Questions tagged [space-colonization]
For questions concerning species that have settled on or near celestial bodies they are not native to and the challenges this presents.
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Bullet resistant space armor material
I'm currently developing a world in which humanity has colonized Mars. Armed bandit attacks are common, and military enforcers are necessary to eliminate these threats.
Most combatants use firearms in ...
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How would a government lay claim over a Space Colony that it never founded? What legal arguments could they make to cite it’s always been theirs? [closed]
I’ve read some books with a premise of leaving an increasingly centralized and decadent Earth for the stars before it heads a turn for the extra worse
Part of their premise is Earth Governments ...
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what is the minimum size for a human settlement to ensure genetic diversity? [duplicate]
assuming pretty good access to things like food and water, and a regular to slightly extended lifespan, would a population of ~120ish adults be enough to avoid inbreeding issues over time? basically, ...
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How would researchers on an alien planet be able to support their dietary requirements?
A group of scientists travels to a newly discovered planet shown to support life in the form of plants and animals. Obviously they can only bring so much food with them so at some point they would ...
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What would motivate a spacefaring civilization with access to effectively infinite resources to expand [closed]
I'm developing sci-fantasy setting in which the Home Planet was destroyed in an extinction level screw-up by a bunch of wizards, but a few thousand individuals were able to flee into space, and then ...
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Could this hypothetical Super-Earth support human life?
The Question Could this hypothetical Super-Earth (Planet Y) support the lives of human settlers arriving from off world, or have I created any reasons for the planet to be inhospitable?
Planet Y
Star: ...
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Is a society where children are entirely raised by boarding schools sustainable?
In my previous question, I brought up a hypothetical society where children aren't raised at all by their biological parents. Instead, the children are taken care of by hospital staff for the first ...
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Could this hypothetical Sub-Earth support human life?
The Question
Is a theoretical 2/3rds - 7/10ths Earth big enough to have the magnetic field, atmosphere and plate tectonics to do this, or will I wind up geologically killing the planet?
I have been ...
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Possibility of forced labour on a comet
Something I've pondered in a work of mine, in which a corrupt authority figure threatens the protagonists with being sentenced to forced labour "chiseling ice off of (insert name here) comet.&...
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Spacecraft Design of a Cold-Blooded Humanoid Race
I was talking with a friend recently and he reasoned that a cold-blooded race would take longer to get to space, but survive more easily once the technology progressed enough. The rationale was that a ...
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Fluvial systems: Are they necessary for human survival in domed cities on waterless planets
A world with a natural water cycle has rivers which generate a lot of transportation and ecological benefits. But gravity and sunlight drive those engines. An artificial domed community doesn’t have ...
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Why would lunar megacorps install a government in this scenario? [closed]
The year is 2170. Ish. Humans have colonised Mars, but the planet has yet to rival the economic might of other solar system worlds. As of yet, the main colonial power in the sol system is our own ...
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How to make a Stanford torus start rotating?
The notion of using the so called Stanford torus to generate artificial gravity is well known, but once you build the mega-structure how do you make it start rotating? Do you rotate somehow from the ...
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How does a Person survive an intergalactic voayage?
Intergalactic voyages are long, they go over quite large distances, but you, a human in the Milky Way, want to see a galaxy beyond our own with your own eyes and live there. At 99% the speed of light, ...
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How Much of the Universe Could Humanity Conquer?
Imagine that less than a million years from now, probably in the hundreds of thousands, humanity has spread throughout the galaxy. There are afew aliens here and there, but that is insignificant, they ...
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Regulations Regarding Artificial Embryos In Space Colonization [closed]
With natural reproduction in space having significant issues and drawbacks, such as the presence of microgravity causing either minor or severe detrimental alterations to human physiology, scientists ...
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Are interstellar penal colonies a feasible idea?
I've been exploring the idea of an interstellar penal colony or prison planet from a realistic perspective. This idea is featured in many science fiction stories, but I've never really thought deeply ...
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Ideal location for settlement on Bishop Ring Space habitat
let's take a Bishop Ring, with a diameter of approximately 1800km, 460km wide and with retention walls 150 km tall. At the centre of the ring there is an artificial sun that recreates a day/night ...
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Ways to harvest hydrogen (apart from sun and giant planets)
Various posts and articles discuss the possibility to harvest hydrogen (but also Helium etc...) from the Sun or the giant planets, Uranus appearing the be the most favourable for this operation.
Is ...
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What earth crops could be grown on a high gravity (1.5-3g) planet?
I feel like there must be a lot of factors here from the actual structural rigidity of the plants, to how well capillary action functions in higher gravity, to how well cellular mechanisms such as ...
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Why are interstellar colonists lone rangers? (Not-so-far future version)
This question is inspired by Why are interstellar colonists lone rangers?. I know that many of its answers are also suitable for this questions. However, I am more interested in ideas that work with ...
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Aeroponic farming in a gas giant
In the setting of my projects there is a gas giant (with a mass of about 3 jupiters) that migrated within the habitable zone, as such it's outer atmosphere would feature plenty of water wapor and have ...
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Is this a viable theoretical method of fast interplanetary space travel?
Let's say in the future humanity has traveled to all parts of the solar system, but they want to be able to travel between planets faster. In pursuit of this, they create massive space probes with ...
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Nose-wrestling for political power - Is a human trunk possible in terms of evolution?
In the far future, a planet in the Milky Way that was colonised by humans 500,000 years before has developed nose-wrestling as a means of establishing dominance.
This is thought to have begun with a ...
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Growing space on an early planetary colony
So, humans in the distant future have launched a sleeper ship to a new solar system. Having shed its light-sails in orbit, the vessel has crash landed on it’s intended World; a barren mars-like planet....
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A laser-propelled starship loses its decelerating beam; what options do they have to slow down?
New to the site, and like many others here, I've been bouncing around a few ideas for a hard sci-fi short story with some friends, centered around an interstellar voyage to colonize a habitable world. ...
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Why would multiple off-world colonies secede all at once? [closed]
So, we have a situation where various Earth countries, (the Republic of Alaska, the United States of Europe, etc) now all have colonies on Mars, over venus and under the surface of Mercury. Technology ...
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Justifying why the birth of a post-scarcity world would cause other planets to secede
So, in roughing out the basic historical timeline of this project o’ mine, I have decided that the two most important aspects of the 24th century are:
1st, the birth of a post-scarcity on Earth, ...
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How will corporations ensure return on investment for funding slower than light colonization efforts?
Let's say a future world where faster than light communication exists, but not faster than light travel. There is a desire to colonize other worlds outside the solar system, but it's massively ...
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How long would it take to recreate the biosphere on a “dead Earth” planet?
So, one of my main settings involves humanity colonizing an Earth-like planet. The planet has all the abiotic features needed to support mankind (oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, magnetic field, 70% ...
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What do you call fishing on a planet where there are no fish? [closed]
When Plato gave Socrates the definition of man as “featherless bipeds,” Diogenes found and plucked a chicken and brought the poor creature into Plato's Academy, placed it on the ground and announced, “...
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What would the easiest planet to terraform look like?
With terraforming, how to do it and how long it takes depends largely on the planet in question. Worlds such as Venus may be nigh-impossible to terraform, whereas worlds more similar to prebiotic ...
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Can you destroy a dyson swarm?
The Swarm
Let's suppose we have a dyson swarm with an orbital trajectory analogous to the star-link constellation over earth, although only over a relatively small belt (lets say about 20 degrees from ...
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Planetesimal Habitation Grav-Train?
The Ring
Let's say, for the sake of argument, we have a small, sort-of-heavy moon, with little geological activity, orbiting a gas giant. Let's take Ganymede. It has around 0.12Gs of surface gravity. ...
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Would a rotating habitat work on the surface of a moon?
While we hear a lot about rotating habitats as a space structure, I happen to know there are a large number of small worlds and moons out there cursed with low gravity, which has a similar effect to ...
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How Mars colonization/terraformation could go so wrong, that it would be uncolonizable [closed]
So, in my world (~Cyberpunk level of technology) humans are trying to either colonize or terraform Mars (both is fine, doesn't really matter that much for the story). But then, something needs to go ...
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If Mars and Venus were habitable, by when would they have been colonized? [closed]
The first human stepped foot on the Moon in 1969.
The first probe (Venera 3) landed on Venus in 1970
The first probe (Mars 3) landed on Mars in 1971.
If Venus and Mars were habitable (they have liquid ...
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Functioning humanoid society with negligible gravity
In a fictional world, a humanoid species settles upon a foreign planet and intends to build a colony on this planet with an eventual goal of full habitation. They originally chose this planet for ...
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How would humans contend with low gravity when they colonize Titan?
So, in this setting, by the year 2139, humans have landed a fleet of settler ships on Titan to create the Asteria colony. They will repurpose the ships into anchored buildings, and stay there until ...
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Are horses better than rovers on a habitable planet with a small colony
OK, so, as a bit of scene setting in a story I am writing, a small group of people has landed on a nearly exact replica of Earth (atmospherics, geology, and physical parameters are nearly the same as ...
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How could my characters be tricked into thinking they are on Mars? [closed]
In the not-so-distant future, a corporation announces their plan to turn a colony on Mars into a competition-reality show. This is a believable claim, because others have already colonized Mars, but ...
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Saturnian Cloud Cities Pt. 7- Kronothermal Hydrogen Pumps
Recap
So my Cloud-cities, were practically Rigid-Hull Airships made of titanium and graphene to withstand severe wind-speeds and turbulent weather on Saturn. The Cloud-cities in question, are floating ...
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How to make a good landing pad for a start-up colony
Due to the expansion of humanity into the stars, landing pads have popped up on every planet with even a remote resemblance of a permanent human presence, whether they start with a dozen or a thousand ...
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Protecting Proxima Centauri from solar wind
So, I’m trying to terraform Proxima Centauri B, an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf. This star emits a lot of UV, solar flares and solar wind, which all pose a problem for colonists; the UV and solar ...
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Can Nanorobots make oxygen to terraform Mars?
I have devised a way of colonising Mars by pantropy, (that is, by adapting life to the environment rather than terraforming it, which is exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming). The process ...
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Could a virus be used to terraform planets?
I came up with a society of insectoid aliens called Ebline, based on ants. Their class structure and stuff are very interesting, but their coolest tool is a virus called Cuulaziu. When they find a new ...
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Chances for a Large Asteroid Hitting Mars
Since Mars is much closer to the asteroid belt, is it also more likely an asteroid large enough for planetary devastation (~1 kilometer) will strike it? I'm especially wondering how such a possibility ...
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Is there a point in the moon where the gravity is earth like?
Supposing, out of boredom, we were to settle on the moon.
I read that at certain depths on earth, the gravity is stronger than on the surface, so presumably the same is true to Luna.
If so, then is ...
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Could magnetism work in place of gravity for large bases in space?
So, in my sci-fi future, humanity has spread across the universe, made contact with many sentient races, and advanced technology greatly.
However, very few bases in the vacuum of space can use ...
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Saturnian Cloud-Cities Pt. 6 :- Geothermal Cables Vs Stupendously Large Airships
In my previous questions, I discussed the possibility of cloud cities on Saturn
And there were a few technologies which could be useful for the colony. The cloud-cities in question are giant airships,...
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