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Here's a starting point: the Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN): Artistically gratuitous representation. Not to be taken literally. The green swoops are odd and potentially unimportant. The ...
By putting prisoners in a place where they wouldn't be able to survive on their own, you are taking on a larger burden of caretaking: What if there is a mechanical or electrical failure on the st...
The eccentricity of an orbit is defined as $$e=\frac{r_a-r_p}{r_a+r_p}$$ where $r_a$ and $r_p$ are the distances to the farthest and closest points of the planet's orbit from the star. If $e=2/3$, ...
There are three separate issues here: Too much oxygen, and the human body (as well as any other organic material) will be highly flammable. You don't really want to live there. Too high or too lo...
Actually, even with contemporary communication protocols today, latency is not really an issue as long as the link is reasonably reliable. This is a delay-tolerant network. Note that in the real wo...
Time travel due to FTL follows directly from the relativity of simultaneity: In different frames, the temporal order of events is different. This is true for all events which are spacelike to each ...
How long does this process take? We don't know. As I discussed here1, Saturn's rings could have formed billions of years ago or only a few hundred million years ago. Wikipedia and NASA each ex...
Fight in a gas cloud. While cosmic gas clouds are still incredibly thin, at relativistic speeds they will anyway cause considerable friction to your space fighter, so I'd expect more or less the s...
The important thing here is how the moon formed. Earth's moon formed in a scenario explained by the Giant Impact Hypothesis: Earth, the inner planets and other small bodies coalesce in the Sun's...
I haven't read through all the answers in detail, but there is one obvious possibility that I don't see anyone else having really mentioned so far: peak oil. Or more generally, peak available resou...
The first thing that would happen is that it would wreak havoc with every orbit in the solar system. The orbits of the planets around the sun have their focal point very close to the sun's centre ...
Original answer, preserved for posterity Here's the paper. First, there are some important assumptions that the author - Vyacheslav Dokuchaev - made. Specifically, there are two scenarios: The...
An article recently posted to Cracked, "5 Fantasy Beasts That Wouldn't Work (According to Science)" by Justin Crockett and Nathan Murphy, points out that a hydra might collapse under the weight of ...
I have one major point to make: A good portion of Jupiter does not complete one rotation in 9.8 hours. Jupiter isn't like a giant ball of rock. It's called as "gas giant" for a reason, which is th...
Estimates vary, but I'll be cautious and say that a radius of roughly two Earth radii is most likely the upper limit for rocky planets. There are many studies, both theoretical and empirical, that...
It's a good idea but it will never happen. Becoming one nation is a good idea in terms of interplanetary commerce and diplomacy. If we're multiple nations, then we are pretty likely to have multip...
Oh, good, a planet habitability question. I love these. What would be the habitable zone (capable of supporting liquid water) for a planet with an atmosphere and size similar to Earth, but seve...
The technique should work. I can't really say much besides that. There are other things they could do, too. They might not be easier than tracking the proper motion of a star, but they'll work: ...
You can look quite a long way back into the planet's history to answer this. Stars are formed from giant gas clouds called nebulae. When enough material accumulates in the nebula, it collapses und...
These black holes are going to emit Hawking radiation. Not a lot, but a bit. The power emitted by a black hole with mass $M$ is $$P=\frac{\hbar c^6}{15360 \pi G^2M^2}$$ Each black hole will emit th...
You might well be interested in my answer to this question, as it details minimum requirements. In it, I do some calculation to find out that to feed one average human for a year, you need 5110 pot...
Let's have a look at what methods of propulsion could be used. Sailing (wind) Paddle power Steam engines Sailing requires a large sheet of sailcloth attached to a mast. Paddles require big padd...
The Earth is round because it is in hydrostatic equilibrium: its gravity is strong enough, and the material comprising most of its bulk fluid enough, to make it flow into the shape that minimizes i...
Multi-national corporations get to the point where their income rivals the GDP of 90% of the worlds countries, while at the same time because of greed in the financial and banking markets world cur...
One effect I could imagine is that life would have entered land earlier in evolution, since there's less space in the upper ocean levels (the ones which are most life-friendly, because below there'...
