General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Theory If I am understanding this history of this correctly, in the 1920s the mathematical process of converting measurements with a certain amount of measurement error into numbers, then doing yo...
Low gravity golf was invented by Alan Shepard in 1971 when he hit two golf balls 40 yards on the moon. Surprisingly, this version of the sport with little atmosphere and much lower gravity, is the...
Utility fog is a swarm robotics concept in which a mesh of robots barely larger than a grain of pollen (5 micrometer ( $10^{-6} $ m ) bodies and 50 micrometer arms) are dodecahedrons (12 sided pol...
Living in space can be boring. What are some good home games for people living and working in free fall? I thought of a few - Bocce : in this variant the size of the jack and the player balls i...
What happens when PVA glue sets? I am curious about the white PVA glue that is commonly used for bonding wood and paper. Although an Internet search find lots of articles they mostly seem to be ne...
I was investigating a few ideas on recreational solar sailing, and came up with some interesting things - The primary equation in solar sailing is $ F = {{2 R S A} \over {c}} \sin^2{\theta} $ Whe...
Price's Law is a hypothesis that in an organization, or across an industry, roughly half the productive output is being generated by a number of people equal to the square root of those participati...
These WorldFamous companies advertise that their lenses can control myopia for kids, NOT adults. But none of these lenses are approved by FDA. How can they work for adults too? Essilor Stellest ...
Orbital rings are a proposed megastructure intended to dramatically reduce the cost to enter or exit a planetary gravity well. The ring is a solid structure, belting around the planet like a hula h...
How would competitive wrestling change in a microgravity environment?
How could I modify an alternate Earth to have less tornados in the American Great Plains area known as Tornado Alley? Maybe make the Rockies lower? Introduce an east-west range of mountains or high...
I imagined a person who's scapulae is overly developed and extruding outside the shoulder girdle like an elitra or fixed plane wings. They can be moved by shrugging the shoulders or rotated by rai...
Imagine a far-future spacecraft drive that accelerates its reaction mass to a small fraction the speed of light (say, 1,000 km/s). Say the mass flow rate to the drive were 1kg/s, and say the reacti...
I was recently introduced to the South Atlantic Anomaly. As I understand, for satellites and space craft, this is a natural feature that can wreck space craft by taking even computers designed fo...
During the summer of 2022 Europe has had several heat waves. As described in 2022 European heat waves: Climatologists linked the extreme heat to the impact of climate change, and experts predict...
Under normal circumstances, monolithic diamond is pretty terrible at resisting impact, due to it being weak in certain planes, also known as cleavage planes. To solve this, why don't we just make ...
I understand that both Creatine and Carnosine are amino acid derivates abundant in Animalia muscle tissue and are both occasionally taken by non-aerobic exercisers to enhance performance. The huma...
So, Second Earth had/has a firearm problem. Since my magic is really just advanced science, I can't create firearm-disabling fields, so instead, I created a spell that should be able to ruin firear...
Should digging Depressions in seafloor to create artificial islands in nearby areas be sustainable And by the way, was it widely done somewhere in this planet already?
The question may seem stupid but for someone with both a fear of heights and a collapse anxiety can choose renting/buying an apartment in a very horizontally wide building and a very vertically wid...
Imagine a spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit. Say the craft burns at periapsis towards the planet such that its orbital eccentricity does not change and the craft's periapsis moves with the shi...
In a world where pollution and population have drastically reduced the effectiveness of sunlight to grow food, would light-panels be capable of completely replacing the sun? The problem I'm trying...
Nivea have developed a hair product which I personally found very special among this filled-with-generic-stuff market of products, which is named in German "Creme-Gel": I find Nivea's Creme-Gel sp...
Years ago I read a letter in a magazine suggesting a method for reducing the fire risk in an enclosed environment such as a space shuttle. The idea was to reduce the oxygen concentration to the po...
If humanity will cause natural dissolution of all ice in planet earth's poles and the sea level would indeed rise tremendously all over the world --- would it be justified to try to "reverse" the s...
Some people straighten their head-hair with what's named: Keratin straightening Keratin smoothening Keratin rebonding Keratin treatment It is an external hair straightening procedure in wh...
A global epidemic of H1Z2 virus has rendered 95% of the population into zombies. The zombies have lost most of their frontal and temporal lobes so the following capabilities are either severely de...
Is a colony on earth's moon must be deeply underground to ensure more natural gravity (by getting closer to its core) as well as more natural heat? By natural heat I mean "without the need of arti...
Time travel works...just invented, by you. The tests prove it! After many conversations and significant planning, your epidemiologist significant other has approved your plans for time travel, for...
I distinguish human-identification from bureaucracy-applied-to-humans: There was a period in human history in which no state existed so no bureaucracy-applied-to-humans existed and humans identi...
The way this would work is by creating lasers & pumping them into a chamber where it can't escape. The power for the lasers to be created is made either with a generator or by charging using an...
There's apparently a type of transmissible cancer that came from new world dogs thousands of years ago, the Canine transmissible venereal tumor. As I understand, this self replicating surviving ca...
Many physicians apply numbing agent creams/ointments such as Lidocaine+Prilocaine or Benzocaine+Lidocaine+Tetracaine (BLT) preparations topically some 30 minutes before laser hair removal treatment...
Building on the universe established in this question, what happens to identity verification when someone's physical appearance and genetic code are modifiable at any time? Review of universe rule...
In all my reading about laser treatments I always found laser treatments which can be applied either for hair removal or for scar flattening (or other unique uses) but I never came across a laser t...
The concept of utility fogs is actually pretty old. The idea is a swarm of fairly small micromachines (about 100 micrometers in length) that would be able to mimic most materials and objects. Each...
Let's say I have a bunch of pre-pubescent children (circa 8-12 years old). Let's also say I subjected them to some drug/process/whatever that caused them to stop growing. In particular: Whatever...
I have an idea for a land based mobile organism that moves and uses photosynthesis for its primary means of energy generation. Can a motile organism conceivably get enough energy from photosyntheti...
My friends and I are building a world with a 50 mile high volcano on it. The mountain is the result of some bored god deciding to play a joke on everyone. Or, some other god got angry and decided ...
What coloration pattern/ technique could a large mammalian predator employ to evade detection from other mammalian predators at 100 -> 20 meter distances (or close enough so that it could sprint...
Is it plausible to assume that the total amount of water (edit: water molecules) on planet earth was, in different periods of earth's history, significantly lower or significantly higher, or rather...
In an alternate Earth, early or midway in the Eocene Epoch, there debuted a family of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completely submerged. As a result, the limit is that they can't germin...
In the foreseeable future, a scientific community has discovered an alternate universe in which the solar system centers around a binary system of G-type suns, unlike the one G-type that ours orbit...
In my world, I plan for an alien pathogen to cause drastic mutations in all lifeforms, reshaping animals and humans alike in a scenario of near inversion of positions, with animals achieving human-...
How would it switch between if endothermic and ectothermic and in between and how would it be able to create different temperature in specific areas in the body?
In the late 23rd century certain groups of mankind stared down the barrel of what may be possible in the future: cross galactic relativistic kill missile storms, gamma-ray Dyson Beams, Kugelblitz b...
Imagine a plain made of tall grass that sways in a gentle breeze. Everything is a deep green and there is a riot of life sprouting from the black ground. A few days later, the grasses turn brown an...
I am building a setting that is essentially steampunk,being exact it would be pneumatic punk. What electronics and electronic equivalent exists, are primitive and extremely expensive. Thus the majo...
What possible evolutionary adaptations could you foresee in the sensory organs of wildlife in an environment beset by a nigh-permanent sandstorm? e.g. in the case of vision, ways to protect the ey...
This was an idea for a flashback as I pick up my story around 100 trillions years from now at the point where star formation is ceasing and the red dwarf and stellar remnant era begins. Now living ...
