32
Preservation:
Grey goo in any of it's forms does what it does - destroys everything it comes in contact with. It makes more grey goo. Now grey goo is nice, but we all know what happened to king Midas when he wanted everything to be gold - the things he really valued were destroyed.
Grey goo as a WMD is only useful to destroy everything you point it at. But ...
23
The Wikipedia page for an O'Neill Cylinder indicates that they would revolve at a rate of around 2.8 degrees per second – at a diameter of 5 miles, that would be a surface speed of about 0.12 miles per second, or ~440 mph.
If the velocity of the surface is 440 mph, then ±40 mph would be about 90–110% of Earth gravity. Not enough to float, but probably ...
20
Because we don't know about its past and the ordering system is not as straightforward as it seems.
Before anything, I'd like to say that these drones seem to function a lot like ants. They clearly function more like a superorganism, in the sense that they act more like the cells of an individual organism than as a group of individual entities, especially ...
18
As long as your car stays on the same radius from the axis, it can do what it wants with very little effect.
Driving north/south along the axis is exactly just driving on flat road.
Driving spin/antispin will encounter an apparent upwards curve in the road, that the car somehow never reaches. Spinward will increase gravity a bit, Antispin will decrease it a ...
14
The universal translation "drug" isn't a drug.
Oh, it's administered and used like a drug, but it's actually an infusion of nanocomputers that have two functions. Obviously, they contain the software to not only translate a large sheaf of pre-loaded languages, but to learn other languages (the more bizarre the structure of the language, the longer ...
14
Adaptation
This swarm was used for that purpose, but strong targets found ways to disrupt communications between drones, preventing them from recognising each other. Each drone had to fall back to a basic pattern: Find material, build replica. So they wasted their time devouring each other.
Disruptors require testing and development. Keeping the swarm doing ...
13
Atoms in a solid oscillate around their rest position, the higher the temperature the wider the amplitude of the oscillation, but the position is more or less well defined.
In liquid or solid instead, atoms move around without being bound to a certain position.
Compare the tasks to checking a class of kids when they are sitting at their desks with checking a ...
answered May 29 at 16:45
10
The gravity of the situation presents danger.
NO seriously, you have trillions, capable of further doubling every couple minutes, and they are each the size of a rhinoceros, and mass about 3.5 tonnes?
Just how much gravity does a 3.5 trillion ton swarm present?
Or how about one that has replicated itself for just one hour, and now masses 52 times as much as ...
10
Assumption: the powers you describe are real and explainable with science, just like any power source we're currently aware of.
Given the above, the short answer to your question is OBVIOUSLY NO.
Two claims require addressing:
People will believe whatever they want to believe, so if "magic" becomes a mundane power there will still be people who ...
10
Slapping aside a inbound projectile usually takes more energy than it took to accelerate it
If you try to slap aside a projectile once it gets too close to your ship, it means you need to slap it aside at relativistic speeds to make it miss. So if you have a 100m ship and you try to slap aside a projectile that is 100m away, you have to push it just as hard ...
9
We trust this swarm, we aren't worried about it going rogue.
Maybe you should be.
The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
-HAL 9000 on itself
Value drift
The Grey goo is intelligent, ...
8
Escalation and the Rules of War
Certain powerful alien species like to consider themselves universal police and step in when inferior species start to mess around with truly dangerous stuff like grey-goo, vacuum decay, or time travel. While limited use of these technologies is fine, they don't like to see it used as an opening salvo to a war, instead ...
8
Tonne-per-Tonne, Ships are Stronger.
In your universe, combat power increases exponentially with size. This is likely do to efficiencies in power or shield generation at scale.
Imagine 100 U of resources. When used for a single ship, it makes 100 U of destructive power, but when used with 100 ships, it makes 10 U of destructive power. The difference is so ...
8
A beam, not a laser.
Irrelevant in this case.
What temperature should a beam of light be at to burn through a person in a couple of seconds? Cut a bone in a couple of seconds?
It's not about temperature, it's about power output.
Lasers are used in medicine to cut flesh. Decade and a half ago I had wisdom teeth that did not surface, my dentist cut through ...
8
IronEagle's answer explains that the cylinder would have a linear speed of about 440 mph (708 km/h). Driving spinward or "east" (which is to say, in the direction of rotation) would cause the occupants of the vehicle to feel heavier, and driving antispinward or "west" would make them feel lighter.
I've calculated just how much heavier or ...
6
Energy budgets
Paragravity is scifi but you can easily calculate energy budgets. Let us say a 5 kg bowling ball is incoming at 0.95 c. It has 225 petajoules of energy. To bring it to a halt, your deflectors need to expend that much energy and that is regardless of how they work. You have specified that the paragravity deflectors require energy.
In your ...
5
It depends on the symbolic aspirations of the founders of your city
A 'Planned Capital City' allows the Urban Designer (or other entity placed in charge of design) or leaders to implement principles that are considered important to either the nation or the time. This is distinct to other city planning, as Capital Cities have both government and symbolic ...
4
Nukes can stop them.
Targeted nuclear strikes can destroy them before they can mass replicate, and any experienced enemy has either nukes or something similar. Using grey goo tends to be ineffective and ruins biospheres.
As such, it isn't used until all nuclear powers have been defeated.
Once the grey goo has reached enough mass it can produce large shields ...
4
Scientists have found that, no matter what languages they spoke, most of the test people exposed to meaningless sounds like zizi would associate them to spiky objects, while sounds like bubu would have been associated to more rounded objects (I am quoting this out of memory, so the sounds might be slightly different).
Now, let's assume because science-...
answered May 26 at 15:29
4
Reverse crystallography
In an ordinary X-ray crystallography experiment, a beam of X-rays is shot at a crystal and produces a lovely pattern of dots, which can be deciphered to determine the location of every atom in the unit cell of the crystal.
You have developed the ability to release X-rays approaching a crystalline object from all directions. Tracking ...
4
This idea is based on a convoluted understanding on space-time. I posted the idea to r/scificoncepts, and it can be found here.
The ideas (as to be determined when put into mathematical form) are either consistent with general relativity (the Einstein equations) and special relativity (speed of light invariance and inertial invariance) or they are not.
The ...
3
You can't violate too many physics laws.
Reducing a gas to a solid means subtracting a substantial amount of energy, and that energy has to go somewhere. The nature of your psi power allows energy to be channeled in only one direction at a time, so while you can produce large amounts of energy and direct it outwards, doing the reverse would mean effectively ...
3
Shear tentacle strength is all that is needed for a cephalopod to go vertical and once the evolutionary advantage of a higher point of view expressed itself, those individuals with stronger tentacles would have a survival advantage over others. If a mutation introduced cartilage structures onto which the tentacle muscles could exert force, all the better. ...
3
You ask two slightly different questions, so I will address both of them.
1. Do my Mutants having Chi/Spiritual/Magical/Supernatural powers undermined Religion and real-world beliefs? The short answer to this is no.
If anything, these abilities strengthen religion since they serve as proof that something beyond the material world exists. There is no longer ...
3
Science and religion come from a whole other way of thinking
Sciencecand religion are fundamentally different. So different they can be practiced at the same time. There are still plenty of religious people on this Earth that are also highly regarded scientists. Even during my university time you could see that there were plenty of religious people about in ...
3
Your power is telekinesis, with psi hands.
These hands are about as capable of manipulating objects as flesh hands would be, with the advantage that they are not limited by mass or distance. Case in pointing, grip and grasp.
Have you ever tried to hold a lot of water in your hands? How about holding actual air? I rest my case.
3
Have a panpsychic reality, and the drug induces a shared consciousness.
If you decide to have panpsychism be a true feature of your universe, then you could use it as a ground to argue (or just handwave) for the plausibility of a conscious entity being put in such a state-of-mind that they end up picking up, sharing or leaking consciousness with their ...
3
Temporary super enhanced language learning
Language is difficult. Even within humans we have words that don't, or are difficult to translate to another language. Even within the sake language, with dialects of big cities not far from another, I found that people can use a word as an insult or as everyday use. Interspecies it becomes so much more difficult. ...
3
The surface and car only move in reference to the axis they're jointly spinning around so as long as the car maintains surface contact it will behave as a car on Earth would.
O'Neill cylinders are small enough that people could detect the difference in spinward/antispinward direction by turning their heads, without feeling sick or other I'll effects, so the ...
3
This was originally a comment but I now think it may also provide an answer, so here it is...
The only way I can see how to blueshift a laser by a point-source gravity field is by shooting the laser, and then accelerating the point-source in front of the laser beam along its journey. The laser constantly "falls" into the gravity well and blueshifts,...
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