Search
For the longest time growing up with Peak Oil and other such dire predictions, I assumed humanity had just about peaked, in terms of industrial-technological might and capacity to influence its env...
There is a system of one star and something like an asteroid belt around it. But the distance between asteroids is much less than usual, with some perhaps within nine kilometers of each other, and...
We all know about how the aliens in War of the Worlds were killed by the common cold, but how susceptible would aliens really be to human diseases? In my story, I have an alien species living amo...
I have got a fictional universe, where a humanoid lifeform evolved on earth not from apes, but from bears. The humanoid bears are like humans; they walk on their legs only, wear clothing, have vari...
Partly due to WB's great response to my steampunk questions, I think the world I'll work on next will have to be steampunk :) If I had a steampunk cyborg running around, what could he do with his ...
In this question, we were provided a look at what would happen if a human-like species was capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. The consequences of such a modification seem rather disa...
For my Science-Fantasy WIP I am considering using a single artificial planet (roughly the size of a Dyson Sphere) and its moons (of which only three are large enough to exert any real influence) as...
This question may be a bit broad, but I'm basically wondering what minimal things humans need to have in an atmosphere in order to survive. Let's assume we have Earthlike gravity, and are only deal...
Is there a way to make a planet invisible naturaly? I dont want the entire thing to be clear, but have a natural "field" or something that prevents the planet from being seen (or makes it much hard...
Let's say that tens of thousands of years pass and earth effectively becomes a giant city. What species of organisms survive our conquest? How do these species evolve to adapt? How long would huma...
Near the beginning of my story, my main character loses an arm, and is going to get a prosthetic replacement. I've done some research on prosthetic limbs, and as one might expect, you're not good ...
I'm doing some background work for a scifi/horror piece, and it includes "orcs", who are just humans that have undergone a series of mutations - the main one being that they no longer produce myost...
Pretty much every vehicle ever invented has been used for racing on at some point, so it seems likely that people would want to do the same in space. However in space it doesn't really work the sa...
Let's say I have an OCD and I want everything to be perfect. I want all the planets and The sun of our solar system to be equal in size. Apart from that, I want the distance between the orbits to b...
After seeing the film Oblivion I began wondering about what would happen if the Moon was fractured in such a way that large chunks of the Moon were ripped apart. Would the chunks of Moon stay in o...
So, I read the question, the associated answers and comments located here, as well as some others that were more divergent than what I was hoping for. Basically, imagine two earth-like planets ve...
I have a city in space that will have a local population and a lot of travel in and out (center of commerce). Should I place it out in open space or near a planet? Being near a planet obviously i...
One property of life is communication. In particular sound is very useful due to it's non-directional nature. An alarm call is heard by every member of the pack and warns them immediately of the da...
I recently wrote a silly little flash fiction piece in which some party-goers go hide in a bunker under an apartment building in NYC because of a "megablizzard." In said silly flash fiction, I buri...
I am currently creating a world from scratch, and while I have a map, I still need to figure out distribution of natural resources. For resources like fossil fuels, while many do appear in deserts...
Let's say you were living on a planet near (but not too near) a black hole. I'm thinking of the planet Miller in the movie Interstellar. Obviously there are some strong tidal forces. But at this d...
Guns, Germs and Steel is a very thought-provoking book. One of it's theorems is that certain cultures - largely due to geographical reasons - were incapable of getting past certain technological a...
I've just come across a subplot in Jack McDevitt's Firebird where the earth-like planet Villanueva and the rest of its planet system was moving towards an unspecified dust cloud that made the plane...
I'm working on a space-fantasy setting and one of the cosmological quirks is that the cosmos, instead of being a vacuum, is actually filled with a gaseous substance. As a result, the entire cosmos ...
Questions about how to feed a large population keep popping up on this website quite frequently. One obvious option is farming. But how many people can you feed per square-kilometer of farmland? I...
