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Background info The humanoids in my Kepler Bb story have stronger muscles at every stage. This makes it much easier for babies to go through physical milestones and thus the shortening of time bef...
I am working on an alternate history where the USSR won the Moon Race (by upgrading the NK-15, starting development of the N1 earlier, and making cybernetics/computer science not a "bourgeois pseud...
I'm designing a mission to a planet orbiting 61 Virginis (27.9 ly distant), and want to stay within physics that we're aware of (e.g. no warp drive). I've asked questions here and here, and the an...
Humanity survives long enough to create a Dyson-Ring around old Sol using many of the planets and asteroids currently in the system. Then 'something happens' we die out, we discover a way to trave...
So at some point in the future, humans have small colonies on the Moon, on Mars and many space stations in orbit of all the planets in the solar system. Everything is going great until one day some...
Do we have the technology to go to the Moon now, and stay this time? I'm not talking about the political will or economic rationale for doing so, I just want to know if there are any unsolved (and...
I'm inspired by the comments discussion on a (now deleted) question by XandarTheZenon. We're preconditioned to think in terms of a 2-sex lifeform, which is natural with diploid genetic material, an...
As usual, another interesting scientific question, taken from /r/worldbuilding. Would it mean any difference for a desert, where the amount of threatened objects is so low? Or would it form the ge...
I'm currently planning for my own new story, and in one point in time there will be a city somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean which has to have the space resources necessary to sustain for around 1 bi...
Al's been working on his power armor, and has started thinking about combat drops. He'd considered parachutes to facilitate this, but then he thought of the Square-Cube Law and had a thought: are p...
In this answer to another question, solar system-scale rail gun acceleration (and deceleration) was brought up as an alternative, and I found this intriguing. It's worth another question at least....
Assuming a lithotrophic slime mold were to be created, which metabolized iron, carbon dioxide and sulphur, and released, how much damage would it do? Let's say it was created to help manage landfi...
Assuming a genetic engineer possessed sufficient knowledge and facilities, could they design a highly infectious Retro-Virus or Adenovirus, which would drastically increase the rate of random mutat...
Goal: Just imaging a Star Wars X-Wing fight, and you've got the idea. However, I want to know whether something like that is possible without tons of metaphysical hand-waiving and 'just because'. ...
Inside our eyes are two different kinds of receptors: The rod, in which the human eye has 120 million and work in low light The cone, in which the human eye has only 6 to 7 million of them, the r...
Our notion of recording and communicating time and date is based on very old concepts, many of them being built upon flawed assumptions (that the Sun should be at exact south at noon, that a year s...
I am trying to design a world where one pole is very cold, and the other is very hot. I don't mean that there would be instant death in either, but it is colder than our South Pole on one end and w...
Silicon is often brought up in science fiction as being very similar to carbon, just below it on the periodic table. The silicon-based "organic" molecules are more tightly bound and thus would fin...
One day in the year 1980 humans receive a message from an alien race. It reads a little something like this: Hey guys, real sorry, but a weapon we launched in an excercise malfunctioned and is ...
In my alternate history (1800s), I have troop hiking through tropical sub-Saharan Africa. For plot reasons, I have man-killing mosquitos, but I also have a plant that exudes CO2 and other attracta...
I'm planning on setting a story on Earth where the Sun is slowly becoming a red giant. I guess with so much solar activity and probably less atmosphere and magnetic field, the surface of our Earth ...
I have a city on a 3km-high mountain-top with a population of perhaps 50,000 humans, at a technological level of late renaissance or early steam. Below the city is a coniferous forest with wildlife...
Most of the planets that we know of have a sidereal day (rotational period) that is shorter or on the same order of magnitude as their sidereal year (orbital period), the latter being the case in t...
My story (same world as here) take place in a future Earth between 3 and 5 million years in the future. What kind of artifacts, if any, would civilizations from this era find from the now extinct h...
My idea was to use 2 stages for an interstellar spacecraft (particularly the Orion Drive) and use it in a way similar to Project: Daedalus. Phase 1 would involve accelerating to cruising speed foll...
