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I was on a beach recently and was contemplating what it would look like if Silicon just didn't bind oxygen very well/at all, perhaps similar to gold. I'm not sure if something else would take the ...
So the background is simple: in the modern day a CME (coronal mass ejection, a solar flare that has escaped the sun) hits the Earth and destroyed all the electrical equipment causing planes to cras...
Rockets consume a lot of fuel and carry not eough payload. To reduce the fuel needed, why not send it in the mesosphere? Imagine a big balloon, capable of carrying a small rocket to the mesosphere...
I want to put a circular city in geostationary orbit. The city will have a radius of 20Km. I was thinking of using quantum trapping/levitation to achieve this. Here's what quantum trapping is: ...
By Colonies 'in' the outer solar system I mean the various moons and space stations past the asteroid belt. Currently the Hegemony has established bio domes, mining stations, and a few large scale...
Pretend I'm writing a story about a world exactly like our own. Real world physics, no magic, modern technology. Suddenly an eccentric world leader comes up with the idea to replace the melting gl...
There's a Thylacine that's found in Tasmania, unfortunately they only found a single female specimen. It it possible to grow Thylacines artificially (say like in an artificial womb) of both male a...
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...
I'm writing a rough sketch for a book about a world where people sorta violently and suddenly get barely working superpowers. That is every time each person uses their power they run the risk of ki...
In my earlier question, regarding airships, I mentioned fictional gas, as light as hydrogen but non-flammable. Is it possible to make chemical element, with atoms made not from nucleons, but with s...
I have a story in which a King, knowing his kingdom will fall, would like to have a scorched earth policy. The King would order all residents to begin salting the earth to ensure nothing there can ...
I've got a lunar colony that struggles to obtain resources, so they're looking for ways to launch satellites into orbit without using up a bunch of rocket fuel. One plucky engineer has suggested ...
What kind of technology would be required for a space travelling civilization to have an effective communication system or network that is similar in speed to the telegram? How would it work? This ...
On earth there can be hours where the moon is up during the same time the sun is in the sky (daytime moon) due to the combined rotation of earth and orbit of the moon. I would like to have an earth...
The year is 2030. The US has set up a moon base with about 2,000 people. The base can theoretically survive indefinitely, growing its own food and 3D-printing supplies, but in practice it needs t...
I have a spaceship that's powered by an efficient hydrogen fusion drive, but the drive outputs a large amount of dangerous neutron radiation as a side effect, and those neutrons are not captured an...
AA (azidoazide azide) is a hyper-explosive 14 nitrogen molecule. My questions are: what are some theoretical ways to store it so it doesn't explode on you but on the enemy you throw it at, and what...
This is a purely hypothetical question but I can't find a satisfactory answer to it. Let's say somehow Jupiter collects enough mass to be considered a brown dwarf. Let's assume Jupiter achieves a...
I was reading this article from NASA about chemical rockets and they argue that, with a planet 50% larger than the Earth (assuming similar density, about 1.5G surface gravity), it would be impossib...
Inspired by Spaceship orbiting a black hole under the event horizon - a prison where no one escapes, I was wondering if it is possible to make a space elevator that goes down into a black hole. In...
Assume an Earth-like or super-Earth terrestrial planet in a state comparable to Precambrian or Archaen Earth. The atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, perhaps some methane, but very li...
So, I the question of what if a black hole hits the earth has been asked to death by various people, but what if the somewhat tamer wormhole hits the Earth? In particular, we'll say that one mouth...
I'm working on a sci-fi book, and a chapter I'm currently on is about a guerilla attack on a human city on the planet. The outer atmosphere is mostly CO$_2$ and methane. The aliens breathe methane...
In a very distant future people have survived by slowing the metabolism to extremely long timescales, reducing the energy consumption per time. It is causing thought processes and movements to be e...
Suppose we have an Earthlike planet, with a rocky moon orbiting it. Under what conditions would dark lunar maria form on its surface, and would they always be on the side facing the planet? For Ear...
So I was curious what would be the advantages and disadvantages to have 12 DNA bases? For example could it be used to store complex memories in an organism, could it cause very complex structure in...
Chthonian planets are gas giants that orbit their stars so closely, the intense heat from the star strips off the gas giant's atmosphere, leaving behind a tail of gas. This turns the gas giant into...
I'm writing a book and I want to use rail-guns for advanced space age factions in warfare. I would like to make them as realistic as possible so I did a bit of digging myself, but most of the inf...
Many questions on this site hypothesize about two planets in close orbit of each other, each developing their own civilizations. How feasible is that? Some 4.5 billion years ago Theia, a planetary...
EDIT: As it turns out the method I had thought of using to combat aging doesn't work the way I expected. As such I have rethought this question in more vague terms. New Question: Using current hyp...
We know from the International Pronunciation Alphabet (IPA) and the research that gave us the IPA, what sounds typically used in human speech (certainly not all sounds that can be made). This is al...
In the question of a biological cannon How would a Biological Cannon work? , one option was to use biological by-products for chemical propulsion of the cannon ball. It might have also been propel...
I'd like to explore some details on a so-called water-ball planet (i.e. a planet in the habitable zone of a sun, covered by a 100 km deep ocean). I am particularly interested where life could devel...
There exists a single solitary tree at the mouth of a small river. This tree is basically a fountain of youth, granting immortality to anyone who eats it's grapefruit-sized fruits. As you can ima...
If $8.8 \times 10^{16} m^3$ of water volume is added to the surface of Venus, how would I calculate how much of Venus would be covered in water? The land of Venus has its topographical features wi...
For the purpose of this post, full spectrum means a non-trivial number of frequencies within a non-trivial band. So human eyes aren't full spectrum within the visual range (each cone is wide band, ...
Three natives who study their version of science on the surface of a large rotating habitat located in a cylindrical shape in the space between our solar system and Alpha Centauri, are trying to fi...
In a near future setting I am working on, humans have built space-habitats and have established colonies on celestial objects such as Luna. Their spaceships cannot go faster-than-light and have the...
I am trying to build a hard science-fiction world where the interstellar travel might work like this: Travellers bodies are scanned and all relevant information regarding body structure, neural c...
On a giant 50 mile high volcano, created and sustained by magic, there is extreme weather. Storms, high winds, snow, everything you'd find at the flanks of exceedingly high mountain. Explorers have...
As you know, Earth has active and moving techtonic plates known as the lithosphere. They float on the asthenosphere and slowly move about. Here's my question: Can a planet with a hot molten core h...
Decades in the future, people have been able to augment their own sensory inputs in their brains and nerves to feel, see, taste and touch things that are not really there. Also, they can modify the...
So in this world somewhere in distant future. The government has created I.D Chips that are designed to be biologically implanted into its own citizens. To ensure extra "security" and also act as a...
People have been trying to imagine elaborate alien biologically possible ecosystems for a while. A lot of people seem to both want but ignore one of those fundamental aspects of our own ecosystem, ...
I had this one idea of having the government create chips that monitor the thoughts of prison inmates as a way of preventing future crimes. At the same time still, give them a degree of freedom and...
Section 1: Non-Duplicate Proofs. Section 2: Background, THE QUESTION, and Useful Info. Section 3: Other cited ways of preventing. Section 4: Sources and Additional Resources. Section 5: TL;D...
Information and Context I'm working on a story, based 220 or so years in the future in a hard-science universe (where a quantum jump drive has been invented). I was wondering if anyone could giv...
I recently watched this Kurzgesagt video exploring the question of what would happen if you had a black hole the size of a coin. To summarize the video: A black hole with the MASS of a coin wo...
The Setting I'm doing background work on a story involving a civilization about as advanced as ours materiologically. A significant part of their military operates along the continental shelf zone...
The situation: the good guys are attempting to infiltrate an enemy base, and cause mayhem either in person and/or by planting explosives and running away. They know there is a big dust storm on the...
