szputnyik

Let's say an asteroid similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs strikes again. A few thousand people manage to live for a thousand years in an underground bunker system under conditions similar to the Real World of the Matrix trilogy. After emerging from the bunker, they find a devastated environment on the surface, composed of small shrub-like forests, undergrowth consisting of mostly ferns, the main components of land fauna are rodents and birds. Signs of civilization, eg. cities, structures, machines are nowhere to be seen. The bunker is similar to a self-sustaining underground Martian base, or a generational ship, but after all these years, the systems are starting to fail, and there are no heavy industrial factories or raw materials stored down there, just some simple machines that manufacture products needed for day-to-day living from recycled materials.

I've read somewhere a long time ago, that we have mined out all of the metals and fossil fuels on Earth that could be mined with pre-industrial technology, and if a large-scale war or a natural disaster blasted us back to the stone age, we would be stuck at a technological stage similar to the Aztecs and other Native Americans of South America, who were literate but still used Neolithic technology, because there would be no metals or hydrocarbons left in easy reach, which we could access with pre-industrial mining methods. In other words, we couldn't simply dig new mines and mine ores and coal Minecraft-style because there are none of these left that can be accessed that easily. We could have saved modern books and other information sources that would tell us how to build modern mining machines, but without raw materials, with which we could build simple machines, to build the complex mining machines needed, we would be stuck. Do you think this is true or not?

By strenght, I mean how far can a radio station broadcast, how bright is a light, or how damaging is an X-ray or gamma ray.

I've been studying the electromagnetic spectrum, and I read that the frequency of an EM wave depends on its strenght. However if that is the case, how come there is an FM broadcasting station the broadcasts on 98 MHz that is strong enough to be received at a distance of 20km and there is another one broadcasting at 103 MHz that is weaker and can only be received at a distance of 5km? How come there are bright, high-energy red-colored lights, and weak UV lights?

In Hungary, dental extractions and other simple dental procedures are also free, but only at state-owned dental clinics. Most people who can afford private dentists avoid them though, because there is a stereotype that state dentists are brutal, do a shabby job, and use old East German equipment. That was maybe true 20 years ago, but conditions are improving. Nonetheless in the Hungarian psyche State Dentist=Medieval Torture Chamber

Unless the antenna is somehow broadcasting gamma rays, no. X-rays and gamma rays are hazardous to health because their wavelenghts are short enough to interfere with the atoms that make up your body. Radio waves have even longer wavelenghts than visible light. A bright street lamp has more of a chance to mess with your health, than any radio transmitter, but its wavelenghts are still too long for that. Is Polish society still that conservative? Communist Hungary in the 1960s was much more liberal than this, at least according to what my parents and grandparents told me. I've been to Poland two times, and it felt more or less like being in Hungary. Although I was in the relatively big city of Krakow, maybe rural areas are much different.

I remember about 10 years ago, I downloaded a zip file and when I tried to open it, I discovered it required a password. After some googling I came across a program to break passwords of archived files. I set it to try breaking it with the brute force method, trying every ASCII character with a password lenght between 1 and 15 characters. I hit start, and it displayed "600 years left". I though, "oh well, might as well keep running this, my great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to access the file." XDDD

The Enigma cypher is not computer-based, it's more like a very complicated pen-and-paper style cypher that would be very slow and require long calculations if actually done on pen and paper, so it is automated by the machine. In mathematical terms, it's more like a slide rule, than a calculator. Which means, that there is no software into which you can plug a coded enigma message, and out it comes decoded. In order to decode the message on your side, you would need to set your machine's rotors to the correct positions, wire up your plugboard with the correct connections, and set how many steps the rotor jumps after pressing a key. One mistake, and out comes gibberish. That means that if the machine set-up instructions are changed often and sent with good enough discretion, it would be very hard for non-crytographers to decode the message.

While vintage Enigma machines are rare museum pieces, replicas made from solid-state electronics and software-based emulators are widespread. Are there still state-owned organizations in any country, or even private companies who use Enigma replicas to send information that is not as sensitive to warrant the use of modern cyphers, but more sensitive to be hidden from the layman?

It wouldn't be immortality, just a gigantic life extension. At the end of the Degenerate Era, the protons that make up your body will decay, making you effectively disappear.

In Hungary you can't photograph military bases and installations, although you can photograph military training camps, air-raid shelters and bunkers, but only from the outside. Photographing border crossings to Schengen countries is theoretically legal, though you musn't photo the crossings at the Ukrainian and Serbian borders and the small iron curtain-like installations (mostly fences and infrared cameras) at the Ukrainian and Serbian border. I've heard that the strictest laws against photographing military and border installations in Europe are in Greece. Some British guy got into trouble because he tried to cross the border by car from Greece to Bulgaria, and the Greek border soldier noticed a small adhesive camera on his windshield with which he recorded his trip.

Gasoline or gun powder.

You're missing the point. Humans have a brain capable of moderating an outburst of violent emotions. The Chimpanzee simply isn't capable of coming up with a reaction other than an immediate, violent attack.

I think the Common Chimpanzee is much more aggressive, since it remains even as an adult at the emotional level of a 2-year-old human child. Humans without serious mental disorders can moderate themselves, count to ten and cool off when provoked, while a Chimpanzee can always throw a potentially deadly hissy fit.

I'm playing with the Tekkit modpack for Minecraft, which adds various technological items like machines to the game. One of these machines is called the Slaughterhouse. What it does is that it kills every nearby animal and "monster" like zombies etc. and processes it into a homogenous nutritional goo called "meat", which can then be cooked and eaten. Could a similar thing be done in real life? Grinding up a whole pig for example and then cooking the mixture of its semi-liquefied meat, ground-up bones, and sterilized bowel contents? Would this be more efficient than current methods of animal butchering?

I wouldn't go. I start getting homesick even if I only leave good old Hungary for a 2-week vacation. Mars would be a place where even good old Earth is nothing more than an occasionally visible faint star.

I had it when I was 5. Had to stay 4 days in the hospital to have it taken out, then to recuperate. I was dressed in pyjamas, assigned a 4-bed hospital room with other children, then about 2 hours later a nurse came, and gave me some kind of sedative pill. It didn't seem to have any effect, it would've been more effective to just pour me a shot of vodka or pálinka. Then, 30 minutes later I was taken to a smaller room, made to sit in a chair, the doctor reached into my throat with a pair of forceps and ripped out my tonsils. I remember shouting out in pain. Then came 3 days of recuperation, during which I was given a lot of ice cream to cool my throat down, I enjoyed that. This happened in a small town hospital in 1996, I've heard that nowadays, anesthesia is used during this surgery so no pain.

My mother was young in Communist Hungary she said she knew literally no one who had any allergies. She started developing allergies to some metals and pollens around 2010. I only have one allergy: to shower gels. Every brand I've tried gives me red itchy rashes after bathing with them, so I switched to good old fashioned soap to which I'm not allergic. For the Asperger part, I was never diagnosed with it, if I try filling out Asperger-tests on the internet, they seem to put me mildly on the spectrum.

I suggested an LED because it can turn on and off in nanoseconds, useful if you don't want to send binary data at morse-code speeds.

As we know, radio signals degrade heavily over interstellar distances, but the light of even distant stars seem to reach us in pristine condition. I'm wondering, would it be a logical (or even possible) approach, to construct a huge LED light in solar orbit, that can shine as bright as a star, and send binary "Li-Fi" data over it, for example to a previously launched probe to Alpha Centauri. If the probe has a camera that is at least as good as the human eye, it could see the blinking artificial star in the distance, and decode the binary code sent over it. Additionally, unless we make the LED emit light in a strongly directional beam towards the probe, this could attract the attention of potential intelligent aliens in nearby star systems.

I always found them very similar to the Goblins of World of Warcraft, minus the money hungriness.

The only thing that would be easier than on Venus is keeping the spacecraft that entered its atmosphere at room temperature. Lighting a campfire in a pressurized compartment and periodically supplying it with oxygen and venting the built up CO2 and smoke to the Uranian atmosphere would theoretically be enough, while even the most Earth-like 50km altitude above Venus would experience a temperature of about 55 °C, making some kind of power hungry super-air conditioner necessary.

Well, Uranus is the most "habitable" gas giant in the Solar System. Its gravity is about the same as that of Venus, and the atmosphere could be accessed with spaceplanes, which would dip down to mine hydrogen and helium, then fly off into space. Making a balloon aerostat like on Venus is impossible, because in a hydrogen/helium atmosphere there are no lighter gases that would be bouyant. The only problem is the extreme cold, which coupled with the thick atmosphere could disable spaceplanes entering it, though it wouldn't be more dangerous than the atmosphere of Titan. Flying machines flying with, instead of against the winds, would experience no dynamic pressure and relative wind.

This makes me think of that old Ren and Stimpy episode, in which they parody Star Trek and their spaceship gets sucked into a black hole, and they end up in a weird dimension of floating toasters and hideous museum exhibits, then start mutating into other animals.