Questions tagged [hard-science]
REVIEW THE WIKI BEFORE USING THIS TAG! For questions that require unequivocal proof that answers are correct through the use of equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, etc. Compare to: science-fiction, science-based and internal-consistency. This tag may not be used alone. This tag may not be used with the science-fiction, science-based, or internal-consistency tags. Flag your question for moderator attention once posted.
984
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How realistic is my idea of dividing the brain into several separate models?
Recently, I decided to work on scientifically plausible superhumans that would have to be quite different from ordinary people from an anatomical point of view and be many times smarter than us.
So ...
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1
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How Small Can a Planet be with 1G Gravity and Tectonics?
Without resorting to solid osmium inner cores that we couldn't give an origin story for, what's a cosmologically plausible lower bound of a planet's radius that also maintains 1G gravity and the sort ...
5
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1
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What would we notice if the fine structure constant started to increase?
What would we notice if the fine structure constant started to increase?
Wikipedia says:
For instance, were α to change by 4%, stellar fusion would not produce carbon, so that carbon-based life would ...
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3
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Black Hole Weapons - Laser/Particle Beam?
First post here, but longtime lurker :3
My question is this: if you have a civilization that is using black holes as a battery/pseudo power source, and they want to weaponize it -without- shooting the ...
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3
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Is bi-metallic blood possible to develop organically in a species?
I've looked up the different "Colorations" of blood online, different metal-based proteins have differing levels of oxygen transfer efficiency, but those were answers I didn't find ...
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1
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It is possible to slow down time without a Black Hole? [closed]
Well, I saw a interesting question in other sites and it made me wondering.
Since cryogenics and hibernation aren't exactly that easy, and colony ships that travel through the eons in space carrying ...
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1
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How deep would the frozen atmosphere be?
I have a rough planet with the following specs:
Data
Value
Mean Radius:
4886.4 km (almost 50% larger than mars)
Surface Area:
3.00046x10^8 km^2 (0.58 Earths)
Volume:
4.88715x10^11 km^3 (0.45 ...
- 585
0
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1
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Scanning for Resources and Mapping a Rogue Planet
EDIT: Thanks to Starfish Prime's answer to this it looks like the atmospheric ice would only be ~16m thick, and the water vapor is a rounding error. I have adjusted the layering to account for their ...
- 585
2
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0
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Plausible altitude for my planet's ring?
The numbers come (relative to Earth and the Sun respectively unless indicated otherwise) as follows:
Planet:
Mass: 1,32
Radius: 1,24
Gravity: 0,86
Density: 0,69
Semi-major axis: 1,24
Escape velocity: ...
- 1,273
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3
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What is the largest possible appearance of a celestial body in the sky?
In SciFi Art we often see planets/moons/stars fill enormous amounts of the visible sky. I'm wondering what the theoretical limit for this is realistically, since there are maxima for the possible size ...
- 3,090
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How wide should be the most possible visual spectrum for an organic eye?
A typical human eye reacts to waves with a length of 380 to 750 nanometers, which in frequency corresponds to the strip in the area of 400-790 THz. At the same time, a portion of 380-400 nm is ...
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4
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Making the Moon brighter with talcum powder - how much brighter could it be?
A future nation wants to make the Moon as bright as possible in order to save massive amounts of night-time electricity on Earth at certain phases of the moon.
The plan is to coat the Moon's surface ...
- 49.3k
5
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3
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How much energy can a space ship use internally without overheating?
More thoughts on hard science possibilities for interstellar colonization and the request to check my understanding of physics.
Suppose you have a fully self contained colony ship. They have some ...
- 1,565
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1
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Ringworld held in place around a Magnetar using Quantum Locking
Ringworlds are very interesting superstructures sometimes found in science fiction, but they run afoul of being under so much force that they would rip apart any known materials.
Magnetars are Neutron ...
- 87.8k
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2
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How long can a given volume of air in an airtight chamber remain breathable?
If we have a known volume of air in an airtight chamber (basically, in a spaceship) of atmospheric composition and pressure, and we know the number of people in the chamber, how long does the air ...
- 2,035
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4
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How to achieve an area of long-lasting radioactivity, without affecting surrounding areas?
Question
(How) can we have a very long lasting source of radioactivity with strongly harmful effects within its area, without those effects dispersing into nearby areas?
Constraints
The source of ...
- 6,981
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1
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796
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Does the sun provide enough energy to accelerate a large ship to a decent proportion of the speed of light?
This came up when running some numbers on the hard science possibilities of interstellar colonization and I mostly want to know whether I made some major errors and am off by a few orders of magnitude ...
- 1,565
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3
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Would an Antimatter Engine be dangerous to use around people?
I was considering having the spacecraft in my setting use antimatter-matter spacecraft, but then I realised that at least some of the annihilation of protons and electrons with antiprotons and ...
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1
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Fleet tactics & strategies in a hard sci-fi setting with near light speed weapons, ultra hypervelocity kinetics, realistic sensors, and torch ships
I am trying to figure out tactics and strategies for ships that move in a Newtonian regime and use weapons at or near the speed of light. Signals are also at light speed, being lidar and radar; ECM ...
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Is there any upper limit on the size a plant can reach? [duplicate]
Is there any innate limitation (like the square-cube law for animals) that restricts the size which a plant can grow to? Is it simply a matter of having sufficient nutrients and time?
I've been ...
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2
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What change in the nutritious regime are needed without organic limbs
I got this idea of a society where for some reason where electric energy and a vast array of mechanical prostesis are basicly free, but food on the other hand is extremly expensive. The thing is I ...
- 1,039
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2
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Is The Climate Map for My Alternate Earth Accurate?
Here is a map of an alternate Earth that I've been building and rebuilding for years:
To make things easier on all of us, myself included especially, at the bottom left is a legend on this world's ...
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0
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How would ballistics, rocketry and orbital mechanics work on a ring world? [duplicate]
I'm new here so sorry if my formatting sucks but I was wondering how rocketry and orbital mechanics would work on a ring world?
I was thinking my ring world would be 1 AU in radius, 80,150km in length....
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5
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How to keep Utility Fog in place?
I was thinking about the concept of Utility Fog, programmable matter that can replicate a physical structure. They can be made to form air, furniture, and even entire buildings, with sufficient ...
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3
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Uncovering superhuman cetacean intelligence
My world is as close as possible to contemporary real life under the constraint that orcas (and maybe other cetaceans) are significantly smarter than humans.
What is smarts?
We define it as ...
- 478
4
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1
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278
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How long and how much money would it take to rebuild a war torn domain/city in a late Medieval esque society (+ levitation magic)?
This is research for a book I'm writing which is set in a world with the technology level and feudal system of the late medieval period. The only exception is that there is magic and a non-human race ...
- 542
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3
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347
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How should the human body be arranged, adapted to the lethal level of radiation?
A lethal dose is considered to be 6 Sievert and above, but absolutely lethal exposure to a dose of over 10 Sievert. The main reason for cell death under extreme environmental influences (in our case, ...
- 815
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1
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How should the respiratory system of a person adapted to high-mountain conditions be arranged?
As known because of the rarefied air, the blood in the mountainous regions is less saturated with oxygen. Because of this, the inhabitants of the lowlands who got there often feel weakness, malaise ...
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3
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Protecting Mars with no magnetosphere: Can genetic engineering help?
It is the year something-something, and the Sol system has been colonized. The Sun is surrounded by a growing cloud of habitats, Venus is a veritable garden world, Jupiter is being fed mass from the ...
- 4,373
2
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2
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400
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Introducing Television/Cellphone tech to lower tech society
So aliens show up on earth in the mid 1800s (or modernish humans but with FTL show up at an alien world w/ equivalent tech level). They want to share some of their advanced technology with us (not ...
- 7,280
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1
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Feedback/help on planetary density?
I’m at a bit of a wall here. I have numbers for mass, radius, and gravity for my planet (Neogaea), but the density is escaping me.
Mass: 1.31 earth masses
Radius: 1.027 earth radius
Gravity: 1.25 ...
- 63
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3
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How far would we have to travel to make all of our familiar constellations unrecognisable?
How far would we have to travel to make all of our familiar constellations unrecognisable? (in terms of human recognition)**
We know that groupings of stars in constellations is illusory. Two ...
- 49.3k
6
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3
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Shape of a Large Battle Laser?
If I have lasers being used as a primary weapon for spaceships in a realistic sci-fi setting, what would the proportions of the laser cannon itself be? Presumably the cannon would be cylindrical, but ...
- 3,267
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1
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Could a world exist without autotrophs, but have heterotrophs?
I was watching Biblaridian’s biosphere videos and he said it is
believed that heterotrophs evolved before autotrophs.
This gave me a cool idea: what if a (my) world had heterotrophs, but no autotrophs?...
- 63
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4
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Localized snow storm
I am looking for any way to make a very localized snow fall event in the same way hail could be a very local event (and I believe summer showers could be very local too). There should be a village ...
- 1,260
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1
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Specs for body armor rated to stop a heavy machine gun
I have a setting where some units of specialized infantry use ridiculously over-engineered power armor similar to that worn by the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout or Space Marines in Warhammer 40k. ...
- 87.8k
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2
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Flammability in denser atmospheres: is it a serious problem?
Take a planet with an atmosphere somewhat similar to Earth's but denser, say 9-10bar incl 2-3bar O2, rest mostly N2 with some CO2 (0.1-0.3bar?) Temperature likewise similar to Earth, in the liquid ...
- 5,519
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1
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What problems will a person with purple blood (hemerithrin instead of hemoglobin) have?
Hemerythrin is an oligomeric iron-containing protein of the metalloprotein class found in the blood of some invertebrates. Able to reversibly bind with oxygen, ensuring its transfer to tissues. ...
- 1,509
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1
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How would I calculate population growth over 300 years with little advancement after an extinction event?
HEAVY EDIT after a few hours sleep and some coffee. Retracting my own answer and adding it to the questioon as it doesn't actually solve my problem and gave me more questions. My logic last night was ...
- 4,871
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1
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What should the faster nerves be like?
In 1830, one of the greatest physiologists of the 19th century, Johann Müller, declared that the rate of propagation of electrical impulse in neurons was impossible to measure. In his opinion, since ...
- 1,509
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2
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Black Hole for ship artificial gravity?
So in my universe ship use thrust or spin to create gravity. But what if I could “contain” (assume I can contain it) a black hole to use it for gravity. This way ships can drift and still have gravity....
- 2,082
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1
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Endless rain in a cave
I am currently designing an extensive big volcanic cave system located underneath a glacier, which contains a phenomenon of underground rain. The nearby volcano is still active, and heats the ice year ...
- 1,660
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1
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Data and Processing Power of Multiple Telescope Array
I've been looking at the idea of Multiple Telescope Arrays, but there's an aspect I can't quite figure out. I have the angular resolution part down, and it's absolutely nuts how far away you can see ...
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4
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How to increase the cognitive ability of the human brain without increasing the size of the cranium?
Graham is the joint brainchild of sculptor Patricia Piccinini, a leading trauma and road safety specialist. The humanoid creature they created is developed on the basis of many car accidents and ...
- 1,509
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2
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Spinning up the Moon: does it survive the event?
The year is 2xxx. A large asteroid is spotted on a collision course with Earth. The more time it passes, the more it is clear that the impact cannot be avoided. But when most of humanity is starting ...
- 275k
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1
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What needs to be changed in the structure of the human body to be able to drink salt water and at the same time conserve water like camels?
The saltiest sea on the planet is the Dead Sea. It is 10 times saltier than the ocean average (34 g in the ocean to 340 g per liter of water in the Dead Sea). This high salinity is because it has ...
- 1,509
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3
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What would the geography a planet with extreme tides look like?
A planet with two orbiting moons (not-tidally locked) and large oceans will have extreme tides. Both moons are about the size of our Moon. I do not know an exact number, but I'm estimating somewhere ...
- 1,583
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0
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What would the seasonal patterns be like on this world?
Here's the set up on this system I have: The sun is .99 solar mass, .97 luminosity. The world in question has the following orbital parameters:
Dist: 1.253 AU Orbital Period: 1.41 (rel. to Earth)
...
- 83
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2
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What is the ideal day length for extreme weather?
This question is in reference to a previous question by TrEs-2b and SRM:
I want to create a planet with a significantly longer day than Earth's. However, I was only able to find a question about a ...
- 1,583
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6
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751
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How would you arrange wormholes throughout the galaxy so that they don't violate the Chronology protection conjecture?
Any form of FTL, including traversable wormholes, allows backwards time travel. (EDIT: I mean going backwards in coordinate time. We get to closed timelike curves later in the post.) My world has ...
- 12.6k