General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The human race is spread through the inner Solar System. Technological and scientific progression is thriving, but we still haven't developed FTL travel, research has its focus on developing a dev...
A genetic mutation is causing people to have a cerebrovascular accident as soon as they think or do something considered immoral by the society in which they live. For instance, in most countries...
The singularity has occurred and it wants an off-site backup. How deep should we all bury the lunar datacenter to be comfortably safe from radiation, cosmic rays, etc., while not causing cave-ins ...
The situation: A planet largely composed of water, with land masses being island chains scattered planet-wide. At all times there is precipitation of some sort, whether it be snow or rain based on...
In the real world — I am from Europe — I often hear and participate in discussions about how printing a paper 2 Euro note would have an impact on micro-economy, i.e. how it would make people less p...
I'm thinking of a planet incredibly similar to earth. It's located in a solar system where everything is 1000x bigger than ours. The sudden turn to this is that humans aren't scaled. The Earth ha...
For this question I'm assuming a utterly infeasible technological breakthrough suddenly makes wormholes technology possible. However there is a major catch, the 2D "windows" as they're called don't...
My continent features a large canyon, perhaps 100 miles long and mile across. It is deep enough that descending to the bottom is dangerous and impractical. It is located primarily in an arid scrubl...
I have a colony of humans living underground in man-made catacombs on another planet. They are, essentially, digging/blasting as they go; they did not create a complete underground city first and ...
Tech level is early Rome, China, Ethiopia, etc. ~ first century BC. Unlike history, there's peace and cooperation among all the benign monarchies of the whole Earth. But it's hard to get daily co...
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task. My ideal...
I have an idea about a person, who knows exact date and time of significant future events. But does not know what is going to happen. And the dates such person knows are significant for culture tha...
Deep underground, there's a huge limestone cavern, roughly 50m x 100m. It's 250m deep, and completely filled with still water. There is a very small inlet, but the system is now effectively closed,...
I read on the cooking.stackexchange site that all natural salt on Earth was created by seas and oceans, starting with primordial oceans four billion years ago. This got me thinking about my fiction...
Suppose that there are 2 interstellar empires at war with one another, both armed with FTL drives which cannot be used within a certain radius of huge gravity fields, stars, gas giants, etc. Anothe...
Aliens have come to Earth, and decided that the most intelligent life on the planet must live in the water, because it makes up most of the planet. They encounter dolphins and, upon learning to tra...
Could something like this be possible? All humans have been replaced with highly advanced androids, indiscernible from humans, which have been implanted with the memories of the humans they were ba...
The size of a planet affects its gravity, its climate, and its likelihood of developing life. Earth is large enough for an advanced civilization to develop. A smaller body such as Europa, while a...
Would a world be able to sustain a constant low pressure area such that there would be a constant wind from one side to the other? Imagine that on one side of the world is a desert with some rock...
It is 1970. Planet Earth is uninhabitable - the Cold War got very hot. The Earth's entire population is floating through space in giant transport ships. They've found another habitable(ish) world....
The Chirr are a race of space-faring aliens that look vaguely like rat-sized ants. They've got powerful mandibles and small, fairly dexterous hand-like claws, though their chitinous nature makes de...
I seek a realistic method, either by genetic change or other scientific method that doesn't require magic or future tech, to obtain naturally occuring two tone hair for a race of humanoids. My id...
I am trying to imagine a scenario in which there is a world that has been terraformed in so far as it has water and oxygen but there is only one area which has been established as a strong foothold...
For a science fiction novel I'm currently writing... The spacecraft in question is based in the asteroid belt and is not designed to approach a planet. The ship has an offensive/defensive capabil...
I have a few questions related to a crazy setting I'm working for my novel. Let's say we have a planet with a thin atmosphere and low gravity. It's volcanic activity is so intense that the planet ...
Plausibility check of the whole "insect race". As background, I want some poor astronauts to "crash" (safely land, but because they had no other option, possibly some engine malfunction) and meet w...
Would it be possible to raise a piece of land (say the size of Texas or France) from the bottom of an ocean (say, the middle of the South Pacific)? More specifically, would it be possible (given th...
I'm thinking on the colonizing of another planet by humans. The conditions of this planet are quite different from Earth, and particularly the day-night cycle is much larger. In my fictional plane...
I have an AI character who has determined through simulation that, though "greed or the lust for money is the root of all evil" is a valid statement, it does not necessarily logically follow that m...
I know it's been proven false in our world, but what is the most plausible mechanism by which an Open Polar Sea could form and persist? I don't mean all the ice melting, but an open sea as it was ...
Would humanoid sized insectoid lifeforms be relatively slow considering that their exoskeleton would have to be rather heavy since it takes more 'armor' to get the same relative protection? Genera...
Picture, if you will, four planets sharing the exact same orbit and orbital speed, and separated by exactly same distance from each other. Each planet is the same size and roughly the same gravitat...
In a magic setting, a stereotypical "cold fire" might be a deep blue color but otherwise look just like a normal fire, consuming some materials and radiating cold. In reality, this is not possible...
All of the launched human habitable space stations in orbit around Earth (such as the International Space Station, are very spindly and brittle as of current day. In a idea I'm contemplating that ...
In my world human(oid)s are not born anymore, they are grown in pods which mirror the conditions of a natural womb. Children are educated before birth and are "born" as fully mature adults with a ...
Over the last few months I have created a fictional character who is very rough and dominant. One of his specialities is to stare down rivals, and hide his own feelings. I wanted to give him a spe...
In my answer to my own question, Physical laws for a matter-filled universe, I detail the gross physical laws that would shape my four-spatial-dimensional matter filled universe. Given a slowly ex...
I stumbled across Vincent's answer regarding forests and deserts. He claims an elevation difference of 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) could put a forest and a desert in close proximity. That got me thin...
In our universe, the energy of the sun generates heat and light. This helps keep the earth warm enough for life and drives much of the earth's climate. Warmth slowly bleeds off into the coldness of...
If projecting on the moon is realistically very hard to achieve for an individual or a group of people, how would you project films on the night sky? One instance I was thinking was flying four dro...
One of the main problems with creatures that they have tentacles instead of manipulating paws or hands. This isn't a big problem for developing sapience, but it is a problem for entering the realm ...
My premise is that a bay-like body of water empties into a sea via a waterfall. Specifications: The sea is roughly the size and shape of the Mediterranean. The tributary body of water is around 2...
Electricity pervades our daily lives, and makes possible a lot of technological achievements. Harnessing it helps the development of any civilization. The thing is, water - especially sea water - i...
What kind of phenomenon do we need to achieve that kind of destructibility. If possible not a chemical based lasers but i'll welcome all of the answers
A world I am developing requires that only approximately one quadrasphere or quadrant (1/2 a hemisphere) of the planet be occupied. I would like the north and south extremes to be outside anything...
Let's imagine we have an algorithm that produce an elevation-map for a sphere. I wonder if the ratio between the planet radius and the delta between the highest and lowest altitude is a constant or...
I am working on a world and I have run into a minor roadblock. The world is altered such that one of its polar regions is constantly facing the sun and the other is always facing away. I figure tha...
I have a group of settlers that live on top of an animal, and I want his skin to be their mode of communication. In the morning, information is transmitted through chromataphores in the skin changi...
In a parallel universe the uncertainty in position and the uncertainty in momentum are directly related to each other. What kinds of effects would this have on the quantum mechanics of this univer...
