New answers tagged science-fiction
1
There are several options:
1) Larger brood size: Humans typically only give birth to a single child at a time. Simply ensuring twins most of the time will double reproduction. Larger broods will require breast-feeding in turns unless the women are equipped with more mammary glands.
2) Shorter gestation and interpregnancy periods: The time between ...
0
Mass production of eggs would be the easiest, but staying as realistic as possible, I would provide the following:
The biggest drawback of humans vs most other creatures is our growth rate. There are unconfirmed theories that shows that while growing up, our brains consumes most of the energy our bodies receive, and leaves the body behind. Given this factor,...
1
Option 1:
The most important aspect of why human births take so long are not fertility, but length of pregnancy.
If you make the cells of the unborn child multiply faster, your babies will grow much quicker and be able to be birthed. Add to that better given instincts, like that of newborn cows or foxes, and you'll sooner have "useful" babies that aren't ...
2
Simply said eggs. If we look at how many eggs most animals are able to put out it will dwarf the amount of live births(highest mammals do it around 30, while fish and insects can go in to the millions). And if you got full genetic control you could have the breeding mother be able to get pregnant straight after the first batch of eggs.
After that it's a ...
0
How bright? In my personal opinion, illumination level will top out between 10 lux (twilight) and 100 lux (very dark day). In places where light pollution is a recognized concern, these levels will be lower.
Existing street lighting on busy roads already puts us within this ballpark. Some areas (shopping, entertainment) will be lit brighter, but those areas ...
0
iMHO opinion future cities will tend more and more to be built and rebuilt as gigantic single multistory buildings, with corridors taking the place of streets. These cities will be more and more closed cycle ecology with intensive recycling of everything, like moon bases and space habitats. Thus all of their lighting will be interior lighting, and will be ...
0
The problem with your assumption is that "a second is arbitrary." Which it isn't and hasn't since the 1940s with the introduction of the Quartz Crystal Ocillator clocks, which kept a second better than the Earth's rotation (which is not uniform, but is corrected with "leap seconds" to the new standard). It was redefined in 1967 to be "the duration of 9,...
1
Is this based on earth, or is this a planet on which these measurements make sense? Because if you redefine one unit of measurement for uniformity, other units might not necessarily fit into that standard.
Your system is based around one measurement (the speed of light), and tries to conform the rest around that. On earth at least, more factors play a role.
...
0
I don't think it makes much sense to start playing around with physical constants. Since this is a science fiction novel, you may want to bring in other physics concepts later in the story. By changing the speed of light, you are changing a lot of other concepts that rely on this fixed concept to make any sense.
And its important to remember that seconds, ...
-1
The Dyson sphere is complete, and cooled to ~2.7 Kelvin
Basically the star is completely invisible because all the star's radiation is captured by the Dyson sphere, and the sphere itself is kept cool, so it's blackbody radiation is the same as the background.
They manage the cooling feat by a giant laser directed into empty space, or dumping it into an ...
1
Possible to do, yet unlikely to happen.
Cities could be incredibly bright, but seeing how people are more and more erring towards conserving energy, thus having as little waste as possible. Lighting up a city like a Christmas tree is unlikely to happen. As mentioned, there are some places that are illuminated brightly like Times Square or Las Vegas. Those ...
1
Yes, this is very much possible. However, at the same time unlikely at the scale you point out.
First of all, as pointed out by L.Dutch, an overload of harsh bright light is increasingly uncomfortable and has massively diminishing returns. While it is technically possible to illuminate a city to daylight, it is simply not necessary to do so, and apart from ...
2
It was mis-identified as a planet
A Dyson Swarm is a beefy beefy project, for efficiency, the individual satellites are constructed near one another in a spreading region rather than deployed evenly around the star.
For whatever reason, they stopped building, perhaps they ran out of resources, or they simply got far enough to feel they had enough.
Maybe ...
1
Our eyes are tuned to a maximum luminosity comparable with that of the sun at noon in a clear day. And already many people prefer to wear sunglasses in those conditions.
It's therefore logic to assume that no city would become brighter than that at night, because more than that would become increasingly uncomfortable.
6
The Dyson swarm isn't actually between the star and us
The alien's Dyson swarm isn't a full shell - instead, it is more of a ring, with some objects being perhaps a few tens of millions of miles of what used to be the planentary ecliptic. However, the view of the star from the poles is largely unobscured. Of course, one of the poles points almost directly ...
5
It was never deemed worth investigating closely.
So actually, we know it's location, and have for a hundred years or more. Every 10 years or so some astronomer gets excited, gets a grant and does research on it; usually the conclusion ends up that it's a star that's being mostly occluded by an asteroid belt. Because all of the planets in the system were ...
3
Taking advantage of the fact that FTL implies time travel, every time they get discovered, the aliens fly back in time, violate causality, and destroy whatever human noticed them (or at least the records of the discovery). The fact that they have been discovered now just means humans have finally learned to patrol their own backstory.
My favorite write-up, ...
3
You don't need an explanation - there could be Dyson swarms all around us and we might not notice
Let's think about what scientists will see if they look at the star.
They might see it dimming and brightening a bit as the distribution of solar panels around it shifts, but stars dimming and brightening every so often are nothing new.
Its spectrum would ...
13
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
There are two reasons why your civilization doesn't spot the Dyson Swarm ("DS"), the combining of the two making ...
14
They’ve been actively trying to hide.
These aliens don’t want to be found. As such they actively keep track of nearby astronomical phenomena that indicate younger civilisations and, upon detecting them, engage in active surveillance/espionage to track their expansion. Their Dyson swarm is actually very efficient, and will capture almost all energy unless ...
27
Simplest explanation: until recently, humans simply didn't see the star directly as it was hidden behind a small, but thick star-forming nebula between it and Earth.
(One doesn't really exist, but one could.)
The nebula has some young, hot stars which are in the way of the star you're interested in, obscuring it. Only recently have humans expanded "...
7
I'm not too familiar with star characteristics, so wouldn't know what humans could or would dismiss as natural. But I have some ideas on how to hide such a megastructure:
Full coverage
If this civilisation is as advanced and powerful as you state, and they have the resources to actually construct a Dyson swarm effectively, they might have had enough ...
3
The swarm are really small objects, enough to be disguised as interstellar dust
If each unit is comprised of elements in the order of centimeters and surround the star, it can easily be confused. Only a probe sent specifically to study the star would find something off, and even then a second one would be needed to certify the findings.
5
The reason we don't see many "cosmological features" here on Earth is in large part because there aren't any near Earth.
The solar system is essentially in the backwaters of the Milky Way; considering it "rural" wouldn't be wrong. Still, despite that, there are places in our solar system where more "cosmological features" are visible with the naked eye (to ...
0
Maybe consider the star supporting life on the planet as a relatively dim red dwarf or something.
This would prevent the star's light from overwhelming the other light from the cosmos.
5
This could be explained by these cosmic object being sufficiently close to the planet so enough light reaches them to render them visible during daylight hours. Not unlike how the moon is also visible during day time hours.
Multiple moons could explain the multiple visible planet like objects in the sky. It would however be unlikely two actual planets ...
2
There were no restaurants as such in medieval Europe (just odd bakeshops and vendors for working types who could not get home to eat). The concept was quite alien to them. You would have to work extremely hard to build any sort of clientele -- those with the money would much rather be in their own grand homes, those without cannot afford to eat there.
That, ...
1
I think we're looking at this wrong... The thing to do is bring some of your own produce (stuff that can be grown locally) and focus on culinary traditions that would be unfamiliar to the area.
I'm going to assume you're in England (partly because they are notorious for poor cuisine) for my examples, but similar ideas should apply anywhere. Simply serving ...
0
Crime is how civilization copes with bad laws. Both in that it ameliorates them and in that it gathers the data needed to discover they're bad and get rid of them. So long as law-makers are fallible, too much law enforcement breaks civilizations. Imagine what would happen to Earth's scientific research if everyone who used sci-hub got caught.
And ...
4
TL; DR - Hot sword is better for roasting its wielder than chopping up their enemies
Looking at this from a heat transfer perspective, this sword has some problems that are going to make it unusable. dspeyer's answer notes the danger of spontaneous ignition of clothing. I'm going to address what happens to the wielder in the case where nothing spontaneously ...
4
If we assume you mean 'have identical sequences' by 'share DNA', then half-blooded siblings share over 99% of their DNA. This is because DNA is responsible for everything responsible to make us human, and most of the differences between the various races of human are in under 1% of all DNA.
If, on the other hand, you're only referring to that small fraction ...
5
Never mind its brittleness at 3000C or otherwise ...
unless your sword fights are in a perfect vacuum or a halon or noble gas atmosphere, it'll burn with the oxygen in air long before it reaches 3000K.
Anywhere tungsten is heated it is kept enveloped in inert gas - either as a lightbulb filament, in the glass envelope - or as a TIG welding rod where T ...
1
If you could make a glowing sword people would either revere you as some kind of saint or fear you as some kind of witch and have you put to death so actually your glowing sword, back pack and whatnot would actually be the least of your worries, I'd be more inclined to use the sword to make toast...that's a win for everyone.
1
Site your restaurant in a seaport; and make friends with shipowners and sea captains. They eat free all year round, if they add a few sacks of rice, dried fruit or meats, or spices to their cargo, or (for only the fastest ships ... maybe favours from the Navy) fresh oranges from Seville or bananas (picked green) from West Africa.
Especially if they travel ...
1
Tungsten is a useless material for this application, as it's very brittle. Its more useful cousin is tungsten carbide, which is a lot tougher, but it's still very brittle compared to most steels.
Most steels and titanium alloys get soft when heated, so if you want a heated weapon, your options are either tungsten carbide, or a super-alloy.
Inconel springs ...
0
If your floating continents were originally land continents, the your oceans lost their shallow areas. So ocean fauna and flora that grew in depths less than 500’-1000’ lost 100% of their habitat.
So this could mean that there are no mussels, large crabs, lobsters, and none of the predators that feed on them. Also, I think there wouldn’t be any reefs or ...
2
There hasn't been a lot of innovation in cooking techniques, and preservation is mostly needed to have things year-round rather than in-season. The big difference is transportation. We take for granted meals combining ingredients that don't grow within a thousand miles of each other.
If you're attempting to recreate modern american food in medieval Europe,...
13
Your blade is about 150 cm^3 of tungsten, roughly 3 kg. That's a lot of mass to heat up and maintain at 3000 K. The surface area of your sword is about 550 cm^2. More surface area will radiate away the energy faster requiring a large battery and also melting the user.
All that heat will be right near your face and hands making it possibly impossible to hold ...
1
Somewhat counterintuitively, I would suggest the issue isn't really the artificial gravity at all, but rather the protection of the spacecraft and systems from the effects of high energy radiation and impact with interstellar gas molecules and dust particles when travelling at high fractions of c.
The ship will need to be protected by various active or ...
6
I suggest making your restaurant an ice cream parlor.
Most modern food preparation techniques were used in the middle ages. They did not have microwaves, but steaming or putting something to stand near the fire could get similar results, just slower. It was certainly possible to create foods similar to modern ones if the ingredients were available. To see ...
1
Erosion is not your friend, and stuff gets scarce
The answer to your question depends heavily on when the continents were lifted. If they were lifted after humanity evolved and spread, you'd see a very different result than if they were lifted when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Scarcity
Your floating continents are only so thick, and if there is land ...
4
Considering @In the name of the story’s update that the protagonist has modern refrigeration and transportation available to him/her, the only barrier should be the fact that many food ingredients would not be available in the place where the restaurant would open in. Assuming that the restaurant will open in Medieval Europe (as that’s what most people think ...
2
First off, this is a very cool concept! Your question is fairly broad, so I was going to answer a few different ways.
Society - just like how oceans and mountains separate societies and cultures in our world, the separate floating continents would likely give rise to different cultures. This would extend to their belief systems (do they all know/believe the ...
10
There was no refrigeration in the Middle Ages. So ingredients had to either be sourced locally, or preserved in some way. So no fresh oranges in Stockholm, for example.
The next problem you have is that some ingredients haven't been invented yet. Just as an example, look at all the different kinds of pepper the hot pepper community has invented in it's ...
1
As others have already pointed out, the rocket equation is brutal and the mission will dictate the spacecraft design. Even highly efficient fusion or antimatter drives don't perform well enough to make interstellar travel really convenient. Your only hope is to circumvent the rocket equation. Your best hope are concepts like Sail Beams, as they put the fuel ...
3
Modular designs are slightly easier to build, much easier to extend after being built, are much easier to isolate sections and allow you to have a pivot at the hub-end of each arm so the direction and strength of the artificial gravity can be maintained even under thrust.
Contiguous torus or cylindrical shapes will have weird effects at boost time and brake ...
7
Considering tungsten's melting point is 3,422 °C, your champion would be swinging something akin to a very hot wet noodle, so not very effective. Realize a blade in medieval times had semi-sharp edges, not to specifically cut through things, but to rather concentrate the force of the inertial energy being brought to bear by it. Even though tungsten is quite ...
6
The heat adds absolutely no advantage against an armored opponent. To do damage, you'd have to hold the heated sword against the foe long enough for significant heat transfer to take place. But the foe is encased in steel, which is a good conductor & radiator of heat, so it disperses over the piece of armor that you're hitting, with some of it ...
1
Frame Challenge: Your post-catastrophe planet is still more hospitable than "space." Without a specific, already-habitable destination, getting the people off of the planet is just one of a whole family of problems. "Good news! We've figured out how to get you off the planet, so you can escape the coming catastrophe of fiery lava, endless winter, poisoned ...
24
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 ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
