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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...
For a while now I've been building a science fiction world and I've been thinking what would be a feasible way to power a large ship capable of interstellar travel. I've always disliked the idea on...
Using my world changing invention and my massive intellect I have created the perfect defensive tool for myself and any minions valued friends I deem might need one. The tool is a super suit that ...
Suppose there was a ternary system where the stars are effectively identical in mass, luminosity, radius, etc. These three stars circle a central point rather than two orbiting a larger third. At t...
Nowdays we have biometric doors that can scan your eye, palm, fingerprint, ear, etc, etc... But all of them rely on electronic readers and computers to match the sample against the stored pattern....
I am trying to understand the physics of an interstellar race. Say two ships are racing past a black hole as if it were a corner on a race track. One of the ships takes a hard line and comes very ...
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 (...
I'm currently writing a story, but however I'm having trouble with one part. The hero is faced with a situation where he has to create a fire strong enough melt 5 kg of copper, and he only has a ma...
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...
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...
Once the geography of the world is designed, it needs a planetary system to inhabit. But how should that solar system look? The only constraint is that the system needs the new world to be placed i...
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...
Currently, Earth's eccentricity (orbital shape) is 0.0167086. Zero is a perfect circle whereas One is parabolic escape orbit and any greater becomes a hyperbola. And in the theory of the Milankov...
Our intrepid interstellar crew arrive in a new solar system. The find a planet in the Goldilocks zone. However the planet has no life, but is otherwise earth like*. The atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, ...
Let us assume we have a Kerr metric (rotating) black hole of 10 Sol-masses, spinning at 300 revs/s (as measured by a rest frame observer). What yield strength (assume that yield strength is limiti...
My novel is set on a planet covered in 90% water with no moons. How would the lack of natural satellites effect the waves and wind?
Many authors describe worlds with higher gravity than our own, from whence super-muscular aliens originate. However, as we increased the size, mass and surface gravity of a world; there would be p...
Nobody knows where the big Blue is. Some people say it's a dream. Some people say it's the space between the worlds, where all the things that fall through the cracks end up. The occasional rains o...
In recent years, we have discovered exoplanets that defy our traditional perspectives on how planets work. WASP-17b is twice as wide as Jupiter, yet half as massive, probably because of its orbita...
Planet has these characteristics: Half of the planet is always on day, and other half is always night (it rotates at the same velocity as its orbit) There are no underground water sources; it's a...
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 currently working on a Sci-Fi setting for my friends to use in a campaign (my friend is GM but he's too lazy to come up with a setting so I offered to do it), I've already worked out the minor ...
We are in a future where genetics has advanced to a point where arbitrary modifications can be done to living beings. Now a geneticist wants to make a flying human. That is, he wants to modify a hu...
I know that moon composition and atmosphere (if it exists) will influence how reflective a moon is, but I was hoping for a fairly exhaustive list of materials that moons are actually made of, how r...
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...
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...
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 ...
In the game Portal, there are glowing light platforms. These platforms are (supposedly) made of solid, compressed light. How can these realistically be made?
A key part of the plot in a story I'm working on revolves around the main region being on top of volcano that is set to erupt. The trouble is that the region in question in my setting is roughly th...
When thinking about a potential answer to this question about preventing flight in a cyberpunk dystopia, I had an idea that I do no possess sufficient knowledge to prove/disprove. Thus you'll be t...
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...
Well, I ask the question because apparently I am going to aim for NaNoWriMo. I am calculating the density of a planet with 1.8 Earth masses and 0.9 Earth radii, but last I checked, the calculation...
I'm exploring various kinds of potentially habitable planets as part of a universe-building exercise, and have recently delved into the fascinating concept of carbon-rich planets. My question is mu...
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...
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...
If the ozone layer of planet Earth was completely depleted (to near-zero concentrations), what would the average summer UV-index rise to in New York City? If relevant, other changes anticipated ar...
In my universe, gravity varies with the inverse of the distance (instead of the inverse square of the distance). I already know that this means that all circular orbits around the same object will ...
A good summary of the Zerg race is given on wikipedia as follows: The Zerg are a collective consciousness of a variety of different races assimilated into the Zerg genome. The Zerg were origina...
Imagine that God has many universes to deal with or just needs a break sometimes. He has a pause control. What plausible mechanism does God use to perform the pause without breaking the laws of ph...
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...
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...
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 ...
This story takes place in our world around the year 2116. Global warming couldn't be avoided and a runnaway effect suddenlty started increasing temperatures much faster than experts predicted. Ov...
Is it possible to contain similarly charged particles in a magnetic field or traps, in generally large scale (say, all of them have positive charge), and could be utilized as power reserves quite e...
Preamble The Alternity Cosmos II is a complement to a dice role-playing game that uses heuristics based on hard-science to 'build' plausible star systems for the Alternity game: http://www.altern...
Suppose the chemical reaction: $$3CO_2+2H_2\rightarrow 2H_2O+2O_2+3C$$ This reaction could be used to filter out $CO_2$ from the atmosphere, slowing down or reversing climate change. The solar syst...
I'd like my (very well funded) group of scientists to conduct an important excavation, in-situ with fully breathable air and comfort. I realize a pipe down to the surface would require a pump and ...
I am interested in building a little world involving a very realistic asteroid pair, orbiting each other, and would really appreciate some help with numbers and science for this. I would like two l...
My question is simple: How many nested moons are physically possible? If our moon had a moon, that would be a nesting of 1. I'm assuming it's easily possible for a really big moon to be orbiting ...
In Lyman Stone's fantastic blog post about George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, Stone mentions that the seasonal cycle of Westeros is very unrealistic. Here's the truth: Medieva...
