General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
in the recent Star Wars: The Old Republic expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire, the planet of Zakuul, seat of the Eternal Empire, has a number of buildings that are so big that they're clearly vi...
In this alternate scenario, there is a clear ecological distinction between broad-leaved deciduous trees and coniferous trees based solely on altitude. The broad-leaves and other angiosperms are t...
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, if you travel faster than light, time would slow down so I could go into the future. But how do I come back from the future? Is there any science provi...
The geographical features that make New York stand out from any other of the United States--Long Island, the huge boulders scattered in the city and the Hudson River, deep enough for barges to pass...
I am often fascinated by one of Earth's most magnificent beings, the mantis shrimp (also known as 1-2-3-death). These beautiful animals have sixteen kinds of colour receptive cones - compare to our...
Assuming we had a gas giant instead of Mars in our planetary system. Everything else stays the same. Which long-term and short-term consequences for life on Earth would I have to take into account?
Basically I want to create a world in which some of the humans have developed a higher body temperature in order to survive cold, harsh climates, such as the poles or even tall mountains. The reaso...
Suppose humanity found a rocky planet outside the solar system. It is in the habitable zone of its star, has breathable air, clean water etc. A true paradise. Only problem is, its surface gravity ...
Another question made me remember this. Consider a sizable base (building, station) in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. It should hold a staff of a couple hundred, with supplies and scientifi...
I've devised a world where artificial intelligence (AI) have taken over as middle-class (America), leading to the further division of human classes: a superior upper-class and a now much lower-clas...
Orbital construction facilities have a great many advantages over ground based ones: You can use materials from space without having to drag them up the gravity well, you can make vessels that don'...
What modifications would be needed for a mammal, bird or reptile to work with electricity? For work I mean mostly think and move, for example it would need to eat in order to repair it's body, gro...
Some months ago I made this thing, it doesn't have a name.So let's just call it Jonathan like my brother. Basically a lizard in erect posture with the head of a mammal, two ''tentacle'' antennas i...
Take, if you will, a sci-fi setting in which power is cheap and handheld energy weapons (blasters, lasers, plasma rifles, that sorta thing) are common. In this setting is an isolated community bas...
I'm retouching the idea discussed in detail here Evolution of species with seperate sapient and non-sapient forms?. I like the discussion had there, but want to focus in on one specific question, ...
I have seen some questions asking whether some atmospheric compositions are survivable for humans. Most of them focus on long term survival, as in people being able to breathe indefinitely without ...
I was told to ask more impractical and unrealistic questions in the world building SE community, so here's my question. Say we have a hypothetical solar system that we want to destroy by separatin...
I'm currently working on an idea for a ring world. Thus far I've worked out the following things: Radius of 1 AU Width of half the circumference of Earth 2000km high walls across the rims to keep...
I have a binary system in which my world orbits one of the stars, not the pair, in the habitable zone. The stars are relatively close together (because I want the secondary one to shed significant...
Like this question I'm wondering about design considerations for an intelligent aquatic species that wants to travel into space. Would they have to try and create special body suits to keep moistur...
Let's assume this planet has had a normal lifecycle up to this point, becoming an Earth-like world with around the same climates, size, landmass, day/night cycle, and has a single moon of similar s...
If humanity decided right now that they wanted to become a space empire and colonize the entire solar system would they be able to do it? One of the biggest problems with theoretically colonizing M...
Within software environments there is a variety of malware such as viruses, trojans, bots and so forth. This malware is created by human programmers to accomplish specific purposes (e.g. steal pers...
Consider an Earth like planet is orbiting around a Sun like star, it is almost identical to our Solar system, except the orbital inclination of the planet is 90 degree to the equator of the star (n...
If we assume their homeworld is similar to Titan, but instead orbiting a Neptune sized gas giant and a bit bigger and receiving the same amount of Solar energy as Titan, The star is a main sequence...
In an old story of mine, there happened to be a species of humanoid who could produce a variety of mutants and hybrids from stolen and harvested DNA, sperm, and biological tissues. They would produ...
So I've got a bunch of freeze-dried colonists traveling in torpor to a solar system 55 light years away at 92% c. From an outsider's perspective it takes them sixty years to get there, but how long...
The Hollow Earth theory is/was a pseudoscientific idea that our world is actually on the inside of a large sphere. The "sky" points inward towards the center, where the "Sun" (a light source) is, w...
For my story I am working on, a peaceful alien race that is studying Earth wants to terraform the Moon by building a giant sealed dome over its entire surface, then they will create forests, desert...
I know the idea seems a bit far fetched but it's something I believe is common is science fiction and fantasy stories. I remember the talking trees of Zelda: Ocarina of time and of course, Tolkien'...
The concept of "age" on Earth is based on the number of revolutions the planet has completed since one's birth. In a setting where interstellar colonies exists, of even in a setting where multiple ...
The obvious hitch with a superdense atmosphere is that, even without being super deep as well, it absorbs light. Just as the bottom of the ocean is dark even just miles deep, an atmosphere as dense...
It is well known that in respiration, we produce carbon dioxide, while plants, via photosynthesis, absorb CO2. My question is, if 50% of all people die today, will the total amount of CO2 decrease ...
I'm making a species which has a gas-based circulatory system. How would one go about designing such a system, in which liquid blood is replaced by some kind of gas? What kind of blood vessels wou...
My idea is to have a place that is "inescapable" by any conventional propulsion system, except it has Earth-like conditions: a breathable atmosphere, 1.0g gravity, etc. What would have to be the c...
Let's say that in my fictitious, scientifically advanced world, humans create some "miniature" (and I say miniature because I'm not sure what prefix use: Nano? Micro? Or even smaller?) machines to ...
Would it be possible for a terrestrial planet say atleast >0.3 Earth masses orbiting in the L3/L4/L5 and L1/L2 Lagrangian points of a Jupiter sized planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like sta...
Thinking of terraforming a localized region, how (if possible) can we create an artificial high pressure zone, whether practical or not, Initially I thought, perhaps we can arrange heatsinks to i...
Set in near future probably in the mid of 22nd century AD, most of our labours are being overtaken by robots and especially in those sectors which requires zero room for error such as surgical oper...
Note: This question assumes an earth-like biology. Could a microbe (probably virus) be created that transformed humans into plants? What I mean by this is that the microbe would take human cells, ...
I'm trying to work out some really basic biochemical details for cold-world aliens whose bodily fluids are based on liquid methane rather than water. I figure they have to be hydrogen breathers, be...
In Pokemon, each individual Pokemon "evolves" into a new stage of its evolution. A lot people claim that this can be explained using mere metamorphosis, but there are no mammals that go through suc...
You are a planetary engineer from a lonely species fairly high on the Kardashev scale. Although your species has wandered throughout the galaxy seeking out new life and civilizations for thousands...
Would it be possible for a moon that receives a lot of tidal heating from its gas giant parent planet like Io to develop intelligent life? Assuming moon is big enough to support an atmosphere and i...
Let's say that planet X with a gravity similar to Earth increases its gravity by a certain amount. The increase is great enough to make living conditions difficult or impossible: for instance, the ...
In the case of a world-wide plague epidemic that'll trigger the near extinction of humanity, is it possible that a virus/disease has inconsistent symptoms so that people aren't aware that it's real...
What if our planet was always lit so that there would be no nighttime? Assume that the scenario is like this, where A is the planet and B and ABb are the stars. And they are all aligned so that it ...
In my fantasy setting, dreams are located in what could be called a parallel dimension - commonly known as "The Void". Some people are able to develop powers related to the Void through long traini...
First the situation, then the question. Here's the situation: An Earth-like planet had a civilization similar to ours, but when it emitted its first radio signals, a nearby alien observation post ...
Let's say an alien species discovered Earth and wants to land here and establish contact, however their homeworld's gravity is only 46 percent of Earth's, Would it be possible for them to be able t...
