General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
How plausible would it be for an asteroid impact to create a hole through the Earth's crust into the mantle? What sort of traces would such an impact leave behind? Would it be survivable by at le...
There is an earth like planet, with similar mass, gravity, atmosphere and magnetic field. The main difference with earth is that it has a highly eccentric orbit (eccentricity 0.8). Let's say that ...
Something I'm working on- originally I intended for this particular species to build cities up in the treetops of massive forests, but that's been done before. So I considered maybe they built thei...
As recommended by another user, on a different question I asked, I pose this new question under the following criteria: The creature I'm trying to create has evolved, though it may not have been e...
There is a really obvious problem with going to a planet we have deemed "habitable". Even if the temperature is perfect, the air composition is perfect and the terrain is perfect we still have the ...
All known life forms have life cycles that are not time symmetric as they look different when time is reversed. I was wondering if there could be a life form that would have a life cycle that wou...
First off, let's get definitions out of the way: A "race" here is defined as stable, heritable, phenotypic, clearly visual distinction between large demographic groups living in different geograph...
In the future, humans decide to conduct a long term experiment in which they make robots that move and think exactly like humans. They also need to eat, drink and breathe the same as humans. These ...
I'm asking for a world I'm making, which orbits a red star. According to this image, there is a star that would make the sky white. What would the sky look like during sunrise and sunset on a p...
Let's assume that sometime in the next year, we receive a transmission from deep space containing what appears to be blueprints of an alien genome. After extensive study and determining that the da...
Say that you have a cuboid "planet" that can retain its shape. Can it have a cubical iron core (as opposed to the spherical one described in this question) and generate a magnetic field? Would the ...
Situation: A knight wants to kill me. I have a night to prepare. It will be a duel. Me: I'm a time traveler (and I ended up in the worst possible timelines of the multiverse) I have a laser w...
Assume there are three earth-like worlds in our solar system. These three worlds would also have a single natural satellite roughly at the same mass-distance ratio of Earth to the Moon (about 1.2 p...
Powerfish - on! I'm thinking about writing about a world where fish are used like lab rats, to power technologies. But I'm thinking about worldwide use. I placed my TV on my fish tank yesterday. T...
I am trying to design a world where one pole is very cold, and the other is very hot. I don't mean that there would be instant death in either, but it is colder than our South Pole on one end and w...
Would it be realistic for a (relatively) small island nation to have these features: A Forest A lake A snowy mountaintop A desert A bustling modern city How large would this island have to be i...
So, I know that the universe is expanding, and that that means that things are generally getting further apart as time goes on. What I'm having difficulty with, however, is figuring out just how mu...
In what ways could an island be protected from tsunamis, given the following constraints?: It lies in the middle of the ocean, at least several hundred kilometers from the nearest continent. It d...
Okay, so I have a sci-fi setting in which there is a form of FTL travel. Imagine the universe(all three/four dimensions of it) was stretched out onto the surface of a sphere. Now assume that ther...
Which body in the Solar System is the best candidate for being an artificial construct, placed there by a Kardashev Type II Civilization? Some notes: The purpose of this body is to monitor eart...
Setting: In a fantasy setting much like World of Warcraft (where huge liberties are taken regarding the level of technological sophistication), an evil emperor rules from a castle in which there ar...
I'm planning on setting a story on Earth where the Sun is slowly becoming a red giant. I guess with so much solar activity and probably less atmosphere and magnetic field, the surface of our Earth ...
I'm currently writing a narrative and hoping to include a world which is home to a sea of some form of 'nasty' substance (doesn't have to be acid). The varieties of inhabitants of this world have ...
I'm creating a world my protagonist will visit with humanoid inhabitants that have a peculiar feature: their eye sockets are in the palms of their hands, not unlike the Pale Man Pan's Labyrinth. ...
This seemed too scifi or hypothetical for physics, so here goes. Suppose a manipulated quark with 0 mass could travel faster than the speed of light. It's known that the faster you go, the slower...
One of the ideas I've had for a story is to have million year old subterranean buildings/cities/temples which have younger architecture built on top of them, resulting in a "dungeon" which would be...
I'm reading this article on speech in animals, and it made an interesting claim: chimpanzees and other non-human great apes posses the anatomy needed to vocalize words, they just don't use it to do...
This is set in the same universe as my Andromeda galactic war question (same tech level). In this question, I had somewhat purposely labelled the galactic core as "off-limits" (black holes and oth...
I just got shoved through a stargate onto a planet I don't know. I was told the gate would open again in exactly one Earth year. I wasn't carrying anything; I don't even have my watch. How do I k...
We know lasers right? Damn accurate, pew pew.... Meh. What I never saw, is using lasers to create pressure waves, to resonate something into its destruction. But Boeing even patented the plan of a ...
If I'm writing a sci-fi story and I wanted to include humans with modified eyesight that see into the ultraviolet and infrared bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, what would I have to change abo...
Suppose that Khufu, pharaoh of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, was introduced to the idea of an amusement park. More specifically, suppose that he was visited by a time traveler a...
This is question #1 regarding the background art of Worldbuilding.SE One of the first things I noticed when I found this site was that amazing background picture. I like to think a great story can...
This human population developed in a mild climate region, with fair abundance of food, water and shelter. However, though they have the skills and the means to explore forth, the population is unab...
For those that do not know, the tardigrade is a microscopic animal that can survive: extreme heat extreme cold extreme levels of radiation lack of water indefinitely lack of food indefinitely a...
I'm working on a map of several star systems (with the stars, planets, etc. not to scale with the map), and I'd like to show that they don't all lie in the same plane. Some orbits are perpendicular...
Buildings are often build on the ground into the sky. Would it be conceivable if instead, we build down into the ground instead? We wouldn't have to worry about wind then. I think we could go farth...
Let's say a human engineer comes across an alien electronics lab. It occurs to me that electrons are electrons, if the aliens are at a similar state of development to us then at least the simples...
A ship powered by a black hole of a few hundred thousand tons (say, under $6 \times10^8$ kg, which would have a lifetime of several years and a power output of a few hundred petawatts) crashes (mal...
What is the oldest a still extant cave on Earth could be? What conditions could encourage the longevity of a cave? It seems that the oldest known caves, the Jenolan Caves in Australia, formed i...
Imagine a pair of black holes in orbit around each other. I'm wondering how this would distort their mutual event horizons. In fact would it be possible to "break" the event horizons by reducing th...
In the book Dune by Frank Herbert. Arrakis is a desolate planet composed entirely of deserts. Water is a precious commodity due to its rarity. The Fremen have found ways to live on its surface, des...
So let's say it's a big planet, like a Jupiter. Not talking about our Solar System. This is hypothetical. But say a Jupiter-esque planet in a solar system suddenly disappears. And by disappears I m...
There's a famous saying in science fiction: "Relativity, causality, FTL: pick two". I choose causality and FTL. In a Newtonian universe, where there's a privileged reference frame, the speed of l...
I am familar with current reactor (experimental) fusion reactor design. But imagine a fusion reaction happening without a reactor, so there is no reactor hull to shield the sound from an innocent ...
In an earlier question I shared the idea of Bill, the stranded alien that has a challenge getting the attention of local humans because he's the size of a mosquito. He needs to re-establish contac...
One answer to the question of "Why don't we see any aliens?" prompted me to consider: The computer was a comparatively simple design, what the natives would call "single core" Von Neumann arch...
A fault that ruptures causing an earthquake can cause a chain reaction of dynamically triggered earthquakes in nearby faults, thus causing a much larger seismic event. What are some high unlikely b...
So here's what I'm trying to do. I've got a setting that at a medieval level of technology and is rather similar to Europe with knights, castles and all that jazz. However to give the setting some...
Imagine a world (or rather a solar system) where in its history there has been a war with emergent AI's There are very strict laws governing the speed and complexity of computer systems However b...
