Posts tagged earth
Would it be possible for a spaceship of some sort to descend from space and through the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet, not land, then turn around and head back into space? In other words, coul...
Has a device been invented that can lower a person's voice by various decibels (as in the loudness of their voices)? This would be to enable silent communication as in whispering at a much lower ra...
I'm working on a post-apocalyptic desert scenario in the near future where people live in small, loosely connected communities that trade with each other on a small scale and might have agreements ...
So I'm thinking about orbital warehousing of raw materials but I'm wondering whether one would actually need an orbital structure to store the goods inside or could you just strap a booster to the ...
I'd like earthquakes to cause deep gullies along some mountainsides of my planet. Here on earth, vertical fault scarps can form from earthquakes, but the examples I see online tend to be less gully...
Imagine a very long bridge (Visbi Bridge - named after the designer) across an immense canyon - really almost a wide deep gorge -use on an earth-like world. My concept is that part of the support o...
Start with a planet just like Earth as of today (whatever today means when you are reading this). For simplicity's sake, disregard mankind's continuous spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphe...
Say in an alternate timeline, Earth developed with more moons. Many, many many more moons. In fact, it developed with the absolute maximum amount of moons a planet of its size and mass can physical...
Reading this answer I realized that for my purposes I don't really want a fully steampunk world. All I want is lack of cars and planes as we know them, and lack of oil, or inaccessible deposits of ...
My character kills a goat in the mountains and eats some of it for dinner. What kind of plant or mineral could he use to preserve the meat to carry with him so that it stays fresh and doesn't becom...
I have built a Tchou-Tchou 'hyperloop' wagon that reaches 310Â km/h on a 500 meter test rail. One of my investor customers wants to try the Tchou-Tchou, but I am a bit concerned about his safety. T...
Has anybody made any serious calculations of what the climates on Earth would be if our planet had a larger axial tilt? The most interesting are the cases of 45 and 90 degrees.
It's my first time writing an original story and I have this idea, but I don't know if it could be scientifically feasible. My story would be medieval fantasy with magic, but I wanted to add a twis...
The rotational axis of the Earth is slightly tilted now, but I would like to tilt it to 90° - something like Uranus has - and make the Earth rotate with one pole always facing one direction - eg. ...
The consensus (1, 2) is that the reason most continents have relatively few large animals compared to Africa is that humans, even stone age humans, were able to drive them to extinction. African a...
The world I am envisioning is a rocky planet with oceans, plate tectonics, atmosphere, and several other similarities to our globe. The mass and size is roughly equal, but its moon is orbiting much...
I was wondering would a planetary drill be possible? The drill should go inside the planet on one side and exit on the other. Would that kind of a drill be possible on Earth and if not on what kind...
In my latest draft, a worm-like species buries itself deep below the crust of their world and consumes/gathers tiny amounts of heavy metals. Can you think of any plausible reason why a wormlike cr...
I'm building a mining colony world with large mine-able deposits of rare earth elements (REEs). One source of REEs on Earth is alkaline carbonitite magma. On Earth, I believe, it is thought to be d...
For story purpose I am trying to design a mass transit system for a perfect city. Right ... maybe not so perfect, if you look carefully into the details, but actually the mass transit system is sup...
I'm trying to build as close to a 1:1 Earth as possible, but finding information on a non-jovian moon-based planet is extremely hard to find. I tend to ramble trying to explain things in a non-list...
I'm not even sure if gas comets can exist naturally -- feel free to comment on that in the answers. But assume that somehow a large block of frozen hydrogen/helium/oxygen/nitrogen is tumbling throu...
I'm trying to find some type of space weather or other natural occurrences that would result in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field dropping for a few hours to maybe a week or two at most. Pola...
Back home, the Tibetan Plateau averages 4,950 meters above sea level with its highest point being Mount Everest, 8,848 meters--29,029 feet--above sea level. At such heights, problems are resulted ...
Let's assume a human civilization have been living for centuries, nay millennia, in a very large cave, not too deep under Antarctica - deep enough not to freeze, but shallow enough not to die becau...
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 ...
A couple friends and I have started a world called Lothaucan. On this world there is a continent called Novara with a circle of islands as its key feature. (seen in the mid-left of the image) I...
This is specifically about the climate, and where on the planet it would be mildest. Imagine Earth, rotating at the usual distance from the sun. Except, it is tidally locked to the sun; a so-calle...
How could an earth sized and broadly / liberally earth-like planet have plate tectonics but still experience zero or weak / little earthquakes? How can I have the weakest earthquakes possible while...
Relating to this question: Ensuring an endless war, and an endless stalemate In a planet such as our Earth, what climate conditions and/or atmospheric changes would be required for the formation a...
I'm curious as to what the implications to any navigation system are: ship trekking aviation etc. Will their compass change shape (as being spherical), or might they dump the compass alltogeth...
2017, flying islands just appeared in the sky. Different places in the world, different sizes. The biggest one is about the size of the Corsica french island. They have similar ecosystem than Eart...
Since I'm creating a "new world" for my story, I wanted to know if the following conditions would work for an Earth-like planet: Its moon (more or less same size as our moon) being much closer (...
Tech level: more or less comparable to contemporary. Location: forsaken, habitable planet with population of approximately 10-20 milion. Wealth level: first world equivalent Covering capital, ma...
Assuming it just spins at the same rate, the other way. Axial tilt is the same, year length is the same. Perhaps winds and ocean currents? What would the effect be on geography? Would deserts or r...
On a tidally locked Earth-like planet a big part of long distance air routes would have to approach the hurricane eye and some may even benefit from it. On Earth aircraft are able to save time and...
An illness has been slowly spreading throughout the inhabitants of my agrarian society, decimating villages. The first sign of infection is the excessive production of slimy yellow saliva, and sinc...
I've been toying around with the idea of a tidally locked Earth. Spent the better majority of today figuring out weather patterns, habitable zones, etc, but I missed one big detail: How the hell di...
I was wondering what would happen to life, when an infamous epidemic plague would be able to infect and kill any imaginable plant, be it on land or in the waters. Would the lack of oxygen eventual...
This idea comes up quite frequently in science fiction, but there has not been a question about it yet on Worldbuilding.SE. Is it possible that intelligent life was brought to Earth by an alien ci...
Lets suppose that Antarctica at some point lost most of its ice (due to global warming or some other plausible reason) and now most of its bedrock surface is exposed. Compared to other continents,...
Here is the situation. A planet fairly similar to Earth is orbiting binary stars, one O or B type and one F type. Sometimes the stars are close together in the sky, sometimes far apart, sometimes o...
For story reasons I need a situation with a planet around red dwarf, which already has had the equivalent of a Great Oxygenation Event. Simultaneously I also like the planet to be mostly without ac...
If I want an Earth-like planet, what kind of star can I use to achieve that ? According to the Harvard stellar classification, our Sun is a G-class star. The best would be to have: Temperature ...
Right, you are standing on Earth 100 million years in the future and observing the sky. What would you see during night and how would a day look like when you look up. Weather is not relevant (no c...
Let's say through some magic or other, the Earth's spin came to a halt (to the point that the same side now always faces the Sun) How would this process feel? Obviously it would depend on how long...
I'm writing a species of dragon-sized butterflies¹ as flying mounts into a low-magic fantasy setting², and would like to know if these creatures have to be imbued with magic, or if they could jus...
This is a followup to this question about city building on flood plains. There is a civilization that developed along the rich varzea flooded forests of an enormous rainforest river, larger than ...
My colonists have been terraforming a planet for centuries. They chose this exo-planet for its many earth-like qualities (size, gravity, Goldilocks zone, volcanos, similar sun). However, it is like...
While asking another question about Jormungandr, the Snakebot of Doom, a point was made that it is so big and hot that it might produce its own weather effects. To that end: Jormungandr is 446 me...