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Actually, the "light year" is a unit of length that has its origins in Earth's movement around the Sun, but has since been detached from it. The SI unit of length is the meter. It is defined as ...
Actually I don't think you'll have that problem, for a simple reason: It is very unlikely that the planet will be a perfect match before doing some serious terraforming. Therefore after landing, pe...
Let's take inspiration from the claws of mantis shrimp. Their club- or spear-like claws are deployed by flexing and releasing bands of chitin. In the same way, your creature's tail would need suc...
Potentially the most cost effective way to mine the core of a rocky planet would be to first hit it very hard with something that removed the crust and mantle. Once exposed, the metallic core would...
Quantum computers operate differently than classical computers, and most importantly, doing measurements in the middle of a quantum computation process will disturb the process, and possibly lead t...
Redirecting rivers may be some help by causing desertification and changes in local rainfall. Directing them into blind valleys may cause salt pans that reflect sunlight locally which may not be d...
The dwarves can keep the bees in the caverns, but provide them with suitable exits. You have your beekeepers on the upper levels of the cities. You'll need ventilation somehow to allow for your ci...
You need to constantly threaten those humanoids from the back - for example big silent owls and manual tasks that require a lot of time The eyes need to provide an advantage for these humanoids, s...
You could use a large mid-ocean ridge, like the Mid-Atlantic ridge, and then play around with sea levels. Mid-ocean ridges occur at (divergent) plate boundaries, and can be thousands of kilometers ...
Water is, generally speaking, incompressible. It doesn't act like other liquids, at least not until you treat is as though it's already at absurd compression as it is. I highly doubt that water wou...
The two humanoid lifeforms are two mental states inhabiting the same bodies. The switch is triggered, for instance, by the day/night cycle, or it follows a seasonal pattern. All the planet is simul...
Watch this overly gratuitously destructive video of some poor normal capacitors. Those are low-voltage low-capacitance capacitors. And they still have a decent amount of force to them. A high-vo...
What we're concerned with here is the eruption column and subsequent plume arising from the volcanic eruption. This is a shield volcano, so it's not going to erupt a la Mount St. Helens; rather, it...
There is actually real-world precedent for what you want. Many indigenous Australians have a genetic mutation that helps them cope with a wide range of temperatures, including freezing. As discus...
What would be a reasonable prime purpose of this research mission? For what reason would a dozen scientists be sent to the bottom of the ocean for a month? Study of the Xenophyophores down the...
Is it possible for such a system to exist? I'm sorry, but no. At least not according to orbital mechanics as currently understood. Kepler's third law of planetary motion is one of the old wor...
The melding of the tree and building could be an intentional part of the structure - providing structural support for the building around it. This has advantages in terms of growth - the building ...
Magnets For some reason your aliens developed a strong magnetic field that they are constantly emitting. Your humanoids use this to attract prey, either by forcing them directly through the magn...
ROBOTS! Why send a bunch of under-evolved meatbags to understand a machine, when you can send the most advanced machine available to understand its alien counterpart? If not, then two distinct te...
Speaking as a college professor that works in artificial intelligence, this is basically all impossible. Sentience would require some way for plants to both sense and "model" the world around them ...
They both live in swampy environments, each exudes a delightful-smelling musky lubricant that allows them to slither through their environment and protects them from contact with the potentially na...
Your replicator is a programmable universal catalyst combined with a 3D printer. It can force any particular chemical reaction to occur over others and deposit the result of that chemical reaction ...
Have the very durable material canal meander slightly and have narrow side channels all along the length at the inside of the meander curves where the silt will collect. If the channel is 30m deep...
As long as the astronaut has a map of the sky from Earth where stellar bodies are grouped by distance (like on onion peels), then geometry suggests that there must be at least one point, or more li...
Here's another option: There are three genes: The X gene, the Y gene, and the Z gene. And there are three sex chromosomes: The XY chromosome, the XZ chromosome and the YZ chromosome. Each sex chro...
