Posts by rek
Background I am investigating the practical utility and limitations of a procedural-generation-based naming scheme for stars and other notable or significant interstellar structures (e.g. nebulae,...
What natural environmental pressures or opportunities might drive an alien ophidian species to evolve sapience and caudal tool use? Conditions The species should be lacking limbs prior to the e...
Setting A binary planet system consisting of two terrestrial planets (hereafter Alpha/α and Beta/β). The system barycentre (C) is between the two planets; for the sake of this question the exact...
Original post: Imagine a world in which both left- and right-handed chirality appeared and evolved into a variety of complex organisms comparable to post-Cambrian Explosion Earth (both plant an...
I've been thinking about flag designs for colonies on Mars, and something occurred to me. The "official" Flag of Mars has a critical flaw The average wind speed on Mars is 10 m/s (20 mph); the fa...
Using the following dimensions (and assuming any material characteristics necessary to maintain structural integrity), could a Standford Torus-style artificial habitat achieve the necessary spin to...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a rotating cylindrical space habitat comparable to the more well known O'Neill model. It was proposed by NASA engineer Thomas McKendree in 2000 as an update of O...
Is there a way to design a river system in an O'Neill/McKendree-style cylindrical habitat to passively feed into itself in an endless loop, from one end of the habitat to the other and back again? ...
Some speculation on a neurological supercharger for a sapient alien species: The supercharger is a natural biochemical compound of some sort produced and stored in a specialized brain-adjacent o...
Premise On Earth the seas have numerous filter feeding species, large and small, sustaining themselves on the microscopic nutrients and organisms that drift in the current. The largest animal evol...
Vocalization has a number of features that make it a very robust natural form of communication: Variable volume from whisper to shout, roughly scaling from direct to omnidirectional; Equally effe...
Below is a diagram showing transverse cross sections of skulls representative of the two subspecies (A and B) of the Trilateral* species. Is it plausible that such obvious differences "“ noting the...
The classic example of a cylindrical space habitat, Clarke's Rama, has a 10 km-wide ring of water at the middle. Most depictions of this O'Neill-style of habitat do something similar, placing a lar...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a spinning space habitat in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (below), but orders of magnitude larger. McKendree habitats are hundreds of kilometres in diameter a...
Assume an Earth-like or super-Earth terrestrial planet in a state comparable to Precambrian or Archaen Earth. The atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, perhaps some methane, but very li...
