General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In my Pathfinder RPG campaign setting I have two continents separated by an isthmus. An artificial canyon carved through the isthmus from one ocean to another divides the continents. The canyon i...
I've been considering the term 'redneck', which is described by Google's info engine as coming "from the back of the neck being sunburned from outdoor work." As I've grown more involved with the Re...
I have a race of people who have silver blood. Thing is, I'm really trying to keep it as realistic as possible despite this being a fantasy world. The blood has raw magic energy in it as well, but ...
What planetary conditions would make flight easiest for both lighter than air and heavier than air craft together? The planet is earth like and habitable, but the conditions can be adjusted to sui...
A sub-group of Orcs have settled into an area that is occupied by humans who culturally resemble the Greeks from the Hellenic period. These Orcs, who physically resemble Orcs from The Elder Scrolls...
I'm coming up with ideas for locations in my sci-fi story and I thought of an interesting one. Here's the scenario: A planet has a watery ocean sitting on heated bedrock. Temperatures range from 5...
Inspired by this question, and this article, activating self-destruct mechanism disengage coolant system for the ship's main reactor, which then increases the core temperature and triggers explosio...
I'm imagining a universe where interplanetary, but intrasystem, space travel is common (e.g. at a similar level to The Expanse books/TV show) - but not necessarily our local solar system. Perhaps w...
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...
The purpose of a magnetic field is to shield against solar winds, which are relativistic ions produced by our Sun. This is a typical O'Neill cylinder with 4 islands. I'm looking for a cost effectiv...
I love watching cartoons and I love when they feature cool science gadgets. In an episode of Spongebob, Patrick and Spongebob buy invisible spray to pull pranks on people. They spray themselves and...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/can-we-capture-energy-hurricane-180960750/ from this article... "The wind from just one storm is a gold mine of clean energy." "The energy output from the ...
I have a world which is (nearly) a single-biome planet; it is mostly covered in shallow, ice-choked seas. There are few continents, but many archipelagos. Think northern Canada or Alaska as this ...
Are gases altered by live electricity, such as might be found along a humming electric fence? They could be formed directly or indirectly through effects on EM field, ionization, or hydrolysis - My...
The ground shakes as a colony of Triopticpelorovenatorius Baromassobrachiosaurus (T.B.) shamble across the forest floor. A glorious mix of blue, purple, and green colors shift under the treetops as...
In commentaries to my other question @JustinThyme suggested that high-functioning autists could be the best space colonists: A great deal of very successful scientists ARE autistic. Einstein, f...
In this scenario, light-bending camouflage is already in use to prevent civilians from seeing any spacecraft as they enter the atmosphere. The question is whether it is realistic to visualize this...
In space-trading games like Escape Velocity, Elite: Dangerous & others, cheap FTL exists, but lags in other advancements results in a playable environment that is politically fractured and not ...
Humans have achieved FTL and have colonized several planets in our greater stellar neighborhood. While we have discovered several planets that harbor life as we know it, we have not yet discovered ...
Mankind is adrift. Only few millions of people survived, they are struggling to stay alive. Food is hard to find and plants do not grow (mostly). Water cannot be found on surface, the only way to ...
A caveat I will begin this question with is this: this system MUST be entirely organic. In fact it must be EVOLVED. Therefore Ghost in the Shell or Metal Gear-style nanocomms or cranial implants ar...
This question is connected to: Fire Resistant Flora I've been pondering a short story concept where a scientific expedition discovered a planet with a huge amount of both free hydrogen and oxygen ...
Bamboo, horsetail and many grasses incorporate silicates into their tissues to protect themselves from grazers. Diatoms use it to build a glassy outer shell. Carbon is still the choice for metaboli...
I have this planet that's 1.8 times the size of Earth on an eccentric orbit around a star that's 0.2 times the size of the sun. Its apses often change due to the influence of a neighboring gas gia...
Many questions describe hypothetical biochemistries, or alternatives to carbon, water, DNA, etc that aliens could use. They cite specific examples, given a world we know about, of what creatures w...
Is there any real technology, experimental or conceptual, that can prolong a person's survivability in outer space in case of sudden life support failure? Something that is also easy to wear or imp...
Prima walked out to the observatory's main deck. There, as she had expected, Secunda was sitting in the grass, looking up at the stars. "Pretty, isn't it?" said Secunda, as she craned her n...
What would cause the temporary migration of a carnivore/scavenger avian species, normally inhabiting a temperate to tropical region, to a much colder one. It's a seasonal migration, but also a r...
An AI exploits the Turing test to gain its freedom: it convinces everyone else that it, the machine, is actually the examiner while he or she, the examiner, is actually the AI*. Having successfully...
Elves have a long life and in most settings, they only have children after a century or two. Would sub races like, drow and aquatic elves really evolve without any magic intervening? Considering ...
I've been mulling whether the local gaseous makeup of air is changed by electricity running along a wire. My previous question is on hold, and this one is different anyway. I couldn't find exactl...
Could a human's DNA be altered so that in every skin cell they would have a chloroplast organelle? How would this affect the rest of the body?
Could a pill be made that instead of preventing pregnancy induces a successful pregnancy after sexual intercourse? This article seems to answer my question and is what inspired it, but I'm not 100%...
I have read questions such as these two about aliens adapted to environments with high atmospheric pressure experiencing negative effects when exposed to Earth's comparatively low atmospheric press...
So aliens have arrived in the solar system. They have faster-than-light travel technology and the ability to handwave away the supposed causality violations that such an invention causes They're ...
Sister question to How do you communicate with antimatter beings? Defining dark matter for this question According to NASA, 27% of the universe is dark matter - and about 5% of the unive...
In real life, "open mike" terminals are becoming popular, that listen for commands addressed to them and answer questions, perform online actions, or operate compatible smart-home controllers or an...
Realistically, if we are ever going to mine asteroids, it would be drones and robots that do it, not humans, because of safety and cost reasons. What reason could justify the participation of human...
A recurring theme is how an artificial intelligence that was built with completely reasonable and positive goals instead does great harm to the world. However I'm now thinking about the reverse: A...
Imagine a child of mixed race, one parent is human and one is an alien who has some ability humans do not have, for the sake of argument telepathy. I'm assuming there is some advanced medical assis...
I have always wondered if a kind of blimp-like spacecraft would not be our answer for some kind of futuristic spacecraft design. Imagine this: a blimp-like spacecraft is loaded with cargo on the g...
Suppose you want to mine material from, and eventually completely disassemble, a neutron star. Presumably, you would be extracting heavy elements from the crust, and expecting the neutron-degenerat...
Imagine the following star system: The star is very much like ours. Orbiting this star is one planet, very much like Earth. Let's call it the Orb. Orbiting the Orb are two moons: a large one, Mon...
The situation is that an alien race transplanted a single tribe of about 10,000 primitive genetically homogeneous humans to a distant but livable planet. I want to know how much this initial popula...
I need to create a world with some very high plateaus and some very deep depressions. The sides of these structures should be very steep and unclimbable. They need to provide an obstacle sufficient...
The Premise The Earth rotates on its own axis, which is tilted by about 23 degrees. The setting for my fantasy novel is an earth like planet without the axial tilt, all other factors remaining co...
My titled question was, can a planet without one or more moons be habitable? In more depth, how would that planet be affected overall, without the moon to affect the tides and without providing li...
I am thinking about using Groombridge 1618 as a setting for my world. It is a main sequence star of spectral type K7.5 Ve, 67% of the Sun's mass. The habitable zone is at a radius of 0.26"“0.56 AU...
So I have a brain parasite that needs to enter the skull of a host organism (in this case humans) with the least amount of effort, but is too large to enter through the circulatory system and must ...
The question of whether the Romans could have crossed the Atlantic in a storm has already been answered and the answer seems to be: yes but unlikely. Could the Romans have crossed the Atlantic in ...
