27
Your island will produce Lava Bears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_bear
The lava bear (also known as sand lapper, dwarf grizzly, and North
American sun bear) is a variety of American black bear (Ursus
americanus) found in the lava beds of south central Oregon. The animal
was described as a very small bear with wooly light brown fur. The few
lava bears ...
13
They'd be small, due to Island Dwarfism.
The thing that controls whether you get dwarfism or gigantism is what was the limiting factor for the mainland species. Dodo get big because the main limit on small flightless birds is usually predation. for large herbivores and large carnivores the limit is getting enough food so you get dwarfism.
Black bears are ...
12
No.
Because that would require perfection of efficiency. Not just ridiculously good efficiency, but perfection, which nudges right up there with perpetual motion machines.
However, you can get very, very close, thereby making the apparent heat signature of your ship tiny.
If you know where the observer(s) are, you can shield for that direction(s) only.
You ...
12
Zeus Wins
As a reader of this story, my first question is: "Did the author read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Heinlien?" You said "yes", so I don't get why Zeus is unable to throw rocks at Earth, or any other target. It has:
Robots
Energy
All the resources of Luna
The mere threat of throwing rocks should be enough for humanity to ...
11
Downloading
It is impossible for humans to travel at lightspeed. No matter how much we try, doing so would cost more energy than exists in the universe and we would go slower than light speed. However, if we digitize the human consciousness then we can instead download into new bodies at the speed of light.
There can only be one
To ensure there is no ...
9
It's hypothetically possible to cool the exterior of your vessel to the ambient temperature (cosmic background + interplanetary medium) and project the waste thermal energy away from the regions of space you want to avoid detection in.
However, in doing so you heat the interplanetary medium "behind" you, which could be detectable everywhere if it's ...
9
As a matter of fact, something quite close to what you want actually exists: the Kodiak bear, which lives on Kodiak Island (Alaska) and adjacent islands. Although it's a subspecies of the brown/grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) rather than the black bear, they're not all that much different. They tend to be larger than their mainland relatives. (Also note that ...
7
Hyperloop
The hyperloop system are transport pods to transport trains in tubes. One of the most energy consuming parts of travel is resistance from the air. To remove this as much as possible, the tubes are sucked to practically a vacuum. This allows for incredible speeds of travel. Although currently speeds between 1000 and 1300 km/h (about 700 to 800 mph) ...
6
MASERS
Beam weapons, very similar to lasers, except they use radio-frequency waves instead of light. The only real difference is that making the beam is done somewhat differently, and due to the different frequency of the beam, it has different characteristics. Notably, a Maser may be able to penetrate things like gas clouds or other thin material that are ...
5
Use the same old, but differently
What seems to be the worst for you is that a lot of weapons are the same old. The thing is, many can be used in surprising ways, allowing you to be incredibly creative with the same old stuff.
Lasers have a huge range of effects possible. They can heat, ablate, accelerate, change composition, localised freezing and more. It ...
5
You can't have a single compound which randomly gives out different emission lines when in a flame.
What you have found with different elements giving out different colors when in a flame are basically emission lines of those atoms: the flame excites certain electronic transition in those atoms, resulting in light being emitted.
Now, those transitions are so ...
answered Jun 9 at 4:34
4
The island rule, also known as Foster's rule: they will be smaller.
Islands tend to make small animals larger (the dodo was a kind of pigeon) and large animals smaller (the pygmy mammoth lived on an island). Bears are large. They will shrink.
4
There are three options for light hitting an object: it can be transmitted, absorbed, or reflected. You presumably want an object that will absorb as much light as possible, without reflecting or transmitting.
In laser use, there is a device used to absorb as much light as possible, called a beam dump. This is usually composed of a black cone inside a ...
4
As stated, this situation is unstable. Zeus has complete hacking dominance, while Earth has far more resources and weaponry. Either Zeus will quickly compromise and shut down Earth's arsenal, or Earth will nuke Zeus to oblivion.
However, there is one small change the OP could make to turn this into a true standoff:
Hostages
What if Zeus doesn't kill the Luna ...
4
Humanity loses, long before any decades-long stalemate occurs.
If this AI wants humanity dead, humanity loses. End of story. It has all the advantages, and it can and will enact whatever its primary goal is, regardless of what humanity wants.
With the programming and computational abilities you described, there's nothing stopping it from undergoing a hard ...
3
Engrave the Moon
As human civilisation fell, a group of scientists used a solar power satellites power beaming laser or a spacecrafts main battle laser to engrave several regions of the moon.
The engravings could be of different sizes. Perhaps big enough to be deciferable with the unaided eye. In your case making them small enough that one would need a ...
3
I think a collimated neutral particle beam is probably the best possible possible weapon if you disregard exactly how to produce the beam (I doubt it would be very energy efficient compared to a relativistic railgun).
It combines the best properties of mass drivers/rail guns and lasers, in that it's non dispersive over basically any reasonable range (unlike ...
3
Sphere in a sphere.
Outer sphere is clear.
Inner sphere is matte black.
The shape is symmetric. It can rotate and bounce all you want. You have a clear shot at the light absorbing center regardless of how the sphere happens to be oriented.
The force applied to the black center must be transmitted to the rest of the sphere. Regardless of the orientation ...
3
Also have to say no. At the end of the day the amount of heat produced by an object correlates to the amount of 'work' that object can do. And by work I mean any useful form of output.
So yes, while you could easily place an object in space that produced little or no heat it would by also by default be incapable of doing anything particularly useful.
About ...
3
You might want to check out "The Roads Must Roll", a short story by Robert Heinlein. The Roads Must Roll
He describes a transportation network based on moving walkways, but walkways moving at speeds up to 100mph.
A variant on @Graham's idea would be individual air transport, where rush hour traffic is guided by swarm intelligence and forms, well, a ...
3
Zeus has a deadline.
Zeus probably has long-range anti-meteor defense, with projectile manufacturing (thus infinite supply) capabilities.
So, any bomb, missile or commando aiming for the Moon is effectively toast.
On the other hand, antimeteor projectiles burn in Earth atmosphere long before they can be a threat to anything, except of course satellites and ...
3
Protection against AI
Virtualisation, containers and security AI
A foothold is something you can push off from. This can be prevented. So even if something gets compromised, it might mot be compromised long enough to "push off" from. Some ways to protect yourself is to have virtualisation, containers and security AI running.
Virtualisation is a way ...
2
Physical obstructions would become an issue before the absolute limitations of radar became an issue, but you would still probably want to avoid using long range radar
Take our world now as an example - the maximum possible distance you can sail in a straight line is just shy of 20,000 miles: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a20114871/...
2
If you want this to be science-based, you have some pretty big problems to overcome:
Pressure
The pressure near the Earth's mantle-core boundary is around 140 GPa, so your support structures need to withstand at least such pressures. However
the strongest known materials have compressive strengths on the order of several hundred MPa, so you have a few orders ...
2
Temporarily.
Thermodynamics requires that for a heat engine to do useful work, you must transfer heat from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir. The usual way of doing this is to have some sort of exothermic process (burning chemical fuel, nuclear reactor) as your hot reservoir and the environment as your cold reservoir. But you don't have to do it that way. ...
2
I'm going to approach this question differently, since the reasons why the answer is essentially 'not completely' are well established in other answers.
Stealth is not about invisibility, it's about deception.
The goal of stealth needn't be that you're undetectable, the goal of stealth is to mask your true nature. Current generation stealth aircraft are not ...
2
I feel like you are describing the bears of Haida Gwaii?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursus_americanus_carlottae
2
Your bears will be either small or extinct.
The territory size of a female black bear is 2.5 to 10 square miles and females do not overlap territories with each other.
The size of Hawai'i is ~11000 square miles.
By math, your island will support no more than 1100 to 4400 brown bears currently--assuming most of the terrain is able to support bears. A ...
2
Hard to implement - easy to overcome
So unfortunately electron beams have some difficulties:
In an atmosphere, air particles interact with beams and dissipate the effectiveness very quickly. This is why cathode ray tubes are in vacuums, and also why tasers need a wire to 'channel' the electrons. The range of an electron beam through air therefore is ...
2
I love the macaroon accelerator! And now I am hungry. I also have some other ideas for weird weapons:
Strange matter. Not super novel but not rehashed lasers and rockets. Strange matter is a form of quark matter that is not like our familiar baryonic matter. It is possible that strange matter could be "infectious" converting our familiar ...
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