Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
I appreciate the examples, but as someone who used to be a nuclear physicist, I'd say a new element that is stable is as much fantasy as Star Trek's "warp factor 10".  That's the trouble with most science fiction, the technological innovations required to make the stories interesting (faster-than-light travel and communications, cryogenics, transporter beams, tractor beams, hand-held weapons containing immense quantities of energy,...) are considered to be impossible today for very good scientific reasons. Why worry about hand-waving when the whole premise is fantasy to begin with? |
Actually, both warp drives and stable transuranics and things *not* known to be impossible as current scientific theories say they are in fact possible. We just do not know how to create them just yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
https://www.space.com/17628-warp-dri...aceflight.html
It is worth remembering Clarke's Laws:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
Quote:
1- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
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