General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In this fantasy world there is no day/night but a constant mild light. There are also no seasons and the mild light is akin to the light at dawn or dusk. The sun doesn't really exist. How would th...
If our hands had 2 thumbs and 3 fingers how would they work? I mainly concerned with the bones and how they would interfere and interact with each other. But the muscle work would be helpful as we...
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 ...
As we see today the interconnection between the brain and computing is becoming thinner day by day, we could imagine a future that where we could install additional artificial neurons. In a world ...
I've always loved well-done ghosts. However, I've always hated the afterlife-speculation that they engender if used in a story. So I need a way to get ghosts without the fluffy spiritualistic bits...
The grey goo end-of-the-world scenario in which lots of little microscopic Von Neumann self-replicating machines basically eat everything to make more of themselves. Eventually everything is grey ...
Imagine a world (or rather a solar system) where in its history there has been a war with emergent AI's There are very strict laws governing the speed and complexity of computer systems However b...
I am sure most of you have seen Star Wars. In Episode IV: The Empire Strikes Back our heroes travel to Bespin, a gas planet with a habitable zone to refuel at the floating cloud city. Well of cou...
In my scenario, a tremendous war wipes most of the humanity. While pockets survive here and there, the biggest part lives in one city, totaling around 3000 to 5000 survivors. It is also important t...
Well, today I have a fairly simple question. Is it possible for a human to have some sort of birth defect, mutation, disease or something that causes the human body to be unable to produce body hea...
How feasible would it be to use a huge electron gun to pump electrons from a solar array positioned close to the Sun back to Earth or Mars? My idea is to create a eletrical circuit by means of usi...
I have been told that if I slow down today from 24 hours to 30, I'd end up getting hotter days, colder nights and more intense weather. That's fine, except that Earth's diverse climate makes that ...
Let's say on an alien planet called Thindor, the surface gravity is 3.27 m/s2 (which is 1/3rd of Earth's). But the atmospheric pressure is only 50 kPa (which is 1/2 of Earth's). Assume the same 20/...
Upon asking this question, I have learned why we can have nuclear powered ships, but not aircraft. The reason is because the shielding needed for the nuclear reactor is simply too heavy for the pow...
Basically, it starts as a variation on the seahorse, once the ova are fertilized within the mother the embryoes are drawn back into the father who then carries them to term (there's actually a seco...
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...
Diamonds are carbon. Plants take in CO2 and use the carbon. Chemically, could the right kind of plant have diamonds for berries, or is there some other limiting factor?
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...
Y'all should know by now that I want to build a Death Star ;-) Let's assume that we did that already -- and against the odds, we've built two of them, and they're currently in orbit around a plane...
You were born in Rome, when the Roman Republic was still in power. Your father is an upper middle class merchant and you are (or will be) the sole inheritor of his wealth. One day, a m...
I am drafting a short story about a small object orbiting the Sun at the precise 'speed' as Earth's opposite the Sun, undiscovered by us due to its position. The problems I see with this include t...
Time travel on movies and tv always say they were able to tell the year by looking at the stars. But how? For example Voyager goes back in 1996 and Ensign Kim says astrometrics puts them in the ye...
Okay, so our society has starting harnessing significant amounts of energy from its sun, and has started mass producing micro-black holes (although there have been experiments with gathering energy...
I'm trying to figure out a realistic mechanism to explain a global drought that only lasts for about a decade. Assume an earth-like planet. My goal for this drought is not to have no rain and kill...
How would human culture and civilisation develop if placed onto a planet permanently psychoactive, e.g. because of low (but inevitable) amount of LSD-like substance in either water or air? To simpl...
In this question, we were provided a look at what would happen if a human-like species was capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. The consequences of such a modification seem rather disa...
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...
I have an earth-like planet orbiting one of the stars in a binary system. I have learned that, for G-class stars, if the secondary star is 100AU from the primary one, I can expect the secondary st...
Faster than light travel is Dangerous with a capital D. The main reason for this is because by the time you see something, you've already smashed into it and vaporised yourself, the target and any...
For the purposes of this question, lets assume that we are in Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland, but the world is a disk, with living shapes Above, and 'dead' shapes Below (the underside of the disk)...
Archimedes claimed that he would lift the Earth if he could find a suitable place outside it, with his knowledge of mechanics. So, my question is: What kind of set-up (e.g. how large lever or how ...
Consider a planet similar from Earth: very suitable for life, with vegetal and animal life forms thriving onside. I wonder if one of these life forms could raise as a civilization as humans did, i...
Could a planet have an orbit in the shape of a figure 8 around twin (possibly binary) stars? Mostly curious about the physical possibility of such an orbital arrangement; is it stable over a long ...
A top secret organization is planning to introduce a New World Order and replaces every human being (homo sapiens sapiens) with the evolved form of sub species of homo sapiens. Meaning we are sub s...
Definition: Interlunar adjective Of or traveling between moons. I'm (as far as I can tell) inventing the term interlunar to describe travel between moons in a single planetary system. Travel b...
(I've tried to research this online but I'm a linguist, not a physicist, and most places that discuss this quickly get too technical for me. Simple answers will get tons of gratitude!) I imagine t...
In another question, Are flying plants possible?, a point was raised that because of the square-cube law, a large, hollow, spherical plant could fly by having the air inside be a little bit hotter ...
One of the biggest 'immortality sucks' issues has always been the question of what to do with the new people being born. Without death, a world's limited resources can't keep up with a never endin...
My world is science-based with an earth-like biology. The dragons fly when they're young and then grow too heavy and can only glide if at all. They breathe fire by expelling gas and igniting it. Th...
I am looking for a technologically-viable substance that could be used to accelerate growth in plants or very large trees. The option for administering the substance to the plant is open, whether ...
Is it possible (for humans)? My main concern was heavy gravity because they are much bigger and heavier. But it appears that in our system, the gas giants (but not Jupiter) all have a similar surf...
Given a world where a sentient species already populates, how would the population respond to another, unrelated species evolving into sentience? I think this can be effectively split into 3: It...
I'm currently writing a military science fiction story set in a post cyberpunk world I've been building. The story focuses on a tank crew, but it also prominently features an enormous airship that ...
We are creating a world of floating islands, these vary in size from small outposts that are little more than a Dock and Watchtower, through independent farmsteads, to full Nations in which the maj...
In a future where all cars and public services are self-driving the way, I am assuming traffic congestion would be seriously limited, if not removed completely, because the road network would also ...
I've posted a previous question similar to this in the way that it is of my WIP web-comic. The planet my friend and I have designed is strange as she wanted to create either a permanently dark plan...
Based on the situation described by this earlier question: recap If due to some strange phenomena that changed our universe laws, time stopped and can only move if a creature capable of observing...
So imagine this scenario: Sapience (which I define as Human-like intelligence or better) is a relatively common occurence once a life-form is on a specific brain-arms-race path like Hominins 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...
Imagine a world in which the structures and resources are our own organs, tissues and cells. The society would be run by special cells and living microorganisms. My inspiration is from the animati...
