Posts 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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable, slightly damp ball of rock that would be very difficult to do things like grow crops on. However, it's also very far away. Far enough that, presumably, it would probab...
The year is 2100. While climate change has wrought serious damage to the biosphere, humanity has at last managed to become carbon neutral, and has even developed technology that can be used to redu...
The year is 3030 and the robots (who have replaced humanity as the dominant intelligent beings on Earth) have decided to build a Dyson sphere around the sun. They're planning on disassembling Venus...
If I've recently started a colony on a somewhat habitable, but uninhabited planet, what's the best way to determine the location of any ore or other subterranean resource deposits? The planet is E...
Faster than light travel is a really cool thing to have in sci-fi settings. It allows humans, in relatable time scales, to travel the galaxy and see a variety of worlds. It allows for conflicts spa...
On Earth, the vast majority of the biosphere is ultimately dependent on a large number of autotrophic organisms that produce usable energy in the form of glucose by using photosynthesis. However, o...
I'm interested in asteroid mining, but don't have the infrastructure in place to process ores and the like in space. However, I've got a nice planet-based refinery setup where I could easily proces...
Satyrs, fauns, pan, and even the devil are commonly depicted as humanoid bipeds with goatlike unguligrade hooves for feet. However, common as such beings may be in fantasy and mythology, I have bee...
Suppose we had reached the moon and found it to be habitable. It was big enough to support an atmosphere, albeit a thinner one than the Earth has, and at some point in the past few hundred million ...
Our universe is incredibly young, relative to its total life span. How young? Well, it contains stars. Giant balls of readily fusing hydrogen and helium that give off a pleasant glow, suitable for ...
People have proposed mining the moon for Helium-3 and mining asteroids for gold, iridium, and other precious metals. Suppose we have the means to do so in an economically-viable manner. We've got f...
I'm planning on sending a colony ship on an extended, multi-generational voyage to a distant star. My colony ship is an oblate spheroid, 2km long on its long axis and 1km across on its shortest axi...
If I take ten thousand healthy adult humans, strap them into a colony ship, and fire them off on a three-million year journey to a distant star, what will the creatures climbing out of the colony s...
I'd like to travel really really fast, and I've got some scientists proposing a novel new way of doing so. They've developed the technology to generate extremely powerful controlled gravitational ...
The Chirr are a race of space-faring aliens that look vaguely like rat-sized ants. They've got powerful mandibles and small, fairly dexterous hand-like claws, though their chitinous nature makes de...
Island planets are common in science-fiction, and we've even got a few questions about them in worldbuilding. However, I cannot help but wonder how, or if, they could form. On Earth, at least, our ...
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...
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...
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...
They say that nature abhors a vacuum, but could life evolve to live in one? Alternately, could life be engineered to exist on a planet with no atmosphere, even if there is no biologically feasible ...
