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Planets can die, but it either takes a lot of energy and effort, or is very boring. Boring Planets can just stop working. As stated by some other answers here, if a planet has no life on it and i...
tl;dr: It can't be done. Meteors and all the various different classifications of them (meteorites, meteoroids) are small. The sun is big. More importantly, the sun is hot. If a meteor is heading ...
No. At the moment, I can't answer the part about the shape of the core. I can answer the part about the magnetic field. The Earth rotates, and because of that its shape is that of an oblate spher...
Here's some information about Venus: Surface gravity: $8.87 \text{ m/s}^2$ Surface temperature: $737 \text{ K}$ Surface pressure: $\approx$ $92 \text{ atm}$ So no liquid water on the surface. ...
I'm really having trouble here. Let me outline my thinking: The First AI This is my major problem. If the first shackling AI is weaker than the next, which is weaker than the next, and so on, the...
1.Can fly to the altitudes of modern airliners (around 10 000 meters or 32808 ft). Take a look at this graph: At 10,000 meters, the air pressure is about 25% of its value at sea level. Wiki...
tl;dr: Not without killing everything. Let's do some maths and actually figure this out. The specific heat capacity of water is $4.186 \text{ kJkg}^{-1}$. That means it takes 4186 joules of energ...
Air is incredibly light. It's hard to conceive of any materials that are actually lighter than air and sufficiently so to keep lift while under load. However, it might be possible to use balloons ...
Why would they live on a planet? These robots, with sufficiently advanced AI, could have a pretty advanced social system. They could have community leaders, followers, criminals even (if the progr...
Stick yourself in a rock and hope for the best. That's literally the best approach. It's a bit more elegant than that sentence might make you think, but it's something. I'll tell it like a story....
The orbit you describe is typical for (moderately) long-period comets. Given the desired orbital period, we can calculate the semi-major axis of the orbit (which, for a highly elliptical orbit lik...
Blue supergiants are massive. Really, really massive - up to dozens of times the mass of the Sun. They are also extremely hot, large and luminous. They live much shorter lives that stars like the S...
Actually, the strength of the field would change at the planet's surface. If we model the field as a dipole, it is described by the equations $$B_r = -B_0 \left(\frac{R_E}{r} \right)^3 \cos \theta$...
Problem 1: Food This is the major contributing factor to the size of the biosphere. Humans need to consume around 2,250 calories per day (averaged between men and women) to sustain themselves, and...
Earth's magnetic field is caused by movements in its core. Its outer core is roughly $2,890,000 \text{ meters}$ below Earth's surface. Therefore, to directly interfere with Earth's magnetic field, ...
When people think of supernovae, they often only think about the visible light emitted during and after the explosion. However, if you restrict yourself to observing in the optical part of the elec...
Let's work out some factors. Luminosity You gave the radius of the inner edge of the habitable zone as 1.976 AU and the outer edge as 2.808 AU. From this, we can calculate the luminosity of the ...
Plants survive the night by producing excess energy during the day. This excess they then convert to starch and store. Research shows that chemical reactions in the plant's cells then calculate, ba...
No, you could not. Temperature probably isn't an issue, but a Dyson sphere shouldn't show the proper spectral lines. The-best case scenario This site gives the formula for the temperature of a Dy...
To expand on a point Sempie made, the colour of the ground determines how much light it reflects. White is the best reflector; black absorbs. This is why a black car will be hotter on the outside t...
Remove much of the Earth's mass. The giant impact hypothesis states that about 4 billion years ago, when Earth was but a wee protoplanet, a Mars-sized object dubbed "Theia" hit it at an angle of 4...
From what I've found, they'd be less prone to injury. Bird bones are hollow and therefore lighter than solid bones of the same size, which is a boon to flying. However, they're also extremely dens...
In order for this to be possible, the moon would have to be in the same place relative to the planet and the star throughout the day - in other words, if you drew a line from the center of the star...
Here, it is useful to treat the planet as a black body. The Stefan-Boltzmann law states that a black body will have a luminosity $L$ directly related to its temperature $T$ and radius $R$: $$L=4 \p...
The Bussard ramjet idea could very well work - if you plan your route correctly. You're worried about the low number density of hydrogen atoms/ions in outer space. This table shows that this is in...
