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Story starts out about 100 years from now. While in orbit around Earth preparing for an interstellar mission, our spacecraft encounters some hand-wavey spacetime anomaly such that we're still in o...
Deserts are known to be hot and dry places. In my desert, I need a high humidity in the air. It doesn't have to be near the ground, but at least the atmosphere below 1 km should have a layer of hig...
Saturnian moons Iapetus, Atlas, and Pan all have equatorial ridges. There's a few explanations as to why, but the theory behind why Iapetus has one is what intrigues me. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org...
Imagine a spaceship constructed for merfolk and it is completely filled with oxygenated water instead of air. Since they can swim around effortlessly in the water, do they even need artificial gr...
You are on a generation ship in interstellar space, between star systems. We know that there are rocks whizzing around out there - escaped asteroids, bashed planets, we have even put a few artifici...
A while back I saw this video talking about the habitability of double planets and Rocheworlds. I haven't seen any questions about the latter case here, so I decided to take a swing at it. For so...
I am writing a story (well, developing one) in which a humanoid intelligently genetically engineered species is effectively immortal. The creature maintains its lifespan through a thick-shelled see...
Imagine a world in which you have all the creatures from the game franchise "Monster Hunter"... Screenshot from the upcoming Monster Hunter World game ...and when I say all the creatures I mea...
I rediscovered this article recently and loved all the creative answers on how a mermaid might build underwater. This, for me, brought to mind Atlantis, the kingdom that sank into the sea. I've...
I'm in the midst of writing a space opera, and there are several characters that are sentient androids and I need some help with their physiology. I have them set up with small fusion cores for pow...
I was reading an article that said pulsars could be used in the far future, by travelers, by acting as "lighthouses" in space and aiding in interstellar travel. In a galaxy wide civilization, would...
According to this list mercury only makes up 6.7×10-6 % of the Earth's crust (by mass, I believe; though even if it's by number of atoms it's still tiny). I'd like to make mercury sufficiently c...
What could I "use" to cause a population wide long-term memory loss. So far all chemicals that I have read about cause future memory loss. That is to say, if you are exposed to it today, tomorrow ...
The relationship between the distance, $d$, of the event horizon from a black hole's center and the tidal acceleration, $a$, experienced by an object near a black hole allows for scenarios in which...
Considering a world with Jackalopes. These half-rabbit half-antelope creatures stand a little over 2 feet long when fully grown and have horns like a deer growing 1 to 2 feet in length. Like deer...
Primary question If this world averages a visible light level of civil twilight (about 1000x dimmer than full daylight, or 500x brighter than full moonlight) during the day, what kind of plants ca...
If a star had a Dyson ring of some kind around it, such that to the naked eye the star wouldn't dim at all, how long would it take a civilization to reasonably see and understand the Dyson swarm, a...
I want to create a gas giant planet. The parameters I would like for it to have are: It should have a large layer of gas within its atmosphere that living creatures including humans can survive an...
In this recently asked question on a large, sun blocking object it is pointed out in the comments that there would be ~10e7 N of thrust from the sun due to solar wind. My question is does there ex...
Background There is a world with flora and fauna based on the life forms that evolved on Gondwana (see here for previous questions). Humans colonized this continent from a distant one some thousan...
I have a story idea that involves a human attempt to halt and reverse global climate change. The idea is a simple one - a satellite that partially blocks out the sun. The satellite is located at th...
So as the title describes, I need an apocalyptic event which is survivable by cryogenically preserved humans in hermetically sealed bunkers underground (or somewhere else). This event should wipe o...
I recently came by the many questions of scaling creatures and the square-cube law in real world physics right here, and it piqued my interest a bit to make this question. Think of it as an exercis...
Using this handy dandy graph, I estimate that by the time climate change forces a response we will need to reverse 2° Celsius of heating. The method for temperature control is described in here ...
So let's say you changed a human's DNA to give him: a thick exoskeleton that is a lot like that of a mantis shrimp (to make him bullet-proof) very small holes all over his body to use to breathe ...
