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I will derive my solution by comparing to real-world precedents, and analyzing how these might be adapted by merfolk. (TL;DR: Rock domes.) Why do humans have houses? Shelter from the elements. ...
Assassinate Hitler In 1941, mid war, Hitler is assassinated with the hope that this would weaken the German top ranks, cause infighting, hurt morale, and bring a faster end to the war. Instead E...
Well, the first obvious difference would be that the square-cube law would basically be replaced by a cube-tesseract* law. Since 4/3 is closer to 1 than 3/2, this means that there could be greater ...
Human language evolved for the interaction between humans. That may sound like a trivial fact, but it isn't: If there had not been social interaction between humans, humans would not have evolved l...
I'm making the following simplifying assumptions: No time travel, time dilation or other temporal effects through use of those technologies (basically, the travelling works as if there were an un...
It is definitely possible. Like for example the earth at the time of the dinosaurs. Quote (from relatively far down on the page): As the world entered the Cretaceous Period, Antarctica was very...
Let's do a bit of math. According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is $7.3\cdot10^{22}\,\rm kg$ and its average orbital speed is $1.0\,\rm km/s$. That means its kinetic energy is $3.7\cdot 10^{2...
The defining equation of hydrostatic equilibrium - the state a celestial body must be in to maintain some semblance of a spherical shape - is $$\frac{dP}{dr}=-\frac{GM(r)\rho(r)}{r^2}$$ where $P$ i...
Not without artificial gravity or some other outside source. Your mega structure large enough to have an earth sized pocket is going to have a lot of mass. Something that big is going to need futur...
It could easily be done with instinct, and not involve "intelligence" in any real way. For instance the Golden Ratio is all over the place in plants and animals, but it doesn't mean any of them k...
Weaver ants in Africa use chemicals to communicate, and can work together to make huge colonies with hundreds of nests spanning many trees and containing millions of ants. With a rat sized ant and...
I asked How can I safely brighten my secondary star? because I was looking for a bright night, though not specifically a nebula, for my habitable planet. This answer suggested placing a star in a ...
The hair could contain a combination of chemical substances that changes colour after a given time. If the time needed for that process is long enough to allow the hair to significantly grow, but s...
How can I achieve this[?] Make them cavemen. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) keeps the brain in neutral buoyancy, effectively lessening its weight against itself. This means that the brain can be h...
Most amnesiac drugs only work while they are in your system, making it so that new memories can't be recorded, without messing with old stored memories. This is really useful for anesthetic, since ...
Yes. We can write out the force as $$\mathbf{F}=-k\frac{\sqrt{e_1e_2}}{r^2}\mathbf{u}_r$$ where $\mathbf{u}_r$ is the unit vector in the direction of $\mathbf{r}$, defined as $$\mathbf{u}_r=\frac{...
Hill Valley is, apparently, somewhere in the Sierra Nevada range in Northern California. That fact, as well as its name, should make it clear that the region has an abundance of hills, which are ha...
Realistically, a well-trained backpacking dog can carry up to anywhere between 30% and 50% of its weight on its back. While the dog's spine is possibly going to be a problem, that can be worked aro...
tl;dr: No, it is not possible to have the force proportional to the product of the square roots of the charges. In an alternate universe there is a force known as the emotion force although the...
Like other answers so far, I don't think that we have any chance of establishing a colony on that planet. I would like to add another reason, however, for why this is not possible with current tech...
You said "assume uploaded personalities have been granted the franchise", which I am interpreting as "assume they are both 'persons' and 'citizens' under the constitution", which would be prerequis...
Yes, via panspermia. Panspermia is the idea that extremophiles "hitch a lift", as it were, on ejecta from collisions between celestial bodies. There are a few obstacles, because the microbes would...
When reading "faster than light" one normally thinks of it as faster than the limit speed of relativity, which is the same as the speed of light in relativity, as the photon is massless and therefo...
I see rail being an attractive transportation option, since visibility is less important when you don't have to steer. Plants and Crops would also be effected, and imported warm weather food stuf...
Why do they have the right to live? Serious question. They eat us. It's all they do, and we have a right to defend ourselves from being eaten. If they can be taught to eat something else, fine....
