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I like TimB's answer discussing the Giant Impact Hypothesis. I see that in a comment on his answer, you wrote Thank you! I actually had this Moon origin theory in mind. But I'm actually wonderi...
It would not discourage oceanic shipping, but it would make the times it can be done more selective. If you have a port that is 20m deep and full at high tide, with our Moon you should still have ...
If you want a detailed analysis, simply solve Laplace's tidal equations. These are not easy to do. If you're curious, I can get you part of the way to what might be an answer. Also, I'm curious as ...
Habitability For a cosmic body to be habitable by humans, it needs to have a few things (or substitutes for those things): Oxygen Water Correct temperature Food source Some of those we can bri...
Civilizations without mounted cavalry are less likely to develop trousers. (See "Q: Why Do We Wear Pants? A: Horses" by Alexis Madrigal and "Cultural Evolution of Pants" by Peter Turchin.) So you'd...
The tidal forces would be the main gravitational effects that would change. Tidal forces cause, among other things, tides, and are the result of another object's gravitational pull. The Moon is inf...
This situation is quite similar to the current Earth-Moon system. As another answer here says, the two bodies do orbit each other, around a central point called the barycentre. The barycentre of th...
This is a real story about a lot of people dying. Lake Nyos is in a volcanically active area of Cameroon. It sits over a pool of magma, which leaks carbon dioxide gas into the lake. The gas dissol...
There was a Life After People episode about ships. Most of the navy ships would still be floating after a couple hundred years (depending on hull thickness, weather, hull imperfections, if the inte...
Others have put up some good ideas for how to generate light. As eimyr pointed out, tooth and claw is going to be a lot more effective than shining a bright light on them, though using it to blind/...
Based on this question/answer: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25918/ There is a place you could kind of do this, namely one of the gas giants. If you fell into a gas giant you would fa...
I think your concerns may be well founded. This city will be fairly similar to most other cities and I don't think there's a whole lot you can do about it. However, it will have a couple of good at...
I think the hard part would be each nation wanting to make sure they got a piece of the pie, and it might be hard to do that with a single space station and set of equipment. They'll be fighting ov...
Based on the fact that a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements not pleasant to their government... (One way this ...
They're fine. Here, I discussed the effects of a supernova on life on Earth. Note that a supernova would have to be within about ten parsecs (~33 light-years) to have harmful effects on life on Ea...
It depends on other things, like metabolism and digestion. If you convert the blood into proteins and sugars like we do, then it isn't very efficient, however you could use blood from other sources...
I think the most scientifically plausible method available to us with what we know is one that has been mentioned: use computers. However, the tech required is still out of our current range, so if...
Would it be possible for a water based animal to swim with a tail that was structurally just human legs fused together? If mermaiding is any indication, yes. Real-world mermaids are humans who ...
To break people, recruit them into a cult. Steven Hassan has written several books about the mind control practiced by destructive cults. The acronym BITE refers to Hassan's four factors of brainwa...
With unlimited energy, and an afternoon to get the job done, I think anti-matter is going to be the best way. A large-scale power plant generating 2000 MWe would take 25 hours to produce just...
Sky Colour The sky looks blue to us because of two major factors: Atmospheric composition Light hue and intensity There are also a number of other factors including atmospheric temperature and...
Is there a reason to believe that programming languages are going to converge into a single language in the decades/centuries to come? As a programmer myself, I certainly would hope not. It wo...
I'll do a quick explanation of the impacts of Earth's axial tilt to start off: As Earth orbits the sun, it's tilted at 23.5 degrees. This varies between 21 and 25 degrees, but I'll ignore that bec...
What Shihab Dider said. The Earth is monstrously massive compared to everything humans have ever built, and the Sun is monstrously massive compared to the Earth. How monstrously massive are we tal...
It is possible but impractical. Double-helix DNA's structure is something like this: $$ \text{B "” (A/C/T/G) : (T/G/A/C) "” B} $$ where B is a backbone molecule, A/C/T/G is adenine/cytosine/thym...
