Posts tagged modern-age
Suppose our alien neighbors woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided humans would be less annoying if their home planet was hit with a giant artillery shell travelling at half the speed of ...
There are three "worlds" in this setting: Heaven, Hell and Midgard, Midgard being Earth and the entire Milkyway galaxy. When a demon or an angel enters Midgard, they can't just walk there, as they...
Consider the following situation: Over the last 2 to 3 years, all the world's birds and bats outside of those in human captivity or domestication have stopped getting sick; sick - even terminally s...
I'm trying to build a story around a supermassive black hole, which is ejected from a merger of two galaxies, that is hurtling our own way. What is the smallest realistic distance at which the blac...
A colony ship headed for its new home countless light-years from Earth suffers an unfortunate malfunction on the final part of its descent phase and crashes onto the planet. Thankfully, the ship cr...
In which wilderness area on modern-day Earth would it be easiest for a lone human to survive year-round? What resources are available there and what tools and skills would be necessary? What is t...
I'm creating a near future world where one faction is using high energy density batteries that enable their vehicles to outperform gasoline based technology. Like cold and silent aircraft and helic...
While similar to other questions they mostly focused on what impacts required in the past to keep airships as a popular air transport method today, this question is about how to make airships the d...
We know that Gor, or Counter-Earth, is not stable in a long-term sense. Let's handwave that away, or assume that we are dealing with a temporary span of time in which the instability is immaterial....
I'm creating a near future world where laboratories could create human gametes (sperm & ova) using chromosomes from different people. So theoretically we could take 1st chromosome from a 1st pe...
I'm building a setting in a fictional Latin American country which is under military rule. The junta starts a breeding program in the late 40's with help from unscrupulous escaped Nazi scientists....
In my city, a very high skyscraper stands at the center. Somehow, a tree, in a span of [x] years integrates itself into the building. Its branches reach out from the top of the building and its sha...
I want the Netherlands to be flooded entirely, and I want the event to be of such a scale that it goes faster than hydroengineering can keep up with. This will mean that I need a sea level rise of ...
Since Tolkien put people riding on giant eagles in his books (or maybe even before that), the imaginarium of riding the winds on the back of magnificent birds has generated a plethora of images and...
I've seen multiple posts on destroying the Earth, but is it possible for humans to reverse the spin of Earth? In order words, considering modern technology at our disposal, is it possible for hum...
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...
What would be a situation in modern times where normal, healthy people would want to get infected by a non-curable, but non-lethal, virus? A virus that would have pretty nasty symptoms. There...
It's Earth, the modern day"¦and in the out there, there is a fight going on. Two vast space-empires duel for survival, locked in hateful combat. Clashes of fleets and individual spaceships are the ...
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...
The time: January 27th, 2017, 7:00 AM local. The place: New York City and environs. Jormungandr, the Snakebot of Doom, has just finished steamrolling New York City into something more closely res...
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...
Our planet is dying. Cliche, I know, but unfortunately true and we do not have superpowers or the technology to build generation ships to escape. We have maybe a hundred years left, and we have d...
Tech level: more or less contemporary, no tech that would put you in awe. I'm trying to make realistic, driverless, mass-transit system. The first idea was that "driverless" implies that in each ...
I've worked a couple of Habitat for Humanity mass builds where entire houses go from a poured foundation to complete in the course of a few days, and whole neighborhoods are built in a week. There'...
Which voltage and frequency would be selected if there were no legacy issues? I can easily find how selection of electricity frequency and voltage was based on backward compatibility and quite arb...
Assuming we're talking about a world similar to ours with the difference of the existence of mermaids, that are fishes with an upper half visibly similar to a human's, live in the sea, can survive ...
In the question, Weapons for a civilisation-destroying giant robot, I asked about what weapons might be mounted on a giant snakebot over 1 km in diameter and over 9km long, equipped with six fusion...
Inspired by this question, and my own answer to it: Avoiding galactic pandemics. World ending pandemics are a common disaster/after-the-end story trope, I'm trying to determine if plausible, and h...
