Posts by celtschk
The ship started out as a generational ship to colonize some far-away planet. However, when approaching that planet, nobody wanted to be a colonist. They lived on the ship, their parents lived on t...
We are in a future where genetics has advanced to a point where arbitrary modifications can be done to living beings. Now a geneticist wants to make a flying human. That is, he wants to modify a hu...
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...
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...
The whole universe could be filled with air. That would also explain why the world isn't just in free-fall (and thus effectively gravitation-free): It is going at the limit speed where air resistan...
With many more than three colour receptors, our colour TVs, using just three colours for display, would not come even close to showing all the colours of the world. Moreover, LDCs inherently work w...
I think plants would get into trouble. Plants need nitrogen compounds, which many of them get from bacteria that take the nitrogen from the air. Without nitrogen in the air, those bacteria cannot c...
Assuming the alien life form is multicellular, it should definitively know cancer. Cancer is basically a defect in the mechanism that controls the cell division. Cell division is absolutely essenti...
There's no way to achieve this in the known laws of physics. However given that near a mass the time "goes slower". I guess if you could create a negative mass, near it time should "go faster". S...
If $R$ is the planet's radius and $\rho$ is the planet's average density, then its surface gravity is $\propto \rho R$ and its mass is $\propto \rho R^3$. Let's measure in units where the Earth's ...
The space age civilisation has heavily computerized systems. That is, all important aspects of the space ships, factories, and whatever else advanced technology they use is completely controlled by...
tl;dr: The corpses would still decay, but probably much slower. From the Wikipedia article about decomposition: Decomposition begins at the moment of death, caused by two factors: autolysis, t...
For a spherically symmetric planet, surface gravitation is determined by just two quantities: The average density, $\rho$, and the radius, $R$. In particular, due to spherical symmetry you can cons...
One way to give a glow without causing vision problems would be if that glow is monochromatic (just one frequency), and at the same time that person happens to be blind for exactly that frequency, ...
Would it be possible for a planet with surface conditions suitable for humans landing on it to have a very strong magnetic field, with field strengths on the planet's surface similar to the surface...
The main problem would be energy. Without a star as energy source, you will have to produce all the energy yourself. You'll need a lot of energy, so probably fusion is the right source (note that i...
You need enough air that its own gravity holds it together. However that means in the center you'll have much more than atmospheric pressure; indeed I don't think your air will be gaseous in the ce...
I guess atoms would still form (hydrogen, some helium, traces of lithium). However there won't be galaxies or stars, as it's exactly the attractive nature of the gravitation that creates that type ...
