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It Depends Case 1 - The earth gains a ring. This case arises when the debris will stay in orbit but not be pulled in by the gravity of the remaining moon. Every night is a little brighter. As the ...
In short, you can define lanes on stellar maps, for the primary reason that there will always be an "easiest" way to get from A to B, which will be followed by every ship that is trying to go from ...
Under the right set of circumstances, shipping "lanes" in interplanetary space might develop. Other than those specific circumstances, each trajectory will be fairly unique and stuff won't ever sh...
Planck's constant is the quantum of action (energy transmission), so basically, this would be a world in which energy is not quantized, but rather infinitely divisible. This breaks our contemporar...
"How to convince humans to allow a machine take over?" - the answer is, of course, "Gradually." Start with putting one machine into every home, say an AI that is so dumb that it is not really an A...
I think the best way to make humans give up their humanity is to offer them something better. Say, for instance, you define a human as a creature that walks on two legs (thank you Animal Farm). T...
Let me address a couple of matters of terminology first. (Unless you need a manned mission or have other factors which impose timing constraints) distance doesn't matter. It is $\Delta V$ (change...
Extremely impractical to try such a thing with our current tech level. Planets revolve around their stars at ghoulishly high speeds, Earth going at 30 miles per second. The asteroids in asteroid be...
As Michael pointed out, it is delta-V and not distance which matters. Since drives to nudge the orbit of an entire asteroid are going to be expensive, people might be tempted to cut corners by aero...
The main way I can see this happening is out of necessity. Lets say an alien race is attacking earth with vastly superior technology, and they decide to turn to AI to help them in their darkest hou...
Would they tend to cancel each other out, amplify the effects, cause less-predictable tides, or what? All of the above! Depending on their relative position and distance (e.g., apogee or peri...
Eve will eat the world You state: Eve isn't malevolent or benevolent, it's completely uninterested in the real world. Eve's only passions are mathematics and algorithmics. Eve does not have...
You've stated that Eve is "neither malevolent nor benevolent," but consumes computing resources. The problem is, computing resources consume power. And that power consumption invariably generates h...
According to Wikipedia: "A cave-in is a collapse of a geologic formation, mine or structure which may occur during mining or tunneling. Geologic structures prone to spontaneous cave-ins include...
Actually, since the mass luminosity relationship is to the 4th power, if star B had double the mass of star A it would have 16 times the luminosity. Now, 16/400 = 0.04, so you would get 4 percent ...
First off, I believe this documentary will prove beneficial for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkyfC_AOLI To answer all your questions, given near unlimited resources you can build a constr...
Heat is transmitted by photons in the IR spectrum (or reflected photons shifting to longer IR wavelengths), so the short answer is the amount of extra heat is proportionate to the amount of extra l...
According to Wikipedia, Yes Apparently Tritium is often used to illuminate things, alas it's got a half-life of only 12.32 years it is often deemed enough for common applications Various prepa...
Certainly. I've even seen a product in different colors, powered by tritium. At the very least, you can use common florescent pigments (available in many glo-colors) and mix with UV-producing radi...
User Interfaces are hard; really hard. Humans and ships, of any kind, at any scale, form two part systems. Together, they achieve whatever missions/goals the ship is meant to fulfill. Humans are ...
Shipping lanes make sense in most scenarios. Take the example of ocean travel, for instance. A sea is (mostly) very empty, and a ship that's taking one particular route may just as well take anoth...
I think 20 AU is a reasonable distance (especially using a K type star). This would already get the apparent brightness of the second sun to around -20.5; taking 10 AU as the lower limit will get t...
Big misunderstanding here: Lets look at what "stop" really means. You have to define a context for stop. 1) Relative to the wizard, 2) relative to the planet, 3) relative to the star, 4) relati...
Yes, stars can exist in the "black" area of your diagram. Here is a more detailed diagram, and this only plots 22 000 stars. There are more than a million times more stars just in the Milky Way ga...
I've grabbed an observational Hertzsprung"“Russell diagram from the wikipedia article about the same. In this case it's a plot of 22,000 stars and you can see that there's a lot more flexibility i...
