Posts by Amadeus
A plausible reason for the negative correlation between anthropoid muzzle size and brain size is quite simple, the higher the intelligence, particularly if high enough to cook, the less need there ...
Scientifically speaking, plants are Autotrophs, and they do not require life to thrive. They don't need DNA, proteins, or anything else produced by life. After all, life must have begun with somet...
You can have tectonic plates even on a water world, that is still "land" under there, you just have enough water to cover it all. In your case, any tectonic plates carrying enough land to break t...
We elves naturally developed a method that is more worthy of our nature. I would modify your premise, which I will get to in a moment. First, we humans preprocess our food to make it more ed...
I don't think a planet sized object can do it; both Earth and the object don't just melt, too much of it actually vaporizes (Not in the Star Trek sense, but the scientific sense; being heated beyon...
Yes. With technology! Specifically, Replicated Mechanized Police guaranteed to be the same everywhere, throughout the galaxy. This will also work with any length of human lifespans; even just the...
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...
I don't think you are thinking about thoughts correctly. I am an AI researcher, familiar with the field. It is provably true that the human brain uses sensory information to discern patterns; about...
I cannot answer for pointed ears specifically, but the shape of ears is known, in audio science, to have an impact on sounds reflected into the ear canal. See here, an excerpt is below (The pinna ...
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 ...
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...
Requires no exotic dimensional physics. For the same reasons we humans never visited either the North or South poles, until we developed the technology to do so a few hundred years ago. It's too ...
First, putting all morality issues aside, IQ can be well defined, and in fact it is, by current intelligence tests. For the purpose of this question simply divorce yourself from the notion that the...
It is not plausible for a self-destruct to have a count-down by purely mechanical or chemical means, especially one that could be stopped at the last second. HOWEVER, it makes a great deal of sens...
My grandson is autistic, through him I know a dozen other autistic children. A major problem with autistic children is a failure to understand the needs of other people, the pain of other people, ...
Natural Vaccination. Read about how Cowpox was used to vaccinate against Smallpox, this is our IRL first instance of vaccination against a disease. The word "vaccination," coined by Jenner in ...
Presuming the worm-holes or "warp space" are obstacle free and danger does not increase with speed, then I think there is no reason whatsoever to travel at less than the maximum sustainable non-dam...
