vger

So... yeah. Doing a bit of research for a possible story I'm writing. A human medical student from the modern age finds himself in a stone-age society, trying to deal with an infection that is wiping out the populous. I have it figured out, generally, how he can solve the dilemma, but I want to push human ingenuity to the max here. What kind of equipment could be built that would be analogous to a modern med-lab? Yes, I'm assuming a "tech tree" could be involved here; if something had to be constructed for rudimentary fabrication, that's fine, but there are only a couple of months available in which to do all of this. Mortar and pestle is easy enough. How about a glass lens? How hard would it be to create a robust microscope with 5x magnification? In a nutshell, I'm looking for boy scout solutions to advanced scientific instruments. Nothing too fancy required. Anything from the 18-early 1900's (penicillin discovery) would be sufficient, but that's still a huge leap forward.

Aren't silicates still the biggest problem facing the colonization of Mars? That stuff effects lungs the same way eating glass affects the digestive tract. Even assuming life in domes, and using suits while taking as many safety measures as possible, Mars has regular dust storms, and if any of that finds its way into the living space, either by air currents or on the soles of boots, it'll lead to you having a very short and painful life. We're not even sure where Earth's nitrogen came from, aside from a possibility that it arrived via meteorites, or even Jupiter at a time when it had a much less stable orbit and wandered nearer the sun, handing out gases to the rocky planets like candy. So isn't it possible there's a decent supply at the poles or beneath the soil?

Post-scarcity makes money irrelevant.

A lot of this tech would have a lot more uses than just weaponry though. And if someone has been hotrodding around with these things for decades, with enough plausible deniability that it still can't be proven to exist, then we could just as easily shovel resources into cementing our position at key strategic locations in space without anybody being the wiser. And if the information was declassified with a fleet already prepared to go, it would still give us more than enough of a headstart to capitalize on it before any other nations could replicate and get a project off the ground. It's also worth considering what such advanced gear would do for humanity in general though. Why bother keeping technology buried in top secret for military purposes, if the very existence of such technology could bring about a post-scarcity society and bring an end to a need for war in the first place?

This has to be a joke. One of the most famous UFO sighting designs from the 80's & 90's? And yet the semi top-secret X-37B is only using conventional motors? Sorry... if we had that technology there would be far more reasons to release it and revolutionize our infrastructure "Where we're going, we don't need roads" rather than just keep it as a plaything for a handful of Illuminati wannabes. We would be out mining asteroids and the moon; clinching the market on rare earth metals and bringing back the "glory days" of the mid-century U.S. economy.

I'm looking for anything that will allow for good machinima creation. Things like the ability to record a mission and then play it back while observing from a different "camera." A "zoom" camera to grab footage of a blastoff as if viewed from the planet surface, like the kind of shots we see in live coverage of a rocket launch. A way to ride "shotgun" near a vessel as it executes maneuvers, staying relative to its movement but still allowing slow pans past it? Any utility that could aid in making cinematic scenes with no trace of the UI. Have things like this been done?

Making Kerbin's radius smaller results in the space center sliding along the surface. Going in one direction, rubberbanding back, rinse and repeat. Troubleshooting the problem visually isn't exactly practical since due to this error, I am unable to launch. Not sure if the game thinks I'm underwater or what. Radius was the only thing I changed.

Actually if something like that were going to happen at all, it would happen from a drop in pressure. High pressure would probably result in smaller eyes. Though high pressure in general allows for overall larger bodies if there's more oxygen... this is why dinosaurs (and pretty much everything else from that era) were enormous. Though science already showed that low pressure sucking eyeballs out wouldn't happen, even if you were in space and popped your helmet. I did wonder though if their eyes were so huge to compensate for low light during their stone age. Compared to our own moon, Mun has like NO albedo.

When a Coyote actually manages to eat a Roadrunner, he turns into a Kerbal.

Space magic.

Well, alright... I feel like an idiot. Where's the most exhaustive and comprehensive source for learning how to use this? So many questions but I see so little documentation. I want to use textures for color and heightmap but no indication of how. Nothing about 'where' on Kerbol the launchpad would appear on a 2D map to ensure it isn't buried in mountains. I don't even see anything about how to load the maps for a world. So much potential, nothing explained at all beyond the examples, but looking at them, there seems to be a LOT that is still missing to paint the complete picture of how this works.

This might be one of those no-brainers that is actually REALLY easy to make sense of but hey, it's late at night, and this is a conundrum I never really thought about before, and the more I tried to wrap my brain around it, the more I felt like the most accurate analogy was similar to trying to draw a picture of a black hole... but since we can't perceive curved space, all we can do is draw something similar, that of a 3D object influencing 2D space (classic funnel diagram). So I was thinking specifically about radio waves, but a wave at any part of the light spectrum will do. I presume the best evidence we have for its behavior is the double-slit experiment. But the drawings of how a wave works still describe, essentially, particles moving in one direction, and then the other, rhythmically. Now, I can stretch my mind to conceive this, but then I start trying to imagine it as something moving in 3 dimensions; a signal being fired in 360 degrees*3 simultaneously... How does one even try to visualize something this in the form of waves? Is is all a SINGLE wave? Is it millions of tiny ones, all going in slightly different directions? What the heck would this look like in 3 dimensions? Or even two for that matter, if you could see every nuance of the light being sent? Can this even be conceived without "ascending" to the 4th dimension? I never had much of a struggle with this when thinking of it as a laser beam or a flashlight (which was what science books always used for this), but then trying to think of more complex examples, the idea of a light wave suddenly feels much more theoretical. A single "noise" expands outward from the source as a rapidly expanding sphere. Even if looking at it from 4D, how can that possibly look like a wave?

I used to build 3D models using Legos and then "copied" the design in my computer back when I was playing with early-era CGI software. I just found it SO much easier to come up with cool ships that way. Also... I have just as much of a fetish for the late 70's/early 80's space series as the astronaut from the Lego Movie. They really need to bring that stuff back.

Not just them, but if we're talking about an alternate evolution, I wonder what impact this would have on everyone's perception of time. If the rising and falling of the sun was the minute hand, then surely the moon was the hour hand. And how much longer would it have taken to conceive the idea of a heliocentric system comprised of orbiting spheres?

Can this be used to customize controlled walking animations or will it only work for typical "one-shot" emotes?

Well, dang. Somehow I never knew that O-class emitted primarily UV. Heh... too bad they don't look like black lights in the sky Is the "force" going to keep the star compressed after it reaches singularity size, or does it terminate at that point? Considering that the sun's mass isn't actually being increased, would it be a stable black hole even if you could somehow do this? Seems like turning off the force would just cause the star to immediately go supernova.

No, it's the opposite. Bigger = dimmer. Generally-speaking. There are some stars out there that are both big and bright. But I'm inclined to agree that if you could somehow compress the sun like squeezing an egg, it would get brighter and hotter.

Well... at least we've established that it's possible to escalate faster than the speed of light. Still need to work on the accelerate part though.

@kerbiloid Dang, that was profound. You just solved a riddle that nobody intentionally made.

A very good question, especially when experiments have shown that measuring a particle can even retroactively alter its state, BEFORE you measured it. Taking that into account though, I'm completely baffled how quantum computing would ever work since it seems to have to be governed by the same principle. How are qbits of any use if read/write can't be done accurately?

Good explanation for why the communication aspect doesn't actually work as we wish it would. But also, dagnabbit, my google-fu is failing me at the moment. Anyone remember an experiment in the past year or so where someone actually figured out a way to observe photons in the double-slit experiment without altering their behavior? My gut tells me there's a way around the quantum-entanglement communication problem. Or at least, I have much higher hopes we'll be able to do this in the near future compared to warp drive.

Uh... didn't they just do exactly this just a few months back? Regardless, of whether or not they can transmit data, I wonder if it's even possible to comprehend how entangled particles are capable of ignoring relativity with their "transmission." Also, if you want to bake your noodle even more than basic quantum entanglement, check out this variation of the double-slit experiment. https://hackaday.com/2016/09/07/the-quantum-eraser/

Or a redefinition of "air space." Dunno... raise the ceiling by a few miles? Also though sooner or later all that would need to be done is for someone to claim a polar orbit, thereby making it impossible to orbit the planet without intersecting the claimed one. In this case the Pentagon definition is fun though, because it also includes extraterrestrial attacks And... eh... patenting the wheel? Well considering the wheel and axle is one of the 6 simple machines, there's plenty wrong with it, because it would impact practically every complex machine ever invented by humans. I've always said that if the patent system had existed at the time humans first began developing technology, our only refined light source today would still be candles.

You realize how dangerous that is, right? That means turning orbit into a frantic territorial "land grab." Outer space has been "free" since humans first touched it.

Hopefully not. That sounds strikingly similar to a "protection service" which means a really lame new way to tax vehicles for services provided by the Space Force (whether you actually want it or not).