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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...
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...
A Kardashev Type III civilisation has need of a long-scale timepiece, and as such has arranged a series of planets around a black hole such that their orbital periods can be used to tell the time i...
So I'm thinking about orbital warehousing of raw materials but I'm wondering whether one would actually need an orbital structure to store the goods inside or could you just strap a booster to the ...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 end goal is to have human like beings with vestigial horns or antlers, but I am unsure of what types of horns they should be. Apparently there are three type of horn: living horn-bony outgr...
In Larry Niven's short story "Bordered in Black", there's a planet (Sirius B-IV) with much lower gravity than Earth. As a result, the planet has a gentler atmospheric pressure gradient, i.e., the a...
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...
Nuclear rockets, or as I like to think of them, "half way between a continuous small atomic explosion and reactor whose front fell off". There are many variants, and my aliens are using relative si...
Mars has a couple of problems with regards to colonization such as lack of atmosphere, lack of magnetosphere, weak sunlight, and a few others. Of concern in this question is how to shield human col...
In an effort to reduce the murder rate I want to greatly increase the chances of getting caught. To do so I invented a device that will record your last words (and potential the murderer's and your...
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...
Is it possible that subterranean caves do/have existed on Mars? We know of the past existence of water on Mars. Which region (if any) of Mars would we likely find/expect to find a cave system bel...
The coldest place in the universe that we have observed is in the Boomerang Nebula. Similarly to a refrigerator, heat is carried away through a fluid, resulting in a space colder than the surroundi...
The exposition is that a civilization exists about 200 light years from earth and has been capable of radio communication for several thousands of years. They are not trying to hide from detection ...
So, assume that you have 1m$^3$ of normal Terran seawater you can adiabatically raise to an arbitrarily high pressure/temperature in situ (say, by compressing it with nuclear shockwaves from all di...
If the holograms are really advanced like the hologram of Snoke in The Force Awakens and they are haptic, which means you can feel them, can they be used to make an immersive virtual reality envior...
Background I was pondering my answer to this question. I asked myself, "Why would I only do a 45-minute burn and then float for 3 months to get to Mars?". Then I answered, "Because you only have ...
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...
This is a follow-up to Neutron Star mining. Assuming that problem can be solved, it would eventually degenerate to something similar to this case. And if it can't, white dwarfs seem like the next b...
There are a number of stories about persons with exact look alikes. In general this seems to be a rather rare phenomenon. But if you assume more and more humans it should become also more likely ...
Considering the rather hostile radiation environment on Europa, what communication and navigation systems might be used with near-future manned spacecraft? What would the ranges and features of th...
I've read that even in a "perfect" vacuum, matter exists in the form of virtual particles that spontaneously pop into existence only to be immediately annihilated. This suggests to me that it might...
I've been searching for hours, and most formulas I can find use complex/imaginary numbers or variables that I don't know or can't find out (such as the imaginary part of the planet's love number, w...
So I want a large power source to heat my new real estate on the Jovian moons. I create a micro black hole (MBH), maybe a few kg, maybe more and drop it into Jupiter. I expect the following to 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...
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...
This is in reference to Could an organism have evolved to kill its prey by shouting at it? However, most answers here speak towards the brute force side of the equation, measure by it's decibel le...
Simplifying a larger problem. Building a sci-fi text game and I don't want the science to be too wrong. Imagine I have two points in space which are 111,125 kilometers apart and it takes 17 minut...
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...
For a SciFi project I work on I have a space-station orbiting earth that uses an 8 hour 3 shift system for its staff. Each shift is assigned to one-third of the countries and organizations on earth...
Consider an interstellar spaceship. It is a rather classical design, somewhat similar to the ISS Venture Star from Avatar: http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Interstellar_Vehicle_Venture...
Blood of most vertebrates contains hemoglobin, which contains iron. I've imagined a world where someone once had a seemingly stupid idea of using blood as a source of iron. Now, the world is analo...
So I'm writing a story (set well into the future and on a different, but similar to Earth planet colonised by humans) and as part of it I am including specs and designs for the armour that the mili...
I was thinking about making up a visor like Batman has in the Arkham series, where he "analyzes" a sample and then he can set a filter on his visor for particles of that compound. Something like a...
I'm trying to design a realistic genetically engineered nanotech super-soldier with a full set of redundant organs. How much more interior volume and thus height/weight/muscle mass would a human bo...
In a world similar to ours, a mad scientist is bent on preventing the ascendance of one certain individual over the rest of the people inhabiting the northern part of the continental America, also ...
Scenario: I have a generation ship moving between two star systems. Given that such a ship needs to have a completely self sufficient life cycle system to make it viable, ejecting mass continuously...
Lets say you have an average-ish magnetar "” about 3 solar masses, with a magnetic field of 108 teslas (it's decayed a bit since it was born). Now lets say we have a solar system with a small-ish ...
And how much fuel would you need to carry? I'm trying to determine what kind of engine you'd need to accelerate a good-size spacecraft (thousands to millions of tons) at a constant 1g in a race acr...
I've been reading here for a little while, but this is my first question. I am trying to come up with either a concrete set of numbers for a single answer for a binary planet system, or a simple fo...
For the purpose of this questions, let's assume my crew has solved all those nasty problems of survivability inside the field, not unleashing a devastating blast of particles at their destination, ...
There is a group of people with about renaissance-level technology clearing out underground granite. They have no access to work animals. 700 men are working at any given time. Mining Using rena...
Our universe is described as having three physical dimensions, plus one time dimension, where the eigenvalues for the physical dimensions are all the same, but the eigenvalue for time is opposite (...
Suppose there is a culture on earth that sees dead bodies as holy items and letting them decompose is a sin. I have seen many examples of mummies preserved so well that they almost look like their ...
I'm working on a species of large bird, and trying to determine whether they will be able to fly or not. I know that this equation likely applies: $$ A = \cfrac{L}{\cfrac{1}{2} v^2 \rho C_L} $$ ...
