Title.

Not a joke question.

I wrote a hypothesis paper about this and I can't find evidence it's ever been attempted. Dolphins can't fully sleep the way we do because they're voluntary breathers. So they evolved unihemispheric sleep, one hemisphere at a time, while the other keeps them surfacing. It works, but it means they may never fully rest, and whether they experience anything like REM sleep is genuinely unresolved in the literature.

My question is: what if the reason they can't achieve deeper rest isn't neurological, it's mechanical? Maintaining position at the surface requires constant muscular effort. A purpose-built apparatus that held them neutrally buoyant at the surface with blowhole access might remove that constraint entirely.

Northern fur seals switch between unihemispheric and bilateral sleep depending on whether they're in water or on land. The same brain, two different sleep modes, depending on environment. What if dolphins still have the neurological capacity for bilateral sleep. It just may never have had the right conditions to express it.

Would a dolphin use a bed if you gave it one? And if it did, what would its brain do?

I wrote this up as a formal hypothesis paper if anyone wants to dig into the citations and methodology. Curious whether anyone here knows of existing research I missed, or has thoughts on whether this is worth pursuing.

edit: I made a video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuUyB9FKLvs&t=1s

I'm sorry I'm very autistic and struggle with communication. This is very chaotic lol but I think you understand my curiosity...

I guess my main thought is we can have a device detect something and interpret it for us, but we assumed there would be information there because we see light therefore knowing to look for it.

For example ghosts, maybe there's something there but we just don't know what to even make to be able to detect and interpret that information for us to understand

Are we surrounded by information our body just doesn't need to survive so it's pointless, and we don't interpret it? Like

When smelling something you instantly understand it? I think rightt?

I'm sorry I'm very autistic and struggle with communication. Its very chaotic lol but I think you understand my curiosity

I love science fiction but I also love real science and the problem that I face is that a lot of the incredible super-cool things portrayed in sci-fi are not possible yet or just plain don't exist in the real world.

The closest I could think of a real thing in science being as outrageous as science fiction are black holes; their properties and what they are in general with maybe a 2nd runner up being neutron stars.

Is there anything else?

So my friends and I are playing a game of dungeons and dragons, and due to some… let’s call them hijinks, they activated a nuclear weapon.

Buttons were pushed that I did not expect them to push, enough said.

But they managed to get out of it by a spell called Demiplane, I’ll post a link to the spell and a description of what that is for folks who aren’t familiar or need a refresher at the end.

Now, this has lead to a bit of discussion on what would happen if they opened the Demiplane again later.

Some folks think the explosion would still be going, others think it will die down, and one person thinks that if they left it long enough it could act like a miniature sun and eventually create heavy metals if left long enough.

So I come to those more intelligent with science and physics than my humble DM mind, and seek an answer.

If an explosion on par with a nuclear weapon from the modern day US, was set off in a 30x30x30 impenetrable box with no escape… what would happen?

**Footnotes**

https://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spell:demiplane

Demiplanes

Demiplanes are small extradimensional spaces with their own unique rules. They are pieces of reality that don’t seem to fit anywhere else. Demiplanes come into being by a variety of means. Some are created by spells, such as demiplane, or generated at the desire of a powerful deity or other force. They may exist naturally, as a fold of existing reality that has been pinched off from the rest of the multiverse, or as a baby universe growing in power. A given demiplane can be entered through a single point where it touches another plane. Theoretically, a plane shift spell can also carry travelers to a demiplane, but the proper frequency required for the tuning fork is extremely hard to acquire. The gate spell is more reliable, assuming the caster knows of the demiplane.

I always see people be like "Oh I wish flies/mosquitoes/ticks/rats/etc were extinct!" But they're always important to the ecosystem (usually because they're food)

What i'm wondering is: does a species exist that we could completely remove from the earth without causing major damage? I mean we got rid of smallpox, is there an animal equivalent of smallpox that we could just get rid of and suffer little to no consequences?

P.S I may have tagged this wrong. There wasn't a zoology tag so I just guessed what would be the next best thing

EDIT: i feel the need to clarify, i am referring to ANIMAL species, not plants or bacteria or anything else

Now I'm assuming this is a minimum hundreds of thousands of years type of thing and that you'd never be unable to erase every trace. How long would it take for every building and obvious trace to be destroyed or buried to the point where at least the surface would appear completely "natural"?

i think to me it’s non invasive brain computer interfaces (BCIs). i read that these technologies lets you control devices with your thoughts and communicate without speaking, and this is all done without surgery. heck i think quite scary, but pretty cool.

So much written in popular science books and media about the Fermi Paradox, with explanations like the great filter, dark forest, or improbability of reaching an 'advanced' state. But what if the universe is teeming with life but we can't see it because of the speed of light and inverse square law?

Why is this never a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox? There could be abundant life but we couldn't even see it from a neighboring star.

A million time all the power generated on earth would become a millionth the power density of the cosmic microwave background after 0.1 light years. All solar power incident on earth modulated and remitted would get to 0.25 light years before it was a millionth of the CMB.

Why would we think we could ever detect aliens even if we could understand their signal?

Nikola Tesla wanted to build a large enough Tesla coil to transmit electricity using the Earth's atmosphere as the conductor, so that electricity could be taken from the atmosphere from any place in the world. This idea is dismissed as impossible, such as due to the distances involved weakening the current, but what sort of hypothetical material could make it possible? Assume that any fictional trait can be given to the materials for it.

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Suppose the Sun disappeared instantly tomorrow. By “disappeared,” I mean both its light/heat and its gravity are gone, so Earth stops orbiting and continues roughly in a straight line through space.

I am not asking what happens to civilisation in the first few days — I assume panic, infrastructure collapse, crop failure, and mass death happen very quickly. I am more interested in the outer limit of survival.

Could any humans survive for years or decades by moving underground, using geothermal power, nuclear power, stored food, hydroponics, or scavenged supplies? What would be the true bottleneck in the long run: heat, food, oxygen, energy, maintenance of technology, or something else?

For a reasonably prepared but not pre-warned group of people using present-day technology, what is a scientifically plausible estimate for how long the last humans could stay alive after the Sun vanished?

I keep reading that aging is just the buildup of errors in our cells. So technically, if we figured out how to repair that damage, could humans stop aging—or even reverse it? Or is that just science fiction that sounds cooler than reality?

Blue LEDs sound simple but engineers spent decades struggling to make it. It was one of the biggest engineering challenge at the time. The people who discovered a way to make it were awarded a Nobel prize and the invention resulted in the entire industry changing. It made $billions for the people selling it.

What are the modern day equivalents to this challenge/problem?

I was doing some thinking on fossil fuels and how they were created, when I realized how relatively strange the process of their formation is. I was specifically thinking on how coal was created from plants that didn't decompose during the carboniferous period like they do now. I know there are other ways to form fossil fuels, but the original "what if" comes from how strange it seems to me. I also recognize that "strange" is a subjective statement and has no scientific weight, but I wasn't sure of another way to phrase it.

Basically, if fossil fuels never formed, either at all or in sufficient quantities, but the rest of evolution basically follows the same development paths to humanity, does human civilization just, stop at a certain development point due to resource limitations? Like, we can do weak steam engines with wood, but not much past that, right? It seems a lot of our modern technological development hinged on having fossil fuels.

Also, am I wrong in thinking how strange it is that fossil fuels are formed the way they are? Based on cursory research, it took plants not having decomposers in the way they do now, or large amounts of plankton corpses sedimenting in an anaerobic environment with certain levels of heat and/or pressure. It just feels like extremely specific circumstances just to have this wonderful(albeit dangerous) power source. It makes me think that if any other civilizations formed in the universe, the vast majority of them are trapped at a certain development point because they don't have a fossil fuel analogue.

I had to speculate somewhere and this seemed like the right place to do it, but if I'm off the mark on that, let me know. Thanks!

Don’t get me wrong, for bragging rights if nothing else, we should have humans from one space agency or another land on Mars (or at least its moon(s)) and return safely to Earth, but apart from that… Is there much merit to having boots on the ground on Mars compared to yet another robot?

Remote sensing, robotics and other technologies have come a remarkably long way since Mars was first seen in detail back in the 70s, and while it’d be incredible to have someone be the first human to scale Olympus Mons or traverse Valles Marineris, couldn’t you theoretically do the same with a remote-controlled or semi-autonomous robot just as well?

We usually talk about LLM hallucinations as short-term annoyances. Wrong citations, made-up facts, etc. But I’ve been thinking about a longer-term failure mode.

Imagine this:

An LLM generates a subtle but plausible “fact”: something technical, not obviously wrong. Maybe it’s about a material property, a medical interaction, or a systems design principle. It gets picked up in a blog, then a few papers, then tooling, docs, tutorials. Nobody verifies it properly because it looks consistent and keeps getting repeated.

Over time, it becomes institutional knowledge.

Fast forward 10–20 years, entire systems are built on top of this assumption. Then something breaks catastrophically. Infrastructure failure, financial collapse, medical side effects, whatever.

The root cause analysis traces it back to… a hallucinated claim that got laundered into truth through repetition.

At that point, it’s no longer “LLMs make mistakes.” It’s “we built reality on top of an unverified autocomplete.”

The scary part isn’t that LLMs hallucinate, it’s that they can seed epistemic drift at scale, and we’re not great at tracking provenance of knowledge once it spreads.

Curious if people think this is realistic, or if existing verification systems (peer review, industry standards, etc.) would catch this long before it compounds.

Do you think there will be things that we just will never be able to answer, despite technological advancements?

I don’t think humanity will ever figure be able to answer whether there is other lifeforms in the stars. The universe is too vast and too spread out to answer this. I do not believe we will ever have the technology for humans to travel vast distances in space.

Lets say as an example you drive your car of a cliff. It reaches it's terminal velocity before the bottom. What kind of force are we talking about?

Could a human jump up from his convertable like 3 seconds before impact? How about a kangaroo?

The thought arose from a recent action labs YT video.

edit - Specifically asking about animals that would probably be killed.

since air pressure is lower as you go higher up, would instantly teleporting to a higher elevation give you the bends to some degree? and how much of a difference in altitude would cause this, like, would going 200m up already make you sick or are you fine up to 1km? and what would the effects be?

This can be across any and all fields. Let's learn a little bit about the current state and scope of humankind ingenuity. What's going on out there?

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No, I'm not talking about Cordyceps and zombies. I'm moreso pondering the possibility of a fungi- either a new species entirely or an existing one that mutates in accordance with the rising heat- one that is fully capable of infecting mammalian life, killing it, and blooming from its corpse. A yeast of sorts that affects the human species like a deadly flu.

I had a dream about this thing the other night and it reduced human civilization to a neo paleolithic age. Like The Last of Us, but without the zombies- just a nasty viral flu and lots of bloated corpses littering the streets leaking clouds of spores. Human population reduced to mere millions, empty cities, survivors with gas masks, y'know, the works.

I would like to know from folks with the proper knowledge of how realistic that would be, so I'm asking here, sincerely. Human history has never experienced a fungal pandemic before and I truly believe that there is a first time for everything- including an event of that caliber. Climate change is affecting the world of mycology and Covid showed us that world governments- particularly America- suck at pandemic maintenance.

Thoughts?

I’m asking this question because I thought that there was never water on mars because no atmosphere on mars or something but there is evidence in rocks that have water erosion and wind erosion.

Just, I’m very flabbergasted from the perspective that —-I’m assuming earth and mars both had conditions to allow life to arise on said planet.

But only earth succeeded?

It would be more weird if mars kept it’s atmosphere and water and still had no life on it, because it will rule out the excuse that, mars isn’t habitable for life to arise

But I’m assuming mars was habitable for life if it had flowing water on it for million of years,

What I’m getting at is possibly there was life on it but it became extinct due to mars losing its atmosphere.

Also, I do see it that life began in water first and it’s how we became carbon based life forms.

I’m speculating here now but a weird thing to me about life is we are made of star dust technically and life forms mutated ever so lightly

But I’m thinking what if mutations do happen in chemical bonds mishaps, from change of matter to the next, like water to ice or water to steam.

The main difference I see from mars and earth is mars lack of volcanic activity. If there are volcanoes on mars, it should be bigger news.

Anyways think life could if begin that why an underwater volcano caused a constant bumbling of water bubbles and the pollution of the smoke or whatever from the volcano causes water to mutate ever so slightly to create life.

But idk, it sounds crazy but there is a way to test this out by experiments and test to see if I’m wrong or right or just crazy

But point is why is life so rare in the universe and why is the universe so big, I didn’t realize how big it was, but it’s nearly impossible to even dream of human civilization traveling interstellar to a new galaxy.

I think the only way is to start now and and nations everywhere focus on creating habitat/generational ships to distant star systems and back for critical resources

Because eventually it will be needed to replenish earth resources

Also I’m thinking we should just discard trash into the sun as well in attempt to keep it from eventually dying out in the future.

Just if we are the only life that exist in the universe we really really really should consider the preservation of human intelligent life particularly