General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Is subsurface life possible on Titan (Saturn's moon) ? Temperatures on the surface are way too low to sustain any life (<-150 degrees Celcius) but since there is some tectonic activity, I was w...
In Terminator, a human can evade a hit from a machine, rolling onto the floor at the last second. But a machine (cyborg) from the future would be able to do millions of calculations in a second, an...
According to several sources, all organisms process information at different rates - to a fly, the world is in slow motion (relative to humans), for instance, but to a pigeon, the world may move fa...
Let's assume I can travel in a space-time on Earth. Every time I jump I get to almost the same place, but in different past time relative to the first jump: it solves the problem of planet rotation...
Lets say I have this nice gun which can shoot a certain amount of antimatter. After hearing answers about why that won't work, I added a magical coating to the projectile making sure the antimatter...
If a race were advanced enough to colonise space and travel between galaxies, would it be possible for them to harness a black hole in some way to generate power for the massive ships needed to col...
So most of you have probably heard of extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air to make water. In a world where water could be scarce, is this technique even feasible? Specifically, assuming ex...
BioSteel is a substance produced by goats whose DNA has received the silk-producing genes of spiders. While silkworms are generally social creatures, spiders are reclusive, meaning they cannot be...
3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtai...
I'm worldbuilding for a story in which a certain portion of the population relocates to a slightly habitable planet due to the complete inhabitability of Earth. It takes place several generations a...
I'm working on a story right now where darkness plays an important role, and I had the idea to set my story on a rogue planet, a planet in perpetual darkness because it has no sun. However, from wh...
When I was younger I learned about time dilation and since my story was (and is) set post-planet I thought many hours about how to handle it. I came to the conclusion that I could just drop it and ...
I made a map of the tectonic plates for my planet and then assigned each of them a direction. So as the question title says, what geographic features occur at each type of plate boundary? Also to ...
Diurnal vs Nocturnal These aliens have genes that influence whether the alien will be diurnal or nocturnal. Hatching time also influences this. Genetics: DD - Diurnal NN - Nocturnal DN or ND -...
Development The females ovulate on average 5-15 eggs per cycle. Unfertilized eggs get reabsorbed and fertilized eggs start developing a shell. The shell takes 2 weeks to fully form. Once all the f...
No matter which mammal you are talking about, be it a rodent or a bat or a cat or an elephant or a whale, all have the same lung size--7% of the entire body volume. In this alternate scenario, the...
Let's not delve into specific genuses, families, orders etc. Broaden your definition of "classifications" to words like "mammal" or "fish", "crustacean" or "avian". Science fiction depictions of...
Several science fiction books picture bigger Terran planets with higher gravity. I'm curious to know what would be the maximum gravity mammals similar to the one on earth could survive. Only bones ...
I've been thinking about flag designs for colonies on Mars, and something occurred to me. The "official" Flag of Mars has a critical flaw The average wind speed on Mars is 10 m/s (20 mph); the fa...
If I were to hide an artifact, where would could I hide it so that it is the hardest for a human to get there (or even be there). For example, hiding something inside a volcano sounds like a prett...
Preface With all technology discovered prior to this question, on today's planet, there are still some things we have not observed - which may be used to justify introducing new life forms, right h...
Is there any solid, scientific counterargument against the hypothetical explanation that attributes dark matter as matter in hidden planes of existence? I am trying to construct a world in which t...
I've been reading this question about agriculture for merfolk and more specifically the accepted answer. They mention the problem of food preservation only minutely. Now I'd like to pour that thoug...
Every single depiction out there seems to think that animal teeth and/or mouth are no problem for a perfect speech-therapist approved pronunciation. For instance the Cat People. They never have an...
I'm throwing around a rough concept in my head and wonder which effect it would have on the present world. How would the world as we know it change if this technology were invented (and nothing els...
I am considering whether a pre-Industrial civilisation could carry on for millennia on an Earth-like planet without entering the Industrial Age. Of course, regularly destroying everything with pla...
How would you justify hidden aliens on Mars, which no one on Earth has discovered yet? I was thinking over it, and having them be primitive or highly advanced seems a necessity. The latter gives a...
Out there in the vastness of space there is a colossal machine by unknown makers. An entire artificial planet that, underneath the initial crust, has massive systems of clockwork with the topmost p...
This world is all water, and I want the trees to be the only thing that represents land. The trees are horizontally positioned, and start from a large self sufficient floating seed pod, much like a...
In the overly sterile environment my characters live in, the AIs supplement probiotics with food servings for the humans. Let's say one type of gut flora went extinct. The AIs are trying to fix t...
In the future, AI systems sanitize humans as they walk through doorways. Home surfaces self-sanitize. Food is mostly 3D printed from cleaned particles, including Vitamin K and possibly some probiot...
Given that AIs will be produced with military and commercial "prime directives", all over the world, by organisations that will ignore or subvert something like a UN resolution ... what is a practi...
After the WorldBuilding community helped Average Joe start his own microstate, Joe has become scientifically inclined, and uses his money to conduct somewhat dangerous research projects from...
Would it be at all viable for a person to have certain plant characteristics such as: Chloroplasts in their hair and skin, with the skin maybe lookmuch darker because of extra light absorbance (m...
Back home and in this alternate scenario, the Ozarks are all that remains of a Proterozoic mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago. Back home, the Ozarks look like this, highlit in lime: ...
Edited to give a reason why synthetic diamonds wouldn't work instead. In the distant future, all the diamonds are gone. While synthetic diamonds are an excellent sollution for technology - as @...
I am imagining a temperate forested area with freshwater lakes, rivers, small mountains, and rolling grassy hills. This environment is situated within a very large explosion crater. Outside this cr...
On an Earthlike planet with one large moon (just like Earth's), I have a large landlocked sea with one narrow exit (like the Black Sea, but much larger, something like six or eight Mediterraneans, ...
On the generation ship in one of my stories and possibly more, there exists a positive relationship between the egg laying humanoid aliens who have an egg pouch on their chest and the humans they a...
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." "” H.P. Lovecraft One example of this is the universal fear of the da...
I want to have an Earth like planet, but with most of the continents having very little flatland. Thus continents would be covered mostly by hills and mountains. I want the rest of the planet to be...
I really think that we can feed way more than our current population using more advanced farming IF WE FIND A WAY TO PRODUCE CHEAP RENEWABLE ENERGY. The solution would be hydroponic vertical farms...
I was thinking about how humans have evolved from apes to what we are now, while apes still remain a species that isn't extinct. Is it possible that the human race will evolve into a species that c...
Assume that a person gets infected by a pathogen and then goes into stasis, emerging several hundred years later transformed into a vampire. Now this vampire can meditate and release a pathogen tha...
Here's the scenario: 400 million years ago, a species of lobe-finned fish created tetrapod history as it gulped up air, not water. Fast-forward to 342 million years ago, and one species immediate...
I am writing a story that takes place in a big desert. I've figured that I could make my desert as extensive as possible by building a Pangea-like supercontinent, since I've learned here that, give...
Picture a setting similar to that of many fantasy works: a relatively low level of technology among the general population, lots of manual labor, agriculture or hunter/gatherer society, and that mo...
I wish to build a sort of Dyson swarm around the sun. Not to transmit energy, but to put supercomputers in each satellite so they can calculate spatial trajectories. The main idea of the project i...
As a whole, the reptiles have a problem. The majority of them have legs sprawled away from the body, so when they move, they would suffer a kind of problem called "Carrier's constraint", and what ...
I trying to describe colonization of an Earth Like planet orbiting a red dwarf in its habitable zone. It is NOT tidally locked with the star Similar to Earth though somewhat larger Magnetic field...
