General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I'm interested in knowing if in terms of cost/efficiency/quality would be better to grow crops(food) in Earth and then sending it to space habitats on orbit, or would it be better to grow them in t...
Would a Dyson sphere make a red dwarf appear to be a Brown Dwarf? Would it disguise a star enough to misidentify it what size it is? I'm just wondering if it could be possible that some Dyson sph...
it's me again :) With the help of the fine people of this place I have been able to find solution for a number of problems and come up with compelling technologies. One question keep bugging me, ...
Hello again :) My first questions had some wonderful answers, but brought me to the following problem: Although (in my eyes) really dull, the Cpt. Geary series (the Lost Fleet) tends to depict the...
Exactly as asked on the title, is there a way that a human, or at least, a species that appears outwardly human, could survive being pincushioned by arrows, at least for a suitably dramatic length ...
Imagine a race of what we would call 'giants', each of them possibly around 8 to 10 feet (2.40-3.00 meters) tall. What differences would they need compared to us regular humans in order to function...
I'm imagining an electromagnetic wave that could deliberately alter its wavelength. It would be a totally unfamiliar type of creature, but actually, we material beings act because of the electical ...
The earth is migrating, somehow (it doesn't matter how, but it's not directly destructive) into a higher orbit over the course of a century. Details: The earth-sun distance will increase by 150...
I would like to have Earth slowly move away from the sun, taking somewhere between several months and a couple of years to reach the point where human life on the surface is no longer possible. (T...
As I understand it, the principle of relativity was accepted from Galileo until Maxwell, whereupon the equations which predict constant speed of light imply a preferred reference frame in a Euclidi...
If some advanced race were to make a solid opaque shell around our Sun, say around Mercury's orbit, something like a Dyson Sphere, how long would it take for Earth to freeze over and end most life?
A generation ship was sent out a long time ago, to colonize a far away planet. However the ship failed to reach its goal due to navigational issues (which also means they didn't have any clue where...
A Dyson Laser would be a spherical swarm megastructure arrangement of robots focusing mirrors directing sunlight towards a particular planet in a system heating it with enough energy to melt it. T...
What would happen if an extremely advanced race removed the metal (everything beyond H and He) from a star. Would the star still function? Would it change in appearance or properties at all?
Is it possible for a planet's moon to always rise at the same time of the night? And in this way be used as a timekeeping device? What if there are two moons?
An Orbital is a miniature ringworld used by the Culture in Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Wikipedia has details on their basic structure, but to simplify, the main difference from a Niven ringworl...
I'm working on creating a race of humanoids with "hollow" bones like birds (they have criss-crossing struts for internal support). They are short - an individual is unlikely to top five feet. Woul...
I wonder if it possible for human civilization to evolve into two different civilizations. One is controlled by artificial intelligence (or by uploaded human minds) and the other is biology-based ...
I have an idea for a short SF story, where an alien race infects a tiny village with a virus, which eventually spreads to entire Earth. And I need to know what minimum time is required to infect th...
In a new self-sufficient human colony, what are the minimum requirements of the local environment (i.e. what resources would it need) for long-term survival? Let's suppose that the colony land on...
The question Could we still live if Earth's spin speed slowed down by 90% assumed Earth's spin speed slowed down by undefined human activities (as if climate change was not bad enough). One answer ...
I am working on a project (The Longest Day), and I'm sure some people here have the necessary knowledge to give me some more usefull info. OK, here it is: Lets say that Earth's spinning speed dim...
The area of the earth covered by desert is more than 20%. (Sites range from 20-33%, I don't know why the wide range). With technology close to providing zero cost solar (not free, but declining e...
I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...
How would plants be affected by a 48 hour day, instead of 24 hour? Would plants be larger to store more energy for photosynthesis? Also, how about the temperature of the earth be different on bot...
This is a partner question to How do centaurs get enough calories to live? Centaurs are a common mythological figure, with the body of a man where a horses head would be. They usually exist in fan...
This is a partner question to How do centaurs get enough oxygen to run Centaurs are a common mythological figure, with the body of a man where a horses head would be. They usual exist in a fantasy...
In novels (SF and FF) that hint at being earlier in Earth's history, such as Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, in which period would such a story need to take place to plausibly and realisti...
I am attempting to create fictional, stable P-Type binary system, featuring a gas giant in a stable orbit, with a habitable Earth-like moon. "Is a Jupiter-sized planet plausible in a habitable zone...
Consider a planet where a day, that is to say the amount of time a specific (roughly equatorial) point is in sunlight is much longer than on earth. A humanoid race has evolved on this planet. You c...
Ice is strange, in that the solid form is less dense than the liquid water it freezes from. This causes Ice to float on top of the water. How would our planet earth be different if something chang...
In this question, the most "realistic" idea is to have the human have an oxygen tank strapped to his back and connected to his nose at all times (preferably through a mask of some sort). However, t...
What technology (at minimum), devices or minimum civilization development is needed, so that an individual member of this civilization would be able to detect that some star is going supernova? My...
Suppose a planet/space station is a hollow sphere, and in the center of this sphere is a smaller sphere. This sphere would be solid, with grass and dirt like Earth. The only thing holding this smal...
What would it take in terms of impact size to interrupt or stop Earth's (or an Earth-like planet's) magnetic field?
I have a head-world idea where one of the planets in it has four magnetic poles. It is a desert rocky planet with carbon based lifeforms on it (mostly underground or in bio-domes). What would the...
I read some time ago about terraria (singular: terrarium), which are basically small ecosystems of plants, isolated from the outside world (they get just energy from outside, not water or oxygen). ...
I wanted to ask about the system described in the following scenario... A villain has built a system consisting of a telescope connected to a computer that runs some autonomous object recognition ...
I'm considering making a novel about something weird that really happened sort of: an island that was on every map of the world, but never really existed. The real deal is called a Phantom Island,...
Plenty of stories have done AI's before, but many of them feel unrealistic. If you make an AI that is as smart as humans, but with faster reaction speed and ability to process and calculate certai...
Allright, what i'm asking is how life would be like on Earth (which pretends Earth could develop life in the "short" life of a blue giant) if we had two blue giants in the sky instead of the Sun?
I'm trying to figure out realistic futuristic jobs for my characters. We're in a verge-of-singularity world, 15-25 years in the future. Convoluted neural networks and their even more awesome near-...
In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
Is it possible for humans to live on a world with the following conditions? Atmosphere: 50% nitrogen; 30% oxygen; 20% carbon dioxide. Climate: The rain in some areas is acidic. (Is there som...
Supposing you took Earth or a planet like it and doubled its mass, the gravity would obviously increase in whatever proportion to that. As a result, humans as we know them would be ... thicker, (...
Imagine that you lived in this world: The planet has a diameter of 5000 km. The rotation time is the same as the orbital period. And here it comes: the orbital period is 1027 years. The planet's ...
A staple of both fantasy and science fiction literature is the long-vanished Ancients, who left nothing but their buildings (or devices) behind. Somehow, these (usually) decrepit structures still ...
Terraforming would not strictly be the appropriate term for the type of planetary modifications I am asking about. Say humanity develops advanced AI robots, who are then left alone in space (as hu...
EDIT: Yup, totally misguided here: http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae429.cfm Drifting away. So, no lunar catastrophe for me (without some other handwavium) I've read somewhere tha...
What ethical/legal implications would there be if we invented a technology to make it possible to communicate intelligibly with some (or all) animals? The constraints on this technology would mak...
