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Calculating flux I think a slightly more helpful quantity to calculate is the flux received by the planet - the power per unit area from the star. The mean flux on Earth is the solar constant, $F_...
Try the Kozai mechanism The basis for the Kozai mechanism is that in a binary system, a third orbiting body - with a much lower mass than the other two - has a quantity that doesn't change in time...
Yes, what you are looking for has already happened (as @Christmas Snow and other mentioned, snakes are the brightest example). We humans have undergone a similar process when we lost the tail (you ...
For Hawaii, $H\propto\sqrt{A}$. I looked at the islands on the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain with surface volcanoes, and plotted their surface area vs. their maximum elevation, using data from W...
I feel like the answer to this one is already in the question. It was created many thousand years ago by a hyper advanced race that created it as a sort of biological torture mechanism. You'r...
Cave formation This setup reminds me of rhizomes, which are essentially underground root systems that can spread out underground, sending up new seedlings at various intervals. Rhizomatic root sys...
Dung Charcoal A staple fuel for grassland people is dried dung. It generally doesn't burn particularly hot, but if you a assume a source of dung that is both unusually dense and comes in cohesive...
I don't see any show stoppers. 100-200 years in the future, I will presume you have all the energy you need indefinitely, by solar or fusion. Although the sunlight is much reduced, all the materia...
The blood-brain barrier is more permeable during various points in development, notably infancy. But also in adolescence. If the disease affects only people with high levels of sex hormones and a...
It depends on how intelligent the t-rex is. Wolves and lions, for example, can be tame if raised from birth. But black widows can not be. We don't really know how smart our historical t-rexes we...
I don't think mental state matters very much at all to physical age. As far as a world-building matter, for all the reason you state in your question; I would expect FTL travelers to not have any...
The Dimensions are in neighboring areas in four-dimensional space As an analogy: Let's say that you live in New York, and you want to get to Los Angeles. How do you get there? Well, the simplest r...
TL;DR: About 2150 light-years Here's the gist of my answer, for simplicity: The largest nebulae are HII regions, clouds of gas ionized by young hot stars forming inside them. We can calculate th...
I'm not up on seal anatomy; but I think the main thing to evolve is some sort of grip on, for example, a stick or spear. That does NOT require an opposable thumb. Our opposable thumb gives our gri...
Yes. With technology! Specifically, Replicated Mechanized Police guaranteed to be the same everywhere, throughout the galaxy. This will also work with any length of human lifespans; even just the...
There is no way for a galaxy government to work without faster than light something. The obvious requirement for creating the society are faster than light travel but this can be dispensed with if...
I don't think a planet sized object can do it; both Earth and the object don't just melt, too much of it actually vaporizes (Not in the Star Trek sense, but the scientific sense; being heated beyon...
I would recommend looking at pre-existing numerical models, rather than computing your own. This has a couple of advantages: You don't need to use any approximations. Factors like metallicity, ro...
We elves naturally developed a method that is more worthy of our nature. I would modify your premise, which I will get to in a moment. First, we humans preprocess our food to make it more ed...
Early microbial life on such a world is almost certainly aquatic, so I'll answer this question in those terms. Earthly bacteria move at a rate between 2 and 200 microns per second, with the higher...
I can't do better than Wilik's answer, but I'd like to add to it. The land flooded and the sea built up with silt and eventually dried completely, leaving only desert. As it dried, it left a crus...
The parasite lies dorment in wisdom teeth. Wisdom teeth usually emerge sometime between the ages of 17 and 25. They have that name because their emergence generally coincides with maturation, wit...
When they died matters The universe likes to keep things in balance, but the universe - not being sapient - is quite dumb about it. So, a body that dies of old age at 80, 90, etc years old will ta...
Really big tides and really low tides. With the average exactly where it is right now. There might be multiple high and low tides (vs the two a day of each that we have now). Because the Eart...
Poop! Poop! And more Poop! But seriously, dried animal dung is a very common fuel, even today in some places. You can burn it like wood. Dry dung fuel (or dry manure fuel) is animal feces t...
