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To create Artificial Gravity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity These ships do years-long missions in space, and months in microgravity is just unhealthy.
At least on Earth, astronomical instruments are extremely precise and sensitive compared to the innate biological abilities of an astronomer! Sure, I can look up at the sky and see that Betelgeuse ...
How much sunlight can you focus? Troy Rising postulates a solar-pumped "laser" that can push nearly 2000 petawatts, which reportedly can "destroy the Earth in 6 months, the biosphere in 16 days." ...
Look at dogs and cats for inspiration. Besides doing things with their tongues (as CaptainSkyfish suggested; good suggestion!), think also about angle of their head. Do they have mobile ears (or ea...
Yes and no, and possibly "it depends on what you mean by "civilization". As L. Dutch already noted, technological development is more a function of available resources and population density. On...
The density profile of a planet's atmosphere arises from two laws of physics: hydrostatic equilibrium and the ideal gas law. Put together, they require that the density $\rho(z)$ be a function of t...
The best tools for this job, I think, are perturbation theory and Laplace's planetary equations. You might know that the orbit of a planet can be described by six osculating elements $(a,e,i,\omega...
In general, I think the answer is "no"; buoyancy simply doesn't work that way, and you'd need to somehow circumvent buoyancy. What might be plausible is to have a low spot in your terrain that is ...
A cosmic void. Your best bet would be in a cosmic void. While not entirely empty - they do contain small numbers of galaxies and clouds of gas - they are substantially rarefied compared to your av...
It would be uniform. The crust of the Moon is, on average, about 50 km thick. There is indeed some stratification in its composition, with upper layers composed largely of feldspar and a lower lay...
Try microlensing other evaporating black holes Folks have suggested Hawking radiation; I don't think that's a particularly good idea. If you run the numbers, a black hole would need to have a mass...
You have two questions to consider here: Can compounds required for blue atmospheres form in significant amounts on this planet, and are the temperatures right for them to condense and form clouds?...
No. The best protection is air-gapping; don't allow untrusted information into the system in the first place. The next best protection is to thoroughly vet incoming information. This may take the ...
Would a computer using biological components as an interface be any good? Also can using biological components provide some other advantage to a computer, like flexibility or better pattern...
Some simple molecules can exist in stars - but not the right ones. Contrary to popular belief, many different types of molecules can exist in stellar atmospheres, especially cool stars like red d...
You need methane, ammonia and atmospheric temperatures of $∼$150 K. The color of a giant planet depends on the type of clouds dominating its upper atmosphere. These in turn depend on the tempera...
About 100 trillion years from now. The answer to your question depends on several things: When the final low-mass star forms How long it takes that star to exit the main sequence and become a wh...
Without having the information to crunch numbers on this... I'm going to call it plausible, but only if the commoners have enough knowledge of physics. What you really need is to absorb energy slo...
I agree that a possible solution would be to add in a source of high-energy ambient neutrons. Cosmic rays are a possible neutron source, at least at high enough altitudes and assuming the uranium d...
I wasn't sure about making this an answer, but @Alexander convinced me. Your AI may be hyper-intelligent, but it lacks the creativity to construct an entire civilizational structure from scratch. ...
I wonder what the optimal posture be for these dragons when flying/gliding? Superman. No, seriously. I'm just not seeing any practical way those forelimbs can be tucked away against those (ne...
Use low temperatures. For a given system, we can tell if degeneracy pressure is important by comparing the Fermi energy $E_F$ to the thermal energy $kT$. if $E_F\gg kT$, the gas is fully degenerat...
First off... I don't think I buy the "but the power!" argument. Aside from atmospheric absorption (which isn't that significant), photons are going to keep until they hit something. Thus, as long a...
Monstrous Nightmare, anyone? Do they have to have fur? The Monstrous Nightmare exudes a flammable gel over its body, which it can ignite by a biologically-produced spark. Presumably, its scales a...
If "the local star" isn't our Sun, I think I can help you. Actually, I think I can even if it is the Sun, but in the far future. In "The End of the Sun", two such scenarios are described. These wi...
