General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Back home, one ice age during the two and a half million years of the Pleistocene lasted a total of 100,000 years, ninety thousand of intense cold followed by ten thousand of milder interglacial we...
I just stumbled across this website the other day, and this is my first time posting, so apologies if the question is too vague or improperly worded. I am trying to build an all ocean world. I'm ...
Let's assume a planet like ours, same size and same conditions. My characters live at approximately 60° North, in a boreal forest, with a climate much like the Nordic countries in Europe. They are...
I am trying to estimate how much calories is available in form of plants to mammal herbivores per square meter per year in optimal conditions. By optimal conditions I mean that the climate is tempe...
For 10,000 years since Beringia, the bridge connecting Asia to North America, had vanished, the Asian and Native American races show great distinction. But if Beringia has persisted to this day, c...
As the question title suggests, I'm looking to find out how long a human could live for if they didn't age in their sleep. Assume that this ability kicks in at about the age of 16 and they have com...
In a world where duodecimals (base 12) have never been invented or thought of, how will decimals replace them? We now know that we owe everything related to duodecimals to the ancient Egyptians an...
What could make polar areas of an earth-like planet habitable (non desert) and what side effect would it cause (i.e. how such planet would differ to contemporary earth)?
In a system where 2 planets of similar mass are orbiting around a common barycenter, would the following configuration considered stable on the long run? They orbit at 1,6 AU from their star The ...
Picture this...the sun sets over an orangish red desert, in the distance you see a town rising from three hills, a river snaking between them. The buildings rise from the hills and spread between ...
We are living on a planet where governments are constantly trying to reduce the amount of pollution and emissions in a bid to slow down (or reverse) global warming. But imagine a world where the Ea...
Imagine the speed of light is 100 times that in our universe. Light from the moon takes about 1/100th of a second, the sunlight reaches our eyes in about 4 seconds, from nearby Alpha Centauri in ab...
A race of aliens exists on a distant planet whose biological functioning depends on absorbing a specific type of energy. They have what is essentially an antenna through which they passively absorb...
This is an extension of my first question, and precisely as Jim2B suggests, I want enough time to pass on my network of space stations for their inhabitants to forget why they're there, how they go...
In this scenario, corals, sponges and bryozoans have been extinct for 65 million years. In their place as reefbuilders are echinoderms, bivalves, barnacles and worms of the infraclass canalipalpat...
We're a lovely, ethical, near-future population of Earthlings, and prepared to begin terraforming Mars (yes, I went there: set it aside). We have just stumbled on remnants of an alien civilizati...
I've been interested in binary systems lately, and I was recently wondering what Earth would be like if it was in a binary orbit with another Earth-like planet. Both planets exhibit the following ...
Hanorane (han-or-a-ney) is a moon with a dynamic surface covered in charged sand particles that drift in massive rivers suspended by electrostatic levitation. The only solid ground is the worn an...
Question inspired by movies Minority Report and Her The year is 2050, USA: The future is "realistically optimistic": We, the humans, have steady progress in computers and AI: We use wearable AI, w...
I am trying to build a planetary system with a maximum number of earth/near earth like planets/moons. What would the maximum number of possible earth like planets be? I am assuming that some woul...
In a setting <200 years in the future could airborne military vehicles(fighter-jets), mass-transportation vehicles (planes, buses etc.), and personal vehicles (cars, motorcycles) use something ...
Is it possible that any life on earth could evolve to live off a liquid which is not water? Something like oil or some other natural liquid?
Siberia was formed as a result of a massive hotspot volcano (Siberian Traps) ~250 million years ago (mya) and so was India ~64 mya (Deccan Traps). So, I was working on a random planet generator fo...
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...
Let us assume that we have a moon with a reasonable iron core enough that it can retain atmosphere, (as per this question), now let us further assume that the people who settle on the moon are shor...
It's the year 2050, and you're the planner for a manned mission to Pluto - New New Horizons. The mission will take 5 years round trip, and there are 40 members of the crew. What's the most effici...
In the classic idea of a Tokamak Fusion Reactor, plasma races around an electromagnetic track. Is it plausible to "spin" off some of this rapidly moving plasma and direct it to nozzles for use in...
A top secret organization is planning to introduce a New World Order and replaces every human being (homo sapiens sapiens) with the evolved form of sub species of homo sapiens. Meaning we are sub s...
I've been inspired to ask this question based off of my answer, and the resulting discussion, to this question: Why would a species of intelligent parthenogenetics invent males? However, this is a...
Concerning long term effects of zero gravity on humans living in space compared with those living on super earths with 1.5x to 2x G, how could the gravity differences cause reproductive failure amo...
This is another question pertaining to my super-intelligent humanoids: Assuming that their race successfully developed extremely advanced, easily available prosthetics, while they were morally of ...
What would happen to a planet if it was really massive, like something around the size of the sun (likely made of asteroid materials)? What kind of environment might it have? What would happen to ...
This is in my world of balloons and zeppelins, war and peace, day and night. Sleeping may be the least important thing but it is still important. On this world, the day and night cycle is 8.89 of t...
Bioships - biological spaceships - appear in a lot of SF, so I thought I'd have a go. However, in most books they are depicted as more powerful than conventional tech in all and any regard. This ...
Are there any valuable deposits (gold ore, iron ore, silver, copper, gemstones) which are likely to be found in or around excavation sites for building materials like limestone, sandstone, slate or...
By some combination of changes in both the environment, and human biology, humans evolved on Earth in a way that basically makes them 100% unable to alter their minds using traditional methods: A...
In my world, Earth populated the Moon. Even if people are concealed in stations they got to go out from time to time (to explore or repair things that robot can't). My question is: Is it possible...
If we had Full-Body Immersion MMORPGs, how would morale-boosting and morale-lowering skills work for players? By that, I mean, how would the game forcibly make players more or less confident, even ...
As a child, I was always fascinated by the propensity of water going down a drain to form a vortex. I created a world with a global ocean where there was a narrow body of land running north-south...
Bob escaped from his exploding spaceship in the world's most ghetto escape pod - an airtight metal box, with only some respiratory gear ($\text{O}_2$ tank, $\text{CO}_2$ filter) as company. Now he'...
Being on the autism spectrum is often described as a feeling of being on "The Wrong Planet" So I'm wondering what the right planet might be like... For those that are unfamiliar: Social conventi...
(Disclaimer: I tried this question earlier in the scifi site as well as real science sites, and was told should be on topic here) I'm writing a speculative story about aliens coming to earth - and...
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...
My protagonist, let's call her Alice, must acquire a priceless artifact, located deep inside an ancient temple. If this were a ruin, the exercise would be academic, but the Temple was protected b...
I'm currently working on a world where there are people that live in data bases (basically a computer with no internet connection). They link to a human for life and and can record everything the ...
I have made my billions here in the present day, and I'd like to have a permanent underwater settlement. It is about as useless as the Mars One mission (yes, I went there), but some people may c...
Diamonds are carbon. Plants take in CO2 and use the carbon. Chemically, could the right kind of plant have diamonds for berries, or is there some other limiting factor?
It would be useful for a story I'm working on to color the world or various dominant parts of it red. I'm trying to look into the following alternatives, but am open to further suggestions. Essenti...
I'm picturing a world with a permanent, dark, overcast sky, but I'm wondering how dark it can be before photosynthesis is no longer an option. It looks like there are a good number of plants that ...
