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Imagine a spacefaring creature, one that colonises star systems, and then shoots some of its kind on to another system (the mechanism for doing this doesn't matter). The question is, how could thi...
What is the oldest a still extant cave on Earth could be? What conditions could encourage the longevity of a cave? It seems that the oldest known caves, the Jenolan Caves in Australia, formed i...
For those that do not know, the tardigrade is a microscopic animal that can survive: extreme heat extreme cold extreme levels of radiation lack of water indefinitely lack of food indefinitely a...
Imagine a pair of black holes in orbit around each other. I'm wondering how this would distort their mutual event horizons. In fact would it be possible to "break" the event horizons by reducing th...
A ship powered by a black hole of a few hundred thousand tons (say, under $6 \times10^8$ kg, which would have a lifetime of several years and a power output of a few hundred petawatts) crashes (mal...
Assume there are three earth-like worlds in our solar system. These three worlds would also have a single natural satellite roughly at the same mass-distance ratio of Earth to the Moon (about 1.2 p...
This human population developed in a mild climate region, with fair abundance of food, water and shelter. However, though they have the skills and the means to explore forth, the population is unab...
There's a famous saying in science fiction: "Relativity, causality, FTL: pick two". I choose causality and FTL. In a Newtonian universe, where there's a privileged reference frame, the speed of l...
So let's say it's a big planet, like a Jupiter. Not talking about our Solar System. This is hypothetical. But say a Jupiter-esque planet in a solar system suddenly disappears. And by disappears I m...
I am imaging a world in which a minor plot device is that there is a strain of dogs that were genetically engineered so that they are even more loyal than ordinary dogs at first, but at some point ...
Imagine a meta-human, one engineered to be immortal. A combination of cybernetic enhancements, genetic engineering, and other scientific modifications have made it so this human will not die from a...
This is set in the same universe as my Andromeda galactic war question (same tech level). In this question, I had somewhat purposely labelled the galactic core as "off-limits" (black holes and oth...
Would it be realistic for a (relatively) small island nation to have these features: A Forest A lake A snowy mountaintop A desert A bustling modern city How large would this island have to be i...
As a way to travel fast, my Earth-like planet is going to have a special train, circling it (the axis of the 'tracks' is aligned with the planet's axis of rotation). The thing about this train - i...
Using the process of 'pair production' and using the nature of a blackhole to separate and destroy one of the particles from that pair, would surrounding blackholes with heavy metals (which increas...
Imagine someone putting a battleship over a country, always in sight, in order to threaten them to not try anything funny. Imagine tech that allows to suspend the ship is not a problem. How high i...
How would gripping of different objects, such as rocks and sticks, work for an organism that has radially symmetrical hands, resembling starfish in shape. They have four to five digits, depending...
I'm writing a book about a man traveling on a Desert planet (colonized) and I need help with some of the species he might encounter there. I'm focusing on animals right now. I need to know what ada...
The setting is present day Earth as we know it. No Magic, and no technologies which do not already exist. Let's say there is all-out nuclear war and much of the existing infrastructure is destroy...
I am designing an alien species of organism (not necessarily intelligent, in fact, probably not). My current settings are these: The female is very large (bigger than cattle, smaller than elephant...
What would be the most limiting factor for a handheld plasma weapon or a wormhole or an alcubierre drive if they could exist? the answer is simple: Energy This is what limits most energy weapons,...
This question is not a duplicate of this question. They're similar, but this one has one very large difference: only a large area has permanent cloud cover, not the whole planet. If low clouds or...
Traditionally we recognize 5 Senses in humans, but in building an alien race for my world I wanted to go beyond that. This is the first in a series of questions. This one is: How can a race express...
So I want robot enemies in my series, but I also want gore without killing living creatures (related to this, because the opponent is the same, the gr8 computer) So basically the robots I talking ...
What characteristics might define a group of multicellular chemosynthetic organisms (similar to that of bacteria living in earth's hot springs and deep sea vents, but relatively more complex, as mu...
