Posts by Arkenstein XII
My hypothetical gas giant has five major moons. Three of those moons are icy bodies with abundant water ice and volatiles. Any of these could provide fuel for translunar spacecraft, or for spacecra...
For a star of that mass, you are looking at a G0V to F9V main sequence star. It's luminosity, depending on age, is probably around 1.2 sol, from which you can calculate the bounds of the habitable ...
An interstellar traveller stands upon the surface of an alien planet beneath the light of an unfamiliar sun. The planet upon which he stands orbits one star of a binary system in which one is a G-c...
A fictional starship that I am designing functions via a form of Bussard ramjet that uses hydrogen from the interstellar medium as reaction mass, not as fuel. In order to accelerate the propellant...
The earliest Metazoa originate between 800mya and 750mya, so anywhere from 80my to 30my prior to the beginning of the Cryogenian. The occurrence of snowball periods is likely not a factor in their...
Human physiology is adapted for life at 1G, but planets colonised by future humans will likely have different surface gravities. What is the range of values for surface gravity that humans can com...
Straying slightly from currently available technologies to those that are possible, but not yet achieved... The Lunar surface is rich in Helium-3, so if Helium-3 fusion propulsion is developed, th...
The mass of a star is directly related to how hot its surface is, which in turn, is responsible for the wavelengths of light it emits (This is called Black-Body Radiation). As a main sequence G2V ...
I am developing a fictional planetary system in which a large gas giant planet (slightly less than the mass of Saturn), has migrated into the habitable zone during the formational years of the syst...
Brain and nervous system tissue Your AI has learnt to augment its silicon-based processors with human brain tissue, which it uses to undertake cognitive tasks that traditional computer processors ...
In astrobiology, this concept is known as the 'Superhabitable Planet'. Such a planet would be more massive than Earth, up to about 2.5 Earth masses. This additional mass provides shallower oceans,...
The spectrum of a main-sequence star results mainly from the surface temperature, which is controlled by the star's mass. As mass increases, the star burns hotter, and as temperature increases, mor...
Models suggest that a desert planet (that is to say, a planet with some polar surface water, but otherwise dominated by land), can remain habitable as close as ~0.75 AU from a star with luminosity ...
Potentially the most cost effective way to mine the core of a rocky planet would be to first hit it very hard with something that removed the crust and mantle. Once exposed, the metallic core would...
There are two good ways to have animals become larger. The first, is cooler temperatures. Animals tend to become bulkier with shorter limbs in order to conserve body heat, see: Bergmann & Alle...
Perhaps a vast colony of lithotrophic organisms lives deep beneath the sand? Long ago, the region was a rocky plain. Then, a species of lithotrophs was introduced, and they began to consume the ve...
In a world dominated by steppe, the warmest regions give way into parklands dominated by stands of Aspen. My research suggests that Aspen groves may tend to exclude other species of tree, but I am...
The creation of genetically engineered microorganisms for industrial and high-tech applications such as terraforming is certainly within the realm of possibility. However, there are several hurdles...
The hero saves the captured giant, and as a reward, the giant presents the hero with a magic ring... However, the ring is made for giant fingers, so the hero decides to wear it as an armband instea...
Your Dragons communicate largely using infrasound as a means to transmit across long distances. Similarly to Elephants, Hippopotamuses, Rhinoceroses, and even Alligators, these organisms find util...
With sufficient effort, this could be done. It would require the manual alteration of the orbit of each asteroid. Bear in mind that the total mass of the asteroid belt is around 4% that of the moo...
Ok, lets start with a population of 10,000 colonists. I will assume that the population consists entirely of adults that have been selected to be of reproductive age, and that half the population ...
I am working on the realism of a fictional planet which has an average temperature lower than that of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and possesses a single large supercontinent rather than distrib...
The Earth has some excellent examples of ecosystems that thrive on the underside of sea-ice in the polar regions. Convection in the Europan ocean could conceivably bring nutrients up to the base of...
Well, since vibrations can't propagate through a vacuum, the 'shaking' would have to be something that can propagate through spacetime. Something like a Gravitational Wave fits the bill. However, ...
