General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
As title suggests, what is the size limit by volume for a rocky planet, if any? Some ideas are discussed here, but I'm wondering if there is more concrete, expert evidence to point either way. If p...
Could a Dwarven society as described by Tolkien mythology actually work? Dwarves for the purposes of this question are short, stout, bearded men and women who live primarily underground. They have ...
In the world I have been working on my planet has a gelatinous mass of cells coexisting but not a technical single creature. It bridges the gap between single celled and complex and it grows in siz...
One property of life is communication. In particular sound is very useful due to it's non-directional nature. An alarm call is heard by every member of the pack and warns them immediately of the da...
At the moment it seems we have two different types of planet We have Rocky planets with a solid core that occupies most of the mass of the planet We have Gas Giants that contain a solid core but ...
I am creating a fantasy world where a given race is mystically tied to the planet. Predominately this race will be earth-dwellers, quite happy and content to burrow underground, but I'd like some o...
In my world, I would like to have a certain configuration and I wonder if it's plausible or not. There is a continent with a climate similar to the Amazonian basin, covered by a very dense forest...
I'm thinking a planet orbiting a nearby star colonized by human settlers sometime in the not near, but not too distant future. How small could a planet be while still standing in as a relatively c...
In my reading of sci-fi I came across a fascinating concept: an alien race called the Chromatics that had a partially photonic nervous system. They were described as having very fast reflexes. Now ...
The title is pretty self-explanatory. How powerful does a computer have to be before it has the hardware capability to simulate and emulate a human mind in real-time? I'm leaving the question of ...
In a fantasy world (a D&D setting, basically), how would an open underwater town populated by an assortment of mer-people deal with waste disposal? A few details: the town in question is a part...
Most fantasy worlds have large creatures living in a world with humans and other races. In Tamriel, the province of Skyrim has giants, mammoth and even dragons roaming freely. The Lord of the ring ...
My source of inspiration and imagination... StarGate Atlantis Tv-Series: Wraith hive-ships were mainly biological. Genesis Rising Pc-game: The game itself, storyline, human technology, etc based ar...
Where should I shoot a solar flare that is at least as strong as the solar flare(s) in 2012 for the most death? What else would happen? And how much death, in percentage of world population, would ...
Based on the previous answer here, concerning hammer-proof armor, one of the easiest way to mitigate blunt force trauma, both from swinging hammers and falling off buildings, are with some sort of ...
In a world where three or four, at least, other sentient, intelligent civilisations (of non-human species) with a few planets each exist, earthly humans are getting more advanced. We've finally got...
Like the title states, how would it be possible for the same species to live on multiple planets (before space travel is invented)? Basically, a civilization invents space travel, meets aliens, and...
What physical attributes of atmosphere and flora could cause clouds to form on a regular basis below the canopy of a forest between one-fourth and one-half the height of the forest, without impacti...
Suppose we have a planetary system in orbit around a Class O hypergiant star of 225 solar masses (larger than all but R136a1, the largest star we currently know of), 32,000 times as bright as our s...
Suppose we have a planet whose atmosphere has roughly the same gaseous proportions as Earth, but helium replaces nitrogen, and has a strong hydrogen presence in the upper atmosphere; has a gravitat...
What could drive a human civilization to use base-12 system? As far as I know there have been such civilizations and they probably used their phalanges to count (instead of their fingers). I have f...
Time travel on movies and tv always say they were able to tell the year by looking at the stars. But how? For example Voyager goes back in 1996 and Ensign Kim says astrometrics puts them in the ye...
With the technologies that we have got, is it possible to completely migrate 1/3rd of the world's population to another planet which has characteristics similar to those of earth ? Possibly it will...
Imagine a child of mixed race, one parent is human and one is an alien who has some ability humans do not have, for the sake of argument telepathy. I'm assuming there is some advanced medical assis...
The sun inexplicably ceases to give light. It's still there and continues to have a gravitational pull keeping us in orbit. The solar system continues to operate as normal, but the sun has gone dar...
I am designing a world where humans have somehow developed or have been put onto a planet in a primitive state. This world has only been habitable for about ten thousand years and therefore only ha...
I am currently creating a world from scratch, and while I have a map, I still need to figure out distribution of natural resources. For resources like fossil fuels, while many do appear in deserts...
Let's say you were living on a planet near (but not too near) a black hole. I'm thinking of the planet Miller in the movie Interstellar. Obviously there are some strong tidal forces. But at this d...
Guns, Germs and Steel is a very thought-provoking book. One of it's theorems is that certain cultures - largely due to geographical reasons - were incapable of getting past certain technological a...
I've just come across a subplot in Jack McDevitt's Firebird where the earth-like planet Villanueva and the rest of its planet system was moving towards an unspecified dust cloud that made the plane...
I'm working on a space-fantasy setting and one of the cosmological quirks is that the cosmos, instead of being a vacuum, is actually filled with a gaseous substance. As a result, the entire cosmos ...
Questions about how to feed a large population keep popping up on this website quite frequently. One obvious option is farming. But how many people can you feed per square-kilometer of farmland? I...
TL;DR then scroll down, genius This question is set in a planet with a human population, about the size of Earth with earth-like formations, that has appropriate lifeforms to the conditions follow...
If it is even possible, what would the Goldilocks zone be like - in fact is such a system even possible of holding life - around a binary black hole? Could it have planets orbiting it? EDIT 1: Oh ...
My setting takes place in a densely forested continent, with huge trees and rushing rivers. The problem is that this forest stretches on for thousands of miles, only occasionally punctuated by some...
I am interested of a fictional future world where people can walk into a bar, order a drink with the flavors they want, and as that drink flows through their system, their DNA is modified. An exam...
If humans were to vanish completely from the Earth rapture-style, other primates would possibly slowly evolve and eventually take our place (in a few million years?), since they have both the basic...
I recently wrote a silly little flash fiction piece in which some party-goers go hide in a bunker under an apartment building in NYC because of a "megablizzard." In said silly flash fiction, I buri...
Ornithopters are vehicles that fly by flapping their wings, rather than trough use of a propeller or jet engine. They've been proposed and built many times throughout history, and are a common elem...
It appears that multiple planets existing in the same orbit is theoretically possible. In that case, how would we go about building a second Earth-sized planet and inserting it into some position i...
Okay, this is unrelated to my current world building in any way whatsoever, but... I have always been a huge fan of the humongous mecha genre (bonus points to anyone who actually recognized my ava...
Okay so we have the case: My world is Earth-like(Spherical) Slight fantasy, but also some science It has a normal day-night cycle and seasons I need for a particular area to make the sky somewh...
On a planet with Earth-like attributes in every way, including physics and geography, what repercussions would there be for a relatively deep 'dent' in one quadrant of the spherical body? This is o...
I define "Venusian world" to be high pressure, thick atmosphere, and high temperatures. Assume the atmosphere is similar to Venus, but whatever gets the same effect and supports life is fine. I'm ...
Humans have grown fat, complacent and cock-sure of the certainty of future progress, arrogantly expecting to build minds in their own image. They even dream of building themselves a city, with a to...
A frog has already been levitated without any magnetic object attached to it. I'm wondering if it's possible to reverse this for transportation purposes, by having a vehicle levitate itself using m...
Assuming only plausible advancements in science, a Martian colony is established before the end of the century. (Sooner if possible). What materials would be needed in regular shipments from Earth?...
A character needs to build a computer out of raw materials in a bronze age. He has a nano scale factory, so manufacturing chips and such from silicon is possible, but I'm not sure of the best way t...
In a civilisation similar to humans (although not necessarily humanoid) living on a planet the size of Earth, could the whole civilisation (no limits on size, although I was thinking a few thousand...
Imagine a very long bridge (Visbi Bridge - named after the designer) across an immense canyon - really almost a wide deep gorge -use on an earth-like world. My concept is that part of the support o...
