General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The traditional description of the mermaid is half-girl and half-fish. That, both biologically and dramatically, is just ridiculous. If the mermaid were half-fish, then why does she move her tail...
Suppose that a person has the ability to kill any living being it touches (literally). That happens due to the fact that when this person touches using such ability, the target's spot being touched...
Is there any way a catdog (like from the television program Catdog) could survive? If it could survive could it evolve? Are there any reasons it couldn't?
Building things in space is a massive benefit as the weightlessness and lack of stress means the only restraint is the amount of resources available for construction. But therein lies the problem, ...
History shows that most inventors of groundbreaking new technologies, for example, the light bulb or the telephone were not actually the first to invent this technology and that there were actually...
I'm currently brainstorming the rules for some Tolkien-esque elves. I'm trying to do some research to make them as realistic as possible, but all the science-y things go right over my head. I've pr...
Assumptions for the story: The rocket pack is not unlike the scenario of the movie when I was little, "Rocketeer," in terms of viability. I have hand-waved it in my story. The rocket pack should...
Alternatively, could DNA be a language (the normal coding that exists within DNA to tell it what to build) that is capable of telling us anything. This question is based off of this article about...
I was originally going to claim my world has very low levels of sulfur, resulting in a lack of gunpowder and thus a lack of guns. But after realizing how cool things like fireworks and Hwacha are, ...
Is it possible for traffic lights to work underwater? Even for a short period of time. I understand that any electronics inside would short-circuit pretty quick. But could it be protected by the ac...
Cobaltduckworlda has had somewhat of a similar biological past as earth, but not exactly. As examples, sentience has happened multiple times, and not just in primate-like species. Beasts that did...
Set in the year 2216 C.E. Imagine a spacecraft with a crew of twenty is leaving for Enceladus, moon of Saturn which is estimated 1.272 billions km away in a matter of months using the next generat...
Self-explanatory. I have a planet-eating entity moving slowly across the solar system towards Earth and I wanna know how long it would take for us to notice its presence once it starts consuming Pl...
I have a habitable Earth-like moon that orbits a gas giant. This moon is inhabited by a pre-medieval civilisation that has spread out across just one continent. The inhabitants of this civilisati...
So let's say you have a Dyson sphere that is 5 kilometers thick . Now, it isn't solid. It's meant to be inhabited. There's the inner shell which is completely covered with solar panels and any oth...
Some details about the planet and its moon plus the host star. Star: 0.85 Sol, 0.54% of the Sun's luminosity Planet: 0.04926 (M⊕) 4836 km, 0.34 G, Orbits the host star at 0.901 AU. The atmosph...
It's 100 years in the future, and we've decided to end all war and crime. How do we plan to accomplish this? Through rigorous study of personality theory and human interaction, we've identified 5...
Here I will talk about the digestive system of my Kepler Bb humanoids. Mouth The teeth are much stronger than bone(Strong enough that they can eat bones no problem). Other than that and all time ...
I'm wondering what natural phenomenon would allow a planet to have a part of its surface always under daylight, a part of its surface never seeing said light, and a third part where day and night c...
Assuming the wars of the far, far future aren't either fought exclusively by unmanned spacecraft/robots/drones or in ways so incomprehensible to us that comparisons are meaningless, the only foolpr...
I have already taken into concern renewable sources and several other factors. Ventilation Oxygen easily gets into this underground system via diffusion and likewise CO2 easily goes out. Plants a...
We already know how to produce pork with skin that bright during the night. The most advanced project Enviropig attempted to enhance phosphorus absorption. The aim would be to make the skin produc...
Consider the following: We have a city, designed to be a retreat. Everything consumed and needed by the population is created via a machine in the middle of this stronghold. This machine is able ...
I'm building a post-apocalyptic setting where the cataclysmic event is a volcanic eruption from Yellowstone that releases a blanket of ash that reaches from California to just before the Midwest. E...
I have just found out that the Milankovitch Cycle, a machination responsible for the creation of the Pleistocene ice ages, has its part played partly by orbit from the entire solar system. As a re...
A Weyland-Yutani like conglomerate wants to colonize exoplanet in the habitable zone of the orange dwarf 0.75 M of the Sun. The planet has 2 X Earth diameter 3g surface gravity atmosphere 92% ...
Based off this question, since it also involves brain uploading. My Magnificent Bastard villain is a cognitive neuroscientist with his own lab who has interest in knowing how brains would work in ...
Age varies vastly even in just the vertebrate world, from the 2 years a rabbit has to the over 170 year old Seychelles giant tortoise, who is still going. Obviously, Lifespan will determine populat...
For story reasons I'd like to have a mine which exploited part was turned in to a nuclear shelter, for the city built above. Later, the nuclear shelter was utilized effectively as an district of ci...
I recently decided to revisit an older scenario I came up with, Ant-hill world, but I have been hitting roadblocks, both old and new. One of the bigger roadblocks is the evolution of such an odd mu...
In theory I believe that if you moved far enough above the surface of the pole you should be able to reach an area where you have constant sunlight, even in the middle of winter. My question is - ...
My story has brain uploading, but in practice it serves a purpose more like reincarnation, recreating the original recorded state of the scanned brain in a pre-prepared clone of the deceased. I nee...
Yesterday I was reading through this question and it got me thinking: would it be possible on a ship or building mounted railgun to convert the energy from the recoil of the shot in order to partia...
I am making design of a fictional doomsday weapon which is like a miniature version of Death star's beam. I.e it can rip apart chunks of planet and impart significant change in its mass. However ...
I want to build a big structure that will be visible from space. A object would need to be very large, maybe kilometers across, to be visible from, let's say, the ISS (which orbits at an average he...
I've been looking into anti-matter and a relatively realistic way to contain it through gravity in my story. I'm probably incorrect in the theoretical physics of the idea but, I'm imagining that th...
I was wondering if three planets can rotate around each other so that: Two of the planets are smaller and rotate around each other Both of the smaller planets rotate around another, bigger plan...
Could a planet have an orbit in the shape of a figure 8 around twin (possibly binary) stars? Mostly curious about the physical possibility of such an orbital arrangement; is it stable over a long ...
Which direction is the best way to go if you were to have to leave Sol and travel 500 ly away to find habitable planets to set up long term colonies? Core-ward? Rim-ward? Towards the core through ...
This question is basically related to my former question: What would change if our Earth lacked mountains? (Geology) So in my world people have stopped at a level of wisdom that might be similar t...
I am currently at the end of my wits. No matter what change I do to the North American geography, northeastern Nebraska (42.4649° North, 96.4131° West), is still in the danger zone called Tornad...
After a nuclear apocalypse, will the earth have enough time left to go back to its pre-human state? If it did, and a new civilization appeared, would it be impossible for them to know that the ini...
On the planet of the Aves, birds have evolved to dominate the Earth instead of mammals. Of the thousands of species in this world, both on the ground and in the water, the only one to develop sapie...
I'm piecing together a short graphic story about the last few thousand "people" on a small rocky planet that has partially survived the destruction of it's solar system. I wanted to explore the sci...
On my fictitious planet, a 1/2 pound mammal had a brain to body mass ratio similar to that of a human , could they have human - level intelligence, or would the brain be too small the develop that ...
What many people mayn't know is that there actually three basic types of algae: Green algae, the origin of the kingdom Plantae Brown algae, found primarily in kelp forests And red algae F...
On the planet of the Aves, birds have evolved to dominate the Earth instead of mammals. Of the thousands of species in this world, both on the ground and in the water, the only one to develop sapie...
In a lot of science-fiction stories, there are people who hibernate of sorts in cryosleep. Basically something like the person's body is stored in a container which is then chilled at really really...
I wonder if there is a stable star-moon-planet system where a specific area of the planet would be permanently covered by shadow. I'm not looking for a common tidally locked planet with a roughly 5...
The scenario is that an asteroid has been found and converted into a travelling interstellar space colony. Using some undefined future sci-fi tech, the occupants of the colony have increased gravit...
