General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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This is a followup to my previous question concerning the potential orbits. I've decided on a barycenter with each body in its own orbit--the primary planet having the center orbit, the first moon ...
What sort of time/date system would suit a Dyson Ring, also known as a Ring-World, an artificial habitat megastructure shaped like a circular band, located in the habitable zone encircling a star, ...
So I'm trying to make an orbital city, kind of like the ISS, but on a much bigger scale. And against all logic and reason, I want there to be balconies. Like, where someone can just step outside, w...
Many sci-fi questions here are derailed by complaints that the proposed version of FTL breaks causality. However, relativity-safe FTL concepts do exist. What range of conditions allow FTL (movement...
In the vision of its creators, the Dr. Watson AI would gather multiple live feeds from its insurance buyers, overcoming privacy concerns through friendly advice (I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't ...
So here's the rough idea. I'm trying to figure out what kind of life could exist that spends basically its entire life in the air, for an alien world I'm working on. No sentient life, just wilderne...
I know, it sounds like a geek swearing at Windows 8 on his work-owned computer. But actually I was just reading Peter Clines (Fold and then had to order 14 for instant delivery), and when I got to...
In previous questions on this topic, I've devised a genetically-diverse creature that uses a cold fusion internal engine to provide tremendous amounts of short-term (sprint) energy. However, there...
You are an intelligent species whose sun is very near expiring. When your sun expires your world will be engulfed by it. You are evacuating your planet as fast as possible but you don't yet have en...
Bangladesh, like a lot of other third world countries require an awful lot of work to become, 'first-world' ready, thoughts we take for granted are condemned in such societies, but if they were to ...
There is a system of one star and something like an asteroid belt around it. But the distance between asteroids is much less than usual, with some perhaps within nine kilometers of each other, and...
Is the following scenario reasonable? Enormous metal whales, which fly through space eating planets and nebulae by: Churning with blender (like mastication), then Melting them down in a furnace ...
Scenario run-down. Several billion years from now, Sol has finally exhausted its hydrogen supplies and has entered the red giant phase. It has already been increasing in lumosity for some time and ...
I am creating a Pangaea type continent for a D&D series with some friends and I was wondering (since this continent will last us years) if we should add every biome to it. IE: equatorial dry/we...
The year is 2020, and an organization known as Helios successfully settles a colony of 200 people on the moon. The colony is self sustaining and is mainly a research center, with most of its resid...
In my story, humanity has wiped itself off earth (salted nukes, to be precise) and survives as a large remnant civilization in the asteroid belt, with small bases on the moon and possible mars. A...
Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees? In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitiv...
This is for a science fiction story I'm writing. Are there ways to transport information like a book, or a computer program, within the human body (not in the brain)? Say, by storing the informatio...
Gravity in our universe is an attractive force between bodies with mass [citation needed]. This allows matter to coalesce and form all the large scale structures we observe - planets, stars, galaxi...
So, I have a character who has an interesting quirk: they cannot wear flat shoes or boots (i.e. where the heel is at the same level as the ball of the foot or approximately so, within 1.27cm or so)...
Ignoring how this sort of atmosphere would come about, what are some things that happen regularly on Earth that would be altered by this sort of atmosphere? Example: Would firearms still ignite nor...
You have a planet about the size of Earth. It needs to be continually dark, with just the slightest bit of light. Or no light at all. It makes little difference to the aliens that live there. But, ...
I am seeking to temporarily trap my protagonists on a wasteland. The kind I wanted to create was an icy planet that doesn't experience day or night, just a constant state of moonlight. I suppose th...
I was thinking, and I came up with an alien race, which enthralled me. I was just wondering if these creatures would plausibly evolve this way. (Info dump time These aliens are humanoid. While t...
Is there any way to make a planet with a corkscrew orbit (like this) that could host a sci-fi civilisation? It'd be amazing if there was a way to make life arise naturally, but colonize-able works...
A boundless AI brain could survive on any planet that has some basic metals and power sources, because it could invent new types of transistors from any kinds of chemicals to increase it's knowledg...
I have a large rotating (think wagonwheel) portion of a space-craft that, at the hub, connects to a non-rotating scientific research station. Imagine a football (soccer) field sized research and l...
Suppose that in our Solar System in the future will be two stealth ships (small cross section/low temperature signature/radar absorbent material). Still visible for human eye and detectable when mo...
I'm not sure if this question belongs here or over on Physics Stack Exchange. The Earth and Moon are unique in the Solar System in that the Moon is a significant size compared to the Earth, at 1/4...
(I have tried to fix this question as best as possible with the help provided from the staff of the site.) I have started to develop my own crustacean species that resembles ants slightly. I would...
Does the position of the sun in a hollow earth scenario affect the way light scattering would "color" the sky? My understanding is the reddish-orange color during sunrise/sunset is caused by the ...
I was thinking of a hypothetical universe in which electromagnetic waves decrease in intensity with the distance instead of the square of the distance. What kinds of effects would that have on that...
Scenario This is set in the future; humans already achieved Type II civilization status. Humans conquered the entire Solar System and managed to colonize Jupiter and all its moons. The next big ch...
Guilty pleasure: I just returned from one tinfoil-hat type of internet pages which suggests that we are being visited by Aliens who live on Venus. The fact, that we have only pictures from the grou...
In Artifexians newest video he discusses how you can have a habitable near earth world that still has rings. Fast forwarding to the end of the video, he points out that due to their pull on any lea...
Let say a asteroid hit earth and you survived in a bomb shelter. How long would you have to stay in that bomb shelter before it was safe to leave it? How would earth look when you got out from the ...
I'm building an RPG world and the ice caps are rather large. How big of an effect would it have on the climate and seasons of said world? Would it be slightly colder or would it be similar to an ...
To avoid being too broad, I'd like to use the portals for purely altruistic purposes (health, environment, safety), and not for scientific or military acheivement (e.g. - not an instant space eleva...
Humans make mistakes, computers don't. So I asked myself: Why do humans make mistakes? it we follow instructions one per one like a single threaded computer, why do we still making mistakes? So my ...
A few definitions: permanent - not permanent on the scale of the Earth's lifetime, but good enough to last a couple hundred years - seeming permanent to those who were born there at least. size o...
Okay, so I'm a fiction writer and I love neo-futuristic tech, but when I write I like to be as realistic as possible. One such technology, which I'm thinking of using in a fictional series, is the ...
Say an early human civilization is arising on an earth-like planet (Earth, in fact) with one notable difference to the sky: a small ring of debris orbiting the planet. Assume the ring is clearly vi...
For my current purposes, assume we have two planets identical to earth. So, could two of these planets form a stable binary system, and still be close enough to see the green foliage on the surface...
So, after multiple users informed me that my previous question was a little to broad, I decided to narrow my focus a little bit. Using only hard science, could there be a planet composed, with the...
Under currently known science, is it possible to make a robot of which every part was either made of a clear, non-reflective material (such as bulletproof glass, or plastic), or too small or thin t...
How much blood does a vampire need? Could a humanesque creature derive all its nutrients from drinking blood? Both these questions have some good answers and my question is based off them both......
Other blood colors The link about talks about other color's of blood that could be if made with either different metals or different oxygen carrier's. What I want to know is if you mixed iron bloo...
So the idea is that the world has been destroyed, and an emergency plan to put the rest of humanity on floating cities/islands has been put in place. These islands subsist off of some sort of gener...
The human race has colonized the solar system with permanent settlements on all of the inner planets and outposts beyond. Vast space stations pepper the voids between orbits and massive mining/ref...
Could space travelers save space inside their craft by trailing freeze-dried meat on a rope (space tether) behind their space pod? Presumably nothing would be able to get it out there, and it woul...
