Tag: space
-
No, a black hole can’t be used as a rocket
With a headline like that, I need to introduce some concepts. First, a black hole: if you have enough stuff in a small enough volume, the outside is causally disconnected from the inside. This is normally phrased as “nothing, not even light, can escape”, but that’s a little misleading because… Second: Black holes emit Hawking…
-
SciFi: The unexpected problems with gravity
Artificial gravity in science fiction falls into three categories: Applied Phlebotinum works via made-up technobabble. Examples include the gravity plating in Star Trek. Spin gravity is where inertia wants you to keep going in a straight line, but centripetal force from your outer hull keeps pulling (or pushing) you towards your axis of rotation, creating…
-
Memetic monocultures
Brief kernel of an idea: Societies deem certain ideas “dangerous”. If it possible to technologically eliminate perceived dangers, we can be tempted to do so, even when we perceived wrongly. Group-think has lead to catastrophic misjudgments. This represents a potential future “great filter” for the Fermi paradox. It does not apply to previous attempts at…
-
Homeopathic solutions to the Fermi paradox
Homeopathy: for those who have never learned the details, claims that the potency of a treatment can be increased by repeatedly diluting it. There are many scales — the C-scale is “how many times has this been diluted by a factor of 100”, the X-scale “…by a factor of 10”. I’d say “clearly nonsense”, but…
-
Hyperloop’s secondary purposes
I can’t believe it took me this long (and until watching this video my Isaac Arthur) to realise that Hyperloop is a tech demo for a Launch loop. I (along with many others) had realised the stated reason for the related–but–separate The Boring Company was silly. My first thought for that was it was a…
-
Kessler-resistant real-life force-fields?
Idle thought at this stage. The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect, collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade where each…
-
Musk City, Antarctica
One of the criticisms of a Mars colony is that Antarctica is more hospitable in literally every regard (you might argue that the 6-month day and the 6-month night makes it less hospitable, to which I would reply that light bulbs exist and you’d need light bulbs all year round on Mars to avoid SAD-like…
-
Falcon 9 to scale
Space rockets are Big. Those quaint little pictures that show them next to Nelson’s Column or the Eiffel Tower don’t do them justice, partly because… well. I didn’t even realise how big the Eiffel Tower is until I visited it a few years ago. So, here’s what the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9…
Kitsune Software 