Posts by celtschk
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 ...
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...
Note: I'm assuming all relevant space travel is close to earth (that is, there's no need to coordinate e.g. travel to Mars, as soon as it leaves the near-earth range). One point about space is tha...
Well, the first effect would of course be for anything that flies, like birds or bats. Half the air density means flying gets much harder. So I'd expect flying animals to be smaller in general, but...
The first question is: What would be the first reaction of the ants on seeing the humans? Run away. Well, that's completely natural behaviour, and there's nothing you can tell from that; also, th...
Imagine aliens dropped a small black hole (say, 1% of the moon's mass, so you wouldn't notice the difference in gravitation) into the sun (from the far side of the sun, so nobody on earth can see i...
One effect I could imagine is that life would have entered land earlier in evolution, since there's less space in the upper ocean levels (the ones which are most life-friendly, because below there'...
Another idea: Black holes shadow the cosmic microwave background. This might be used to detect them. Given that with high speeds, the microwave background in movement direction (that's the directio...
It could be that our reproductive system doesn't work too well in zero gravity. That would impose a strong selection pressure to adapt the reproductive system to zero gravity, which then in turn mi...
In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Thirty Days", there was a planet made completely out of water, which is the inspiration for this question. However, that planet was held together by an artificia...
tl;dr: Such a world would be quite different from ours. Basically, all modern formulations of classical mechanics fail on it, and you also could not base that world on an underlying quantum theo...
Let's listen to the head of the colonization movement, who happens to give a speech about this topic right now: Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you about t...
All the answers so far dealt with the ship creating gravity itself. But there's another possibility: The ship might have some sort of gravity shields (to allow to pass close nearby heavy objects li...
What I've found out is that Ammonia has (in the relevant temperature/pressure regime) cubic crystal structure. But what would that mean for ammonia snowflakes? Would they have fourfold symmetry? Bu...
First, the good news: You still can have quantum stuff. All the quantum weirdness already exists in non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Without the speed limit, full relativity is, of course, out ...
The situation I'm considering is as follows: A space ship (a transport ship operated by two people) crashes onto a planet on which a swing-by was planned. The crew could escape using an escape cap...
This is somewhat of a follow-up question to my ammonia-based world question. I've found out that the melting point of ammonia is at 25°C at a pressure of about 1 MPa (about 10 times the atmospheri...
