Posts by Arkenstein XII
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Earth-like Desert planets are entirely feasible. In fact, models have suggested that such a planet could enjoy a habitable zone that extends much closer to its host star than a more aqueous one cou...
One possible solution, is that your species have abandoned sexual reproduction entirely in favour of reproducing clonally. They are all derived from a database of genomes that were at some point in...
Water cannot remain fluid at the pressures of a terrestrial planet's core. However, it doesn't need to for your setting to be viable. The planet's crust could simply possess large, deep aquifers th...
The surface of the moon is covered in an exotic lifeform with an exceedingly rapid lifecycle. Colonies of this lifeform grow to cover large portions of the lunar surface in as little as 12 hours, c...
The biggest impediment to metalworking without fire is getting the metal to forging temperature. Even the easiest to work metals, such as lead and tin, require temperatures around 300 C and 200 C ...
One major advantage that octopodes have in colonising the land, is that they can already make short stints out of the water without any specialised equipment. This is very much not true of humans i...
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...
Early microbial life on such a world is almost certainly aquatic, so I'll answer this question in those terms. Earthly bacteria move at a rate between 2 and 200 microns per second, with the higher...
