General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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There is a settlement moving along the terminator line on Mercury: I can build it within $\pm 2^{o}$ of the terminator, that is, in the daylight side or the night side. There are going to be lots o...
An illness has been slowly spreading throughout the inhabitants of my agrarian society, decimating villages. The first sign of infection is the excessive production of slimy yellow saliva, and sinc...
Background: In the world of Krynn (Dragonlance) there was this worldwide catastrophe, the Cataclysm. What happened: Gods became angery to a single person, so they threw an asteroid at him, oblite...
Is there any combination of factors that would allow the average human to walk on a cloud without the aid of magic or technology? If so, could buildings and cities be constructed on clouds in those...
I'm writing about a small desert planet (about the size of pluto) that humans can live on. Is this possible?
The problem with FTL is that, due to the tachyonic antitelephone, it allows causality violation: I send you a superluminal message (you are moving away from me at relativistic speed), you reply wit...
I want to create a world that abides completely by our understanding of reality. The whole premise is that "If the Universe is large enough, this would all be non-fiction", assuming the laws of phy...
I've been toying around with the idea of a tidally locked Earth. Spent the better majority of today figuring out weather patterns, habitable zones, etc, but I missed one big detail: How the hell di...
Background In an environment with little visibility/short line of sight, in a roughly medieval setting, people who wish to represent their business and guilds etc., choose do so using sounds/music...
In a previous question on my purely peaceful, 100% pacifist species, I asked about how to remove all defining characteristics for sexuality yet still retaining sapience. As was pointed out, I had a...
I'm thinking of a planet with one side too hot, and one too cold due to always facing its star. With the planet having a small ring, a "twilight zone" which may be habitable, I was wondering if a m...
This is a follow-up to an earlier question. My intent here is to work out the details, and explore the potential consequences, of one of the many excellent answers I received. Relevant questions ha...
I am currently writing a story where natives are discovered in a jungle smoking a plant that depending on the variety will release different colored smoke when burned. The visuals in this story are...
One of the benefits of humanity is our subconscious need to explore. It is a simple instinct of primitive people wanting to know, not only what is in your territory, but almost what is around your ...
I'm thinking of aliens that don't have hands but use their tentacles to make and use tools and, eventually, advanced technology. I would like to know whether this is a realistic idea. For the purpo...
Could I make a world where gorillas replace elephants in their niche as herbivore? Are there any reasons that they could not?
If you've never been in a shower fight you cannot possibly imagine the pain a wet towel can inflict.. Pete Williams, 12b Avergreen Road, 4th grade, likes Brussels sprouts1 A towel can b...
I know next to nothing about astrophysics, but I've read a few Wikipedia articles, and it seems like a "normal" kind of binary system includes two stars of similar mass orbiting a common center. I...
Is there a scientifically plausible way for a habitable world to have a sun that undergoes a regular, dramatic, and easily observable change? One comparable in visual impact to an event like a sola...
For no apparent reason (this is a song, not a story, so I'm pretty economical with exposition) nearly every tetrapod on Earth has vanished, and water is gone from the oceans. Just sort of hand-wave...
I'm curious what it would take to get a planet with so much free fluorine that you can have an atmosphere of predominantly or purely fluorine. I realize how improbable a planet like this is, so I'm...
I'm writing a medieval/post apocalypse world stricken with horrible dust storms that last days or weeks at a time. Would it be possible, using medieval technology, to: protect yourself from such...
Through a short amount of research it seems most blood is cleaned in the liver and most toxins are neutralized before being passed into urine or the bowels. If this is how most toxins are excreted ...
Supposing you took Earth or a planet like it and doubled its mass, the gravity would obviously increase in whatever proportion to that. As a result, humans as we know them would be ... thicker, (...
In my fantasy pre-industrial world pollen production and plant reproduction has been disabled by some sort of curse. The curse has a limited geographical span, but the region affected is very larg...
This is the ideal set up for my solar system: EDIT It's been pointed out that this is not a stable set up, so I want to clarify that everything in this set up can be changed at will to fit my plan...
Is it possible to create a room-temperature solid made from 100% human blood? One of my stories features a girl who has the passive ability to block the superpowers of anyone in a 100-meter radi...
How might such a species evolve? How would they swim, navigate and breed? How big could they grow, and what complications might arise out of their growing very large?
Is it possible that there might be a virus (of the giant, ancient, frozen-in-glaciers type) that is, for lack of a better explanation, double-layered? As in the first layer affects the host and the...
(I'm talking binary:Male and female) This is post apocalyptic scenario. I'm writing a short story and storyline"‹ is as follows: In a distant future: After the world war there are only a few thous...
Primordial Earth was buried in carbon dioxide. When life started, it was with algae using energy from the sun to crack the carbon out of carbon dioxide, with the byproduct of releasing the corrosiv...
In 1890's H.G. Wells famously takes a "science fiction" approach to time travel by building a machine that can move freely through time as a dimension. It was made of clockwork "” mechanical gears...
We have Venus flytraps which move by closing their 'mouth' to trap prey. There are currently few identified plants with a 'quick' reflex like this. Blooms of course open and close through the cou...
I've been looking for information on this, but I haven't come upon an answer that could actually help me figure this out: Imagine a planet, inhabited by somewhat "human" beings, that has one sun-l...
I can easily set a story in a dystopian environment not subject to ethics, but I would rather try to create a backdrop that is as ethical as possible given the requirements. I feel that writing abo...
Our Earth and Venus each keep a thick atmosphere because of a magnetosphere. Most terraforming scenarios of Mars involve transferring water and other gases from the ground to the atmosphere. We no...
So there are these AGIs made by some ancient aliens (who are out of the picture for now). The ancient aliens were a lot more intelligent than humans, we are at a dog-like intelligence level compare...
I am world building/culture building for a story that I'm writing and one of the races/sapient species is patterned after spiders. I'm willing to take a lot of liberties with the physiology (for ex...
I thought of two questions regarding ringworld structures in solar systems with results I can't assume, so I will try to describe each (assume stability): If a (toroidal) ringworld were massive e...
In a future where all cars and public services are self-driving the way, I am assuming traffic congestion would be seriously limited, if not removed completely, because the road network would also ...
I was wondering what would happen to life, when an infamous epidemic plague would be able to infect and kill any imaginable plant, be it on land or in the waters. Would the lack of oxygen eventual...
What technology will humanity use the first time it moves a planet? In the near-ish future, humanity has colonized Mars which has since become self-sustaining and independent, as well as various o...
One of the strangest and most effective weapons in the wonderful world of arthropods in the proboscis of the famed assassin bug, with even the head of the insect working as part of the weapon. T...
I have previously asked this question about the plausibility of large six-legged creatures, but I decided to split it into several more specific questions because of the advice here. I want to fi...
If for instance in 2117 when we have the next Venus transit (Venus between the Sun and Earth). There was a huge solar flare or storm right on the line from Venus to Earth. Could this give enough en...
So in the story I'm trying to write, I'm having trouble getting the gravity on my fictional to seem realistic, and I would like to know if it seems technically possible? A group of astronauts tra...
Would it be possible, with genetic engineering, to create a form of tree which produces wood with the same strength/hardness as granite, capable of being used in place of stone for castle-style wal...
If animals were scaled up to be about the same size in anthro form (human-size) regardless of species (i.e. wolf-people and hare-people both become man-sized as well as man-shaped), would the ones ...
While playing old games, I encountered a friend I knew from SciFi series and games alike, the Merculite missile. While thinking about what Merculite might actually be (and linking it to a mineral f...
Our AI in question inhabits a synthetic brain housed in an organic and genetically modified human body (With a few other cybernetics). This body/brain combination was the result of a black project ...
