General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Can life exist on planets as barren as Mercury? How would it survive? It seems like it couldn't. Mercury is very hot, would any life break down becuase of the heat? What other challenges face life ...
If you arrive at a distant planet you mean to colonise, without enough food for the long term - just maybe a couple of plants and a bunch of seeds and enough food in storage to keep you going for t...
Knowing that our brain uses just about a few watts of power and is as powerful as a supercomputer using megaWatts of power in 2016 and that we seem close to the physical limit of what silicon can d...
I'm developing a world in the near future where a start-up company develops an artificial womb. Now well-off people could grow their children from their eggs & sperm. My story is about couples ...
Guran's comment Perhaps they are tinkering with the solar activity, turning stars into Yotta-watt, nano-bit/second beakons. (We would see the pattern eventually, but not before we looked at cen...
Could a kugelblitz be stored in a container lined with metamaterials to reflect back the outpouring of hawking radiation or would it require something more exotic? Could it be pinned in the center ...
Would it be possible for a virus to extend the average human life-span (but only by about 50-70 years max) if the infected people kept it controlled enough where it wouldn't (alternatively) kill th...
There is a nocturnal mammal, about the size of a common red fox, which has evolved (by way of some unspecified-at-this-point selective pressure) the ability to see well in situations involving larg...
I have a mars-sized "planet" orbiting a superearth-sized mother-planet. There is also another satellite with an abnormal elliptic orbit, but it is of minor concern for now. This is the resume of ...
The primary armament of the space warships of a race I am building use an armament that consists of explosive shells that have a rocket engine in them. The idea is that they are fired from the shi...
I'm writing a sci-fi screenplay and I wonder how a human face of an adolescent would look if it was somehow covered with a sort of flexible mask since birth? What would you discover if you removed ...
Here's an idea that I've been toying with. The aliens are real, they are here and they dominate at least a part of our galaxy. How did they overcome the vast distances and why haven't we noticed?...
Partly due to WB's great response to my steampunk questions, I think the world I'll work on next will have to be steampunk :) If I had a steampunk cyborg running around, what could he do with his ...
It appears that multiple planets existing in the same orbit is theoretically possible. In that case, how would we go about building a second Earth-sized planet and inserting it into some position i...
So I'm writing a story that takes place in Saturn's atmosphere, and I've run into a bit of a problem. You see, I wanted it to be possible to have some pretty badass scenes with sci-fi fighter jets ...
There has evolved a species of turtles large enough to maintain an atmosphere of their own and travel interstellar space. We have already discovered how they don't collapse under their own gravity,...
Welcome to Smooth World. Most of this planet (at least two thirds, but preferably more) has only tiny differences in elevation, 30-40cm at most. No hills, no mountains, no valleys. Even plains fou...
So, like my question says, I've been wondering if a rocky planet, that looks much like our planet from the surface (oceans, forests, mountains, ext) could be possible. I've read through a good nu...
Slenderman is unarguably the most iconic creation of the early internet. It has led to games, stories and even books. But is his design evolutionarily possible? What evolutionary pressures would le...
Say a star system in the local neighborhood (~15 light years away max) has a species that did not survive its own version of the cold war. The result is the usage of tens of thousands of nuclear we...
Would it be a good idea to use a railgun to propel a person into combat in a low/zero grav environment, Ã la human cannonballs in a circus? If a person was strapped into some sort of temporary fra...
Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces of universe but along with electromagnetism tends to dominate most of the macro world phenomenon. But what would happen if the force of gravitatio...
Say the moon is drifting further away from Earth at an astonishing rate of 3.14159km each year due to the crazy tides, the rising sea level and shielding us from stray asteroids. Given 150 years ti...
Related Question : Can we 'beam' energy from the moon? I was wondering if instead of 'beam'ing energy from the moon, could it be possible to extend a power cable from the earth to the moon? If th...
The Problem In a world I am building, the days are 9 years long, this means 4 and half years of cold darkness following 4 and a half years of blistering daylight. I have asked questions on this Ye...
I'm imagining an electromagnetic wave that could deliberately alter its wavelength. It would be a totally unfamiliar type of creature, but actually, we material beings act because of the electical ...
I'm writing a Earth history time travel story, and the main character needs to solve puzzles from each time period he visits. I'm going very far back in history and I'm concerned about being able t...
In the 22nd century C.E. human already colonised the entire Solar system, and Earth becomes a dangerous place to live because of the spread of deadly synthetic virus that kills every animals and sc...
I'm trying to figure out how fast my tiny critters from a previous question, Mistraille, can travel. Why? It's not that I'm detail orientated and want to know the exact decimal point of speed they ...
I wanna have a scene where the protagonists see the gray goo excreting human skeletons because they can't use the calcium in them for anything. But is this true? Would a self-replicating machine re...
I am writing up a system of wormhole-based gates to allow "fast travel" in a far-future setting. My description is an extrapolation of the way I understand a flatlander's experience of the followin...
Technology: Comparable to early XXIst century, except self-driving vehicles are already available. On a tidally locked planet most of the models that I can found (ex. http://www.meteo.mcgill.ca/~t...
On Earth and other planets, the surfaces spherical shape and rotation lead to a Coriolis effect or force which causes large storms and weather systems to rotate (clockwise in the Northern hemispher...
Flux pinning (also known as quantum locking): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning This technique has been discussed on this site before as a method for creating nearly indestructible supe...
Let's say my eyes were ripped out in some horrible accident, and were replaced with cameras. Over the years, the cameras get better and better... 4k... 8k... 16k... etc. Is there a limit to how hig...
I'm trying to figure out a way to create a situation much like the apocalypse of Turry from Robotica, but which involves all the people on Earth being either temporarily or permanently strapped int...
There are three different species of pine collectively called "bristlecones", all of whom can grow in weather too harsh and soil too poor for any other tree to take root. They are renowned for the...
I have a habitable moon orbiting a gas giant, and there is another moon orbiting the planet on a closer orbit. The cultures on the near-side of the further, habitable moon use the transit of the cl...
Follow up to this question. Is it possible to translate the inputs from the optical nerve to something readable by a computer?
I've always liked living spaceships, but it seems to me that the animal kingdom would make far inferior spaceships to the plant kingdom. With that in mind, what does this tree-ship have to be made ...
My hero is a synthetic biologist of an ancient race that achieved spaceflight billions years ago. His bio ship could achieve high fraction of speed of light, and he could repair or modify his body ...
Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep re...
There was a good question and answer here: Does mermaid evolution come with buoyancy control? But I would like to expand the question. I got off talking with a friend, it got me thinking about mer...
Imagine a starship with a tonnage of 600,000Â metric tons that must maintain an average speed of 10km/s to remain in Near Earth Orbit, that's probably going to consume much more energy than simply ...
An O'Neill cylinder for those not in the know is basically a space habitat consisting of a rotating cylinder 32km long and 8km in diameter. I want to turn one into an actual spacecraft rather than ...
Looking at the topographical map of the two main islands of Britain--England to the east and Ireland to the west--is looking at two and a half million years of ice sculpting, grinding and melting...
Suppose that I have a spherical space-ship with an approximately 1 kilometer diameter. For some reason I need to park it (unmanned) for a long period (100+ years) fairly close to the Sun. (Half the...
I was wondering whether a planet might exist that has life forms with up to five sexes, with a single organism having three different and independent, functional sets of sexual organs. Presuming in...
I imagine such a creature would be composed of thousands, possibly millions of planets, gas clouds, asteroids and stars. Almost like a giant living engine powered entirely by gravity. Obviously t...
Assuming it was possible to create an artificial magnetic shield on the moon, would it be possible that a sufficiently powerful field could hold onto an atmosphere despite the low gravity. Thanks
