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We occasionally get questions and answers that discuss how close to each other planets can be and still meet some criteria. For example, this answer to the question ''Habitable'' planet close to a ...
I'd like to be able to see from my Earth-like planet, a very bright nebula that can even be seen during the daytime. I question, however, whether that is possible, because in order for it to be co...
I'm going to use the US model for the simple reason that I'm most familiar with it. Constraints and assumptions In the US, legislative representation is by region (state) and population levels. ...
Robots (intelligent machines using some form of artificial intelligence), are central to the plot in a snippet I'm working on. These robots do not have to interact with humans on a regular basis: m...
A staple of science fiction is substances like 'durasteel' or 'tritanium', which, through generally unexplained means, have vastly superior material qualities when compared to conventional material...
Far away, across the vastness of space, lies an alien civilization, who are pretty similar to us. They've got ice cream, peer to peer networking, and photography. More importantly, they do lots of ...
How can a character explain baryon asymmetry (there is more matter than antimatter) by the universe being a simulation with a slightly imbalanced random number generator being employed at the point...
Water is different from air, and sound waves propagate through water in a different way than they do in air (caused in part by interactions with the bottom of the body of water). For a society livi...
I request some help with the design of one particular denizen of my fantasy world, tentatively named Boar Troll. It needs to be an ungulate or closely related creature with emerging sentience, and...
You are probably aware of that certain radioactive things glow, usually a soft green. But is there any way to add compounds or what have you to achieve a different color, say, orange? I know Chere...
The current world population is around 7 billion living people and 107 billion dead people. Since the population is increasing steadily and faster than ever, I was wondering if we could ever reach ...
Could a high powered telescope in space (such as the Hubble Telescope) be capable of peering through a large worm hole with enough clarity to detect that a planet is somewhere on the other side? I...
For the purposes of this question, "teleportation" refers to Star Trek style teleportation: a body is diassembled in one location, and reassembled with an exact (perfect) replica of the entire cons...
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central ma...
For a species I am working on, there is a specific genetic trait that I want to introduce into the population. The exact nature of either is not important for the purposes of this question, but the...
What kind of a scenario would have to occur in order for human beings to seek survival on the sea floor? It could be man made or natural, ice age or heat apocalypse, sudden disaster or gradual coll...
We know that planets can have multiple moons, sometimes quite a few (like Jupiter). Assuming that a planet with several moons were habitable in the first place and has significant oceans (greater ...
If a planet always faces the same side to the sun, so that it has a permanent night side and a permanent day side, it will have a twilight zone in between the two sides. This will be a band around ...
This question is a bit of an outgrowth of Can you simply scale up animals?, but it does approach it from a different angle. "All else equal" (which it of course never is, but we're good at pretend...
How would the human body be affected if the oxygen levels on Earth suddenly decreased by 15 percent? This is instant. Not over time. How would we adapt? Would some people die and some not?
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
The setup: Near future (maximum 50 years in future) where "only" thing changed is, that company SpaceX together with NASA and ESA found out, how to get cargo and people to space very cheap USA dec...
I have a roughly Earth-like planet in a solar system some distance from ours. The atmosphere of this planet is largely similar to that of Earth, but particularly, has a somewhat higher oxygen conte...
In the wake of this, my answer to this question about where to put a Dyson Sphere an apparent issue came up. And it needs some good resolution: What are we going to do with all that heat the syste...
While this is a hypothetical question, I am actually looking for a 'real-world' answer. This is my first time here, so please let me know if I should ask it somewhere else. So, let's say I am an o...
