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Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees? In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitiv...
What is the minimum size of a planet that could harbor human life? You get to decide what the atmosphere is, but I'm reasonably sure that O2, CO2, and H2O are necessary components of the atmosphere...
So here's the rough idea. I'm trying to figure out what kind of life could exist that spends basically its entire life in the air, for an alien world I'm working on. No sentient life, just wilderne...
The Idea: A planetary system composed of many interconnected nodes and small bodies in a semi-stable arrangement, with much shorter distances between astronomical bodies than our own Solar System. ...
Ignoring how this sort of atmosphere would come about, what are some things that happen regularly on Earth that would be altered by this sort of atmosphere? Example: Would firearms still ignite nor...
Duplicate Earth and Moon, where should I put it? This question partly arises from the criticisms of stories that claim a hidden planet obscured by the sun, how it would have been detected and if s...
In my story, humanity has wiped itself off earth (salted nukes, to be precise) and survives as a large remnant civilization in the asteroid belt, with small bases on the moon and possible mars. A...
Suppose a species possessed different sets of DNA for different parts of its anatomy. I'm not suggesting one set for every function in the body; that would result in hundreds of thousands of unique...
Gravity in our universe is an attractive force between bodies with mass [citation needed]. This allows matter to coalesce and form all the large scale structures we observe - planets, stars, galaxi...
You have a planet about the size of Earth. It needs to be continually dark, with just the slightest bit of light. Or no light at all. It makes little difference to the aliens that live there. But, ...
I was thinking, and I came up with an alien race, which enthralled me. I was just wondering if these creatures would plausibly evolve this way. (Info dump time These aliens are humanoid. While t...
In this question I asked about the lighting patterns from this system: A really helpful answer there explained when the planet is getting how much illumination. This question is about heat. On ea...
So here's the deal: In a D&D-fantasy-style world, the continent of Archaon is inhabited by a wide variety of elves, whose physical characteristics vary based on their dwellings. The forest elv...
So the idea is that the world has been destroyed, and an emergency plan to put the rest of humanity on floating cities/islands has been put in place. These islands subsist off of some sort of gener...
Could space travelers save space inside their craft by trailing freeze-dried meat on a rope (space tether) behind their space pod? Presumably nothing would be able to get it out there, and it woul...
So, I'm looking to get one of my characters poisoned. However, if they notice that something's up, the jig's likely up as they'll seek treatment for what happened, so this needs to happen "under th...
I've had a great idea to leap over the giant boundary of respiration when making giant insects.The largest problem is that insects rely on diffusion through exterior holes (spiracles) to breathe, a...
The human race is spread through the inner Solar System. Technological and scientific progression is thriving, but we still haven't developed FTL travel, research has its focus on developing a dev...
A genetic mutation is causing people to have a cerebrovascular accident as soon as they think or do something considered immoral by the society in which they live. For instance, in most countries...
Santa delivers to the homes of the 7 billion people on Christmas night, eating cookies and milk at each of the homes. Provided each home puts out a glass of milk and 3+ cookies, that's a lot of mi...
The singularity has occurred and it wants an off-site backup. How deep should we all bury the lunar datacenter to be comfortably safe from radiation, cosmic rays, etc., while not causing cave-ins ...
A"¦ well, dream"¦ of mine: what if smoking suddenly, overnight, became immediately lethal? To be more specific, this is about "active" smoking; bystanders aren't affected. To make things more inte...
Why might a species advanced enough to develop genetic engineering start a process by which their own genes, over hundreds of years, would get edited back to resemble their more primitive ancestors...
Elementals are based on the 4 classical elements: earth, fire, air, and water, as those were all that the ancients knew of. However, with science we have learned that none of those are actually ...
Under currently known science, is it possible to make a robot of which every part was either made of a clear, non-reflective material (such as bulletproof glass, or plastic), or too small or thin t...
