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Just calling it Knowles Syndrome would probably be just fine and consistent with current practice.
But if you really want to go with sudden-onset acute hyperthermia, feel free.
58
They can, but they have reached a mutual contract not to do so.
These are, as you say, godlike beings. Any one of them that wants to cause problems would have caused problems on a galactic scale - which means that, since problems on a galactic scale are not happening, it stands to reason that all of the survivors must have reached a mutual understanding and ...
49
It became a controlled technology when the risk became greater than the reward
Why, in that situation, would the government NOT use it for mass
surveillance?
Fifteen centuries is a LOT of time for people to find and execute ways of exploiting AI driven surveillance systems. By then they will have been used by school shooters to ID and track targets, ...
answered Feb 10 at 18:10
Nosajimiki - Reinstate Monica
16.2k2 gold badges23 silver badges71 bronze badges
42
No, not really.
Dead Space is a game about engineer stranded on a mining space-ship fighting off space-zombies. Primarily, mining and construction tools are what he has access to. Secondarily, space-zombies in DS are animated by space-magic emanated by space-artefacts, said space-magic makes them impossible to kill and keeps them going forever. Main ...
40
Anaphlexis, or autoanaphlexis
(Thanks to AlexP for corrections)
I got it by going into Google Translate and trying to get latin for combustion. It was combustione, I didn't like that. So I tried greek next (the other language that is used for most scientific terms). Didn't like the first term I got (kaf-si), but the second one sounded sciency. It was "...
31
They can easily reproduce, but the results would not be near-godlike immortal beings
There is no more complex problem than engineering perfect biological beings. They aren't just born.
While your scattered aliens possess the fruits of their super-advanced civilization, they are not really the engineers of their kind, and the super-ai that was required for ...
31
With the all knowing AI at hand, anything would be possible, so you could handwave this as you see fit, surely?
The issues are probably ones of fabrication... people have made piston engines for centuries, because the key elements that need to be made with the highest precision are things that can be handily fabricated on a lathe, and lathes are the ...
27
For the same reason it's a bad idea in the present world: anyone who can get access to the surveillance network will have the same world of information as you do, but their goals will rarely be aligned with yours.
Sure, the cameras are useful for public safety, finding criminals, and monitoring those in need. They're also useful for identifying high value ...
24
The system under the Constitution in the USA makes that kind of fracturing pretty hard.
What makes it harder now is that a steady increase in power of the federal government has reduced the amount of power that each state has.
If you look at the Civil War in the 1860's, the wedge issue was slavery. The precipitation events, though, wasn't slavery itself, ...
answered Jan 23 at 20:00
Paul TIKI -Monica come Home
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24
Lots of people think we're currently on the verge of Civil War 2.0
Or that we're already in a "cold civil war". Haven't you heard the Claire Wolfe quote?
“America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
Civil War 2.0 already has a nickname: the "boogaloo". No few observers expected it to ...
20
Combat equipment has to travel long and fast. Take for example the difference between Light, Medium and heavy tanks.
Heavy tanks are far superior in armor and weapons to light and medium tanks, but due to the weight of its parts it becomes a nightmare to deploy to the battlefield because of its low speed and high fuel cost. Add to this the fact that their ...
19
Try Tachypyrolysis
From the Greek "tach-" (rapid), "pyro-" (fire), and "-lysis" (separating). The prefix "tachy-" is already well known in the medical realm (as in tachycardia or tachyphylaxis). "Pyrolysis" is itself a common term in the chemistry community, where it describes the thermal decomposition of a material at a high temperature.
Who knows, ...
18
They are sterile. They were the unexpected result of two different advanced species mating, and as often happens with hybrids, were more powerful and durable than either of their parents ("hybrid vigor"). However, hybrids cannot reproduce on their own, so once either or both of their parents species went extinct, no more could be created naturally.
Even ...
16
To steal from the book Unwind-- abortion is a big one. One side believes that the other is literally murdering babies, so they're primed to fight. The other see sit as a form of slavery for women due to the choices of others, so they're also primed to fight. Boom-- civil war.
I think that income inequality might finally boil over into a civil war at some ...
16
One possibility:
Privacy laws
For some reasons humans got really fed up with constantly being monitored, so they simply started protesting and voting until a government got into power which did something about it. The government did not ban it outright, but made the rules and regulations of creating/owning someones personal data on video such a pain that ...
16
Tungsten is very brittle. So brittle that it shatters when hit.
Your warrior will be helpless on the battlefield after the first blow.
Summary: it will work very poorly.
16
Yes, you have an effective weapon here. Just throw away the useless sword and find a way to get the battery pack to release all its energy at once instead of over three hours. It contains a lot of energy, and will make an excellent explosive device.
15
They are all dudes.
Imagine now you are a dude, one of several. You have powers and abilities, all of you, and you like to compete, show off and the like. It may not be that hard to imagine.
These dudes are satisfied with the company of the other dudes, each living in the galactic equivalent of mom's basement. They engage in their pastimes and ...
15
Everybody is wearing face masks to cope with the various viral pathogens floating around. Real or imagined. Indeed, they are wearing not just surgical masks, but full face masks covering the eyes. Since it seems the latest corona virus can enter through the eyes.
So facial recognition becomes worthless. Indeed, it might become the fashion to decorate the ...
15
It would damage itself more than the opponent.
As other answers mentioned, Tungsten would be much too brittle to use, and shatter at the first strike(s).
If this can be overcome by changing the metal composition, you would run into different problems like heat dissapation making the handle too hot to hold.
Even if a structurally sound and handleable sword ...
13
If you already know how, and you just need to do fabrication from scratch: jet engines, no question.
Yes, building proper turbine blades is a bigger technological problem than building pistons, cylinders, and crankshafts... but jet engines don't need turbine blades.
Pulse jets are just about the simplest form of aircraft propulsion you could possibly ...
12
They could reproduce only some bilions years ago, when their race was still in its infancy, because of different cosmological parameters
In the course of some bilions years, the universe could change some parameters, for instance the Cosmic microwave background was "warmer" than it is now. And the reproductive biology of these creatures was very sensible to ...
12
As noted in another answer, fabrication is the key. Piston driven steam engines predated working steam turbines by more than two centuries, because any competent blacksmith can make a simple piston and crank (and a rather skilled one might be able to build a multi-cylinder version), and machine tools for this kind of work existed by the late 18th century -- ...
12
3000C is very, very hot. Steel forges and glassblowers operate around 1000C. They wear protective gear just to stand near the stuff.
I know volcanologists have issues with their gear spontaneously catching fire due to the heat off of lava flows (again, roughly 1000C). Granted, the flows are a lot bigger than this sword. Still, I think contactless ...
11
The television show Stargate SG-1 featured a race of aliens who had just this problem. They were called the "Asgard". Their civilization had decided a long time ago that simply cloning their current bodies was superior to reproduction (no risk of genetic issues/children breaking the norm). However, they cloned for so long that they decided they didn't need ...
11
is there a reason that mining tools would be made to specifically prioritize durability while military equipments may not be?
Logistics costs. Mining is a commercial enterprise; if using tougher kit makes it easy to keep a site up and running with reduced repair and resupply costs, some spreadsheet wrangler is eventually going to point this out and things ...
11
If you want to name something in a realistic sounding way, you should think about how this name came to be.
The first question is who named it? If something was named by a scientific organisation, the name would be done in a very specific way. Diseases are very often named by the first patient. This does not mean the first person in history who ever got the ...
10
The Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex has a character who manages to remove his face from all recordings from cameras in real time:
He is an expert hacker, able to hide his physical presence by editing himself out of video feeds and cybernetic eyes, concealing his identity by superimposing an animated logo over his face, and hijacking cybernetic ...
10
Nobody trusts video footage
It's so trivially easy to fake footage, insert false video into camera systems or otherwise fool surveillance that video footage is worthless.
It's not admissable in court, and even petty shoplifters know how to deepfake someone else's face onto theirs as they steal. If you're robbed, even having clear footage is no guarantee ...
9
Mining tools are made to crush, destroy, pullverize SPACE stuff. Things made in space scale temperatures mixed with space pressure.
On Mohs Scale diamond is 10, the hardest mineral. Hardened steel is just 8. You design tools for that to be used days after day after day for 8-12 hours a day. While your military equipment is designed to "work" for minutes ...
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