General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Suppose I have a time-traveling DeLorean (of all things), and I've used it to travel back to 1955. But then I ran out of juice. Fortunately, I just happen to know that a certain clock tower will be...
I am creating a race of aliens that are amphibious and mammalian in detail, they have six tentacles, bunny ears and also fur covering their bodies. They are about 3-4 ft in length, if this species ...
As we all know, hydrogen and by extension water, gaseous, liquid or frozen, is pretty much everywhere in our solar system besides maybe Mercury. The most abundant source may be the Asteroid Belt, w...
Basically what I'm picturing is a slight variation of the usual model that relies on flux pinning (a.k.a quantum locking) to resist damage. The swarm has a macroscopic "core", some sort of electrom...
What would it look like for a ship with an Alcubierre drive to drop out of FTL both for the passengers, and to an observer (assuming they aren't obliterated)?
Since I'm getting plenty of great for my other question "How can a nine tailed fox catch its prey? Thought I might try to get ideas for both fox-fire and illusions. So far I've thought of biolumin...
This is a spin off from this question here. I want a spaceship or several spaceships to be able to move a planet out of its orbit around another planet. How big could the planet realistically be...
I'm writing a Earth history time travel story, and the main character needs to solve puzzles from each time period he visits. I'm going very far back in history and I'm concerned about being able t...
A common problem I have with modern science fiction and fantasy (Halo, Mass Effect, Narnia etc) is that the aliens and animals are somehow able to speak in perfect human speech. How does an alien o...
Had a random thought. I was wondering if a uranium deposits underwater could result in radiotrophic plants or bacteria to sustain an ecosystem. One issue with this, is radiation has very short att...
In most sci-fi (graphic) novels and films, they often depict the design of the cockpit or captain's bridge in a rather unusual way. A smaller ship such as a fighter or a transport ship usually come...
I want to have two planets orbiting each other, and there is a ring around both of them, is this possible? I know rings are formed inside the Roche limit, so if the ring lies outside the planets, ...
Suppose that I have a spherical space-ship with an approximately 1 kilometer diameter. For some reason I need to park it (unmanned) for a long period (100+ years) fairly close to the Sun. (Half the...
I imagine such a creature would be composed of thousands, possibly millions of planets, gas clouds, asteroids and stars. Almost like a giant living engine powered entirely by gravity. Obviously t...
I am writing up a system of wormhole-based gates to allow "fast travel" in a far-future setting. My description is an extrapolation of the way I understand a flatlander's experience of the followin...
I was wondering whether a planet might exist that has life forms with up to five sexes, with a single organism having three different and independent, functional sets of sexual organs. Presuming in...
Original post: Imagine a world in which both left- and right-handed chirality appeared and evolved into a variety of complex organisms comparable to post-Cambrian Explosion Earth (both plant an...
Assuming it was possible to create an artificial magnetic shield on the moon, would it be possible that a sufficiently powerful field could hold onto an atmosphere despite the low gravity. Thanks
Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter ...
I'm trying to figure out how fast my tiny critters from a previous question, Mistraille, can travel. Why? It's not that I'm detail orientated and want to know the exact decimal point of speed they ...
Let's assume the reactor takes up about 4 vertical kilometers and has the same radius as the ship (4km). This gives you a volume of about 2.01e11 m^3, which given about 3-5% of the reactor's estima...
Looking at the topographical map of the two main islands of Britain--England to the east and Ireland to the west--is looking at two and a half million years of ice sculpting, grinding and melting...
Imagine a starship with a tonnage of 600,000Â metric tons that must maintain an average speed of 10km/s to remain in Near Earth Orbit, that's probably going to consume much more energy than simply ...
An O'Neill cylinder for those not in the know is basically a space habitat consisting of a rotating cylinder 32km long and 8km in diameter. I want to turn one into an actual spacecraft rather than ...
I've always liked living spaceships, but it seems to me that the animal kingdom would make far inferior spaceships to the plant kingdom. With that in mind, what does this tree-ship have to be made ...
My hero is a synthetic biologist of an ancient race that achieved spaceflight billions years ago. His bio ship could achieve high fraction of speed of light, and he could repair or modify his body ...
There have been a few questions on mobile plants on this site and even more on their intelligence, but one that has not been asked so far is related to the lifeblood of creatures: blood. Inside of ...
Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep re...
Let's say my eyes were ripped out in some horrible accident, and were replaced with cameras. Over the years, the cameras get better and better... 4k... 8k... 16k... etc. Is there a limit to how hig...
I am trying to build a truly alien form of life, and easily found several replacements for water, such as methane or ammonia, with there own unique advantages and disadvantages (Wikipedia has a won...
Follow up to this question. Is it possible to translate the inputs from the optical nerve to something readable by a computer?
Flux pinning (also known as quantum locking): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning This technique has been discussed on this site before as a method for creating nearly indestructible supe...
I'm developing a world in the near future where a start-up company develops an artificial womb. Now well-off people could grow their children from their eggs & sperm. My story is about couples ...
Technology: Comparable to early XXIst century, except self-driving vehicles are already available. On a tidally locked planet most of the models that I can found (ex. http://www.meteo.mcgill.ca/~t...
I have a habitable moon orbiting a gas giant, and there is another moon orbiting the planet on a closer orbit. The cultures on the near-side of the further, habitable moon use the transit of the cl...
On Earth and other planets, the surfaces spherical shape and rotation lead to a Coriolis effect or force which causes large storms and weather systems to rotate (clockwise in the Northern hemispher...
In the 22nd century C.E. human already colonised the entire Solar system, and Earth becomes a dangerous place to live because of the spread of deadly synthetic virus that kills every animals and sc...
I'm designing a "adaptive" humans where repeated physical contact, skin on skin or exchange of bodily fluids, over prolonged period affects the development of the individuals. The effect I want t...
I don't trust anyone when I conduct my special line of business. I do my thing, face-to-face, verbally. I hand over a sealed envelope of cash and I'm done. I don't want to be recorded, I don't w...
I wanna have a scene where the protagonists see the gray goo excreting human skeletons because they can't use the calcium in them for anything. But is this true? Would a self-replicating machine re...
Just wondering both out of curiosity and something to add to my book, how do the nine tailed fox's dreads grow and developed? This is what I wrote so fa...
Is it easier to build colonies within the solar system than to send colonies to other stars? Logically, wouldn't we have cities on Pluto sooner than we will have travelled to an exoplanet?
I know that this would, perhaps, be biologically impossible, but suppose it's possible, how would such person see? I know that cats have a vertical adjustable pupil and goats have a horizontal one...
In my setting the known worlds have recently begun coming out of a medieval stasis after about two thousand years; the lucky worlds at least. Prior to the event that destroyed their technology and ...
So, like my question says, I've been wondering if a rocky planet, that looks much like our planet from the surface (oceans, forests, mountains, ext) could be possible. I've read through a good nu...
I'm well aware that a Sun-like star is incapable of producing a supernova at the end of its life. However, would removing the core or a fraction of it, trigger an explosion from the star collapsing...
Slenderman is unarguably the most iconic creation of the early internet. It has led to games, stories and even books. But is his design evolutionarily possible? What evolutionary pressures would le...
Consider a race of humanoid, winged tree-dwellers. They can fly and generally spend most of their time either in the air or climbing around their tree-homes in the upper reaches of a forest. In ord...
Say the moon is drifting further away from Earth at an astonishing rate of 3.14159km each year due to the crazy tides, the rising sea level and shielding us from stray asteroids. Given 150 years ti...
Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces of universe but along with electromagnetism tends to dominate most of the macro world phenomenon. But what would happen if the force of gravitatio...
