Posts by ArtOfCode
What about simply reversing the name? Instead of "Speculative Science", potentially implying speculating about science (with all the implications of that), we could have "Scientific Speculation", i...
I've fixed the most obvious failures in SQL. Beyond that... the posts are now UTF8, so fixing the encoding retroactively is difficult if not impossible - if there are other common bugs please let m...
Does it differ from the early days of the internet - in another sense, would it be possible to handle with any protocols ever developed in the field of computer networks? No, that's not possib...
The prefix extra- is generally used for things that are outside of normality - for example, extraterrestrial for being outside Earth-normal, or extracurricular for education outside of the normal c...
Well, think about the direction in which each of these operations needs to go. Tunnels go horizontally across the mountain. Mines go more diagonally downwards, or even straight down in some cases....
Yes and no. It'd be worth keeping some of the larger telescopes around, simply because they have a wider area of coverage. A large radio telescope can cover a significant portion of its sky and li...
It is 1970. Planet Earth is uninhabitable - the Cold War got very hot. The Earth's entire population is floating through space in giant transport ships. They've found another habitable(ish) world....
Theoretically infinite, though the classification would get interesting. Consider the Moon. It orbits us, the Earth. That's a nesting of 0, right? Now consider the Earth. What's to say that the Ea...
It's hard to conceive of a star that doesn't supply itself by nuclear fusion, except those that already exist. Some background Nuclear fusion is a process by which two nuclei of two atoms fuse to...
Instead of thinking about how the body changes, I propose you think about how the food might change. In your world, there could have been a cataclysmic event that removed digestive enzymes from ex...
Do it digitally. A screen is still 2-dimensional, no? However, a screen allows you to add functions such as rotating the map - a tried-and-tested method of showing 3D. See Google Earth for an exam...
We'd get on the phone to some of the people who did it the first time. No, seriously. We have a lot of experts in this field who are still alive, and they may well hold enough knowledge between th...
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that without a decent amount of energy, existing physical structures will decay because there are more ways of arranging an unordered structure than one ca...
It all depends on how obliterated you want the Earth to be. If you want nothing left, you need to completely destroy Earth and accelerate all the remaining fragments so that they clear the area pr...
On Earth: $$ a_G = 9.81\text{ ms}^{-1} $$ That's acceleration due to gravity. On a spinning torus, you simulate gravity by living on the outer edge and using centrifugal force, for which the form...
It is some small number of years into the future. We are regularly using beamed energy, as defined in this answer: large arrays of microwave transmitters. We have developed this so that these array...
TL;DR: No. Programming languages are too diverse. Reason 1: Purpose There are, according to Wikipedia's list of programming languages, 806 distinct programming languages, excluding BASIC dialects...
Sky Colour The sky looks blue to us because of two major factors: Atmospheric composition Light hue and intensity There are also a number of other factors including atmospheric temperature and...
I think the most scientifically plausible method available to us with what we know is one that has been mentioned: use computers. However, the tech required is still out of our current range, so if...
As you say, just give them low-tech inertial dampeners. If you're using inertial dampeners to mean the same as I am, then we already have the technology to do this and it's used in many places. Ta...
This situation is quite similar to the current Earth-Moon system. As another answer here says, the two bodies do orbit each other, around a central point called the barycentre. The barycentre of th...
Habitability For a cosmic body to be habitable by humans, it needs to have a few things (or substitutes for those things): Oxygen Water Correct temperature Food source Some of those we can bri...
It would not discourage oceanic shipping, but it would make the times it can be done more selective. If you have a port that is 20m deep and full at high tide, with our Moon you should still have ...
I think your concerns may be well founded. This city will be fairly similar to most other cities and I don't think there's a whole lot you can do about it. However, it will have a couple of good at...
Communication Seawater is highly resistive to radio waves at the frequencies we usually use them. (see page 7, section Sea Water.) However, at lower frequencies, 10-30 kHz, it is entirely possible...
