Posts by System
I am writing a story where a freak magical accident causes a fully-formed landmass to pop into existence like it was there all along. For the purposes of this question, let's assume: the contine...
Suppose in the future (about 3-4 decades in the future), we start preferring smaller people as mates. The average size of a human would go down, maybe as far as or further than average heights from...
I don't trust anyone when I conduct my special line of business. I do my thing, face-to-face, verbally. I hand over a sealed envelope of cash and I'm done. I don't want to be recorded, I don't w...
Being inspired by the lovely concept art of Star Trek's Nibiru, I have long thought that the Nibirans would use the tiered pools for aquacultural purposes, and would like to implement tiered aquacu...
If I were to attempt the colonization of a planet with preexisting life, how would I manage to pinpoint a candidate planet from the comforts of Earth's orbit? I am interested in the stars somewhere...
Here on Earth, time standardisation was enabled by the invention of accurate time pieces which allowed us to create a global constant (GMT/Zulu time) and regional offsets. If we travel outside our...
This is the next piece in my question-series, you guys have been absolutely awesome in your answers to the first question: How to solve the old 'gun on a spaceship' problem? In this series, I try ...
Five years ago, our company reached the stage where we were able to create, maintain, and communicate with digitized brain transfer images. These trials were conducted on patients with life-limiti...
I am writing a novel. In that novel, humans have settled a tidally locked planet. That planet is positioned at just such a distance from its sun that the sun heats the planet to an average of 25 °...
If humans hadn't lost their tails and today we had fully prehensile tails as long as 1/2 our body and stronger than an arm, how would the tail of a bodybuilder or just a buff person look? Would tai...
The Setup: We have a highly advanced orbital station. It is designed to be rather stealthy, like a observation post. Is it possible to make it completely invisible to the naked eye, even when in ...
Joe Schmoe was six years old when he killed his best friend; it wasn't his fault, it was just the way that he was made... Joe was born with an auto-telepathic telekinetic feedback ability - he has...
Consider the following: We have a city, designed to be a retreat. Everything consumed and needed by the population is created via a machine in the middle of this stronghold. This machine is able ...
In my world there is a neolithic civilization of people who inhabit earthen trenches. The people first soften the earth with ... fluids ... and dig out 6 - 12 foot deep trench systems that extend o...
Charmspeak is defined as mind control through the medium of speech - that is, the user tells the target what to do, and the target has no choice but to obey. Is there a way to explain such a phenom...
As I'm sure anyone reading this knows, our body parts move via the brain signaling the appropriate muscles to contract or expand. Now, for hair to function the way it does - its texture, malleabili...
Say that you have a cuboid "planet" that can retain its shape. Can it have a cubical iron core (as opposed to the spherical one described in this question) and generate a magnetic field? Would the ...
What animals and in what conditions would evolve into something resembling a bearfolk like this one A ''bear'' humanoid of 600"“800 pounds standing in two legs, divided in many sub-species with ...
First question What event would cause hydrogen to slowly replace oxygen in the athmosphere? it can be something natural or artifial. it doesn't have to cause too much mass extinctions. Some sa...
I'm making five habitable planets the size of earth as moons for a gas giant the size of Jupiter. Then I want to add many more smaller moons, Our Jupiter has 67 moons, I want as many small moons...
In my latest draft, a worm-like species buries itself deep below the crust of their world and consumes/gathers tiny amounts of heavy metals. Can you think of any plausible reason why a wormlike cr...
In Lyman Stone's fantastic blog post about George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, Stone mentions that the seasonal cycle of Westeros is very unrealistic. Here's the truth: Medieva...
I have seen a few similar questions but none seem to take the density of a planet into account. I'm creating a planet on which several small civilisations develop. The planet needs to have a few bi...
I was thinking of writing a story and had the idea of having a society exist on the core of a gas planet. The core would be similar to earth with a breathable atmosphere similar to ours above it bu...
Many planets don't have habitable surfaces, though at least Mercury has good temperatures underground (source: http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/Mercury_temperature.pdf). So I'm wondering how la...
