New answers tagged reality-check
-1
votes
Large projectiles vs heavy personal armor
The answer depends on why armor is so good.
If armor is just freaking thick hard pieces of stuff, then whacking it hard makes sense. That energy goes somewhere.
Tanks got past extra hard whacks with ...
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5
votes
Could harvesting antimatter from a Gas giant's van Allen Belts be feasible?
Feasibility is in the eye of the beholder
Recommended that you refer to the NASA paper (pg 31.) that looked at this topic in more detail than you are likely to find in other places.
In short, expected ...
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2
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Could harvesting antimatter from a Gas giant's van Allen Belts be feasible?
Assuming that you have the technology to efficiently separate, harvest and contain antimatter, you will have to deal with the deeper gravity well of a gas giant and its related greater energy ...
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1
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Is a religion which allows cyborgs but not AI or genetic engineering realistic?
Injury is the gateway.
Modern religious groups are fine with people and priests getting prosthetic attachments. Religion doesn't protect you from being sick. It might become very common to get ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Is a religion which allows cyborgs but not AI or genetic engineering realistic?
The religion can set constraints, but no cyborg would be halal
A religion may set any rules, its narrative serves to make them consistent, not logical. See other answers. This is not a frame challenge:...
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3
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Is a religion which allows cyborgs but not AI or genetic engineering realistic?
Yes, the answer to your exact question is easy - we have extant religions banning Coca-Cola, shaving, polycotton or eating meat on a Friday except for beaver, so the bar is pretty low.
I'm going to ...
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3
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Accepted
Could a planetary disk create a shared atmosphere?
A protoplanetary disk is, in astronomical terms, a violent and deadly place. It is not somewhere you want to live. Gravity has spun all of this debris from the birth of the star into a disk. ...
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-1
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Could a planetary disk create a shared atmosphere?
Normally, no. BUT. In The Integral Trees by Larry Niven, he proposes such a world, a gas torus around a neutron star and main sequence binary pair.
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1
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Could my Adnaps exist?
Turns out It's Man
You are looking at one my friend. Your creature sounds like a human being. A mostly herbivorous ape that can survive eating only meat and vitamin C pills.
Bonus points for starting ...
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1
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Is there any feasible way for Antarctica have hidden oases?
Low elevation.
The higher you get, the colder it gets. But the lower you get, the warmer it gets.
If it is 0C at sea level, it is 25C at -4000 meters
http://www.easysurf.cc/tempbyalt.htm
There is no ...
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5
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Is a religion which allows cyborgs but not AI or genetic engineering realistic?
Yes
What you are describing is not only possible, but practiced by most people.
AI are an imitation of God’s life. Many religions consider recreating life to be a sin, since you are saying humans are ...
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13
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Is a religion which allows cyborgs but not AI or genetic engineering realistic?
Yes.
Internal consistency is not a requirement for religious policies. (Citation: Earth.) And while what you've described skirts what we consider inconsistencies (embracing technology in some guises, ...
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5
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Is there any feasible way for Antarctica have hidden oases?
Cave systems.
The Transantarctic mountain range goes from the Ross sea by the south of New Zealand across more than half the width of the continent for 2,000 or so km.
Postulate: A natural cave-system ...
- 21.7k
5
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Is this an accurate environment for life on a super Earth speculatively?
There are a number of issues.
It is possible to have a planet with twice the size of Earth and a lower gravity, but it requires the radius of the planet to be at least 1.45 the radius of the Earth. ...
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4
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Is this an accurate environment for life on a super Earth speculatively?
Should be fine
There was a time in the Earth's history where we had a lot of large animals. Look:
Your world is like the prehistoric Earth. It is believable you have big animals too.
There is no need ...
- 36.9k
3
votes
Large projectiles vs heavy personal armor
Armor is designed to spread out an impact over a larger area. This is how if you step on a nail it will go through you foot but if you can lie on a bed of nails without injury. If armor is somehow so ...
- 19.5k
2
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Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
The thing about Sputnik I is that it was a quickly conceived Plan B.
Plan A was to launch Object D in 1957, which was supposed to undertake a series of scientific measurements during a brief 3 or so ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Can Mars disintegrate entirely in this scenario?
Yes, and no need to introduce fast rotation, or nukes or anything similar.
The Roche limit for liquid bodies is $d=2.544R \sqrt[3]{\frac{\rho_M}{\rho_m}}$, where $R$ is the radius of the more massive ...
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3
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What atmospheric pressure and temperature are reasonable to maintain water on a low gravity planet?
This is entirely dependent upon temperature. Here's the basic diagram, from Wikipedia:
If there is enough light hitting the surface from the nearest star to melt it, and there is no available ...
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5
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Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
I think the answers so far are kind-of-right, but not exactly right.
The West certainly could have detected Sputnik, even painted black and without radio, if they had known where to look.
Without the ...
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3
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Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
Well before 1957, it was possible to build a (vacuum tube) radio circuit that would respond to a pretty specific interrogating signal. Instead of a timer, that might cause your Sputnik to announce ...
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35
votes
Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
Beyond all certainty, the answer is 'yes'.
The Sputnik was specifically designed as a propaganda ploy, the singular intention of which was to broadcast a radio 'beep' that could be picked up on ...
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3
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Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
Malicious compliance
This might seem like a joke, but it isn't. The URSS was a strange place to live, getting stranger by the moment. There were many rules to follow, sometimes contradictory, and ...
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5
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Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
Not if you want to communicate with it
Undetectability is impossible if it needs to send you something. In fact, the moment it needs to send a single beep from orbit with non directed antennae, that ...
- 11.7k
12
votes
Could the Soviet Union have hidden the launch of the first satellite?
At the time of the launch of the Sputnik, there was no system to detect rocket launch, but it was developed soon after
On October 4, 1957, from the Tyuratam range in the Kazakh SSR, the Soviet Union ...
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0
votes
Could a hot desert plausibly exist in this location?
Deserts can happen anywhere
Deserts aren't a just places with little rain and a lot of sun. Deserts can happen anywhere for a multitude of reasons.
The easiest natural one is erosion. Through some ...
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3
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Could a hot desert plausibly exist in this location?
because the trade winds are nearly parallel to the coast. Deserts outside the subtropical zone exist in the Horn of Africa. A near-desert exists in northeastern Brazil for much the same reason, ...
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11
votes
Can Mars disintegrate entirely in this scenario?
One part of the question says:
Before the fly-over, Mars's rotation can be accelerated to up to 1 Martian day per hour if that helps Mars to disintegrate.
Would that help Mars break up into pieces?
...
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0
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Can Mars disintegrate entirely in this scenario?
Keeping in mind many of the theories of the Formation and evolution of main rings. And as you mentioned Mars could travels within the Roche limit, Édouard Roche himself proposed that the rings are ...
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0
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Day/night cycle and tracking celestial positions in S-type binary star system
I figure that you could have the star correspond roughly to centuries. Unfortunately, this system probably wouldn't result in a double sunset, and I would guess that the "Wandering Star" ...
1
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Is my environmental map consistent?
Deserts happen at specific latitudes
Due to Hadley cells, most of the worlds deserts are all at 30 deg N or S. You can see it on a world map; put your finger on the Sahara, and travel due East or West....
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3
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Is my environmental map consistent?
Extend the Jungle.
I suggest these changes
The grassland becomes jungle. The Blue arrow is the wind. The brown parts are extra mountains.
Explanation:
Typically jungles are on the coast.
The wind ...
- 36.9k
4
votes
Is my environmental map consistent?
Since nobody knows the conditions on your planet - temperature, humidity, wind pattern, size etc. - who is to say if your deserts and jungles are on the right place?
Generally on Earth the center of ...
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1
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A mainly barren world with two moons and a shared ring. Is it feasible?
No
First, two moons can't share an orbit unless they orbit a common barycentre. So they would be a pair moving through the sky, not independent movement. But it's the ring that's the real ...
- 23.4k
1
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The Emperor's Coffee House - how to build a neolithic steam engine?
Take the stomach of an erbivore, encase it in a wooden or stone box.
Fill the stomach with water, and put some stones into a fire until they become hot.
Place the hot stones into the stomach and close ...
- 236k
1
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The Emperor's Coffee House - how to build a neolithic steam engine?
This is interesting question. A lot of times we forget that the first steam engines were not for locomotives but for doing simple repetitive things like pumping water out of mine shafts, or hammering, ...
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4
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The Emperor's Coffee House - how to build a neolithic steam engine?
This wouldn't actually be that hard. The biggest obstacle to building a steam engine wouldn't be the lack of metal, it would be the lack of rubber.
Building a pressure vessel out of stone would be ...
- 1,508
2
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A mainly barren world with two moons and a shared ring. Is it feasible?
Moons; check. Ring; check. All good!
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2065.html
In case you were wondering, all the tax dollars I have ever paid were used to take this ...
- 272k
2
votes
Accepted
How to create realistic alien evolution in a swampy planet? (Like dagobah from Star Wars)
Honestly, roaches, kind of like District 9. They would be intelligent enough and have many usable limbs. This question is kind of vague so almost anything can work here, even a blob-person.
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1
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How to create realistic alien evolution in a swampy planet? (Like dagobah from Star Wars)
You should exlain what you want in more detail. YOur question as it is worded now, 2:26 pm EST on May 7, 2022, is vague enough to have several possible meanings.
Do you plaln to create a planet wth ...
- 23.4k
1
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How to create realistic alien evolution in a swampy planet? (Like dagobah from Star Wars)
I would go with the ocotopi!
They are highly intelligent, by some measures of problem solving they are smarter than six-year-old humans.
And completely alien to humans. Five lobed brains, 8 arms that ...
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1
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How to create realistic alien evolution in a swampy planet? (Like dagobah from Star Wars)
Crabs
Crabs have evolved on Earth several times. A process called carcinisation.
I guess that means if life evolved on Mars it . . . MIGHT be crabs.
- 36.9k
0
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How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Contact one of the primitive civilizations in their sector.
Your civilization resides on Alpha Centauri, a hub of learning and reason. But just a few light years away is Earth, a backward and ...
- 18.5k
1
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How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Sneak in with other celestial bodies
Detection is one step, identifying another. You want to reduce both as much as possible.
Detection can be difficult to fool. Space is big, but it's also empty. Our ...
- 27.3k
1
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How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
I suggest laser propulsion for the acceleration phase.
The reason stealth is hard when accelerating is waste heat. Any method of propulsion will produce lots of it, and heat is easy to detect.
However,...
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2
votes
How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Mimic the signature of high energy particles
The different planets of interest are bombarded by high energy cosmic rays, gamma ray bursts or other natural phenomenon.
Given the advanced tech, they ...
- 3,082
2
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How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Distract their sensors
The distance is pretty huge. While at that distance they could detect the immense amount of power needed to accelerate over a hundred tons to 0.1C, that would be much harder if ...
- 23.5k
0
votes
How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Flechette Launched Probes and some Deception
Launch a tubular object that contains thousands of tiny Von Neumann probes inside of it. When it enters the system, shoot the probes (inactivated) in a ...
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7
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How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
Mechanically accelerate the probes.
A look into railgun physics and design
Railguns, however, do not have these limitations. Since the force on
the projectile is proportional to the current applied, ...
- 272k
2
votes
How to Sneak Von Neumann Probes Past the Enemy?
If nano tech is available(?).
You covered pretty much all of the bases, so the only thing I can think of is, to deploy small swarms nanites into the systems Ort Cloud / Kuiper Belt. Each swarm is ...
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