Posts by celtschk
After an age of highly developed technology, including many different satellites in various Earth orbits, humanity loses the technology needed to control those satellites. After many centuries, how...
While the other posts did already explain the issues with the cube-formed Earth, I just want to give a feeling of the dimensions we are speaking of. Imagine that the centre of the cube's faces are...
I've got this idea of a rogue planet that is moving that fast through the intergalactic void that the cosmic microwave radiation, thanks to the Doppler effect, actually provides enough heat that it...
The first question is: What is instantaneous speed measured against (that is, what is the “ground” relative to which the speed is measured)? Remember that there is no such thing as absolute speed. ...
Since manipulation of the brain is prohibited and illegal modifications are assumed to be reliably caught, the obvious way to check someone's identity with biometry would be by checking their brain...
Gravity You seem to assume that the Moon's mass is mostly concentrated in its core. While I didn't find detailed data on the Moon's density distribution, this Wikipedia page tells that the density...
Machines are not in a hurry, impatience is one of those inferior human traits the machines want to eliminate. Therefore it is not necessary to have humans give up their life; it's sufficient to jus...
On your suggestions Natural gravity Works, of course. But needs a lot of energy to accelerate towards your destination. Accelerated mass While a ring collider can accelerate particles to very h...
I think a reasonable assumption is that you don't want to accumulate entropy from the Dyson sphere. That is, the entropy you get from the star must not be lower than the entropy you send to outer s...
OK, so we have two sun-like stars (I'll just write "suns" from now on) at $100\,\rm AU$ distance, and a (probably earth-like) planet at $1\,\rm AU$ distance from one of the suns. I'll call the sun ...
All the answers so far dealt with the ship creating gravity itself. But there's another possibility: The ship might have some sort of gravity shields (to allow to pass close nearby heavy objects li...
According to this answer to another question an Alcubierre drive would need to have a channel setup far in advance. So with such a technology, you'd need to have a network on established lanes just...
If the planet is tidally locked, the main determining property of the planet will be the heat transport from the warm to the cold side. There are two main heat transport mechanisms: Air currents (w...
Growing from a very small size to an extremely large size is no problem, as dinosaurs show (and remember, ultimately even the largest dinosaur started as a single cell; the size of the egg is basic...
It would mean a more complicated modulation of the tides. On earth, we have a superposition of two cycles: An exactly 12 hour cycle of the sun, and a cycle deviating from that by the moon. The moon...
Quantum computers operate differently than classical computers, and most importantly, doing measurements in the middle of a quantum computation process will disturb the process, and possibly lead t...
Actually I don't think you'll have that problem, for a simple reason: It is very unlikely that the planet will be a perfect match before doing some serious terraforming. Therefore after landing, pe...
Here's another option: There are three genes: The X gene, the Y gene, and the Z gene. And there are three sex chromosomes: The XY chromosome, the XZ chromosome and the YZ chromosome. Each sex chro...
A possible way to have the virus spread quickly yet be deadly is to have a double effect. Shortly after infection, it basically acts like the common cold. The common cold spreads quite effectively ...
When the sun started to behave strangely, astronomers were confused: The accepted solar model didn't at all predict this behaviour. Indeed, based on the new data it could quickly be shown that thei...
Well, let's see how such a field would work. The Hamiltonian equations are $$\frac{\mathrm d x_k}{\mathrm d t} = \frac{\partial H}{\partial p_k} \quad \frac{\mathrm d p_k}{\mathrm d t} = -\frac{\pa...
Never. The problem is not being able to simulate a human brain; that one I consider possible, and probably even achievable on affordable hardware at some time in the future. The problem is taking ...
The main function of clothing is to hinder the flow of heat. The last thing you want to do when putting people into cryogenic sleep is to hinder the flow of heat. Quite the opposite: You want to ha...
A remark at the beginning: In a world where real-life vampires existed, there would certainly also grow a lot of myths about them. So we would have to distinguish between in-world real traits and i...
Hostile takeover. The other AI has lots of useful routines that your AI doesn't want to simply erase or leave unused. Instead it takes over the other AI, that is, incorporates all its routines, so...
