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Could a Manned Maneuvering Unit-type device provide a few hours of light artificial gravity* for a small person on an object with minimal gravity of its own? What sort of fuel would it need? * Com...
Is there any conceivable way that a planet with two moons--one being visibly red to the naked eye due to its mineral composition--could align in an eclipse in such a way so that the whole effect lo...
So I found out that it would under certain circumstances be economic to harvest Asteroids. Given the following: Technological level is nearly similar to todays Earth. There are transportships wh...
Supposed we have a ship travelling at the speed of light, or very close to it, or over. A second ship is travelling behind it at the same speed. The second ship wishes to communicate something ...
After asking my question about seeing black holes in your path between the stars, I also wondered abut other more mundane objects. Black holes affect large areas of space so even if you didn't get...
By now, everyone is familiar with the remarkable achievements of special-purpose AIs like Deep Blue and Watson. Now, it is clear that as our accumulated knowledge of algorithmic methods and of the ...
If there was a majority of land on earth (66 percent land), how would it affect the animals and plant? Lets say somehow earth has been created with 66 percent land and 34 percent water? Would our p...
This question is about a fictional scenario where an evil suicidal scientist has built a high-energy weapon somewhere on earth. His intention is to shoot a beam of some form of energy (or high-ener...
Plausibility check of the whole "insect race". As background, I want some poor astronauts to "crash" (safely land, but because they had no other option, possibly some engine malfunction) and meet w...
Suppose, through some fantastical mechanism, all macroscopic (i.e. reasonably massive) objects in the universe were instantly made at rest. In other words, the relative velocity between every two ...
Imagine aliens dropped a small black hole (say, 1% of the moon's mass, so you wouldn't notice the difference in gravitation) into the sun (from the far side of the sun, so nobody on earth can see i...
If our atmosphere was much thinner (half as thin as we have now) how would animals and humans evolve? Would we evolve completely different? Would we have a quite barren planet? Let's just say that ...
Take a torus planet: It has the structure of a normal planet (ours): The diagram is not to scale. Assume similar proportions of Crust:Mantle:Cores as the Earth. Is has a similar volume (close...
If somehow Mars suddenly had our exact atmosphere, could there be lots of life in a few million years? Would the temperature rise quickly? Would the ice caps melt? Could the life be as advanced as ...
Would it be possible to raise a piece of land (say the size of Texas or France) from the bottom of an ocean (say, the middle of the South Pacific)? More specifically, would it be possible (given th...
In a future where space travel is common, how would access to space be regulated? From what I know, currently the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) assigns slots for geostationary satell...
Very narrow question: assuming an immortality treatment keeping people at a biological age of a fit 30's, free of infections and cancers & ruling out death by aging, how long would people live ...
If Mars is thought to have once been like Earth several billion years ago, with an atmosphere, magnetic field, oceans, etc., then what would the planets true surface gravitational acceleration "m/s...
I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the assum...
Scenarios for a technological singularity usually seem to wait for machine intelligence to exceed human intelligence. Say the consumer needs of humans are food, clothing, shelter, transportation, ...
If a hostile group wanted to render Earth or an Earth-like planet completely unfit for human life, what could they do to go about achieving that end? By uninhabitable, I mean a planet on which hum...
Earth is destroyed in explosive fashion by an unknown force. How does this affect the rest of the Solar System? Does sudden absence of that mass affect the orbits of the other planets at all? Let's...
Related, and in continuation to The Challenge of Controlling an Advanced AI. At this point in my story, I'm assuming a got-out-of-the-box-AI scenario, where no singleton (a single self-coherent dom...
A highly advanced civilization has developed and is about to ascend to become beings of pure energy in a hyper-dimensional universe. Before leaving they restore our universe to a reasonably pristin...
In the world I'm building, there's a non-human race that I want to have no concept of gender. Their language doesn't contain gendered words like "man" or "woman," and sexual attraction is not based...
