General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I think of a world of islands floating in the sky. The planet basically is (was) our Earth. For some reason all that is left is a small ball covered nearly completely with water. Pieces of the shat...
Premise Let me begin by citing the intellectually charged and equally comical banter between physicist Brian Cox and "Doctor Who": (aliens appear on console) Dr. Who: "That's a silent; yo...
I'm working on a sci fi story with bio-punk elements in it (such as gene manipulation). This has brought up a problem with one of the sub plots, however, as I am unaware of whether or not an extrem...
Pretty much the title. I was thinking that it could have originated from a meteorite impact. I think that there are meteors that are made of frozen noble gases, so that would be the source of the "...
How could, for example, wolf and cat evolve to walk in two legs, have fingers and the ability to speak, reason and build civilization? The conditions: This works not only for these two species, ...
In my story, I have a fairly advanced human race who is at the point they want to start terraforming planets. Of course, all of the materials necessary have to come from somewhere, and the proposed...
A Dyson sphere is a spherical megastructure built around a star with the goal of capturing all of the energy output of the encased star and making that energy available to the controllers of the me...
Some research papers, such as Arnold 2005, has investigated the possibility of using artificial megastructures transit signatures as long-range, long-lived and low-maintenance signals of unambiguou...
I'm working with the idea of a 'ring station' encircling a planet, as a tightly connected belt of structures that connect in orbit around the planet's equator. I'm curious to know what would happen...
My habitat ring is constructed in orbit around a planet with disconnected sections: (not to scale, obviously) The sections are connected by cables and winched together. As the diameter gets sma...
If Humanity were to suddenly come to its senses and stop relying all together on fossil fuels and start relying on wind powered and solar energy sources, wouldn't this lead to some sort of climate ...
BACKGROUND: I have been working on a game called Rise: The Vieneo Province. Vieneo is a terrestrial moon (all details can be found here) but we have an atmospheric composition we arrived on from ...
How would you contain a small star in order to draw energy from it, and power a ship? I'm thinking along the lines of a force field. I need the star visible from the exterior of the ship for aes...
Using our world's physics, how could one explain the mechanics behind a witch on a broomstick? Not just the propelling part, but even the most basic fact - sitting on a broomstick - seems problemat...
A present day society has had to relocate from their coastal community and have taken refuge at the top of a very high mountain roughly 10,000 feet above sea level. This mountain is the most promin...
I have a new fluid, called Unobtaniol, which is a room temperature frictionless superfluid. It has the same physical properties as liquid helium, but with less freezing everything. A friend of min...
Say you have an interstellar spacecraft packed full of advanced technology, such as: Fusion generators Androids A sublight drive capable of ~0.5C Various robots, holograms, and other automated sy...
In a "mountains and valleys" type area, there is a very large fire (say, an acre or two) that generates a lot of smoke. Where would the wind be strong enough and constant enough in this type of ge...
When the mass (wood, hardened sand, iced water, stone or whatever but is not so fluid) fills all of space (especially in a volume of infinite size) in almost uniform density, could the mass sustain...
Reading this answer I realized that for my purposes I don't really want a fully steampunk world. All I want is lack of cars and planes as we know them, and lack of oil, or inaccessible deposits of ...
My character kills a goat in the mountains and eats some of it for dinner. What kind of plant or mineral could he use to preserve the meat to carry with him so that it stays fresh and doesn't becom...
The Nachtkrapp is a german version of the bogeyman or in a more general term a kind of bugbear. Nacht is the german word for night and Krapp is used in southern germany and austria as a word for ra...
Suppose a highly tectonically active planet, slightly smaller than Earth, has attracted the human race's attention due to its mineral wealth. Its landscape primarily consists of mountain chains, vo...
I was thinking of a scenario in which a population of snakes gets stranded on an island in which they are literally the only animals. This hypothetical island does not even have insects for the sn...
So let's say I have a super cooling "battery" basically a brick that cools anything that touches one end of it to ~0k. Now, using handwavium I can thermally isolate it so that it doesn't just cool ...
"The most sophisticated of the galactic elite crave the most exotic delicacies and few come more exotic or delicious than diamond cheese. This cheese made only on a small agrarian world on the oute...
For simplicity assume hypothetically we make multiple copies of earth: XS, S, M, L, XL. The only difference between them is their size (radius), everything else is the same. S is half the size of...
Is it possible to have a planet where the atmosphere is mostly water vapor instead of mostly N + O2 with solid ground, so not a gas giant? In the sense - how close to the center star(s) should it ...
In a world where people are not allowed to (or choose not to) make use of electron flow current, would it be possible to construct an electric generator using ionic conductors such as tubes with sa...
Essentially all the members of an alien species live within a single relatively sparsely inhabited megacity. The city has a surface area of about 30,000km². The species happens to be almost exclu...
In my RPG campaign setting the orcs are tougher than most other races. In hard times they can eat wood (small bushes and fresh pieces of trees). In really hard times they can eat healthy soil and...
What would be able to explain a visor like device that can see the past or future? I'm trying to make it as little as clarketech as possible. Any ideas?
I need you guys to help me out here. I'm developing clothing ideas and I need to understand what animals and plants may be used to create such clothes. Part of a story that I'm creating is a wate...
I am working on a story where ships are tricked and crash land on a volcanic planet due to some sort of electromagnetic interference. The survivors of the landing essentially become gladiators on ...
Is it realistic for me to write about a time period where silicon-based sentience have evolved alongside humans? Perhaps they could have evolved to sentience when driven by nanobots (which could be...
If all the fresh water were at least 25% deuterium, would humans be able to survive? Would there be significant other detrimental side effects to human physiology as a result?
Assuming these vampires are genetically altered humans and not undead humans. What biological structure changes would you need to make vampires with the following parameters realistic. Abilities:,...
I'm picturing an universe where FTL travel was invented as a sort-of-fluke, and artificial gravity technology isn't available. Transit between star-systems takes at least a few days and a star's gr...
I'm imagining that a group of humans was transported to a different planet almost 100 thousand years ago. The planet is similar enough to Earth that they can survive, and already had other earth-...
I have built a Tchou-Tchou 'hyperloop' wagon that reaches 310Â km/h on a 500 meter test rail. One of my investor customers wants to try the Tchou-Tchou, but I am a bit concerned about his safety. T...
How could we use our own heart which pumps our blood, to potentially charge devices such as a cell phone?
Assuming a civilization has the technology and capability to build a worldship, a planet that doubles as a spacecraft, installs an FTL drive on it and has the energy to power it, what would the eff...
So, normal humans can tolerate up to 4g of acceleration. If I had the tech to freeze and thaw people, would being frozen aid in tolerating high-g forces, or would the brittleness of your froz...
My experience with mousetraps has intrigued me to think that way. They exploit every flaw again and again to get the food out of the trap. Once a trap holds on to one they all learn to avoid it. Th...
Has anybody made any serious calculations of what the climates on Earth would be if our planet had a larger axial tilt? The most interesting are the cases of 45 and 90 degrees.
It's my first time writing an original story and I have this idea, but I don't know if it could be scientifically feasible. My story would be medieval fantasy with magic, but I wanted to add a twis...
My question is : Is it possible to have a hot desert planet with no significant vegetation with the surface mainly covered with liquid water? Normally, we should expect to have rain overland beca...
The rotational axis of the Earth is slightly tilted now, but I would like to tilt it to 90° - something like Uranus has - and make the Earth rotate with one pole always facing one direction - eg. ...
I am writing a sci-fi novel, set in a 1984-style dystopia, so a society which is obsessed with order and surveillance where non-predictable behaviour is punished. My protagonist is a person with a ...
On earth, as far a we know, there are two main ways that bacteria gain energy. there is Photosynthesis, the transition of light into chemical based energies such as ATP. there are chemical proce...
