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Five million years ago, the warm Miocene gradually descended into the cool Pliocene before dropping into the frigid Pleistocene. Such a change in temperature was so gradual that life went on withou...
For some reasons, Stack Exchange became its own country and decides to use its reputation system as the official currency. What would be the advantages and the disadvantages of such a system in co...
Could there be life on or around Planet Nine (a real-world planet in our Solar System, which has recently been discovered through indirect methods)? Of course, it probably receives nearly no solar ...
A common feature in fantasy are half-human creatures such as centaurs, satyrs and merpeople. As much as the worldbuilding community wants these to be real, the evolution and anatomy don't match. ...
Assuming current technology, is there any catastrophic event from space/earth that humanity are able to see/detect/calculated it coming. (Would prefer a space event but earth ones are welcomed) Th...
If all the fresh water were at least 25% deuterium, would humans be able to survive? Would there be significant other detrimental side effects to human physiology as a result?
In the (relatively new) Star Trek movie Into Darkness, we see Dr. Bones and Captain Kirk in a world composed mainly of red plants. Obviously these are just eye candy with no real basis behind it, b...
While something like a warp drive is a staple of ftl technology in sci-fi, I wonder how this sort of spatial warping would operate on a smaller scale on earth. The idea has occurred to me to have...
In regards to questions on artificial-intelligence, it seems like there is always usually an immediate opinion that the goals an AI is tasked with is going to end up with the opposite effects than ...
The Setting Imagine a generation ship of 10-20 generations (200-400 year trip). The generation ship is divided into living crew and frozen eggs. Upon reaching the destination & for genetic d...
If all, or most, fresh water was frozen due to temperature drop over the space of a few generations, what would be the effects on living organisms such as humans and animals? Take in to considerat...
I asked a similar question earlier: What would happen if electricity stopped working?. But I was also thinking about what would happen if magnets stopped working. This question is very related to w...
Orbital construction facilities have a great many advantages over ground based ones: You can use materials from space without having to drag them up the gravity well, you can make vessels that don'...
In the human species, one male partner is enough for the sperm to fertilize the egg. The average cargo is just one child, half of its DNA from the mother and the other half from the father. But t...
I've been thinking that the natural manner for interstellar dispersion of humanity with relatively hard science is with permanently habited nomadic generation ships. Instead of building a ship, goi...
Ok, so I'm making a setting where people have colonized various objects in the solar system and out of it. One thing I know I want to include to flesh it out a bit* is a sport for low-gravity envir...
The flight craft in my Dieselpunk-ish Science Fantasy setting are heavily inspired by the Hovercraft of The Matrix series. I think that those ships have a very interesting look, and they are the fi...
Imagine a dwarf star and a gas giant orbiting each other around their barycenter. The gas giant does not have enough mass to ignite (but may be close to igniting). Over time, the sun loses mass du...
If two different species with different blood bases, say iron and copper, had a child together, how would that affect their child? Which blood base would the child inherit? Could they even have a c...
I want the area I am currently making to have a hot summer climate, but to also some years have a cold winter, including frost and some snow. I understand that this may affect the fauna, but what ...
In my world there are rings, these rings are around 9.5 meters tall and a little around 5000 kilometres wide. Their closest point is a little over 12,000 kilometres away from the surface and under ...
I'm writing a game script at the moment that involves the protagonist exploring various planets in several solar systems. The character starts the game with nothing to their name, but I want them t...
I am seeking to temporarily trap my protagonists on a wasteland. The kind I wanted to create was an icy planet that doesn't experience day or night, just a constant state of moonlight. I suppose th...
I'm looking for a star system between 15 and 36 ly from Sun with these characteristics: composed by 2 or more stars one of the stars should be a late G/ K type star (it doesn't matter for the ot...
In this question I asked about temperatures on a planet where a day last 30 days. The data are the same: stellar flux of 1.118 albedo between Earth's and Mars's atmospheric composition of 18% oxy...
