek there if they are properly supplied, but anyone popping through from the other side would come ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Flora and fauna of a tidally locked planet A paper I found suggests that the sunlit side might not be a burning desert as long as the planet isn't to close to the star. Basically the difference in heat between the light and dark sides would cause a Hadley cell to wrap around the planet, circulating the heat from the light to the dark constan... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How long does a component of a Dyson swarm spend in shadow? Honestly, this kinda depends on a lot of factors: Size of the plates, distance from the star, orbital period, to name a very few. The suns surface is 12,000 times bigger than Earths, meaning if each plate had the same surface area as the entire planet, you'd need 12,000 of them to cover it. If yo... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: If we built a large moon close to Mars, could we make Mars a living world? Assuming that you are right that a large moon could actually gets Mars tectonic and magnetic system working again... (which is an interesting idea) So after merging Phobos and Deimos and getting them in the right orbit, take the four largest asteroids in our solar system and send probes to them. Set ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Animal That Eats Planets So having the toughest skin would allow for reentry. Getting out of the atmosphere and moving through space is another matter, but this is your creature in your world that you are building. If you want it to eat rocks then have it eat rocks. Skies the limits when you are making all the rules. Just ma... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What reason could change people's mentality to treat each other as members of one kind? One thing I can see working is a forced marbling of society. You see it all the time with immigrants; they move to a new country, find people with a shared background, move into the same communities, and you end up with places like Little Italy, China Town, etc. Basically small towns inside of a lar... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is a world with two different types of air possible? So a very dense/heavy gas like sulfur hexafluoride has the ability to support the weight of objects, like a boat floating on invisible water. So you could have creatures that live on the surface, and creatures that bob on top of the gas and roost on the mountain tops that rise above the gas. I don't ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How wide would my cylinder be to allow air 500m below water surface? Thermal convection is your friend By heating air in the center you can draw air down from the sides. Because of thermal stacking, thermal power generation towers can be as tall as 1000 meters. (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Where do mushroom forests thrive? Maybe it doesn't actually have much to do with light as it does with nutrients. Say the mushrooms are parasitic on other plants and aggressively predatory. Their spores invade a forest, latch onto trees and begin sending their mycelia all over like vampiric fingers, spreading more mushrooms very fast... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How to harness Jupiter's gravitational energy? Direct gravitation energy is a lost cause in freefall. If you're close enough to get gravity, then you're no longer in orbit and will die soon. There is a work around though, which does use gravity, indirectly at least. By using an Electrodynamic Tether you can tap into all the kinetic energy you h... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Mermaid Buoyancy: Oily Livers, Swim Bladders and Lungs It could be possible for them to have a duel system (both gills and lungs), like lungfish. Some lungfish are able to run the two systems independently, so when they are breathing through their lungs then the gills are closed, and when they are breathing through their gills then the lungs are bypass... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Plausibility of a creature made of planets and stars? I don't think so, considering the distances involved, and the kind of density you'd need, unless a lot of it is "below the surface" embedded in the dark matter or in subspace. Maybe if the whole galaxy was the organism, and the central black hole was its brain? That would put the impending collisi... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Tactical Cooling of a Predator If it has a mane like a lion, this could be your heat shield. If it flaired out like a large umbrella and was made of a thin membrane or possibly fur, then it would block its body heat from whatever prey is directly in front of it, while allowing the heat to radiate normally from its body. Prey se... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Source of breathable air to fill Dyson sphere shell So the good news is that if you have the capability to construct a Dyson sphere, you have the capability of supplying it with resources. The sheer amount of matter needed is huge, and you'd need to steal the planets and other debris from many other stars to get enough. And since you're stealing all ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Powerfish - how to use fish movements to power tech So you have to look at the different ways that energy is created. Most of the power plants we have boil down to something turning a turbine, which creates electricity. Coal, nuclear, etc all work by turning water to steam and then using the steam to run a generator. Hydro electric dams do it by chann... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How to knock down humanity? I believe that an EMP attack would do what you want. 8-10 bombs launched on scuds from container ships and set off in low earth orbit, evenly spread around the north and south hemispheres, would take out all the infrastructure that we depend on. You could expect 75-90% of the earth's population to be... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Is it a forgone conclusion that any exo-bacteria discovered on an alien, albeit Earth-like planet will be deadly to human life? Humans are basically warm bags of slightly salty water. If an exo-bacteria can grow on your skin, there isn't much stopping it from growing inside your body. Your immune system could give it problems, but if the bacteria is foreign enough your body might not be able to do anything about it. The ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Orbital period of a tidally-locked Earth-like planet around a red dwarf As far as I can tell, the habitable zone around a red dwarf is less than .5 AU, and is going to be very narrow. The exo-planet Gliese 581 g is right in the middle of the habitable zone of the star Gliese 581, and its orbital period is 32 days. If you push it slightly further out its orbit would be... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Are space stations like Sevastopol (Alien Isolation) realistic? The benifit of the O'Neill cylinder is that you can get spin gravity by rotating it. The Alien universe has artificial gravity, so space stations can be more like the one in the picture without having to float everywhere. If your universe has artificial gravity then you can make the station look ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: How would plants that moved like animals change the world? Farming would look a lot more like herding. This would be interesting because you could drive your crops to market, let them out to pasture, etc. Picturing cropboys driving potatoes from Idaho to the rail head in Kansas to ship back east. Or the famines caused when the corn just decides it wants to... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Alien analogues to the vertebrate ear? Possibly by detecting resonance on a membrane through nerve signals. Sound is vibrations in the air, and when those waves run into things you get vibrations. Human skin is sensitive to sound to some extent, especially low frequencies. If the aliens membrane had a lot of nerves running through it... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Best kind of creature to be capable of biologically spawning an 'ecosystem' with borrowed organic tissues? So after some consideration, this is what I've come up with. Sort of a half plant half animal hybrid similar to a sea anemone. Maybe slightly more mobile like a sea slug. It would have a wide trunk, be 30 feet tall, and have a flaring top with tendrils that hang down. The tips of the tendrils w... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Neutron Star materials - If a neutron star stops spinning, What will be the characteristics of the materials in it? Neutronium probably isn't the material that you want to use if you want to keep it even slightly plausible. It can't exist outside of a neutron star that has less than 2 solar masses squeezed into a 10 mile diameter. Anything less than that and the strong nuclear force would cause the outer layers to... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Gravitational slingshots: could they be used to decelerate a spacecraft traveling at a small fraction of light speed? Yes, in theory. Gravity assist braking is a thing The problem is the speed. Going that fast you'd need to do a lot of maneuvers in order to lose enough velocity to enter orbit around the sun, and that means that the planets would need to be in just the right places. In the book Aurora, a ship tr... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Scientifically-plausible alien telepathy One evolutionary path is if the fungus communicated using EM signals. Electrical synapses use electricity instead of chemicals to communicate with each other. This typically means that they have to be really close together. But if the fungus began to develop stronger and more sensitive communication ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Is it possible to communicate through DNA? There isn't a reason why not. Computers communicate with just 1 and 0. DNA has 4 chemical bases, and humans have around 3 billion base pairs. There are sections of human DNA that are left over from ancient viruses, so it's not a great leap to think that a message could be encoded in DNA, put into ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: How much electric charge are dermis cells able to contain? So as others have said, air is a poor conductor of electricity compared to water, and so you would need unrealistic levels of electricity to make this work. Most super powers are essentially magic without the label. Say you had a man with electric eel organs that could generate electricity. Coming... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: How to improve manorial living with modern low-tech innovations? Some of the things they could do are modern takes on ancient techniques. For instance crop rotation and allowing the land to rest once in a while. We know that if you plant the same crop year after year you deplete the soil of nutrients and the plants don't do as well. So you rotate the crops, pla... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: How can you have dualism in Hard SF? Several scientific theories predict the presence of extra higher dimensions. Physics has validated (or at least not falsified) a 4 dimensional (3+1) model of space-time, and if string theory is correct then there are possibly 6+ other dimensions that make up reality, and that we have no way of detect... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: How can someone be invulnerable to any damage down to cellular levels while still having a limited lifespan? There was an article by Brandon Sanderson about how superpowers are basically magic. If you want Wolverine style healing, where you could burn him down to a skeleton with a few gristly bits and he'd be able to regenerate, then just say that eventually the magic runs out... Another idea, is that the ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |