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Magic conveniently "explains away" many things associated with shapeshifting, but in the course of some of my fiction writing, I endeavor to include some slightly more plausible explanations when p...
Apart from the obvious difference that liquid ammonia needs a much colder temperature than liquid water (but ammonia-based life forms wouldn't feel that as particularly cold), what would be the mos...
At least the Artemis project thinks it is possible. The process they describe is $$\rm FeTiO_3 + H_2 \to Fe + TiO_2 + H_2O$$ and then split the water to hydrogen and oxygen (note that after splitt...
According to this answer to what the moon is made of, the moon's crust is, among other things, 43% oxygen. Assuming we were to go back to the moon within the next couple of years with the goal of ...
Imagine we have a machine that can consume celestial bodies, breaking them down into component elements and storing them in big bins somewhere. If we fed that machine a moon, what would wind up in ...
I hope my question isn't too vague or broad. It's a follow-up to this one. So, we have a human (genetically modified in order to support life on another place, from previous question) on an alien ...
Racism has been a defining trait in how human civilizations have interacted and developed in regard to each other. It, however, is founded on differences which separate us visibly but not function...
Could life be sustained only by a gas? Humans need food, water and air but can a ET or Alien could just live off gas.
If a human is kidnapped by an alien vessel and taken to another planet - and, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the alien life-form lives in a completely different environment from Earth'...
There have been a few questions about an intelligent avian species lately and they have gotten me thinking. It seems to me that it would be hard for an avian species to evolve to be more intellige...
I recently asked this question about what would happen if a fusion bomb went off in the core of a planet, and the answer was relatively uninteresting. As was aptly said in my previous answer, the e...
Can life exist on planets as barren as Mercury? How would it survive? It seems like it couldn't. Mercury is very hot, would any life break down becuase of the heat? What other challenges face life ...
How would evolution have changed without the "reflex arc", if all reflexes had to go through the brain instead of the spinal cord? Would intelligent species be able to evolve?
Imagine there is a country in which there are all important natural resources (oil, gas, metal ores, wood, etc.) in their natural form and which lies in a temperate climate region. There may be som...
Imagine a world with a very wacky magnetic field, the magnetic poles are not aligned at the top of the axial tilt and the sun is active enough to cause huge northern lights each night. I know elec...
What significant technologies would be lost in a world without "Advanced" Mathematics? Specifically, what technologies required to get to the next level of scientific progress in an area would be l...
What would happen if a powerful explosive went off in the core of a planet? On Earth, you have several layers of the planet, the crust, the magma, the outer core, and the inner core. Right now, hu...
Here, I asked if it's possible to terraform a hot planet. But now, if we have a volcanic active planet, can we use the same techniques to cool it down? Normally, the planet cool off slowly after...
Take any well-known aggressive/dominant/predatory animal - wolves, big cats, bears, dragons, etc. Now say this animal were to have two heads, each equal in all capacities. What would realistically ...
Yes, living without sunlight can affect the human body and mind negatively. I say can because as mentioned in Githubphagocyte's answer, blind people may be affected differently, and different indi...
The major problem with living in a surface dome will be radiation. Mars radiation is too high for constant exposure. People will spend most of their time under radiation shelter. A tall thin dome...
Physical properties If Jupiter turns into a star, it would likely turn into the least massive star possible. This would make it a red dwarf - in particular, a red dwarf of spectral type M9V. We ca...
Lets indulge in a bit of Mad Science, here. Assuming the world described here: Making the Enterprise Fly (60% of earth's gravity, 50% denser atmosphere) what is the wingspan needed to allow an ave...
There are tables, created for mining engineers that list types of stone e.g. sandstone, granite, limestone etc and tell exactly how large a tunnel they will support, how big galleries and where to ...
Not a lot would be different, actually. Let's take the orbits of the planets around the Sun. In the Newtonian world, gravity is represented by Newton's law of universal gravitation: $$F=G\frac{m_1...
