r/AskScienceDiscussion

As an enthusiast, I have ideas, As an outsider, I lack fundamentals.

I have no credentials, no affiliations, no background. I don't know the processes, the etiquette, the norms. [And those sentences were not written by an LLM.]

But I've been down a rabbit hole, and I popped back out with a whole portfolio: harebrained, yarn-board style theories, distilled down to basic, falsifiable, prerequisite research questions that can be lifted individually for evaluation. And before I hop back in, I feel like I should really get some of it in front of someone who knows what they don't know, instead of someone like me who doesn't.

How can someone like me reasonably engage with the scientific community to find out if any of it matters?

I have never been able to convince someone who firmly believes in a concept that is not supported by scientific data and facts that what they believe in is not real. Has there been research done into communicating what is real based off of scientific consensus with people that believe in concepts like the flat earth theory, ancient aliens, god and religion etc.

I would love if someone could tell me how they are able to convince others what is reality versus imaginary beliefs so that way I could better communicate this with others.

Would a room a Vantablack room be possible to map out with Lidar? If not, what would work? I'm writing a short story that involves a room made of vantablack, and would like the characters to actually map out the room, is it possible with real current technology?

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

So, it's basically the title but to add a bit of info, I have 2 animals missing body parts. Both are rescues, both were missing the parts before they were making memories. Neither reason is known by the rescue we got them from. (They were a package deal because they got super close in recovery.)

1 is a cat who had a severe infection in his eye, causing it to protrude from his head, resulting in removal of the eye and sealing of the socket.

The other is a dog that had multiple breaks in his jaw and necrotic tissue in the break, causing it to be unable to be repaired, resulting in the removal of about 50% of the lower jaw.

Again, both of these happened before memories were forming. Do these animals recognize that they can't see/bite correctly? Do they understand that they are missing pieces? Does my cat know he lacks depth perception? Does my dog know he has a hard time picking things up for a reason?

They both live great lives and you'd almost never know they have these issues. The cat has learned to check distances and not trust what he sees, the dog is great at doing everything except picking up things that lay flat on the ground. There are no real long term issues, I am just genuinely curious if they understand that something is missing or if because it happened when they were so young they think they are completely normal.

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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?

Was looking uo on evolutionary psychology. I had read some oliver sacks and antonio damasio's books (descartes' error), so the foundational argument of evopsy being that many of our cognitive and behavioural capacities are handled by ultraspecialized neural networks acting as some kind of software didnt bug me, but I realize that there is no evopsy without this, so I wanted to know more but I dont know where to look, I'm just a curious muggle in biology.

I know evopsy is really controversial, so I'm just asking about that one aspect.

Thank you all.

I've often heard that turbulence is one of the last unsolved problems in classical physics, while quantum physics is notoriously counterintuitive and mathematically challenging. If you had to pick one, which is considered the more complex problem, and why?

He famously said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." According to him then, paleontology, taxonomy, meteorology e.g. would definitely be science.

What domains of information gathering would Rutherford or you NOT classify as science, even if we're talking about objective information (from objective data)?

PS: Would geography of planets be science?

If all the numbers in the universe were shifted by one from their original value, would the universe we have today still exist, or would it take on a different form? Because if this number that “built” the universe does not exist, maybe your birth would not even exist, and maybe everything that happened on Earth would not have existed either, such as the foundations of religions or even several scientific missions. So can a single number change the entire course of the universe, or does it take a much bigger event to change everything?

This is something I’ve wondered for years. We know the deep ocean is still largely unexplored and we’re still discovering new species.

Is there any scientific reason an ancient marine lineage couldn’t have survived and slowly evolved in the deep ocean for millions of years? I’m not saying it definitely happened, I’m just wondering if there’s a biological reason it would be impossible, or if it’s just considered extremely unlikely because we’d expect to have found evidence by now.

Genuinely curious to hear what people who know more about palaeontology or marine biology think.

So yeah I will try and keep this short. I had, still kind of have, hope that the renewables shift, something I think we’ve all been waiting for in regards to climate change, would really help in the fight for mitigation. I had more hope for the future climate fight than I had in years when I saw how much it was taking off. I still want to feel that hope but with pretty much everything getting worse in terms of temperature and weather events (which I know will keep happening) and the online consensus(probably not a great gauge) leaning more and more towards “we are all gonna die from this, don’t have kids, maybe kill yourself before it gets too bad“ it’s feeling like that’s all for naught now.

I wanna believe humanity can adapt. I wanna place more faith in the recent 4 degrees celsius by 2100 scenario being retired. But now I see people doubting even that and not just on shitholes like r/collapse where suicide and despair are practically venerated. Really I may just be feeling this bad because of one article from the Guardian I saw that said something like Earth’s reaching critical energy imbalances due to climate change. But basically, the question I have is does hope remain for a good or happy future with all that’s going on? Does the renewables shift actually imply more hope for the future or is it likely to be temporary?

If we were to set up something like the avatar movie, and allowed dolphins to control human bodies, would they be capable of the same types of things humans have done? Like buildings and all this technology we have?

I know everyone says they are super smart, but they are also limited by their biology so they don't really have the same options that we do.

Also how long would it take? Like if a baby dolphin went right into avatar mode off rip, and went into a young human body, and was raised by humans, would it be comparable to an average human by adulthood? (Assuming that other humans are feeding its body and keeping it healthy somehow)

Edit: also would it take multple generations of that scenario going on for them to compare to us? or am i just ignorant and even if this scenario happened, they wouldnt be comparable to humans ever?

Here is another way to phrase my question. Is it the case that everything has a pattern, but for some things (e.g. Brownian motion, genetic mutations, car traffic, radioactive decay, asset prices, weather behavior, electrical noise, etc.), humans (and computers) have not detected the pattern yet?

Here is a third way to phrase it. Is it the case that randomness/stochasticity exists only epistemically, not ontologically?

There's a question that's been bothering me lately: if fate truly exists, where is freedom? If my fate is already predetermined, where is free will? Please enlighten me.

"Most current literature on the Alcubierre metric focuses on the astronomical amount of exotic matter needed to sustain a warp bubble. My question is: Are we assuming the manifold must be pushed, or are we ignoring the possibility that space-time has inherent 'stress points' that could be triggered to achieve the same result with negligible energy? If space-time is a dynamic system, why are we trying to brute-force its geometry rather than looking for local structural instabilities to exploit?"