General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I have a city in space that will have a local population and a lot of travel in and out (center of commerce). Should I place it out in open space or near a planet? Being near a planet obviously i...
If two incredibly strong incredibly indestructible characters were fighting on earth could one punch the other one into space? By space I am assuming that we at sea level and are trying to escape t...
Setup: Earth is the same (somehow, minus the tides -- don't overthink this bit) Moon is 2x the mass Moon is 2x closer Moon contains the derelict fissile fuel-dump of a hyper-advanced civil...
Alright, my understanding of both modern physics and classical cosmology is a little shaky, so I hope this question is neither unclear nor foolish. Here goes: In Aristotelian cosmology all matter...
Recently, I've seen those pictures showing what Earth would be like if it had rings, and that made me wonder, what would the sky map be like? This ring would appear as a fixed object (pretty much a...
I was wondering if a planet that has a higher escape velocity but lower surface gravity lose its atmosphere more faster/slower than a planet that has a higher surface gravity but lower escape veloc...
Welcome to the Black Cauldron. The Cauldron of Storms, even. It's a sunny day now, perfect for fishing. Just not here. There's no boats on the water. The weather can go bad, quickly. And anything o...
Background Moonshot entrepreneur Elon Branson funds a migration to space. Instead of spending billions of developing safe space technology, he instead finds volunteers and shoots them in to spac...
When I was a kid, I read an essay by Asimov describing an inside-out asteroid: (summary from Wikipedia) The Bubbleworld or Inside/Outside concept was originated by Dandridge M. Cole in 1964....
Given an Earth-like planet, what sort of geological features or weather systems are required for a place to have the same average day and night temperatures throughout the whole year? Is such a thi...
What materials would be significantly better than currently commonly used radioactive materials (Uranium/Plutonium) for energy generation? I am looking for some material which could've been brough...
I created a world a few month ago for a role play game, Ryuutama. The game system is higly based on season and weather, but I'm not good in time gestion as GM. I so decided that regions will have t...
How would you form an extended stretch of coastline that is effectively useless for overwater trade -- i.e. there are no sheltered areas to serve as ports, or trade routes that can reach all the wa...
If an average human is 5'10" (1.8m), when scaled to be roughly 50 ft (15 m) how much food would it need to remain healthy? Let's also assume there are three types of this giant; carnivorous, herbi...
If a matrioshka brain where constructed specifically for AI , and , say , 1,000,000 AI were placed within it , also with many hostile enemies and various obstacles which may cause the destruction o...
Plenty of stories have done AI's before, but many of them feel unrealistic. If you make an AI that is as smart as humans, but with faster reaction speed and ability to process and calculate certai...
Based on the Newton's law of gravity $$g= \frac{GM}{r^2}$$ we calculate the gravity acceleration, gravity exerted, etc. And now, provided there exist the correct gasses to create a humanly surv...
Logically a born and raised on a planet with Earth-like gravity would move slower on a high gravity planet, and would be both faster, and possibly clumsier in low gravity. In my world humanity has ...
I am assuming that monkey like animals are more likely to develop some form of horn or antler than apes(feel free to correct me), the question is what would be the most plausible function of the ho...
Is it possible to create a scenario where nuclear power is a practical option for nomads living like in Mongolia? There's two possible applications of nuclear power. One is to just use it as a hea...
All right, so I have a game that I already made, the concept is that there are "planets" that do not move and ships that can stand still without being sucked in to the gravity of the planets. I ne...
In Nemesis Games, the 5th book of The Expanse series by (pseudonym) James S. A. Corey, a disenfranchised group seeks to disrupt the solar system by "dropping rocks" on Earth (pushing or otherw...
Would the discovery of alien bacteria found on even an Earth analog planet preclude the possibility of colonization due to the potentially deadly nature of bacterial/viral infections? Put different...
What orbital parameters could I give seven Mars/Earth sized planets so they have stable orbits around a G-type star like The Sun, they need to fit between 0.5 AU and 1.7 AU.
Plenty of aliens from various galaxies have managed to land on Earth without getting tracked on Radars or satellites. For now, as I want my story to stay undisclosed, please assume that aliens have...
A rocky planet, similar to Earth in mass and composition, is set to pass through the solar system in one year's time. It has frozen oceans of water ice and a thin atmosphere of unknown composition....
In the real world, humans have tamed horses and use them as mounts. Horses have very specific characteristics that make them a viable mount, such as size, back-strength, stamina, diet, behavior, et...
Imagine a terrestrial creature with a sail on its back, like a Spinosaurus or Dimetrodon. Would it be possible to use this sail as a lung for oxygen exchange with the air?
If the force of gravity at the Earth's surface suddenly became 2 times stronger, how would the environment and humans cope? I'm guessing a lot of flying creatures would suffer, but what would happe...
I am in the midst of writing a book wherein one of my characters (Let's call her X) can affect spacetime, mostly by causing time to dilate. My character is earthbound and a shadow organization di...
So, with all the recent discoveries and almost certainly true theories that a few of Jupiter and Saturn's moons could have a subsurface ocean, notably Enceladus and Titan, would an ~10 meter long s...
Suppose you have a race of early people similar to humans, except that they have fish eyes to help with peripheral vision. Would this adversely affect their spacial reasoning skills? It seems that ...
In this universe, the planet Paveiha has a mountain range that completely surrounds a region in a semi square/rectangle(ish) shape. Inside the borders of this vast mountain range is a verdant land ...
I just detected a strange object in space, and it appears to be of alien origin! Telescope readings seem to indicate it is some sort of deep space probe, with a golden disk of some sort attached to...
Imagine a large butterfly- or moth-like creature, with a wingspan of about one meter (it's moth-like, not actually related to Earth insects). It lives its entire life high in the open sky, never to...
Disclaimer: This is not a duplicate of this question. This question deals with a specifically non-marine snake. My fantasy story requires a giant snake. The easiest way to create one (as far as f...
My question is as the title put it. I would like to know how large and thick of a wall we could currently construct. Given we have no limitations in money or materials. Bonus if it's actually sturd...
There's a person who has enough working knowledge of our current real-world methods of cryptography (e.g. knows how a few modern algorithms work and could implement one or two from scratch). That ...
It would preferably be something that will either last a fairly long time fifteen to twenty years perhaps, periodically and last at least some months between or last indefinitely. I do not require ...
How can a part of a continent (super or other) remain unexplored by the apparently civilized majority? The undiscovered part must be habitable but inaccessible, by land or sea, so that the rest of ...
Following in the vein of super-villains with problems... I am an anonymous villain (the best in my world), and have recently bought some new land and am in process of building on it with the inten...
We are an interplanetary human empire at war with an alien species. On the brink of defeat, this alien species designed a virus to turn the tide of war. This virus is airborne and highly contagio...
In my world, having a nuclear reactor at your own house is legal, in fact government donates money in the form of subsidies ( So no constraints of funds). This might have been practical because of ...
I define "generalization" as the ability to put things together into groups based on common characteristics. I define "abstraction" to be the ability to articulate what those characteristics actua...
Ships are capable of FTL warp and relativistic speed flying. In order for a ship to intercept other ship at high non-FTL speed, it needs a mechanism that will enable it to slow down the other ship....
I'm writing a species of dragon-sized butterflies¹ as flying mounts into a low-magic fantasy setting², and would like to know if these creatures have to be imbued with magic, or if they could jus...
The character I'm working om has the ability to compress/decompress air in a 2 foot radius around his body. His signature move is the "Thunder Punch" in which he compresses the air in front of his ...
I've looked around here a bit, but I haven't managed to find a post that really answers my question (though if there is one, please let me know). I'm trying to write a story where the two main cha...
Compressed archives in computer science are, from some perspective, decreasing the data size by minimizing repetition of data. Take each particle (to any precision you prefer) in the whole univers...
In the world I'm building, there's a race of sapient, technologically advanced lizard people, most of whom live in an enormous, climate-controlled city. Based on the answers to this question, it se...
