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Would it be practical to use a "squirrel suit" and sacs of buoyant gas for deceleration from a free fall as opposed to a parachute? Furthermore, once the sacs have been inflated, could the person i...
So, let's assume you've cobbled together an interplanetary empire without using transportation methods that violate causality or have the power to blow up stars. You may feel pretty proud of yourse...
I watched a youtube video on the Darwin IV probe mission to this planet has lower mass than the earth, about the size of Mars, and has a single sea. According to the movie, the microbes that reside...
In another question, Are flying plants possible?, a point was raised that because of the square-cube law, a large, hollow, spherical plant could fly by having the air inside be a little bit hotter ...
I'd like to construct a planet where the rivers all run east to west, but I need a plausible reason for them to do so. Rivers run from high altitude to low, but also I suppose there is the corioli...
This question is inspired by book The Day of the triffids and this question Russia and USA have never been really "friends", lets admit it. So we will not be surprised, that one of them (pick your...
I was experimenting with various star system designs with a gravity simulator, and one of the patterns I ended up with is best described as a planet with a very elongated elliptic orbit that itself...
Consider a scenario where there is an over-populated solar system (not necessarily our solar system). Several other rocky planets and moons in this solar system are inhabited by the same humanoid r...
Recently I had an idea for a world setting. A large part of this world focuses around a habitable satellite the size of Earth orbiting a Super-Jupiter. The fact that it's a moon is pretty integral ...
In creating a calendar for a fictional world I'm considering the phases of the moon. I understand our moon has an orbital period of approx. 28 days. Is there room for variation if the planet and th...
PREMISE The zone will make all electrons disappear. QUESTIONS If a person walks in that zone with his whole body, would he die from heart failure? What happens if he just sticks his hand in? H...
Imagine there is a space station shaped like a cylinder. The cylinder spins on its axis, in order to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. My question: How fast would the space sta...
Premise Imagine a slightly more advanced modern day world where space flight was starting to commercialize. Imagine that all of a sudden laws changed and the only thing different is that no comput...
Earth has stopped rotating. Maybe Superman started flying around the Earth backwards to turn back time, but hit a wall of kryptonite just when the Earth stopped rotating. Or Stupendous Man hit the ...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
Through extreme pollution and large-scale warfare with atomic, biological and chemical weapons Earth has become completely unable to sustain life. The atmosphere is toxic, the water undrinkable and...
According to this Reddit conversation, the detritus around a planet tends to form into a single plane located around the equator given enough time. How long does this process take? Suppose a planet...
An abandoned outpost from a long extinct race is discovered. It can easily be repaired and would make an ideal location for a colony, however it has been breached and any usable air has been long ...
Take for example, Neptune, a planet with a slushy mantle and outer core. Imagine we want to mine for water (or some substance beneath it - maybe an exotic ice form under all that liquid). How do ...
We have a tiny robot, insect like, barely five millimetres long, but with an almost perfect AI. The sensory input consists on an array of chemoreceptors, vibrissae, and cameras. It can fly through ...
Obviously there are plenty of potential physics problems with this scenario, but if people lived along the inner crust of the Earth, and there was a Sun-like core at the center with nothing else in...
This is about a fictional planet that has a solid land surface but on which the atmosphere is composed of some liquid containing hemoglobin, or some artificial blood substitute. I am not sure yet ...
Imagine that we live in a setting where there are a trillion humans (see linked question). A bit crowded, I know. Further imagine that at least the entire energy output of the Sun was available to ...
Many sci-fi questions here are derailed by complaints that the proposed version of FTL breaks causality. However, relativity-safe FTL concepts do exist. What range of conditions allow FTL (movement...
