Search
A fusion drive would fit your requirements, and produce plenty of thrust. One of the early designs estimated that the VISTA spacecraft could deliver a 100-tonne payload to Mars orbit and return to...
A few days, at best If you want to detect a supernova as quickly as possible, you need a neutrino detector. Supernovae produce substantial amounts of neutrinos - which actually carry away much of ...
Turns out this is happening- right now, on this planet, in reality. All you need is some smog. This photo from Beijing last year looks rather bronze-ish to orange-ish I think. (image source: In...
Dust/fines in the atmosphere would be able to do it. Mars has a reddish sky because of this. The reason is that the dust particles in the atmosphere absorb sunlight in the 0.4-0.6 µm range, giving...
Pigeon Express Messenger birds have been around for a long time, and can travel much faster than a man on horse. The Romans were good at roads, and with peace comes trading, so it would be in ever...
Colonization of other moons and planets You could open up portals around a bunch of bodies in our solar system to increase insolation and make teraforming more viable. Titan would be a real po...
The most durable information storage is having it carved in stone or in clay that then got burned. Our oldest writings are of that form, and they are thousands of years old. The main problem of thi...
Food would be an obvious one, where plants would need to be able to grow in low light levels. Precipitation means clouds, which means lower solar energy reaching the ground. This isn't really a pro...
If Santa ate all that, he'd be packing on the pounds way more than he already is (and Santa is not a lightweight now). Since nobody's reported a 2-ton Santa, there must be another explanation. Sa...
They probably wouldn't be blind/eyeless, since there is light from fungus and creatures. Also, unlike a cave fish, they would probably at times go to the surface just to see what is happening, mayb...
There could be desirable traits that are wanted. For instance, many with European ancestors have Neanderthal DNA. Neanderthals were believed to have been bigger and stronger, though possibly not as...
Climate change Let's say that a species lives in a world that used to be temperature. Over time, though, greenhouse gases were released from deposits in the soil, thus increasing the temperature o...
I think plants would get into trouble. Plants need nitrogen compounds, which many of them get from bacteria that take the nitrogen from the air. Without nitrogen in the air, those bacteria cannot c...
You say that you want "present-day technology at the start of the super-spending spree". I'm going to take this to mean basically our current world. Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on the ec...
One possibility is that the brains have implanted hardware that controls the brain to machine to wormhole interface. The way I understand the science, a wormhole would be a sub-atomic, quantum ...
Some basic statistics: Number of humans on Earth: ~7.3 billion people CO2 output per day per human: ~1.0 kilograms CO2 output per year by vertebrates: ~220 gigatonnes (=220 trillion kilograms) ...
Congratulations! You've solved the energy crisis! Place Portal B some distance above Portal A. Now place a turbine blade in between the two of them. Slowly insert a steady stream of water, stoppin...
The way the moon formed was that something big collided with early Earth when things were still pretty gooey, and knocked a big chunk out, which then fell into orbit instead of drifting away or fal...
The retention of gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water depends on the mass and radius of the planet, via its surface gravity. It also depends on the effective temperature, something we ca...
With regard to your edit of using the biological scanners to infect a computer system... In the movie Gattaca people are identified every day when entering work by a blood/dna scan. The protagonis...
I wonder if you would even have a "sky", or if you'd just see the other side of the world through a haze? We can see the moon in the daytime if it's in the right phase after all. The entire surface...
The thing with laser is that you won't be able to detect it unless you're right in the beam, or you see reflected light off of dust and other things. That is to say, it would be harder to detect th...
Xi Boötis Basic statistics: Distance from the Solar System: 22 light-years Spectral types: G8 Ve and K4 Ve Masses: 0.86 and 0.70 solar masses Semi-major axis: 33.14 AU Maximum semi-major axis f...
One way is if colonies keep failing because of something on the planets. For instance, the colonists could arrive on planet only to find there is low level biological life (like prions) that is a...
It could be a moon of a class L brown dwarf. Some class L stars are large enough to support hydrogen fusion, and are red dwarfs. But there are many that are of substellar mass, and so are brown d...
