Posts by Canina
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...
Sorry to be a bit of a spoil-sport, but... Moore's law doesn't apply. Moore's law is the recognition that semiconductor complexity (in integrated circuits) increases at a particular rate. The ve...
It's a commonly held misconception, but you really don't need a lot of gravity to retain an appreciable atmosphere. Conversely, gravity alone is no guarantee that a body will have an appreciable at...
Since you say in a comment that you're willing to settle for a combination of tamper-evident and write-only unless tampered with, as opposed to strictly tamper-proof (which indeed is a much harder ...
I actually believe there are real-world Earth cultures you can draw inspiration from here. So you want a culture where hard work is considered a virtue, but you also want that culture to see being...
That's plenty possible. In fact, if you're willing to fudge your requirements just slightly, it could easily be the case for Earth's moon. Let's look at the equation for orbital speed, also known...
Do it the way NASA did it in the 1960s -- with ropes and pulleys! No, really. I distinctly recall seeing a video clip, but can't recall exactly where, of how Apollo astronauts trained for walking ...
Jane was different from the other kids. While all the other kids were playing with fire, Jane played with ice. Now, Jane has grown up and is an accomplished scientist or engineer in your discipline...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
