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Two ideas, prompted by a question I submitted recently. (About the chemistry of PVA glue.) Firstly, the topics are too narrow and exclude many, quite possibility the majority, of likely questions....
Since voting on this discussion is currently unclear, I'm separating out each proposal from the question for voting, each in its own answer: Proposal 2 Posts that were imported, claimed, and no...
Since voting on this discussion is currently unclear, I'm separating out each proposal from the question for voting, each in its own answer: Proposal 3 Posts that were imported, claimed, not ed...
First, moving questions rewards people for asking in the wrong place. That's not something that should be encouraged. Second, that's not a great question because it requires following links to ge...
but you could still ask questions about how FTL could be achieved with what we know of physics That's not scientific at all, according to what we know of physics, it's not possible. End of lin...
There is this fantasy in fiction that humans meet another species and figure out that it's intelligent. This usually happens with dragons, dolphins, aliens, collectively intelligent plancton... Bu...
The question: What characteristics are necessary for a planet to be habitable for humans? What should the generic star and planet be like? The life forms are human, so they Need to have access ...
Previously on the same setting (: How close is too close for a human habitation to be near an erupting volcano? What factors could delay the rescue of a small group of survivors on a Pacific volc...
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 ...
I'm looking for various factors; Atmosphere Composition, Type of Sun, etc, whatever would work. That is, of course, if this is even likely/possible. I believe that yellow is generally not an ideal ...
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...
Holograms are a real thing. But what science-fiction TV shows and movies call holograms are something different entirely. From a classical geometric optics standpoint, in order to create the illu...
In the red corner, a top of the line Main Battle Tank, you can have your pick, but let's say a tricked out M-1A2 'Abrams' with a full Nuclear-Bio-Chem Protection kit. In the blue corner, a Nuclea...
The question: What characteristics are necessary for a planet to be habitable for humans? What should the generic star and planet be like? The life forms are human, so they Need to have access ...
All the recent talk on Worldbuilding about the vast energies available to higher-level Kardashev civilizations, the need for 50,000 year message-systems, and so on, got me thinking. With enough ene...
I'm building a moderately hard scifi future setting that focuses on space and land warfare and I'm trying to decide what would be the most realistic from an engineering standpoint of artillery tec...
Many science fiction stories, movies, and shows involve characters undergoing explosive decompression, the technical term for a rapid drop in pressure, usually all the way to a vacuum. Frequently,...
Background A large colony lives in the Antarctic in a network of bases. They have so far evaded the dreadful worldwide plague. When they venture outside their base they don their climate-proof ...
Note: This is different from the previous question Building a full-sized Lego Earth - what would it look like at various levels?. In that case it was about making a solid full-size Earth from Lego ...
I'm looking to create a species of marsupial that is heavily K select, which is to say they put significant effort into raising their young after birth (both of them :P ) in which both the male and...
How would I calculate if it is possible to have an eccentric enough orbit around a gas giant to dip the periapsis some depth(how deep?) into the atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn and...
A perverse incentive is a reward system that has the opposite effect to the one intended. In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat tail handed in wa...
Lego representations of Earth have been made at various scales, for example this one: Suppose Slartibartfast made a full-size Earth from Lego (including the oceans being represented as solid blo...
Most works of fiction have quite imaginative views of time travel. Mighty machines that teleport in time instead of space. Gaping portals in space that take you to another time. Mystical beings wit...
Pathogen Note: For the purpose of this question I define a pathogen to include viruses and/or bacteria. Edit: I don't exclude other biological agents such as fungi that might have the same effect...
