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I'm taking "near ground" as meaning "the height over ground is negligible compared to the radius of the planet". That is, we can as good approximation we can assume that the radius of the geostatio...
Setup I realized that it's possible to design a specific box that's bigger on the inside. Wanted to write this down. Relating Mass to Lorentz Contraction As velocity approaches the speed of ligh...
What about the sphere being hit by a cosmic string? Some excerpts from the Wikipedia page: Cosmic strings, if they exist, would be extremely thin with diameters of the same order of magnitude ...
I was researching genomes and observed some similarities with literature that I think might better help communicate the topic. Wanted to share them: There exists an Alphabet (A, C, G, T and some...
The most obvious result would be that there would be no concept of a family. Now the concept of a family influences a lot of things; for one, the concept of inheriting goods might not develop; with...
Actually, an 48 hour cycle is great, because it's exactly twice the normal 24 hour cycle. Thus adaption would be easy; people would just sleep twice for each planetary day. There might, however, be...
The Alcubierre drive works by distorting space around a bubble: expanding space behind it and contracting space in front of it. It's a nice way to get faster-than-light travel without, well, techni...
For the cells to act exactly as described would require cooperation between different metastasising cell lines, both during infection and when growing structures in the new host. That implies a ki...
This isn't an answer to the question as asked, but since I mentioned: We can look at growth rates of real critters and use that as a reference, maybe with a little bit of fudge factor because w...
Stay safe the same way you've been doing it for the past 9 months: Stay home and only jump through time when you really need to. When you do time travel, try to keep your distance from other pe...
The big problem with using radar in outer space is simply range. The received flux of a radar signal falls off as $1/r^4$ instead of the $1/r^2$dependence we're used to getting for signals emitted ...
It's very unlikely that it's impossible, but you may want to remove "human" from the title, if you want to make it plausible. There are many large animals that are 15-18 feet tall and they go on to...
On thinking about the other answers, I'm not sure this is possible without a little "something extra"... If humans suddenly die out, nature is likely going to reclaim most of our stuff more quickly...
The Alcubierre drive not only allows but actually necessitates the production of event horizons at superluminal speeds - but not necessarily the sort you're looking for. It's been shown (Finazzi e...
This is actually a really interesting question. While there are many stars with orbits outside the galactic plane ("halo stars"), these tend to be old and metal-poor, as star formation in the halo ...
Maybe... but probably not. It's possible that an animal that is "used" to seeing polarization would be able to infer this information from a reproduction that lacks it, based on other effects. Thi...
Your question makes no sense due to its disregard of basic science. The atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide and methane So did the early Earth's, and life was able to start here. This ...
The Copernican principle As L.Dutch pointed out, this would violate the Copernican principle, which essentially states that there's nothing special about observing the universe from any one place....
Directly? No. Indirectly? Yes. As Renan indicated in their answer, material that enters a black hole cannot leave; the only way around this is through evaporation. Even then, the Hawking radiation...
Sort of. A structure similar to the one you describe can in fact form. Triple-stranded DNA can be stable under certain conditions. Two bases bond via slightly different structures, and a third bas...
Yes... and no. Since no one else has done so yet, I'll point out the elephant in the room... You are writing for a human audience. Humans think in words. Therefore, no matter what ideas anyone com...
I don't think a "display" can accomplish this... but if it's a feature intentionally built into the mirror (and not just an "accidental" misuse of what it could otherwise do), there are certainly L...
Bring a canary with them. When it dies, find fresh air fast. Yes, it's a trite answer, but it's also what we did back before we had technological ways of monitoring air quality. If they're allowe...
A decent proxy for habitability and long-term colonizability is the effective temperature of the planet - essentially the surface temperature. A planet's effective temperature scales as $T\propto (...
I have to give partial credit to gianluca, whose answer inspired this, but... what if They live in the ocean If your aliens live underwater, and especially if they only live in deep water and don...
