General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Set in the not so distant future, space travel becomes commonplace but is limited within the heliosphere. I'm thinking since it is fuel efficient and more economical to use gravity assist to slow d...
Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is vo...
I came across this interesting weapon by H.G. Wells, from his novel, The World Set Free, about a special type of atomic bomb that will explode indefinitely. Here is a description on Wikipedia: ...
I would like to apologize in advance if this comes off as laziness or a poor attempt at trying to get someone to do my work for me. That is not my intention. This is my fictional continent of Digg...
In my narrative I have these aliens that don't experience time, they don't remember and don't predict events, which makes them completely reactionary. This is supposed to make them alien and diffic...
If hawks or eagles (or any creature that can fly like a hawk) had the same ability to pronounce words as parrots but also had consciousness (what I mean by that is that they can scout and describe ...
Some kind of WW3/resource war event happens. The majority of human beings (definately over 90%, so billions) are killed by a series of bioweapon diseases used by both sides or die in the ensuing co...
Is it possible for a large enough structure built near a small enough subduction zone to become lodged in it or buried very slowly as opposed to taken underground? If so, how big would the structu...
I have seen some discussions about Middle Earth's Erebor, the "lonely mountain" and how it really isn't lonely. How could a true "Lonely Mountain" (a single peak in the middle of a vast plain) form...
There is a concern that's been brought up only recently--steel and concrete buildings are environmentally wasteful. In further clarification, they waste away too much greenhouse gases. And consid...
What I'm looking at doing is a small game where you land on a planet, and the atmosphere is not survivable by a human being, but there is local life. Over the course of the game, terraforming has t...
If it were possible to build a giant geodesic dome tens of miles in diameter, what effect would it have on nearby weather? If built in an arid climate like the Sahara or Australia, would it be li...
Is it plausible that a virus could contaminate the entire ocean to where humans that enter it are highly likely to contract the virus? It doesn't necessarily have to be the whole ocean what with th...
In the movie, Arrival, there is an advance alien race that arrives on are planet, with a few landing in specific places. The aliens species are called "heptapods" (by our standards). They have 7 a...
Radiation is the ultimate bane of all organic life. Its particles punch holes in our DNA, causing mutations and giving us cancer. But, is there a way to make an organism that is unable to get radia...
There is a secret ship and it is used by pirates as a recharging point. It has a nuclear reactor as a power source and other ships are using electricity. Let's assume in this world stealth technolo...
An alien automatic "beacon" tries to warn us about some imminent danger. It does so with launching a succession of large "veils" in front of their star so we can detect them via the transit method....
In the waters of Iceland, the natives have their own word for a particular brand of cetaceans--"Illhveli", literally "evil whales". And the bloodthirstiest of them all is Raudkembingur, Icelandic ...
Inspired by this question, which is asking how to deny land for several hundreds of years after a global nuclear holocaust, I would like to know, given only nuclear weapons, and especially salted b...
I'm attempting to flesh out the history to a sci-fi novel I'm currently writing, which is set in the future. Several hundred years prior to the beginning of the story, lack of resources lead to s...
As the tittle says what would the ecosystem look like if predator and prey were to switch places? The cause of this change is either handwavium or a very unlucky sorcerer. The transformation is mai...
In my fantasy setting, slimes are a species of giant (about eight cubic feet), single-celled amoeba. They have the ability to freely change their state and viscocity, being able to "melt" into a sl...
In a scenario where the Soviets didn't manage to stop corium from reaching the water reservoirs underneath the plant, causing a detonation equivalent to a nuclear explosion, what would life in the ...
In my current writing project, I'm working in a universe where mysterious alien beings travel not directly through space, but through planetary atmospheres via wormholes. These aliens shotgunned th...
I've got an intelligent, stone-age species that looks a bit like an Azhdarchid pterosaur. It is around the size of a large eagle. They have a proboscis and a finger on each wing used for manipulati...
This is a bit of a continuation of my previous question, could a form of acoustic levitation be used as artificial gravity? In that question, I referenced how some scientists use acoustic levitat...
What is a possible event${^*}$ that would cause a spike in the speed of $^{235}$U fission and reduce its average concentration in ore worldwide? As I understand the physics of the process, it is i...
Question: does a liquid or gelatinous substance exist that once outside a body could solidify and be hard enough to be used once as a tool? The setting is low fantasy without magic, yet with creat...
Set in the distant future, human is transitioning to a type 3 advanced civilization on a Kardashev scale in about a hundred years or two. We have nearly exhausted the energy from our Sun and severa...
If orbiting in the L2 lagrange point of a large planet (doesn't actually have to be a hot Jupiter, just large enough to fully shadow the smaller planet), how close could you get to the host star be...
The praised Dutch book "Koning van Katoren" features an 18 year old who wants to become king of his country of Katoren, which had been under the regency of half a dozen evil ministers for his whole...
Assume I have a human colony on The Moon. A meteor fragment gets by the defense system and smashes into a portion of the dome, let's say the hole is 1 meter in diameter, it's big. Safety measures...
Thousands of years ago (approximately 12 000 years), a group of humans (let's call them First Group) reached out and settled in forests with huge trees (Tall trees : atmospheric pressure) which mad...
The only limiting factors are that it has to be in an area near to the ocean and to mountains (Similar distance as the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal), and that it has to be in a hospitable place, ...
Can a planet with a dense atmosphere composed mainly of sulfur dioxide have a blue sky like Earth's due to Rayleigh scattering? Or would the composition change the color of the sky? I mean, it's we...
Is it theoretically possible to extract all ice and water from moons with subsurface oceans like Ganymede or Enceladus? What would the consequences of isostatic rebounding be if this was done on ...
I'm designing a tidally locked world around a red dwarf star. The habitable ring is an Earth analogue. The atmosphere and gravity are similar to Earth's, and we're going to pretend the wind is negl...
Imagine a visiting alien accidentally spilled a bucket of inverse matter (a substance I made up just now) on the planet Earth and this stuff will annihilate with ordinary matter to produce neutrino...
Would it be possible for life to develop on a planet with a highly elliptical orbit? (Similar to a comet, but possibly less extreme.) If so, what conditions would be necessary and what would the li...
If humans lived on the inside of the earth's crust, what would happen if they climbed mountains? These mountains would stretch toward the burning center of the Earth. Would gravity get stronger the...
Taking into account the some limitations of the square-cube law, biology, and aviation, I have tried to make a dragon-like creature and a hominid that participate in a symbiotic relationship. For ...
Time is not a constant, Albert Einstein proved that much. Time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or b...
I'm looking for a more economical and efficient method of making steel for my project Death Star Unlimited, a mega infrastructure orbiting Mars with a mass of 500,000,000 metric ton give or take 1%...
my question is as follows: How cold temperatures can withstand a genetically modified person who has the opportunity for a long time (more than a day ) at low temperatures (below -30 ° Celsius ) t...
So, the X-Seed 4000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Seed_4000) is a rather large lad. The tallest building ever fully realized. Let's just say that, in five decades, they decide to actually build ...
I'm considering making one "creature" that is encountered in a story a sentient star in an alternate universe. I hope to hand-wave a little of the more complicated stuff by saying "this universe's ...
I want my planet to be the last planet in a universe to host life forms. I expect a rough estimation as answer. Thanks.
I am building a city in the sky; it floats thanks to hot air balloons and hydrogen. The main issue I have is how to make it grow, as this is not some kind of giant structure to start, it is a small...
I am working on creating a species where they have hollow horns (the horns have evolved to the point of being mostly for display and minor neck protection so they do not have to be super sturdy) so...
From the superpower wiki I heard that vapor is a medium for heat exchange, but when I did some research on it I found that heat exchange might need a closed system. In a fictional world how would a...
