59
votes
Child sorcerers - are they a danger to themselves and others
The answer is simple: you hold their hand.
(Source: The experience of raising a toddler who is currently wielding a highlighter under my desk while I write this. I'm keeping her fed with sufficient ...
- 133k
57
votes
Accepted
How would the lifts work on a space station which worries about hull breaches?
The same way you put weapons elevators in a warship
The US Navy has lots of very large boats that use elevators. Of specific interest are the weapons elevators on aircraft carriers, since these have ...
- 85.8k
49
votes
Accepted
If you were wearing a bomb suit, would it be safe to set off a Claymore mine strapped to your chest?
Not survivable
Imagine you removed the plastic body and ball bearings from a Claymore, so that all that is remaining is a layer of about 700 g of explosive. The quantity of explosive is several times ...
- 29.7k
40
votes
Accepted
How safe would deep-sea investigation of a nuclear battleground be?
We already did this. And oh boy, what a mess.
The target wasn't a sea monster, but the Japanese battleship Nagato, Yamamoto's flagship at Pearl Harbor. And it wasn't any Tsar Bomba, just an ordinary ...
35
votes
How to safely knock someone out
I don't have to worry one bit about your average thug hurting me.
So you don't need to knock people out.
Note that ordinary superheroes (the police) don't knock people out (and a taser does not do ...
- 23.3k
35
votes
Accepted
How to keep critters out of my flooded skyscrapers?
What's the actual problem? It doesn't sound like these are mutant super-pythons, just regular ones. Hundreds of millions of people live in areas with lots of deadly snakes. Consider rural India. They ...
- 8,735
28
votes
How Do I Contain Hydrogen Gas With Pre-Modern Technology?
This was done in Victorian times. Early chemistry included producing hydrogen gas in bell jars to collect it.
Limelight burners used in theaters were oxygen-hydrogen lamps and they used animal skin or ...
- 82.7k
26
votes
How to build a fail-safe system for an engine that can harness energy from a Black Hole?
Start with an 0.1% of Everest-mass black hole. Stuff it into a 0.001 meter radius (1 mm) containment device.
At the edge of the containment device, gravity is 0.01 m/s^2 from the black hole. This ...
- 16k
26
votes
If you were wearing a bomb suit, would it be safe to set off a Claymore mine strapped to your chest?
KerrAvon's answer is good. It is not survivable and I don't see point in arguing that - the amount of explosive is just too extreme for such a close range.
But I just want to point out that you don't ...
- 2,433
26
votes
What collateral damage would a mach 23 bullet cause?
You had it right with the 2mm projectile before you edited.
A 20mm wide projectile would have far too much recoil for a man-portable weapon. Let's say it's 30mm long, since it needs to be longer than ...
- 8,735
25
votes
How to build a fail-safe system for an engine that can harness energy from a Black Hole?
You invented it, you decide
Sorry for coming off as boring but this question is of the sort:
I have invented Big Magic™ for my setting.
Now please tell me how this little aspect of Big Magic™ works.
...
- 44k
23
votes
How to safely knock someone out
Karate student of 30 years - you cant. Knocking someone out requires striking the skull with sufficient force to bruise the brain. Brains have limited healing capacity.
The brain is two hemispheres ...
- 9,750
23
votes
Accepted
How to prevent crew from accidentally teleporting oneself outside a spaceship with portal gun?
Similar with geofencing in today's drones - do not allow the destination be set outside the volume of the ship, at height above void volumes inside the ship or inside ships reactors/walls/hull or be ...
- 11.6k
23
votes
What is the safest way to camp in a zombie apocalypse?
Don't stop
The wagons are basically armored tanks moving faster than the zombies can go(at least as far as they know). The only way the zombies can really threaten them is when they are stopped and ...
- 2,118
22
votes
Accepted
How to ensure the safety of a surface base on Europa?
Avoidance; or, don't build your house on a thermal vent
The Earth has tectonic activity: both earthquakes and "thermal vents" that spew fiery rocks out (i.e. volcanos). How do you know you aren't in ...
- 85.8k
22
votes
Ideal way to deactivate a Sun Gun when not in use?
Just deform it and lose focus.
The problem with your death ray is that if you don't have a quick way to turn it on and off you can't just take out a city. You have to take out an entire swath leading ...
- 4,434
22
votes
How to keep critters out of my flooded skyscrapers?
Pythons are a total non-issue.
Human fatalities from non-venomous snakes are exceedingly rare, on the order of single digits worldwide annually. Many incidents involve captive snakes, that is, people ...
- 14.8k
19
votes
How would the lifts work on a space station which worries about hull breaches?
There are elevators which do not require cables (i.r.e. https://multi.thyssenkrupp-elevator.com/en/ )
These could lock into the walls with spare room for bulkheads to fall into in times of crisis.
...
- 291
19
votes
How safe would deep-sea investigation of a nuclear battleground be?
Water is routinely used to store in a safe way radioactive materials like those present in a working nuclear reactor, like Randall Munroe tells in one of his What it
Spent fuel from nuclear reactors ...
- 301k
18
votes
What would a school that tried to minimize deaths at all costs look like?
Frame challenge: In rich economies (except maybe the USA) schools themselves are probably not a major factor in child mortality.
Schools would only be affected incidentally, for example if there's an ...
- 3,017
18
votes
What is the safest way to camp in a zombie apocalypse?
A circle of wagons would seem promising, but a fort can also become a trap. If you are besieged by zombies, you are stuck. More zombies arrive and things get worse.
Your main defense is speed. Go at ...
- 12.6k
17
votes
What's the safest way to carry and throw marble sized high-explosive grenades?
The only sensible way I can think of to deploy such things would be a cluster munition patterned after a stick grenade (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stielhandgranate). The central "stick&...
- 7,764
16
votes
Accepted
Would making a last ditch effort to skip save the spaceship?
It doesn't really make sense to talk of "forward engines" and "reverse engines" for a spacecraft. Use maneuvering thrusters to orient the ship, main engines to change orbit. As long as it is not in ...
- 120k
15
votes
Safety acronyms for space travel
Really, the question is "What's going to kill you if you don't have it", in order of "How QUICKLY will you die if you don't have it." - Morris The Cat, in comments
How kind of you to capitalize a ...
- 133k
15
votes
Accepted
Threats in a post-apocalyptic world without mutants?
The most 'realistic' threat for your survivors to face is simply environmental factors - lack of access to safe water or enough food, and competition for resources against other more desperate and ...
- 350
14
votes
How would the lifts work on a space station which worries about hull breaches?
Motors on the cab.
An electrified rail in the shaft supplies small motors on the lift cab itself. The cab then crawls along the tube by its own propulsion.
Other variants:
Put the winch mechanism ...
- 44k
13
votes
Safety acronyms for space travel
Your ship has been damaged by enemy fire. You are injured and hurting, so it should be easy to remember the universal acronym:
A.C.H.E.S.
A - Air - Air is the most precious item in space. Without air,...
12
votes
How to safely capture someone when you have super-strength
If a lion, a tiger or an alligator, though being able of crunching an animal with a bite of their jaw, can gently hold and carry their cubs using the very same jaws, I can imagine that also a ...
- 301k
12
votes
Would It Be Feasible to Hollow Mount Everest Into a Palace?
First of all, mountains are HUGE! Even a conservative estimate puts Mount Everest at a volume of 2.1 trillion cubic feet. That could fit all the buildings in Manhattan about 300-400 times over. This ...
- 106k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible