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I would like to explore how to design an alien planet featuring plants and animals but with a much more prominent ecological role for fungi. More fungi, larger fungi, more complex and beautiful fun...
On an Earth-like planet, with the technological and cultural level of ancient Rome: What kind of terrain would be statistically best suited for a powerful city to be located?. The most important ...
Let's say that I want to colonize a planet which is basically like mars but has got an atmosphere which still has extremely low pressure but consists mainly of oxygen. The temperatures are more or ...
Does the following progression/collection of technologies make sense on the way to an artificial womb? The central assumption to this question is that the female body is a delicate, complicated ma...
So I want to send a ship to Alpha Centauri very quickly - by this, I mean less than 5 years. This means that the ship will have to accelerate at 50-100 $g$ or even more. But we don't want to turn o...
Perhaps you've flown in a plane on an especially cloudy day when all you can see are clouds beneath and above you. It's a beautiful sight, strata'd white all around. So what if the plane were flyin...
In my story, I have a slower-than-light starship (traveling at 0.6 $c$) going to Alpha Centauri A. There are several planets around the star. The target planet is a terrestrial, habitable world orb...
Consideration For the sake of argument, please assume the following: The planet in question is around the size of Earth The planet may contain native intelligent life, artificially engineered Th...
Would a salt flat be near a river? I have a world with a Nile River-like region and within a few miles, perhaps 10-20, I have a massive salt flat. The arable land of the river brushes up against e...
Imagine a world much like ours, except our ape ancestors decided they liked the trees and never climbed down and decided to try out these 'tool' things. sapient apes never evolved. Instead a pred...
Imagine that we one day invent an ansible, capable of near-instantaneous FTL communication, but we can not transport physical matter any faster than light. Imagine also that we have gotten to the ...
While smashing heavier and heavier particles together to create super heavy elements 122, 123, and 124, scientists noticed that these collisions created strange, random-looking electromagnetic wave...
If the moon started to move closer to the earth, for e.g. one meter per year, I suppose that it would be accelerating towards the earth and then, eventually, will crash to it. I suppose that if it...
Consider an advanced species unlocks all of the curiosities of science in our universe. They spend millions of years learning every fact, every mechanism of physics, and develop a perfect "Theory o...
Thousands of years ago, human domesticated wolfs and from this domestication came dogs, one of the most varied species on earth. This occurred through simple genetic manipulation and forced evoluti...
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode The Die is Cast. A planetary bombardment scene occured where 17 shots was stated to have destroyed 30% of a planet's crust. Now obviously that's a HUGE amo...
There have been questions about sizing giant animals, giant humanoids, giant flying creatures (also discussed particularly for dragons and giant floating mammals), and giant spiders, one type of i...
A few days ago, I was roaming around Wikipedia and came across something, this comet came extremely close to Mars for astronomical standards recently. I'm also working on a science fiction univer...
Suppose we had reached the moon and found it to be habitable. It was big enough to support an atmosphere, albeit a thinner one than the Earth has, and at some point in the past few hundred million ...
A large group of people has been banished from Earth and punished to scrape out a perilous existence on a strange planet. The planet has breathable atmosphere, and consists of an immense ocean teem...
For as long as recorded history, the Earth has had two moons - religions were based around the interactions of these two bodies in the heavens, they were worshipped, feared and romanticised. Then ...
So, I know that on the planet earth, the force of gravity is actually slightly less nearer the equator, due to the Centrifugal Centripetal Spinny Force. Not by a whole lot, but by some small amount...
Far Future. Almost every household has a 'fabber'. You put raw materials in it (can be almost anything) and it does what you program it to do. It transmutes the raw materials into what is needed. T...
Is it possible that a complex humanoid creature to somehow still use Mitosis as a method for reproduction, and if so, what would it look like?
A Russian billionaire wants to send postage stamp-sized probes off to Alpha Centauri using meter-square light sails. Regardless of the practicality of such an attempt, is there a lot to be gained ...
