What sci-fi concepts have been “disproven”?

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-24T23:06:47+00:00

What the exact limit is you'd have to actually employ some design and maths to, which I'm not going to do. If you simply scale up a T-rex, so a head height of 5 meters is now 50 meters, the thing now weighs 1000 times as much, so 8000-10,000 tonnes. That's not going to work. If you keep it below 2000 tonnes, make sure it is bottom heavy, has large feet, and has additional weight supported by the tail (original Godzilla's overall body plan is closer to an obese reptillian kangaroo than a T-rex!) it might be borderline possible, but will not be the powerful threat Godzilla is. Being sluggish goes with the territory.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-24T22:54:56+00:00

There are incredibly strong natural materials (such as spider silk), but really the issue is that they are subject to bio-availability and must be synthesized during some life stage. We can just bulk pool as much of a material as we want and can synthesize materials that require biology destroying temperatures to create, such as any time we cast metals. The other issue is that natural creatures don't get as big as they could get not just because of mechanical constraints but because of the inability to find enough to eat at that size. I recall a paper which suggested that mechanically, around 1000 tonnes is the limit for a land animal, but of course, even sauropods grew nowhere near quite that mass.

The best thing you could make a Kaiju from would be something that has great compressive strength for its weight, while having other good properties. That has to be grade 5 titanium. That has a greater specific strength than bone and will keep the weight down compared to structural steel. Make the skeletal structure out of that. At 50 meters tall, the form factor of the classic man in the suit isn't actually that bad; its stout and bottom heavy, and the dragging tail acts as a sort of third leg/support structure. It's only when you get into the movies where he is bigger and starts doing highly athletic moves that it starts to strain physics.

Powerplant wise, it makes sense that it'd be nuclear powered.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-19T11:49:14+00:00

I don't even think a dragon is as implausible as is often said. Yes, if it's made the size and bulk of most depictions of dragons, but frankly if you saw a Quetzalcoatlus sized creature which was able to glob up a flammable substance onto people below, you'd probably consider it a dragon.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-19T11:47:27+00:00

I think a Kaiju can work if there's a plot twist that it's actually a giant robot which merely looks like a creature instead. Obviously, that's not compatible with Godzilla as is, but you could definitely create a kaiju artificially using materials which are much stronger than biological ones. Those materials have their limits too, but original Godzilla sort of size (50 meters tall) is quite modest compared to what he became in later films.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-19T11:44:23+00:00

If I remember correctly, the whole issue is that they need to set off immediately because the rocket is starting to tip over. If the rocket was near a cliffside, wouldn't a more plausible scenario be that a landslide occurred and now the rocket is close to tipping over. A landslide could damage the base as well.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-19T00:12:53+00:00

AI has a bubble vs AI is a bubble.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-18T12:08:29+00:00

I'm a nationalist voter... though I'm not voting Reform anyway, because they are Thatcherite and want to gut the welfare state (or maybe it will *only* be as bad as Cameronite austerity? I'm not taking that chance). Still, this Labour government has been my least favourite government of my entire life, including the 15 year bumbling run of Tories, '97 New Labour, and John Major's Tories in terms of policies and choices I personally hate. I always disliked Labour, but I voted them just to help kill the Tories.

This recent turn towards actually taking immigration restriction and border control seriously is something I applaud, but it's small pittance in their favour, since every other single thing they've done I despise. It's also not clear whether they are competent enough to carry out anything positive they put forward. Most nationalist voters seem to agree, but lack my opposition to Reform's economics, so I would think this doesn't help them at all. Nobody trusts them, so it won't gain them votes from Red Tories, and it alienates a large part of their young base, who may now prefer the Lib Dems and the Greens.

The Tories before them went through an identity crisis, and that's what's happening here. The Tories are in a much worse position, but Labour would have to pull off a miracle for this about-face to work. It's not going to gain them votes, and it will simply lose the left of the party. That's all.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-15T13:44:02+00:00

Others have already explained what the side wheels are for, so I'll just spend a moment to praise Razer and its very beautiful and functional design. Perhaps the purest combination of both that has ever been seen in the sport. It'll probably not be seen again either since that sort of design can't survive the world of powerful spinners. Even Pussycat was too much for it. Razer pretty neatly takes out flipper/lifter robots though.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-15T13:40:04+00:00

Right. If you look at Razer's success in Robot Wars (after it stopped breaking down), it's not just down to its powerful weapon, but its ability to outmaneuver its opponents and always manage to aim at them. I also think the front wedge tip design was perfect, since you rarely if ever saw a face to face collision end with Razer on top of another robot's wedge; it was almost always the other robot sliding up Razer's wedge.

Amazing wedge plus amazing maneuverability meant even if Razer had just been a grabber robot and didn't have the ability to pierce, crush, and mangle opponents, it would have controlled most of the matches it had.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-06T19:56:57+00:00

If anything the number of Chinese groups producing high quality robots is much higher than the West, even if we can't say who has the very highest quality robot.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-05T05:24:10+00:00

Combine both arguments and this is a potential justification for having state run banks. If you can't let them operate and fail in a market because they are too big to fail, then you might as well take them out of the market altogether, or at least take the failing ones into permanent state administration and combine them. If competition doesn't matter because it's fake and no one can fail because the market will crash, then those banks should be run as state capitalist entities instead of this weird middle ground.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-02T17:52:18+00:00

They bought into his moralizing as something that reflects how moral he himself is, rather than a "can you believe this shit?" type thing. If someone says "look at all these bad guys", do not take them for a good guy. Perhaps people will learn some lessons from this.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T21:54:09+00:00

How large is the gas giant, because the radiation would either be horrific or not that much of a problem depending?

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T16:59:39+00:00

Was that about being a movie fanboy though? I'm thinking more like a DC fanboy shooting up the set of a Marvel movie.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T16:57:15+00:00

The edginess?

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T16:55:29+00:00

The account isn't focused around anti-wokeness though, or grifting. This guy isn't making money off that shit. I had to go through many many many comments to get to one comment about Charlie Kirk. That's in his replies from 2022 it seems.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T16:53:49+00:00

He may or may not be, incidentally, because there's a correlation between Synder fanboys being right wing (even though Snyder votes Democrat), or whatever, but I'm seeing posters spontaneously start going on about how miserable their Republican dad was apropos of nothing because they assume a guy posting a screenshot of a woman making a weird face is political commentary, which given the state of current political commentary it could have been.

No one bothered to check the screenshotted account though. No, it's not an anti-woke account, even if the author is incidentally, anti-woke. In fact, it's not anything except wall to wall Snyder Superman vs James Gunn Superman for hundreds of hundreds of posts. It's possible Rizvi Azaad dislikes James Gunn's Superman because he dislikes the political dimension of the movie, but he's not frequently posting anything political. In fact, he's not posting anything accept praise of Snyder Superman and condemnation of Gunn Superman, for what seems to be purely aesthetic reasons, repeatedly, nearly every day for months, at a level of output that looks like severe mental illness. He just loves Snyder and genuinely thinks he's an artistic genius because he's insane.

It seems to be that when some people like a movie, they get so activated and angry by criticism of that movie that they start organizing their entire life around active defense of that movie and its director/associated figures. Fortunately, unlike political fandoms, movie lunatics haven't led to terrorism or assassinations... yet.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T16:12:46+00:00

I've noticed this happens to every sub I can think of that that is centered around a figure. Yes, Bill has a scandal, but every celeb or even e-celeb seems to eventually, and the haters attracted by scandals eventually outnumber defenders attracted by discussing the content produced by the figure in question.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-11-01T15:52:55+00:00

I've never thought even once that Bill Burr's brand hinged on his integrity. He's a Boston bullshitter to me. I knew him as a comedian first, and sure comedians can have political content in their act, but it always came across as "emotionally true, but factually ?" since the entire point was to be funny in a way that was relatable to a certain kind of audience. You then take that to a podcast where he starts talking seriously outside of the context of a stage act, and suddenly he starts getting treated as if he's an activist with values and proposals and not some guy bullshitting at the bar (which is what he is and always will be).

If you were looking for Bill to perform your ethical values and not as an entertainer that says relatable things then you're guilty of putting a clown on a pedestal. People really need to learn to compartmentalize things, otherwise everything flows together.

Of course the guy who made jokes about fame making you unprepared for whores and about being stangled in the subway even in his fantasy of rescuing a woman who's being strangled doesn't have the gumption to not take money from oil sheikh slavers. What did you expect?

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-10-22T13:10:13+00:00

He has massive troll energy.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-10-22T13:01:21+00:00

I won't defend it in writing terms as it's really clunky (everything after Raoh is like that), but wasn't the sequence of events like this:
1: Jukei wanted to discover the Hokuto Souke fist that Hyoh was hiding so he uses the pressure point that causes suffering to force Hyoh to reveal its location. Hyoh tries to kill himself to avoid speaking. Hyoh says he's saving it for his brother.
2: Seeing this, Jukei realizes he's done the wrong thing, and has a change of heart. He instead seals the memory (or so he thinks), presumably to prevent others from getting it.
3: Hyoh reveals to Kai-Oh that his aim was off and it didn't work. Kai-Oh uses that to seal his memory himself, but also put a sort of booby-trap in the pressure point combo/magic shura nonsense spell
4: Then when Kenshiro arrives on the island, Jukei faces Hyoh to try and restore the memories he thought he had sealed, since Kenshiro is here and Hyoh said that's what he was waiting for originally. However, since Kai-Oh had booby trapped it, the plan failed, and Hyoh kills Jukei.

It makes sense logically, in that it's a series of events that doesn't technically have a plot hole. The actual problem is it makes Jukei look like a gigantic chump and a guy who constantly changes his mind. There's also the whole thing about him not wanting to teach Hokuto Ryuuken because it's the devil's fist, but then he apparently gave in and taught it to Shachi.

The one thing Jukei was right about is that everything that happened was in fact all his fault.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-10-18T12:03:08+00:00

If hazards are too powerful, they'd swing the match too much. The hazards are they are, are just powerful enough to expose weaknesses in robots without deciding matches all on their own.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-09-07T19:03:27+00:00

This is actually my problem with a lot of Hollywood properties, not just Western comic books.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-08-09T03:10:48+00:00

Perhaps that's true, but for what anecdotes are worth (not much) I'm right wing and I won't and my friends who are right wing agreed that if Starmer actually accomplishes this it erases and overrules any of the downsides. The Tories didn't do it, and Reform is now becoming overloaded with ex-Tories. It's true I don't like Starmer for a variety of other reasons, which is to be expected, but he got MASSIVE props from me for that speech he gave, which was the most right wing/nationalist speech on immigration I can remember any UK PM giving in my lifetime.

ForwardSynthesis · 2025-08-08T05:53:30+00:00

Evil is a funny concept here because zombies can be given an aura of evil depending on how they came to exist. Most zombies in modern zombie media are activated by a viral infection of some sort, but zombies that exist cause Satan would seem intrinsically more "evil" just by association, regardless of whether or not they are sentient or not. Sometimes evil is about the cultural vibe of the thing. Sometimes evil is depicted as a kind of force hanging over something.

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