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In the movie Interstellar, Miller's planet is an ocean planet orbiting extremely close to a black hole. The ridiculous tidal effects caused by the black hole cause the planet's water to concentrate...
Imagine a waste heat driven pressure swing adsorption device is used to treat automobile exhaust gas. Further it aggressively scrubs nitrate, sulphate and CO2 emissions. Note: tanks and filters wou...
Ghyesh is an Earth-like habitable moon that orbits a gas giant in a system with a sun significantly larger and hotter than Earth's. Both the gas giant and the sun emit an equal level of heat to the...
The Humern Empire is a vast, well established empire that spans the galaxy. Despite having no FTL travel they have kept their empire together with a series of subluminal transport methods. Heavy c...
On a world similar to Earth in many aspects, a species exists that is partly carbon-based and partly X-based. X can (mostly) be found in the thick exoskeleton that this creature possesses. I'm look...
I was wondering what kind of planet would lead to aliens being significantly larger and stronger than humans. From my understanding, a planet with lighter gravity would lead to larger creatures, b...
I was wondering if it is plausible for a civilization to go from the end of the stone age to the space age from 6,000 years to 10,000 years. I was thinking this planet's star was starting to die, a...
Scientists have just released details on their discovery of inter-galactic baryon material - "Dark Matter" that turns out to be regular matter, except that it is 'dark' - dispersed throughout the i...
The planet orbits a supermassive gas giant, almost double the size of Jupiter. But the planet orbiting it is also supposed to have rather large rings in my story. Question: Is it possible for a mo...
I'm building a world which is 50% covered by the sea. For approximately half the year, the sea covers one hemisphere; for the other half it moves to the other hemisphere, leaving the first a dry se...
Sequel to this question. Basically, I've been designing an intelligent avian race based on bats. After reading through some of the answers for the linked question, I've decided that these bats wil...
So, a neat thing, depending on how you look at it, about greenhouse gases is that while it's causing a raise in temperature near the surface it actually makes the upper parts of the atmosphere decr...
Is there a realistic way that a Charybdis-like creature could evolve? Starting with roughly earth-like biology, what is the closest plausible creature to the mythical Charybdis that could exist? ...
I previously asked What measures might an ancient civilization take to protect itself from extreme heat? The answers gave some useful suggestions as to how cities could be adapted. For convenience...
My question is not human-specific. I found this question that mentions that a brain have more neuronal complexity; I deduce it is more efficient (in terms of neural communication and energy use) to...
I am designing a fantasy setting for pen-and-paper role-playing purposes. I have decided that a continent be situated right on a Pole of some imaginary planet with axial tilt comparable to Earth. M...
If two planets (roughly Earth sized) in a binary planet system were tidal locked with one another what would be the necessary orbital angle and degree of axial tilt of each planet to satisfy the fo...
First, yes I was inspired by this question: "How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere/pressure?" I wanted to take the scenario further, instead of asking how t...
This question considers the respiratory apparatus of an aquatic (or amphibious) species descended from engineered humans. The history of the species provides a relevant constraint. While the scien...
Similar to Could Plants Develop Sentience? but slightly more general: I'm not interested in plants in particular, but want a more general understanding of the effect of motion on intelligence and v...
An ancient human like civilization exists on a planet like our own but warmer, with more deserts and smaller oceans. Climate change is forcing the daytime temperature slowly upwards. What measures ...
The Humerns are quite an odd species when it comes to mating. They have nine distinct sexes (not genders, they're biologically distinct) all of which exhibit varying levels of dimorphism and all of...
Say they had pale skin, what would they look like? Would the lips be black? Would the vascular system show through the skin more? I'm not very interested in how or why their blood is black, just ho...
I would like for a civilization to be very good at bio-engineering, but I do not know how they would be able to modify DNA to suit their purposes, with greater things than breeding can bring. For e...
I would like to use CRISPr Cas9 technology to extend the life expectancy of my fictional civilizations. From what I understand, CRISPr could extend life by lengthening telomeres and improve quality...
