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The Earth would be broken into pieces if the total energy delivered by the impacts was comparable to the gravitational binding energy of the planet. Earth is a sphere, so its binding energy is $$U=...
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
What would one experience travelling through an invisible Krasnikov tube? A flat piece of paper doesn't quite lie flat, and the walls on your ship are under considerable stress (unless the ship's...
No matter what mechanism your animal uses for running its systems from sunlight, you still have the fundamental limitation of sunlight power per area (insolation). Solar insolation at earth's dista...
When we did the initial import from Worldbuilding SE, we also inherited the tag set from there. This leaves us with some tags which are (should be) redundant on Scientific Speculation. I primarily ...
I have an idea for a land based mobile organism that moves and uses photosynthesis for its primary means of energy generation. Can a motile organism conceivably get enough energy from photosyntheti...
Yes, it can – they're called “heterotherms”. As with most "can an organism" questions, you only need to look to find some organism that already does this. All hibernating animals (many bears, many...
Any mechanism for generating a neutrino beam starts with a way to generate neutrinos, and there is only one underlying means right now: weak decay (including beta decay in radioactive nuclides). Th...
The known charge-conserving decay modes of free neutrons all involve the production of a proton, an electron and an electron antineutrino: $$n\to p^++e^-+\bar{\nu}_{e}$$ This beta decay is why, out...
It's not black at all, it's not even light (or maybe even any other wavelength of photons) at all, but something about the magic interferes with the ability of our rods and cones to interact with l...
Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...
How about "rigorous-science"? There are lots of ways to apply rigorous logic to a question, this draws focus to the science part.
For those who don't know: while this site was being proposed, I raised some issues about not importing questions with the [magic] tag. After some discussion, I feel like we reached a consensus that...
a type of light we could perceive as black because our eyes ... do not That's anything in the EM spectrum other than visible light. So exclude roughly 400 to 750 nm wavelengths. Infrared and ultr...
Nature does this on its own, given enough time. Different tree species have evolved different strategies. Some require a lot of sun, grow fast, and make a lot of seeds before being overshadowed b...
It is said that in dense rainforests, only 1% of sunlight (sometimes less) reaches the forest floor, which greatly restricts the types of plant and animal life that can survive there. My (limited) ...
I am trying to create "black magic" with a visual black effect with lore backing (it is for PC game). How can I create this effect, either optically or neurologically? I am not talking about hue ...
This isn't "my" site, so I don't really care what you do. Take this as an observation from a bystander. It seems to me you're trying to put a rather fine point on two broad classes of questions. ...
Yes, it can. We can determine the distance to the source if we have an idea of what's causing that shift in velocity. Let's say that we have a source moving at a speed $v$ away from us. If it emit...
Before launching the site, we had a discussion on Codidact Meta about naming the category we currently called "Researched Q&A". Other possibilities we explored included "Hard science", our sta...
I've had a number of interesting conversations with people about how the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will evolve in the future. The CMB is the sea of photons left over from the epoch of recom...
Of the suggestions I've seen, I like 'scientific worldbuilding' the best. However, Mithrandir has raised some concerns that this focuses on the worldbuilding aspect, on a site where we're inviting ...
What about simply reversing the name? Instead of "Speculative Science", potentially implying speculating about science (with all the implications of that), we could have "Scientific Speculation", i...
We try to hammer these things out during the proposal phase; really we do... but in the last day or two we've seen some objections to the name "Speculative Science", and if we're going to change it...
