asksciencefiction

I was under the impression that the Numenoreans were very much imperialists towards the end, as in they'd raid Middle Earth for all its riches and there was nothing they could do about it. When Numenor sank beneath the waves and the Faithful came to Middle Earth, how did they reconcile with the existing inhabitants? "Oh yeah we're Numenorean but we're totally not like those bad ones. Btw we're setting up a kingdom here and here and there's nothing you can do about it". There couldn't have been **that** many Faithful on those ships. How did they manage to acquire so much land with so little opposition?

In our world, the police going to a spirit medium for the DL-6 case, and being ridiculed might be logical, since spirit channelling isn't a real thing, but in the world of Ace Attorney, it is. Not only is it a known and established practice, with detectable physical effects, but the monarchy of at least one country is specifically sought out for their spirit-channelling powers by other governments, so that they can commune with the dead, and receive advice that way. However, it also seems to be disbelieved, and ridiculed as a pseudoscience, despite that.

Doctor Who zips all the way up and down through time, popping in at any time and place. If you don't have a time machine to follow them around with, it should be impossible to keep track of which incarnation was where. And yet, the Doctor's enemies somehow manage to do just that, with the [Daleks being accurate enough to determine he was on his last regeneration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVQSqm5djEo) on Trenzalore.

One of the options for students enrolling into Hogwarts, if they come from a wizarding family, is that they have the option of using a hand-me-down wand. But short of wands being damaged beyond repair, we don't see many people replacing them, even though it happens enough that hand-me-downs are a valid option for new students. So how long does one last? Does a wizard normally use one wand in their lifetime, or is it the kind of thing where an old, worn-out wand is fine for schoolwork, but you'd need something newer/better for adult life?

While we hear of the TARDIS having engines that are implicitly essential to it working, we've also see a TARDIS work without the rest of the machine. ["The Doctor's Wife"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rfOs8sGHi8) and ["Inferno"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcNrCVYWHec) show that a TARDIS is capable of operating as just the console, which would seem to imply that they're just a power source to allow the console to do its thing and move the whole ship around, or to allow for the pilot to do silly things like tow an entire planet one second out of phase.

One of the ways that you can find out whether a child has magic or not, is to see whether they are able to use it subconsciously, such as by defenestrating them, and seeing if they stop themselves from being killed. But once they get their wands, that use of subconscious magic seems to stop entirely. Logically, you would expect students to fire off similar magic when their lives were at risk, or their emotions ran particularly high. Is it a function of having the wand that stops it, or is it just a matter of that only happening for really young mages, and that they learn to control themselves as they enter childhood?

When we're introduced to the Stargate, it's in the early-mid 90s, so them needing a big, bulky computer system would make sense, but as the show progresses, we see Tau'ri computer technology develop, either conventionally in the form of laptops like what the Atlantis team use, or computer crystals like what they fitted onto their starships. Through it all, however, the SGC continues to use the same computer with comparatively dated hardware. Why keep it, instead of upgrading it to something more modern? Especially since one of the main issues that the SGC kept facing was that their dialling computer was not sophisticated enough to respond to some of the status codes put out by the stargate, causing all kinds of unpredictable behaviour.

While the movie has latin american themes, it doesn't ever specify a country. From the first movie, the parents met after they were both sent to kill the other one. Eventually both parents are working at the OSS. Did one parent defect? Was this inter-agency drama? If one parent did defect, which parent changed sides? This part of the movie was set late in the cold war, which opens up a lot of different ways this could go (unless it was stated explicitly somewhere).

The optics of the US using children of spies can't possibly be good, in addition to the risk of misuse, and all of that.

In the GTA series, the various cities that the games are set in are usually rampant with crime. If it isn't the player characters going on a rampage, then it is either the police, or the other citizens that will be easily driven into a homicidal rage for such minor things as being bumped into while walking down the road/minor collisions. Why would anyone bother to live there? It seems wildly unsafe, even before the various other criminal enterprises get involved.

One of Superman's known weaknesses, besides that of kryptonite, is that he's as vulnerable to magic as the average human (besides what he can avoid with his super-reflexes). So why doesn't he learn to use magic? His Super-intelligence and speed would make it much easier for him to learn magic compared to the average person, and he's already well aware that magic exists. Knowing magic would help him cover a major weakness of his, so it seems illogical that he doesn't pick it up, or look into it.

In Doctor Strange, the Ancient One knows that she is going to die soon because she cannot look past a point in the future, and believes it to be when she will die. However, we also know from Infinity War, that Doctor Strange was able to look past the point of his own death, and determine how to undo the "snap", but we can put that down to the assistance of the eye of Agamatto and the Time Stone. However, the question remains: Why is it that you can't look into the future past your own death?

We already know that the Federation seems to struggle when it comes to things that are non-humanoid, and non-organic, especially if they originated from Federation technology. But we also see that there are progressive elements. Both the Doctor and Data have a fairly healthy heaping of support, once some form of personhood was established for them. But does that attitude extend to non-organics that the Federation isn't familiar with? For the other side, Federation attitudes towards Data, the Voyager's EMH, and the ExoComps weren't all that favourable. Both the EMH and the ExoComp's burgeoning sapience were treated as simple malfunctions, that could be resolved be constant factory resets, or in the case of the ExoComps, lobotomisation/resetting of their control circuitry, effectively killing the ExoComp, and putting the Doctor back to a blank slate (in theory). There have been some documented cases where the Federation meets some [mechanical beings](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Star_Trek_vs._Transformers), which were treated as sapient beings in their own right, but does that treatment extend to other non-organic beings? Or do you have to be "acceptable" as a humanoid to be treated as one?

Hello everyone, There has been a lot of new traffic to Lemmy in the past few weeks due to the turmoil at Reddit. A lot of you may be Reddit refugees, like I am, and are missing their old favorite subs right about now. I think it's more important than ever for regular users to step up and take an active role in rebuilding their communities, and I wasn't sure that things would ever get going unless somebody stepped up to the plate and made the effort, and I didn't want to wait around for someone else to take the initiative when I already had a strong desire to see this sort of content brought over to Lemmy. Now that the first step has been taken, I'm inviting others who might be interested in building or managing this community to join me in making this the best version of asksciencefiction possible. I have never been affiliated with /r/asksciencefiction or even been a moderator at reddit before. Preferably, I would like to hand off ownership of this community to somebody who has a strong desire to build and grow the community and enforce the rules. If that sounds like something you are interested in, please don't hesitate to send me a private message. Thank you!