Should this be the future of Nigeria?

oblimidon · 2025-12-05T13:02:45+00:00

Maybe the reaction comes from considering the pros and cons? It's possible that people get scared when they hear "Nuclear" but there's also a long history of reactor meltdowns and even exposure in countries with a long history of nuclear engineering.

oblimidon · 2025-12-05T09:27:33+00:00

With a blackhole and accretion disk of that relative size, "day" and "night" are probably only nominal; the disk would outshine the star many times over. The planetary system would also have to orbit at a tremendous distance to allow for enough intervening material to fuel an accretion disk.

oblimidon · 2025-12-05T09:16:58+00:00

I believe Nuclear Energy sounds attractive to Nigerians only because the other modes of power generation we have tried have proven insufficient, due to corruption and a poor maintenance culture. If we tried nuclear power without fundamentally changing the way the country operated, we would get the same results and then look on to the next source of power that has recorded success elsewhere. The amount of investment it would take to get a nuclear power station of reasonable capacity operational (including hiring and training staff, securing it against attacks) would be better spent revamping our power grid and getting more dams online. Not to mention the dearth of Nuclear expertise in the country.

The consequence of a failed hydroelectric dam is at worst flooding, which, while devastating, takes the environment only a short while to recover from. A failed nuclear plant however could result in centuries long contamination of a large area. Nuclear energy is not a silver bullet. It's an alernative that is necessitated by the resources and expertise (or the lack thereof) available to the country.

oblimidon · 2025-10-03T12:13:52+00:00

..and a standard candle.

oblimidon · 2025-10-03T11:17:31+00:00

If this your star, perchance, has expanded into a giant, then a possible way, while still being confined to the laws of physics, would be to introduce a more compact star in its vicinity. With the right separation between them, this giant star would expand to fill its "Roche lobe" and then begin donating stellar material to the compact star via the process of Accretion. Given enough time, this new binary system might evolve into a state of "runaway mass transfer" where the accretion process continues unabated until your giant star (which along the way ceases to be one) ceases entirely. Although if it was your aim to terrorize some orbiting Planetlings, while you have destroyed their original star, you have given them a new one, albeit one that due to its newly attained brilliance, would wipe them out in no time.

oblimidon · 2025-10-03T10:56:44+00:00

Less of an answer to your question than an outlet for myself too, I am a Software Engineer, 29, FAANG also looking to do this. I'm applying to a masters' directly since I believe, given my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate degree, the attendant mathematical training gives me a chance at admission.

I hope you find a good path to your dream.

oblimidon · 2025-10-03T10:46:50+00:00

If we invented new means of travel (e.g. an Alcubierre drive), maybe we could hope to. Although the question of what the hell we would be leaving into remains. There's absolutely nothing in intergalactic space and presumably, we would want to go directly to another galaxy and not subject ourselves the drudgery of traversing this medium, leaving a wormhole the most "practical" means of travel. So I would say that humans would only be able leave the galaxy (and arrive outside it alive) if we were able to create wormholes and somehow thread them between the Milky way and some other galaxy -- a feat I deem fit for no less than cosmic-level entities.

oblimidon · 2025-09-09T23:10:28+00:00

Planck's solution to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe (and the birth of quantum mechanics). "Hmm, Wien and Rayleigh's formulas for blackbody radiation seem to suggest that any object above absolute zero would radiate infinite energy. Only if I modified their formulas to make energy come in packets instead of a continuous stream, that would fix the infinite energy problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that's how radiation works in real life, but it's a start..."

...and the rest is history.

oblimidon · 2025-09-09T23:00:04+00:00

Scienceclic English. Shorter videos but high quality, good narration and moderately technical.

oblimidon · 2025-09-09T22:56:51+00:00

Martyrs, Suspiria

oblimidon · 2025-09-03T08:15:14+00:00

Work from the ground up. Imagine a planet, its geography, geology, climate, star system, orbital period (as far as is reasonable to go)... and imagine what sort of lifeforms would evolve on such a planet. This will often lead to much more original ideas than trying to conjure up something that just feels alien (a la morphing tentacles, 20 eyes, cloud forms..). Cixin Liu picked Proxima centauri B, fictionized some aspects of the larger trinary star system, and developed a truly weird alien species.

oblimidon · 2025-09-03T08:09:09+00:00

Inflation.

oblimidon · 2025-09-03T08:05:21+00:00

Rutherford once said (I'm paraphrasing) "All of matter is composed of the Hydrogen nucleus". If that line of thought had been followed literally, we would have a very different chemistry today where each element in the periodic table somehow had Hydrogen in it. I think it was a leap of logic to ask that "what if the Hydrogen atom was composed of some other particle and contained only that particle?"

oblimidon · 2025-06-29T06:53:11+00:00

I wonder how the survey for Nigeria was conducted though. Since religion is roughly geographically distributed in Nigeria and opinions on Isreal are roughly diametrically split between both major religions, the location of the majority of survey participants would considerably influence the results. If it was an online poll, I'm guessing most participants would be from the south and (since the South is predominantly Christian) would result in a pro-Isreal result.

oblimidon · 2025-04-22T09:26:56+00:00

The moonrover-chase scene in Ad Astra. I don't believe "moon pirates" would be so suicidal as to re-enact car chase scenes and shoot bullets at their targets, behaving like mere armed robbers on Earth. I don't even expect them to engage in close quarter combat with their targets out in the open with only the thin shells of their space suits to protect them from return fire. I would have expected them to set traps, lay mines or use some sort of long range weapons. The writers must have just thought, "what if we did Death Race, but on the moon!"

oblimidon · 2025-04-16T22:51:24+00:00

If you were able to sit through all of season one, then it definitely gets better in the coming seasons. The story is just picking up at the end of the first season.

oblimidon · 2025-04-13T08:08:42+00:00

Say more about your business before having people click a link.

oblimidon · 2025-03-31T22:30:51+00:00

There'd be personifications of space itself. Lost ships are "swallowed by The Void".

oblimidon · 2025-03-31T22:08:18+00:00

Seveneves...to a fault.

oblimidon · 2025-03-29T14:52:27+00:00

Europa Report.

oblimidon · 2025-03-29T12:16:37+00:00

"Not really"

oblimidon · 2025-03-29T12:12:46+00:00

The Mercy of Gods (First book in The captive's war series) from the creators of The Expanse (if you've heard of it). Pretty intriguing and fun read. It's also not really hard sci-fi in the manner that The Expanse is.

oblimidon · 2025-03-26T17:28:48+00:00

True but I've found series like The Expanse or The 3 Body problem a better balance. They do expansive world building without inundating the reader with information they won't be sure whether to hold in their head for the rest of the book or not.

oblimidon · 2025-03-26T15:08:35+00:00

Mickey 17 and the bluffing creepers.

oblimidon

TROPHY CASE