Posts tagged physics
This question asks what would happen to the solar system if the sun vanished for about three days, the mass and energy of the sun simply ceasing to exist. This answer (as of this question, anyway) ...
A super alien warrior goes training inside a gravity room. It's a room with a flat floor, but the surface gravity of the room can be modified at the push of a button. But under general relativity ...
Premise Imagine a slightly more advanced modern day world where space flight was starting to commercialize. Imagine that all of a sudden laws changed and the only thing different is that no comput...
If I have a world where all races are one-foot-tall versions of their typical fantasy counterparts, what would be the most obvious ways this would affect the building style of these cultures? Would...
I recently re-watched an awesome show - Diebuster. At one point in the show, one of the characters uses Jupiter as a projectile, slamming it into one of the aliens, but to no avail. I can't find a...
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...
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...
We have a tiny robot, insect like, barely five millimetres long, but with an almost perfect AI. The sensory input consists on an array of chemoreceptors, vibrissae, and cameras. It can fly through ...
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 my reading of sci-fi I came across a fascinating concept: an alien race called the Chromatics that had a partially photonic nervous system. They were described as having very fast reflexes. Now ...
Suppose we have a planetary system in orbit around a Class O hypergiant star of 225 solar masses (larger than all but R136a1, the largest star we currently know of), 32,000 times as bright as our s...
TL;DR then scroll down, genius This question is set in a planet with a human population, about the size of Earth with earth-like formations, that has appropriate lifeforms to the conditions follow...
The idea of knocking a satellite out of its orbit is common in fiction, but what does it actually mean.
What would happen if an extremely advanced race removed the metal (everything beyond H and He) from a star. Would the star still function? Would it change in appearance or properties at all?
I have a head-world idea where one of the planets in it has four magnetic poles. It is a desert rocky planet with carbon based lifeforms on it (mostly underground or in bio-domes). What would the...
A question about portals from the 'portal' games. In the games, pairs of flat, identically sized and shaped, effectively for simplicity rectangular, portals, that lay flat on surfaces, link two pl...
The idea of hollowing out asteroids, spinning them on their longest axis, and filling them with air, water, and soil is common in science fiction (Rendezvous with Rama, or 2312 for good examples). ...
What if, sometime in the next say 600 years, humanity develops a device capable of manipulating the four fundamental forces in the area around it. (For example, a handheld device could work in a ra...
Related to the this question about not going SPLAT. That one was for conventional travel through space at high speeds. Now I want to know about how things would work with an Alcubierre drive. I...
I want two populations to coexist in a world with extensive tunnels carved into the rock. One population lives in the tunnels, coming out to trade and gather food. The other is aware of the tunnels...
A long time ago I heard about a Medieval Irish pirate that used a Trebuchet mounted on his ship (no I am not sure what he was or where I heard it). The idea of a ship acting like a double pendulum...
This question was stimulated by the question How would an aquatic race develop computers?. The answers obviously were based on the aquatic civilization being earth based, but what about a totally ...
Summary: I am looking for a portal transportation mechanism that is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Portals (or wormholes or gateways, something that connects two different locatio...
I heard that some scientists placed chickens under 2.5g for 6 months, and they survived. A normal human would black out at 5g. A trained astronaut could take up to 8g before blacking out. 20g woul...
I was thinking about a different possibilities for habitable planets. And I was wondering what actually causes a planet to be tidally locked? I am assuming it more than chance that the bodies rot...
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans converted entirely to machines, so the population can be larger than would be possible with biological humans. In contrast to biologically...
