New answers tagged science-fiction
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What is "unauthorized access"? How could people do things they should not do? How could they even have the idea? These impossible things you speak of are like a riddle. They are hard for us to imagine.
And so let us put them from our minds. Come and let me show you the spinach!
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Religion and tradition
In most cases throughout history, development has been hindered easily by religion or mysticism - or simply tradition.
Perhaps as the city grew from its origins, the populace were intensely afraid of the forest and therefore had a very inward looking culture. It makes sense if the forest killed anyone who ventured into it - this would ...
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Not being able to have satellites is quite reallistic. I asked a question specifically about it once:
A moon that is hard to orbit
As for going past a certain height or distance, the limit is based on how much fuel you can take with you. If fuel is hard to come by for your civilization, then ships should not be designed to go very far - or very fast. While a ...
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Over the level of the forest there are high winds.
Once you get over the level of the trees, there are immensely high winds. The city could not exist without the forest sheltering it from the wind. The trees buttress themselves against each other and the forest is very wide. At the treetops, the wind is what limits further upward growth of the forest.
...
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Economy of Scale
Many modern technologies are only practical at civilizations bigger than a certain scale. Producing a space program costs billions of dollars and requires hundreds of industries in place to pull all of your resources, technology, and man power from to make it happen. However, city-states typically don't have populations in excess of a few ...
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Is there a chance the plants could have made some kind of acidic cloud that floats above the city?
Maybe "venus fly traps?" Except they're more like those phalanx defense guns
You have your pick of projectiles. Nature doesn't use metals very often because it's very energetically expensive to shape metals, break those bonds, move around those atoms. ...
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If this space station is just for Humans - assuming that all the micro-organisms I will just list the 5 species for plants, vertebrates & invertebrates and the reasons I chose them.
I would have the land form be a terraced mountain falling into the ocean with the terraces randomly holding freshwater ponds/springs.
Invertebrates:
Bees - pollinators of ...
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Mountains, Rival Ecosystems, and Death Rays:
The forest extends up to a certain altitude, at which point a different ecosystem takes over - an intelligent, hostile alpine ecosystem. THIS ecosystem is neutral to the lower forest ecosystem - they have a sort of non-compete arrangement, or a détente. The upper ecosystem defends itself from the lower sending ...
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Some stars fade out because they run out of fuel; not much that can be done about that.
However, other stars explode because of core collapse before burning all of their fuel: supernovas. The elements at the core of the star have fused to iron which cannot be further fused to release energy to sustain core's pressure against the weight of the outer layers ...
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Technobabale mass energy conversion
Stars usually use fusion, which has a mass-energy conversion ratio of about 1%. If you want to have your stars live longer you could always just wave your hands and say that they achieved 10% or 100% mass-energy conversion, which would extend their life spans to a degree, maybe not by a factor of 100 but they would exist ...
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It might not be as instantaneous as a jump-assist technology, but what about a hot-burning material, and a personal hot air balloon?
All that's really necessary is something to heat /fill the air inside the balloon fast enough, and they'd have as much vertical as they need-- until the material runs out.
Something similar might work for lighter-than-air gases,...
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There's really no way around it: if you have relativity, then FTL equals time travel and time travel equals FTL.
The best solution to the issue that I've seen in published fiction is this: A powerful entity from the future arrives and makes it known that it will not tolerate time travel shenanigans in its past, which is your present.
And, that's all it does. ...
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I would recommend a combination of the super pogo stick, Soviet diesel boots, and kangaroo legs. Basically, do an image search for "digitigrade stilts" and use those pics as a starting point. Also check out the video game Valley and their L.E.A.F. suits.
Basically, though, take some digitigrade stilts, extend them upward to connect at the hips; ...
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I here shamelessly recycle my old answer. Shamelessly!
A clothing material or other method to slow free-fall descent down walls
Super pogo stick.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/554576141587551724/
Your soldiers carry pogo sticks on their backs. The unobtainium springs capture the energy of their descent, and when they are in a hurry give it right back; ...
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Ash's kangaroo boots are a great option, but if we really want to lean into the Dieselpunk style, consider something like the Soviet 'rocket boots'. These were essentially a pair of two-stroke pistons on either side of each foot connected to a platform under the sole. Stepping down compressed the fuel-air mixture in the piston, and when ignited they would ...
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Kangaroo boots
I had a set of these years ago, they're basically a spring extending down from your calf to about 30cm below your feet.
With practice, you can run faster and jump much higher than you normally can. I was having so much fun I never stopped to measure how high my jump got, but I could touch a gutter with my hand that I later measured was ~3.6m ...
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Short-burst jetpack mounted on the back.
The exhaust can be directed to the sides for safety or further to the back to also give a strong forward push and not endanger the wearer. There can also be special heat resistant trousers for jump crew. The need to have it compact would stop you from flying around for longer as carrying a larger fuel pack would make ...
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Work from what you have already imagined.
In the linked description you describe 5 schools of magic.
Schools of Evocation, Schools of Illusion, Schools of Enchantments,
Schools of Divination, Schools of Abjuration.
I am thinking of your story told from the perspective of an individual who has comrades, Percy Jackson style. Or maybe it is a comic book or ...
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The max 1 jump drive per ship seems like a strange limitation. I would not be satisfied with that in a movie, it makes no sense.
Since you have no FTL communication or other ways of observing light that hasn't reached you, you can easily make a much more sensible explanation to why you can't have 2 drives:
It's not the drive itself that's the limitation, it'...
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To start, you should identify the human needs, then find species that support those needs while keeping each other alive as well. In order of how long you can go without them before dying, humans need: air, water, and food. Shelter and sanitation can be structural, without dedicating species slots to them. Psychological needs can be met by other humans, so ...
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Sedimentary rock such as sandstone, shale, slate, silt stone and mud stone would not be possible as water is required for these rocks to form.
As on the Moon, which has an effective vacuum, the finer fractions of surface regolith will be sharp, angular and most likely abrasive.
After terraforming, expect landslides as rain water will cause a lot of loose ...
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No features of erosion, since most liquids can't exist in vacuum and the ones that can probably wouldn't come in big enough quantities.
That means no canyons, no valleys. No meandering rivers. No caves. No sea cliffs. No waterfalls. Not as much soil and sand as you're used to on earth.
Overall the landscape might have a more jagged appearance than earth, ...
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As @philipp says "Memorizing Checklists" is a great example. Taken to the extreme you get the cult of mechanicus from the Warhammer 40k universe where the underlying understanding of the technology has been lost and all you have is rituals for how to do things.
For example the song of glue setting to allow enough bonding time or the song of paint ...
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You control the gravity. That means you get to say what an orbit looks like. Sometimes stars are attracted, and sometimes they're repelled. Double and septuple stars fly across the landscape at sedate-to-relativistic speeds, chasing after one another like Keystone Kops. If there is a mishap in the choreography, fine ... reverse gravity to disassemble the ...
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Efficiency numbers are off
Plants are .1% to 4% efficient at turning incoming energy into plant. So your 26% is much too generous. These numbers are from plant efficiencies for the whole biofuel thing. Granted the life prior to the living planet could have evolved higher efficiency which was then incorporated.
How would exoplanet seeding evolve?
Evolution ...
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Don't move the light sources, move the blinds
Let's work through a few of the basics of this situation:
A single point source (or even ring of point sources around the "equator") won't work - it/they would totally fry the centre of the structure while failing to illuminate the ends. (Assuming a light source around the magnitude of our sun, very ...
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That's no star, that's an illusion
The plants get their energy magically at day-like intervals, which keeps them alive. The landscape and air is heated in day like intervals. However, the sun is an illusion only visible to people who have that illusion cast on them. It doesn't matter where you are on the thing. The sun appears to orbit like the whole thing ...
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stop earth from being destroyed
We start with 1.67x10^39 J, and we just need to ensure that the cross section of the explosion with Earth doesn't exceed 2.24x10^32 J.
First, we know that the distribution of the energy at a certain distance is even over the surface area of a sphere at the given radius. So the energy density of the explosion at a distance R is ...
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No, it is not realistic
First of all, 50 km/s is ridiculously fast. If you assume an unrealistically fast acceleration of 100g (far more than a human could reasonably survive) it will still take 50 seconds to get up to speed, during which time it will travel $\frac{1}{2}at^2=125000$ meters. Thanks to the $t^2$ component of that equation, having a more ...
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Limestone.
Depicted: the Muav limestone of the Grand Canyon in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muav_Limestone
Limestone is a sedimentary rock formed by the accumulation of shelled creatures over time - and so a biogeological formation which I think is what you are looking for. It is common worldwide and many familiar ecosystems have underlying ...
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It depends on the type of False Memory you want to add to people.
If is something they experienced themselves, then it is a bit harder. For that one, you'll need something akin to Total Recall devices - something that can edit the brain's synapses and create whatever memory you need.
If you want to add a memory about an event that they didn't experience ...
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A Dream Machine
Most of the time, when we wake up from a dream, we forget about it in a split second. But sometimes the dream seems real enough that we have to convince ourselves that it was just a dream. And in some extremely rare cases (at least it happened to me) when we recall a dream after some time, we have to really think hard to recall if it was ...
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If you’re just asking for examples of many-party wars, I can give you a few from history:
Allies, Geographically Isolated : examples of this would be Russia’s place among the Allied nations, or Germany, Italy and Japan among the Axis in World War 2. These nations are working for a common cause, but not sharing much else. They are fighting largely on their ...
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I would teleport the villain deep into intergalactic space, hundreds of thousands or millions of light years from the nearest galaxy. Thus the probability of being near enough to a planet to destroy or damage it would be very low. and if the heroes have enough time and sufficient data they might select a location which they know is at least a few hundred ...
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The kinetic energy of a standard 9mm bullet is in the region of 600J. An energy transfer efficiency of 70% to an organism of approximately 75% water would give an approximate temperature increase of 1 degree Celcius - assuming that your organism can distribute the thermal energy quickly and uniformly around its body. You would need to decide the temperature ...
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Here's an idea: CPT symmetry. It says that our universe has a twin that looks like its mirror image, where all matter is replaced by antimatter, and time flows backwards. If you are able to access said universe without something bad happening to you, you could end up going backwards in time. This is, if you get there by mirroring yourself, flipping your XYZ ...
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Many time travel mechanisms in literature have three major problems
A grandfather paradox: go back in time and murder your grandfather, thus change your present so you no longer exist etc...
Energetically implausible: for example, accelerating a body to "beyond the speed of light" so it goes backwards in time is going to require more than to the ...
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After having been in the cosmos of the solar system for nearly 200 million years, the stasis chambers accumulated dust and were impacted by asteroids and comets and are themselves covered in the collision detritus and they look like any other asteroid or comet in the solar system.
Have a closer look at Ceres, Vesta, Triton. There will be other that just ...
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Any inelastic collision would do that: take a bag full of sand or water, drop it on the ground, it will splat flat there. All the kinetic energy it had before the impact has turned into heat, with a 100% efficiency (when it comes to turning energy into heat thermodynamic is your friend).
If you want another example, see what happens if you fire a bullet into ...
answered Apr 11 at 5:16
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If our entire reality is a matrix style simulation, then all you need for time travel is access to the backup and restore utilities.
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While technically not time travel the effect is the same.
If the universe is homogeneous and isotropic as well as infinite and uncurved, if you travel an infinite distance at an infinitesimally small amount under the speed of light (so you wont feel the time), eventually you will find an area of the universe that has a matter and energy configuration that is ...
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Travel faster than light. This is time travel.
Here is JDlugosz's magnum opus and one of the best explanations I have seen on why FTL means time travel.
Are there any ways to allow some form of FTL travel without allowing time travel?
Use an Alcubierre drive to effectively travel faster than light.
An Alcubierre drive is a theoretical device which ...
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Drilling the phalanges of the sky.
Water magicians learn the purity of form, a world reflected in a single molecule that links with itself in infinite variation. Fire magicians learn the purity of essence, the heat energy that pervades all things. Earth mages learn the purity of origin, the substance of the planet of creation. And air mages learn the ...
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I don't have enough reputation to comment on another comment, but yes, the technique would be useful indoors as well because it is created due to interaction between the ground (or possibly an object? I'm not sure) and clouds involving positive and negative charges. Generally, there is humidity in a room which is caused by water vapor in the air, and clouds ...
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IANAB (I am not a biologist)
Think of your DNA as doing 3 things
1. Instructions to build
Your genes encode instructions to build your body - but they're not blueprints. Rather, they're like a step-by-step recipe, or a series of instructions. (Not really even like that, but it's a good way to think about it.) You're getting from one end of the room to the ...
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I haven't looked into this scientifically, but if the virus infected the human's RNA it might be possible for the RNA to take aspects of the DNA of other creatures it's encountered (as long as it's had contact with said DNA) and mutate. I'm not sure how likely it will be that the human will grow a scaly tail, but it probably could affect the already-existing ...
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I decided to build upon PcMan´s awnser by trying to simulate this scenario using my (not all that accurate, but hopefully good enough for this) gravitational simulator. So i tried placing a 3x earth mass planet at earths L5 point and let physics do its thing. (My simulator could not handle having the moon in this aswell as the earth-moon distance is too ...
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Jodrell Bank, one of the first radio telescopes in the world, is located 13KM from the nearest large town of Macclesfield and about 27KM from the city centre of Manchester in the UK.
There are also small settlements like villages and farms within 1KM of the dish, as well as a major railway.
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Say you have an RNA virus, with genetic information to do the virus things.
This is an essential starting point.
Virus that copies random.
The virus is modified such that the next generation of virus will also contain some random stretch of RNA from the host. Additionally the extra RNA will then also be included in the 'execute' upon infection.
So each virus ...
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I feel one idea not touched upon others here is to record and pass on historic events of cultural significance to the space-faring people. I also feel like space chanties might exist to warn people about specific survival tips for specific regions of space and/or exo-biomes.
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