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So after some consideration, this is what I've come up with. Sort of a half plant half animal hybrid similar to a sea anemone. Maybe slightly more mobile like a sea slug. It would have a wide ...
With many more than three colour receptors, our colour TVs, using just three colours for display, would not come even close to showing all the colours of the world. Moreover, LDCs inherently work w...
The prefix extra- is generally used for things that are outside of normality - for example, extraterrestrial for being outside Earth-normal, or extracurricular for education outside of the normal c...
The whole universe could be filled with air. That would also explain why the world isn't just in free-fall (and thus effectively gravitation-free): It is going at the limit speed where air resistan...
Using Michael Karnerfors' answer as a basis for the numbers, only instead of directly attaching the rail-gun to the ship so that everything moves as a whole, attaching the gun to a flywheel (or som...
Farming would look a lot more like herding. This would be interesting because you could drive your crops to market, let them out to pasture, etc. Picturing cropboys driving potatoes from Idaho to ...
Hostile takeover. The other AI has lots of useful routines that your AI doesn't want to simply erase or leave unused. Instead it takes over the other AI, that is, incorporates all its routines, so...
The major problem with building a space station like a city is that you can't really make it anything like Earth: O'Neill cylinders are big enough that they can have their own weather systems. Th...
The benifit of the O'Neill cylinder is that you can get spin gravity by rotating it. The Alien universe has artificial gravity, so space stations can be more like the one in the picture without h...
Check out the cone snail. Cone snails like to stupefy their victims (see also Safavi-Hemami et al. (2014)) by either Using an extremely fast "harpoon" with venom to stab their prey. Releasing a ...
As far as I can tell, the habitable zone around a red dwarf is less than .5 AU, and is going to be very narrow. The exo-planet Gliese 581 g is right in the middle of the habitable zone of the st...
Yes, it's quite possible for hydrogen sulfide ($\text{H}_2\text{S}$) to replace water as the solvent for life. It already plays a major role in chemosynthesis in hydrothermal vents. The basic react...
Humans are basically warm bags of slightly salty water. If an exo-bacteria can grow on your skin, there isn't much stopping it from growing inside your body. Your immune system could give it prob...
A method that doesn't take any equipment: Choose two trees where one is in front of the other by some amount, and walk so that they always line up. When you get to the closest of the two trees pick...
Argon is inert, meaning that in doesn't really interact much with anything. Like the other noble gases, it is much less reactive than the major components of the atmosphere. Therefore, to look at c...
Launching stuff from the planet to orbit is expensive. And if we want to do some major planet colonizing some day we're going to need to build a lot of ships and that means a lot of launches with a...
Like Philip said, Niven's Ringworld had an inner ring of shades that rotated inside to give a day night cycle. The inner ring was not a solid ring. It was made of electricity generating sections ...
Wikipedia states that the strength of the magnetic field near a kitchen magnet is approximately 5 mT ($5 \times 10^{-3}$ Tesla), roughly 1,000 times as strong as Earth's magnetic field in that same...
The main problem would be energy. Without a star as energy source, you will have to produce all the energy yourself. You'll need a lot of energy, so probably fusion is the right source (note that i...
You need enough air that its own gravity holds it together. However that means in the center you'll have much more than atmospheric pressure; indeed I don't think your air will be gaseous in the ce...
Reminds me a bit of a story where a guy makes a very small station with gravity and an atmosphere by having a very small sphere of nutronium sealed and magnetically suspended in the center. The gra...
The power source There are existing biological power sources that your DNA chimera could use to "power" the muscles, like the organs of an electric eel. The organs could produce electricity and pr...
The largest so-far known flying animal on this here earth was the quetzalcoatlus. At 10 meters, its wingspan falls far short of 1000 feet you mention. (image from wikimedia) However, the mecha...
Say it's a factory that takes hydrogen and creates fusion. If the machine had a nebula with lots of hydrogen or a gas giant near by, then automated machines could collect it and bring it back to th...
I guess atoms would still form (hydrogen, some helium, traces of lithium). However there won't be galaxies or stars, as it's exactly the attractive nature of the gravitation that creates that type ...
