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A large solar flare event ignites the atmosphere of Earth, but luckily, humans have been preparing for an event like this for some time. We have a fairly large shelter around 2.2 kilometers undergr...
I've built a device, it's capable of turning matter to energy and energy to matter with perfect efficiency, I've got the resources to build a space station in secrecy, and I want to get off the pla...
Imagine someone from the modern day somehow gets transported back in time around the same time of WW2 without warning ahead of time. He has with him a laptop, graphing calculator (and a hand full ...
I gave this a quick test on sandbox, and agreed with the comment that I should steer away from the physics part and focus on the geology, etc. Assuming Europa's ice crust is 10km thick as some spe...
In many movies we see super heroes creating walls of ice to block explosions and bullets. How realistic is this? In the Incredibles Frozone shoots ice at a police officer just before he shoots a ...
So I'm writing a setting featuring asteroid mining à la Deep Space Industries, where the material mined is used for construction in space rather than brought to Earth. To maximize efficiency, I'm ...
As a source of food, would it be possible to have fish and/or plants living inside a water tank situated between the fusion or fission power plant and the crew quarters of a ship? The ship in ques...
I want to play with the idea of a sapient species evolving on a world where at least part of the world experiences a permanent day. The obvious way to doing this would be where part of the world f...
Given that a laser beam is made up of coherent light waves running in parallel in the same direction, and that space is not a complete vacuum (dust, radiation, electromagnetic forces etc.), what ki...
For my story, I need to know the following: I have a (long exposure) analog (as in "not digital") picture of the night sky taken on a random planet somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. I know it i...
When looking to design armor - how can I determine whether a given ballistic object would completely stop, deflect into another direction, or penetrate another object given complete physical inform...
In How large a bioengineered mobile lifeform could exist on Earth?, I asked how big my nanoassembled war beasts could be, and it was suggested that I make my question more specific. I am designing...
This is inspired by What single element could destroy the world?. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere has been proposed as a mechanism to relieve the symptoms of global warming by creatin...
Arising from the comments in This Question, which started to stray offtopic into the question of whether men are needed at all. In Short: Could you create a fertilized human (necessarily female) f...
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...
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...
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...
Introduction In our universe, the cosmic microwave background was formed approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang. It was hot, but within a few million years after the Big Bang, it would no ...
Is this physically possible? A non-technological phenomenon visible in the same position of the sky, for 18 hours of a day using the other 6 to do whatever, rise and set, just be impossible to see...
A civilization wishes to create a wormhole connecting its universe to a universe with a different spacetime metric. For instance if we describe a timelike dimension with $+$ symbol and a spacelike...
Bernal spheres and other O'Neill cylinders are complicated, maintenance-high and fragile beasts. Someone started to make micro-black-holes and put them in asteroids, in order to have 1 to 10+km roc...
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...
They do not necessarily meet humans and try to interact with them. This question is more about the technical possibility/impossibility of 4D aliens being able to "analyze" the inner structure of ou...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
I'm thinking of a character that has the magical ability to transform parts of his body into technology, similar to Generator Rex or Bleeding armor iron man, but only with the technology that he "u...
A perverse incentive is a reward system that has the opposite effect to the one intended. In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat tail handed in wa...
How would I calculate if it is possible to have an eccentric enough orbit around a gas giant to dip the periapsis some depth(how deep?) into the atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn and...
I'm looking to create a species of marsupial that is heavily K select, which is to say they put significant effort into raising their young after birth (both of them :P ) in which both the male and...
Note: This is different from the previous question Building a full-sized Lego Earth - what would it look like at various levels?. In that case it was about making a solid full-size Earth from Lego ...
Background A large colony lives in the Antarctic in a network of bases. They have so far evaded the dreadful worldwide plague. When they venture outside their base they don their climate-proof ...
Many science fiction stories, movies, and shows involve characters undergoing explosive decompression, the technical term for a rapid drop in pressure, usually all the way to a vacuum. Frequently,...
Most works of fiction have quite imaginative views of time travel. Mighty machines that teleport in time instead of space. Gaping portals in space that take you to another time. Mystical beings wit...
There are many questions on Worldbuilding about what item(s) a time traveller should take back in time in order to alter past events or even simply to survive. There has never as far as I know bee...
