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Q&A Can there be a moon within a planetary ring?

Yes, you absolutely can have a moon orbiting within a ring system. In fact, we have a perfect example of that in our own solar system: Saturn's A ring has the Encke and Keeler gaps, wherein orbits ...

posted 8y ago by Canina‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Canina‭

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Q&A Science-based FTL drive

TL;DR: "Scientifically correct" (according to current established science) and "faster-than-light travel" cannot be used in the same context without some form of negation. What you are asking for i...

posted 8y ago by Canina‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Canina‭

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Q&A Can a disease be airborne but not be contagious by other means?

Let's imagine that the organism causing the disease (a virus) has two states, depending on whether or not it's inside its host. State #1: Active In this state, the organism is inside the host. It...

posted 8y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A Is it possible to communicate through DNA?

There isn't a reason why not. Computers communicate with just 1 and 0. DNA has 4 chemical bases, and humans have around 3 billion base pairs. There are sections of human DNA that are left over f...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Why would a civilisation choose to inhabit a single enormous vessel instead of maintaining interstellar colonies?

The ship started out as a generational ship to colonize some far-away planet. However, when approaching that planet, nobody wanted to be a colonist. They lived on the ship, their parents lived on t...

posted 8y ago by celtschk‭

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Q&A Scientifically-plausible alien telepathy

One evolutionary path is if the fungus communicated using EM signals. Electrical synapses use electricity instead of chemicals to communicate with each other. This typically means that they have to...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Gravitational slingshots: could they be used to decelerate a spacecraft traveling at a small fraction of light speed?

Yes, in theory. Gravity assist braking is a thing The problem is the speed. Going that fast you'd need to do a lot of maneuvers in order to lose enough velocity to enter orbit around the sun, a...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Neutron Star materials - If a neutron star stops spinning, What will be the characteristics of the materials in it?

Neutronium probably isn't the material that you want to use if you want to keep it even slightly plausible. It can't exist outside of a neutron star that has less than 2 solar masses squeezed into ...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Best kind of creature to be capable of biologically spawning an 'ecosystem' with borrowed organic tissues?

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 ...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A How would we see the world if we could see polarized light?

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...

posted 8y ago by celtschk‭

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Q&A Nomenclature for software beings

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...

posted 8y ago by ArtOfCode‭

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Q&A How could the air be stopped from falling off of a flat world?

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...

posted 8y ago by celtschk‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by celtschk‭

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Q&A How to generate energy from recoil?

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...

posted 8y ago by Mithrandir24601‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Mithrandir24601‭

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Q&A How would plants that moved like animals change the world?

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 ...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Ways to "kill" an AI?

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...

posted 8y ago by celtschk‭

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Q&A Are space stations like Sevastopol (Alien Isolation) realistic?

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...

posted 8y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A Are space stations like Sevastopol (Alien Isolation) realistic?

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...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A An animal that puts its prey to sleep

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 ...

posted 8y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A Orbital period of a tidally-locked Earth-like planet around a red dwarf

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...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Hydrogen sulfide replacing water?

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...

posted 8y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A Is it a forgone conclusion that any exo-bacteria discovered on an alien, albeit Earth-like planet will be deadly to human life?

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...

posted 8y ago by AndyD273‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A How can two persons orient themselves without a compass in an environment without sun, stars or remarkable landscape features?

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...

posted 9y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A What common chemical/physical reactions would, in an atmosphere composed of ~20% Oxygen and ~80% Argon, behave differently than on Earth?

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...

posted 9y ago by HDE 226868‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by HDE 226868‭

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Q&A How can mankind duplicate the rings of Saturn for Earth?

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...

posted 9y ago by AndyD273‭

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Q&A Time system for a Ring-World

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 ...

posted 9y ago by AndyD273‭

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