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Really awesome answer by ckersch. I want to add in some math to get an idea of how large this kind of habitable zone would be. Formulas are from here and here, if you want to investigate them furth...
I'm going to take a shot at near-term technology forecasting, and say that your time traveller's near future smartphone and laptop are probably charged over some version of USB (unless they're Appl...
There are one or two chronological things which I should like to clear up before proceeding here. This graphic shows the geographical distribution of members of the genus homo over time: Image ...
Gravity is not dependent on the composition of the body. In fact, Jupiter exerts exactly the same gravitational influence that a solid body of the same mass would. So does the Sun, or a black hole....
You've touched on the major points already: vitamins and skin colour. They are linked to an extent. Vitamin D is the major vitamin we get from sunlight. It's partly a "happy vitamin" in that it pr...
Here's what your guy would have to do: manipulate time and space Well, actually, we all do this, because we all have mass and therefore all exert a gravitational force. But to manipulate thin...
Why not make them parasites - on their parent? Take, for example, the parasitoid wasp. Female adult wasps lay eggs in or on another creature - the host. The young them develop inside the host, fee...
Hmm. How about a nebula? Pavel Janicek mentioned it briefly in his answer, but I want to elaborate on it a little. You have a bunch of choices if you want to pick a nebula: Dark nebula: As you c...
Alert: Mathematics ahead. Just being humorous. I know that not everyone likes math, so I figured I'd add that in. Just so I can say 'I told you!' if you complain about the math. In which case just...
Note: I'm assuming all relevant space travel is close to earth (that is, there's no need to coordinate e.g. travel to Mars, as soon as it leaves the near-earth range). One point about space is tha...
There are a lot of cool effects - and some problems. Formation Planets form after a long, drawn-out process that starts with grains of dust colliding and forming planetesimals. These then become ...
Well, the first effect would of course be for anything that flies, like birds or bats. Half the air density means flying gets much harder. So I'd expect flying animals to be smaller in general, but...
Good analysis by the others, but I want to add in some math here, because I'm really that nerdy. We can model the growth of a black hole by the matter it accretes. Normally, a black hole accretes ...
The first question is: What would be the first reaction of the ants on seeing the humans? Run away. Well, that's completely natural behaviour, and there's nothing you can tell from that; also, th...
I don't think we could directly harness the energy transferred to particles in auroras. However, we could probably captured the energy from the phenomena that caused auroras. Wikipedia notes that ...
If the ships really are travelling at the speed of light, using known physics (which is possible, sort of — see below), then they cannot communicate. The reason for this is time dilation: the clos...
Another idea: Black holes shadow the cosmic microwave background. This might be used to detect them. Given that with high speeds, the microwave background in movement direction (that's the directio...
Barring the presence of an accretion disk surrounding these black holes - unlikely, in the absence of a compansion object - our best bet is likely to exploit gravitational lensing, the bending of l...
There has to be some sort of heat source for this to happen, and it can't be something temporary. Here are some ideas: Volcanic Activity. Vodolaz095 beat me to posting this, but I was already wor...
Ha! An obscure question I asked somewhere else now becomes relevant! A while ago, I asked this question on Biology about liquid breathing. It's currently unanswered, and may stay that way forever,...
As you say, the most sought after materials are the rarest. You also correctly assume that the rarest materials are often those with the greatest molecular mass. This is because it takes a much, mu...
Others have looked at this from various theoretical points of view. I want to look at it from the point of view of our own Earth's history, and what would be the impact if your population followed ...
There are three huge reasons for temperature fluctuations on a planet: The parent star, axial tilt and the curvature of the planet. The star. There's normally a huge difference on temperatures be...
This isn't possible without a huge uptick in technology. You certainly can't go back in time, because that would violate, among other things, causality. Also, going back in time wouldn't help, beca...
I remember a book I read several years ago now, involving the Voynich manuscript. The basis was it was not decodable in any way - until a university student who happens to know symbols of another a...
