Ansible: aka quantum entanglement. Faster than light communication using special relativity effects since verified to actually exist in the CERN experiment with fiber optic cable lengths. Its positively EERIE, too. Serious work is being done with this effect to build unhackable encrypted military radios since they don't transmit via EM waves, rather directly connecting separated components without intervening wires. Invented by Ursula K. LeGuin as a key point in her novel The Dispossessed, which is a powerful refutation of communism, thus banned by more libraries. No, I'm not kidding about that either.
Generation Ship: this is a large space vehicle, big enough and armored enough to survive impacts, which carries thousands of people, entire generations of people, into space at sub-light speeds from one solar system to another, along with everything they need to terraform and planet and populate it with plants, animals, crops, trees, fish, frogs, etc and turn some space rock into another Earth. Generation ships experience Genetic Drift, teratogenic mutations, and possibly rebellions/mutiny and possibly wiped out by accident, disease, or impact with a rock too big for the armor to handle. Some versions of this idea provide consensual hallucination during Cold Sleep/hibernation which allows passengers to make the trip in suspended animation and gives their brains something to do. Japanese Anime Megazone 23 (Part 2) is about a generation ship that arrives on a planet after carrying its passengers brainwashed into never wanting to leave Tokyo, which is actually just a life module inside a generation ship going between stars. More recently, Sora Mo Otoshimono (anime) is the story of passengers on another generation ship managed by androids self aware enough to know they want to be more human which interact with the passengers shared hallucination.
Ringworld: see "Bigger Than Worlds" article by Larry Niven, Caltech professor of Mathematics. A type of large space habitat which orbits a sun in the Goldilocks Zone but instead of gravity, works by spin. Smaller roofed habitats sometimes appear in movies. If a light source is provided (safely), such habitats can serve as generation ships.
L2/L5: L points are stable orbits which use tricks in gravity to stabilize their positions. In the real world, such points are often occupied with space rocks.
Kessler Syndrome: see Gravity (2013 movie) or Planetes (anime) which is about the build up of LEO space debris sufficiently dense to destroy LEO objects, creating more debris to destroy newly launched vehicles or objects and becoming a type of shield against gaining higher orbits, essentially blocking space exploration. There is a good chance that if there are alien worlds out there, with people-ish aliens on them, their own Kessler Syndrome has caused serious trouble, possible civilization collapse for the several centuries the debris is capable of. Worse, attempts to wait and then launch objects for communications, for example, can just make more debris if unlucky.
Geosynchronous/stationary Orbit: 26200 miles out from the Earth's surface is Geosynchronous Orbit, where an object orbits along the equator and appears to be stable in relation to the surface. This is where we put our satellite TV broadcasters for Dish Network and HBO etc. Ground stations transmit encoded messages, which the satellite retransmits pointed at North America or Europe so you can pick it up off a 2-foot dish on your roof for endless channels of Gilligan's Island and Jersey Shores.
LEO: aka Low Earth Orbit. LEO objects include satellite radio and the International Space Station, which as we saw in Gravity is at real risk of being tin-canned by a bit of space debris. Until 2009, it was unarmored and completely at risk, but use of aerogel armor is now protecting it slightly. The advantage of LEO is you can use less fuel to get objects up there. The downside is they're barely out of atmospheric drag range, and the ISS has to get a boost periodically or eventually it will fall out of the sky like MIR and Skylab both did. It is also important to realize that snowballs drift out of the atmosphere and fall back into it again at LEO, so they're another risk.
Wormholes: alas the best math I've seen on these is two different kinds. The femtosecond quantum sized ones which are said to exist and vanish again across the fabric of space, according to Stephen Hawking, and the more stable kind only two atoms wide in the extremely rare binary black hole systems which can't be observed because the wormhole exists inside the event horizon. Neither is useful. Sorry, Stargate fans.
Schroedinger's Cat: thought experiment famous a century ago on how quantum states work, misappropriated to explain lots of things wrongly. The cat is both alive and dead, but PETA hates the entire thing and has stopped using cellphones, which take advantage of quantum states to work in the first place. Only they haven't because PETA is a bunch of hypocrites.
Multiverse: popular scifi writer gimmick for diverging parallel worlds based on Schroedinger's Cat, usually as an excuse to offer infinite worlds with only slight differences created by every quantum state, every femtosecond.
Onionspace: not to be confused with The Onion parody newspaper. Onionspace, proposed by Russian mathematician, suggests 2D windows between finite but expanding universes still being created by an infinitely running Big Bang making finite but nearly infinite number of universes, constantly expanding. We live in one of those, created 13 billion years ago, but more were created just a second ago, only we can't see it because we're in a universe 13 billion years older. Unproven and untestable, potentially just some mathematician's way to get invited to cocktail parties and go on a world tour instead of spending the winter in a Russian apartment shivering and drunk on potato vodka.
10 dimensional space: 1950's theory about how complicated the universe is, being 10 dimensions but we only perceive 4 of them. Three directions and TIME, lest you forget. Several of those other ones govern quantum mechanics, light, and define constants like columb's law and natural logarithm. If you don't like math or physics, don't investigate these things. You'll get nightmares for years once you understand.
String Theory: disproven by experiments in 1982, but still popular by the same scifi writers that like Wormholes, often used as a bunch of babble which amounts to "space magic". Any scientist who suggests string theory is valid is an easy clue you're dealing with a fake/crazy.
Quantum Collapse: corollary to Multiverse, collapse of quantum matter states back into lesser number because the energy separating the two states of matter no longer sufficient to keep them apart. Might actually be happening constantly without people noticing.
Global Warming: took place 19,500 years ago, Earth warmed 10'C in a decade, melting off the Pleistocene glaciers and ice sheets covering North America, Europe, and much of Russia. Mass of ice mostly melted but took 9000 years. Remaining ice still melting today much slower. Temporary event. Ice will return, as it has several times in the past under the Milancovic Cycles in the previous ice ages. Milancovic Cycles are orbital in nature. Popular scam and source of scifi novels. See Waterworld by Kevin Costner.
Interglacial Epoch: 10,000-18,000 year periods of time where ice melts and earth warms up before glaciers return and earth cools once more. Tied to polar orientation to planet and sun, completely unrelated to people or fossil fuels. The glaciers ALWAYS come back and will once more. We are about due for the return.
Antigravity: space magic.
Space Elevator: really stupid idea that won't die. Place very long thin cable connected to equator thousands of miles long with counterweight in orbit, use elevator system to physically lift elevator car carrying sealed atmosphere and contents from surface into space without using rocket thrust. Materials to do this do not exist. Stresses on cable, and weight of cable exceed properties of all materials, including diamond, and as attack on mounting point by terrorist would cause 26,000 mile long cable, because that's how long it has to be, is capable of delivering nuclear weapons level gigaton strike energies to the entire equator by the second half of the cable coming down. But since it is impossible to build the thing in the first place, there's little danger of it crashing. Any alien civilization that attempted this insanity was likely completely destroyed, which may be why the universe is so quiet.
Aliens: people from other planets, probably not human exports or colonists. As there are 52 different amino acid bases, and we only use 4 of them, we being ALL organisms on earth down to bacteria, viruses, black smoker worms and the slow bacteria inside of volcanic rocks, ALL of everything alive on earth uses the same 4, aliens real aliens, would likely use other bases than we do, odds being what they are. Of course, aliens are just a manifestation of the irresponsible religious nonsense which plagues our species. They are a fantasy. Probably. Odd favor alien life, but most astronomers who make estimates about inhabited worlds are seeking further funding for their telescopes rather than offer realistic limitations, much less understand the 32+ necessary feedback loops required for our planet to have a stable place to live, feedback loops which are probably necessary for life to exist, much less evolve. Throw into the mess that we've only been broadcasting beyond our atmosphere for 80 years and turned our solar system into a trinary system instead of binary (Jupiter is HOT with microwave emissions like a red giant) which should get the attention of aliens, if they existed and had a network able to pick up our transmissions. Since FTL doesn't exist in this universe (true, it doesn't), they're at least a century out if they exist at all, and since we don't pick up anything for thousands or millions of light years, odds suggest our local group is empty of life. We're it. The Milky Way Galaxy is 200,000 light years across. And its millions of light years to the next galaxy. Nothing alive there either. The universe is huge, something like 26 billion light years across, with millions of galaxies, and trillions of planets and stars, and we're the only life. Deal with it. Being alone in the universe despite the odds is just part of the irony of our existence. I might be proven wrong about this someday, but it feels right that we're completely alone in the vastness of the universe.
FTL: fantasy of string theory. Does not exist. Stands for Faster Than Light. FTL violates relativity. Relativity is absolutely true. Nuclear bombs work by relativity. Nuclear bombs exist. FTL doesn't. Sorry, Star Trek fans. You suck.
Gravity Lens: massive object in space which warps light around it. Light warps and bends when passing through objects with different densities, which is how a pair of glasses works. This is common, not magical. A gravity lens is one of the reason we know about supergiant black holes, about dark matter, and other curiosities.
Dark Matter: whirlpool galaxies like our own spin like a record, with the outer portions staying in relative position to the inner, as if both were fixed and rotated. This is very odd without a massive globe of invisible matter above and below the plane of the record. Think of this record being a slice of invisible orange. We can't see this matter, but it is believed to be there because the galaxies do move in this extremely odd way, exactly unlike our solar system where inner planets move faster than outer. Dark Matter is 99% of the universe. This is odd but predicted by Stephen Hawking's work. Dark Matter remains undetectable despite our best efforts. May be a larger scale corollary of the Strong Force, which prevents atoms from exploding apart. Nightmare fuel, I tell you.
Dark Energy: responsible for the ongoing expansion of the universe, which is accelerating apart rather than slowing down like it should be. The energy required for acceleration of the universe is 99% invisible, thus called dark. We can't even detect it other than inferring the expansion. This will give you nightmares if you understand it.
Nanotechnology: imaginary robots so small they can manipulate atoms and are able to float in your blood and body tissues. Fantasy. No power supply viable at that scale, and movement any distance so difficult as to make them useless. Used often for comic book effects but ridiculous to people who can do basic math.
Grey Goo: nanotechnology gone rogue, possibly AI. Turns everything into more grey goo nanites.
Turing AI: Alan Turing, mathematician in WW2 cracked the Enigma Code, father of modern cryptography devised a test by which an artificial intelligence can pass for human. Popular subject of scifi since then. Hal 9000 was a Turing AI in the movie 2001. So were the androids of Blade Runner, but NOT Skynet of Terminator since it wouldn't pass the test.
Technological Singularity: AI which surpasses human intelligence and develops technologies beyond which we can currently imagine. Religious people believe this is building God. Popular subject for scifi for decades now.
If you understand the above things, you get most of scifi.
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