# Tag Info

23

Last summer, for another answer on Worldbuilding, I wrote a script in an attempt to show how the positions of stars in the sky would change from the perspective of an observer outside the Solar System, using data from three catalogs: the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese databases. (The site which generated the CSV file I used is currently down, ...

21

It might work well! I initially thought - no way. This molecule is for cold blooded creatures living in low oxygen environments. It is going to be burnt by our high O2 environment and will not deliver O2 adequate for our hot muscles. To my surprise I found a bunch of stuff about using hemerythrin as a blood substitute! Towards the Development of Hemerythrin-...

7

You have blundered somewhere in calculating the density $density = mass / volume$ $density = 1.31 M_E / (1.027 R_E)^3 = 1.31/(1.027)^3 D_E = 1.209 D_E$ which seems much more reasonable. To explain why I didn't count the constants: $V_E =4/3 \pi R^3_E$ $V_P = 4/3 \pi R^3_P$ $V_P/V_E = $$4/3 \pi R^3_P \over 4/3 \pi R^3_E$$= R^3_P/R^3_E = (1.027R_E)^3/R^3_E$

6

Hdes answer is very thorough and essentially correct, and I am not going to duplicate their mathematics, but the flaw in their answer is the corner case of moving directly away from a constellation. Taking the southern cross as an example, the closest star is 88 light years. If I moved 88 light years away from it, the crosses angular size would halve, and it ...

6

What you want is lake-effect snow. Areas downwind of large lakes can have very heavy snow, while nearby areas that don’t share the same topography have much less.

5

Frame Challenge: Bigger Ain't Better Why would you want a lens 100m across? Lasers are more capable of delivering power over distance the narrower their beam is. More importantly, anti-ship weapons wouldn't have lenses; nothing is sufficiently optically pure to allow the laser energy to pass through without destroying the lens. You want as small a beam as ...

5

Medical science is not the limiting factor, food production and infrastructure building is. If you give people enough nutritious food and a place to live, and no other task, you can double your population every 15 years. This requires each woman to bear about 8 children, and for them to live to maturity. You could achieve your 9 billion target population in ...

4

Faster information From what you said in the comments I see you want is faster information. Unfortunately ten times faster electricity will not result in ten times faster information for the brain. There are multiple parts that reduce the speed of information. The synaptic terminals, the stimulation of the neuron, the refractory period and neural structures. ...

3

What you are asking it's plausible enough, just based on personal experience. I live not far from the border with Belgium: I am a few minutes cycling away from "abroad". Last week while here it was cold and raining, across the border there were 50+ cm of snow. In February 2012 I was working for an installation in the field in a village on the ...

3

The obvious first step is to look at real-world vehicles which are rated to resist HMGs. STANAG 4569 Level 4, even if that might overestimate things a little (the ex-Soviet 14.5mm vs. the Western .50-cal). Googling a bit says 16.5mm composite plus 15mm ceramic, at 90.5 kg per square meter. A human has 1.5-2 square meters skin area. The outer hull of your ...

3

Ice Ice is your friend. Keep the rock itself cold, cold enough to freeze water. Keep the water a little warmer than that. The line of balance between frozen water and liquid, assuming temperatures remain consistent, will keep a layer of ice on the rock. The water won't erode the rock, it'll just strip some ice and freeze in its place. It'd be dependent ...

2

It is lucky for space travelers that they have much easier ways to find their posiitons in space than by recognizing constellations. So if you want to reduce your fictional characters to recognizing constellations, you will have to disable those superior methods, perhaps by having the ship's AI control them and thus the AI's malfunction will interfere with ...

2

Let's assume that you are using some kind of micro-black hole, with the convenient gravity approximating Earth's surface outside of the containment chamber. That means, of course, that your micro-black hole has a pretty good fraction of the mass of the Earth, a mass likely to be far greater than your spaceship. You will need to expend fuel equivalent to ...

2

The continents largely could look however you like; they're down to the tectonic plates rather than the tides themselves. With the twin moons as you mentioned, the tides wouldn't be much more than Earth's: even if they were twice or thrice Earth's then there wouldn't be much of a difference from an orbit-level perspective unless the coasts were all virtually ...

1

No, no cylinders. The most optimal path is to hid your laser-generating part of the setup in the hull, leaving outside only a rotational mirror turret. Like that: Do away with the useless in space aerodynamic shell, and you're left with this: (The flaps are for the protection of the mirror from micrometeorites or the enemy and are closed in any instance ...

1

Each would be a giant diamond crystal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiAtCLHFep8 You have a lot of little laser pump beams. They combine their energy through a diamond and emit one giant beam, Death Star style. Little pump beams might escape out the side so give this things some space when you fire. You get your enormous diamonds from the correct ...

1

Not in a normal environment: A lot of people will refer to organisms like what you're discussing as chemoautotrophs, so it's a blurry line. Heterotrophs need to NOT fix carbon to build organics, which is a challenge. The earliest organisms evolved in a nutrient-rich environment because nothing had ever consumed all the natural organics in the environment. So ...

1

Two gentle fronts, one warm and one cool meet as equals. Together they have a snow baby. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/27/bizarre-snow-strip-over-kansas-just-15-miles-across-highlights-challenges-forecasting/ Weather satellites confirmed the bizarre feature, which highlights the meteorological caprice that can give rise to such narrow ...

1

So I grew up in Maryland where predicting snow was interesting. In this state 80% of the population lives 40 minutes or less from the boarder with another state by car and we do have days where a part of the state it is snowing and another part is covered. When predicting school closures as the kid, I would generally look at which portion of the state ...

1

Everyone in the ship will die of cramps, circulation problems. The force of a gravity field around some mass follows a gradient. That's because gravity is proportional to the masses involved, but also inversely proportional to the square of the distance. In laysman terms, if you are standing your feet are pulled down with more force than your head. This ...

1

Salt Glands (alternatively, hyper-efficient kidneys) This is how animals IRL drink salt water and manage to not die. This is how saltwater crocodiles, sea turtles, seabirds, and the extinct mihirungs dealt with excess salt. That said, salt glands are pretty much unknown in mammals. This may not be because "they can't do it", but rather because they ...

1

A corroded object is placed in a vacuum and electrically bombarded with hydrogen molecules, which react with the ferrous oxide, or rust. After several hours most of the rust converts to hard iron -- and the object is back to its original shape and size. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1986-10-19-0260290108-story.html Some lasers are also able to ...

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