Questions tagged [science-based]
For questions that require plausible (better than suspension-of-disbelief) answers based on Real World science that are not necessarily constrained to the known limits of Real World science. Contrast with the hard-science, science-fiction and internal-consistency tags. This tag may not be used alone. This tag may not be used with the science-fiction, hard-science, or internal-consistency tags.
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How could a shapeshifter change forms realistically and what limitations should there be?
I have a shapeshifter character whose power-set is relatively grounded. They can only change into other human forms. They can basically impersonate anyone they want, so they use their powers primarily ...
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Can migration be planted into an animal's instincts by humans
So animals will migrate for many different reasons and I wondered if humans could take a species (example:rabbits) that doesn't migrate, and somehow make it develop a yearly migration pattern without ...
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How does one accurately deduce scale from any given fantasy map (to the best one can)?
Sometimes, a person might wish to know the touch scale of a map, whether made by another person or you, in order to better understand the world a story is taking place. How might one go about deducing ...
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Can too much data cause brain failure?
A brain is sort of like a computer. It stores information, has multiple processes, and can compute and calculate. I have learned in computer science intro about a program that used to be popular for ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
The idea is that you would have pieces of plutonium or U233 close enough that if left to their own devices they should go supercritical in a fraction of a second. However, in between the pieces you ...
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What would happen to earth if atmospheric escape were completely stopped?
One day, the earth suddenly gets covered by a spherical barrier that allows waves (light from the sun, radio, etc.) to pass both ways, but not matter. Let's ignore the feasibility of that kind of ...
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Would a habitable moon orbiting a Gas Giant experience a runaway cooling effect? (on the side that faces the giant)
Assuming the Moon in question is tidally locked to its parent, then on the facing-side of the moon a significant portion of the day time would be spent in eclipse behind the gas giant, essentially ...
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Appearance of sky in space habitat with low (50 m) ceiling, using mirrors and blinders
Background
I have considered rotating space habitats of various forms for my worldbuilding projects (i.e. cylinders, rings/torii, spheres) and recently discovered this intriguing design by physicist ...
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How could the ability to produce a negative electric charge without a corresponding positive charge be used to power a basic portable circuit?
Relevant Information
My magic system consists of a fluid (called aura) emitted from the body whose position can be telekinetically controlled (manipulation), whose physical properties can be altered (...
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What stellar temperature, orbital distance, and eccentricity is needed to create an Earthlike orbital planet with a last glacial maximum climate?
I am creating an Earthlike planet with a year length of 515 Earth days and 9 Earth hours. I am aware that Kepler's third law of planetary motion states that warmer stars are needed for longer orbital ...
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What would happen if we expanded the Arctic ice cap?
Having found a setting for my story, I am thinking of a country which encompasses a giant New Zealand, basically a partially surfaced Zealandia, and having studied a little science, I have noticed ...
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How would vision be affected by eyesockets placed diagonally from each other?
Some owls have ears placed with one higher, and the other lower. If an (otherwise normal) human were to have that sort of thing, only with their eyes sockets (and by extent, eyeballs). For the sake of ...
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How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?
In this setting materials science is decades ahead, so answers should be limited by technology that isn't too speculative and don't presume anything supernatural beyond what I describe in this ...
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How would one navigate and explore a planet with a non-euclidian surface using current technology?
On this planet space is non-euclidian in an non-uniform way. This means that two random points (A and B) on this planet could have the following properties (exact numbers are arbitrary):
One could ...
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Could You Use Artificial Volcanoes To Create Buildings?
For the purposes of this question the builders are incredibly wealthy, have access to cheap nukes to use for excavation, and everyone in this world is immune to radiation.
The technology is decades ...
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Feasibility of Tiny Nuclear Engines
In this setting nuclear material is incredibly cheap, while all hydrocarbons need to be synthesized from scratch. Additionally people have shadow magic which allows them to both easily shield against ...
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How limited would computers be if silicon transistors were never invented?
In a world where silicon transistors were never invented, how many limitations would be incurred if we had to continue to use germanium transistors? In this world, silicon transistors were never ...
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Ideal location for settlement on Bishop Ring Space habitat
let's take a Bishop Ring, with a diameter of approximately 1800km, 460km wide and with retention walls 150 km tall. At the centre of the ring there is an artificial sun that recreates a day/night ...
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Ways to harvest hydrogen (apart from sun and giant planets)
Various posts and articles discuss the possibility to harvest hydrogen (but also Helium etc...) from the Sun or the giant planets, Uranus appearing the be the most favourable for this operation.
Is ...
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Reasonable Relative Value in Domestication of Kelenken Terror Birds?
I'm working on a pretty detailed alternate history of the ancient America's, and currently I'm focusing upon Mesoamerica in particular. The core difference is that, through several different ...
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What geographic features could cause a stable pocket of unmoving air?
As title. What geographic features could cause a stable pocket of unmoving air?
I'm envisioning some kind of shrine, sacred place, or untouched grotto, which due to terrain features or certain aspects ...
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Space Elevator for Ganymede
My settlement on Jupiter's moon Ganymede is to get a space elevator. Unfortunately, I am completely overwhelmed with the math: How long would the cable have to be to the stationary anchor point in ...
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What's the optimal weight of a bladed weapon? [closed]
In my magic system, people are capable of forming weapons out of their aura. The density of aura is naturally around 0.1g/cm3, but can be compressed down to 0.5g/cm. This means that aura can at most ...
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How might a race of humanoids with haplodiploid sex determination reproduce artificially? [closed]
I'd like to have unique fantasy type 'races' in a world which appears as a typical fantasy world, but is in fact set far in the future after an apocalyptic event.
I'd like one of these races to be '...
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How early can some kind of nuclear reactor resonably be invented or stumbled upon?
The physics of this world work practically the same as our own. All these nuclear reactors need to do is make a somewhat usable amount of heat for power generation, possibly ship use. They have to be ...
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Feasability of an OGAS/Cybersyn-style Socialist Internet In An Alternate 1930s
OGAS and Project Cybersyn were both plans in socialist countries for an internet-style system that would be used to coordinate central planning. In this alternate timeline, World War 1 has never ...
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Could some sort of genetic engineering allow for "renewable" immortality?
Is there a way that a sort of immortality could be achieved through genetic engineering or some other type of biological/medical technique? Not necessarily permanent immortality until the heat death ...
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How would Mathematics and Sciences had developed in a strongly non-Euclidean universe? [closed]
The geometry of our universe is, on human scale, Euclidean. This means that our everyday experience gives us a good understanding of $\mathbb{R}^2$ and $\mathbb{R}^3$, which in turn is of great help ...
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What are most hydrogen-dense materials that a pre-electric civilization could produce? [closed]
Context
My world has an 'unobtanium' strategic resource that is an alternate form of hydrogen. When atoms of this hydrogen is embedded in a rotor, they generate a field force that pushes against the ...
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Appearance of double planets with tilted orbit
Consider a pair of double planets. They are roughly the same size and also roughly earth-sized, but their orbital plane around each other is tilted with respect to the ecliptic (see sketch below). The ...
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Is there a general rule/formula for the length of an ice age?
Right now in our worldbuilding project, my friends and I are working on the history of the world with respect to evolution and tectonics. Recently (322 mya) I was pretty sure an ice age would be ...
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What would a society do with negative refractive index glass? [closed]
In the late 18th century, a chemist somewhere in the West discovers a cheap and easy process that can be used to produce glass with a negative refractive index. What use would society have for this ...
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What are tetrachromat colors like? [duplicate]
Monochrome vision is easy to describe--each "pixel" only has one dimension, luminosity.
Dichromatic vision--what most mammals have--has two channels per pixel. On the physical level, that's ...
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Trojan Planet Skies
A few questions here have broached the possibility and survivability of life on a Trojan planet, a planet that exists at the Lagrange point of a larger celestial body. In this particular question, the ...
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If humans were killed out in the Great Oxidation Event, would they leave behind any evidence?
I was thinking about the Great Oxidation Event - how, when they evolved and starting dumping a ton of oxygen into the atmosphere through photosynthesis, they accidentally killed off almost all life on ...
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Is it possible for a civilization that has fusion and has spread to other lifeless worlds to die out naturally if they lose their homeworld?
Key word in the title is naturally. Ignore nearby GRBs, supernovas, black holes, super powerful aliens, and anything outside of the star system that would cause problems to the civilization. Whatever ...
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Would this atmosphere be habitable to humans?
I have been creating a world, but I'm not sure if the atmosphere would be breathable for humans. (I'm kind of worried about the xenon levels)
The planet is made of
62% Nitrogen (N)
21% Oxygen (O2)
15....
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Why are interstellar colonists lone rangers? (Not-so-far future version)
This question is inspired by Why are interstellar colonists lone rangers?. I know that many of its answers are also suitable for this questions. However, I am more interested in ideas that work with ...
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Most effecient way to build a steam-electric bimodal locomotive?
A somewhat significantly sized city is faced with a problem. It currently wants to reduce the smoke from the steam locomotives in the city & build more efficient & compact stations, however it ...
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Survival in a low-oxygen environment
I have a small group of astronauts in a damaged vessel, adrift for days with a non-functional environmental system/scrubbers. Ambient oxygen levels are low, but they have some emergency tanks of ...
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What's the maximum thrust to weight ratio of a photon rocket?
Outside of science fiction, photon rockets are positioned as low-thrust, low-acceleration, space-use-only engines. But... do they have to be?
For purposes of this question, a "photon rocket" ...
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My character grows large upper and lower canines, how might their speech be effected?
I've read this answer and it was insightful, but I'm describing a character who undergoes a one off transformation rather than being from a whole new species. She grows fangs (both upper and lower ...
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Other ways "Fossil fuels" can form [closed]
For clarification my question is: What are some other ways hydrocarbons can form?
Okay for context in my world people traveled to another planet and found hydrocarbons in the ground (coal, oil and ...
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How to move a large amount of energy being generated as electricity in a situation where a powerline isn't a usable option?
There is a very very large dam in the middle of a desert; it operates similarly to the Qattara Depression Project, and was constructed both to power the areas south of it, but primarily for political ...
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Can ultra-low-frequency photon rockets be "safe"?
Your typical photon rocket is imagined as being an antimatter-powered, gamma-ray laser. A flashlight of extremely lethal ionizing radiation, capable of sterilizing a planet if pointed the wrong way.
...
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Anatomical changes form biped to quadruped [closed]
I have a character that changes from a bipedal human to a quadruped. The change is a result of extreme surgery with magic to support it. I know there are multiple anatomical changes that need to ...
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When does a gravitational wave beam become dangerous?
A follow-up on this old question.
If you've got ridiculous amounts of energy to play with, and not much reaction mass, a photon rocket is the way to go for moving your spaceship--it gives you the best ...
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How would a bioengineered warbeast get energy from fossil fuel products?
In the somewhat far future, mankind has become fairly adept at wet nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Allowing them to not just modify what exists in nature, but build beyond it with almost ...
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Velociculture viability (Los Raptors Hermanos)
Assume we managed to revive the famed velociraptor. The real one, which is the size of a turkey, not the movie version.
How viable would it be to breed them for human consumption?
I've reviewed the ...
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How far in between a K-Type Star and a Planet would there need to be in order for there to be a very rare eclipse inside a S-Type Binary System?
Here I have posted a diagram I have made for my planet's solar system that I think may be correct.
For background understanding: My Main Planet is orbiting a G-Type Star in this binary system, whereas ...
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