Posts by Canina
I'm trying to work out the kinks of an ecosystem on a planet that is rather similar to Earth, but with some species of animal (both carnivores and herbivores) we aren't familiar with in our world. ...
I think you are pushing the boundary of believability a little too far, at least for someone who is somewhat familiar with orbital mechanics. (That may or may not be a problem for your intended aud...
This is perhaps not exactly the answer you are looking for, but I would suggest you consider the possibility of having the satyrs coevolve with your homids, but start from some other species. Human...
Problem? Well, I think you stated the problem pretty well already in your question. As the earth does its daily rotation and the moon does its monthly orbit the cable drags around, flickin...
Like other answers so far, I don't think that we have any chance of establishing a colony on that planet. I would like to add another reason, however, for why this is not possible with current tech...
Realistically, a well-trained backpacking dog can carry up to anywhere between 30% and 50% of its weight on its back. While the dog's spine is possibly going to be a problem, that can be worked aro...
Pretty much what it says in the question title. Suppose a non-human, social species of Earth animal found itself on an evolutionary path that favored increased intelligence of a kind not completel...
A group of scientists has been slaving away largely in obscurity for two decades, with very few publishable results. Suddenly, one of them has an epiphany, which turns out to be instrumental to ena...
As you point out, any large predator should be plenty able to kill a human, given a reason to do it. Hunting for food could certainly be one such reason. Tigers already kill humans directly, and a...
Consider the present day Earth. Now, through some event (magic, a giant maid with a vacuum cleaner, a disgruntled alien did it, ...), our planet is stripped of its atmosphere. Assume that this happ...
Is there a reason to believe that programming languages are going to converge into a single language in the decades/centuries to come? As a programmer myself, I certainly would hope not. It wo...
Based on the fact that a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements not pleasant to their government... (One way this ...
Like Samuel mentioned in a comment, the effects would be minor to slim at most, and probably not detectable except from a significant distance. Nebulae are extremely sparse. Wikipedia states that ...
You could quite easily detect the presence of any planets by taking an image of the sky in a specific direction, move some small distance, and take another image of the sky in the same direction. T...
On Earth, the polar bear is among the most sexually dimorphic animals, with males being on average almost twice as heavy as females (Wikipedia claims average weights of 450 kg for males versus 260 ...
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central ma...
Actually, even with contemporary communication protocols today, latency is not really an issue as long as the link is reasonably reliable. This is a delay-tolerant network. Note that in the real wo...
The first thing that would happen is that it would wreak havoc with every orbit in the solar system. The orbits of the planets around the sun have their focal point very close to the sun's centre ...
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
I haven't read through all the answers in detail, but there is one obvious possibility that I don't see anyone else having really mentioned so far: peak oil. Or more generally, peak available resou...
For a species I am working on, there is a specific genetic trait that I want to introduce into the population. The exact nature of either is not important for the purposes of this question, but the...
Gravity is not dependent on the composition of the body. In fact, Jupiter exerts exactly the same gravitational influence that a solid body of the same mass would. So does the Sun, or a black hole....
Others have looked at this from various theoretical points of view. I want to look at it from the point of view of our own Earth's history, and what would be the impact if your population followed ...
Atmospheric dust by itself shouldn't have any major impact on generation or distribution of electricity. The two are unrelated. However, a fraction of the Earth's electricity production is based o...
The angular resolution of the naked human eye is approximately one arc minute, or 1/60th of a degree. (Also a nice illustration of what this means in practice, which just so it happens also shows t...
