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Others have put up some good ideas for how to generate light. As eimyr pointed out, tooth and claw is going to be a lot more effective than shining a bright light on them, though using it to blind/...
Based on this question/answer: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25918/ There is a place you could kind of do this, namely one of the gas giants. If you fell into a gas giant you would fa...
I think your concerns may be well founded. This city will be fairly similar to most other cities and I don't think there's a whole lot you can do about it. However, it will have a couple of good at...
I think the hard part would be each nation wanting to make sure they got a piece of the pie, and it might be hard to do that with a single space station and set of equipment. They'll be fighting ov...
Based on the fact that a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements not pleasant to their government... (One way this ...
They're fine. Here, I discussed the effects of a supernova on life on Earth. Note that a supernova would have to be within about ten parsecs (~33 light-years) to have harmful effects on life on Ea...
It depends on other things, like metabolism and digestion. If you convert the blood into proteins and sugars like we do, then it isn't very efficient, however you could use blood from other sources...
I think the most scientifically plausible method available to us with what we know is one that has been mentioned: use computers. However, the tech required is still out of our current range, so if...
Would it be possible for a water based animal to swim with a tail that was structurally just human legs fused together? If mermaiding is any indication, yes. Real-world mermaids are humans who ...
To break people, recruit them into a cult. Steven Hassan has written several books about the mind control practiced by destructive cults. The acronym BITE refers to Hassan's four factors of brainwa...
With unlimited energy, and an afternoon to get the job done, I think anti-matter is going to be the best way. A large-scale power plant generating 2000 MWe would take 25 hours to produce just...
Sky Colour The sky looks blue to us because of two major factors: Atmospheric composition Light hue and intensity There are also a number of other factors including atmospheric temperature and...
Is there a reason to believe that programming languages are going to converge into a single language in the decades/centuries to come? As a programmer myself, I certainly would hope not. It wo...
I'll do a quick explanation of the impacts of Earth's axial tilt to start off: As Earth orbits the sun, it's tilted at 23.5 degrees. This varies between 21 and 25 degrees, but I'll ignore that bec...
What Shihab Dider said. The Earth is monstrously massive compared to everything humans have ever built, and the Sun is monstrously massive compared to the Earth. How monstrously massive are we tal...
It is possible but impractical. Double-helix DNA's structure is something like this: $$ \text{B "” (A/C/T/G) : (T/G/A/C) "” B} $$ where B is a backbone molecule, A/C/T/G is adenine/cytosine/thym...
If you think about it, even something as positive as the three laws could lead to something like this. Sort of like they did with the I, Robot movie. A robot may not injure a human being or, t...
We have a lot of foundations that we kind of take for granted. There is kind of an expectation that once someone enters med school they have some basic understanding in anatomy, biology, math, medi...
Your biggest problem by far here is going to be getting other people to believe you. I'm assuming this mystical tutor is from the future? Given that, surely he must know that there will be problem...
Building off @DustinJackson's answer, I'm going to posit a few ways that this planet would be different from earth to avoid an ice age. First the orbit is a bit closer to the star, this adds more...
Design a self replicating robot that consumes natural resources. Picture a machine that can convert wood and straw into plastic and carbon nanotube conductors and piezoelectric actuators and thi...
I proposed something like this in another question, but it might work better here. Put something in orbit between the sun and Venus to cut down on the amount of sunlight. If you can block it com...
You could quite easily detect the presence of any planets by taking an image of the sky in a specific direction, move some small distance, and take another image of the sky in the same direction. T...
Let's calculate the mass of this huge oxygen atmosphere, shall we? I can use a modified version of the barometric formula to calculate the density at any altitude $h$ above a reference point - in ...
Gamma-ray bursts Let's not give up on the gamma-ray burst (GRB) idea so quickly. Sure, most GRBs are quite short, but there are exceptions: ultra-long gamma-ray bursts. While normal GRBs last on ...
