General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Set in the 23rd Century, space tourism has matured. The scientists gathered at a summit to discuss plans for terraforming Mars, therefore the Mars colonists living inside a temporary biosphere will...
From this chart it appears that the star types closest to our own are K-type (oranger, a little cooler, and less than half as bright) and F-type (bluer, a little warmer, and much brighter). If I w...
Assuming a fairly earth-like planet, perhaps, higher in minerals and resources. And a race of highly industrious, highly cooperative, very enginuitive people. Their science is comparable to our own...
A long time ago I heard about a Medieval Irish pirate that used a Trebuchet mounted on his ship (no I am not sure what he was or where I heard it). The idea of a ship acting like a double pendulum...
There are a number of humanoid creatures in fantasy that we more or less take for granted. Humans are almost a necessity for us to be able to relate to the story and they interact with dwarves, elv...
In a relationship between two species, could a certain relationship become harmful to both involved species? Keep in mind, I am looking for a relationship between two species, preferably of the ki...
I'm working on a graphic novel that deals with this particular topic but I'm unsure if something like this can happen. Some Nebulae have a luminosity 1000s of times brighter than our sun while dark...
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...
Related, and in continuation to The Challenge of Controlling an Advanced AI. At this point in my story, I'm assuming a got-out-of-the-box-AI scenario, where no singleton (a single self-coherent dom...
In Science Fiction we often see the protagonists exploring all sorts of strange new worlds with no apparent discomfort to the variations in gravity. What factors determine how strong the gravity w...
Several light-years away, an alien species has just discovered Mars. They deem it a candidate for colonization, so they launch a Voyager-like probe to get a closer look. They have no idea that ther...
I am attempting to create fictional, stable P-Type binary system, featuring a gas giant in a stable orbit, with a habitable Earth-like moon. "Is a Jupiter-sized planet plausible in a habitable zone...
Would it be possible to modify a human to be able to survive in space without protective gear? Genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancement are both allowed, although when not in space the perso...
OK, so scientists have found a great new substance: That substance makes you think ten times as fast! The advantages are obvious. However, as every medicine, this pill will have side effects. Ther...
I'm trying to setup a non-real scenario that doesn't break suspension of disbelief too much past the original idea. But so long as things keep consistency it should be fine. So you are flying a fi...
Imagine a space cataclysm, where the Earth is hit by a deadly wave sterilizing all life of the bright side, but the dark side is more or less intact (at least the atmosphere and life are still in p...
Going off of my other question here, I guessed that a cube planet could work out. BUT, would it be possible for the planet to exist and function as a (relatively) normal planet with life on it with...
Instead of trying to tether the Moon, can we somehow harness the Moon's kinetic energy, the same way we do wind? If so, how is this possible?
Can life exist on planets as barren as Mercury? How would it survive? It seems like it couldn't. Mercury is very hot, would any life break down becuase of the heat? What other challenges face life ...
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 ...
I was considering the creation a long-lived plant which generates harmful (to other species) radiation. If it could be immune to its own radiation, the primary benefit would be that the plants offs...
In a story I'm working on, there are some creatures that eat hair, wool, fur, and anything similar. They're not mites or insects, but are (very roughly) the size of humans. Is there any realistic...
Water is different from air, and sound waves propagate through water in a different way than they do in air (caused in part by interactions with the bottom of the body of water). For a society livi...
I've always been curious whenever I heard the mother wererabbit sings a popular folksong to the young, there is a particular line in the lyric that seems to puzzle me. It goes likes this: "up up a...
We live on this lovely, assumed naturally shaped almost sphere (accepted as an oblate spheriod) that makes everything really nice and easy when it comes to things like constant gravity and horizon ...
My question regards mirroring, specifically what you would expect from a universe that was mirrored from the perspective of our own, regarding its interactions with our own. The mirroring works exa...
Conspiracy theorists love to talk about a group called the Illuminati that pull the strings of world events. While there have been several real (and many more imaginary) Illuminati groups, what wo...
By now, everyone is familiar with the remarkable achievements of special-purpose AIs like Deep Blue and Watson. Now, it is clear that as our accumulated knowledge of algorithmic methods and of the ...
Recently I had an idea for a world setting. A large part of this world focuses around a habitable satellite the size of Earth orbiting a Super-Jupiter. The fact that it's a moon is pretty integral ...
Assuming a civilization has the technology and capability to build a worldship, a planet that doubles as a spacecraft, installs an FTL drive on it and has the energy to power it, what would the eff...
This is inspired by The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. In the book - in the far future - humans have split into two races, the Eloi, who live aboveground, and the Morlocks, who live underground. The...
Suppose the universe contained a species of planet sized turtles1 that can travers at least interstellar space. How can I explain (without invoking magic) that these turtles are not spherical? If ...
Can there be a different kind of mathematics with different sets of rules? That is without inference and axioms. One attempt might be Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", but I am not sure that...
We have modern humans found in a near future, first world country on Earth. The primary technological advancements are in the form of extremely cheap and fast genome sequencing ($10USD/genome) and...
As the title suggests, what happens to a planet geologically and geographically over time? This question came to mind from the many sessions of Civilization I have played where when you set up a c...
In a short story that I read (don't have the link, but the short story itself is not relevant to this question), it is set about a millennia from now, where humans have long since made contact with...
Imagine a world with a very wacky magnetic field, the magnetic poles are not aligned at the top of the axial tilt and the sun is active enough to cause huge northern lights each night. I know elec...
Almost all of our terrestrial furniture is designed and depends on gravity. Beds to lie down in, chairs to sit down on, tables to place things on top. None of these would work in a zero-G environme...
My world has a huge crater (4400 miles in diameter) on a world that's roughly earth equivalent (so a circumference of 25000 miles). The native population doesn't need to know how it was formed but...
I'm starting a whole new planet for a story and would like it to have an orange sky during the day. At a basic level (I am not a smart man) what chemical composition would be most conducive to Ora...
One possible approach how to estimate extend of space colonization is to define costs of it and then estimate the investments the governments and organizations would be willing to pay. In an excell...
If a pair of twins developed when their mother's egg split in half and they were fertilized by different sperm, could one of them develop situs inversus? The child with the condition would be male,...
I'm trying to design a food chain. For the sake of argument lets say it's based on flying creatures over a particular mountain range. Sun Plants/Fungus etc Tiny Insects Small Birds Hawks Large Ape...
Inspired by this comment: What if every animal as large as, or larger than, a ice-age vintage horse, except for those that are acclimated to cold climates, went extinct during the last Ice Age? I...
On earth most of our sealife is fishlike (excluding a few other species such as squid/octopus). As far as I'm aware there are no legged creatures which live solely in the sea. In my world I'd like...
Similar, but a bit more broad, to Would a zombie apocalypse be possible if a zombie existed? A secret lab (owned by a private company) near Chicago creates a virus strain called 'ZB01' (to be so...
Making things bigger or smaller is common in speculative fiction (giant ants, tiny people, planets bigger than stars, and stars smaller than light bulbs.) What general principles should be kept in...
I'm looking for a rock from which my island is constructed. It needs to be: Either created from the sea or via intense pressure/heat Capable of trapping layers of gas beneath it White(ish) I wa...
So some aliens come, put everyone in space suits, and drop us one the moon. The aliens are super smart, and the space suits have enough air for a year, and can't be damaged easily, and only upon fr...
Would any creature ever need to evolve a second (or multiple) brain(s)? If so, under what conditions, why, and what implications would it have on the creature's intelligence? Note that while an o...
