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I'm starting a story taking place around 2080 AD/CE, and I'm wondering if the key element - global pollution - is plausible. In my storyline, the XXIst century brings no huge technological advance...
From the viewpoint of evolutionary dynamics, the reason why very few species are both autotrophic (photosynthesizing) and heterotrophic (hunting / foraging on other living organism) at the same tim...
This is really sort of cheating, but it could actually work, so here it goes. As professorfish says, It is theoretically possible, but I don't know how you could rip off the atmosphere and man...
One possibility that has not yet been mentioned (actually inspired from githubphagocyte's comment on how the evolution of plants began in the first place): It could be that the animal doesn't do ph...
One of the solution to make a cold planet habitable for us is to increase the greenhouse effect. It works with planets like Mars that are inside the habitable zone but would it be enough for a plan...
Is it possible (for humans)? My main concern was heavy gravity because they are much bigger and heavier. But it appears that in our system, the gas giants (but not Jupiter) all have a similar surf...
Why aren't animals photosynthetic on earth? And what would make it plausible for them to evolve to be?
As Neil pointed out, there is no absolute frame of reference, so I'll pretend that the frame of reference is relative to something - in some scenarios, the Sun; in others, the Earth, and in others,...
In this setting, humanity has advanced to the technological capability of extra stellar travel via faster-than-light drives. However, due to distances between inhabited areas being extremely large,...
I'm actually going to answer the question from the opposite viewpoint of TimB, if only because there are some loopholes to a lack of fire. They primarily apply to deep-sea civilizations, but still,...
Could underwater creatures with the intelligence of human cave men or possibly the intelligence of apes create technology (that is, more complex technology comparable to what we have now rather tha...
As others noted, there's no real physical effect that does this. However let's look at how a fictional effect might work. Water can be supercooled to quite low temperatures, that means, there does...
A quite common idea to provide "gravitation" in space stations is to make them rotate, so the centrifugal force gives an effective gravitation. A possible design is a ring-shaped space station. No...
Hit it with a rock. A big rock. Something like Ceres might do, if you could somehow get it into an orbit that hits the moon with sufficient relative velocity. Alas, moving Ceres significantly fr...
This question comes up from Is there a man-made or natural event that can cause an abrupt climate change within hours/a day? "“ trying to get KaguraRap a functional answer to an abrupt temperature ...
Maelstroms are ginormous whirlpools. They can exist continuously in an area. They're cool. The question is, how large can they get? As large as an island? Could a maelstrom have a diameter of 60 o...
I am recalling the Space:1999 nuclear waste containment explosion; this has been criticized because such an explosion would have actually destroyed the moon. I am curious for events that could happ...
All life we know of to date (presumably) formed on a rocky planet (more precisely: earth). Fiction has been written about life in more exotic locations. Though as far as I know, these lifeforms wer...
TL;DR To make a long story short, the planet will lose its atmosphere and some of its crust, but most of it will remain intact, even in the worst-case scenario. That should be the major effect you...
This is only a partial answer (it only addresses land animals), but I don't know if anyone else is going to mention it, so I might as well. Land animals rely on their bodies to support their weigh...
I found this on Wikipedia. I'm aiming for the fastest climate change possible without that much advanced notice, e.g. perhaps a regional sized asteroid scientists miss or are too distracted to cat...
If a planet had such a large imbalance of protons and electrons that it possessed a net negative or positive charge what would happen to it and its solar system? First, could it be stable, or woul...
Some species that reproduce sexually, don't actually have sex as such. Instead the female might lay soft scaled eggs, which the male then fertilizes extrenally. I want to know what a society of an...
Simply put is there an upper bound for the largest possible living creature in a scientifically rational world without incorporating anti-gravity, magic, the force, or other physical concepts we ar...
Suppose the universe contained a species of planet sized turtles1 that can travers at least interstellar space. How can I explain (without invoking magic) that these turtles are not spherical? If ...
