Posts by Canina
Actually, the "light year" is a unit of length that has its origins in Earth's movement around the Sun, but has since been detached from it. The SI unit of length is the meter. It is defined as ...
Just as I was contemplating this, L.Dutch posted an answer saying in part that one of your two options would be to 1. tune your surface temperature to that of the environment/background (unprac...
Life on Earth pretty early on settled on deoxyribonucleic acid organized in chains of base pairs as the means to code for the construction of proteins which make up a lifeform. It also has the bene...
Is it possible for such a system to exist? I'm sorry, but no. At least not according to orbital mechanics as currently understood. Kepler's third law of planetary motion is one of the old wor...
There is actually real-world precedent for what you want. Many indigenous Australians have a genetic mutation that helps them cope with a wide range of temperatures, including freezing. As discus...
Let's take a stab, and say that your creatures look something like this: Those are pretty dog-like, don't you think? Now, let's look at where that one came from, evolutionarily speaking (its cl...
The article Why Can't All Animals Be Domesticated? on Live Science sets out a list of criteria that a species needs to meet in order to be successfully domesticated by humans. In short, that list s...
Okay, I'm going to take a stab at this, and run the risk of having to delete this answer if it turns out my assumptions are wrong. Given what's in the question thus far, though, I think that an obv...
Start with a planet just like Earth as of today (whatever today means when you are reading this). For simplicity's sake, disregard mankind's continuous spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphe...
I'm working on a species of large bird, and trying to determine whether they will be able to fly or not. I know that this equation likely applies: $$ A = \cfrac{L}{\cfrac{1}{2} v^2 \rho C_L} $$ ...
First off, something that might seem like an inconsequential detail or perhaps even nitpicking, but really isn't in this case: You don't need oxygen for something to burn. What you need is an oxidi...
All right, let's look at this from a geometric point of view. As seen from Earth, the Sun subtends anywhere between 31.6 and 32.7 minutes of arc in diameter. The area enclosed by a circle (ellipse...
Inspired by the answers to What can I add to an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere to make it unpalatable or poisonous to humans, yet stable and breathable to local creatures?, I am building a planet that ...
I have built a star that is loosely based on a real-world star. It has the following properties: Spectral class G Mass: 1.03 M$_\odot$ Radius: 1.02 r$_\odot$ Luminosity: 1.05 L$_\odot$ Surface te...
I have a roughly Earth-like planet in a solar system some distance from ours. The atmosphere of this planet is largely similar to that of Earth, but particularly, has a somewhat higher oxygen conte...
L.Dutch made a worthwhile observation in an answer to a different question: Moreover for close range shots there is almost no time to react and move the limb: for a shot fired at 20 m, with a s...
Besides a4android's discussion on the similarities of your planet to Earth... A sphere has an enclosed volume of $ \frac{4}{3} \pi r^3 $. For a 1 m (a little over three feet) diameter sphere this ...
The reason why Earth has seasons in the way it does is Earth's axial tilt relative to the Sun combined with its atmosphere. Earth's moon has a much smaller (about 1.5°) axial tilt relative to the...
For the TL;DR, see the bottom of this answer. Okay, so first of all, the orbital period of the gas giant around its star is $256 \times 24$ hours, and I'd like to establish the distance from the p...
I am going to assume that by constant, you really mean constant as opposed to instantaneous. In other words, we are still bound by the speed of light propagation delay. We are also bound by the law...
I'm very tempted to say that no, that's not possible in practice. At least not without severely stretching the laws of physics. But like Nobody proposed, you could perhaps make it work if you are w...
Take the Earth-Moon system as we know it. Now, something causes a large rock to be lobbed in the direction of our moon. Exactly how that happens is deliberately left unspecified; it could be everyt...
I'm going to take the comment you posted on the question, because it is important. The story should not be driven or build around the technology. But I have the ambition to also not just handwa...
Fight fire with fire. Remember, the fire-breathing dragon breathes fire for some reason. Even if the dragon doesn't realize that it breathes fire, the ability almost certainly evolved together wit...
I don't think there is any inherent reason why a large number of "eyes" would necessarily have to imply the downsides of compound eyes. For an extreme example, you could consider each cone or rod ...
