Posts tagged space
First question: if you melted Europa's ice, would there be any land? Second question (assuming the answer to the first question is no), how much water would you have to remove after that in order ...
So I'm thinking here about the sort of setting like Eclipse Phase, in which virtually all of humanity lives in a wide range of space habitats because of an apocalypse on Earth. I am imagining a var...
Most planetary rings are rich in water in the form of ice, especially now we are running low on freshwater reserves on Earth. Imagine someone discovered a huge chunk of meteorite consisting of a wh...
I am struggling to picture what placement of artificial lighting I should use for my O'Neill cylinder design for the daylight hours, a strip light along the centre of the cylinder would obstruct th...
We all know that the universe is going to die one day: all the stars will die, all the black holes will evaporate and life will be gone. But hypothetically speaking, if a super advanced alien race ...
I have a ship that begins the equation traveling at 50 percent the speed of light, but decelerating constantly to finally land on a certain planet (towards which it is moving the entire time). It b...
Let's say that a civilization has access to FTL. Let's say it is instantaneous so travel time between solar systems isn't a factor. How long would it take for them to spread out from their home sol...
I like to hear the sound of birds when I travel amongst my orbital and planetary habitats scattered around the outer system. Most of these settlements are very densely populated - what you might ...
I have a layman's (re: not very good) understanding of nuclear physics, and it's pretty cool to me, but I'm quite bad at math. I'm working on a sci-fi book (classic, I know) and just finished a dra...
I have an interstellar ship going from earth to a nearby star system using current technology and chemical fuel. The ship has been created and is being managed by a self sufficient android. The an...
We often see, in Sci-fi, food being produced from, say, algae or yeast. What could be the effect of such a limited diet on the gut microbiome? Would there be any believable side-effect that would h...
Consider a space elevator, a thread hanging from the heavens and being anchored to a spot in ground or sea barge at equator. As I understand it, it'd be very thin at ground and get thicker on the w...
If a cylindrical rocket ship with a diameter of about 350 meters were spinning on its long axis, would more than just the interior surface of the outer hull have artificial gravity? The ships dec...
A colony ship headed for its new home countless light-years from Earth suffers an unfortunate malfunction on the final part of its descent phase and crashes onto the planet. Thankfully, the ship cr...
Say we have a civilization on the verge of becoming Type II, and are in the process of building a Dyson Sphere. They are aware that in the process, and especially after completion, there will be te...
In the story I'm writing, three humans with stone-age technology and no knowledge of space accidentally awaken thousands of cryogenically preserved humans. These humans immediately get to work on...
Imagine a light spaceship capable of traveling at 0.999c is tasked to tow a radioactive cargo containing millions of tons of polonium and radium, however the container holding the radioactive mater...
I'm developing a story where humans colonize a few planets. One planet, lets call it Planet A, has similar gravity to earth, air pressure, and solar radiation. You cannot however, walk on the surf...
First, a clarification: Dwarfism is the umbrella term for 200+ medical conditions that result in short stature. Since this is Worldbuilding, my question refers to human beings with genetic dwarfis...
In my world, there are 3 astrological bodies of significance, the sun, the moon, and a 3rd, geostationary object, believed to be the home of the gods. I want all three of them to have roughly the s...
Suppose I want to have a moon with more gravity than ours how large of a moon can I have and what effects would there be.
Following on from this question. Question Context : Mars second moon Deimos has been converted into a generation ship. A considerable portion of its mass has been shaved off during the process &...
Question Context : Mars second moon Deimos has been converted into a generation ship. A considerable portion of its mass has been shaved off during the process & ejected backwards along its p...
A habitat/space harbor ring encircles an ice giant crossing both poles (polar orbit) and rotating to create artificial gravity. Can the ring also precess in synchronization with the planet's year,...
So, I was recently watching Stargate: Atlantis, and I saw a very interesting concept. In one episode, the villainous Replicators use the stargate network to fire what is essentially a high-powered ...
I'm writing a story where aliens are using humanity like a botnet to do hyper complex calculations - each infested human has a program running in their subconscious brain that does a small part of ...
Imagine a spaceship capable of achieving faster than light travel uses several transporters to allow crew members to move around its interior at the constant speed of light. What happens to the cre...
I have a world (around 3000-3500ad) where human race is spread across various planetary systems - so interstellar travel it's possible. The interstellar travel is possible via a Bussard Ramjet whi...
Im creating a world where for whatever reason all power on Earth is gone. Meaning there is no more man-made light. Which also means no more light pollution. Would the night sky revert to its former...
After asking my question about seeing black holes in your path between the stars, I also wondered abut other more mundane objects. Black holes affect large areas of space so even if you didn't get...
In a very large and decadent galactic empire (think of Asimov's foundation empire), a new technology leap allows planet's government bodies to communicate instantaneously across the galaxy. It can ...
Saturn has rings of debris which orbit it, and it is possible to get a satellite into an orbit that will at least last a few years, so my question is as follows; How many satellites (or just the pu...
I like to have a concept of an engine that spaceships can use to lift off (and land) from/on a planet (regardless of it having an atmosphere or not) with the following constraints: It should be s...
I've got a lunar colony that was set up to be self-sustaining before a collapse of life on Earth. The colony has survived on its own for several thousand years through a period of technological reg...
In my story, I need a spaceplane, that is, a shuttle which can fly in an atmosphere as well as in space. It needs to be able to land from space, and then take off and go to space without refuelling...
Goal: Just imaging a Star Wars X-Wing fight, and you've got the idea. However, I want to know whether something like that is possible without tons of metaphysical hand-waiving and 'just because'. ...
I'm trying to not delve too into the sciences so as to keep things fairly suitable for a space opera setting, but I'm trying to figure a few things to a reasonable degree of detail. My question he...
Imagine a species one foot tall that has a relatively large brain for its size. The species has human like intelligence and in principle the ability to build anything that we could. It lives on a w...
The cylinder is 32 km long in total, 8 km in diameter, with 3km long endcaps, resulting in a habital area with a length of 26 km (= and an area of cirka 754 km2). The main body of the cylinder is...
In laying out the groundwork for a series of stories I'd like to write, I'm positing a somewhat modernly-realistic take on the "well-aged human empire in the stars" type of setting the classic auth...
I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has...
I wish to build a sort of Dyson swarm around the sun. Not to transmit energy, but to put supercomputers in each satellite so they can calculate spatial trajectories. The main idea of the project i...
I'm working on a version of wormhole-based FTL travel, and one of the side effects of passing through the wormhole is going to be instantaneous heating of every molecule of the thing passing throug...
So I'm writing a story set in the close(ish) future(say 2130), and space debris is starting to be a real problem. Stations in orbit are constantly having to maneuver out of the paths of orbital deb...
To have a fire you need three things: oxygen, heat and flammable material, therefore the cold vacuum of space is the last place you would expect something to burn. I was, however, wondering if a ve...
What happens to small pieces of debris left floating around inside a derelict space station? My space station had 100 people aboard, and due to sabotage, it decompressed and was abandoned. Inside...
Can large amount space debris be used to block sunlight from falling in a particular land area (about the size of Hawaiian islands)? If so, how much space debris will be required? What will be the ...
A large railgun mounted on the spine of a mega-scale starship (20-32km) or an antimatter-powered missile launched outside the ship? For clarification's sake, when I say "safer" I'm referring to "sa...
And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32"‰MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons wi...
My story is set within one solar system, which can be assumed to have a similar composition to that of our own: one Class G star, a handful of rocky inner planets and a handful of gas giants on the...