Posts by celtschk
First, an "acceleration shield" in the true sense of the word is impossible. However, one could imagine something close to it: The reason why acceleration affects you is that it actually doesn't a...
Since in your world, there are no natural time cycles, life will not have an external synchronization. Therefore the main changes in your world will be to changing weather (unless your world doesn'...
Here's one method that doesn't rely on either gravitational time dilation or simulation: If you look at the basic equations of quantum mechanics, you notice that if you scale all masses by a commo...
OK, so humanity is going to space, and they are going to take farm animals into space, not only humans on earth value meat, but humans in space do, too. However, they don't want to waste precious r...
There are many one-time energy sources around: They are called bombs. So maybe there's a leftover nuclear bomb around. People would naturally not normally want to trigger it. However, if it is the...
OK, so scientists have found a great new substance: That substance makes you think ten times as fast! The advantages are obvious. However, as every medicine, this pill will have side effects. Ther...
Here's an unconventional idea (which however assumes you are able to build large space constructs): Put a gigantic parabolic mirror around Barnard's star which concentrates the energy in a focal po...
Back in the days when men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centaury, an obscenely rich woman decided s...
Space is full of radiation. When doing long stays in space, no matter whether it's a generation ship on its journey to a new colony, a research ship exploring new worlds, a freighter delivering goo...
I think all the virus would need to do to have that effect is to dramatically ramp up the levels of adrenaline and testosterone. I think it is perfectly possible that a custom-designed virus could ...
Yes, this is about Dr. Evil's dream: Sharks with frickin' lasers. Except that the lasers would not be artificially attached, but be part of the animal itself (bio-lasing instead of simply biolumine...
One thing that necessarily happens on a generation ship is that people die of old age. Now that poses a tension: On one hand, you need to handle the dead with dignity. On the other hand, you probab...
To add to the other answers, there's also the possibility of the water appearing to run uphill due to a an optical illusion. I'm not aware of any river where this is the case, but since it happens...
A generation ship was sent out a long time ago, to colonize a far away planet. However the ship failed to reach its goal due to navigational issues (which also means they didn't have any clue where...
Plants can have very different pollinators: The wind, insects, and even birds. However, is there a conceivable scenario where a plant could naturally have evolved to depend on humans as pollinators...
I think such plants would have no use for leaves. Leaves are basically solar energy collectors, and since your plants do not do photosynthesis, they have no use for them. I'd expect all the energy ...
The main problem is to establish a common time standard to base your local clocks off. Then it doesn't matter if your local time system differs from that (for example, you will want to base your pl...
It is well known that some organisms can produce electricity. Therefore I think it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that also some plants might have evolved that ability (after all, it ...
Fight in a gas cloud. While cosmic gas clouds are still incredibly thin, at relativistic speeds they will anyway cause considerable friction to your space fighter, so I'd expect more or less the s...
Time travel due to FTL follows directly from the relativity of simultaneity: In different frames, the temporal order of events is different. This is true for all events which are spacelike to each ...
There are three separate issues here: Too much oxygen, and the human body (as well as any other organic material) will be highly flammable. You don't really want to live there. Too high or too lo...
I think there would be mainly three types of reactions: Those groups who think that apes should be given human rights would use that as additional arguments; also if you can speak with the apes, ...
Imagine your scientists have found a way to increase the space of your empire, literally: They are able to create an artificial inflaton field which locally creates a "space bubble" connected with ...
How could it be possible? Obviously the black holes cannot be the source of light for the planet, so we need four bodies: The two black holes, a star and a planet. Moreover, the star should be in ...
If you say you want to make the speed of light 100 times as high, you have to say what you want to keep constant. I'll assume you want to keep constant the sizes of things (because if light is 100 ...
