New answers tagged science-fiction
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When in a low gravity environment, resistive equipment is better than mass based equipment
In a low-gravity environment (like the Moon), you are going to want to optimise for volume used by equipment. One problem with making something more massive is that you increase it's volume proportionately. For example, you need ~6 times the mass to have the equivalent ...
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Assuming the point of the weight is to make sure the wearer avoids muscle atrophy associated with long duration space flight...
The best solution is probably not heavy cloths, but rather a body covering that resists motion at all of the wearer's joints.
Some possible options here would be...
A conforming suit (like a wetsuit) made of a material that ...
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On earth, people already sometimes wear weights when exercising. It would absolutely be possible to do so under lower gravity conditions. But it would not be equivalent to just living on earth, and my guess is that people wouldn't do it except possibly as preparation for traveling to a higher gravity body.
The biggest reason that it would feel very different ...
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They will either have one-or-more holes to take in food and excrete waste OR a way to absorb energy from light and absorb nutrients. They will have to obey a cube-square law for body size so they don’t overheat. Beyond that, assuming silicon is viable for life, silicon life will be as widely varying as carbon-based species.
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Complex silicon polymers generally fall into two classes: those that are inert in water, or those that are unstable in water.
The same applies to simpler silicon compounds: silica is almost entirely inert in water (it does dissolve as silicic acid, Si(OH)4, which makes it bioavailable... but only in very low concentrations, and no naturally-evolved ...
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It depends on just what aspects of Earth gravity you're trying to simulate. There are two different processes here: actual movement, and the energy your astronaut expends in order to move (and all the related physiology).
(Note that for simplicity, I'm assuming a low-gravity environment with a breathable atmosphere, so the astronaut doesn't have to wear a ...
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It would help with running.
Consider Formula One racecars.
http://formula1-dictionary.net/downforce.html
To be faster you need power, but there is a limit to how much power
you can put on the ground. To increase this limit, force to ground
must be applied on the wheels. Increasing weight can do this, but
weight makes handling worse and require more power. ...
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when only talking about low-gravity environments. some aspects like muscle deterioration and bone density loss should be slowed down or stopped with heavier clothes in a low-gravity environment. others like problems with blood circulation, or pooling of fluids may not.
there is much still left to research to be honest. we don't know for example what the ...
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I remember reading an interview to an astronaut, a long time ago, where they asked him how it felt to move objects in the microgravity of space.
The astronaut said that the objects, even big ones, were not heavy but felt massive.
To get a similar feeling to something you might have experienced on Earth, I think you can recall how does it feel to push or pull ...
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Tungsten carbide does has some ductility but it's still crystalline rather than metallic in structure. This means is has natural planes of cleavage which make it far less shock resistant than pure tungsten, let alone steel. The longer a weapon is the more leverage it's going to put on the crystal structure in a swinging attack so those beautiful leaf-shaped ...
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Wormholes conceptually could have all sorts of different topologies. Not all of these are realistic in terms of general relativity, but science fiction often doesn't bother with the details.
The 'funnel' or 'tunnel' type of wormhole is a case of a flattened 'cross-over' gate. It's easiest to think about the 2D analogue - Flatland people living in a 2D plane ...
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The simplest solution would be that it looks the same from whichever direction the 'gate' is approached. Wormhole entrances (and exits) are spherical 'points' in space but regardless of the angle of approach any observer looking into the event horizon sees the 'tunnel' effect. The effect is a product of space/time distortion within the wormhole on photons ...
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Simple space time deformation, caused by the mass of the wormhole. Nothing dissimilar from what a massive object like a neutron star looks like.
When the warp gate is active, its influence is no longer contained and extends also to its surroundings, giving it the peculiar funnel appearance.
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That will depend on the exact dimensions of the mech's feet, and its total weight, but once you've decided on those, you can use the following table to determine the acceptable substrates.
Soil Bearing Capacities
Clay soil: 95 kPa
Sand or sand gravel mixture: 144 kPa
Gravel: 239 kPa
Sedimentary Rock (ex. Sandstone): 287 kPa
Crystalline Bedrock (ex. Granite): ...
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Organometallic hydride hydrogen carriers.
Just as we have organometallic carriers of oxygen in our own biological systems (hemoglobin with the iron containing heme ring), in a world where hydrogen is energy your creatures will have organometallic metal hydrides.
From The Power of Hydrides
Image cropped by me to emphasize biological organometal hydrides.
...
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Short Answer.
It might be possible for stars that emit more violet light than the Sun to have habitable planets, where the daytime sky might be more violet colored than blue.
The star of a habitable palnet might have a ring of dust particles that absorb ultraviolet light from the star and re emit it as violet light, and that might possibly color the day time ...
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I don't know why it took me this long to realize the answer, but it turns out I need to frame challenge myself:
When hydrogen is lost to space, there will be nitrogen left behind in the atmosphere
As a result, it doesn't actually matter if the reaction cycle that photosynthesizers use to produce carbohydrate-analogs releases hydrogen--because any hydrogen ...
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Sight based on forming images from photons would indeed be completely pointless, but basically everything else is on the table.
Taste/smell: most magmas have a lot of dissolved volatile molecules like water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, etc. Especially the less-viscous ones that would be easier (not easy, but easier) to swim through. Also lots of metal ...
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The analogue for echolocation in earth sciences would be reflection seismology, in which a shock wave is generated and the acoustic reflections give information about the surroundings. Like echolocation, it is very coarse information, only identifying large-ish things that are nearby.
Smell is rather implausible. The diffusion rate through lava would be ...
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The most plausible way to "sense" something in lava seems to be echolocation: sonic waves bouncing off the interfaces between the lava and the other body, possibly at frequencies outside the range of noise produced by flowing lava, just for the signal to not be drown into noise.
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The Rayleigh-scattering solution
Your chance to make it work naturally is to accept violet (a pure spectral color) instead of purple (a mix of red and blue).
Since it is a shorter wave length than blue, it will be Rayleigh-scattered stronger than blue. So your problem is to make the violet intensity in the light spectrum of your star higher than the ...
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The colour of the sky on Earth is blue due to Rayleigh scattering. This means that unless the incoming light is mostly purple, you're not going to get a purple sky.
Now... all is not necessarily lost. Mars has a reddish sky because of its load of reddish airborne dust. If you could find a way to have your world's atmosphere contain a significant amount of ...
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There is no difference
Not being able to reproduce is a major advantage in the robot's
perspective
Robots could reproduce. Self replicating robots are a common trope in many scifi series. AI could also reproduce. In Batteries Not Included, a bunch of small robotic UFOs come to Earth to breed.
Sati in The Matrix was the child of two programs.
"Not ...
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frame challenge, Androids don’t have to and probably shouldn’t work like that.
Lots of android and android adjacent media isn’t actually about androids but ends up looking like near humans who are often on the autism spectrum. Because of this you get robots that want to be “human” and more emotionally expressive and feel things. However robots shouldn’t work ...
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We need a creature that subsists on microscopic organisms, with an aerodynamic shape, and a land dweller. I propose a slime mold.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-creeping-slime-is-changing-how-we-think-about-intelligence
These macroscopic amoeboid sheets adopt aerodynamic shapes by flowing according to forces produced by air currents. Shapes of each ...
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From your description of the creatures it looks like their method of consumption is passive. Since you said they hardly ever move implies they can move if they wished. So they are a higher on the evolutionary tree than sea sponges. A sloth consumes around 110 calories /day. About as much as a big apple.
or:
1 Cup of Blueberries
1 Hard-Boiled Egg.
1 Orange.
...
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The Biggest Advantage is Intellectual Immortality & Expandability
When a human dies, everything we have ever learned is lost forever. No matter how well we try to teach each other things, you can never know everything someone else knows. A very significant part of our lives is just spent learning, and we quickly hit an age where learning new things ...
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There have been mentions of Frame Dragging
I would expect those to be negligible, even if the mass of the object (which would need to be kept together by magic, otherwise it would collapse into a black hole) is substantial.
Further what the visual or detectable effects these phenomenon would exhibit.
It would be extremely bright in all bands, because any ...
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Slavery.
The main drawback of being an android is that you are considered an object that belongs to a real human.
If you are a repair android you can do repairs better than most humans. However you cannot stop being a repair droid without your masters' permission. If you are a surgery android you can do super precise operations. But on the other hand you ...
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Since blue whales are very large ann only eat Krill I think that your creatures could eat relatively small amount of bacteria( and bacteria are abundant) to live.
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Q: "regular EMP bombardments that permanently make the production/maintenance of electronics severely more difficult"
A yearly EMP needs not be so big, to make production difficult.. some black hole far away, wagging its plasma jet** tail in a certain direction.. Earth travels through it every year.. refer to Adrian's answer for the options.
For me ...
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Handwavium, right? Like, lotsa handwavium, but with a plausible mechanism.
IK Pegasi is a binary with a secondary 1.15 M☉ white dwarf and A-type main-sequence star primary. They circle each other in a close enough orbit with only 21.72168 days as period.
Moreover, the primary is a Delta-Scuti variable, with an actual metallicity ratio of 1.17, about 17% ...
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The short answer to your question is: It would look like a white hole. The reason is simple: In Hilbert's In FOUNDATION OF PHYSICS FROM A THEORY OF EVERYTHING TO A
CONSTITUENT OF GENERAL RELATIVITY by Hilbert states that particles moving at a little more than half the speed of light would produce an anti-gravity cone. Later Franklin Felber
gave a precise ...
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I think it is more interesting if the invisible beings of your story were ghosts( if that is what you wanted us to understand).
Ghosts are spirits, souls of dead people and animals and in the fantasy stories they livre in their own dimension bit they also can "walk" in the ordinary world and van see living people but cannot directly interact with ...
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Thiotimoline
In The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline, Isaac Asimov describes a molecule called thiotimoline where the bonds around a carbon atom are so crowded, they are pushed into the past and future, so it takes a negative amount of time to dissolve.
You can have two universes very close together through a fourth spatial dimension. A small ...
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They could be detected by a " new " way of projecting Kirlian type images through to an eye piece setup in a google glasses kind of way, sent through in real time from a tiny built in Kirlian sensor.
An experiment in visualizing electrical fields can lead to the discovery and the real time Kirlian imagery can show shadowy energy patterns that look ...
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You said "near luminal speed", then stated What would an observer see and be able to detect in the local area of space as the ring is spun up to %9.999$c$. I will assume you missed a 9 at the left, for 99.999% of $c$.
An observer nearby would see nothing, because they would have their subscription to life cancelled in less time than it takes for ...
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Can't help you on what if any relativistic effects you might get from your spinning ring, but I can tell you how to calculate how fast it can spin for any given material.
For a spinning ring, it's really fairly simple: multiply the mass of half the ring by the component of its spin gravity that's perpendicular to an arbitrary "cut plane" and you'll ...
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Instead of making it hard to break make it improbable(?) to break?
The dinosaur Triceratops, oddly has a ball and socket joint in its neck, with beefed up muscles, making it very flexible, yet very strong at the same time.
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HORNS TOO BIG
The horns are so large and bulky that they restrict the range of motion of the neck. So even if your enemy grabs your horns and twists really hard, you just end up bashing your horns into your shoulder with a nasty bruise.
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Okay, I tried to hint at that in the comments but it seems I need a little bit more Space.
No difference
There are at least 4 reasons, why I think that way:
health reasons, aka how biology works
environmental reason, why and how we would like to move in space
technological reasons, what we are capable of doing in space
Today's reality - on this planet, ...
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If you're using the original specifications for O'Neill Cylinders as a stepping off point then your Space Born are going to have a series of slight differences stemming from the fact that they live in an atmosphere with a sea-level oxygen pressure but total pressure closer to that at 5500 metres above sea level. This will effect the structure of their skin, ...
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For starters, think of the long-term impact of lower gravity settings on the human body. Humans lose bone density, and muscle strength since less is needed in lower gravity. Over generations, perhaps people in space bound colonies would be smaller.
Also, diet is important to consider. It seems plants are more sustainable than meat for space-bound colonies. ...
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Yes.
Fast impacts produce EMPs. This is most relevant for impacts on spacecrafts because there are fast moving object out there.
Characterizing Electromagnetic Pulses from Hypervelocity Impact Plasmas
Abstract: Projectiles that strike targets with enormous speeds will
vaporize and ionize the material, producing a rapidly expanding
plasma. Experiments ...
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Can I have sand in a desert that would make it impossible to differentiate between land and horizon?
Table salt
Some regions of the world are covered in meters of a salt crust due to ancient lakes evaporating and geology being a cruel mistress. The evaporation process also makes these places uncannily flat.
The most famous salt flat in the world is Salar de Uyuni. Some parts of it look like what you ask in your requirement no. 2:
Or can I increase the ...
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Can I have sand in a desert that would make it impossible to differentiate between land and horizon?
"Do you know of materials that can be used to create near transparent sand / dust?"
Fill the gaps between the grains with a liquid that has the same refractive index. The liquid doesn't have to be water. It could be some biological goo, or a clear oil. If the match isn't perfect, you would likely get something translucent, like slush (ice crystals ...
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Can I have sand in a desert that would make it impossible to differentiate between land and horizon?
"I am looking for an end-result where one would not be able to differentiate between land and horizon"
I believe that a warm and very flat desert ought to be enough (the same can be obtained with a thin layer of water), but if you have clouds in the sky, then you will be able to differentiate very easily even if, technically, the horizon border ...
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