General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Our war with the plants has been unending for thousands of years. And we don't even know it exists. Plants strategize, doing their best to survive, but the humans are relentless. Constant removal ...
How can I explain that it only rains at night (i.e. from dusk till dawn) in a certain region? Can or must I make this meteorological phenomenon apply planet-wide? Can or must I restrict rainfall...
Imagine for a few moments that despite the difficulty a race has evolved in space, away from any atmosphere (perhaps a species of space jellyfish). This race exists in a fairly 'noisy' nebula, but...
I know that in our universe, electromagnetism and gravity decrease with the inverse of the distance squared. Would it be possible though for there to be a force in another universe with three spati...
I'm building a world that I would like to be quite realistic. One of the plot lines I've considered is plate tectonics that move at a rate of anywhere from 0.8 to 2.0 kilometers per year. This is i...
Supposed we have a ship travelling at the speed of light, or very close to it, or over. A second ship is travelling behind it at the same speed. The second ship wishes to communicate something ...
All life we know of to date (presumably) formed on a rocky planet (more precisely: earth). Fiction has been written about life in more exotic locations. Though as far as I know, these lifeforms wer...
Suppose the Earth entered a period of intense global warming, say by 50° Fahrenheit (28° Celsius), and then levelled off at the new, higher, temperature. Obviously, anywhere near the equator would ...
Imagine an advanced A.I. with access to the brain of an 18-year-old. However, this 18-year-old has had no exposure to humanity or the outside world until now, the only information he has received i...
Follow up to my previous question, after botched registration. We have an Earth-like planet tidally locked to a star similar to Sirius A. The star does not belong to a binary system. The planet it...
This is for a novel I'm writing. The basic premise is that massive networks of mycelium running under the soil combine to form a decentralised intelligence that has been managing life and condition...
Here's the setup: You have a space station orbiting Earth. On this space station is an anti-gravity device powerful enough to lift a small ship on Earth up through the atmosphere and into the space...
Supposing a roughly mars sized planet, how little surface water would need to exist to sustain a population of a size similar to pre-industrial earth (say 750 million?) The situation is somewhat u...
In this scenario, the sun is a binary star, sharing orbit with an F-type main-sequence star. The first planet from that binary star is a Jupiter-like gas giant, orbiting one-third of an AU from th...
Carbon-based life planet with a plenitude of infinite energy crystals. Could it exist? Somehow, when my planet cooled down, there were crystals that output a fixed amount of electromagnetic radiat...
Let's say I have a roughly humanoid race (similar size, form, activity level, etc.) that spontaneously generates any energy that they need via Magic. However, they still need to eat some materials ...
In this hypothetical solar system the one habitable planet in question would be at center of two sun stars, one similar to our sun and the other a red dwarf. What kind of effect would this have on ...
Given ideal circumstances and a type 4 or 5 Kardashev scale level of technology to set the system in motion (but not to maintain the motion over time): How many planets 1/4 of the Earth's mass co...
Say you were to drop a (bunch of) human(s) at some past era of our Earth. I'm assuming they might encounter a few problems such as the composition of the air not being breathable, the water being t...
A modern day Earth nation is at war with another. That other nation is extremely advanced but they are also pacifists. Instead of killing peoples their gun rounds and shells have the effect of worm...
In the novel Ender's Game, all little kids are protected and closely watched via a 'monitor', a device that sees and hears through them. This happens from around age 1 to about 5 or 6. So my questi...
Let's assume that a human colony was established on an exoplanet, dozens of light years from another inhabited planet, with the expectation that no one"”not even the colonists' far-future descendan...
Cerebrospinal fluid is a thin layer of liquid that helps use avoid being knocked out (among other uses). Creatures with a thicker layer have more trouble being knocked out. I want my humanoids to n...
What problems would perpetual fog cause to a country roughly the size and environment of Ireland? The country has all modern infrastructure such as power plants, roads, factories, hospitals, etc. ...
Would it be in ANY way possible to have 3 or more stars within a few light-hours (up to several light-days between the most distant stars) of each other, and for the resulting orbital mash-up to al...
All multi-cellular life as we know it is composed or eukarotic cells -- cells with a nucleus. Some single-celled organisms are eukarotic, some are prokaryotic (cells without a nucleus, such as bact...
Context In the near future, humans will have manufactured machine sentience. Such a consciousness, the first of a new species, must operate on Earth. Constraints A memristor-based human brain a...
Suppose we have a binary star system and a planet at the L4 or L5 point of the orbit of one of the stars around the other. The planet is thus illuminated by the two stars from the same distance and...
I am mad scientist and I captured Average Joe, who is not average only in one remark: He is person not to be missed (I double checked). Otherwise he is healthy male, around 30 years old, with no fo...
What would happen if a planet like Earth were to be tidal locked to the sun? What effects could it have on lifeforms like plants? Would they always produce oxygen?
Humans show aggression by baring their teeth, dogs show aggression by growling and cats, by hissing. All groups of animal show aggression in a way that makes it clear to attackers that they are agi...
I was reading about the rogue planet PSO J318.5-22 which is thought to have molten iron rain and things like that, and I vaguely remembered from uni that almost all iron mixtures have a slushy eute...
What would cause an area to get continuous rainfall (a la Blade Runner), and what implications would that have for other parts of the world? Ideally I'd like to hear about both natural conditions ...
The heat wave that my area is going through got me looking longingly at the ice in my freezer. I understand that leaving the freezer door open does not help cool the house, but it got me thinking.....
Researchers create a sonic tractor beam By Hanae Armitage 27 October 2015 1:00 pm Using a simple set of loudspeakers, scientists have figured out a way to levitate and rotate object...
I'm doing some planning for a fantasy comic and I was just wondering how the rest of the world would look if sea levels rose enough to completely submerge the U.K. Specifically I'm interested in ma...
I first was thinking centripetal force on a circular ship, but performing external maintenance would be extremely difficult due to the force pushing the person or robot off. Would a spherical ves...
Can non-intelligent life forms evolve to leave their home planet and travel in interplanetary space, for instance, grow on atmosphereless icy moons and transfere spores over interplanetary space?
Suppose in one part of the universe unexplored by science, I imagine there exist a species that rely on quantum teleportation to transmit information about their genetic codes across to the other s...
In the particular world that I am working on, I am attempting to build a "utopian" society. A major piece of this society is that, effectively, all historical atrocities have been "forgotten" by th...
Setting Humans have spent centuries investigating human consciousness, brain physiology, AI, and other technologies. We've finally figured out how to "upload" a "consciousness" (these are quoted b...
One of the older stories I found buried in my documents is about, and from the point of view of, the AI that starts the Singularity. It (well, he calls himself a "he" eventually, but I'm not even s...
I'm going to use the US model for the simple reason that I'm most familiar with it. Constraints and assumptions In the US, legislative representation is by region (state) and population levels. ...
Are there realistic circumstances that a planet would be accelerated (either artificially or naturally) to the speed at which relic radiation becomes so blue-shifted that the planet is illuminated ...
In the distant future, the human race has become extinct, leaving behind the machines they created. These robots are very similar to us and are run by separate AI. They share our emotions and langu...
Yesterday I was driving at night on an unlit road (nothing nefarious, I swear), and there was a truck behind me with a ridiculous amount of headlamps on, and catching a glimpse of it in my mirror i...
There is a cold planet (maybe a moon of a gas giant) far out in a solar system. It has a solid core and the surface is a thick layer of ice. Because of nuclear fission in the planet's core it is w...
This question is intended as a follow up to this one: Naturally occurring wheels - do the 'mech' vs. 'tank' comparison apply to organics? I agree with the arguments against wheels evolving in plac...
Background Several hundred years from now, humans have successfully terraformed the Moon. It has become a fad for the rich and powerful to have exotic residences built in exotic locations. The ri...
Set in the 22nd century CE, space explorations reached maturity and the farthest human colony is on one of the moon of Neptune. So far the only voice from space that we have heard comes is our own,...
