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Another idea: Black holes shadow the cosmic microwave background. This might be used to detect them. Given that with high speeds, the microwave background in movement direction (that's the directio...
Barring the presence of an accretion disk surrounding these black holes - unlikely, in the absence of a compansion object - our best bet is likely to exploit gravitational lensing, the bending of l...
There has to be some sort of heat source for this to happen, and it can't be something temporary. Here are some ideas: Volcanic Activity. Vodolaz095 beat me to posting this, but I was already wor...
Ha! An obscure question I asked somewhere else now becomes relevant! A while ago, I asked this question on Biology about liquid breathing. It's currently unanswered, and may stay that way forever,...
As you say, the most sought after materials are the rarest. You also correctly assume that the rarest materials are often those with the greatest molecular mass. This is because it takes a much, mu...
Others have looked at this from various theoretical points of view. I want to look at it from the point of view of our own Earth's history, and what would be the impact if your population followed ...
There are three huge reasons for temperature fluctuations on a planet: The parent star, axial tilt and the curvature of the planet. The star. There's normally a huge difference on temperatures be...
This isn't possible without a huge uptick in technology. You certainly can't go back in time, because that would violate, among other things, causality. Also, going back in time wouldn't help, beca...
I remember a book I read several years ago now, involving the Voynich manuscript. The basis was it was not decodable in any way - until a university student who happens to know symbols of another a...
First and foremost, not everyone would be able to survive. Much of it depends how quickly this warmup happens: if it's quick and the ice melts very quickly, people on the coast aren't going to get ...
I think the others have done a good job of answering the main question of what it would be composed of (I'd have said iron, too, or something similar), so I'll address some of the other stuff. The...
It depends on the size of the habitable zone. Whether or not a planet's orbit is within the (circumstellar) habitable zone (aka the Goldilocks zone) depends on a wide variety of factors determined...
The problem here isn't really about whether or not a moon could "skim" a ring, but whether or not rings could form around Earth. There are three ways planetary rings can form. All three involve ma...
This method seems a bit extreme... if you want to destroy Earth's politics but keep their culture, there are far easier methods. However, some solutions anyway: Nova Bombs In Andromeda, all Commo...
Let's do a calculation or two, shall we? (Note: All those wishing to skip the boring math can just read the lower portion of this answer.) Finding the speed you're going for: $$v=\frac{15 \text { ...
A few easy steps to destroying Earth: Get hold of a fairly massive celestial body. It could be a star, a rogue planet (as PipperChip mentioned), or something completely different. Put it in a pos...
You could always simply lie down. Jokes aside, the answer is that there would be quite a few issues. Your spine would not be used to being so compressed. This is a problem with astronauts returnin...
Awesome question. I love this kind of thing. Wikipedia of course has a a page on near-Earth supernovae, and the first body paragraph briefly examines the effects of life on Earth. The only really ...
I think another defining factor is how large the ship is to begin with. If you have more components (more engines, wings (for a spaceplane), landing gear, etc.), there's a greater chance that somet...
Mercury vs. the Sun Mass: Mercury - $3.3022×10^{23} \text{ kg}$; Sun - $1.98855×10^{30} \text{ kg}$. Mercury clearly won't so much as jostle the Sun. There should be no major changes in the Sun...
I'm not going to calculate at what speed the planet would have to move in order for this effect to happen. My guess is that it would have to go pretty darn fast for there to be a substantial differ...
I don't know how realistic a scenario this is. I would think that if two cores formed in Earth (this could happen in the early solar system, if another moderately-sized protoplanet hit Earth), they...
My personal favorite is My Solar System, by the University of Colorado-Boulder. You can also access version 2.04 directly here. It's pretty basic, but it has some cool features. You can choose to ...
Awesome! I can talk about what I think is one of the coolest inventions of all time: the analog computer. An analog (more properly, a mechanical) computer was actually the world's first "computer"...
Per Robert Harvey's suggestion, I've made a community wiki for near-answers found in "disposable" comments. Rowanas wrote: Running wouldn't be much of an issue. While their stride would be sho...
