New answers tagged science-fiction
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Pure brain communication.
Your client sits quietly in a room. In a virtual space where the confierence is being held, she controls an avatar using only her mind.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/type-with-your-mind-weve-achieved-a-first-in-brain-computer-research-says-facebook/
Facebook thinks a machine that decodes words in the brain's speech
center could ...
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Set up soundproofed, em-hardened rooms in each customer's house.
Hard-wire a connection to the dark net.
You'll need to check this every so often (about once a week or so should do) for wiretaps.
Use onion routing to disguise the position of a geographically separate location which broadcasts and receives video feeds to and from your satellites.
Again, ...
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The room is inside a Faraday cage, so only the dedicated line the room itself uses can get data outside the room. When you enter and leave the room, you go through a powerful EM-field that fill fry/erase any electronics or recordings.
A recording device would have to be small, to be smuggled in, but then it can't be hardened against the EM field. If it's ...
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Since to the best of our knowledge our sun couldn’t explode, it’s difficult to be sure what kind of explosion you have in mind. But the simple answer is no: If the sun were to go nova (which it can’t), it would sterilise the Earth. No bunker could be deep enough. And we have no way to go to another solar system.
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Casaba Howitzers
Similar to some of the other answers here in terms of visibility mechanism, a casaba howitzer is an offshoot of the Orion nuclear pulse detonation engine technology.
It is a nuclear shaped charge that converts a spherical blast into a roughly 2.5 degree beam with around 90% efficiency. This results in a stream of exceptionally hot plasma ...
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There is no stealth in space. Projectiles that are hotter than the background show up as hot spots, those that are cooler as cool spots, and there is next to no "cover" on scales much smaller than a globular cluster.
So you don't care if your weapons emit.
A problem with any kind of directed energy weapon is that inverse-square law. Their power ...
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A. C. Clark's novel Earthlight comes immediately on mind. It describes a weapon which quite matches what are you looking for. Jet of molten metal propelled by electromagnetic field. But it could be worth of reading the book for battle description in original. The DARPA project MAHEM is/was based on similar idea, so it should not be completely unrealistic.
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monitors add it
The reason it shows up is simple. The monitors and cameras show them, as they can spot the laser frequencies.
Visual confirmation of things becomes less and less viable on high speeds and distances. An ATC doesn't often look out of it's windows, nor do pilots. They mostly fly on instruments.
In a spaceship this is even more so. Windows are a ...
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Particles could emit blackbody radiation.
When you accelerate your particles, they get hot as a side effect. You are ok with that. You accelerate them very fast and they get so hot that they shine with blackbody radiation according to their temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Spectrum
Black-body radiation has a characteristic, ...
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARAUDER
The MARAUDER project as part of the cold war Strategic defense initiative could potentially be what you are looking for.
In short it's a railgun firing microscopic rings of bluish lightning that would most likely look like blue streaks when fired.
It was a coaxial plasma railgun capable of launching tiny toroids of ...
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Flame thrower is a very deterring weapon, but actually not very effective. It could work, but it would not be very effective. It makes far more enemy to flee, than actually kills.
I think with such a fast metabolism, they are lesser prone to poison: if they regenerate quickly, they can also process the poison quickly.
However, quick cell multiplication also ...
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How Did Hercules Kill the Hydra?
The ancient Greeks had to deal with such a monster.
Defeating the Hydra was the second labor of Hercules, and it was a job
that would require both strength and wits to accomplish.
https://mythologysource.com/how-did-hercules-kill-the-hydra/
As Hercules cut off each of the monster’s heads, Iolaus followed behind with the ...
answered Jan 21 at 13:19
chasly - supports Monica
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Explosives have been raised already, I will raise a specific kind:
Thermobaric weapons
Being essentially a giant blob with tentacles, with little rigid structure, those aliens are presumably very susceptible to high pressure. Assuming the fuel is toxic to the aliens, you get even more fun, since sometimes it's not burnt completely.
The [blast] kill ...
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What you should consider is the amount of fuel a missile carries, and it's powered flight time. As many before have pointed out, an unpowered missile can be easily shot down by railgun fire. But with a 10 km kill radius, the missiles could explode outside PDC range and still be effective.
Though they have to be able to maneuver to avoid being shot down, so ...
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There's nowhere near enough information here to answer the question. To address it we should look to videogames--specifically, the concept of damage per second, often called DPS. I have never played such a game where range is an appreciable factor, but in this scenario it is.
For each possible range (you'll have to pick some interval to calculate it at) ...
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It turns out, you can build a perpetual machine of second kind, thus violate the second law of thermodynamics, if you can extract energy from negative temperature systems. The proof of such assertion is as follows.
Kelvin's statement of second law of thermodynamics: It is impossible to build a machine whose sole result is the complete conversion of heat into ...
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You're starting with a false premise.
You say "In English, anyone familiar with the words "fire" and "place" will be able to deduce what a fireplace is", but that's not actually true. All you know is that it's a place or state of being (as "place" can indicate either) that has fire, something metaphorically intended as ...
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A microwave cannon.
Easily buildable using off-the-shelf technology, has relatively precise aiming and area of effect (unlike flamethrowers, explosives, and acid), limited collateral damage, and the power requirements are manageable. The military has already built low power vehicle mounted versions for crowd control so the technology is known to them and ...
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This was originally a comment, because it was small. However, I do believe that Guy Steele has done the thing you describe, and recorded it on film.
Check out Growing a Language or read its transcript. He goes through how to go about developing such a language in a completely unambiguous manner. He has a particular trick to making it happen, which is pure ...
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Acid or fire.
throw acid on it or burn it, if it has not specialized organs it is breathing through its skin which makes the skin very weak and vulnerable, burn it with acid or fire and it will suffocate.
poison
this thing will be very vulnerable to poison with no specialized organs it can't filter its body fluid effectively so poison will be more effective.
...
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Killing them softly with his song
Use sonic weapons. You may think these are early 21st century tech but this is actually early 20th century tech, so it should do.
The scene in the link is from Mars Attacks, a rare non-goth movie from Tim Burton.
The Oldsmobile
Take a page from the best trash movie trilogy ever (The Evil Dead). Protagonist Ash Williams ...
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You have to wrap your mind around the fact that space warfare is 6 dimensional. X, Y, Z positions and Vx, Vy, Vz velocities. The set of possible future positions of a spacecraft is an opening exponential horn. (Actually, something more complex than a horn.)
You want to set up a spreadsheet with the speed, distance and acceleration equations.
You need to ...
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Let go of the Geneva convention
Gasses
Gasses are incredibly dangerous. They can be invisible and odourless (for humans at least) but still have incredible effects. A nerve gas can destroy or temporarily lock down nerve fibres, killing or disabling the target. You can do corrosive things, or simply poison the enemy. As the aliens don't have lungs and I ...
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Because the aliens make the humans EARN their tech
Think of a school. Which teacher is more effective, the one that gives you the answers, or the one who teaches you how to find the answers? Yeah, I thought so. The aliens don't want the humans to become lazy and dependent upon their tech because that would drive them insane, much like how a teacher is driven ...
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Rocket propelled grenade launcher
Or similar weapons - eg: shoulder launched anti-tank weapons. Grenade if you're desperate.
A decent Kaboom solves many problems. The tentacles wont be able to work together if the nervous system is disconnected and scattered over a city block.
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If we assume that when the said alien loses its tentacle it is similar to us humans losing and arm then it is easy to kill them but I do not think that is what you meant. Assuming after cuting off a tentacle alien, perhaps the tentacle itself too, would still continue to live, the solutions left that I can see are:
Burn them
Using a flamethrower your ...
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Fire.
Fire is a great killer because (for any creature with a reasonable amount of body fat) it’s self sustaining. Once a fire reaches a certain temperature it starts using the flesh of the creature it’s burning as fuel, leading to massive trauma and rapidly spiking internal temperatures. Even if a creature survives it burns create a huge surface for ...
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Make a language that is rarely misinterpreted ...
New words can be easily created ...
So, how would such a language work?
A key technical requirement nobody has mentioned yet: Every conversation would need to start with vocabulary exchange and context sync. Or have a very structured way to say "huh?"
More specifically:
All new words must be given ...
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You could just do it yourself, using a handy Stellar Coordinate catalog like
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/astro/nearstar.html
and the tool at
http://www.neoprogrammics.com/stars/distance_between_two_stars/index.php
As there are more than 84 million catalogued stars already, a complete distance map between them would comprise a graph of 7 quadrillion lines,...
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I think there's a flaw in the idea. This doesn't sound possible to me. The very purpose of language is the abstraction of thought. You gain efficiency by sacrificing clarity, that's the basic mechanism by which it functions. You can't have both.
There is no overall "perfection", just a continuum, with perfect explication as the limit on one end and ...
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I would strongly encourage you to look at Esperanto, as it actually approaches the ideals you’re asking for in certain ways:
Consistency
Esperanto was built from the ground up to be easy to learn, and thus is very internally consistent. It has:
One definite article, which never changes (it’s always ‘la’, no matter what gender the noun is).
Exactly one way ...
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It looks and sounds completely random.
Write some English text. Compress it. Base64-encode the compressed file. Now pretend each different letter is a syllable. It looks something like this:
H4sIAAAAAAACA11TMY7cMAzs/Qp2aYx9QJqrUlyRpLgAqWmbsomVJUOUz+ffZyhnb4MYWNgrjWaG
Q6rr3vZtyybEZJuMKkazVKOa8Vqk4INWvgvhD63ZKkkIClyqFDnNO89CIDAdotzoF1APHjUa91j3
...
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Your criteria probably could be met, but the language would not be stable, or survive long
Lojban is a constructed language that allows for syntactically unambiguous sentences which helps minimise misunderstandings, and Toki Pona is another constructed language that builds complex meaning in reasonably predictable ways from a very small set of morphemes
I ...
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A number of philosophical languages were in vogue in the 17th century. Generally they try to achieve perfection in capturing the semantic hierarchy of words; and they tend to be unlearnable and unusable.
A modern approach is loglan/lojban; they try to avoid grammatical ambiguity, their grammar is quite unusual and are very hard to learn.
As for the semantic ...
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In Islam, when a person performs that specific prayer for which they are required to turn in one direction, if they're in the position of not knowing which position or direction they're supposed to face, it's not mandatory to find a direction.
When that prayer starts, there is a declaration of intent that literally says: "I intend to do this prayer for ...
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You will hit one important limitation - language evolves.
You are adding concepts that didn't exist before, relative importance of words changes as world evolves, words get additional meaning because they are now found related to other concepts or because of slang etc etc.
Assume you have a perfect language with whatever conditions you want. Each written ...
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Yes we can make a language like that - but perfection may be subjective.
People may value things like rhyme or other auditory features of your language (Doesn't French sound romantic? doesn't German sound authoritive? isn't written Arabic beautiful? Isn't New-Speak perfect because it's hard for speakers to form rebellious thoughts?). These are so complex to ...
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What you're describing is a classical philosophical language, a kind of engineered language that creates ideas by chaining together strings of morphemes as you say.
Most of these languages are taxonomic, focusing on words with substance: nouns, verbs, descriptors.
Check out Ars Signorum for one of the earliest of the type and for a more modern approach, take ...
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I don't believe such a thing could be possible.
Suppose you have such a theoretically "perfect" language--ideas are expressed in the minimum number of bits (whatever those bits translate to in terms of speaking/writing.) What happens when someone doesn't speak (or write) perfectly? Since there is no redundancy to the message you have a coherent ...
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You'd need to use the absolute maximum number of phonemes that humans (or whatever beings are making this conlang) can produce. With a broader vocabulary of sounds or symbols, it doesn't take as long to come up with a unique sequence for each concept.
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In the movie Pitch Black, there was a group of muslims stranded on that planet.
when they prayed they all prayed in a circle facing each other.
I would say this would show they were praying towards the stars where somewhere out there, the Kabah, or Allah would be.
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There is some speculation that human evolution already went through an aquatic (or at least littoral) (waterside) phase; while the hypothesis is regarded as disproven (or even "junk science") in scientific circles, it has captured a bit of the collective imagination, and may have generated some discussion and fragments of suggestive evidence you'd ...
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Missiles with a 10km zone kill capability are going to keep ranges out at at least the 10km (and probably a lot more since you want to be out of the damage range not just the killzone), until everyone's magazines run dry because you can't engage with them at ranges smaller than that 10kms without them killing the ships that launch them. If those missiles can ...
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The human body is already very elastic. Your skin is amazingly stretchy. Most of your soft tissues and organs can be moved around to a significant extent. The most significant limitation on our ability to contort is those big, hard things inside of us that don't bend, known to the lay man as bones. Cephalopods such as octopods and squids, have no bones at ...
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The fourth portal happens to be in precisely the same place as one of the portals in the parallel universe.
However these portals work, the connection between them exists on a different plane. Unbeknownst to anyone in either universe, that plane is shared by both universes. The portal projects in both universes have been punching holes into a shared ...
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The stretching of the human will only activate when any part of their body is pulled or pushed farther than our normal limits.
I can't see how this would be an advantage at all.
Let's start from a newborn, just out of the mother's womb. The first advice when handling a newborn is "hold their head". Why? Because their neck muscles are not strong ...
answered Jan 17 at 4:51
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Connected to the mothership.
There is a big computer in the parallel universe that controls the endpoints of all the portals. Each portal has an identifier number, and when a new portal is created it is by default connected to Portal 0. Then the computer can be used to redirect the portal.
Now portals by default don't care about which universe they're in. ...
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Each Portal Has a Unique Frequency:
The portals on Our Earth are operating differently than the portals in the parallel universe. It's a little like the portal system in Stargate, where the Earth portal has a human-made controller that operates slightly different from the rest.
Since your people are able to "Dial up" portal locations, there must be ...
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Punching through
If you make a portal, you basically punch through some part of reality. A portal is open at two sides, so you're required to punch through twice.
If you open another portal it'll need an exit. The portal will automatically probe for weak points where it can establish the other portal. Nothing is weaker than an already punched hole, so a ...
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The answer will be technobabble ...
There is nothing special about four portals.
There is something special about version 0.2.3 of the control software, which became necessary to replace a simple boolean switch (one of two other portals) with a list of destinations. Version 0.2.3 of the software happens to use a newer version of a java library, which fixes ...
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