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The other answers are good so far, but I don't think anyone has pointed out that there's another way to easily lower the difficulty of getting off an alien planet: just reduce the gravity and/or at...
Definitely YES. But it would be much more longer, in different ways and we would live in the different world. Energy density is the key At each moment of progress mankind use the most cheap sourc...
No. It was never about the available technology, it was about the excess of energy required to break through to the next level. Steam engines and vacuum tubes wont get you to space. Every civiliz...
I think we're confusing our use of petroleum for technology with our use of petroleum for transportation. Powering technology is a different problem than powering vehicles. Without the portability...
There is very little petroleum product in a rocket. For example the shuttle used liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for fuel. For energy in space they tend to use solar or nuclear power. The only...
Others have put great answers here, I want to cover one specific point. Even without fossil fuel inputs, you can create energy dense fuels like RP-1. The process is inefficient, but very doable. Th...
Yes but it would be harder. Werrf's answer is correct. You need an abundant and fairly cheap source of energy. Without it technological progress is slow. I think Werrf concentrates too much on repl...
Yes...probably What was really important to our development of technology was not oil, but coal. Access to large deposits of high-quality coal largely fueled the industrial revolution, and it was...
Yes Early steam engines used wood. In the early 1800s the first internal combustion engine was created - and didn't use petroleum In 1806 Claude and Nicéphore Niépce (brothers) developed th...
Short Answer. For scientific reasons I have reversed your star designations, making Star B the one that Planet X orbits and Star A the more distant star. If planet X orbits Star B but not Star ...
Let's think about this in terms of peak emission. Wien's displacement law tells us that the peak emission wavelength of a black body, $\lambda_{\text{max}}$, is inversely proportional to its temper...
In the story Wang's Carpets (and part of the novel Diaspora), Greg Egan sketchily describes a high-dimensional universe which contains no analog for light, such that the aliens who inhabit this uni...
For the sake of fixing some image in your mind, imagine you want to practice some sport in a rotating cylinder world: whether it be launching a javelin, strike a tee at the golf club or scoring a 3...
On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens made American history with an eruption that took 57 human lives and killed thousands of animals. It has released only a quarter of a cubic mile of ash, but it i...
I'm working with the idea of creating a sun made out of pure gold. Of course, this would be completely man-made. Why would anyone want to do this? Because I want a cool concept like that in my stor...
As I was thinking about space flight for my world, I thought about how they would need to know a planet's gravitational force before they could land, and found that humans figured out the moon's gr...
I have a planet orbiting a red dwarf and, as expected, it is tidally locked to its star. I know that these planets will have a very significant temperature difference between the diurnal and noctur...
Cooling in space is a well known difficulty. There are many unpleasant consequences like no stealth in space, difficult space battles which turn into a short wars of attrition (because you have to ...
I was curious: Suppose we built an O'Neill cylinder with an air mixture similar to Earth's (not pure oxygen). Does the air also get "thrown" down towards the floor of an O'Neill cylinder? If I sta...
Does anyone know an equation or something along those lines for calculating how many and the locations of atmospheric circulation cells for a planet? Also, does the planet's radius and atmospheric...
One of the cool things about the Moon is that the far side has a thicker crust that the near side.1 One theory explaining this is that the Moon was hit by an object, possibly a moonlet created by t...
Question requirements I think it definitely falls on the asker to demonstrate first and foremost that the basic tenets of their idea are feasible. Their question should show that they've done a go...
I have a story where a species of the very first (literally first) carbon-based humanoid life (surprise!) that happen to emerge roughly seven billion years ago (their home system were formed twelve...
The way I see it for now (and I reserve the right to change my mind in response to discussion in response to this :-)) All of these points are valid for both questions and answers in the standard ...
On topic for the community name only The question could be assumed to be on topic for the name of this community: "Scientific Speculation". It is indeed a speculative question about science that h...
