cosmo-goblin

I had a few ideas actually, based on a Big Bang Theory episode when they discussed what to send on an alien probe - they decided it would have to be tactile, based on the hypothesis that any intelligent species must have some sort of touch-based sense. I think you could quite easily explain other worlds in terms of other lands - a land-based species would understand up and down, and would experience multi-layered landscapes, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that there are other lands millions of times higher up than anything on Earth; and tactile maps of the stars and planets have been produced, so they could certainly do that. The problem is, how would you know they existed? Newton split white light into a spectrum, and as PB666 mentioned, Maxwell and Faraday "simply" extended that spectrum beyond the visible. Without being able to see any of the spectrum, we would start from a much weaker position. We can feel infrared on our skin, but we only sense intensity; I don't think we can tell that there are variations in quality as well as quantity. I just realised though that we would be able to discern tides. It's possible that we could conjecture another gravitational body's influence on the sea; we'd notice that the cycle was linked to periods of warm and cold due to the Sun, but also that this wasn't the only factor. I think we would be able to get as far as the Ptolemaic geocentric model of Earth, Sun and Moon. Hmm, we would also notice that the Sun gave off warmth, but the Moon didn't. Would a blind species be able to use this knowledge to develop a theory of spectrum, and figure out how to detect and analyse the waves?

I had a thought the other day. What would science be like if we were blind? Could we develop astronomy, and space travel? Would we even know there were other bodies? It's certainly possible to be an astronomer today, and blind - due to accident or from birth. But imagine a species just like ours, on a planet with a moon and sun just like ours, but that had never developed eyes (or lost them before the advent of civilization). What would it be like then?

Thanks! This looks like exactly what I need - unfortunately I haven't been able to figure out how to even start using it... Since I'm on time pressure here, I've come up with an alternate solution - I hacked my ships to an orbit 13 km above a 3 km high expanse on the Mun, as well as hacking Mun's gravity to negligible. That way it's an easy 10,000 m above the actual surface, and the ships more or less stay where I put them (since orbital velocity is so slow). This has the added advantage that they'll stay in sunlight for the whole lesson!

Hi guys [B]Request[/B] I would like to edit a moon/planet to be entirely flat. Does anybody know how to do this? [B]Reason[/B] I'm a physics teacher, and want to show students how to use Newton's laws, eg F = m x a. To do this, I want to show them various spaceships of different masses and propulsion forces. I hacked a load of ships into orbit around Ike (quite big, fairly low mass, no atmosphere, pretty nearby planet), and crashed them into the planet. Trouble is, I put them into orbit at 10km, but they hit the surface at the altitude of whatever mountain they're passing over, sometimes as high as 7km. This makes all the calculations useless! I want a nice smooth planet, with the whole surface at 0km high. I'm happy to use a mod, or mod it myself, if I can figure out how. My first lesson is intended for Thursday 19 November 2015, so advice before then would be greatly appreciated!