General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In a story that I'm writing, there is a giant waterfall which flows down a cliff face. The waterfall is extraordinarily large, and the torrents of water which flow over the side are deafening. Beh...
Building on the universe established in this question, what happens to identity verification when someone's physical appearance and genetic code are modifiable at any time? Review of universe rule...
The Demonstration You're a rich, successful CEO/capitalist working in the electronics business. Your R&D division is exceptional and routinely fabs state of the art processors at bleeding edg...
Let's say I have a bunch of pre-pubescent children (circa 8-12 years old). Let's also say I subjected them to some drug/process/whatever that caused them to stop growing. In particular: Whatever...
A global epidemic of H1Z2 virus has rendered 95% of the population into zombies. The zombies have lost most of their frontal and temporal lobes so the following capabilities are either severely de...
My friends and I are building a world with a 50 mile high volcano on it. The mountain is the result of some bored god deciding to play a joke on everyone. Or, some other god got angry and decided ...
Time travel works...just invented, by you. The tests prove it! After many conversations and significant planning, your epidemiologist significant other has approved your plans for time travel, for...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
So I thought about how my dragon-like species would get it's wings between the arms and legs and I figured that this would be the evolutionary path for such a creature: Hexapodal ancestor -> Q...
What coloration pattern/ technique could a large mammalian predator employ to evade detection from other mammalian predators at 100 -> 20 meter distances (or close enough so that it could sprint...
Is it possible, given a strong enough magnet, to rip out iron based molecules out of the blood stream/body of a person/animal? Would such an event be the thing that kills someone or are there other...
In the foreseeable future, a scientific community has discovered an alternate universe in which the solar system centers around a binary system of G-type suns, unlike the one G-type that ours orbit...
How does a Neandertal compare with an anatomically modern human? This diagram below is a simplification of the real answer: The average Neandertal male stood 64 inches tall, weighed 143 pounds an...
Is it possible for a large enough Ion Drive with enough power to be dangerous to other objects "down wind" of the vehicle, even at long distances (100+km)? As I understand it, ion drives accelerat...
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
Inspired by the answers to What can I add to an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere to make it unpalatable or poisonous to humans, yet stable and breathable to local creatures?, I am building a planet that ...
I have an idea for a land based mobile organism that moves and uses photosynthesis for its primary means of energy generation. Can a motile organism conceivably get enough energy from photosyntheti...
Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...
I am trying to create "black magic" with a visual black effect with lore backing (it is for PC game). How can I create this effect, either optically or neurologically? I am not talking about hue ...
I have a binary system. The primary star is F- or G-class; the secondary is K-class, 20AU away, and in a small reflection nebula (suggested here). A planet orbits the primary in the habitable zon...
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...
I have a planet orbiting one star in a binary system. When the planet is exactly between the two stars it will experience a double day; when the primary sun sets the secondary one rises, no overla...
In this question I asked about the lighting patterns from this system: A really helpful answer there explained when the planet is getting how much illumination. This question is about heat. On ea...
It is said that in dense rainforests, only 1% of sunlight (sometimes less) reaches the forest floor, which greatly restricts the types of plant and animal life that can survive there. My (limited) ...
I would like to have Earth slowly move away from the sun, taking somewhere between several months and a couple of years to reach the point where human life on the surface is no longer possible. (T...
I have a roughly Earth-like planet in a solar system some distance from ours. The atmosphere of this planet is largely similar to that of Earth, but particularly, has a somewhat higher oxygen conte...
In my alternative universe, Atlantis was a real city that existed, although it wasn't called Atlantis or founded by humans. Atlantis or rather, Dosham was a city on an isolated landmass in the nort...
My civilization is planning to being starlifting, mining a star by heating up portions of its surface and using a powerful magnetic field to channel the matter away from the star and into storage u...
Shapeshifters and mass... ever the bane of realistic science fiction. Basics: Let's say someone is changing shape (for whatever reason, voluntary or involuntary, it doesn't matter for this purpos...
Say I have a race of obligate carnivores (for simplicity, we'll say they're felinoid). They have carnivore dentition, and must eat meat as a major component of their diet, but they can also eat fru...
Vampirism. There are benefits and drawbacks, but one of the benefits is not aging. Great if you get turned in your early twenties, but... what happens if you are turned earlier? Being turned as an...
Hideaki Sena's cult classic novel, Parasite Evil and it's video game sequels revolve around the premise of mitochondria gaining sentience and usurping mankind after aeons upon aeons of multicellula...
The Diclonii are an evolutionary offshoot of modern homo sapiens from the Elfen Lied series. Most Diclonii can get distinguished from humans thanks to small bone and cartilage horns resembling cat ...
(This is the third in a series of questions, starting with Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands? and How soon does the Earth's surf...
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...
So... I'm fiddling with Yet Another Bipedal Digitigrade Species. There is tons of material on the legs, but seemingly not so much on the hands. Short Version So... I'm wondering; is it possible t...
For the purposes of this question, let's use the definition of nanotechnology from the tag wiki excerpt: "technology that works with sizes of less than 100 nanometres". An EMP can vary in frequenc...
Say we have a planet, similar to Earth, which has deposits of a naturally occuring superconductor. Perhaps have it about as common as deposits of gold - Moderately rare, but occurs in veins as oppo...
(Edited for focus; see history for previous version) Following up on this question, let's say I have a "coastal" mesa (relatively flat, high land not far from an ocean) with taller mountains behin...
I am writing a story, in which I would like to have three locations within about a half hour to an hour driving distance (assuming population, road systems and automobiles on par with the contempor...
Imagine an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star in the inner halo of the Milky Way. As a halo star, it will likely be somewhat metal-poor, having formed early in the life of the galaxy, but o...
Consider a magic system that follows the Eragon model; "doing it by magic takes just as much (biological) energy as doing it the mundane way". In Eragon, magical energy can be drawn from other liv...
(Note: This is a follow-up question to my previous one: Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands?) Thanks to clever stellar engineerin...
Short version A far future catastrophe burns/melts away large chunks of the Earth and Moon. For reasons related to my story's fantasy elements, the remains of the Moon have about one fifth their or...
I am developing a fictional planetary system in which a large gas giant planet (slightly less than the mass of Saturn), has migrated into the habitable zone during the formational years of the syst...
I'm considering a story where an exploration is devised to explore a binary system containing a black hole; the choice is Cygnus X-1, with its companion supergiant star HDE 226868. It would likely ...
Humans (even programmers :-) ) are used to having some access to natural light, but in a colony in space, on the dark side of a tidally-locked planet, or underground (for example) this won't happen...
Many stars, including the Sun, periodically display starspots, cooler areas of the surface associated with higher local concentrations of the stellar magnetic field. They can sometimes be a couple ...
or, Anatomically Correct Weebles A group of behaviorally modern humans was cut off from the rest of the earth-like planet millennia ago. (Myths hold that the separation occurred four to five ka BP...
So I build a city on the ocean floor out of handwavium, Bioshock style, but I want an easier way to get there besides taking a boat to the middle of nowhere and then getting into a submersible. I...
