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I want to launch the heaviest booster + spaceship possible in about 1.5 of earths gravity, using the technology we currently have. To make things easier, imagine there was the same atmosphere as on...
What would it look like if a human (with the proper protection) walked across a lava stream? Assume that 'proper protection' means some way of insulating against the heat so that they don't get...
I have a planet orbiting a red dwarf and, as expected, it is tidally locked to its star. I know that these planets will have a very significant temperature difference between the diurnal and noctur...
Sadly, the asteroid belt isn't the place to showoff your ace pilot skills. It is so sparse you wouldn't even see an asteroid most of the time if you flew through it. But Saturn's rings! The rings ...
Consider current level technology - surveillance satellites, patrol boats, coastal guards, both USA and Russian anti-submarine jet aircraft patrolling skies of Arctic Sea. I have a big group (~100...
Wikipedia states: "Electromagnetic or magnetic induction is the production of an electromotive force (i.e., voltage) across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field." This one ...
I read this and wonder now, what if we would introduce a new planet to our solar system; would the force of gravitation demand a similar plane as that of the other planets? Mercuries 6.3° indica...
Does anyone know an equation or something along those lines for calculating how many and the locations of atmospheric circulation cells for a planet? Also, does the planet's radius and atmospheric...
On Mars any initial colony will be power limited. Power sources can be brought from Earth, but any power generation capacity would reduce the mass available for other, more useful cargo. Alternat...
The year is 2035 and Channel 55-KYED decided on a new reality show. the XXI century knighthood games. It will be your basic renaissance faire re-enactment of medieval combat but since they are doi...
In this near-future setting, biotechnology is slightly more advanced than our own. Genetic engineering is cheap as well, but due to an ecological disaster the environment just doesn't have enough c...
Bob the time traveler has a problem. He went to 75,000,000 BC to get some dinosaur eggs (don't ask) and his time machine re-combobulator broke and a big chunk is missing. Fortunately he can still ...
I recently saw this answers where it was suggested that the galactic core could illuminate a planet suffiently to make sure it is always summer on one side of the planet. This got me curious and af...
On the earth today most animals use a two sex mating system where male and female provide the same amount of genetics to the resulting offspring, despite the fact that in many cases the female prov...
In my setting, a permanent "fog" hangs over the ocean. It is thick, granting low visibility to anyone within it. Instead of water droplets, however, this fog would consist of some substance or comb...
Currently writing a scifi novel and am trying to do the math to establish time frame of the lore. The main points are that in 2068 CE Earth sent a generation ship to colonize Proxima Centauri. They...
Today I visited a two hours long organ concert (man, it was amazing) and weird idea have popped up in my head: organ powered by steam instead of pressurized air. This also made me thinking that it ...
I'm working on a story involving humans looking for another habitable planet, and I have been scouring the net for days, finding lots of info on varying levels of oxygen and nitrogen, but none that...
I've read all the related questions on here and as far as I can tell this should be breathable on my planet Liskuel, which has 1.5 bars of pressure. However, I'm really bad at maths and don't reall...
My (your) goal is to melt several tons of snow and ice in a small area using electromagnetic radiation beamed down from a spacecraft in orbit. The atmosphere that's in the way is vaguely Earth-like...
As I was thinking about space flight for my world, I thought about how they would need to know a planet's gravitational force before they could land, and found that humans figured out the moon's gr...
The black hole question reminded me of an idea I wanted to implement at some point in a space campaign, but didn't go forward with because I was unsure whether it's merely statistically very implau...
What sort of force would a railgun need to produce to have a measurable affect on the trajectory of a large spacecraft? In the scifi book I am working on the primary craft of the story is a milita...
For certain reasons I decided to not set my story on Earth. However, the planet is meant to host an Earth-like biosphere (including humans, most of Earth's species (perhaps some that didn't evolve ...
In the story Wang's Carpets (and part of the novel Diaspora), Greg Egan sketchily describes a high-dimensional universe which contains no analog for light, such that the aliens who inhabit this uni...
In the DC comic book universe, the Vega System is a solar system around the star Vega (Alpha Lyrae), which is depicted as having dozens of habitable planets. While it seems to be an implausibly lar...
Obviously, if available, atmospheric oxygen is a great source of energy. However, I'm surely not the first worldbuilder who wants an alien species which doesn't depend on it (whether due to having ...
Would it be possible for a planet to naturally have a moon or large natural satellite at one of its Lagrange points? If so would it then also be able to have a second moon that would be orbiting t...
For the sake of fixing some image in your mind, imagine you want to practice some sport in a rotating cylinder world: whether it be launching a javelin, strike a tee at the golf club or scoring a 3...
Assume a civilisation with futuristically advanced knowledge of biochemistry. Assume it wants to develop a cybernetic device meant to facilitate the organism's ability to perform high-power activit...
I have a Gas Giant with 13x the mass of Jupiter. How many satellites of Earth size and mass can it hold safely in its orbit? Edit: This gas giant lies smack dab in the middle of its parent star's ...
Would potato- or grain-like crops be able to flourish in northern alpine regions? There's a lot to be said about the Andeans, but the have the benefit of living near the equator that other civiliza...
The details don't matter, just that a large fraction of people have died (let's say 90%) and society has completely collapsed. It's only a year or two later, and people have started to gather toge...
One of my ongoing projects is what I think of as the "constructed worlds gallery", a series of Megastructures as settings for stories and games, including things like the "Flying Pie-plate" a world...
I'm building a S-Type binary system where the primary star is a black hole. Yet the system formed as a O + K-Spectral class binary and the 20 solar-mass O giant went nova 2,7 myr after both the sta...
I am attempting to design aliens that live in a universe with a 4+1 space-time--i.e., a universe with four orthogonal spatial dimensions, rather than three, in addition to a fifth time dimension. I...
I'm working on a computer program which generates realistic planets for worldbuilding purposes. I've run into an issue with calculating my planets heat loss. While radiogenic and tidal heat generat...
I was curious: Suppose we built an O'Neill cylinder with an air mixture similar to Earth's (not pure oxygen). Does the air also get "thrown" down towards the floor of an O'Neill cylinder? If I sta...
In the far future the posthuman successors of mankind have disassembled the stars and live on ultra slow and ultra efficient solar system sized computers, Matrioshka Brains. The last enemy of intel...
Edit: It has been suggested that my question is a duplicate of What could humans do to render the earth uninhabitable?. That question only asks what would be necessary to make human life impossibl...
On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens made American history with an eruption that took 57 human lives and killed thousands of animals. It has released only a quarter of a cubic mile of ash, but it i...
In my fantasy world, the magic system pretty much makes metal armour and weapons obsolete. The magic system's specifics aren't important, just note that the magic system allows the users to 'penetr...
Most gases that are toxic to breathe also do nasty things to the skin when they're in the atmosphere at dangerous concentrations - and one is walking around without sealed protective clothing; sulf...
I want to render impractical the deployment of satellites by exploiting the Kessler syndrome. Why, you ask? Maybe I'm an evil overlord and I don't want those pesky satellites flying over my lair. ...
I have a pair of survivors living in a trailer (18-wheeler's trailer) and they have found about 3 pounds of cigarette butts and have decided to burn them for warmth. What would happen to these two?...
La Rinconada, Peru is notable because it has an effective oxygen concentration of only 11%, leading to the need for special techniques just to keep a fire going, and preventing the use of combustio...
Fire is certainly high up on the top ten list of mankinds most useful inventions. It allows for a more efficient utilisation of nutriants, is the basis of chemistry and the material sciences, allow...
An engineer goes back in time to attempt to rewrite history: since global warming has wiped out all but a few living species at his home timeline, he wants to prevent it without preventing an indu...
I seek to build a habitable moon of a giant planet, thus I looked at the Rouche Limit Equation to figure out how to get the biggest possible Hill Sphere for my moon to exist in. $r_H = a(1-e)\sqrt...
Another question got me interested in this. How would finances work when there would frequently be long delays for confirmations of transactions? Let's say there are Jump Gates/Artificial Wormholes...
