Posts tagged technology
Imagine we have a faster-than-light drive which costs ~$250,000 USD per drive and can propel an ISS-sized craft at 1000 times the speed of light. It is reliable and has safeguards that stop it from...
This question would be best answered for the time period of our first colonized planet, which will most likely be Mars. With the thinner atmosphere, weaker gravity, low oxygen, and the bodily damag...
I'm writing a story about someone who is going to be frozen in cryo for about 450 years. He's frozen in 2120, so the technology is certainly well-developed in his time. I'm thinking maybe the cryo ...
Spaceplanes are cool. SSTOs (Single Stage To Orbit) are even cooler. Imagine a spaceplane that is pretty much a 747. Imagine if Boeing decided to have a crazy new idea and made a space variant of ...
Context In the arms race of survival many animals have developed ways of evading predators, but the animal I am interested in for this question would be the tiger moth. So basically these guys jam...
Context For reasons unknown a large, powerful company wants to engineer colossal squids to catch or kill sperm whales. They have tons of money to do this and even more resources.Just one thing... ...
Is it possible for a technologically developed society to make some invention which could allow trees to be like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and communicate with human? To be like AI (Artificial ...
Premise In this Earth-like world, a multi-billion dollar privately owned aerospace/defense corporation is devising a secret plan to manufacture a fleet of nano-bots. These nano-bot have swarm inte...
Space is filled with all kinds of things that are unkind to cloth, such as dust and radiation, and they are the reason why sticking a nylon national flag on the moon isn't permanent. In my world I...
My question is simple: In theory, would an industrial revolution driven exclusively by alcohol fueled internal and external combustion engines in the early 1800s be practical? What effect would th...
Let's say that the world has successfully converted and only depends on renewable resources for our home energy needs. In fact, we have a massive surplus - currently in the form of raw electricity ...
My story is set in the future where space travel is cheap and humanity has colonized Mars and some parts of the asteroid belt. Asteroid colonies can grow their own staple food, but crops that requi...
I am writing a hard science fiction story and I want to avoid violating known physics, while still enabling some of the classic mainstays of science fiction under the auspice of sufficiently advanc...
In short I'm looking at creating an artificial sperm smart enough to fertilize an egg and develop into an embryo, so that would mean the sperm must have some means of carrying information similar t...
I want to write a science fiction book on a planet mostly covered by ocean, but I also want to incorporate trains into my story. However, it seems that with advances in ship and plane technology, t...
Premise: bio-tech golden age where "wetware" is the new IT meta, organic AI that can interface with our standard computing technology. In this context, I'm imagining a future technology that woul...
Essentially, what would be the most efficient way of causing the Earth's core to cool as much as possible without damaging human civilization in any other way (the outcome can damage it, but not th...
And I mean only making the moon orbit the Earth faster: no change in distance from Earth required. Is such a thing possible?
As explained in this question, current rotary wing aircraft cannot surpass the speed of sound because of retreating blade stall and the fact that the sonic boom would literally rip off the rotor. H...
Say that an apocalyptic even takes place, a genetic disease wiping out most of humanity in a matter of years. So, there are no bombs, nuclear winter, or any sort of event that messes up the environ...
This is another question for a setting I mentioned in previous questions (currency, ammo). The setting is: It's happening in post-apocalyptic SE Europe (Balkans specifically), about 60-80 years fr...
Mains power electrical systems on Earth supply a fixed standardized voltage to a number of devices, which are all wired in parallel with each other. However, on the planet I'm writng about, they d...
I'm thinking of a plot where the Earth is taken over and literally eaten by a race of giant alien beings who use mass-energy conversions to power themselves (These guys are as big as the sun, body ...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing. We've got them in all forms, sizes & colours. They are everywhere and go everywhere else. carrying with them anything from music, over tractors, to foodstuffs a...
I am working on an alternate history where the USSR won the Moon Race (by upgrading the NK-15, starting development of the N1 earlier, and making cybernetics/computer science not a "bourgeois pseud...
Based on The Expanse TV series I wonder how people should build their ships to avoid spreading of highly contagious lifeform. Protomolecule's features: infectious agent with extra-terrestri...
The situation is the usual, we have lots of junk metal lying around in cities, great but not impossible difficulties with logistics (meaning that a few railroads are in operation at immense cost, b...
Following on from this question and assuming the race in question had developed the ability to create tools how would they approach the need for mass calculation. Our early computers were used to ...
Let us develop an industrial electric motor from first principles. Alessandro Volta developed a battery whose ingredients were copper, zinc, seawater, and imagination. These ingredients have been ...
Vantablack is very dark, absorbing 99.965% of light. I've also heard it absorbs waves beyond the visible spectrum. Does this mean planes painted with Vantablack would be invisible to radar? If ye...
Intro: I have gone some way to make airships more preferable over land-based transport in my beautiful conworld. E.g. making tunneling harder & making flying easier. Though there's plenty left ...
Many factors in history have contributed to society's taking a long time to accept the heliocentric (= the Earth orbits the Sun) model: the first that come to mind immediately are religion and, mor...
QUESTION I'd like a nation in the world I'm working on to be able to transport natural gas and hydrogen, for fuel and possibly ballooning. Natural gas pipelines and cylinders were first invented i...
I'm trying to come up with a history for a planet that's more-or-less Earth-like that was colonized by a small group of humans ~1000 years ago. Human civilization on this planet has an understandi...
Assuming a civilization has the capacity to build space vessels designed to travel from one solar system to another, what is the technological difference between traveling at 50% light speed and tr...
In my universe, humanity has learned how to open wormholes for transportation, how they are opened is irrelevant and can be hand-waved, what must be kept in mind is that when they are opened, two e...
You know what they say, the best offense is a good defense, and with the Energized Particle Shield 9000 (patent pending) you will have the ultimate defense possible! The EPS units can be scaled up ...
I want to have an intelligent life-form on a planet, but I want this life form to be technologically limited because of the lack of discovery of fire. What changes would have to occur in the atmo...
BACKGROUND In the antiquity of my world, a college of pyromancers attempted to create stronger magnifying lenses so that they could apply their ability to control heat to ever more finely detailed...
Your people have been displaced by war, and have wandered for many months looking for a new home. Yesterday, you came across something truly marvelous. You are camped at the edge of a huge ravine, ...
I have a character who ends up jumping backwards in time by 24 hours. Essentially nothing else changes, but the character has their jPhone in their pocket at the time of the jump. How functional sh...
I'm developing fictional technology for "perfect recycling." A large plant that takes in water and every cubic millimeter of waste humanity can produce (in the local area, of course). It disinteg...
In the near future humanity discovers a spatial anomaly at a point located somewhere between the orbits of mars and earth. This anomaly quickly induces delirium in anybody who approaches it and eve...
We know that the inner and outer core of our planet is made up of heavy, valuable metals in high concentrations. So, what if a technologically advanced, space-faring civilization wanted to mine tho...
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...
In movies like The Dark Knight, Mission Impossible 4, and Star Trek: Beyond, we see characters attempting to track another person by a unique radiation signature emitted from their body. In the cas...
Forgive me for misusing any terms. This is a subject I'm not knowledgeable in at all aside from doing some online research. In the novel I'm writing, I have an abandoned scientific polar research ...
If we want to be realistic, we imagine ships pushing stuff out the back and relying on the conservation of momentum to move forward. Gravitational waves carry momentum. Are they viable as a kind o...
This applies to all types of weapons, from simple knives to handguns to assault rifles to even military gear, such as night vision goggles. How far into the future do we have to go in order to see...
In this situation, humans have used ships to colonize other worlds very distant from ours but still maintain a interplanetary equivalent of our World Wide Web. These future humans have not yet disc...
