Posts by celtschk
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
