Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Crowdsourcing your brainstorming

Back in the days of Mudge, it was easy to brainstorm an idea like industrial applications of black holes.

Now, it's harder.

I figured I would make use of the largest collection of nerds that I know about - Reddit (seeing as how Slashdot has gone down the tubes).

Reddit is divided into groups, and finding the right one can be somewhat of a challenge.

The most direct would be /r/AskScience, since it is really a science question (or, applied science).  But they take a dim view on science fictiony things.

There is also /r/AskScienceFiction, which sounds perfect.  Except, everything there is in role-playing form (it should be /r/AskLARP or something).  There are other more conceptual/design subreddits, but they are all low traffic.

So, I just had to ask my question in a RP fashion, and try and make sense of RP answers.

The answers weren't spectacular.  But I must give credit to /u/Sriad for the best one.  I had thought about using extreme matter compression, but I was thinking of something like a diamond press (which would not be forceful enough).  Treating it more like a fusion bomb makes a lot of sense.