ckersch‭

If the effects of the tides are significant, and the spaceship inhabitants are observing the planet, it's likely that they would know that they are influencing the tides of the planet. However, if ...

posted 12y ago by ckersch‭

A staple of science fiction is substances like 'durasteel' or 'tritanium', which, through generally unexplained means, have vastly superior material qualities when compared to conventional material...

5 answers  ·  posted 10y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by ckersch‭

Far away, across the vastness of space, lies an alien civilization, who are pretty similar to us. They've got ice cream, peer to peer networking, and photography. More importantly, they do lots of ...

6 answers  ·  posted 10y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by ckersch‭

Blowing Saturn up would be hard. Saturn has a mass of $568.3\times 10^{24}$ kg, or about 95 times the mass of Earth. To blow up Saturn, i.e. to place some sort of unimaginably huge bomb in its cen...

posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by ckersch‭

Suppose that we pare down human consumption to a minimum survivable level across the Earth, and devote the entire surface of the planet (as well as the planet's interior, if needed) to support as m...

6 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by ckersch‭

A staple of fantasy involving time travel is the hero (or heroine) zipping off into the future and then meeting a future lover with whom they go on to have wacky time-based adventures before presum...

2 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by ckersch‭

For sentient avians, knowing the location and behavior of currents in the air would be vitally important. Jet streams, thermals, downdrafts, and shear layers would all be important in their daily l...

7 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by ckersch‭

Let's assume that a halfling is of similar build, but half the height of an adult human. If I strap a wing suit onto one, I should have a quarter the surface area, but one eight the weight of an ad...

2 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by ckersch‭

Epimetheus is a planet with about three times the mass of Earth orbiting a sun-like star in the Andromeda galaxy. However, two major factors separate Epimetheus from Earth. First, it has a thick at...

2 answers  ·  posted 10y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by ckersch‭

If a hostile group wanted to render Earth or an Earth-like planet completely unfit for human life, what could they do to go about achieving that end? By uninhabitable, I mean a planet on which hum...

16 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by ckersch‭

If an earth-sized planet were tidally locked to a star, and was in the life zone of its star with an earth-like atmosphere, what would its wind patterns be like? The planet would have one hot hemi...

2 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by ckersch‭

Is there any feasible way to create a long-term sustainable habitat on the sun? My target region for habitation is the temperature minimum at the bottom of the solar atmosphere. Metals would have ...

9 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by ckersch‭

By extremely high gravity, I specifically mean around 28 Gs. I recently asked this question with regards to inhabiting the sun, and surviving in the sun's gravity seems like one of the major challe...

5 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by ckersch‭

Ornithopters are vehicles that fly by flapping their wings, rather than trough use of a propeller or jet engine. They've been proposed and built many times throughout history, and are a common elem...

6 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by ckersch‭

I'm reading this article on speech in animals, and it made an interesting claim: chimpanzees and other non-human great apes posses the anatomy needed to vocalize words, they just don't use it to do...

2 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by ckersch‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by ckersch‭