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Rigorous Science

Q&A with a focus on more stringent analysis. Questions and answers should be well-researched, clearly explained, and supported with references, equations, or empirical evidence based on current, widely-accepted science. Please read the category guidelines.

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Why would a male marsiupial agree to accept responsibility for carrying half of his mate's joeys?

I'm looking to create a species of marsupial that is heavily K select, which is to say they put significant effort into raising their young after birth (both of them :P ) in which both the male and...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by dsollen‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by dsollen‭

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No More Looking from the Same Side of a Mostly Liquid Surface Terrestrial-based Moon

Section 1: Non-Duplicate Proofs. Section 2: Background, THE QUESTION, and Useful Info. Section 3: Other cited ways of preventing. Section 4: Sources and Additional Resources. Section 5: TL;D...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by LanceLercher‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by LanceLercher‭

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What are the options to incorporate teleportation in my story in a realistic fashion that adheres to the laws of physics?

I'm currently outlining my science fiction novel which deals with humanity reaching Type 3 civilization status. My goal is to place an emphasis on hard science fiction while featuring fantastic tec...

7 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Julian‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Julian‭

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How will a dust storm affect infrared sensors such as thermal imaging?

The situation: the good guys are attempting to infiltrate an enemy base, and cause mayhem either in person and/or by planting explosives and running away. They know there is a big dust storm on the...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by DrBob‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by DrBob‭

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Planetary cave: Gravity inside a non-concentric shell

There are several previous questions concerning concentric shells. I won't reference them here because this is different. I understand that there is no gravitational effect inside a concentric she...

2 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by chasly from UK‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by chasly from UK‭

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Scale model solar system in interstellar space - will it work?

Now that FTL travel is here there are all sorts of family outings we can go on. One of these is a scale model solar system lovingly made by hobbyist Barty Slartfast. In full scale Sedna is thre...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by chasly from UK‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by chasly from UK‭

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How to design a zero-g nuclear reactor?

My worldbuilding involves a reasonably near-future, high-realism space station research outpost, and I'd like it to be powered by a nuclear reactor. However, I need as much detail on the actual rea...

4 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Innovine‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Innovine‭

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Could a planet's Karman line hypothetically occur under a liquid surface?

The Karman Line is one of the most commonly-used definitions of the "edge of space". As an airplane flies higher in the atmosphere, the air gets thinner and thus the lift decreases. This can be c...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by DrSheldon‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by DrSheldon‭

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Regrowing body parts: What are the costs?

Everybody has seen superpowers like superstrength, flying, and regeneration. While flying and superstrength are quite straightforward regarding the energy cost, regeneration is not. In this questi...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by ArtificialSoul‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by ArtificialSoul‭

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How to predict the color of this sky?

How can I predict the color of the sky based on the information provided? Atmospheric composition: | 2% Trace gases | 58% Nitrogen | 26% Oxygen | 11% Argon | 3% Carbon dioxide | Average s...

2 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Neuryte‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Neuryte‭

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The Diet of Space Dwellers

I've looked around the forum but didn't find an answer to this particular question. In short, what food could realistically be produced in a space station assuming current (or near future) technolo...

5 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by tempestwing0101‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by tempestwing0101‭

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Is using thermal energy an effective method to powering an implanted tracking device?

So in this world somewhere in distant future. The government has created I.D Chips that are designed to be biologically implanted into its own citizens. To ensure extra "security" and also act as a...

10 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Red_Wasp‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Red_Wasp‭

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How to generate powerful cyclonic storms in an ocean basin

I have a region on a planet with identical parameters to Earth but different landmasses that is rather similar to the southern ocean on Earth. There is a single piece of land around the size of th...

2 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Antarctica07‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Antarctica07‭

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Can haptic holograms be used to make something akin to a holodeck?

If the holograms are really advanced like the hologram of Snoke in The Force Awakens and they are haptic, which means you can feel them, can they be used to make an immersive virtual reality envior...

2 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Max‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Max‭

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At what rate would this renaissance-esqe mining operation proceed?

There is a group of people with about renaissance-level technology clearing out underground granite. They have no access to work animals. 700 men are working at any given time. Mining Using rena...

1 answer  ·  posted 6y ago by NeoBourne‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by NeoBourne‭

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How to identify a new species?

If a parasitic creature was discovered, how would officials determine whether that parasite was a new species or an existing parasitic species? How long would that process take? Assume the specie...

4 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by CaM‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by CaM‭

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How close can a ship get to Sagittarius A?

Assuming that the only fancy available technology is FTL drives (to get there) plus anything needed to protect and sustain a crew during the journey from Earth to Sagittarius A (whether it takes a ...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by Sava‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Sava‭

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Contamination of orbital warehouses

So I'm thinking about orbital warehousing of raw materials but I'm wondering whether one would actually need an orbital structure to store the goods inside or could you just strap a booster to the ...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Ash‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Ash‭

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How does the n-body-problem affect a star system around a red dwarf?

So my story is set in the TRAPPIST-1-system and a rogue planet enters the system. When it's still far off, a scientist discovers that one of the numbers is slightly off. (She has some tables that p...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by Böller‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Böller‭

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Would it be possible to create an artificial iron star?

I ran a quick calculation, and the mass of iron required to form a black hole is on the order of 10^40kg. So, suppose that in my story there is this almost much iron available to somehow be brough...

2 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Michael‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Michael‭

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What are the conditions of an Earth-like, water-ball planet?

I'd like to explore some details on a so-called water-ball planet (i.e. a planet in the habitable zone of a sun, covered by a 100 km deep ocean). I am particularly interested where life could devel...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by jk - Reinstate Monica‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by jk - Reinstate Monica‭

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Secret Hangar Location Needed for Entropy-sensitive Nano-bots

Premise In this Earth-like world, a multi-billion dollar privately owned aerospace/defense corporation is devising a secret plan to manufacture a fleet of nano-bots. These nano-bot have swarm inte...

4 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Arash Howaida‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Arash Howaida‭

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Could I put a large city into geostationary orbit?

I want to put a circular city in geostationary orbit. The city will have a radius of 20Km. I was thinking of using quantum trapping/levitation to achieve this. Here's what quantum trapping is: ...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by The Last Remnant‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by The Last Remnant‭

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Could Using Technology to monitor the thoughts of a human mind be possible?

I had this one idea of having the government create chips that monitor the thoughts of prison inmates as a way of preventing future crimes. At the same time still, give them a degree of freedom and...

5 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Red_Wasp‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Red_Wasp‭

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Space elevator into a blackhole. Possible?

Inspired by Spaceship orbiting a black hole under the event horizon - a prison where no one escapes, I was wondering if it is possible to make a space elevator that goes down into a black hole. In...

3 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by PyRulez‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by PyRulez‭

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Energy cost of creating body parts from nothing but energy

What amount of energy would you need to expend to create an arm out of nothing but energy? Of course we have $E = m c^2$ telling us the energy any amount of mass represents. Given the average of a...

1 answer  ·  posted 6y ago by ArtificialSoul‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by ArtificialSoul‭

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If Earth's Core had ALL Of the Heavy Metals

Back home, Earth had gone through an impact-coalesce cycle only once. Since then, its core has been 84% iron, 6% nickel and the rest being labeled by The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual ...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by JohnWDailey‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by JohnWDailey‭

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Planet with an inactive and connected lithosphere?

As you know, Earth has active and moving techtonic plates known as the lithosphere. They float on the asthenosphere and slowly move about. Here's my question: Can a planet with a hot molten core h...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Rangoon‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Rangoon‭

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The Great Deoxygenation Event

Assume an Earth-like or super-Earth terrestrial planet in a state comparable to Precambrian or Archaen Earth. The atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, perhaps some methane, but very li...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by rek‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by rek‭

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Can Lenz's Law Allow a Simple Block of Metal to Divert a Charged Electron Beam?

I was curious about an odd effect I first saw in video here: YouTube : Copper's Surprising Reaction to Strong Magnets In the video, a big heavy magnet is brought to an abrupt halt by a simple piec...

1 answer  ·  posted 5y ago by James McLellan‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by James McLellan‭

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Could I have an earth-like planet from which sun and moon would never be simultaneously visible?

On earth there can be hours where the moon is up during the same time the sun is in the sky (daytime moon) due to the combined rotation of earth and orbit of the moon. I would like to have an earth...

7 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by DerGreif‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by DerGreif‭

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White Dwarf mining?

This is a follow-up to Neutron Star mining. Assuming that problem can be solved, it would eventually degenerate to something similar to this case. And if it can't, white dwarfs seem like the next b...

3 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Logan R. Kearsley‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Logan R. Kearsley‭

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How big of a coronal mass ejection from the sun do I need to destroy all the electrical equipment on earth

So the background is simple: in the modern day a CME (coronal mass ejection, a solar flare that has escaped the sun) hits the Earth and destroyed all the electrical equipment causing planes to cras...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by skout‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by skout‭

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How would characters find out they were living in a rotating habitat with only medieval tech?

Three natives who study their version of science on the surface of a large rotating habitat located in a cylindrical shape in the space between our solar system and Alpha Centauri, are trying to fi...

9 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Sean Mignosa‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Sean Mignosa‭

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Diamond as a building material

So lots of Sci-fi works use mono-crystalline diamond as a wonder material used to build all sorts of impressive and in some cases seemingly impossible structures, I'd like to ask about the science ...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Ash‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Ash‭

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Can a sounds frequency stun?

This is in reference to Could an organism have evolved to kill its prey by shouting at it? However, most answers here speak towards the brute force side of the equation, measure by it's decibel le...

2 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Twelfth‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Twelfth‭

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Please help me calculate acceptable planet sizes & eclipse shadows cast by my binary planet system

I've been reading here for a little while, but this is my first question. I am trying to come up with either a concrete set of numbers for a single answer for a binary planet system, or a simple fo...

1 answer  ·  posted 7y ago by castinbronze‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by castinbronze‭

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what type of head anatomy would simians evolve

The end goal is to have human like beings with vestigial horns or antlers, but I am unsure of what types of horns they should be. Apparently there are three type of horn: living horn-bony outgr...

3 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Eloc‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Eloc‭

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Chemical element made with alternative particles

In my earlier question, regarding airships, I mentioned fictional gas, as light as hydrogen but non-flammable. Is it possible to make chemical element, with atoms made not from nucleons, but with s...

5 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Mranderson ‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Mranderson ‭

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Could you turn the asteroid belt into one giant full spectrum interferometer?

For the purpose of this post, full spectrum means a non-trivial number of frequencies within a non-trivial band. So human eyes aren't full spectrum within the visual range (each cone is wide band, ...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Imipak‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Imipak‭

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What if a traversable wormhole hits the earth?

So, I the question of what if a black hole hits the earth has been asked to death by various people, but what if the somewhat tamer wormhole hits the Earth? In particular, we'll say that one mouth...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by PyRulez‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by PyRulez‭

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Deep Space Communication Infrastructure

What kind of technology would be required for a space travelling civilization to have an effective communication system or network that is similar in speed to the telegram? How would it work? This ...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by System‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by System‭

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In a world without aging, how do we age?

EDIT: As it turns out the method I had thought of using to combat aging doesn't work the way I expected. As such I have rethought this question in more vague terms. New Question: Using current hyp...

3 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Douglas‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Douglas‭

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Need help / advice building a habitable body for a book

Information and Context I'm working on a story, based 220 or so years in the future in a hard-science universe (where a quantum jump drive has been invented). I was wondering if anyone could giv...

1 answer  ·  posted 6y ago by Ballistic Porpoise‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Ballistic Porpoise‭

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Azidoazide Azide Storage and Weaponization

AA (azidoazide azide) is a hyper-explosive 14 nitrogen molecule. My questions are: what are some theoretical ways to store it so it doesn't explode on you but on the enemy you throw it at, and what...

1 answer  ·  posted 6y ago by Amoeba‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by Amoeba‭

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Powering a starship with solar cells

For a while now I've been building a science fiction world and I've been thinking what would be a feasible way to power a large ship capable of interstellar travel. I've always disliked the idea on...

3 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by System‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by System‭

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How big would a fusion reactor need to be to produce a constant triple digit terawattage?

And how much fuel would you need to carry? I'm trying to determine what kind of engine you'd need to accelerate a good-size spacecraft (thousands to millions of tons) at a constant 1g in a race acr...

2 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Z.Schroeder‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Z.Schroeder‭

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How would the US re-conquer a Moon Base?

The year is 2030. The US has set up a moon base with about 2,000 people. The base can theoretically survive indefinitely, growing its own food and 3D-printing supplies, but in practice it needs t...

6 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Bert Haddad‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by Bert Haddad‭

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Plausible biological alternative for normal photosynthesis

People have been trying to imagine elaborate alien biologically possible ecosystems for a while. A lot of people seem to both want but ignore one of those fundamental aspects of our own ecosystem, ...

5 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by anon‭  ·  last activity 6y ago by anon‭

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What technology can create water on an airless, desert planet?

Planet has these characteristics: Half of the planet is always on day, and other half is always night (it rotates at the same velocity as its orbit) There are no underground water sources; it's a...

3 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by Malkev‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Malkev‭