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From Wikipedia: By volume, dry air contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. For example, would humans be able to survive ...
On a planet where it is Earth-like, the orbit around the sun is a bit longer than 1 Earth year, and the orbit is on 2/3 eccentricity, but where only the "2" part is inside the Goldilocks zone. In ...
Something I realized not too long ago about a spacefaring society is that while a lot of technology is going to feel advanced, a lot more is going to feel ancient just because of all the hurdles it...
Assume that in the future, mankind develops Augmentations ala Deus Ex, where robot bits are strapped onto people in an attempt to improve them and their quality of life. This will eventually lead t...
I have a fictional technology in my world that involves being able to create "tubes of compressed space" -- essentially, you have two stations and a (straight or curved) line of space between them ...
I'm reading this article on speech in animals, and it made an interesting claim: chimpanzees and other non-human great apes posses the anatomy needed to vocalize words, they just don't use it to do...
Okay, there are two habitable worlds in the Solar System. One of them is Earth. Human history goes mainly the way it really went. Then, there is another planet with a sentient, equally advanced spe...
Imagine your scientists have found a way to increase the space of your empire, literally: They are able to create an artificial inflaton field which locally creates a "space bubble" connected with ...
Ok, so I have this planet that I am still building. It is a desert planet, its surfice is almost completely arid with a few exceptions such as snow deserts in the poles. There is sentient life in ...
The Setting: I have an idea for a universe that, in an inversion to our own, is filled for the most part with matter in solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma form, while vacuum and degenerate matter is...
Instead of flying say tons of metal and/or water and other raw materials/molecular matter to the Moon or Mars, could we shoot it there in ionized form by accelerating these sufficiently? Maybe sub...
I am currently designing a world for a series of short stories and have started looking at what kind of weather patterns would be present in certain regions. For simplicity's sake, we can assume th...
So there is a Minecraft mod that includes various oreberry bushes. One for gold, one for silver, etc. Now I know that various plants can extract specific minerals in higher quantities that what w...
Chemoautotroph Flora In a world where there is not much sunlight, I still want to have life. Specifically, I want to capitalize on chemoautotrophs so much that the alien schoolchildren learn somet...
Okay. I have been piecing together the elements of another story for my school PDF newspaper (we publish one to a wiki page every two days). Yesterday I asked this question on whether a second habi...
It is well known that some organisms can produce electricity. Therefore I think it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that also some plants might have evolved that ability (after all, it ...
In science fiction a common plot device is for a planet to be surrounded by electromagnetic interference that prevents an orbiting ship from scanning it with sensors or communicating with people on...
We have Venus flytraps which move by closing their 'mouth' to trap prey. There are currently few identified plants with a 'quick' reflex like this. Blooms of course open and close through the cou...
Some time ago, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about magnetism, electricity, and graphene. I was (and still am) curious about developing a "deflector shield" based in known and viable scie...
In my fantasy world I want fantastically large trees, particularly in the height category. The tallest trees on earth grow just over 100 meters tall. Why can't they get taller? What circumstances w...
Based on my previous question here, which a helpful other person pointed out, which would make the question too broad, here comes a different question for that. Given a desert full of ore sand, wh...
So, within my setting, I would like to also have a kingdom based in a special desert. Absolutely all of the sand in the desert would be ore sand. Ores of any and all kinds that you could traditiona...
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 ...
This is my entry for the fortnightly topic challenge In Day of the Triffids, many people go blind and the basic summary is this: virulent plague makes most of humanity blind giant, semi-intellig...
This question is based off of an earlier question of mine that dealt with what would happen if humans and our Neanderthal cousins were dropped off on a world with large, technologically developed a...
