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On a terrestrial planet with a high amount of ammonia vapor in the atmosphere, would any organism have a strong enough incentive to develop some form of autotrophic chemosynthesis that derives ener...
Would it be possible to have a humanoid, a human looking species with a roughly equivalent brain to humans, without iron in circulation in its blood or body? I have found that reptiles could be a...
I'm positing a non-planetary world but within Euclidean space. This world has things that resemble mountains (but probably not plate tectonics). Elevation varies considerably, but on average it is ...
I want to create a tidally locked world with a habitable (broadly Earth like atmosphere and biome that humans could breathe and live in) band stretching around the terminator pole to pole. There wo...
In Scifi there is often the issue that all the fancy technology like Mechas and Lasguns need a lot of energy. Chemical sources are limited by volumetric and regular power density. Batteries and cap...
I want to use the an active large ignious province (LIP) as a "biome" on a continent in my world. This video about the Siberian Traps inspired me. A LIP modeled after the Siberian Traps gives you a...
On a distant, habitable world, humanity has observed a biological marvel. A creature that is primarily carnivorous, roaming its planet jungles and deserts, has been observed to be capable of manip...
In a distant future, humanity has colonized and catalogued countless worlds in their home galaxy. However one day humanity has discovered a few habitable words in the Andromeda galaxy. After a wh...
Say one day humanity has found a planet that supports life. It's filled with luscious forest and barren deserts, and various ecosystems that resemble Earthly ones. After a single year of researchi...
In my setting, there's a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf (for specificity, its radius is about half Jupiter's, and it's 0.35 AU from 61 Cygni B. Ignore the effect of the oth...
A type of dragon in my world, simply named the Thick-horn, has a well-known mechanism to use to defend itself despite its clumsiness. They are freakishly large, tend to be slow, and find it hard to...
I'm working to design the atmosphere of a fictional planet inspired by Venus (let's call it Cael). Cael's atmosphere at an altitude of 50 km is essentially identical to Earth's atmosphere at sea l...
By that I mean, if you are travelling about on a continent on a planet with a circumference similar to the Sun, how much further would you be able to see, and would it be noticeable, without more c...
Given current capabilities, is it possible for a missile launched from the surface of the Earth to impact the surface of the Moon? I would imagine the same "rocket" used send stuff to the ISS coul...
I am trying to find a solution for a specific subset of the Stealth in Space Problem: dealing with waste heat without tipping off properly positioned observers. This question is scoped specifically...
I actually rediscovered an old story I wrote five years ago and there was this supposedly synthetic material that can float, be programmed to be directed where to be delivered and can carry luggage...
In a future where Mars has been abandoned for several thousand years, and Earth has reverted to a somewhat-habitable state, why would aliens choose to live on Mars, rather than more habitable Earth...
I'm looking to build a horror type sci-fi game based on the Alien franchise. My question comes in trying to differentiate my alien from the Xenomorphs. I want hurting it with a melee weapon to be i...
How quickly could a bacterial colony / virus / pool-'o-prions / [whatever] digest, disintegrate, or otherwise liquefy an ordinary terrestrial biological system? Think something along the lines of ...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a rotating cylindrical space habitat comparable to the more well known O'Neill model. It was proposed by NASA engineer Thomas McKendree in 2000 as an update of O...
Inspired by this interesting question-- let's say that the universe was just really, really out to get a particular star, such as our sun. Is there a perfect cocktail where a mass significantly sma...
I like demons as they're portrayed in popular culture. I wanted to make a "anatomically correct" succubus question, but StackExchange tells me that this one already exists (even if it is not refere...
As far as it is known, Relativistic Kill Vehicles are a common weapon in science fiction and are rendered as powerful as nukes just due to their kinetic energy alone, a finite mass being propelled ...
In Hungarian, there is a new-ish folk-song sung by school-children who dislike school whenever it snows to the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Hull a pelyhes dinamit, Robbantsuk fel...
Assumptions: Jupiter's moon Europa has a salty subsurface ocean in contact with a rocky mantle. The ocean is populated by hydrothermal vents produced by tidal heating. Global heat flow is similar...
