General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Setting: Earth-sized planet, its inhabitants are human settlers and live in towns protected by custom-sized atmospheres. The rest of the planet is barren and always was. The population uses the e...
For the sake of simplicity, my species is similar to humans but far more advanced. We will also assume that they live in a solar system similar to ours, and that they are advanced enough that they ...
The Collared Peccary is not the name of the greatest man stripper under the sun, but is a species of mammal in the family Tayassuidae found in North, Central, and South America. They are commonly r...
So, I've made... a lot of subterranean worlds. It's a favorite of mine. And, every single time, the major form of vegetation and light was blue, glowing mushrooms, and glowing crystals. While I thi...
Is it possible for a planet and moon to generate electricity in some way? Could a combination of magnetic fields and iron content in the crust or core produce electromagnetic induction due to the r...
I have a more or less primitive (They can not talk to other races nor was any encoding or morsing or smoke signals invented) alien race the MLPARs (10000 individuals), which was parted in half and ...
My story is post-apocalyptic - takes place when they have put society back together again but in a new way. I'm flexible on when this takes place - could be 5 years later or 100 years later. For b...
Does the explanation of this matter sound plausible? A type of exotic matter that allows for generating virtual particles with an energy of 432,541 Mj = 1 uL. The matter is not being converted to ...
In the universe that I am developing the following has occurred... A new type of "liquid energy" has been found/created: 432,540,909,020.0724 Mj in 1 Liter Edit: Description of what the fuel is in...
In a sci-fi setting I'm working on, the power dynamics between two civilizations are maintained by one civilization ("captives") being completely dependent on the other civilization ("captors") for...
(First time posting on worldbuilding, be gentle!) For reasons currently unimportant, Earth has been encased in a solid shell which is for all intents and purposes completely invulnerable. The shel...
For context I'm building a post apocalypse world that was in modern age before but storms and tsunamis wiped almost all civilizations off the planet. The question is how huge should civilization ...
Okay so in my world, I have two pre-industrial societies that live thousands of miles apart from each other on their ringworld. One lives in a desert climate similar to India or the Middle East whi...
I'm imagining a town in a river valley. The river runs straight through the town and is diverted or spread out into canals that form a grid in the central, low-lying part of the town. Technology is...
In the 1989 Batman movie[1], the Joker uses a gas that makes the muscles on your face contract into a "smile" to kill people. My question is simple; is there currently, or is there a way to ...
Imagine you're on vacation in Greece. It's a nice sunny day, so you decide to go for a swim. The bottom of the sea is full of some greenish-brown ugly seaweed, every stone is covered by some fuzz a...
Imagine you are an evil humanoid alien that wants to destroy Earth (or something awfully similar) for whatever reason. However as an alien, you do not possess any physical weapons. No laser guns. N...
So Murlocs. I'm referencing Murlocs from World of Warcraft since I never actually found any other novels or games that have them. Described as a bipedal, amphibious, intelligent, aggressive[Still ...
I'm looking for the perfect kind of apocalypse that not only can kill great parts of the people on Earth leaving the survivors spread in little primitive groups across the world ,but can also avoi...
Given the chance to bring back from the jurassic any plant, which one would be the most adapted to survive and spread in our actual environment?
What would be the impact on modern civilisation be if a benevolent inventor gave the world the ability to travel around the solar system quickly and cheaply. If over the next five years this tech...
Imagine the following situation: There is a global catastrophe that will destroy the earth and there is a habitable planet in reach for spaceships. But it is technically possible to bring only 50,0...
Image a world that superficially appears to have Earth-like gravity. However, the moment you do not in any way touch the ground or something else that is touching the ground, there is no gravity fo...
As the title says, what if a neutron star stops spinning what will happen to the materials that the neutron star is made of? Will they still be super dense? Are they brittle? If they are, how st...
It's the near future, and Bob goes for a spacewalk outside the International Space Station or Space Shuttle or some similar type of realistic space craft. Suddenly, and unfortunately, Bob goes spac...
In my fictional world there are small organisms the size of a dog or smaller,some have the shape of mini-volcanoes, while some are stuck between rocks, they don't move and live in both sea and land...
In a near future society, man will be mining asteroids far from Earth. One technology on board their ships is a hydrocarbon assembler. It takes in energy, water and carbonaceous asteroid matter a...
It's common knowledge that one of the things that makes stealth aircraft so stealthy is that the body is covered in a skin of special material that interferes with radar. Would it be theoretically...
Some people created synthetic bacterial life forms to use them as fuel producers back then; it's called synthia I believe... and I don't know how it ended up. So creating life is already possible...
You're the head engineer for an advanced civilization. Humanity has long since spanned the stars, as as vast as her civilization has become her need for power has increased exponentially. To feed t...
I was thinking of a sci-fi story where a large population of human beings (let's say anywhere between hundreds and millions) live on a planet with robot guardians. But after a certain amount of tim...
If a tribe of homo evolves into a wild animal that doesn't resemble at all a hominid, is there any chance for this animal to evolve back to the original humanoid shape through atavism/other means? ...
Since we're dealing with cat-folk already with the question about the Khajiit, I figured we'd toss a different evolutionary lineage for furry humanoids around, that of the hyena. Ever since the ea...
Here's the scenario: animals on a world with an atmosphere with a significant amount of a certain gas is able to store "air" into a transparent growth (like a crest) and, with an electrical chord i...
Superconductors will be a revolutionary enabling technology for many aspects of space construction. One such use is a magnetic field to protect a craft from solar activity, in the same manner that...
Inspired by this answer, If that Lunar-plant is used as a weapon (pointed toward specific cities/forest/seas/lakes), how much damage it could really do? Is that able to burn cities, or anything? I...
I am a clockmaker: I work with time and can control it on a small scale. One of my powers allow me to return some minutes back in time after having experienced my death, but I remember everything ...
My understanding of the hypothesis is somewhat hazy, so I probably have gotten something wrong. But as I understand it, the total energy density of the universe is either very small or exactly zer...
So a rainforest creates a positive feedback loop"”vegetation creates evapotranspiration which encourages rainfall, which in turns encourages more vegetation. If you wanted to badly enough, could y...
Short question, what events would induce the evolution from hands of 4 fingers and 1 thumb into hands of 2 fingers and 1 thumb like the hands of Yoda in Start wars?Would be 2 thumbs and 1 finger be...
Inspired by Mapping the far side of the galaxy, I wondered how it would be possible to create a real-time map of the entire universe. As that question dealt with the issue of a one-time travel to ...
Why would an non-Eusocial animal have a caste of sterile individuals? Formicidae and Apoidea have sterile workers,but those outnumber the fertile drones and princesses or queens. In another anima...
Having recently learned about the Interplanetary Internet in development by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312, I began to wonder about the actual r...
Inspired by Can we use science to explain a creature that feeds on emotion? I was wondering if we can somehow use science to explain how a creature that devours dreams and nightmares might have c...
I'm looking for some data to create my own sci-fi setting, but I want to base it on real world as much as possible. Also, I don't want to come up with any arbitrary year like 3290 with no backgroun...
We all know (or know how to find) the "rocket equation" that drives the design of a conventional rocket, and we've gone over such things as "specific impulse" and the difference between fuel and re...
If your blood pressure ever falls below the ambient atmospheric pressure would it be possible for you to bleed. Because if blood pressure was less than that of atmosphere air would move in if you g...
So, I just had an idea inspired by This question here while simultaneously listening to a video about language... Could we make a sort of International Phonetic Alphabet for Emotions and States of...
Using pre-industrial era technology how does an intelligent creature create the perfect illusion that reproduces vision,sound and touch sensations and make them seem perfectly ''real'' from the vie...
Humans got a one time ticket to the other side of the galaxy, traveling $2r$ in just a few days (where $r$ is the distance from earth to the super massive black hole: 28,000 lightyears) The stars ...
