General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
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...
Obviously there are plenty of potential physics problems with this scenario, but if people lived along the inner crust of the Earth, and there was a Sun-like core at the center with nothing else in...
From Wikipedia: By volume, dry air contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. For example, would humans be able to survive ...
On a planet where it is Earth-like, the orbit around the sun is a bit longer than 1 Earth year, and the orbit is on 2/3 eccentricity, but where only the "2" part is inside the Goldilocks zone. In ...
Something I realized not too long ago about a spacefaring society is that while a lot of technology is going to feel advanced, a lot more is going to feel ancient just because of all the hurdles it...
Assume that in the future, mankind develops Augmentations ala Deus Ex, where robot bits are strapped onto people in an attempt to improve them and their quality of life. This will eventually lead t...
I have a fictional technology in my world that involves being able to create "tubes of compressed space" -- essentially, you have two stations and a (straight or curved) line of space between them ...
I'm reading this article on speech in animals, and it made an interesting claim: chimpanzees and other non-human great apes posses the anatomy needed to vocalize words, they just don't use it to do...
Imagine your scientists have found a way to increase the space of your empire, literally: They are able to create an artificial inflaton field which locally creates a "space bubble" connected with ...
Let's say that I'm creating a world game that lasts for 1000 years (or more). The game involves players obtaining talented leaders, e.g. George Washington (military), Albert Einstein (science), etc...
Lets pretend that Mars was a bit larger, so the gravity could hold on to the water and possible atmosphere, and then play along with the accidents that happened on earth happened at a similar tact....
Let's assume a planet like ours, same size and same conditions. My characters live at approximately 60° North, in a boreal forest, with a climate much like the Nordic countries in Europe. They are...
The setup: Near future (maximum 50 years in future) where "only" thing changed is, that company SpaceX together with NASA and ESA found out, how to get cargo and people to space very cheap USA dec...
For the longest time growing up with Peak Oil and other such dire predictions, I assumed humanity had just about peaked, in terms of industrial-technological might and capacity to influence its env...
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...
We all know about how the aliens in War of the Worlds were killed by the common cold, but how susceptible would aliens really be to human diseases? In my story, I have an alien species living amo...
I have got a fictional universe, where a humanoid lifeform evolved on earth not from apes, but from bears. The humanoid bears are like humans; they walk on their legs only, wear clothing, have vari...
Partly due to WB's great response to my steampunk questions, I think the world I'll work on next will have to be steampunk :) If I had a steampunk cyborg running around, what could he do with his ...
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...
For my Science-Fantasy WIP I am considering using a single artificial planet (roughly the size of a Dyson Sphere) and its moons (of which only three are large enough to exert any real influence) as...
I recently asked about racing in space (The new Space Race - Racing!) and as expected while there were a few options they were mostly pretty limited. However 2012rcampion did suggest that sports i...
Is there a way to make a planet invisible naturaly? I dont want the entire thing to be clear, but have a natural "field" or something that prevents the planet from being seen (or makes it much hard...
Let's say that tens of thousands of years pass and earth effectively becomes a giant city. What species of organisms survive our conquest? How do these species evolve to adapt? How long would huma...
Near the beginning of my story, my main character loses an arm, and is going to get a prosthetic replacement. I've done some research on prosthetic limbs, and as one might expect, you're not good ...
I'm doing some background work for a scifi/horror piece, and it includes "orcs", who are just humans that have undergone a series of mutations - the main one being that they no longer produce myost...
Pretty much every vehicle ever invented has been used for racing on at some point, so it seems likely that people would want to do the same in space. However in space it doesn't really work the sa...
Let's say I have an OCD and I want everything to be perfect. I want all the planets and The sun of our solar system to be equal in size. Apart from that, I want the distance between the orbits to b...
After seeing the film Oblivion I began wondering about what would happen if the Moon was fractured in such a way that large chunks of the Moon were ripped apart. Would the chunks of Moon stay in o...
So, I read the question, the associated answers and comments located here, as well as some others that were more divergent than what I was hoping for. Basically, imagine two earth-like planets ve...
I have a city in space that will have a local population and a lot of travel in and out (center of commerce). Should I place it out in open space or near a planet? Being near a planet obviously i...
I'm not talking about stuff like radiation and mutations. I'm talking about mechanics (for now). Necessary effects: With superstrength, you can... lift objects weighing many tons without your f...
This question may be a bit broad, but I'm basically wondering what minimal things humans need to have in an atmosphere in order to survive. Let's assume we have Earthlike gravity, and are only deal...
Apparently it is theoretically possible for a planet to achieve a stable orbit around the singularity at the centre of a black hole within the event horizon. This means that life could hypothetical...
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
This question is inspired by the last paragraph of my answer here: Negating the negative effects of childbearing (A follow up question to this can be found here: Methods to ensure gene flow in spe...
Imagine the speed of light is 100 times that in our universe. Light from the moon takes about 1/100th of a second, the sunlight reaches our eyes in about 4 seconds, from nearby Alpha Centauri in ab...
If we were to pull the following races out of a D&D players handbook and remove them from the setting/history of Faerun and look at them from a biological/non-magic perspective (no other planes...
I have been reading on Wikipedia about cloning and am considering it a possibility for reproduction in my world. I am finding it slightly difficult to find all of the cons and pros associated with ...
Would it be possible to modify a human to be able to survive in space without protective gear? Genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancement are both allowed, although when not in space the perso...
Let us suppose that we have people who for all intents and purposes are human, except for one (not so) tiny modification: they are able to exert enough muscular force and react fast enough that the...
For my setting, I wanted my people to have entirely no concept of sexism whatsoever. To facilitate this, I have made it so that the females of my race are broad-shouldered and generally flat-cheste...
The Hydra is a mythical creature with the ability the regrow severed limbs, including the head(s). According to the dungeon and dragon 3.5 version of the hydra : each time one limb is separated fro...
I was amazed when I learned that Jupiter rotates on its axis once in only 9.8 Earth hours. (Yes, you can call me uneducated!) What if the rotation period was 24 Earth hours? What would change in th...
Brown dwarf stars are cool. Both literally and figuratively; the temperature profile for cool brown dwarves runs somewhere between 225K and 600K. It's possible if not probable that there exist som...
This question is related to the following question on whether complex life is possible without oxygen but is not a duplicate. I was doing some searching and found this and this link, the first on w...
In a world where travel is limited to the speed of light, reaching a different star, while not necessarily impossible, would be very time consuming. For an empire stretching across several solar sy...
Ignoring, for the sake of this question, how exactly the gravitational fields required for this to work are generated: The question Our stalwart adventurers have a spaceship, perhaps a gateship, ...
I have been trying to imagine a world which was also created by a Big Bang. Following is something that I have created so far: Another planet which was created also has species like us but they li...
Steampunk!! In a world without the fine electronics that we have today, would space travel be possible? ....I'm not averse to small amounts of magic in my steampunk worlds, but I'd like to keep i...
Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off sol...
