Posts by Zxyrra
In this answer about how to design the ideal cyborg, I said: ... Use electric tissue to power the machines. Cyborgs need some way to generate electricity when mechanical parts are invol...
The coldest place in the universe that we have observed is in the Boomerang Nebula. Similarly to a refrigerator, heat is carried away through a fluid, resulting in a space colder than the surroundi...
While reading this question about how non-primate mammals could develop a bipedal stance, I became curious about the broader reasons why animals could evolve to walk on two legs. I found some insi...
Context: In a near-future version of our solar system, humans have established multiple underwater colonies on Jupiter's moon Europa. Many of these outposts are situated next to hydrothermal vents ...
Humans have colonized the subsurface oceans of Europa - building large cities embedded in the icy crust, hanging beneath it, and resting on the rocky seafloor. These colonists mine metals for const...
Assumptions: Jupiter's moon Europa has a salty subsurface ocean in contact with a rocky mantle. The ocean is populated by hydrothermal vents produced by tidal heating. Global heat flow is similar...
I'm designing a tidally locked world around a red dwarf star. The habitable ring is an Earth analogue. The atmosphere and gravity are similar to Earth's, and we're going to pretend the wind is negl...
One of the answers to What could make a star green? describes a living Dyson sphere made of photosynthetic, plant-like material. What type of star or star system is ideal for a plant-like Dyson sp...
Mars gets somewhat nice In about 1.6 billion years, the sun's habitable zone will have moved outward, increasing the carbon dioxide in Mars's atmosphere. According to Wikipedia, its surface temper...
Sister question to How do you communicate with antimatter beings? Defining dark matter for this question According to NASA, 27% of the universe is dark matter - and about 5% of the unive...
I swear I saw this question elsewhere. Let me know if this is a dupe. Photons are great. They're little bundles of energy that Reflect off of nearly everything, allowing us to see faraway obj...
So aliens have arrived in the solar system. They have faster-than-light travel technology and the ability to handwave away the supposed causality violations that such an invention causes They're ...
It's hard to create a new animal from scratch. If you genetically modify an existing species until it becomes a drastically different species, then implant the fertilized embryo in a female of th...
All organisms on Earth produce waste. Whether an organism's respiration has a byproduct, or it just doesn't process all food it consumes, it will always put some amount of matter into the environme...
Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies in the gray area between planet and star. They're huge, gaseous, hot compared to planets, and come in all different kinds. (1) Is it possible for life to develop...
Context NASA commissioned some awesome, vintage-style prints a while back advertising the colonization of Mars. Three of them stood out to me because they depicted colonization of the moons of ...
Before you comment "dragons can't happen", we've been there before. Based on the question linked above, assume dragons are scientifically plausible. You may change what you need about the...
Part of a series I'm starting since the recent What could make a star green? did quite well and others could use the information here in their worlds. There aren't any "violet" stars. When a ...
Stars are never green. When a star's spectra "peaks" in the green range, it also releases a significant number of waves of the adjacent colors - so "green" stars appear yellow or white. I want ...
The common evolutionary belief is that life originated in water, and that it developed to survive on land later on. Eventually, mammals evolved on land. Cetaceans, which include dolphins, whales, ...
Let's talk about the visible light "rainbow" In almost all depictions of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light is shown as a rainbow, and adjacent parts of the spectrum are monotone in color...
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million." "Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on p...
By using antibiotics too frequently, some argue, we're setting the world up for a pandemic that we cannot treat. Every time an antibiotic substance is used, the bacteria that survive reproduce. Ev...
Nature does some pretty interesting things with gender: This is a female trilobite beetle. Scientists have observed females extensively, yet for decades, scientists could not identify the male ...
Hear me out before you downvote; It's not as simple as it seems. On Earth, nuclear reactions produce heat energy. This is used to heat water, creating steam, powering turbines connected to generat...
