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Our bodies are 1-3% bacteria by weight. Bacteria is vital for our functioning; killing it off has consequences. All cultures (except our very modern one) have special foods and activities that su...
Super-rotation As I wrote in an answer to another question about winds, studies of slow-rotating planets like Venus have yielded information about what we should expect for planets like this in ge...
I'm guessing that your question about endorheic basins is about the buildup of salt and other minerals. Certainly there are many aquatic animals who live in fresh water and many that live in salt ...
The ones that can. Your viable dog population is going to be a fraction of the total. If the humans leave their dogs behind in the cities, they are (mostly) not going to leave them locked up indo...
Summary It turns out that even relatively low-mass ocean planets are capable of forming some of the exotic ices you name in their cores. Ice VII appears to form at the centers of planets of $0.015...
The key is in the ecosystem you're taking with you. Organic tech. I contend that it's about an integrated system, not just about one aspect of that system. The floor is a Tapestry Lawn: Attr...
Supercritical carbon dioxide Once upon a time, Venus may have had seas of supercritical $\text{CO}_2$ ($\text{scCO}_2$) thanks to a higher surface temperature (by a few hundred Kelvin) and surface...
Treat the wand like it came from a blacksmith's forge While some blacksmiths don't use gloves at the forge, others do. And they generally wear them for very short exposures to heat (a wand goin...
Build that fence! Most estimates state that a family of 4 needs 2 acres of land to be self-sufficient. That's the upper limit I've seen (with a couple exceptions). It's a lot more efficient when...
Breath that causes disease Though the source says "venomous," you do not specify the "disease." What about breath that causes vomiting? If it smells like human vomit that does cause a lot of peop...
Not unless life evolves extremely quickly. There are two conditions for cosmic background radiation to be able to support life: It's partially composed of photons at wavelengths required by phot...
Light and thus Energy. This probably will happen as a result of natural phenomena involving Earth's magnetic cycles. The current dust storms on the moon - referred to as "Moon Dust Fountains" tha...
Atmosphere loss As you've suggested in your question, once a Sun-like star leaves the main sequence, it begins losing mass through a strong stellar wind, a stream of charged particles driven by ph...
An additional problem is how to stop rotation. Differences in albedo (reflectivity) and (inevitable in a vacuum) offgassing rates on the surface of asteroids has been known to cause them to spin up...
Even if they survived Zeiss Ikon's way, there's not a hope of surviving this: The neurons in the brain don't get replaced over this sort of time period. It is widely understood now that new neuron...
Brain and nervous system tissue Your AI has learnt to augment its silicon-based processors with human brain tissue, which it uses to undertake cognitive tasks that traditional computer processors ...
Starfish Prime's answer is very good, but there are a couple elements to the analogy that wouldn't be present in your circumstance. While SP is aware it's an imperfect analogy, I want to directly ...
Laser Syntered Regolith First the dust and rock on the surface of the Moon would need to be passed through sieves, to enable the grade of material suitable for printing to be fed to the printer he...
It might be possible. We've known for around a century (since at least 1933) that ultraviolet light can inhibit photosynthesis and possibly damage photosynthetic mechanisms inside an organism. Phy...
The bioluminescence can be a vestige of when the creature's ancestors lived in very dim caves or caves (or other spaces) that were dark part of the time while they were awake. While they still had...
The technique to do this is similar to that used in constructing stellar models. You know some of the properties of your object - in this case, it look like the mass and radius. You want to figure ...
Saliva is a nice clean DNA sample. Ditto cheek cells. You don't need anything more complex to get. Since these are on the inside of the body, they won't have other DNA from touching things. You...
Give them prehensile feet 4 fingers on each of two hands. 4 toes on each of two feet. The feet don't even have to be fully prehensile. Just usable enough that they'd think to count them. After ...
Following up on Christian's comment about seven day weeks... your aliens could use any base you want, for the same reason weeks have seven days: because their deity/religion said to do that. (This ...
You couldn't just replace the Magnesium directly without making other changes. Taking beryllium as the first example. In Plant-like organisms there are at least two different types of Chlorophyll...
