General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Our hero is a normal teenaged boy, living in north central California. Somehow he gains the ability to manipulate heat. My original plan for his origin was a "freak snowboarding accident involving ...
If half the earth was made antimatter and contacted the other half all at once, would the resulting energy be enough to "destroy" the observable universe? I did some math based on the mass of the ...
In my alternate history (1800s), I have troop hiking through tropical sub-Saharan Africa. For plot reasons, I have man-killing mosquitos, but I also have a plant that exudes CO2 and other attracta...
I am working on a novel of a fantasy world on another planet. I am not too concerned with scientific accuracy, as again, it's fantasy, but I am not interested in supernatural things for my world. T...
After writing this question about the ecology of a terraformed planet, I realized that I hadn't quite tied up all the loose ends of the terraforming process itself. I intended for a group of aliens...
In the Carl Sagan novel Contact and the 1997 film of the book, aliens from Vega have picked up TV pictures of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, which is depicted as the first TV signal powerful eno...
I would argue that ants are one of the most dangerous, effective and successful creatures on earth. But as we know they are not the dominant form of life. They also vary through-out their many spec...
Building from this and this, given an aquatic civilization somehow manages to forge tools and build computers, could it build space-faring devices? Also another development that would come earlier...
Suppose that there is a race of intelligent being (actually not as intelligent as human but it isn't important) with great bat-like wings that let them fly. They are a bit smaller than the average...
I just wanted to know something relatively simple. What evolutionary factors could lead to an alien prey species to develop human like intelligence, and by prey species I mean a species like bunnies.
All work and all play makes Jack a distributed boy: Jack is at the hotel reception with his wife. Jack is also in the office, meeting with unspecified forces for inscrutable purposes. Jack is also ...
Assuming a lithotrophic slime mold were to be created, which metabolized iron, carbon dioxide and sulphur, and released, how much damage would it do? Let's say it was created to help manage landfi...
In this answer to another question, solar system-scale rail gun acceleration (and deceleration) was brought up as an alternative, and I found this intriguing. It's worth another question at least....
Humanity survives long enough to create a Dyson-Ring around old Sol using many of the planets and asteroids currently in the system. Then 'something happens' we die out, we discover a way to trave...
As usual, another interesting scientific question, taken from /r/worldbuilding. Would it mean any difference for a desert, where the amount of threatened objects is so low? Or would it form the ge...
I remember a cartoon about some spy guy. In that cartoon they did mass media by projecting from the surface of the earth to the moon in the night sky. Would that technique be possible? Could an e...
My question regards mirroring, specifically what you would expect from a universe that was mirrored from the perspective of our own, regarding its interactions with our own. The mirroring works exa...
Virtually all animals on earth ranging from insects through to swimmers, fliers, mammals and reptiles, have a symmetrical body plan. In other words legs and wings come in pairs, as do most sensory ...
Al's been working on his power armor, and has started thinking about combat drops. He'd considered parachutes to facilitate this, but then he thought of the Square-Cube Law and had a thought: are p...
I have this idea of homicidal alien beings that upon death (after their body ceases living and begins to decompose) release enough poisonous gas into earth's atmosphere to wipe out all life on the ...
Assuming a genetic engineer possessed sufficient knowledge and facilities, could they design a highly infectious Retro-Virus or Adenovirus, which would drastically increase the rate of random mutat...
I'm continuing questions rooted in the same idea: a manned mission to a planet around 61 Virginis. The first set of related questions was asked here. We're sending a crew of twelve. They'll be i...
I came up with an alien species that has the following reproductive life: They hatch out of eggs, tended by their mothers, and by the end of the first year (about two Earth years long) they are ...
I know water would be out of the question, but what about liquid nitrogen or liquid hydrogen, Would silicon work instead of carbon?
One day in the year 1980 humans receive a message from an alien race. It reads a little something like this: Hey guys, real sorry, but a weapon we launched in an excercise malfunctioned and is ...
There have been a few questions about an intelligent avian species lately and they have gotten me thinking. It seems to me that it would be hard for an avian species to evolve to be more intellige...
I am a survivor of the United Nations Space Corp's 2nd Exploration Fleet. On our travel to the distant Epsilon Canares system, our scouts encountered a strange lifeform. We call them 'shapeshifter...
Inside our eyes are two different kinds of receptors: The rod, in which the human eye has 120 million and work in low light The cone, in which the human eye has only 6 to 7 million of them, the r...
I've just read this article and watched the accompanying video. Heady stuff, for sure. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of a "solar gravitational lens telescope" somewhere out near the h...
This question is based off of an earlier question of mine that dealt with what would happen if humans and our Neanderthal cousins were dropped off on a world with large, technologically developed a...
Let's say a 1600s civilization is around, making lots of iron objects: guns, swords, farm implements, etc. One day those people vanish. What conditions would allow their iron implements to be usa...
In my world spaceships are guided by lighthouses floating in space instead of electronic navigational systems. A lighthouse in space has the shape of a huge sphere emitting intense red light. Like ...
For the sake of the question, assume conditions are Earth-like in all manners other than those which would be required to spur the development of such a plant. I want the plant to gestate in the di...
As I understand it, very small black holes have very small and close event horizons, and wouldn't necessarily pose a gravitational risk (I know they give off huge amounts of energy, but let's leave...
Kinda inspired by the non-disappearing ship question, but I actually asked this particular question on an unrelated forum a few years ago. Reposting it here (well, paraphrasing, really, since I don...
Suppose we have a group of organisms (I am not sure if its a society). These organisms are characterised by their ability to reproduce within themselves. That is, every member of this society can ...
Details: Would it be possible to have a mountain spring that only flows occasionally, perhaps only for a few days, following moderate rainfall? The spring water would feed into an otherwise stagn...
An idea for a story I'm working on involves a far away world that was once inhospitable. Scientists - likely alien ones - terraformed it so it could support life (coincidentally, Earth-like life). ...
The world is now a state where AI is sophisticated enough that it can read and meaningfully interpret draft bills/legislation. Human politicians are replaced with AIs in an attempt to combat corru...
As the title says... What would be the effect to earth or an oceanic planet if it lacks the presence of Radioactive Elements in its crust and mantle. Also can you explain what would happen if we d...
Watching E.T. I was wondering what evolutionary factors could cause a species to have the appearance of E.T., like the environment he would likely live in and the gravity of his homeworld.
I've been designing a world and wanted to base it on a rather interesting cosmology proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Philolaus. He was a very early opponent of geocentrism, believing that ...
This is inspired by a comment by JDÅ‚ugosz. Planets change their angular velocity when they orbit stars because they follow Keplerian orbits with (typically) non-zero eccentricity. The bottom line...
In a previous question, I asked about whether a market for uploaded minds could exist. The overwhelming consensus of the answers was that it would pose astonishing ethical challenges and be radical...
I know about humans, and how we have adapted to different eviornments with skin and hair color, but I want something a little bit different for my creatures. They are amphibious humanoids, and live...
Why would a creature that lives on the surface of a planet evolve limbs that can bend at many points (like a tentacle or elephant trunk) and still end in some sort of hand-like appendage?
In a world I'm designing, one of the eldest extant intelligent species is the Trolls. These are not D&D trolls, but something else. I have a number of basic characteristics for these beings, an...
We've all heard about a river of blood. But what would happen if we had an actual river of blood? Say a band of vampires creates a magical portal that draws blood from all the people in the area ...
George is supervillian, and he has a evil plan but he needs a distraction to pull it off. Earlier today he was reading supervillian weekly and he saw an article on faking the Apocalypse and he wan...
This is for a project where the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from early US atomic bomb tests is somehow much more magnified than the destructive blast- so much so that it destroys electrical devices...
