Posts by Z.Schroeder
I need to know if it'd be possible for a underground ring-like structure of immense proportions and alien design to go unnoticed by modern day sonar, radar, and geological surveying. For an idea ...
Soft sci-fi uses inertial dampeners. Harder sci-fi uses stuff like advanced crash couches, robotic exoskeletons, or (my personal favorite) drug cocktails filled with stimulants and other medication...
I've heard that bodies of water boasting high salinities tend to turn red due to seasonal algae blooms. I have a river in a fantasy setting I'm working on that's blood red year-round, and I want to...
Let's say you've either cloned yourself a native population (the ethical option) or taken a bunch of volunteers and wiped all their memories of modern technology and society (the slightly more mora...
I know A LOT of this gonna be a stretch and that I'm probably misunderstanding or exaggerating current real-life trends in science, but that's kind of why I'm asking the question. We know it's poss...
Let's say I'm a superhero or a magic space-wizard with the ability to change the color of any object I touch i.e. change what wavelengths of light it emits. If I want to become invisible, I could t...
Let's assume you have access to some pretty crazy tech but that you still have to obey the basic rules of biology. If you build your cyborg so that the only remaining squishy bits are the brain and...
Sort of a jumping-off point from my last question, I speak of the "binding problem" that currently plagues neuroscience and cognitive studies, and which plays a large role in debating AI and whole ...
I want a story with upload-based resurrective immortality, but this also makes me feel like I need to address the implications of a society that's primarily dominated by digitized human minds. Na...
Let's assume that sometime in the next year, we receive a transmission from deep space containing what appears to be blueprints of an alien genome. After extensive study and determining that the da...
Accelerating a person's perceived sense of time is a fairly common subject in science fiction, and to keep a long story short, I was wondering just how far you could stretch time out when you're wo...
I want to contrive a scenario in which 23rd century humanity faces a dire crisis due to an extraterrestrial von Neumann ecology that rapidly consumes Nitrogen as a part of its life cycle. So rapidl...
I'm trying to build a designer organism that would prove a threat to all life on Earth. Sort of a semi-organic von Neumann ecology of microscopic nitrogen-eaters that rapidly consume nitrogen to fu...
The Resident Evil franchise is obviously the last place you want to take away any lessons on biology, pathology or virology from. However the new(-ish) Molded enemies from Resident Evil 7:Biohazard...
A lot of people are probably familiar with this sort of handwavium in fiction when it's asked where a shapeshifter's extra mass comes from. Most choose to ignore that question. In works that preten...
And how much fuel would you need to carry? I'm trying to determine what kind of engine you'd need to accelerate a good-size spacecraft (thousands to millions of tons) at a constant 1g in a race acr...
Let's say you have a cyborg who's replaced their whole body, everything but the brain, with machinery. Next, you put them on a spaceship pulling dozens or even hundreds of gs. How are they going to...
Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...
I need someone to fact-check me and tell me if there's anything immediately bogus or physically impossible with the scenario I'm about to propose. Billions of years ago, under the ice of Europa, t...
Moreover, could a culture of microorganisms form a collective hive-intelligence similar to ants or bees? I'm trying to design a scientifically plausible hive-mind, and I'm trying to decide whether ...
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/nc...
3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtai...
Assuming you already had sufficient money and resources to build a tower stretching from the top of Europa's ice layer down to the bottom of the seabed, could you build it on top of one of its geys...
Pretty simple question. Whether you're launching a spy satellite, building a top secret orbital missile weapon, or investigating a mysterious alien artifact in orbit around Earth heralding the retu...
Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse ...
