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I'm working on a sci-fi book, and a chapter I'm currently on is about a guerilla attack on a human city on the planet. The outer atmosphere is mostly CO$_2$ and methane. The aliens breathe methane...
In a very distant future people have survived by slowing the metabolism to extremely long timescales, reducing the energy consumption per time. It is causing thought processes and movements to be e...
Suppose we have an Earthlike planet, with a rocky moon orbiting it. Under what conditions would dark lunar maria form on its surface, and would they always be on the side facing the planet? For Ear...
So I was curious what would be the advantages and disadvantages to have 12 DNA bases? For example could it be used to store complex memories in an organism, could it cause very complex structure in...
Chthonian planets are gas giants that orbit their stars so closely, the intense heat from the star strips off the gas giant's atmosphere, leaving behind a tail of gas. This turns the gas giant into...
I'm writing a book and I want to use rail-guns for advanced space age factions in warfare. I would like to make them as realistic as possible so I did a bit of digging myself, but most of the inf...
This is a follow-up to Neutron Star mining. Assuming that problem can be solved, it would eventually degenerate to something similar to this case. And if it can't, white dwarfs seem like the next b...
EDIT: As it turns out the method I had thought of using to combat aging doesn't work the way I expected. As such I have rethought this question in more vague terms. New Question: Using current hyp...
We know from the International Pronunciation Alphabet (IPA) and the research that gave us the IPA, what sounds typically used in human speech (certainly not all sounds that can be made). This is al...
In the question of a biological cannon How would a Biological Cannon work? , one option was to use biological by-products for chemical propulsion of the cannon ball. It might have also been propel...
I'd like to explore some details on a so-called water-ball planet (i.e. a planet in the habitable zone of a sun, covered by a 100 km deep ocean). I am particularly interested where life could devel...
There exists a single solitary tree at the mouth of a small river. This tree is basically a fountain of youth, granting immortality to anyone who eats it's grapefruit-sized fruits. As you can ima...
If $8.8 \times 10^{16} m^3$ of water volume is added to the surface of Venus, how would I calculate how much of Venus would be covered in water? The land of Venus has its topographical features wi...
Three natives who study their version of science on the surface of a large rotating habitat located in a cylindrical shape in the space between our solar system and Alpha Centauri, are trying to fi...
For starters, allow me to define more carefully what I am asking. For now I am not worried about any of the following, as if this question is answered they will be covered in later questions: Bon...
Here is a link to an online animation of stars' movements in a trinary system. Basically, the three stars are orbiting around a barycenter; one (yellow in the animation, mass = 1) closer to it a...
So I want a large power source to heat my new real estate on the Jovian moons. I create a micro black hole (MBH), maybe a few kg, maybe more and drop it into Jupiter. I expect the following to h...
Blood of most vertebrates contains hemoglobin, which contains iron. I've imagined a world where someone once had a seemingly stupid idea of using blood as a source of iron. Now, the world is analo...
My plot is to have temples,castles and cities built on top of the remains of previous structures repeatedly to create a multi-level underground dungeon. My goal is to figure out how many levels thi...
The end goal is to have human like beings with vestigial horns or antlers, but I am unsure of what types of horns they should be. Apparently there are three type of horn: living horn-bony outgr...
Given modern technology, what kind of bandwidth could you expect for communication with an extrasolar spaceship? For example, is HD video possible? Is it safe to assume it would vary by distance? O...
The sun is perfectly fine, but for generations, not a single human has seen sunlight. Earth is completely covered in black fog, reaching high up into the atmosphere, so that not even skyscrapers ca...
Consider an interstellar spaceship. It is a rather classical design, somewhat similar to the ISS Venture Star from Avatar: http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Interstellar_Vehicle_Venture...
This is in reference to Could an organism have evolved to kill its prey by shouting at it? However, most answers here speak towards the brute force side of the equation, measure by it's decibel le...
For a while now I've been building a science fiction world and I've been thinking what would be a feasible way to power a large ship capable of interstellar travel. I've always disliked the idea on...
