Posts by Gryphon
So say there was a rogue gas giant about the mass of Jupiter that, unfortunately, happened to be headed directly at Earth (or at least close enough to knock it into an orbit incompatible with life)...
It all depends on the scale and surface brightness of the nebula. For instance, the famous Orion Nebula is 1,344 light years. The Orion Nebula is a fairly bright nebula. However, if we replaced ...
Internal mass drivers are a potentially useful space drive, due to the ready availability of reaction mass (you can use anything from spare parts to literal dirt as a propellant, assuming you have ...
Many science fiction stories, movies, and shows involve characters undergoing explosive decompression, the technical term for a rapid drop in pressure, usually all the way to a vacuum. Frequently,...
I'm sure most worldbuilders will have heard the aphorism that in space "Everyone sees Everything", or that "There Ain't No Stealth In Space". I'd like to propose a possible solution to this. Th...
During much of the Cretaceous period, oxygen levels were substantially higher than they are currently, with estimates indicating that around 30% of the atmosphere consisted of oxygen. Obviously, t...
I'm working on a version of wormhole-based FTL travel, and one of the side effects of passing through the wormhole is going to be instantaneous heating of every molecule of the thing passing throug...
I'm working on a version of wormhole-based FTL travel, and one of the side effects of passing through the wormhole is going to be instantaneous heating of every molecule of the thing passing throug...
Say 200-300 years in the future, humankind has colonized much of the solar system, using a combination of laser thermal drives and solid-core nuclear rockets (fusion never really panned out). Sudd...
A while back, I asked this question about the plausibility of giant floating whales and received an excellent and high-scoring answer from Dubukay demonstrating that, given the assumptions that Dub...
One day, you suddenly get superpowers! Whoo-hoo, you can speed up or slow down the flow of time for yourself. This means you can run faster than a jet, right? So you decide to test it out. You ...
Inspired by this question and my comment on one of the answers. If the earth were flung out of the solar system, it would rapidly become far too cold for any unprotected life to survive on the s...
How plausible are naturally-evolved, biological, fixed-wing flying creatures? Could such a creature plausibly evolve in Earth-like conditions? If so, what method would it be most likely to use fo...
Ignoring the plausibility of their evolution and sources of food, could a whale-like creature which internally consists largely of hydrogen bladders/gasbags realistically stay aloft? If these cr...
Is there a realistic way that a Charybdis-like creature could evolve? Starting with roughly earth-like biology, what is the closest plausible creature to the mythical Charybdis that could exist? ...
How would a planet need to be changed (gravity, air pressure, air makeup, etc) to allow for the realistic flight and take off from a small hill of a gryphon with a human rider? You can assume the ...
Thousands of years after a nuclear war that killed all life on the surface of earth, the descendants of the humans who fled to bunkers emerge... How deep would these bunkers have to be to prevent ...
Imagine a spacefaring creature, one that colonises star systems, and then shoots some of its kind on to another system (the mechanism for doing this doesn't matter). The question is, how could thi...
