Posts by Monica Cellio
We try to hammer these things out during the proposal phase; really we do... but in the last day or two we've seen some objections to the name "Speculative Science", and if we're going to change it...
Welcome to the Codidact home for the Scientific Speculation community, an outgrowth of the SE Worldbuilding community. Please use it, report problems and make requests on Meta, and collect your th...
A now-deleted question involved archaeology, linguistics, and history. There were some downvotes and critical comments, and the author deleted the question. I don't know whether the downvotes wer...
I'm speaking as a regular user here despite that "staff" label next to my name. Scope is decided by communities, not imposed from above. I think science-based questions about sports, like golf in...
Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged p...
I would think that, at the very least, [science-based] is implied by this site's scope and doesn't add anything. (I didn't think to ask for it to be stripped on import, but presumably it's not har...
On Earth, solar flares can lead to displays of the aurora that are both more spectacular and visible farther south. Flares in September 2014 led to the aurora being visible in Maine, which is arou...
When we launched this community, we did not yet have the ability to set different reputation grants for different categories. We've had this for a while but we failed to follow up before now, sorr...
I have a planet orbiting one star in a binary system. When the planet is exactly between the two stars it will experience a double day; when the primary sun sets the secondary one rises, no overla...
This appears to be a data error related to imported questions. The question was imported with four answers on 2020-05-04. On 2021-03-02, a script deleted zero-score answers from accounts that wer...
We know that planets can have multiple moons, sometimes quite a few (like Jupiter). Assuming that a planet with several moons were habitable in the first place and has significant oceans (greater ...
The cat above glows because it was exposed to a virus that carried a suitable gene: US researcher Eric Poeschla has produced three glowing GM cats by using a virus to carry a gene, called gre...
I want to develop a water-dwelling, intelligent species that could ultimately reach space.1 My question here is about the biology of such creatures. I want my creatures to live in the water, not ...
In the answers to this question I learned that some cephalopods communicate via color: Some cephalopods are capable of rapid changes in skin color and pattern through nervous control of chromat...
Twitter. (Or Facebook, or other similar vector.) What you need is the "share" or "retweet" concept, a button that a reader uses to put your post in front of his readers, whose readers have a butt...
As you point out, Mars has so much stuff going on in its skies that its moons aren't going to provide meaningful calendrical support. Nothing else is both visible and consistent enough to act as a...
I have aphakia, so I can address the near-UV end from personal experience. For the near-IR, I can only reason from other sources. In daylight, subtle effects like the patterns on flowers mentione...
If the Internet and all its component parts (routers, DNS servers, certificate authorities, etc) vanished tomorrow, would you know how to rebuild it? To most people on most of these worlds, the QE...
There are three ways a planet can be positioned in a binary-star system: The two stars are close together and the planet orbits both of them (technically it orbits their center of gravity). This...
Teleportation as you describe it is a sudden change in location that the teleportee perceives through all available senses. We obviously can't test that on humans today, but we can get some clues ...
I have a binary system in which my world orbits one of the stars, not the pair, in the habitable zone. The stars are relatively close together (because I want the secondary one to shed significant...
Recent news reported the discovery of three "earth-like" planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. This is interesting because the star is a small, cool red dwarf about the size of Jupiter. The three pla...
Networks go out sometimes, or can be jammed. This might be particularly problematic in high-radiation environments. See also this answer for reasons they might not be available. Voice communicat...
I've asked before about my polytheists with competing moon gods. I now have a better understanding of how tides -- a very visible manifestation of lunar influence -- work with multiple moons (than...
Broadly speaking you need three things: (1) something that makes it infeasible to keep living on land (most people won't move unless pushed), (2) the inability to evacuate from the planet, and (3) ...