General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I've been researching the idea of spreading out vast sheets of aerogel across regions of Mars. This would theoretically have the effect of both warming whatever land is under the sheet - thus melti...
I've looked into the usual structure of typical animal rhinarium (hairless nose skin with nodules), and it looks possible? — Rhinarium skin structure and epidermal innervation in selected mammal...
Hello everyone, I am thinking yet again about infrastructure. (my calendar project recently asked about... well, that's outside my expertise, I'll get back to that eventually) And I am thinking of...
What happens if Earth's magnetic field shuts down? How exactly does this impact humans, and how long before we need to make significant changes for survival? Does it make any difference if Earth'...
I've sketched out an island, and then threw some tectonic plate boundaries on top hoping it would help me plot mountains. But the more I look at geological diagrams of plate boundaries, and read u...
I recently learned that it's believed that the solar system once had one more gas giant, which was ejected by Jupiter some time in the past. https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/Fifth_Giant Doe...
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...
Hello! I am thinking about analogue mobile telephones, but they have some severe flaws- the most significant being privacy. How could an analogue system be encrypted? It doesn't need to be complet...
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...
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...
I know that this is a bit silly, but I want to make a calendar for my world and I'm really worried about having to do leap years and such to ensure continuing accuracy. Inaccuracy isn't an option;...
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...
The Earth-Moon Lagrange points have names: L1, L2, and L3 are Libration Points, the L4 and L5 points are the Kordylewski Clouds. The Jupiter-Sun L4 is named the Greeks, and the Jupiter-Sun L5 is n...
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...
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...
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...
How would competitive wrestling change in a microgravity environment?
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 removing all head-hair with laser and planting new lab-grown head-hair on the head be dangerous, especially if done repetitively (i.e. two times or more)? Should it risk someone in cancer p...
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?
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...
It might be that between year 0 to the industrial revolution (say 18th to common era), the Caspian sea significantly larger than it is today. If so, is there some graphical illustration as part of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
I've got this idea of a rogue planet that is moving that fast through the intergalactic void that the cosmic microwave radiation, thanks to the Doppler effect, actually provides enough heat that it...
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...
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...
In a story that I'm writing, there is a giant waterfall which flows down a cliff face. The waterfall is extraordinarily large, and the torrents of water which flow over the side are deafening. Beh...
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...
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...
From my prior research I understand that there are several ways to remove or destroy proximal (subcutaneous) fat cells: Liposuction (primarily removal) Cryolipolysis (primarily destruction by f...
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
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...
The largest eye in the world belongs to the giant squid, which has eyes up to 27 cm in diameter (some reports from the 1800s say 40 cm). Extinct ichthyosaurs also had very large eyes, 20-30 cm in d...