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With regards to the real-world, the NOAA says that some deep-sea crabs have low-level UV sensitivity in certain pigments. This would seem to indicate that creatures there may emit UV light - which ...
Assuming the alien life form is multicellular, it should definitively know cancer. Cancer is basically a defect in the mechanism that controls the cell division. Cell division is absolutely essenti...
There's no way to achieve this in the known laws of physics. However given that near a mass the time "goes slower". I guess if you could create a negative mass, near it time should "go faster". S...
In a small way this happens already. Weaver ants have a very complicated communication system using pheromones that allows for an unusual amount of cooperation. A lot of that is hard wired into ...
As Wikipedia notes, $$t_{\text{lock}} \approx \frac{\omega a^6IQ}{3Gm_p^2k_2R^5}$$ where $a$ is the semi-major axis, $m_p$ is the mass of the primary, $\omega$ is the initial angular speed, and the...
Like we learned in Dune, the slow blade penetrates the shield. Anything moving faster or with more force than the threshold is going to rebound. Arrows would be shot backward at speed, swords swun...
The planet The radius you have is perfectly fine. It is true that chthonian planets may have masses of 30-100 times that of the Earth, but this is merely because they are extremely dense. Mocquet ...
First off, the aliens aren't that far away, relatively speaking. Most of our signals are pretty weak, especially compared to the radio output from our sun, and you'd have to be pretty close and...
Like AndreiROM points out, recognizing that there is a signal, and understanding the contents of the signal, are two completely different things. In fact, it's not even a given that the aliens wou...
AndreiROM is right, thanks to our friend inertia the only time you'd notice anything is while the ship is actively thrusting during acceleration and deceleration, or if you turned really sharply. ...
While I think there is a lot to be said for a predator having incredibly sensitive hearing being able to be traumatised or damaged by something like a much louder industrial noise created by humans...
Well, think about the direction in which each of these operations needs to go. Tunnels go horizontally across the mountain. Mines go more diagonally downwards, or even straight down in some cases....
Awesome question. To test the feasibility of your idea, we start with the heat equation, which in our case is (from these notes) $$\frac{\partial T}{\partial t}=D_H\frac{\partial^2T}{\partial z^2}\...
Not as commonly thought of, no. One of the things that we learn in orbital mechanics is that the planet orbits its star, not the other way around. More generally, the less massive body orbits the ...
The term I've seen used to describe the necessary solvents for silicon-based life is cryosolvent. In Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology, by Sullivan & Ross (relevant excerpt...
Yes! And even without the tidal heating. O'Brien et al. (2005) modeled impact craters on Titan using finite-difference methods for various impact scenarios, including a wide range of sizes and tem...
Long hair is inherited from the common ancestors of humans and merpeople. In-hair-itance As whales evolved from an ancestor of the hippopotamus and manatees from an ancestor of the elephant, merpeo...
The idea of volcanic vents to harbor life during the long night that others have suggested is really good. But that won't help during the long day if it gets to hot and dry. One variable that woul...
I contend that the Trojan, Greek, and Hilda groups associated with Jupiter in our own solar system constitute "fields" as opposed to "belts." The Hildas are perhaps more scattered, but they do not...
Well, we did travel to the Moon with 1960s (and some even 1950s) technology. We also had reasonably detailed plans to use the same underlying technology to make a year-long Venus fly-by mission in ...
Most plants would rely on seeds, and would have multiple cycles during the 39,420 hours of daylight. The seeds would probably have some temperature sensitivity so as to not germinate just before du...
They could be incompetent or short sighted eco terrorists, and it doesn't matter that they use a method that would release a lot of co2. "We destroyed the oil by pumping oil eating bacteria down! ...
One way to give a glow without causing vision problems would be if that glow is monochromatic (just one frequency), and at the same time that person happens to be blind for exactly that frequency, ...
I had written up a long spiel that was going to be part of a long answer to another question, but it looks like it'll do all right here. Just so you don't think that I whipped it up in 20 minutes. ...
Like JDÅ‚ugosz wrote, what will cause problems in the scenario you describe isn't so much your orbit as the fact that you are within the gas giant's atmosphere. I'm going to use Jupiter here to ha...
