Posts by celtschk
(Ab)Use Religion to control the people A properly maintained religion can get people to do almost everything, and can guide their behaviour. People have killed others in the name of their religion...
The most durable information storage is having it carved in stone or in clay that then got burned. Our oldest writings are of that form, and they are thousands of years old. The main problem of thi...
How would the civilization discover electricity? That one is easy: There are animals in the sea that use electricity, like the electric eel. The underwater civilization would certainly be curious ...
When reading "faster than light" one normally thinks of it as faster than the limit speed of relativity, which is the same as the speed of light in relativity, as the photon is massless and therefo...
tl;dr: No, it is not possible to have the force proportional to the product of the square roots of the charges. In an alternate universe there is a force known as the emotion force although the...
Well, the first obvious difference would be that the square-cube law would basically be replaced by a cube-tesseract* law. Since 4/3 is closer to 1 than 3/2, this means that there could be greater ...
The hair could contain a combination of chemical substances that changes colour after a given time. If the time needed for that process is long enough to allow the hair to significantly grow, but s...
Assume someone detonates a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb in space. Since in space there's no air, the bomb will behave differently than on Earth. In particular, there will not be an air pressure wav...
A recurring theme is how an artificial intelligence that was built with completely reasonable and positive goals instead does great harm to the world. However I'm now thinking about the reverse: A...
Let's do a bit of math. According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is $7.3\cdot10^{22}\,\rm kg$ and its average orbital speed is $1.0\,\rm km/s$. That means its kinetic energy is $3.7\cdot 10^{2...
It is definitely possible. Like for example the earth at the time of the dinosaurs. Quote (from relatively far down on the page): As the world entered the Cretaceous Period, Antarctica was very...
I'm making the following simplifying assumptions: No time travel, time dilation or other temporal effects through use of those technologies (basically, the travelling works as if there were an un...
Human language evolved for the interaction between humans. That may sound like a trivial fact, but it isn't: If there had not been social interaction between humans, humans would not have evolved l...
While there would certainly variations, I think for the dominant treatment there would be only three possibilities: Enslavement. If we can keep control over the dogs despite their intelligence, t...
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport d...
Well, as scientists have found out, the universe is full of dark matter; indeed there's more than five times as much dark matter than ordinary matter. Now dark matter is called such because we cann...
Your advanced civilization stored all knowledge in electronic systems. Moreover, all work was done by robots or androids. Therefore humans didn't have much practical knowledge (it wasn't needed bec...
I would say it's a bit of independent space that's "glued" to ordinary space at the entry door. That also explains how time travelling works: That independent space is "unglued" from space, and the...
Whoever has this machines and the resources to operate it, basically has absolute power. It is the ultimate weapon (just delete your enemies). It will allow you to go to space easily. It will allow...
Well, some mosquitos when flying make a noise that is clearly audible by a human (as everyone who had one in the room at night knows from painful experience). So I assume that ship has the same abi...
Many animals also prefer to chase their food, but are not allowed to at zoos. And a troll that has to decide between starving and scavenging almost certainly would prefer the latter. Therefore a s...
In four dimensions, you don't have a rotation axis (fixed straight line) but a rotation plane (fixed plane). However, not every 4D rotation has a rotation plane; there are rotations which have no f...
Yes, the ends of a wormhole basically behave like a normal celestial body (assuming there's no additional physics not yet known to us that affects their movement). They would move with the expandin...
Raw materials may be available everywhere, but maybe the best FTL drives are built in the Aldebaran system, the best conventional thrusters are built around Barnard's Star, the asteroid mining equi...
Well, I'm not a biologist or biochemist, but I think your scenario could be made to work (although still very unlikely) as follows: Our genetic code is based on four nucleotides which make up two ...
