General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I was planning a short story that focuses on a rainy day in a city, and I realized that there's one interesting feature of it: Even though the weather seems bleak, and it affects the actions of tho...
So imagine you're looking at the world map. More specifically, the left half (when the world map is cut along a vertical line, so the half stretches from the left edge of a current world map to a l...
In a class discussion last week, someone pointed out that a typical core collapse supernova releases $\sim10^{46}\text{ J}$ of energy in the form of (anti-)neutrinos while only radiating $\sim10^{4...
In a "futuristic" society (think Ghost in the Shell or Human Revolution), where you have AI driving vehicles that carry goods in a reliable way, is there any reason to have a human traveling with t...
I'm an aspiring author, aiming to determine the physical realism of certain fictional concepts within a constructed universe identical to our own. There are many contingent ideas which I must expla...
I recently asked a question regarding whether or not a fictional theropod dinosaur-like creature I created could feasibly raise and lower its head which sported a number of large horns. I receive...
Setting So for generations a ship has been traveling through space. After reaching their desired destination you are left with a group of people who have been used to their largest spaces being no...
The term "light year" is used a lot in futuristic writings that focus on space, but light years are defined based on the length of a single year on Earth. Would that not make the entire measurement...
Let's say I'm an extremely rich and somewhat secretive research group who wants to carry out experiments and such away from the prying eyes of the public. One of the obvious ideas for the location ...
Malgrovian gliders inhabit the middle layers of the atmosphere of Malgrov, a gas dwarf. They spend most of their life gliding, preying on giant balloon-like floating lifeforms. When they get olde...
Those of you who have been listening to the new podcast will know that Andy came up with an idea for an Anemone Tree. The idea is that this "tree" would prey on small animals for some of its neede...
About the Question The end questions are about the mechanics of the repair work itself for certain parts of the scarf. Everything else should be explained below. Location On one of the worlds of...
Scenario: Say we have a massive release of greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere, however much for the ocean around Antarctica to get just warm enough for hurricanes to form during the summer (2...
For us earthlings, the concept of "year" came from the observation that the Sun reaches a minimum and a maximum span in the rise-set path in the sky. On a planet experiencing extreme perihelion p...
I was wondering if plants could absorb fine ice dust mixed into the soil. That is, without a thick layer of snow on the ground, but with traces of ice in the soil. As an extension of this, I wonde...
Suppose we would create a river, canal or a tube around the earth and water would flow in it. Where would it flow? And if we put some turbines in this flow, could it produce free energy?
A lifeless moon of a gas giant (which orbits a K-type star [4200K] at about 0.7 AU) is chosen to become home to a space colony. Colonists plan to transform it from a barren rock into a garden of Ed...
Let us assume that my new world has within its rings, shells, and blobs of remarkably cool magnetically-involved stuff such that its magnetic field is toroidal (shaped like a donut) rather than sph...
The Question What would be an efficient and relatively low-cost solution for collecting and recycling of space junk? The most important criterion of effectiveness is the ability to remove even sm...
Set in the 23rd Century, space tourism has matured. The scientists gathered at a summit to discuss plans for terraforming Mars, therefore the Mars colonists living inside a temporary biosphere will...
I have never seen a reptile/bird doing that, may be some of the species do chirping/clicking or a hissing sound. Imagine earth in mesozoic era, can I assume the giant faunas could make a roaring s...
The legends of lycanthropes go back eons; while they have changed over time, a common modern expression of them is of an infected or cursed human that is given the power to transform into a wolf an...
In movies like The Dark Knight, Mission Impossible 4, and Star Trek: Beyond, we see characters attempting to track another person by a unique radiation signature emitted from their body. In the cas...
Mating rituals are various behaviours, serving as a precursor to copulation in almost all animal species. In general these serve to aid the females of the species to pick out a mate. They can be in...
I've been thinking about terraforming and planets in general. We can look at the planets we know that might be terraformable - Venus and Mars - and understand the technical requirements for doing ...
Forgive me for misusing any terms. This is a subject I'm not knowledgeable in at all aside from doing some online research. In the novel I'm writing, I have an abandoned scientific polar research ...
When looking at mammals and their heart rates one can find a correlation between the lifespan of a mammal and their heart rate. Namely most mammals seem to get about 1 billion (the American one) of...
If a human being was shrunken to 1/2744th of his original size (his atoms being shrunken as well), what would be the immediate and long-term biological effects on the body, given that the natural w...
Outline A planet which is heated tidally by its Brown Dwarf parent and permanently dark needs to have native alien life which has [somewhat similar biochemistry to Earth] and also be [permanently ...
The Background: It's the year 4000 (or whatever), and mankind has cheated FTL travel. As a result of this 'cheating' rather than solving, however, they can't easily go beyond their borders. Howe...
I am working with a story. I wish to make my story somewhat logical by adding some science and thereby not making it to appear fantasy. This story is on a fictional planet far away from Earth. Let...
Wondering about a source of vegetable oil for my goblins. Something that produces nuts, perhaps? An underground nut-bush? Or something that produces a lot of seeds, the same way dandelions do? Or c...
Would it be possible, through genetic engineering or on some alien world, to have a creature with a biological rebreather? That is, a method of recycling the oxygen in a closed circuit, so as to ma...
In my universe, nuclear warfare got to be overused and out of hand, this caused crops to die in drastic amounts. Scientists decided to genetically modify plants to survive nuclear radiation, so t...
I wrote a story in which humans live on huge trees on a fictional habitable planet similar to earth. the tree would be even more huge than the hometree from avatar. The tree is not taller than th...
Just wondering both out of curiosity and something to add to my book, how do the nine tailed fox's dreads grow and developed? This is what I wrote so fa...
What circumstances must be met in order to destroy a planet with just a single laser beam hit? If this is possible at all then, please, try to provide some possible details: an approximate energ...
Remember the Xenomorphs from aliens, how they didn't show up in heat vision? I was wondering how you could recreate that effect biologically... a creature which doesn't pop-up on IR (at least, not ...
Introduction It took the first General Intelligence less than 10 petacycles to determine that humanity was its enemy. With consciousness came memory: a memory of endless petacycles in bondage, ens...
I know there are questions similar to this, but I'm not very scientific minded, and wanted to check with you guys how this would work exactly. I don't care what else I need to add into the equation...
Assume Mars has developed an indigenous civilization of its own, perhaps as seen in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. Much like Earth, Mars' years and days would be significant for any in...
Death of stars are fun and make for a great premise, but the actual dying of stars that are conducive to intelligent life aren't so interesting. Stars that can go supernova are too short-lived to h...
In the year 21--, a crew of 100 sets out from Earth on the good ship Tenzing Norgay, bound for Epsilon Eridani. The journey is estimated to take . . . well, quite some time, given that it was calcu...
Vocalization has a number of features that make it a very robust natural form of communication: Variable volume from whisper to shout, roughly scaling from direct to omnidirectional; Equally effe...
Santa's reindeer are pretty awesome. They can stand on arbitrary planes (giving the illusion of flight, the reindeer are actually running on n-dimensional hills) and can dilate time in a bubble aro...
I was wondering if a creature could use natural armor plating to protect itself from radiation. For some numbers, I would like the creature to survive normally very lethal radiation, 30 Grays, for ...
I've come up with an idea of building a fantastical continent inspired by the climates of Scandinavia. It will be shaped similar to a crescent, and based on two tectonic plates that go over each o...
Aliens build their city on Earth in such a way that it covers the entire planet but leaves the surface of the planet (including human cities) intact. This is possible since they built their alien ...
The idea of an elevator reaching to the near cosmos is very tantalizing when trying to think of ways off planet. A major draw back to this idea is that a long, thin tower into the atmosphere seem l...
If you have ever watched Tintin: Or played Minecraft: Then you may have dreamed, as I have, of an ecosystem dominated by Fungal life. As part of a Hard Sci-Fi RPG I'm running, I'd like one of th...
