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The Karman Line is one of the most commonly-used definitions of the "edge of space". As an airplane flies higher in the atmosphere, the air gets thinner and thus the lift decreases. This can be c...
I want to popularize the following or a similar belief. In many thousand years people will travel back in time to give us an afterlife, if we make it possible, by going the steps, that will lea...
I have a region on a planet with identical parameters to Earth but different landmasses that is rather similar to the southern ocean on Earth. There is a single piece of land around the size of th...
I know that in the past I posted questions on if specific bodies larger than the moon--Mars in one and Titan in another--but this series deals with questions regarding Earth's effects by a natural ...
Motivation The Square-Cube law is usually cited where questions of scale arise. Actually applying it to real-world objects quickly shows that it is completely unusable to approximate weight differ...
I know that objects with lower mass tends to orbit objects with higher mass, is it possible to have a Moon sized planet who's mass is so heavy that an Earth sized planet orbit it as it's Moon in a ...
From time to time I'll see things talking about how thanks to all of our radio communications, we're effectively broadcasting our existence to the entire universe. However, when I did some back-of-...
Back home, Earth had gone through an impact-coalesce cycle only once. Since then, its core has been 84% iron, 6% nickel and the rest being labeled by The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual ...
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...
If I push a couple of magnetic asteroids into mars gravitational field, could they form an interlocking series of magnetic fields able to protect mars from solar winds? Size limits for asteroids ...
I'm referring to an entomological plastron which is a structure that traps a bubble of air next to the insect's body but permits contact between the air and the water. As the insect consumes oxygen...
So for lack of a better term (I'm sure there is a better term) imagine a universe without curvature as being like a sheet of paper. You have left, right, forwards, backwards, up, and down. Now take...
Summary The main idea behind the "cuboverse" is that spacetime distances are measured by (something close to) the sup norm or infinity norm. Under this norm, spheres (the set of points at a fixed ...
I was curious about an odd effect I first saw in video here: YouTube : Copper's Surprising Reaction to Strong Magnets In the video, a big heavy magnet is brought to an abrupt halt by a simple piec...
I'm playing around with a story idea that includes vacuum dwelling intelligent life, but I'm not sure I understand the constraints of biochemistry I need to deal with. There's lots of potential s...
A common, matter-efficient science-fiction habitat is a hollow cylinder or ring in space that is spun to simulate the pull of gravity on its interior surface. These habitats have been imagined as s...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
