Posts by Amadeus
I would go with commmunal pods, just out of financial and space efficiency. Consider the difference between 250 individual cars, and ten buses. Most city buses have 55 seats; you could have just 5 ...
It depends on the size of the asteroid. For something the size of the Earth or moon, where gravity is generated, a molten mass will differentiate with heavier metals descending to the center and li...
I think this is option #3. There is a problem with centrifugal gravity, rotating things want to rotate around their center of gravity; so if the weight is not distributed quite evenly around the r...
Speaking as a scientist, it would not preserve my sanity to believe the world and all the people in it were a simulation for only me. It would quite likely make ME a simulation too! (Particularly i...
As several answers say, this is impossible. One solution is to (very early in the book) attribute the construction to a previous advanced civilization with mystery tech capable of this feat. A mor...
Biological lifelong pair bonding (monogamy). This is rare, but does happen. At least one reason males seek dominance in a society is to increase their access to mates, and thus have more children ...
Consider camouflage colors, for desert, forest, water, city, or whatever environment they do most of their hunting in. Splotches of the most common colors found in such environments. Although splot...
First, I agree with L.Dutch; so I am avoiding duplicating that answer! String Theory is already defeating itself; there have been two books written on the problems within it. Not Even Wrong (The F...
It only depends on alien intelligence and technology for scanning and examining the bodies. The human body (like any other animal's body) is a self-sustaining machine, the parts have functions, a...
Your massive maglev train is, obviously, levitated and accelerated by (electro) magnets, and must be many times the mass of the spaceship. The energy to power those magnets must come from somewher...
Nothing says the orbit of your planet has to be as close to circular as the Earth's. All orbits are elliptical, with the sun at one of the two foci. (Even a circle is an ellipse, it just has both f...
I don't think you can extrapolate from centenarians. As Jimmy Stewart once said about age, "after 70 it's patch, patch, patch." I don't know anybody that has made it to 100, but several in their 80...
Biology cannot predict lifetimes ahead accurately enough to make this work. If I have a population of 500 adult males and 500 adult females in a field, and resources to support another 100 persons...
I am writing a fiction set in the 'dark ages', a pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder world. On Earth that would be no later than 800 AD, but this doesn't have to match Earth. There is no magic, and I won...
The big problem I see for survival is not energy, it is growing plants for food and feed. The dark side is going to turn into a desert, no grass or crops or trees or any photo-synthetic life is goi...
I'm not up on seal anatomy; but I think the main thing to evolve is some sort of grip on, for example, a stick or spear. That does NOT require an opposable thumb. Our opposable thumb gives our gri...
I don't think mental state matters very much at all to physical age. As far as a world-building matter, for all the reason you state in your question; I would expect FTL travelers to not have any...
I don't see any show stoppers. 100-200 years in the future, I will presume you have all the energy you need indefinitely, by solar or fusion. Although the sunlight is much reduced, all the materia...
If the only point is to have 1G somewhere, don't vary the speed. Make a circular disc about a hundred yards across and a maybe five yards high; and spin it horizontally. You then have two vectors t...
Size, space, the room to breathe, and the necessity of dirt. They don't just want to be underwater (for protection from storms and radiation), they actually want to be in million-strong cities on l...
As far as you like, the calendar is not that important. It also depends on what counts as a calendar! The reason the constellations tend to not look anything like a description of their names, w...
Speaking as a college professor that works in artificial intelligence, this is basically all impossible. Sentience would require some way for plants to both sense and "model" the world around them ...
I propose a double light web, and a (quite distant) robotic 'catcher' grid. Things in orbit move in nice predictable orbits, at least in the short term, and are only slightly affected by the gravi...
Genetically engineered recycling bacteria. Many varieties. Plus (perhaps) some new acids to help them along with harder breaking. The "natural" means of recycling for the Earth is biological deco...
It is a trade-off between benefits. Large settlements allow more efficient collective action, trade, etc. It is easier to dig one water well than 10 water wells. If I want all settlements to be ...
