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I have been looking at various animals that have evolved some level of aerial capability, and I came across Kuehneosauridae. Reptiles which evolved gliding struts, attached down their sides, which ...
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...
Epimetheus is a planet with about three times the mass of Earth orbiting a sun-like star in the Andromeda galaxy. However, two major factors separate Epimetheus from Earth. First, it has a thick at...
My basic question is could life 'as we know it' (carbon DNA/RNA based, using water as the main solvent in metabolic processes) evolve on a planet where the temperature ranges from 16 degrees Celsiu...
I'm designing a world, and I want it to have major geological changes over a short period of time. This includes continental drift, which I'm assuming should have some interesting results. In parti...
I have two planets that are the exact same size and mass of Earth. They orbit each other, and have an orbital period of one day. How far apart are they? The planets both orbit a star the same as t...
In this world a secret society "farms" people with desired features (personality appearances etc.). They have ectogenesis of course; but they can't afford personnel to take care of the "products" u...
What kind of system using modern technology would be able to counter a railgun projectile on a vehicle (both land and sea)? Would a think slab of angled armour in the shape of "<" work to cover ...
As per the title, given A billion ($10^9$) dollars. Present day technology. A year of time (including making projects and testing), (preferred, not compulsory) No restriction about maximal nor mi...
Recently LIGO discovered gravitational waves caused by two black holes that were orbiting each other, and then collapsed into one black hole. A few months later, we find out that this actually happ...
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...
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...
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 ...
Before we begin, this system is created by aliens, and all orbits are on the same plane. These orbits are similar to earth's in shape. So, none of this has to occur naturally it just has to be stab...
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 ...
My idea was to use 2 stages for an interstellar spacecraft (particularly the Orion Drive) and use it in a way similar to Project: Daedalus. Phase 1 would involve accelerating to cruising speed foll...
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...
66 million years ago, a space bomb ten kilometers, or six miles, wide raced through the atmosphere at 20 kilometers per second and landed on the Gulf of Mexico at an angle of 90 degrees. The resul...
Could an unmanned solar plane go not only above the clouds, but also so fast that it always is in the day-side of the planet? A solar plane flying above the clouds receives sunlight $12$ hours per...
I have an engine with unlimited $\Delta v$. Don't ask how I got it, it's probably one of my earth changing inventions. Either way: I no longer like Earth and want to get off (I'm headed for a reti...
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 ...
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...
Not a tank that could survive being shot with a 1 GJ railgun (pretty sure nothing can survive that), but a tank that can withstand the recoil of a 1 GJ railgun that's been mounted to it. Obviousl...
How dark would it be living in an impact winter? Where would an asteroid have to hit earth to cause an impact winter? gives a great breakdown of the effects of an impact winter, but I'd like to k...
This question is partially a spinoff of some points that came up in another recent question at Worldbuilding about interstellar space travel. Runaway Truck Ramps I live in Colorado, and on the do...
I know the innate contradiction present here: one cannot "prove" the supernatural exists, for a variety of reasons. But for the sake of argument I want you to consider this: A person is convinced...
So for my story I want to have a binary planetary system, where both planets are about the size of earth and are habitable by human people. I'm also thinking that they will be tidally locked to eac...
Okay, so now that we've established that the badger folk (or Melinae sapien, if you want to be politically correct) are trading their ore to the humans for cat food. Now we need to determine what ...
Okay, so some space miners fly into space to get Helium-3, and then fly it back to earth to sell to non-space people. Flying into and off the earth is rather expensive, so they want to simply take ...
Anchor one end of the cable to the side of the moon that faces the earth. Drop the other end of the cable to earth so that it drags along the ground. The earth's gravity and friction contributes a ...
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...
I have seen a few similar questions but none seem to take the density of a planet into account. I'm creating a planet on which several small civilisations develop. The planet needs to have a few bi...
Based on this question and answer about a human sized creature that lives completely on textiles, how feasible is it for a creature to consume nylon and polyester to derive fats/lipids useful for b...
Setting The US is waging a failing War on Drugs where cartels are quickly gaining power. Scenario In the near future, say 2030, with current technology, the Texas state government is implementin...
I ask because I have a problem trying to find an appropriate launch window around that time or any point in the mid-1980s, and I need to reach Jupiter via Hohmann transfer so I can then use a serie...
I wrote a novel based on a human civilization that lives floating cities and dirigibles on a small, atmosphere-abundant super-Earth with a liquid water core (there's a smaller solid core under that...
So we have had multiple questions on having multiple moons and this is another. I did check and didn't find questions that covered this specific setup. I have an earth-like world I am working on, ...
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...
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 ...
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...
It's the future and oil resources have run out. A scientist has suggested using personal fart power to meet our individual power needs. World governments are seriously considering this. They have ...
Could one (and how much) generate electricity by building a wall connecting: South Africa to Antarctica South America to Antarctica Northern Canada to Northern Greenland Northern Greenland to Rus...
Based on this question about an impossible barbell planet, how hot would the bar be if it extended from halfway in the Earth's mantle to an altitude of 2r of Earth's radius? The diameter of the bar...
This has been considered other places on the net, but I thought it would be good for the hard-science challenge, since it is often an example of the subtle difference between soft and hard science....
In 2015 we can rewind the TV, our CCTV footage and, if we wear an action cam, our latest adventure. However if we walk down the street and something happens we didn't quite catch, the annoying fact...
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...
I'm currently exploring a setting where humans have managed to create traversable wormholes with one critical flaw - something in the wormhole both kills multi-cellular life and destroys electronic...
I have two earth clones, in essence, separated by 16550 miles (26350 kilometers). They are, of course, tidally locked, and orbit each other once every 24 hours. These planets orbit a sun identical ...
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, ...
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...
