Well of Souls Forums

An elevator would be one single big piece of infrastructure with hard and rather low limitations on payload volume and mass and number of active climbers. A Lofstrom loop would have similar limitations, while also being a control nightmare and constant power hog, not to mention the safety issues inv...

Would the Terrestrial Planet Finder have worked on other angles? It would have only needed the light from a planet to see it, after all. As I understand it, both of the direct-observation methods planned for the TPF (interferometry and coronography) involved large or composite optical telescopes wi...

hi hi If you want to buy clothing that isn't made in sweatshops today, it is not going to be cheap. I did some searching and the cheapest t-shirt I could find from a company that pays its employees a living wage was $28. The cheapest t-shirt I could find in general was $1.75. Edit: Although it is c...

On the threat of AI, the main one I see is from them doing exactly what people tell them to, especially in the short-sighted, increasingly disconnected-from-reality financial sector. An AI optimizing high-frequency trades for immediate profits will do just that, it won't have any comprehension of o...

We can't build a trinary computer yet. Quick note: we can and have built trinary computers, it's just that they don't offer many advantages (they do offer some, but that just means they get used in specialty applications: flash memory, for example). Several have been built, even, but they were larg...

Just a dumb question: Why would 1 kg of helium and 1 kg of lead have different weights, with same gravity? In both cases, it should be around 9.81 N, give or take for the local gravity constant. Density. For any normal conditions, the density of lead is going to be reasonably stable. Helium is a ga...

Yep, I'd say she is flirting.... consciously or unconsciously, in a nerdy sort of way. He just casually rattled off a technical definition of base dimensions in terms of fundamental physical quantities to 9 digits of precision. She's Listel caste. From her perspective, he started it. Tempo's probab...

hi hi What are you going to save? A few months? Years? At a hundredth of a g average acceleration, it would only take 5 years to reach 5% c. When you've got a century or two of travel ahead of you, do you really care. I think you missed the point I was trying to make. My response was entirely in re...

The problem is that the mass of the fuel is lost afterwards, and that we therefore need to put tremendous amounts of fuel on the ship. The distance (without FTL) is prohibitively large, the amount of fuel needed therefore tremendous, so much even, that most calculations I've seen so far suggest sta...

hi hi I think that if there is a living crew onboard, and the lifespan of the crew is somehow a concern regardless of the length of the voyage, that having a booster stage would be preferable to building a second spaceship that can overtake and match velocities with the primary ship in order to del...

Having a poor starting thrust is what staging is for. You have a booster stage at the start, and it decouples once it is spent. That is the answer for most rockets. For an interstellar journey, you don't gain much...you're not really in a hurry to finish your burn, since you'll likely spend most of...

For long travel distances, if no FTL shortcut is found, photon drives will be the only viable solution. But they have a terrible low output, but by far the best propulsion/energy ratio. Fusion is supposed to be decent if we can ever get a net-positive fusion reactor. There's also the old Orion Driv...

As far as I'm aware, in the vacuum of space, an exhaust plume will look exactly the same regardless of orientation or current velocity. In the comic, the plumes sometimes bend to indicate change in trajectory, but I think that's more visual convenience than strictly realistic. Like a big water spri...

my personal theory on the subject involves a likeness with the speed of sound, there are surprising amounts of similarities actually. basically there is some kind of drag or something, that makes it very difficult to go faster, overcoming that and you go faster, pretty straight forward, how is anot...

Unfortunately, while Congress bumped up the Commercial Crew funding a bit this time around, they still under-funded it, and are again pressuring NASA to downselect to a single choice. And now Senator Shelby's making another attempt to kill it off. These commercial programs are operated under fixed ...

If for some reason this standoff is still going on 6 years from now, all Russia will be doing with a boycott is taking money out of Russian contractors' pockets and redirecting it to American contractors. They're doing us a favor by lighting a fire under the people responsible for funding the Ameri...

The problem is that when you look at the in-universe descriptions of the 'binary' language, one finds that if you're not a droid, you can neither speak it nor fully understand it (though you can get the general gist of what's being said), as 'binary' could accurately be described as a form of high-...

I'd bet that an artificial container for an Umiak mind upload would have to preserve the pattern of interaction inherent in the original and would thus preserve the detectable telepathic signal, since the Loroi can sense minds of organic aliens already despite enormous differences in biochemistry a...

Not necessarily. Also ... are Historian Emissaries invisible? Do we know? Whether they are or aren't doesn't say anything about Umiak AI...some machine intelligences may be detectable and others undetectable, just like biological intelligences. If one could generate an entirely synthetic intelligen...

To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if current Umiak farseeing jamming (if any) isn't them just having figured out how to transfer consciousness from flesh to machine. We know they are fairly happy on cybernetics, so one could assume that they would take the next logical step and completely throw ...