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All the answers so far dealt with the ship creating gravity itself. But there's another possibility: The ship might have some sort of gravity shields (to allow to pass close nearby heavy objects li...
Quite simply, you can't. The key part here is "unknowingly". If you have a structure large enough (simply massive) or advanced enough (gravity shields or internal gravity or something) to actually...
Someone left the artificial gravity on. The Alcubierre drive works by manipulating space-time so that you ride a 'wave' of gravity forward at any speed. You might use this same technology to creat...
A couple of guys from the University of Colorado created a video simulating what it would look like to fall into a black hole, including passing the event horizon. They have several other simulatio...
It would be interesting if the technology to wirelessly charge your phone was expanded upon in the next two-hundred years. Of course the dream is that one day your electronics can wirelessly charg...
One of many things that differs the pregnancy of my Keplerians and that of humans is that in Keplerians, there is a symptom that is equivalent to a positive pregnancy test. To explain this, first, ...
(This is the third in a series of questions, starting with Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands? and How soon does the Earth's surf...
A human crew of 6 has been sent on mission to Mars The lowest energy transfer to Mars is a Hohmann transfer orbit, which would involve an approximately 9 month travel time from Earth to Mars, a...
Fairly straightforward question. Imagine a gas giant planet, like the size of Jupiter, in orbit around a massive star. The star goes supernova. What happens to the planet? Is the energy of the su...
Apart of the Anatomically Correct Series Vanara The Vanara is a group of people who lives in the forest in the Hindu epic "Ramayana." In there, it describes them as human-like, with reference to...
The technical challenges for Breakthrough Starshot list the huge amount of power required for accelerating a solar sail to interstellar travel speeds and the precise targeting of laser beams of tha...
Set during the Cold War period, the then-president rented five (5) flying saucers from the extraterrestrial aliens and a few training exercises were conducted in the air space above Roswell. My fat...
On Venus the surface is around 467 degrees Celsius. At the top of the atmosphere it is much cooler, and at around 60 km above the surface the temperature is around 40 to 50 degrees Celsius. This is...
My fungus starts out as an extremely small spore, this small spore will bury and implant itself near the spinal cord and cerebellum, and will then secrete an enzyme that hijacks and later puts it i...
While the intended end state is that this planet can support space-faring lifeforms, the solution under question needs a sanity check. I cannot commit to many numbers with how speculative this all ...
When designing a flying car intended for congested city routes with slow traffic, should turn signals indicate all possible directions. In most sci-fi, I've seen designs that have no turn-signals o...
Let's start with the easiest of your questions: Are any multi-planetary binary-star systems known? There are, in fact, quite a few: 55 Cancri: Five planets orbit 55 Cancri A (a G-type yello...
A simple way to think about this problem is simply in terms of which planetary orbits are stable in a given binary star system. Let's talk about S-type orbits, where a planet's orbit around its...
Regarding distances between the stars, and the the light shed upon planets, the Alpha Centauri system is pretty close to the requirements that you want. Here is some useful information summarized f...
Somebody left the tractor beam on or a control system accidentally malfunctioned activating the tractor beam. While this comes close to magical space technology effectively every other answer to th...
I'm going to make some assumptions in this answer: Two moons have masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ and orbit a planet of mass $m_p$, where $m_1, m_2\ll m_p$. The planet is far enough away from the star that...
It just looks like hair; those are actually tentacles. Merfolk are not descended from fish or mammals, but are a type of Cnidarians, who use stingers in their tentacles to stun and kill prey.
In a fictional world with merfolk, the hair could not be a part of their body at all, but some kind of algae or other organism that would look like hair to a human or humanoid observer from another...
Maybe the hair is vestigial? Depending on the evolution of the mermaids it could have served a purpose before.
A mermaid that "realistically" evolved would look very different from the traditional mermaid in many ways. But let's assume that your mermaids do look like the classic type. Why do they have hair?...
