Posts tagged environment
Assume a world with no multiverse theory, just a single unbroken timeline. If you were to go back in time to the town your parents lived in on day of your conception, the air displacement due to yo...
How difficult would it be for a human to survive on a planet with an atmosphere 2-5 times as thick as Earth's but with gravity like Venus? Would such an atmosphere be survivable? If yes, then how ...
Suppose there was a world on which evolution and natural selection took an odd turn and never produced an organism that could be considered a plant by our modern definition, but which still produce...
There is a lot of information on drying up a Mediterranean sized depression. However, there is not a lot of information on drowning such a large area or what sort of habitats could exist before the...
We are used to a world where humans are basically an apex predator; we don't really need to worry much about becoming some other animal's next meal. If that wasn't the case, and humans had to be w...
The basis of my story revolves around a single survivor escaping a massive colony ship gone critical above the skies of an alien world. After his escape via escape pod, the ship crashes halfway acr...
My story is based on a Glacial Climate setting or an Ice Age. However the transition is gradual and humanity was given some time to adapt. The transition began in our real-world technological equiv...
My story revolves around a group of human astronauts exploring various planets via a new revolutionary type of drive. One of the planets I'm envisioning is a Cold Super-Venus, i.e. larger in size, ...
If there was a supermassive structure built on earth (30km tall, 10km wide/deep tower with slightly slanted faces), what sort of effects would this cause on the surrounding areas? Specifically, wha...
I'd like to keep this as science based as possible. I'm not even sure if this sort of question fits this exchange. Is there a possible world wide affect that when triggered (by human/cosmological i...
Imagine an alien species arrived on Earth, to find that the nitrogen in the air was toxic to them. Imagine they wanted to terraform our planet, and decided to fix this problem by nitrifying a lot o...
Taking genetic manipulation of humans to change them to live in other environments, besides maybe gills what other physical changes would need to be done for a human to spend 95+% time living in th...
I've been thinking about writing a fantasy novel set on an earth-like world with Saturn-like rings. I've been doing some research here by looking up questions about worlds with rings, of which ther...
A friend of mine was telling me about a story where a man clear cut a diverse ecosystem of plants in an area similar to size and shape of a small caldera (not necessarily a caldera itself). Eventu...
Can using blimps to hold power lines and implement laser filamentation of ablout 7 meter span from the source of power for a contact free power supply to power an electric engine (designed to run o...
Considering a civilization that was here far before everything we know of, lets say around time of Gilgamesh. Warm climate, almost no winters, near the ocean with enough rivers, and people being ab...
My fantasy world consists of a flat plane, with the sun affixed to a point directly over the main continent. This sun powers down to create night conditions, and then powers up again in the morning...
I was told to post this question separately, so here it is. I need help with the geography and climate of my map. Blue circles are ports Gray circles are cities That one brown circle is a town ...
I am envisioning a world around a red dwarf star. The planet has violent and accelerated (due to higher geological activity) plate tectonics and has a magnetic field about 75% the strength of the E...
Imagine a world whose sun is swinging like a pendulum above a flat surface. This is a sketch of the diagram. A complete cycle lasts twenty-four (24) hours (from an end to the other and back aga...
Assume you have access to some very large amount of energy but there are no exceptions to currently known laws of physics (for example, you can't go faster than the speed of light). Is it possibl...
I'm inspired by this question and was thinking that it is nigh impossible for sun, moon and star to exist in this world and even if they do, there is no way to sun and moon to orbit and create day-...
A good friend of mine, who's a doctor, is very well traveled, and he told me he's seen skies of different worlds take all the colors of the rainbow (and the grayscale to boot). I suspect that he mi...
Let's say there is a city, about the size of New York City, that is made only out of stone, steel, and glass. This city would be completely underwater. Assuming no humans are alive in this city, ho...
Primary question If this world averages a visible light level of civil twilight (about 1000x dimmer than full daylight, or 500x brighter than full moonlight) during the day, what kind of plants ca...
I have a map for my new word but I am not sure how the climate and weather would realistically work on this map. Axis tilt and position to Sun is the same as Earth, with two moons.
I'm thinking of using this as a method of separating a planet's technological and cultural evolution, then having a sudden clash as the more advanced one becoming able to cross the storm belt. This...
Linked: What would animal life on a methane world look like and how would it evolve? What would the conditions on a methane world be like? How would an intelligent race on a methane world achiev...
The movie Back to Future revealed that Mr. Fusion (MF) produced by Fusion Industries (FI) was in widespread use in 2015. What the movie did not reveal was the FI was privately funded by Bill Gates....
Is there a real life chemical or compound that exhibits the characteristics of stereotypical movie acid? From what I know of most acid, it is usually clear or just a little cloudy, but I'm looking...
Outline A planet which is heated tidally by its Brown Dwarf parent and permanently dark needs to have native alien life which has [somewhat similar biochemistry to Earth] and also be [permanently ...
Okay so the story takes place up in the northern hemisphere around glaciers and polar bears and all that good stuff, its main character is named Xavior and he is a good human adapted to the radioac...
T-Rex Forever LLC has a mating pair of Tyrannosaurus rex. They're a bit shady on how they got them, time travel, cloning...they won't say. Third-party biologists and paleontologists have examined...
There exists a single solitary tree at the mouth of a small river. This tree is basically a fountain of youth, granting immortality to anyone who eats it's grapefruit-sized fruits. As you can ima...
For a long, long, long time I have had a concept of a world that exists on the inside of a hallowed-out sphere. The basic construction of the world is like this: It is a large world, at the cent...
I'm looking to found a new country on a real-to-life Earth, and I need somewhere to put it. The country is going to be anywhere from 100 to 1000 square miles (250 to 2500 square km) in size. Assume...
As the title states, is it even possible to remove hazardous air chemicals in Earth? I think I could list the pollutants which I think we could remove, these are the following : Nitrogen oxide...
The enormous shield volcano that this question was based on was held up by magic or God. It presented some very interesting conditions for alternate worlds so I thought I would develop that train o...
A train of thought is that a lot of our problems could be solved by reducing our numbers. For this question I am limiting it to environmental changes. For example: a successful species will increas...
I previously asked What measures might an ancient civilization take to protect itself from extreme heat? The answers gave some useful suggestions as to how cities could be adapted. For convenience...
I'm really in doubt if a fusion thruster could be used inside a planet (populated places). As i saw in the TV show "The Expanse", their fusion engines are really, really hot, hotter than the surfac...
Story starts out about 100 years from now. While in orbit around Earth preparing for an interstellar mission, our spacecraft encounters some hand-wavey spacetime anomaly such that we're still in o...
I have an Earth-sized planet in a Milky Way-like galaxy with all the land located at the equator, in a 2000-km line around the planet. There are small islands near the landmass, but no land anywher...
The current topic challenge is apocalypse, so I figured I might as well come up with a question about surviving one. A man named Noah somehow learns that there will be a large flood within one yea...
I've been pondering for some time an alternate-history story where the Earth as we know it is replaced by a Rocheworld, of the canonical variety introduced in the eponymous Robert Forward novel whe...
What planetary parameters such as plate tectonics and volcanism etc would best encourage the most uneven planetary surface on an earth like planet? I want a world to be covered in very uneven terr...
"Glassing" a planet is a common ultimate tactic in Science Fiction, basically it consists in using high power energy weapons to destroy all life on the planet and reducing the soil and rock of the ...
I'm coming up with ideas for locations in my sci-fi story and I thought of an interesting one. Here's the scenario: A planet has a watery ocean sitting on heated bedrock. Temperatures range from 5...
What would cause the temporary migration of a carnivore/scavenger avian species, normally inhabiting a temperate to tropical region, to a much colder one. It's a seasonal migration, but also a r...
The Premise The Earth rotates on its own axis, which is tilted by about 23 degrees. The setting for my fantasy novel is an earth like planet without the axial tilt, all other factors remaining co...