General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
For my story to work, my characters have to stumble across a small wormhole that actually exists on Earth and is responsible for multiple disappearances throughout history. It connects a point on E...
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...
I have a planet with homogeneous core and mantle, but a thick crust separated in two parts: the north half is composed of water and the south part is an alloy of heavy metals, making the north ligh...
My moon is the basis for a fantasy setting, but I just can't bring myself to abandon science and say "a wizard did it." I want to make the months and seasons realistic, and I want to find a way to ...
The idea is simple, our intellegence is so far above a chimp or bonobo as to make us something different. There are things we can do intuitively that no Bonobo or chimp will be able to, and becaus...
I understand that Antarctica plays a large role in driving ocean currents and thus the climate of the planet. However, I'm curious what the world would be like if there was no Antarctic landmass at...
Mars' gravity is 38% of that of Earth's. Supposing a human born and raised on a Mars colony traveled to earth later in their life, would they be able to survive the increased gravity? For example...
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...
So for the purposes of this question, the following items are already determined by our world: The humans and human society are in very beginning of an Industrial Revolution almost identical to o...
The idea is- as the moon is passing over, the pull of Earth's gravity on immediate area surrounding the spacecraft somehow temporarily cancelled out (still working on the how) and the craft falls t...
In many series (Elder scrolls for example) they have a huge moon. It is rare though when they explain how it can be larger. There are only two choices both of which couldn't work; One is to brin...
We like the moon. It's close, you can see your home from there, low gravity well, so you get easy mass drivers to orbit for fleshing out your spacer economy, plus you can do fun things in pools. ...
I am an immortal, megalomaniacal supervillain with unlimited resources and patience. I want to slowly eliminate the Earth's axial tilt so that its equatorial plane is coplanar with its orbital pla...
The US Government, and eventually the UN and all nation-states around the world, have realized they are broadcasting their existence to potential enemy civilizations in the nearby galaxy (at least ...
Here on earth, the moon is this big white thing that lights the world and hangs in the sky. Every culture on the Earth has incorporated the moon into some of their legends. Sometimes as a woman, so...
Okay, so humans are finally transitioning to a space-colonial society. We sent ships out, colonize worlds, etc... We aren't really in the business of sending multigenerational ships. Instead we use...
I have got a big rotating space station (radius is 5 km and length is 30 km) which provides its occupants the luxury of full terran gravity and atmosphere. The biggest part of the cylinder's inner ...
While smashing heavier and heavier particles together to create super heavy elements 122, 123, and 124, scientists noticed that these collisions created strange, random-looking electromagnetic wave...
This concept is relatively simple. There are many animals which start mobile, but become sessile later in their life history, all of which are simple and primitive. And I was wondering this: what i...
Let's take a classic AI revolution scenario: An organic civilization seeking more comfort in their lives created robots with self-learning algorithms to make them more efficient. But while the AIs...
Suppose a planet/space station is a hollow sphere, and in the center of this sphere is a smaller sphere. This sphere would be solid, with grass and dirt like Earth. The only thing holding this smal...
Imagine that one day in the not-too-distant future, our scientists discover that our world is dying. It doesn't matter how this is happening, maybe magic or unstable core or Gaia herself has finall...
An ancient civilization mapped wormholes when the universe was quite young and smaller. This allowed them to reach other galaxies (wormholes from our galaxy to others). They mapped it all. Humans ...
I'm currently heavily revising a story which is largely set on a habitable but not exactly hospitable moon of a gas giant orbiting on the outer edge (or just beyond) of the habitable zone around a ...
Pretty much what it says on the tin: It's the beginning of 2016. Due to a fast-spreading virus, humans have lost the ability to reproduce themselves. The virus makes current artifical fertiliza...
Every child is afraid of the darkness. For them its not simply the absence of light, its the absence of information. Even if you know that there should be a wall or a doorway right in front of y...
This answer to my question about light-as-a-weapon came up with an interesting concept: The Reflecting-Oven-Jay This is a small African predatory bird with a perfectly smooth set of wings ...
On our world we have any number of creatures that use: Noxious Chemicals Poison(Spiders and Snakes being the obvious examples) Sound Electricity as an alternative to their teeth and claws. One...
Sometimes when building a world, and in particular since Tolkien, one may wish to create original languages for the inhabitants. There are some information around the site about the creation of con...
Stories with shrinking never seen to take into account the Square-Cube law. I'm trying to consider what it would take to do a story like this that actually fully addresses the square cube law. I ...
On a world where Vanadium was the most abundant metal in the crust, with levels similar to Aluminium or Iron on Earth, would you expect to see unusual minerals and rock formations? Massive overab...
An alien race, for reasons of their own, have decided that it's important to make the third and fourth planets in our solar system about the same size and mass. Since they have a strict moratorium...
It's well known that Mars has a very weak atmosphere as a result of billions of years of solar wind bombardment. Mars lacks a sufficiently large magnetic core to generate a magnetosphere strong en...
Once geological processes have created a landscape a number of factors come into play in order to reshape it. This includes weather and climate effects such as wind, rain and ice reshaping the terr...
This question focuses on the initial creation of landmasses. What are the processes that causes land-masses to form, and continents and islands to rise up from the sea and sink back into it? How...
Let us consider two persons who can feel what the other senses and know what the other thinks. Now do these two persons have a common or single consciousness?If so,will it do good, if we succeed to...
Imagine a planet with the same climate all on the surface. There is only one living creature on this planet (let's say a plant to avoid food problem). It is perfectly adapted for the climate. And ...
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....
Okay, I will make a little premise/context to give the question a decent background. I know that the scenario could look rather "handwavy", but take it as the framework on which the answer should b...
Does the following progression/collection of technologies make sense on the way to an artificial womb? The central assumption to this question is that the female body is a delicate, complicated ma...
The trope here is a world with 3-4 X earth atmosphere with high oxygen content (30%). Nice things about this are it enables heavy beasts to fly, and the high pressure smoothes out the negative effe...
Let's suppose we have found a new human colony today, somehow populating Pluto. They have good technology, much like ours and we don't want to slave them. We want to establish a communication link ...
I trust Brandon Sanderson to have done his research - in his book "The Rithmatist" he writes about coiled spring batteries that power a passenger train. I do wonder what could be achieved with a sp...
In this question someone suggested that the classic 'elf' ear could evolve for the same use as whiskers. How (un)realistic is this idea. Lets assume that the humanoid species that evolved these ear...
Can a planet possess more than one ozone layer? Can multiple ozone layers cause more harm? If one ozone layer had a hole, would the other(s) act like a backup shield to harmful rays from a star? As...
Would a human being be able to run faster, jump high, etc. if the gravity on Earth weakened? I'm assuming a weaker gravitational pull would cause the muscle to deteriorate because the body no longe...
While world building, I came up with a planet that had the combined traits of very rough and rugged terrain and small seas. The planets surface is covered with mountains and hills are common place...
Island planets are common in science-fiction, and we've even got a few questions about them in worldbuilding. However, I cannot help but wonder how, or if, they could form. On Earth, at least, our ...
Assuming such a stellar body is even possible, could human or animal life (also assuming they have a way to avoid being pulled toward the planet's core) breathe its outer atmosphere? Would such lif...
