General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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There are a couple of stories where humans gain chloroplasts. Here's a clip from one story: They are also infused with bacteriorhodopsin, allowing photosynthesis. It is now possible for a huma...
We all know of plants that draw in animals with sweet nectar or even just sit around hoping an insect will sit on it and get caught, but I'm imagining a forest dimly lit by the flickering flames of...
What properties of a species of plant would make it the ideal choice for taking it on a year-long trip through space as both an oxygen source and food source? We should assume that the amount of ...
I have a knight fighting a dragon with an electric breath weapon, I'm wondering what would actually happen when the knight was struck by the weapon, assuming it has the power of a 'regular' lightni...
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central ma...
If you look at our society, you can see why we developed technology. Each individual wanted an easier life, therefore we invented tools and overcame obstacles to achieve this easier life. One could...
Being on the autism spectrum is often described as a feeling of being on "The Wrong Planet" So I'm wondering what the right planet might be like... For those that are unfamiliar: Social conventi...
Inspired by the many great questions asked for this fortnight's tag challenge, I got to thinking, could a plant develop/evolve to eventually consume an entire planet, and keep on living? What I mea...
Assume a plant was engineered to cope with a wide range of different environments, and to have seeds that were capable of traveling through and surviving both the depths of space and re-entry into ...
Some time ago, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about magnetism, electricity, and graphene. I was (and still am) curious about developing a "deflector shield" based in known and viable scie...
I was experimenting with various star system designs with a gravity simulator, and one of the patterns I ended up with is best described as a planet with a very elongated elliptic orbit that itself...
Ok, so I have this planet that I am still building. It is a desert planet, its surfice is almost completely arid with a few exceptions such as snow deserts in the poles. There is sentient life in ...
The Setting: I have an idea for a universe that, in an inversion to our own, is filled for the most part with matter in solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma form, while vacuum and degenerate matter is...
Instead of flying say tons of metal and/or water and other raw materials/molecular matter to the Moon or Mars, could we shoot it there in ionized form by accelerating these sufficiently? Maybe sub...
I am currently designing a world for a series of short stories and have started looking at what kind of weather patterns would be present in certain regions. For simplicity's sake, we can assume th...
So there is a Minecraft mod that includes various oreberry bushes. One for gold, one for silver, etc. Now I know that various plants can extract specific minerals in higher quantities that what w...
Chemoautotroph Flora In a world where there is not much sunlight, I still want to have life. Specifically, I want to capitalize on chemoautotrophs so much that the alien schoolchildren learn somet...
Okay. I have been piecing together the elements of another story for my school PDF newspaper (we publish one to a wiki page every two days). Yesterday I asked this question on whether a second habi...
It is well known that some organisms can produce electricity. Therefore I think it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that also some plants might have evolved that ability (after all, it ...
In science fiction a common plot device is for a planet to be surrounded by electromagnetic interference that prevents an orbiting ship from scanning it with sensors or communicating with people on...
We have Venus flytraps which move by closing their 'mouth' to trap prey. There are currently few identified plants with a 'quick' reflex like this. Blooms of course open and close through the cou...
Okay, there are two habitable worlds in the Solar System. One of them is Earth. Human history goes mainly the way it really went. Then, there is another planet with a sentient, equally advanced spe...
In my fantasy world I want fantastically large trees, particularly in the height category. The tallest trees on earth grow just over 100 meters tall. Why can't they get taller? What circumstances w...
Based on my previous question here, which a helpful other person pointed out, which would make the question too broad, here comes a different question for that. Given a desert full of ore sand, wh...
So, within my setting, I would like to also have a kingdom based in a special desert. Absolutely all of the sand in the desert would be ore sand. Ores of any and all kinds that you could traditiona...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
This is my entry for the fortnightly topic challenge In Day of the Triffids, many people go blind and the basic summary is this: virulent plague makes most of humanity blind giant, semi-intellig...
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...
Could an artificial plant species be designed and created that lives in a vacuum - for example on the surface of our moon? The main problems I can see immediately would be the lack of an atmospher...
What conditions are believable for a racial society majority to accept a racial minority, and those to reject them? I have two races. One is a racially pure majority and the other is a mixed breed...
The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds a...
I was reading Flatland, and the thought occurred to me that interaction between an n-dimensional being and a n+1+-dimensional being may not only be difficult but dangerous, that Flatland contains e...
A ship is sent through a wormhole to an unknown planet to create a sustainable colony. The colonists know that they won't have further contact with their home planet - this is a last ditch effort t...
Take for example, Neptune, a planet with a slushy mantle and outer core. Imagine we want to mine for water (or some substance beneath it - maybe an exotic ice form under all that liquid). How do ...
Recently I had an idea for a world setting. A large part of this world focuses around a habitable satellite the size of Earth orbiting a Super-Jupiter. The fact that it's a moon is pretty integral ...
In creating a calendar for a fictional world I'm considering the phases of the moon. I understand our moon has an orbital period of approx. 28 days. Is there room for variation if the planet and th...
PREMISE The zone will make all electrons disappear. QUESTIONS If a person walks in that zone with his whole body, would he die from heart failure? What happens if he just sticks his hand in? H...
This question builds off Information Exchange In Space and How would interstellar internet work?, and specifically uses the communication system I developed here because of this. In a summary of t...
Imagine there is a space station shaped like a cylinder. The cylinder spins on its axis, in order to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. My question: How fast would the space sta...
Premise Imagine a slightly more advanced modern day world where space flight was starting to commercialize. Imagine that all of a sudden laws changed and the only thing different is that no comput...
Earth has stopped rotating. Maybe Superman started flying around the Earth backwards to turn back time, but hit a wall of kryptonite just when the Earth stopped rotating. Or Stupendous Man hit the ...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
Through extreme pollution and large-scale warfare with atomic, biological and chemical weapons Earth has become completely unable to sustain life. The atmosphere is toxic, the water undrinkable and...
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...
An abandoned outpost from a long extinct race is discovered. It can easily be repaired and would make an ideal location for a colony, however it has been breached and any usable air has been long ...
Consider a scenario where there is an over-populated solar system (not necessarily our solar system). Several other rocky planets and moons in this solar system are inhabited by the same humanoid r...
We have a tiny robot, insect like, barely five millimetres long, but with an almost perfect AI. The sensory input consists on an array of chemoreceptors, vibrissae, and cameras. It can fly through ...
This is about a fictional planet that has a solid land surface but on which the atmosphere is composed of some liquid containing hemoglobin, or some artificial blood substitute. I am not sure yet ...
Imagine that we live in a setting where there are a trillion humans (see linked question). A bit crowded, I know. Further imagine that at least the entire energy output of the Sun was available to ...
