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How does a robot test materials to know what they are?
The same way we do today in quality control for manufacturing purposes
With X-Ray Fluorescence to check what the part is made of: this technology is widely used in various applications to check for correct metal composition (don't want anyone installing 304 SS pipes instead of the 316L SS pipes that I ...
10
Your robots aim is simply to replicate. The exact form/materials are secondary. Only have access to low-grade cast iron? Right, this one's going to be chunky, heavy and not very mobile. Got a load of tungsten mixed in with high carbon steel? Sweet! Hit the gold mine on that one.
So I've mentioned materials by name there, but your robot doesn't need to know ...
7
This is exactly what happened during the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. While it was having a VEI-6 eruption, Typhoon Yunya made a direct hit on it.
The result was not that the Typhoon sucked up all the lava. Far from it. Typhoons don't have that much power compared to an VEI-6 eruption. All it did was to spread the ash around more, add water to the ash, ...
7
Sure we would notice (if we were to live to see that, which is unlikely)
If solar system is traveling in that manner, if scoops all interstellar gas and dust on its way. Given that period of time is quite considerable (550 million years), the total mass sucked in will dwarf the mass of our solar system.
Sun is cruising around galactic center at an average ...
7
It seems like you're worried about a problem that's not really a problem.
Firstly, black holes take a long time to evaporate... over 575 trillion years at 6x1011kg (for gigawatt luminosity), over 15 million years at 1.8x1010kg (for terawatt luminosity) and over 2600 years at 1x1-9kg( for petawatt luminosity).
Secondly, mass loss via Hawking radiation is slow ...
7
The most powerful transmitter in a solar system is ... the star. We know that we can detect a star out to 60k light years because we know of stars at that distance.
So if we want to broadcast across the galaxy, it may be cheaper/easier to modulate the output of your star than to build a terawatt-scale omnidierctional transmitter.
How can we modulate a stars ...
6
bionics
The sword is ancient yet futuristic technology. It is one of the few that still are able to interface with the semi-dormant nanobots in the blood, which exist in everyone. When someone picks it up, the nanobots react to the programming in the sword. Like a credit card being swiped, they read the practically no energy costing commands and pass it on ...
6
They use a "suction cup" equipped with:
A laser pulse to vaporize some of the material
a vacuum suction to convey the vapor
a mass spectrometer to analyze the vapor and determine its composition
When they touch the material they determine what it is made of, and the related use.
5
No. All the masses are too similar for Lagrange point stability. You have a 14-body problem here, and those have chaotic behaviour.
5
Higher tech than any internal pharmacy, and potentially as sturdy and physically tough as the steel of the blade: a bioelectrically powered computer controls a highly advanced offshoot of a transcranial inductive stimulation device.
On skin contact, the sword "wakes up"; the computer boots in a few milliseconds (ROM operating system with persistent ...
4
Install a powerful refrigerator in the projectile. Cold refrigerant coils cover the forward surface. The heat from molecular collisions is pumped from the front to the back, where it is radiated away. If the heat generation rate from collisions matches the rate at which heat is radiated away, the projectile won't reach excessive temperatures. The ...
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jansky
The jansky (symbol Jy, plural janskys) is a non-SI unit of spectral flux density,[1] or spectral irradiance, used especially in radio astronomy. It is equivalent to 10e−26 watts per square metre per hertz.
It all in some complicated relationships with other stuff, funny and with pictures https://science.nrao.edu/...
3
The behavior of workers is more and more standardized.
This is good news for an industrial society, but very bad news for a post industrial one like you are describing. Industrialization requires a population of people who can all think alike, and follow orders, and always do things by the book. Variance on a production line is a very bad thing, and the ...
3
Much more slowly than you think, because Market overrides Technology
Work is changing.
But this is not new. Work has been transformed (sometimes quite radically) over the last 150 years, mainly since the Industrial Revolution.
In this period, we have seen lots of manual labour supplanted by more tertiary functions. However, keep in mind that because we could ...
3
The particles you will be impacting are of two types: charged and neutral.
Providing the bullet with a magnetic field will deflect the charged particles and leave you only to impact the neutral particles.
This will result in a lower fingerprint and a more difficult detection.
2
They are bats.
https://www.askideas.com/cute-baby-bat-in-hand-funny-picture/
You are already thinking about colugos so I will take this in a different direction. Your creatures are bats. Just as humans have been on the ground a long time but our own bodies have evidence of adaptation for life in the trees, your sentients have been using agriculture and ...
2
Rainforests are 3d
This bothered me in the comments, because this "extradimensional space" is a bit of an open end, if you don't specify how it works. Let's assume your extradimensional space means you have 4 (or 5, 6) dimensions. Your rainforest will be 3d and could exist in an isolated 3d intersection (a hall) of several 4-dimensional ...
2
Block confers magic energy to pestle over time.
Various pestles are available for various uses.
ok that is from OP. My add ons
It is possible to press a pestle intended for one use into service for another use. Results are less predictable and the skill of the pestle users plays more of a role.
Multiple pestles can be used simultaneously to speed the ...
2
You are missing some important questions.
Will they survive
No, you are are missing all the supporting life, like fungi and pollinators.
If you add all the supporting life will they survive?
Probably, a large continent will have thousand of biomes that they can find, wet places for rice, dry for wheat ect. You are not creating a single ecosystem you are ...
2
It could be a silicon based life form. All life on Earth use primarily carbon to build the compounds that make up their cells but the element silicon is very similar to carbon, being right under it in the periodic table. Most organic compounds could theoretically use silicon instead of carbon. Your creature would look very rocky or crystalline and exhale ...
2
how could the mutated limbs eventually turn useful?
Not without great difficulty.
Here's a few problems that spring to mind:
The basic tetrapod bodyplan (very loosely speaking arms/wings/forelimbs attached to top of chest, legs/hindlimbs attached to pelvis) doesn't have much scope for duplicating either the forelimbs or the hindlimbs, because there's not ...
2
To make anything like an "accurate" guess, you need a lot more detail (e.g., size and location of land masses and oceans, actual distance between luminaries, etc.). But, even without that some general principles can be worked out using analogies to earth and to so-called eyeball planets.
Based on the work that's been done modeling climate on ...
2
For centuries (at least since Ben Franklin designed early bank notes), the first defense against any sort of counterfeiting has been to introduce a level of complexity that is difficult to duplicate.
When the concern is mechanical duplication, the original needs to be something that a machine can't readily make: smooth, flowing strokes are outside the usual ...
2
A super earth with earthlike gravity is going to have to be primarily composed of light elements from the first two rows of the periodic table, transition metals are going to be relatively rare. What transition metals there are will sink towards the core quite rapidly as the hot young world is going to have a very low viscosity and high rate of convection in ...
2
This is all fairly speculative but:
Geology: If the mantle/core is sufficiently light to result in earth-like gravity at the surface then it cannot contain much in the way of dense metals such as iron. In that case it presumably contains more light elements. If there is a significant amount of potassium then its decay would likely increase the internal ...
2
Would this barrier affect the Solar sysem's heliopshere?
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes shape in form of a vast, bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is ...
2
Parts database
In addition to the other methods mentioned (and I think X-ray fluorescence is the best, if you can carry the equipment around), it might be possible to identify the metal by first identifying the part.
For example, your robot finds a piece of scrap in a boneyard. It examines the object from every angle and searches through an internal database ...
2
Assuming you're not asking about highly specific metal grades and alloys, the robot distinguishes metals the same way I do. Steel, copper, tin, lead, zinc, aluminum all have different appearances, feel, scent even. Stiffness, hardness, color, density all are part of it. It's a matter of experience and judgment; if you work with metals enough, you just know.
...
2
My robots have the ability to generate electromagnetic fields to sense the saturation of the material it is holding. It has a database with the information of all the magnetic metals known, its hysteresis curves, etc. It has a piece of tensorflow logic that senses the composition of the material it is holding, and chooses whether or not the element could be ...
2
There is a miniature pharmacy/GMO bacteria inside the blade&hilt.
Four examples:
there is a fungus that infects ants (also called zombie ants from then on) then encourages this ant to walk to a high spot where it dies, a fungus grows out of its head where it releases spores to infect more ants.
a parasite exists that wants to live in cats. To get there ...
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