General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Imagine a spaceship entering Earth's atmosphere, it has lost control of its engines and is relying on its reverse thrusters to decelerate before crashing into the Pacific ocean. So in an attempt ...
I've seen several people independently come up with the idea of three or more sexes where one sex is responsible for brooding the young (pregnancy, pouch, feeding, something along those lines) but ...
After an age of highly developed technology, including many different satellites in various Earth orbits, humanity loses the technology needed to control those satellites. After many centuries, how...
If humans lived on the inside of the earth's crust, what would happen if they climbed mountains? These mountains would stretch toward the burning center of the Earth. Would gravity get stronger the...
So, centaurs are half-human, half-horse creatures that are usually portrayed in myth as wild, violent and animalistic. Now, I, Lucretius, found a good explanation why. The answer is in the growth ...
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these...
Malevolent Spirit: Malevolent spirits are swarms of barely visible machines that have accidentally been imprinted with a deceased person's memories. They posess swarm intelligence and communicate w...
The goal is to get from Earth to the Outer Solar System, preferably the Kuiper Belt, as quickly as practical, with a crew of about 12, and a not-set-in-stone dry mass around 30 tons. The character...
Sulfur hexafluoride is pretty awesome. It is a gas six times denser than regular air, and thus you can actually make tinfoil "boats" float on it. It also makes your voice deep when you breathe it i...
In my narrative universe, there will be ships that use a 1g acceleration for artificial gravity. However, when they are not accelerating (whether on a longer journey at a constant velocity or simpl...
Those of you who are familiar with the DC Comics hero Firestorm know that he can alter the chemical structure of any form of inorganic matter, provided he knows the chemical equation. In my story, ...
I did a lot of research and asking questions about dragons' breathing ability: if there was a dragon that spits pyrophoric liquids like a spitting cobra A tiny fire-breather can any animals (exam...
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was ...
Consider such a tidally locked planet: Many issues with tidally locked worlds have been discussed, but I'm not clear on how the water cycle for an otherwise Earth-like tidally locked world, woul...
I found one question that deals with how to make lightning from clouds strike a target person, Can we make lightning strike a certain person? but I am looking for something that doesn't involve tec...
So, dragons here use aqua regia (an acid that dissolves even gold) as their breath weapon. This acid is made up of the dragon's stomach acid and some nitric acid, stored in a separate organ. On to...
Premise I was inspired by Karl Niklas who used computer modeling to simulate the ideal structure for a tree when different traits were favored. Here is a chart summarizing his work: Explanation...
I am working on a world where an event, like a celebration, occurs during every lunar eclipse. I would like to have lunar eclipses occurring more frequently--maybe even once a month--in order for...
It is (around here, anyway) quite well known that science does not allow the existence of kaiju, mainly because of the cube-square law. bones rip themselves out To my understanding, this boils do...
In Hungarian, there is a new-ish folk-song sung by school-children who dislike school whenever it snows to the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Hull a pelyhes dinamit, Robbantsuk fel...
I see that asteroid mining had already been extensively discussed in the context of today's technology (Ex. Is Asteroid Harvesting economic?) and the answer is a definitive "No" - it's not economic...
So... I'm fiddling with Yet Another Bipedal Digitigrade Species. There is tons of material on the legs, but seemingly not so much on the hands. Short Version So... I'm wondering; is it possible t...
In the world that I am making there are hollows all over the planet, which are massive underground subterranean areas of the planet. Think The Hollow of the Gears Of War series. So far the going th...
Say you somehow invented 50 thousand nanobots that are the size of medium sized bottle caps. Each are capable of hovering for a limited amount of time but do recharge with both solar energy and plu...
I was imagining a sort of post-apocalyptic/collapse setting, where a few centuries of climate catastrophes brought on by climate change cause essentially your general end of the world as we know it...
We often see, in Sci-fi, food being produced from, say, algae or yeast. What could be the effect of such a limited diet on the gut microbiome? Would there be any believable side-effect that would h...
Inspired by this question, which is asking how to deny land for several hundreds of years after a global nuclear holocaust, I would like to know, given only nuclear weapons, and especially salted b...
The animal I'm particularly focusing on is a cat, for which I'm curious how long it would take for said cat to evolve into a bipedal, intelligent, humanoid being capable of complex language and all...
(Note: This is a follow-up question to my previous one: Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands?) Thanks to clever stellar engineerin...
I am currently working on world-building a planet, and I wanted to try to diverge from Earth's atmosphere a little bit, but not extremely. I am planning on still having it be a oxygen-nitrogen rich...
The metric system (SI units) is a base-10 measurement system based on the meter, kilogram and second. But it is tied to earth. A second, which historically was defined as 1/86,400 of a day, now d...
I'm conceiving of a world where humans can readily terraform worlds that were once considered "dead" due to the planet's magnetic field being long gone. In such a situation, what could humans do t...
Aquatic races are usually assumed to be stunted in technological development by the inability to create fire or forge metals. But what about doing chemistry at all? The development of chemistry i...
I've been trying to answer this question for a premise involving a cyborg being out of touch with modern civilization for a prolonged period of time, and the roadblock I keep hitting is that counte...
Giant dogs aren't uncommon in works of fantasy. Sif from Dark Souls comes to mind. What I want to know is: what's the largest a canine could realistically get, what differences would they need c...
In my setting, there are basically no biological life forms left, as everyone has either been mind-uploaded or is an artificial intelligence. It is supposed to take place at a very distant point i...
I am building a setting that is essentially steampunk,being exact it would be pneumatic punk. What electronics and electronic equivalent exists, are primitive and extremely expensive. Thus the majo...
Would it be possible to use a living organism as unobtainium for interstellar travel? Would it make any sense? The story I had in mind would use them as the main bad guys seeking vengeance on thos...
Most arthropods have at least six legs. Some mites have four and some insects have none, but for the most part, they have six or more. What would the anatomy of a large quadrupedal arthropod be li...
On this parallel earth all vertebrates received the ability to efficiently produce super strong materials from readily available minerals/nutrients in the mid Triassic. The specifics of these comp...
I have a spaceship which I want to have travel very quickly around a system like our own solar system -- let's say about 10 million miles per minute, which would go from Mars to Earth in ~15 minute...
I am creating a culture that has the ability to change between 2 forms. One humanoid (the natal form) and one feral, animal form (you can consider this to be a werewolf). Due to this they evolved t...
Earth rocks are largely silicates, combinations of silicon, oxygen, and various other trace elements. What would a planets geography look like if the crust was primarily composed of ceramics like...
I want my planet to be the last planet in a universe to host life forms. I expect a rough estimation as answer. Thanks.
I'm basically searching for an ATP that can be used to supply cells and also have its energy extracted efficiently into a basic form of explosive material (the stronger the better) without a lot of...
I have some ideas regarding this, but thought I would check to see what you guys can come up with, as I found some of the ideas here often trump mine in originality and/or plausibility. So, I hav...
So, I was watching a funny movie about undead pirates when the realization hit me, I never once tried to create naval superiority for my Mary Sue. Well, guess I just do it now. Titanic 2: (n)Ice t...
A traveling scholar during the Dark Ages, with full knowledge of how precious books were, decided to keep his rolled up in a scroll. He's fashioned a clever case for it that allows him to turn a no...
Hypothetically, if an animal such as a cephalopod were to become terrestrial, and walking gradually evolved from crawling, would hardened muscle be likely to evolve as support, with articulation to...
If the immune system of a healthy human just shut down completely and instantly (magic, nanotechnology, whatever), and after a certain time period it went back to normal, how much time without the ...
