General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Say, if I detonate a ridiculously large nuke on this side of the Earth, is it possible that the shock wave travels through the center of the Earth and create an earthquake on the other side? If yes...
In one of the Worlds I am building, there are zombies. Sadly the zombie genre is dead(sorry), this is mainly due to the overwhelming domination in the genre and lack of new creative zombie types (w...
Is it possible that a monkey-like creature, in the mountains, could evolve to have no legs and a really strong set of fore-arms? I was thinking that this might be possible because of the climbing s...
In the last mission, my mosquito drone needed to deliver a payload of deadly substance, but most of the items either had an antidote if discovered in time or could conceivably be traced back to a b...
A moon is, fundamentally, a rock that's caught in the gravitational field of a bigger rock (a planet) and drawn into an orbit. Some of Saturn's moons, for example, are speculated to be debris from...
Not too far off in the future, maybe 20-50 years from now, an anomaly is detected a little ways outside our solar system and it's like nothing we've ever seen before. Researchers begin studying it ...
According to this Reddit conversation, the detritus around a planet tends to form into a single plane located around the equator given enough time. How long does this process take? Suppose a planet...
Imagine the human body has access to infinite energy through some magic. How could that be useful in any capacity to "boost" the immune system? By boost I mean more resistance to disease, and ideal...
This is based on the notion of adaptive radiation, a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environm...
What is the minimum size of a planet that could harbor human life? You get to decide what the atmosphere is, but I'm reasonably sure that O2, CO2, and H2O are necessary components of the atmosphere...
I'm trying to come up with a scenario involving a mining base built on a planet that may only be approached from the shadowed side; the star (or other body) allows only that narrow lane of approach...
Caveat: No cold fusion! Questions Q1: Where can my dragon source for nuclear energy on Earth set in medieval age and how does it convert this energy for fight or flight? Difficulty:âš Q2: How ...
This was inspired by the question How would tattoos fare on reptilian scales Let's assume for this question that humans never lost their hairy, hairy bodies and are covered in fur. How would tattoo...
Would it be practical to use a "squirrel suit" and sacs of buoyant gas for deceleration from a free fall as opposed to a parachute? Furthermore, once the sacs have been inflated, could the person i...
The habitat of the creature in question is most commonly atop mountains (or in moist areas). Such an idea would mean that the creature wouldn't need a heart or stomach to break down things into blo...
The world is divided in several factions. Among them : Insects and Humans. When I say Insects, I don't mean insects : insects are the little creatures with six legs while Insects regroup all soci...
Because elements are classified by the number of protons they have, could there potentially be planets or environments that are so dense that they are made up of elements potentially greater than U...
Is it possible for nuclear waste to somehow naturally cause a nuclear explosion? (with no human input, other than dumping the nuclear waste) The yield of the explosion would preferably be enough t...
*By life, I mean something more complex than microorganisms. Something closer to what we have on Earth. similar to this question: Is it possible for complex life to evolve on planets without oxyg...
A volcanic island can obviously come into existence quite easily and swiftly by natural causes, as evidenced for instance by the appearance of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland. However, people have...
Consider a very conveniently placed asteroid in orbit around the earth, and we hang the space elevator off of that. It doesn't have to be at the geostationary altitude but it would probably help if...
Consider an advanced species unlocks all of the curiosities of science in our universe. They spend millions of years learning every fact, every mechanism of physics, and develop a perfect "Theory o...
I am trying to build a world which has a bit larger gravity force than earth, 1.25g. And I was wondering which impact could this have on its geology and life evolution. I think that with a higher ...
So I am trying to make a sci fi story and I wanted directed energy weapons for starships besides lasers and plasma. I heard that a neutron particle beam weapon could be visible, but could any one c...
My story (same world as here) take place in a future Earth between 3 and 5 million years in the future. What kind of artifacts, if any, would civilizations from this era find from the now extinct h...
Some days ago I had a discussion with a friend about possible alien life forms. He was stating that there anywhere could be lifeforms that do interplanetary or even interstellar travel by jumping ...
This is a question I've been thinking about for a while now. Dragons are, by all observances related to the reptile family, (or maybe lizards) either way these are cold blooded animals. Common ...
There have been questions about sizing giant animals, giant humanoids, giant flying creatures (also discussed particularly for dragons and giant floating mammals), and giant spiders, one type of i...
In my world (set in the near future - no magical tech), every child after reaching the age of 1, is sent to study for 15 years in a centralised location shared by the entire world. With some playin...
Mercury temperatures varies from −173 °C to 427 °C , though temperatures in the poles are always below −93 °C. To have a reference, the lowest recorded temperature in the Antarctica was -93°C ....
Everybody, even those who are complete beginners in the field of Astronomy, know Io, the cryovolcanic moon of Jupiter that looks like a burned pizza with skin cancer. Volcanoes constantly spit out ...
Many myths have creatures like sirens who can use their voices to lure men to their deaths. But is there any way a creature could exist in the real world that had that power? I don't just mean foo...
My space colonies are mainly located onto large, partialy terraformed moons in our solar system. They still travel using rockets but due to their vessels' large size they need very powerful propuls...
Thousands of years ago, human domesticated wolfs and from this domestication came dogs, one of the most varied species on earth. This occurred through simple genetic manipulation and forced evoluti...
I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the assum...
A few days ago, I was roaming around Wikipedia and came across something, this comet came extremely close to Mars for astronomical standards recently. I'm also working on a science fiction univer...
For as long as recorded history, the Earth has had two moons - religions were based around the interactions of these two bodies in the heavens, they were worshipped, feared and romanticised. Then ...
Cities usually emerge at places where transportation is easy (on a plain, near a sea or a river, etc.) so that people can come and go (facilitating trade) and water and food can be brought to the c...
Suppose we had reached the moon and found it to be habitable. It was big enough to support an atmosphere, albeit a thinner one than the Earth has, and at some point in the past few hundred million ...
If the moon started to move closer to the earth, for e.g. one meter per year, I suppose that it would be accelerating towards the earth and then, eventually, will crash to it. I suppose that if it...
Imagine the population of our planet is given free (almost) and unlimited energy. What kind of technologies would go mainstream which are not feasible today due to prohibitively high energy requir...
Do we have the technology to go to the Moon now, and stay this time? I'm not talking about the political will or economic rationale for doing so, I just want to know if there are any unsolved (and...
I drew a little map of a continent, but there is one area that I'm not sure about; the climate. As for the location of this map, remove North America and replace it with this map. The northernmost ...
Making things bigger or smaller is common in speculative fiction (giant ants, tiny people, planets bigger than stars, and stars smaller than light bulbs.) What general principles should be kept in...
A Russian billionaire wants to send postage stamp-sized probes off to Alpha Centauri using meter-square light sails. Regardless of the practicality of such an attempt, is there a lot to be gained ...
Assume there is a point in time when every planet in our Solar System consists of colonies. Each colony is inhabited with civilians that primarily serve the purpose of its colony. Some colonies m...
What would, roughly, a scientific research station look like on a gas giant? Use Saturn as a baseline. The station would float because of a "balloon" carrying nothing. Vacuum is the lifting "gas", ...
It's the year 2100, oil reserves are mostly used up. In this hard times Evil Corp has invented time travel and it send back engineers and material to drill for oil in the Creaceous. The question:...
I have a city on a 3km-high mountain-top with a population of perhaps 50,000 humans, at a technological level of late renaissance or early steam. Below the city is a coniferous forest with wildlife...
Suppose a planetary system works in such a way that there is a rotating planet in the direct centre of a binary star (the star system's centre of gravity, also known as barycenter), such that the t...
