Posts tagged space
I envisioned this method of maintaining breathable oxygen. So each ship would have these gardens generating oxygen like the plants on Earth do. How plausible is this and how would it likely work?
Is living on an Alderson Disk possible? An Alderson Disk is a large CD-like megastructure, with a star in the center. If the disk is thick enough, it could have its own gravity. Also, the star in t...
(I've tried to research this online but I'm a linguist, not a physicist, and most places that discuss this quickly get too technical for me. Simple answers will get tons of gratitude!) I imagine t...
In a short story that I read (don't have the link, but the short story itself is not relevant to this question), it is set about a millennia from now, where humans have long since made contact with...
Kaylee is a mechanic on a Generational ship. The ship has several means for propulsion and has a plotted course that goes from star to star, molecular cloud to molecular cloud. It has a Bussard Ram...
Scenario I'm trying to design a colony spaceship. My main character, a soldier, awakes prematurely from suspended animation (SA) to find that the colony ship she is on, headed for Tau Ceti e, is ...
This is steampunk, so assume a non-relativistic, non-quantum world (but more on that shortly). I want a material that insulates against acceleration but not gravity. Full explanation: This is t...
In the future a major problem arose: a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements were unpleasant to their government....
Scenario Set in modern day Antarctica, a group of very talented scientists are working on a highly confidential scientific experiment which would one day allow us to manipulate time literally. The...
As you might know, our Universe is expanding. In fact, the expansion is accelerating (due to dark energy). As expansion progresses, patches of the universe will not be visible anymore (they cross t...
I am super-rich person with a net worth of 32 billion US dollars. Part of my business is being contractor for NASA and SpaceX (so I have knowledge about space technology). I already own my island ...
I'm working on a graphic novel that deals with this particular topic but I'm unsure if something like this can happen. Some Nebulae have a luminosity 1000s of times brighter than our sun while dark...
In Star Gate, the Ori are notorious for keeping the tech level of their planetary subjects at or under medieval tech levels. It has been said (still looking for the exact source) that if everyone l...
Major Camila de Ocampo, "La Comandante", wakes with a start. As she's been trained to do when coming out of stasis, she flexes each muscle, beginning with her toes until she finally finishes by rai...
I recently envisioned a fight scene in which the three main characters are in a bar on a spaceship when about a dozen space marines ambush them. They take cover behind the bar, but without weapons ...
Instead of flying say tons of metal and/or water and other raw materials/molecular matter to the Moon or Mars, could we shoot it there in ionized form by accelerating these sufficiently? Maybe sub...
A weird question. But let me define "a world without electricity": It's not that we haven't discovered electricity. But rather, electricity doesn't work anymore. Nothing conducts electricity. El...
Let's say we get a cheap technology to collect and then send (hypothetically all) our waste to the Sun by a rocket, and we choose this technology as the main (and only) method to utilize our waste....
Definitions: Slip Space - The area of space separating planes of the universe. Think of the universe as a flat piece of paper. Now imagine this flat piece of paper wrapped into a spherical ball. T...
I'm writing a very nontechnical science fantasy with a star-ship (literally a giant spacecraft toting around a star) in stable orbit around a black hole. It uses one of the "stellar engines" mentio...
In this setting, humanity has advanced to the technological capability of extra stellar travel via faster-than-light drives. However, due to distances between inhabited areas being extremely large,...
I am doing some research for a science fiction novel. I need to have a planetary body around 10,000 km in diameter appear in the Solar System near the Earth and proceed to orbit it artificially. I ...
My answer to this question essentially came down to the pilot being in a sphere with anything large jutting out of it. Some of the arguments made against me I feel are true if we assume fights like...
Considering a distant future where mankind has spread and inhabits lots of star systems. Would there be a justification for inter-system trade or exchanges ? FTL travel may be considered, but with ...
Scenario: Earth men colonized a terraformed planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. There are already industries developed there, farms, mining etc. There's a large fleet of cargo ship capable of reaching...
A great many questions have been written about a habitable moon around a gas giant. This is my take on it. Somehow (extra points to whoever figures out exactly how it is possible) Jupiter gets kno...
I'm working on a space-fantasy setting and one of the cosmological quirks is that the cosmos, instead of being a vacuum, is actually filled with a gaseous substance. As a result, the entire cosmos ...
Scenario: Earth men colonized Alpha Centauri. Barnard's Star is at range. There is a huge fleet of fission bomb pulse propulsion cargo ships. Given Enough time and space they can reach 0.8C. Qu...
Earth is dying. We mis-managed it and brought the whole ecosystem to the edge of total collapse. About 50 years ago, we decided to move humankind to another planet, and now we are almost ready. A ...
A recent question concerning generation ships made me come up with a rather original alternative in my answer. It was pointed out that the concept of embryo space colonization has already been thou...
At the end of a recent movie, the hero wakes up in a space station which is probably only a few kilometers wide and generates gravity by rotating. In this station, kids are playing baseball. It str...
Space is full of radiation. When doing long stays in space, no matter whether it's a generation ship on its journey to a new colony, a research ship exploring new worlds, a freighter delivering goo...
Hello again :) My first questions had some wonderful answers, but brought me to the following problem: Although (in my eyes) really dull, the Cpt. Geary series (the Lost Fleet) tends to depict the...
So, let's assume you've cobbled together an interplanetary empire without using transportation methods that violate causality or have the power to blow up stars. You may feel pretty proud of yourse...
In this world I'm building, I need it to be possible to have enclosed spaces/worlds connected to the main one. Ideally the main world would closely resemble ours, with the same laws of energy/physi...
How feasible would it be to use a huge electron gun to pump electrons from a solar array positioned close to the Sun back to Earth or Mars? My idea is to create a eletrical circuit by means of usi...
Assume a plant was engineered to cope with a wide range of different environments, and to have seeds that were capable of traveling through and surviving both the depths of space and re-entry into ...
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central ma...
I was experimenting with various star system designs with a gravity simulator, and one of the patterns I ended up with is best described as a planet with a very elongated elliptic orbit that itself...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
I've just come across a subplot in Jack McDevitt's Firebird where the earth-like planet Villanueva and the rest of its planet system was moving towards an unspecified dust cloud that made the plane...
This question builds off Information Exchange In Space and How would interstellar internet work?, and specifically uses the communication system I developed here because of this. In a summary of t...
Something I realized not too long ago about a spacefaring society is that while a lot of technology is going to feel advanced, a lot more is going to feel ancient just because of all the hurdles it...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
Consider a scenario where there is an over-populated solar system (not necessarily our solar system). Several other rocky planets and moons in this solar system are inhabited by the same humanoid r...
The setup: Near future (maximum 50 years in future) where "only" thing changed is, that company SpaceX together with NASA and ESA found out, how to get cargo and people to space very cheap USA dec...
I have a fictional technology in my world that involves being able to create "tubes of compressed space" -- essentially, you have two stations and a (straight or curved) line of space between them ...
Recurringly in Sci-Fi spaceships manage to make it to lightspeed and above. Is there a scientifically plausible explanation of such capacity? How does it impact the spaceship's design and its passe...
In this question: Where to Anchor My Space Elevator We get a new material: Thanks to the recent discovery of handwavium filaments that can in principle be extruded to any length, we will be ...
On earth, we use a simple but effective coordinate system which determines position unambiguously on the surface (GPS achieving accuracy within 1 meter, which speaking as an engineer, is a remarkab...
