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Q&A Is it realistic to see satellites moving across the sky centuries after humans stopped space activity?

Satellites will still be visible. A couple of characteristics make human satellites easy to see. They are fast and bright. Slow objects are difficult to pick out from the background star field. ...

posted 3y ago by Green‭  ·  edited 1y ago by deleted user

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Q&A Magnet strong enough to rip the iron out of your body feasible?

This question was discussed by Kyle Hill in his early video on the scene in Days of Future Past in which Magneto rips out iron from the security guard. He begins by noting that the large majority o...

posted 3y ago by DonielF‭  ·  edited 3y ago by DonielF‭

Answer
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Q&A If this earth were cube shaped would it be possible during Magellanic era using a float ship to figure out that the earth is cube shaped?

So couldn't earth be odd shaped other than a sphere? No. Something the size of the earth has significant gravity. There isn't material strong enough over large distances to result in anything mo...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer
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Q&A Is it realistic to see satellites moving across the sky centuries after humans stopped space activity?

After an age of highly developed technology, including many different satellites in various Earth orbits, humanity loses the technology needed to control those satellites. After many centuries, how...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by celtschk‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by deleted user

Question space satellites
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Q&A Analogue Encryption, without converting to digital

Hello! I am thinking about analogue mobile telephones, but they have some severe flaws- the most significant being privacy. How could an analogue system be encrypted? It doesn't need to be complet...

2 answers  ·  posted 9mo ago by Bianca_Railway‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Maarten Bodewes‭

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Meta Is this the right name for the site?

What about simply reversing the name? Instead of "Speculative Science", potentially implying speculating about science (with all the implications of that), we could have "Scientific Speculation", i...

posted 4y ago by ArtOfCode‭

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Q&A If this earth were cube shaped would it be possible during Magellanic era using a float ship to figure out that the earth is cube shaped?

The shape of the Earth is mostly a result of its gravity pulling its mass into the most efficient shape available. The oceans are also pulled towards the centre of mass, and collect on the lowest ...

posted 2y ago by Pastychomper‭  ·  edited 1y ago by Pastychomper‭

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Meta Welcome to Scientific Speculation!

Welcome to the Codidact home for the Scientific Speculation community, an outgrowth of the SE Worldbuilding community. Please use it, report problems and make requests on Meta, and collect your th...

1 answer  ·  posted 4y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Monica Cellio‭

Question announcements
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Meta Is this the right name for the site?

We try to hammer these things out during the proposal phase; really we do... but in the last day or two we've seen some objections to the name "Speculative Science", and if we're going to change it...

3 answers  ·  posted 4y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 6mo ago by Or4ng3h4t‭

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Q&A Could there be a way for a solar system to be very precise, so that the lunar calendar and solar calendar align?

Precise alignment for a limited time Alignment of one ratio In your world, how long do you require the alignment to last? As Olin Lathrops's answer explains, stable resonances are very unlikely ...

posted 10mo ago by trichoplax‭

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Q&A Composite armor based on diamonds, could it work?

Diamonds are hard, but brittle, and not particularly strong. Diamond as a basis for armor doesn't make much sense. Brittleness is bad when sudden impact is exactly the stress being defended again...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Meta A few questions as I dip my toes in the water here

I took the tour and was told that questions about magic wouldn't find a place here. That's when I started looking around. There are 500+ tags, apparently not a single one of them has a summary...

1 answer  ·  posted 2y ago by JBH‭  ·  last activity 2y ago by Canina‭

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Q&A Why would a race constantly deafened by ambient noises still hear?

In a story that I'm writing, there is a giant waterfall which flows down a cliff face. The waterfall is extraordinarily large, and the torrents of water which flow over the side are deafening. Beh...

3 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by DonielF‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by ajekb78‭

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Q&A Is it possible to create a beam of non-relativistic neutrinos?

Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...

1 answer  ·  posted 4y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by dmckee‭

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Q&A Would a huge amount of asteroids hitting Earth change its rotation speed or destroy the planet?

Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by HDE 226868‭

Question asteroids earth
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Q&A Magnet strong enough to rip the iron out of your body feasible?

Is it possible, given a strong enough magnet, to rip out iron based molecules out of the blood stream/body of a person/animal? Would such an event be the thing that kills someone or are there other...

2 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Cazadorro‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by DonielF‭

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Rigorous Science How long will it be until the cosmic microwave background is undetectable?

I've had a number of interesting conversations with people about how the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will evolve in the future. The CMB is the sea of photons left over from the epoch of recom...

0 answers  ·  posted 4y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  edited 4y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A How do you establish identity when people can change their appearance at will?

Building on the universe established in this question, what happens to identity verification when someone's physical appearance and genetic code are modifiable at any time? Review of universe rule...

3 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Green‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Pastychomper‭

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Q&A Centripetal Burn in Orbit

Imagine a spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit. Say the craft burns at periapsis towards the planet such that its orbital eccentricity does not change and the craft's periapsis moves with the shi...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by Josh Hyatt‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Could a habitable planet lit by the cosmic microwave background plausibly exist?

I've got this idea of a rogue planet that is moving that fast through the intergalactic void that the cosmic microwave radiation, thanks to the Doppler effect, actually provides enough heat that it...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by celtschk‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by dsr‭

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Q&A Composite armor based on diamonds, could it work?

Under normal circumstances, monolithic diamond is pretty terrible at resisting impact, due to it being weak in certain planes, also known as cleavage planes. To solve this, why don't we just make ...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by Mr. Mistoffelees‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Could a high-pressure, low oxygen atmosphere reduce fire risk while still being breathable?

Years ago I read a letter in a magazine suggesting a method for reducing the fire risk in an enclosed environment such as a space shuttle. The idea was to reduce the oxygen concentration to the po...

1 answer  ·  posted 2y ago by Pastychomper‭  ·  last activity 2y ago by dsr‭

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Q&A How efficient can a Dyson sphere be?

The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by celtschk‭

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Meta Should we remove "What would X sport in space look like ?" questions

Let's look at the (rather poorly named) FAQ page in the help center which tries to specify in a bit more detail than the few words of a site name what the site's scope is: Scientific Speculation...

posted 6mo ago by Canina‭  ·  edited 6mo ago by Canina‭

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Meta Which sciences are welcome?

Myself, I think that all sciences are in scope on this site. (We're already barely getting any traffic; artificially restricting scope further probably won't help much with that.) The way I see it ...

posted 3y ago by Canina‭

Answer