New answers tagged reality-check
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Your calculator gave you the value of arccos in radians. For example, the function ACOS of Excel or LibreOffice Calc does this. To get degrees, multiply by 180 / π = 57.29577951.
You want one quarter of the illuminance we have at noon. No need to calculate the absolute values; just notice that illuminance is proportional to the cosinus of the angle with the ...
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Assuming these future humans have to land on the ground and/or grab onto trees or something (like squirrels), the answer is that this is probably not possible.
Wingsuits are the closest thing to what you are talking about, and the slowest vertical speed a wingsuiter can manage is about 40 mph. Achieving a 2-1 glide ratio can be done (even a person without ...
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Consider a vocalized version of Morse code or Binary.
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How about using funnel in the atmosphere leaked to outer space. Wouldn't that drain the poisonous atmosphere? Space is the ultimate vacuum ya?
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Exporting the carbon dioxide from the Venusian atmosphere is not the most effective way of terraforming the planet. It isn't realistic. This answer offers an alternative.
Fortunately, if you have this level of space technology there are better options. What you need to do is a three step process.
First, convert atmospheric CO2 into carbonate rocks. Most of ...
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Magnetic moon in an eccentric orbit.
Your planet has a moon. It is magnetic.
The moon has an eccentric orbit. It gets very close to its planet during the close part, skimming the atmosphere. It orbits its planet every 3 days.
When the moon gets close, its magnetic field induces current in metallic regions of your planet.
Metallic inclusions in the ...
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Frame challenge: you do not need satellites, use balloons instead.
Current technology is fine. Costs will be steep, but not as steep as the space based solution.
Have huge balloons flying around. The closer to the ground, the smaller they can be, but higher ones will present a better illusion and be less vulnerable to being seen from the side by a plane or ...
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Could a roughly human sized, human weight, bipedal, anthropomorphized
flying squirrel achieve significant gliding capabilities?
Sure. As mentioned in the comments, wingsuit gliding is a Thing--the tricky bit is landing.
Wingsuits, which are directly analogous to biological patagia, can achieve decent glide ratios--but they also require rather high speeds ...
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It can't.
Two things: first, where is it getting supplies from? Northern Wisconsin has this thing called "winter" and that means burning some kind of fuel, and that leaves evidence, whether it's clearcutting forest or someone buying fuel and transporting it. A community of 5000 people is no small thing when it comes to this subject. Also, water. Several ...
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The only realistic way of making Venus more habitable is to add some microbes that can transform carbon dioxide to carbon and oxygen in solid or liquid form and to gaseous oxygen, in a process similar to photosynthesis. The microbes will have to live approximately 5 km up in the atmosphere, where temperature and pressure is similar to what it is on the Earth'...
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This is fairly easy. With tri-state it's even easier, but for now let's consider just using a click or silence (a la pure binary: 00101010). The answer is a lot and as quick as their memory can handle. Let's lay some ground theory:
There are a small set of "proto verbs" (Incorrect terminology so I'm having trouble sourcing this), of quantity less than 30, ...
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Chinese and Japanese (and other such a languages) have an interesting pronunciation structure: each syllable has a certain "timeframe" and those syllables are pronounced in a rhythm. There are "long" ("two-frame") syllables and "short" ("half-frame") ones, but the timing of "frame" should be kept.
These languages have tens of syllables. But the proposed ...
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You have to copy a password right before it gets shown on the display.
Say you have a small calculator that randomly chooses digits using some on-board entropy device (so actually random, not just pseudo-random). The calculator would flash a digit at a time and to unlock it you must've pressed that digit before it was even generated. Get 10 of these digits ...
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Northern Wisconsin is largely forested, going by Google Maps. In such an environment, it should be possible to excavate subterranean dwellings, perhaps by expanding naturally-occurring caves. If the town was located beneath a forested hill entirely within the bounds of one or more parcels of private land owned by people who were privy to the existence of ...
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This power is completely broken.
Any sort of true futuresight is a form of time travel since you're transmitting data from the future to the past. The precog can not only transmit undetectable messages, he/she can ask any possible question and receive an answer from a possible future self encoded in physical responses that interact with this power. The ...
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Why do you need to stay off the maps? Just craft a reputation as an insular enclave of religious fanatics, like Bountiful BC but even more so. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints ) for more info.
The community keeps to itself, with only a few highly trusted people making trips to town to trade for ...
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It is not a planet...
It is the egg of a swarm of gigantic water breathing life forms!
The egg is filled with water which was originally extremely oxygen rich.
The atmosphere above the surface of the egg is even more oxygen rich.
As the fetuses mature, they consume the available oxygen from the water within the shell. Then, when those enclosed oxygen ...
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Initial issues:
To reach 777.7 m, assuming no air resistance, and a similar gravity to that of the earth, the water will need to move at a speed of 123.4 m/s this is just over 1/3 the speed of sound (275 mph). This is really fast, and would cause a lot of destruction (depending on the size of the geyser). If we factor in atmospheric resistance, you'll ...
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One kinda hilarious answer involve quantum mechanics and being able to observe effects "too soon". I mean, I'm not an expert on quantum mechanics, but from what I understand, it's observation that collapses the waveform down. If you did the double-slit experiment, but were able to "see" where the photon would hit before it actually reached the double slit ...
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Imagine a Morse code that relies on the viewer looking into the future every 3rd signal. This would allow you to include false signals in the message that would not be observed by the intended target. But in the long run it would only be scrambling a message and I imagine it would be breakable if it was recorded and examined for patterns.
I think most ...
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It is essentially a binary language, just like what machines use.
Unless they never stop vocalising, it isn't really binary as you have O, U and silence. Binary signals just have high and low, or on and off. Tri-state stuff is distinguished from plain old binary.
How can each word be differentiated without any pauses between words?
So, study of spoken ...
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Latin written with scripta continua had words without spaces. I have observed that some modern Italian speakers also string their words together without spaces except when they need to breathe. The key I think it to recognize words as such as soon as they are spoken and mentally file each one as you hear it and get ready for the next.
The other thing ...
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Encrypt the message (with modern asymmetric cryptography, but short keys) then destroy the private key. Normal people will only see the message after cracking the code (which involves factorizing a large number), in a few seconds/hours/days/years (depending on the length of the key). People which can see in the future can "guess" what the result of the ...
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It may not be quite what you're looking for, but I think there's an argument that someone who can see into the future in an interesting way, ie. one that allows them to act on the information they see to change the future, can decrypt anything.
They look into the future and see themselves trying to decrypt the message with some key
If they see themselves ...
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Ever heard of Monowi, Nebraska? It has a population of one.
Monowi was platted in 1902, when the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad was extended to that point. A post office was established in Monowi in 1902 and remained in operation until 1967.
Monowi's peak years were in the 1930s, when it had a population of 150. Like many other small ...
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Oh that is easy if you are not looking for a planet. Possible with a planet too. Like Europa or Enceladus have an underground ocean with an ice crust. Then have another moon and the planet itself affect this moon with tidal forces. These tidal forces will most of the time cancel each other to have a diminished effect, however, when they are in sync to ...
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Natural nuclear reactors.
It would have to be relatively early in the solar system's history, compared to Earth, because you'll need Uranium with a higher concentration of U235 to U238 compared to what Earth currently has... though it did have this concentration 1.7 billion years ago.
Your object will have to be very small for this to be a reasonable ...
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Use Qubits
The value of quantum bits can only be described by a probability until they are measured, but once they're measured they are determined.
Using future sight, observe what the determined value of a quantum bit would be. In the present, run the qubits through quantum logic gates that change their value in some predictable way, measure them, then ...
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"[...] into the future, or at least the most likely future."
If less likely futures are game, then this is solvable.
Encrypt the message and destroy the key.
At the press of a button, generate a random key from true random numbers, and try to decrypt with it. Show an error message if it fails, but do not display the key.
The seer will be able to see the ...
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If you had a perfect laser (aka doesn't disperse over any distance, not actually possible but still) you could just shine it on a distant object (or mirror) and encode the message in it.
The only way to read it while in transit in space is to intercept it, requiring FTL or similar
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Don't scale up, scale down
The problem with giant mechs is that they are basically just expensive tanks with lots of weak points and wasted mass, but mini-mechs would offer a wide range of advantages. By mini-mech, I am referring to a military purposed android in the 1-1.5 meter tall range. In this case, your mechs are not designed to compete with tanks, ...
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I would place the message in a way that reading it would mean instant death to whoever reaches it (for instance, in the walls of a deeeep pit, just before reaching the bottom or a box filled with poisonous gas). This way, if you can see the future, you could intend on walking that path, read the message just before dying (in the future) and then change your ...
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A mecha like that would have civilian purposes in less developed regions. Say a machine that cuts wood needs a lot of space and maneuvering to get to where it wants on rough and uneven area's, while a Mecha can be used intuitively by the operator. Climbing, crouching, ducking the Mecha can do it, and the operator can then use the hands of the Mecha in the ...
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It's "Heisencoded": your message is only there when no one is looking at it. The more closely you observe it, the less intelligible it becomes. This includes electronic observations.
However, people can blink - closing and reopening their eyes in about 0.1 seconds - to make the message momentarily "unobserved". Your temporally-gifted individual can thus ...
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The observer would have to convert their prescience into information that no-one else could possess. For example, that person might be able to accurately predict the outcome of a chaotic effect. They would have to repeat their future observations of a period of time long enough to ensure they couldn't have achieved it by chance alone.
They would have to add ...
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(This answer relies on a 4-dimensional being, capable of "seeing" the past/future, being able to 'look around' 3D objects in the same way that we do 2D lines - even if they don't quite realise that that's what they are doing)
Start with 2 layers a special material (Such as e-ink or a liquid crystal) which can change via some mechanism, such as heat or ...
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How does your superheating work?
First, you need to decide on what your superheating skill is like.
Transmission speed: You said it transmits at the speed of light.
Transmission distance: Line of sight? Mental image of area? Anywhere on the planet?
Superheating time: How long does it take to get from 20°C to your 8000°C? Is it like 'bam' instantaneous, or ...
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Is there something like an explosive effect I can achieve?
Oh yes.
Given the handy metre-cube limit, lets think about the energy required to raise the temperature of that volume of liquid water at ambient temperature (say, 20 degrees C) to 8000K. Lets say it is a nice round tonne of water. Specific heat capacity of water is 4181J/kg, so you need about ...
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1) How can the ability to heat portions of matter to high temparatures be used as a weapon, if I cannot affect the opponent's body matter directly and I need to minimize the number of heating instances and volume?
As you have been aswered by @AlexP, you can case explosions up to tons of TNT equivalent. It is very dangerous to youself as you cann't know for ...
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Afaik, 8000K is significantly higher than the temperatures reached by any chemical reaction. As such, instantaneously heating a ton of whatever matter to 8000K definitely gives a larger explosion than a 1 ton TNT bomb. The military will be very interested in your skills.
If we remove that limit, the explosion gets larger. This is proven by all the nuclear ...
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One, instantly zapping a cubic meter of just about anything to 8000 K is going to be a major explosion. You can amplify the destructive effect to a specific area by applying more fun physics. For example, in a fantasy setting, a glacier fortress was built around a nearly impervious stone geode suspended in the glacier. Superheating the geode (through magical ...
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Asimov wrote some stories about a substance, the thiotimoline, which is so soluble in water that is dissolves before touching the liquid, thus seeing the future.
This as a consequence of the substance complex structure, which fold the space time allowing the molecule to see the future.
In Asimov's writings the endochronicity of thiotimoline is ...
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If the user sees where something will be, but sees the object/person as it is now, then some tricks would be possible.
I'm thinking of a sign changing on the side of a subway car, where the future-vision sees it at the station and can read the sign, but that sign changes before actual arrival, therefore the other people would see whatever is changed to (...
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Stronger encryption schemes like AES512 typically take longer than 0.5-1 seconds to encrypt sth. So just use such a scheme. The future looker already sees the encrypted/decrypted message while the computer is still going.
Anyone in the present sees at most an encrypted message (if your computer is that fast).
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Reaction times
Average reaction times for most people are roughly 200 ms for simple responses. If you can see 100 ms into the future, your reaction time is going to be roughly half that. So have something like a "Simon Says" type decoder that requires hitting a sequence of light-up buttons within an extremely short reaction window.
Of course, electronics ...
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The only thing I can think of would be to use some manner of "invisible ink" whose presence and almost instant evaporarion were both invisible to the naked eye, but the overlapping presense of both simultaneously created a visible hue (so, only someone "flipbook viewing" both the present and the next moment would see it). Of course, the reader would have to ...
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Sure it is, and we can use modern technology to do it
(NB: This relies on being able to see into the future further than the OP requirement, but if that's an acceptable change in scale, this would work.)
So, have you ever heard of an RSA token? These are devices that work on the basis of giving you a passcode that changes every 30 seconds or so; similar to ...
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Yes
I mean, it's not going to be very strong, certainly not One Piece levels of strong, but it's possible. There's a very notable problem at the beginning of this thought experiment, namely soft things have a very hard time cutting through harder things. For instance, a knife through butter works very well, because stainless steel is a lot harder than ...
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Little effect on classical/medieval tactics (they had similar items already)
Firebolt & Firecone (Greek Fire & artillery)
First, I'm ignoring using fire in windy conditions.
As this is one of the main weaknesses of fire as a weapon. Due to the fact that wind could cause the smoke & even the fire itself (if not the spell then the stuff it lite ...
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Energy is mainly provided by nuclear fusion with helium 3 mined on place
Moon-encircling superconducting powerlines mean that everyone can use solar, even in the dark bits. Solar power satellites are also a possibility, if you're not into megascale engineering (and if you're not, why are you trying to terraform the moon?)
A thick, breathable atmosphere, ...
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