Posts tagged light
The game Rodina features four planets, all with different colored skies. For some reason, the sun is a different color from each planet's surface (use this guide for reference). The four planets, ...
Bioluminescence is badass. It involves living beings emitting bright light in the visible spectrum. Would it be, though, possible that a lifeform emits UV (ultraviolet) light? Does it occur in re...
In Mercury's orbit around the Sun (Solar orbit, not Mercurial orbit), what are the conditions like? What shielding or heat management would be required for a manned spacecraft? Could a spacesuited ...
I have a terrestrial moon that I would like to have spectacular and frequent lightning storms. What atmospheric compositions and conditions could cause this? Tools The moon orbits a 21 earth-mas...
No, not that one. This one. I want to see the USS Enterprise fly, but I'm curious how it would be accomplished in any realistic fashion. Now, the world I'm building that needs a flying Enterpri...
As usual, another interesting scientific question, taken from /r/worldbuilding. Would it mean any difference for a desert, where the amount of threatened objects is so low? Or would it form the ge...
In my world spaceships are guided by lighthouses floating in space instead of electronic navigational systems. A lighthouse in space has the shape of a huge sphere emitting intense red light. Like ...
It's just another average day in the life of modern day earth. Suddenly a transmission from orbit washes over the planet! Oh no! An alien race, calling themselves the "Thull", has suddenly arrived ...
I am designing a video game in which Alcubierre Drives will be obtainable by the player. I would like this game to be somewhat scientifically accurate in this way. Specifically, I am interested i...
Lets say we have a huge cigar shaped habitat, filled with a breathable atmosphere, and rotating on one axis at the right speed to have about 1 'g' of acceleration on the inside surface. To give th...
Ok, so I'm making a setting where people have colonized various objects in the solar system and out of it. One thing I know I want to include to flesh it out a bit* is a sport for low-gravity envir...
Many sci-fi questions here are derailed by complaints that the proposed version of FTL breaks causality. However, relativity-safe FTL concepts do exist. What range of conditions allow FTL (movement...
So here's the rough idea. I'm trying to figure out what kind of life could exist that spends basically its entire life in the air, for an alien world I'm working on. No sentient life, just wilderne...
I know, it sounds like a geek swearing at Windows 8 on his work-owned computer. But actually I was just reading Peter Clines (Fold and then had to order 14 for instant delivery), and when I got to...
Suppose that there are 2 interstellar empires at war with one another, both armed with FTL drives which cannot be used within a certain radius of huge gravity fields, stars, gas giants, etc. Anothe...
Supposed we have a ship travelling at the speed of light, or very close to it, or over. A second ship is travelling behind it at the same speed. The second ship wishes to communicate something ...
As the legend goes, Coca-Cola was planning on shooting lasers at the moon to project their logo. Unfortunately, the FFA said no (they didn't want planes to be blinded). I haven't been able to confi...
What would happen if a planet like Earth were to be tidal locked to the sun? What effects could it have on lifeforms like plants? Would they always produce oxygen?
At a crucial point in the development of human civilization, there is a split in the timeline: one where FTL travel is facilitated by jump-drives/wormholes, and another with superluminal speeds (St...
On our world we have any number of creatures that use: Noxious Chemicals Poison(Spiders and Snakes being the obvious examples) Sound Electricity as an alternative to their teeth and claws. One...
Let's assume that a halfling is of similar build, but half the height of an adult human. If I strap a wing suit onto one, I should have a quarter the surface area, but one eight the weight of an ad...
Hanorane (han-or-a-ney) is a moon with a dynamic surface covered in charged sand particles that drift in massive rivers suspended by electrostatic levitation. The only solid ground is the worn an...
Let's say there's an OCEAN planet smaller than Earth but larger than the Moon. The Sun lights on the ocean planet reflecting the water textures onto Earth. Would it be possible to see watery refle...
Let's say that somehow, Earth suddenly acquired a computer with ridiculous speed. This computer can run a program described in a language of your choice, which can be described by a readme file tha...
Let's say on an alien planet called Thindor, the surface gravity is 3.27 m/s2 (which is 1/3rd of Earth's). But the atmospheric pressure is only 50 kPa (which is 1/2 of Earth's). Assume the same 20/...
So, for reasons which may or may not pop up in a later question of mine, I need to light a small Moon-like moon on fire. Well, sort of. See, I need a small object capable of emitting a lot of ligh...
Ornithopters are vehicles that fly by flapping their wings, rather than trough use of a propeller or jet engine. They've been proposed and built many times throughout history, and are a common elem...
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,...
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...
On Earth, the planet itself is negatively charged and the clouds are positively charged, causing lightning to travel from the clouds to the surface. While there are significantly smaller wisps of l...