Questions tagged [habitability]
For questions asking about the conditions which are required for the development of life as we know it.
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What is a reasonable day length for a planet with 4 times earth radius?
The fictional planet has a mass of 18 times Earth's and four times earth's equatorial radiusreference. This gives it a gravitational acceleration of 11.02m/s^2 (1.29G) and an escape velocity of 23....
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Planet Orbital Zone and Year Length
So I'm building a fantasy world that takes place on a planet with a circumference of about 18,500 miles (it's average temperature is 40℉), and it orbits a Blue-Giant.
How long would a year be, and how ...
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Daily eclipses for a moon orbiting a gas giant?
I've dug into the idea of a habitable moon getting daily eclipses due to its gas giant getting in the way of the sun; but most examples I've found specify a tidally locked moon. I'm no astrophysicist ...
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Is life feasible in an inhospitable binary system?
There is a planet orbiting a binary system inside the Goldilocks zone. The problem is that the binary system is of a violent kind. It either regularly explodes and sterilizes a portion of the planet's ...
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How much more mass does Mars need to have in order to still be habitable today?
In an alternate timeline where Mars is the second Earth-like planet in our Solar System, the drive for colonizing it would perhaps have been much stronger. There would've been more resources spent ...
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What would cause plants to survive on the ground while restricting animals to the air?
What would be the natural reason for the surface of a planet to be toxic or otherwise uninhabitable to animals but not plants? This planet is not Earth and life would have evolved this way from the ...
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What geographic changes need to occur to make Southern Australia fertile?
Currently, 90% of Australia's land is inhospitable desert. What geographic changes need to occur for its southern side to become fertile soil?
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What would happen on a binary planet if they captured a new moon into orbit?
I've been working on a world where the origin of the magic system is a catastrophic event that ripped the surface of the planet apart allowing magical energy from beneath the crust to escape to the ...
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How could large scale mining operations render an arid region unlivable?
A story I am working on sees the characters returning to a fairly arid planet that was mined heavily by an interplanetary corporation. This left most of the planet uninhabitable and forced the local ...
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Consequences of living on either of two habitable planets orbiting a super-Earth? [closed]
I'm working on a habitable planetary system just at the doorstep of the Solar System. I'd like it to be unique, so I'm thinking of using two habitable planets orbiting a super-Earth. The super-Earth ...
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Plausibility check : a planet with tropical poles
is this planet plausible?
the planet is the third planet from its star.
by size smaller than Earth.
the planet has no moons.
the only habitable areas are rings around the poles.
in the pole, there's ...
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How would griffins collect materials for their nests?
Seeing as griffins are much bigger creatures than birds, plenty more twigs and sticks would be required and so larger size too. So how would griffins go about collecting materials for their nest? One ...
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If Earth's atmosphere was 100% oxygen, which settlement would be the lowest habitable one? [duplicate]
If we replace all other gases of the Earth's atmosphere by oxygen so that we have 1 atm oxygen at sea level, which one would be the lowest (either permanently or for a certain amount of time) ...
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What would be the effects on climate on a Venus sized planet orbiting a K0V star in a similar manner to Mars?
The planet has the characteristics of Venus in terms of mass (0.815 Earths), density (5.243g/cm3), surface area (0.902 Earths) and gravity (8.87m/s). It has an Earth-like atmosphere,water covers about ...
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Verifying Habitability/ Feasibility of my Conworld
Right, lets try this again.
I'm making a planet for a book I'm writing. I want to know if the planet I outline here is scientifically probable, able to support life, and what the climate would ...
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How far away would you need to be to survive a jet of stellar plasma on the surface of a "planet" built around a sun?
So, I'm considering writing a story, and one of the settings is a world created by a powerful wizard millions of years ago, by opening a thousand portals to gate in a thousand Earth-like worlds that ...
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How Do I Make Trappist-1g Habitable (in a fantasy setting)
This question is not about terraforming! (or atleast not technological terraforming)
I am writing a fantasy story set in the (real) Trappist-1 system. I am trying to faithfully keep most of the ...
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Would life be possible on a planet whose poles each directly face the sun once a year?
There is a kind of planet that I'm curious about regarding its habitability. Basically it's a planet that's very earth-like as far as its mass and material and atmospheric content and rotational/...
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Can life exist on a moon orbiting binary planets?
The situation i am trying to describe is a binary planet system where both planets are similarly sized, but without flora or fauna (basically an planet-sized moon). The planets are in the goldilocks ...
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Climate on a slow spinning planet
I'm currently working on a story set in a planet whose rotation period lasts around 24 years (Earth years, or 8766 days). This planet orbits at more or less 0,75 AU from a K-type star, and the ...
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Concerning Earth plants on an alien world, how much "sunlight" would "too much" and "too little" be compared to our sunlight?
In a binary system of artificially immortal stars, each one orbited by a ring of mirrors, a whole line of Earthlike planets orbits the binary within its habitable zone, from 400 to 800 AUs. While ...
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Feasibility of the Ascendia System?
Some of the events in a story I'm thinking of have occur on a planet called Ascendia. Due to the world's backstory, it has several unusual traits.
Despite orbiting around a hot (roughly large F/small ...
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Is a Habitable Planet With Three Suns and a Moon Realistic?
On this planet, which is mostly arid and dominated by large deserts and expansive steppes and savannahs, the sun rises once, and then two more times in the morning, and throughout the night an ...
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Through natural means, what could protect a rocky planet from intense x-rays from a black hole WITHOUT the expense of creating life?
I thought I had it.
I thought I had finally found the solar system with enough light to produce hundreds if not thousands of Earths. I thought that a black hole 12 billion times more massive than our ...
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Habitability zone around a Supermassive Black Hole
I have just found perhaps the biggest thing in the universe: A black hole named SDSS J010013.02+280225.8. It itself is 12 billion times more massive than our sun, and its accretion disk is 439 ...
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How habitable and different would an habitable stagnant-lid (no tectonics) world be?
Recently I was informed of the possibility of having an habitable world lacking tectonic plates, specifically of something called heat-pipe tectonics. Which is essentially the same tectonic system ...
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How to make tides on my world less destructive?
I am currently developing an habitable moon oribiting a gas giant in a resonant orbit, however at the current time I am concerned about the effect of the gas giant on my world when it comes to tidal ...
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How can a gas giant's magnetosphere affect a supposedly habitable tidally locked moon orbiting it?
I have been working on an habitable moon orbiting a gas giant about 3 times the mass of jupiter and lately I have been having issues assessing how the giant's magnetosphere may affect it. To give you ...
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Habitability of my world
For a big narrative project of mine I and my team developed an habitable moon that revolves around a gas giant in a star system with an F-star. I wanted to know what you think about it and if you ...
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The plausibility of this atmosphere? and what the problems that it case?
The atmosphere have ~1 atm pressure at sea level, It does have water ocean maybe 10-30% of the surface, also it supports tectonic plates so the carbon cycle does work, and the Ocean is made mainly of ...
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Could any Earth-based species survive on a supermassive terrestrial planet?
In the far future, a fleet of human settlers arrives in a star system containing an unusual planet; 90 times the mass of Earth, with only 3 times the radius. Rocky planets with similar mass are known ...
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Calculating the Atmospheric Properties of an Exoplanet
I am developing a double-star system filled with several planets, a few of which will be habitable. I also have a spreadsheet file full of all the planets information, from Semi-Major Axis, orbital ...
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How Habitable are these Planets?
For the book I'm writing for my world, Damarian, the villains of the series (The NUSA, America's descendant) are banished off Damarian (Spoilers). The banished are shipped off, but 3 groups formed, ...
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How would a person live on a gas giant?
I had an idea of a character in my story living on the bottom of the upper atmosphere in some sort of space station or ship. Would living like this in a gas giant be possible like on Bespin from Star ...
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Why is this planet such a bad place to live? [closed]
Admiral Edwin Witt was obsessed with discovering a habitable world so future generations would remember his name. After decades of searching, he found a world that challenges the very definition of ...
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Fake, Heatless Sun-like object hovering over a person on Earth, how deadly it would be?
Above the Crimson King in my story is a sun-like paetheon-sized asteroid (5.8 km in diameter) that follows him and never sets.
This is not an asteroid actually but i call it false sun and it appears ...
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Would this planet be habitable for intelligent lifeforms
I am trying to make a universe using math and this is a planet from the first solar system I am making. Firstly the star. This star, which I don't have a name for, has a mass of 1.3 solar masses, a ...
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Reef World 4 - Flora
Piggybacking on the previous “Reef World” questions.
Let’s talk Flora and how it adds to life and the environment on Reef World.
The entire planet is mostly covered in shallow ocean, but not ...
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Can a water world be turned into a dryer habitable planet by an early runaway greenhouse effect?
Consider an Earth clone with oceans several hundred kilometers deep, potentially deep enough to solidify into exotic ices. Such a planet would lose its initial hydrogen and helium atmosphere when the ...
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Placing a planet on the famous Escape Velocity Graph
If I'm understanding the chart correctly, in order for a planet with lower gravity than Earth (smaller than Earth), but with decent magnetosphere, to hold on to an atmosphere with oxygen, and water on ...
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Is My Moon Realistic?
Okay, I have this tropical moon that orbits a gas giant, and is suitable for human life. It has a radius of .9 Earth radii, a mass of .8704 Earth masses, a density of 6585 kg/m3, and a surface gravity ...
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Habitability of a Low Axial Tilt Planet with a Planetary Ring
So, I'm creating a world for a science fantasy setting. It has magic and such, but since it's mainly taboo to use it, I want the world's climate to be based on hard scientific facts.
My world has an ...
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If Thorne–Żytkow Objects Exist, How Far/Wide Would Their Habitable Zones Be?
First proposed in 1977 by physicist Kim Thorne and astronomer Anna Żytkow, a...you know what? Let's just call it a TZO, sounds easier that way. Anyway, a TZO is supposedly a giant or even a ...
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Could there be a star where humans could survive for a short time?
This honestly sounds like it's basically impossible, but here we go anyway.
We've picked up a strange reading from a spot orbiting a star in a system elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. We've come into ...
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Conditions for intelligent and diverse life at high altitudes
I'm making a planet which hosts three distinct layers of floating islands, each higher than the last one. The islands should be reasonably thick, ranging from a couple hundred metres to three or four ...
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Binary planets system day/night cycle
My story has two planets separated by ~35,000 miles of empty space- tidally locked through a magic "planetary anchor" light rope that connects the two planets and keeps them at that exact ...
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How would I make a natural, long-lived red giant star?
I have a system in which the main habitable planets are on the many moons of a super-neptune. The ice giant has not migrated inwards, but rather the habitable zone has expanded outwards due to the red ...
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What if a moon orbits far away and extremely fast?
Imagine an Earth-massed moon orbiting around a Saturn-massed planet in a period of 28 days. This calculation tells me that is possible if the moon is 1.8 million km away. If so, the moon must be ...
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A Habitable Zone Within a Habitable Zone--Would that Make any Difference?
Presented here is a quaternary solar system consisting of two binary orbits. One consists of two red giants, each one 100 times as wide, one-third as massive and 100 times as bright as our sun. Both ...
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Is This Realistic Physical Geography for my World?
One of the planets in my science-fantasy series is small (around the size of Earth's moon). The gravity implications of this are the one part of this the magical origins of my universe are able to ...
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