Questions tagged [water]
For questions that have to do with the liquid form of H2O.
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How would a toxic halophilic bacteria (vibrio vulnificus) mutate and make all coastlines uninhabitable?
I am writing a speculative fictional story set in the future, where the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus mutates and makes life so dangerous for humans along the coast that everyone has to retreat into the ...
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Could mountains form on anhydrous planets?
The primary mechanism for mountain formation (of which I'm aware) is uplift of the crust, with rivers eroding their way through softer sediments as the crust rises to form peaks and canyons. That ...
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Could medieval agriculture develop without soil?
In a water-world where the only "land" are the floating, rotting corpses of titans, how would a medieval civilization develop agriculture?
Since they are of medieval technology level, ...
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What would the effects of drinking reverse gravity water be? [closed]
If you drank a special type of water that falls in the opposite direction of gravity, what would happen? Since you can drink water while upside-down, it might just be the same, but I wanted to make ...
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How to protect a water planet within a water ring of a quasar from radiation?
Tags: science-based habitability radiation
I am using this discovery as my starting point (Source)
An international team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology and involving the ...
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A man wants to create a bomb shelter in a small cave on his land, but there's no visible water source, except a dripping wall. What to do?
A man who wants to live in a hidden cave on his mountain property in the Pyrenees has hired a caver to evaluate the cave as a bomb shelter in case of a nuclear war. The cave is small compared to most ...
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What could lead a large ocean on a planet's surface to recede completely only to reappear later on in a cyclical process?
I don't just mean tides or large-scale floods and droughts but a premise where one or more large bodies of water (or even every such body if that makes it easier) disappear, only to reappear one or ...
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Getting Water Vapour to Condense in the Lungs
So the human body temperature is much lower than that of the cave environment. That means that the air you're breathing is hotter than the inside of your lungs. In these conditions, the humidity from ...
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What is the danger zone of a waterfall to aircraft?
In my world, which is similar to that described in this answer, with suspended platforms between 5 and 40 km above the global sea, with 1 ATM at 25km altitude, with a similar gravity and scale height ...
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Is this SpaceEngine atmosphere realistic?
Height of homogenous atmosphere: 15.26km
Atmospheric pressure: 4.76 atm
Air density: 4.8323kg/m^3
Air temperature: 45.704°C
Speed of sound: 364.65 m/sec
Exosphere temperature: 1255.9°C
Greenhouse ...
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Is it possible for an artesian basin to go underneath a shallow sea while still being freswater?
An artesian basin is an aquifer in which water within permeable rock is kept under pressure between 2 layers of impermeable rock.
I don't know if any artesian basin exists like this in real life, but ...
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What could someone do with Hydrokinesis (the ability to control water with your mind)? [closed]
Someone has the ability to manipulate and shape water from any source. They cannot create water from nothing, but they can control it at a molecular level. For example, they can change the properties ...
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Problems with turning a brackish endoheric lake into freshwater by artificially making an outflow?
A nation wants to utilize a large, currently brackish & endoheric body of water for irrigation & drinking. Damming the rivers & moving the water from there isn't considered viable for the ...
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How long could a person survive on nothing but water, salt, and sugar?
Magic System
One of my worlds has a magic system that allows people to produce any element, as well as a small number of molecules. When something is produced using magic, it spawns into existence in ...
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Is it possible to melt icebergs for water at below the cost of desalination with 1960s/1970s technology?
(i'm going to use dollars for cost because i don't really want to figure out currency conversions for the in world currencies)
In this world people need water, a lot of water. But in areas that don't ...
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Could a pre-industrial society make a heavy load neutrally buoyant?
I have a society of merfolk in fantasy novel (humans from the waist, fish tail from waist down, biology isn't important in this story, nothing complicated). While the humans are around 1850s tech, the ...
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Will the oxygen content in atmosphere increase if we boil oceans? How much, and what's the max % increase?
From what I understand, Dissolved Oxygen is nothing but Molecular Oxygen (O2) loosely bonded with water -- and thus the bond is not chemical, and breaking it would not result to any changes in the ...
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Using asteroids for water
I have a planet that has no natural water bodies or sources. Is it feasible (assuming technology along the lines of the Earth Engines from "The Wandering Earth") to take asteroids from a ...
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World built inside a gigantic drainage pipe
I'm doing a Pratchett style fantasy book, and the setting - the Downspout - is built in a downspout of an astronomically sized gutter drain pipe.
We're assuming an impossibly large structure housing ...
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Breathable air on large space habitat with no water?
I am theorising a scenario in which humans land on a continent-size space habitat of alien origin (probably a rotating habitat).
The gravity is similar to Earth's (96/97% of Earth's) and the air is ...
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How much water must I dump on the Sun to put it out forever? [closed]
Water blows out fire and stop it from burning. How much volume of water, $H_2O$, is needed to put out the sun forever?
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Hycean world space travel [closed]
Hycean worlds are planets which bridge the gap between rocky and gas giant planets. They have atmospheres high in hydrogen and vast oceans with perhaps no dry land at all. How could the local sentient ...
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Why do my Androids need to eat and drink? [closed]
What would be a good reason for androids to have a need to eat and drink (not necessarily human food)?
The human body requires food and water in order to refuel and sustain itself, but in the case of ...
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Could a planet have oceans of heavy water? [duplicate]
Heavy water, or deuterium oxide, is a form of water where the hydrogen atoms contain a proton and a neutron, rather than just a proton as in “normal water”. It is toxic to earth life but luckily, on ...
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How to stop water runoff on floating islands that lack an available surface
I am building a world with islands floating in air, and I'm looking for solutions to loss of water from runoff/erosion (think rivers emptying off the side of the islands). The islands vary in size, ...
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Feasible? A natural geothermal water pump the scale of multiple Mississippi rivers
I want a continent of waterfalls: a place on the scale of South America where the land is broken terraces from mountain heights to sea level. And I want massive waterfalls to be ubiquitous, like ...
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What adaptations would be needed for life and water around a blue star?
Of course it's very obvious that blue stars are insanely hot and would boil away most things if they got too close. BUT I'm curious if with just the right adaptations and fiddling, could there, ...
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Converting mars’ atmosphere to water
So, I have come to the decision that there is no one easy way to bring water to Mars. So, in light of that, i have decided on several methods which will be used simultaneously, and which I hope will ...
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How much of Mars is covered if 10 quadrillion tonnes of water fall on it?
The setting:
In trying to terraform Mars quickly, I am imagining that Phobos, (the bigger of its two moons) holds ten-quadrillion tonnes of water ice beneath its stony regolith. I am further supposing ...
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What global warming level would be needed to keep the dew point of some place above the temperature of the lungs for at least 1 month per year?
Title might be a bit hard to understand but let me explain : when the dew point is above humans temperature (37℃) the water condenses in the lungs which are at a lower temperature than the air which ...
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sources of water for martian terraformers
The terraforming of Mars, assuming that the hurdle of establishing a magnetic field has already been jumped, now meets another problem: water. The planet has a pair of ice caps, but between them they ...
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Fog and a small "Tsunami", appearing suddenly
For the final act of a story I'm building, I'm planning a scene that involves the sudden appearance of fog, along with a small Tsunami, affecting part of the city.
To ask this question, I am going to ...
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Habitable planet without oceans and with all rivers flowing towards the poles
The surface of this planet is about 3/4 the one of earth. It has no oceans or seas, its landscape defined by huge mountain ranges between 15 and 25km high. Most mountain ranges are latitudinal (N-S), ...
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How would the water cycle work on a planet with barely any atmosphere?
See title.
My world is far away from any stars so radiation is of no worry but a very active volcanic system keeps the temperature at similar rates to our planet. The lack of an atmosphere stops any ...
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Would convection cycles happen in my water-filled space station?
Imagine a space station orbiting a star.
The station is not orbiting a planet.
The station has cylinder shape and is orienting its side to the sunlight.
The station is rotating just like any O'Neil ...
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When dealing with a drought or a bushfire, is a million tons of water overkill?
The people of the Vorfall Panzer Werkstat gesellschaft build the largest aircraft in the galaxy. The pride of their fleet is currently the Gyre Explorer, which is an aircraft weighing in at 140,000 ...
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Could animals/plants survive off of coolant instead of water?
Say there was a source of water that animals and plants alike were surviving in, a sort of desert oasis situation, here we have Fred, he is an animal who lives off of this body of water. Buts let's ...
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Any natural way that a River can "move" by hundreds of kilometers seasonally
I'm designing a Nomadic culture and I had an interesting concept.
One of the reasons for nomadism is to find resources that "move" annually.
In the case of pastoral nomads, it is to find new ...
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Is it biologically plausible for a land animal to drink saltwater and not drink freshwater?
I'm trying to come up with a land animal that can drink saltwater but for some reason cannot drink freshwater. The advantage of drinking saltwater would be that they can get drinking water straight ...
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Would a solar flare hitting the earth cause rainfall? [closed]
If you have hydrogen gas, oxygen gas and heat together, it will trigger an (exotermic) reaction that produces water.
Earths atmosphere consists of around 21% oxygen.
Our sun is made mostly out of ...
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How to Feed a City with a Subarctic Climate?
The city of Civitas Sykofantia sits on the shore of Lake Sykofantia, a high-elevation salt lake the size of Lake Superior in the US. The lake is located on the Great Pagomenos Plateau, a huge ...
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Permeability of mountainous rock by seawater
This is tied to a previous question of mine Does atmospheric pressure relate to altitude or sea level, what would happen if sea level rose, but the land was not submerged?
Given the same scenario of a ...
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What geographic/climate changes does the Arabian Peninsula need to become a rainforest?
Despite being surrounded by waters on all sides, the Arabian Peninsula is mostly a massive desert. As a result, Arabia was generally a hinterland for most of early history and there aren't a lot of ...
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Weather patterns on a world with a homogenous distribution of land and ocean?
What would the weather patterns be like on an Earth with a more homogenous distribution of land and ocean? That is, keep the overall amount of water the same, the ratio of water to land the same (...
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Was there a waterproof paper or a substitute that could be written on in the medieval ages?
I'm making a character that keeps their books stored in their many large mouths. Thing is, it's a medieval setting and I'm not sure how the book would be made to survive being in such an environment.
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Is a Bussard Ramjet for collecting water possible
My spacecraft's propellant is water, so an idea I came up with is that it would melt icy bodies in the rings of gas giants into water vapour. Is it possible to collect water vapour with some sort of ...
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Is orangeish water possible on an alien planet with advanced life?
A planet little bigger than earth with slightly less gravity.
Colder than the earth, with longer days and shorter years. And water prevalence: 32% (23% surface water and 9% subterranean) and two moons....
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Is a world where all the water is "heavy water" possible?
I recently discovered that there is another kind of water : heavy water.
Heavy water is made of deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Heavy water itself is 11% percent heavier than "normal&...
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What would this combination lubricant/cleaning solution smell like and taste like?
On an alien Dyson Sphere up in space, there is a blackish-blue slime that is everywhere on the sphere. It's slippery to the touch and is basically a combination of cleaning fluid, disinfectant, and ...
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Could a Massive Freshwater Lake and River System Exist in a Desert Environment?
In my book series, there is this lake called Lake Pheron. Lake Pheron's surface is located about 2,200 feet above sea level in a mostly flat, inland area called the Tangolian Desert. This desert is ...
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