Questions tagged [sunlight]
Questions involving radiant energy from the Sun.
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Artificially simulate a northern-latitude environment in India (UV radiation) in order to make its natives fair-skinned
Assuming the Himalayas are successfully lowered to around 1,000-3,000 meters in altitude with artificial means, with some mountains kept at their actual altitude to feed the most important rivers, the ...
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What would be the climatic and solar conditions of a canyon 1 kilometer below sea level in the West Siberian Plain?
Imagine a 3km wide, 99km long canyon which is 1km below sea level, just next to the city of Surgut but not passing through. This canyon has been dug as part of some superproject which seeks to create ...
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Colour of the sky on a planet near a red dwarf [duplicate]
The twin planets Rhoda and Mary are two planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf star 6 lightyears from earth. The two orbit 0.05 AU from their sun, and 415,000 km from each other. They are ...
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How to estimate the energy output of artificial suns
Setting
I'm designing a world where only a thin belt wrapping the equator of a planet is hospitable. It would look something like this:
The backstory, diluted for brevity, is that the central sun was ...
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Suppose an array of mirrors 50 km above the surface reflect light straight down. How long before the sun rise are they illuminated?
Suppose at a point in the earth’s future, a superstructure has been built at the northern 45 parallel. 50 kilometers above sea level, a large array of mirrors has been built. The mirrors are ...
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How can we prevent the Earth being scorched and swallowed as the Sun grows and eventually enters its red giant phase?
The Sun is slowly growing more and more luminous.
As a result of these processes, multicellular life forms may be extinct in about 800 million years, and eukaryotes in 1.3 billion years, leaving only ...
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Could a moon made of fissile uranium produce enough heat to replace the sun?
This was my answer to this question:
Retrofitting geocentrism - what replaces the star?
I spent long enough on it and got an interesting enough result that I wanted to share, so that it might be a ...
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Would merfolk have pale skin?
Quite simply question. In my story I am depicting merfolk as having lighter skin than even Caucasian people, contrasting to my human society which bears resemblance skin tone wise to Hispanics.
I've ...
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Viability of solar furnace/smelter in pre-industrial society
I am trying to figure out how plausible it would be for people without electricity or steam power technology to use the sun to smelt and forge iron and steel. The people developing this solar furnace ...
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What changes to a humans physical form would occur if society lived inside the Earth?
(Mandatory I am new here, hello, nice to meet some fellow world builders, sorry for any mistakes, yikkity yak and all that)
In my "world", it has been 500 years since the majority of human ...
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How large must a solar furnace be in order to sweep a planets surface melting everything in its path?
To melt a planets surface erasing all traces of civilisation, I figured a solar furnace would do the trick. It is more elegant than nuking a planet, not to mention leaves no nuclear fallout. Perfect ...
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Visibility of a Dyson swarm "creature" from its orbiting planet
An alien species has built Dyson swarms around stars which have orbiting planets with primitive life on them. The section of the star which is facing the planet with life is left uncovered to let the ...
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Can one half of a planet be desolate, while the other half is lush vegetation?
Is it possible for half a planet to be cold, dark and lifeless while the other is a lush jungle? Can a planet be tidally locked to a sun where the jungle surface is always facing the light, and the ...
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How do migratory dragons avoid being blinded by sun?
These dragons are as big as double decker with wing span approaching 20m measuring from tip to tip, they migrate in large numbers and fly at an altitude between 10,000m to 20,000m above sea level. ...
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How big does a world have to be to not have a sunset?
Normally we watch the sun descend, it's dimmed a bit by the atmosphere before dropping below the horizon.
What I'm interested in is how big it would have to be so the atmospheric dimming is sufficient ...
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How would a crystal moon interact with light from the sun? Would a crystal moon reflect "too much" light for night time?
I have an earth-like planet in a fantasy setting with two moons, one of them made of crystal. It will be a fantasy crystal, properties TBD (probably by some of the answers to this question).
My main ...
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How would the 'sky' look in a Stanford Torus?
I hope this is focused enough: my question boils down to: "How do people living in a Stanford Torus experience the sky?"
Context: Operating on the assumption that we're in a fairly typical ...
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Where does most of a sun's energy go?
first post ever here. I've read the guidelines, but please do let me know if I'm breaking any rule or doing something wrong.
So, I am creating a magic system based on the energy of a star. More ...
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Can mirrors on the moon allow solar panels to operate at night?
Solar panels cannot operate at night.
If we put self-adjusting mirrors on the near side of the moon, they could reflect sunlight back to the dark Earth, allowing solar panels to operate at night.
How ...
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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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How would Blue/Yellow colored plants change during different weather seasons
My planet basically revolves around a blue star or a star that gives off more blue wavelengths, and the color of the plants are either blue or yellow or both because they are trying to absorb the most ...
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Can humanoids be of dark skin despite living somewhat lower than the equator and vice versa?
So if the places on the equator of my world has light skinned people of the deserts while the places a bit south of the equator can have dark skinned folks of tropical rainforests, is that explainable ...
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Why does my arcology let light in, when it was originally a sleeper ship
In my story the protagonist lives in an arcology, but this is not just any arcology.
Over a 100 years ago, a global war fought between those who sided with a massively distributed and rather 'insane' ...
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If visible light from the sun stopped hitting the earth but the sun still existed, how would this affect the earth?
The sun produces light, heat, and other things. If the visible spectrum of light from the sun stopped hitting the earth but only the light directly from the sun, so moonlight and if heat can be ...
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What Would the Sky Look Like If the Sun Were a Different Color (And Still Half a Degree Wide)? [duplicate]
This question has been asked many, many, many times--what would the sky look like if the sun were a different color? But the mistake I keep seeing is that they used actual stars and imagined Earth as ...
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Creating fog over the ocean and large island using electricity and..?
Short version: This sea dragon can discharge and manipulate electricity. It wants to cover a large area of the ocean's surface in fog, how could it accomplish this? The creature is intelligent and has ...
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Magic system- photosynthesis/"solar cell" dragons using electricity for warmth?
Background: So, I'm creating a magic system for a race of dragons based on the abilities of the Oriental Hornet and the Elysia chlorotica. both of these animals can directly utilize solar energy. I ...
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Earth with no sunlight
What phenomenon could stop or reduce the sunlight on Earth?
I am thinking about a prolonged solar eclipse. Is it possible for it to last for years?
If not, is there a way for the sun to stop shining ...
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How Bright Would a "Summer" Night Be on This Extreme Alternate Earth?
Here is the oversimplified map of the solar system of an alternate Earth:
It is actually two separate binaries--one consisting of a red giant 100 times as wide, one-third as massive and 1,000 times ...
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Would Venusian Sunlight Be Too Much for Earth Plants?
This is Chris Wayans's map of a terraformed Venus:
While there have been questions in this Stack Exchange on how to make Venus more livable for us humans, one question stands glaringly absent, and ...
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Which Crops Could be Grown in a Subpolar Oceanic (CFC) Climate Zone?
In my fantasy series, the area the main protagonist is from is cool and dreary year-round, but never cold and never hot. For example, it never really gets higher than the 60s farenheit at the peak of ...
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Red Sun Plus Blue Sun Equals Magenta Sky?
Okay, my second cousin is working on a story that takes place on a planet named Odroia. It is an Earthlike planet with a supercontinent similar to Pangea, that has scattered rivers and lakes, with its ...
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Perpetual Day Planet
I’d like to know if this is plausible: A habitable planet that’s always day. It kinda works like this: The planet orbits its largest sun, which is also orbited by three smaller suns that share the ...
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What would seasons and daylight be like if the Earth was on an eight-shaped orbit between two stars?
I'm building a medieval-high-fantasy world and I want it to have two suns. I'd like it to make it somewhat realistic at least as far as seasons and light/biomes go, while the actual feasibility of ...
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How Bright Would the Sky on This Alternate Earth Be? The Sequel to "The 372-Day Calendar"
Long ago, I asked how far Earth would orbit the sun if one year lasts 372 days instead of 365 and how much it'd affect the overall brightness. What I got was that Earth with a 372-day calendar would ...
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Earth was suddenly teleported away from the sun. Can we recover?
Through some evil scientist man's evil plot to destroy the world, he transported the entire Earth away from the sun into an unknown point in space where there is no sun. Could we recover?
Details-
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How would day and night look like on a planet that orbits two suns? [duplicate]
I'm writing a fantasy story set in a p-type circumbinary system and I'd like to know how this would affect day and night, when the suns and moon would be visible, and the climate and seasons on the ...
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What colour is my sky? If my planet has two different suns
In my fictional binary system, my planet has two suns: a white dwarf star and a red giant. I would like to know what colour my sky would be when both suns are in the sky of my planet.
I've done some ...
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What kind of power could be stronger than light and shadow? [closed]
I am creating a world where exist 2 main types of magic users: the ones with the ability to control the light of the sun and the ones with the ability to control the darkness of the shadows/moon. ...
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Harnessing energy directly from the sun via quantum tunneling
In the universe of my story, the Earth is ridden with metahumans with uncanny powers that do all sorts of different things. Of course, to do all this, they would require a tremendous amount of energy, ...
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An Earth with a permanent winter state with drastically reduced temperature, dark skies and mass extinctions
I had posted a question a couple of days ago asking if it would be possible for an artificial satellite/cosmic body at the L1 orbit to block out the Sun, but the logistics of that is a little too ...
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What would happen to all life on Earth if the planet started suddenly receiving reduced sunlight? [duplicate]
Let's say that the Sun suddenly almost completely shuts down and the Earth is now able to only receive an amount of sunlight equal to that received by the Moon during a full-moon night.
(Assuming ...
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How to explain a planet around a K-Type star with Orange/Red/Purple plants?
Basically, in a sci-fi roleplaying group I am apart of, I have began to work on a long-standing human colony world. The tech-level is pretty much bog-standard sci-fi, and such, colonisation is ...
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What if the Sun were suddenly 2/3 as bright? [closed]
The amount of solar energy received by Earth is reduced to 67% of the current amount, uniformly across the Earth and throughout the EM spectrum. The mass of the sun stays the same.
One month later, ...
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How would a Dyson Swarm transmit energy to the Earth?
The Dyson Swarm is common in sci fi as an energy source, and sometimes also as a powerful weapon. As it is commonly understood, it harnesses the energy of the sun, which stores a vast amount of energy....
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What colour would a flat world's sky be?
In continuation of my previous question, I'm wondering about the colour of a flat world's sky.
To recap the previous question, I'm imagining a flat world with the sun fixed relatively low above the ...
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Anatomically correct Kryptonian, part 1
Part of the Anatomically Correct series of questions.
Due to the nature of Superman having so many different powers, I wanted to focus specifically on one aspect of his character: the ability to be ...
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How much sunlight can I get into my O'Neill cylinder and how much light needs to be artificial?
The cylinder is 32 km long in total, 8 km in diameter, with 3km long endcaps, resulting in a habital area with a length of 26 km (= and an area of cirka 754 km2). The main body of the cylinder is ...
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Would living on around Alpha Centauri change how our eyes see color?
I am writing a sci fi novel in which one of the primary factions is a lost space colony sent to Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C) roughly 350 years prior on a generation ship. The trip took roughly ...
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How tall would a rainforest need to be to make it completely dark at ground level
Most of the sunlight in a rainforest is intercepted by its canopy. Only about 2% of the light reaches the ground. How tall would a rainforest need to be to make it completely dark at ground level? ...
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