General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building and the proposed Nazi Volkshalle are cited to be "big enough for weather systems to form inside them". The building has at least 10,000 tons of air conditioni...
Stories with shrinking never seen to take into account the Square-Cube law. I'm trying to consider what it would take to do a story like this that actually fully addresses the square cube law. I ...
I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of t...
What if, sometime in the next say 600 years, humanity develops a device capable of manipulating the four fundamental forces in the area around it. (For example, a handheld device could work in a ra...
Characteristics: has close to 80.000km in diameter The atmosphere is composed of: -30% hydrogen (cold gas planets have hydrogen but it makes sense it exists in a rocky planet?) -20% oxygen -...
Gas giants can generate heat via the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism. It's oft-repeated that Jupiter actually generates more heat internally via this method than it receives from the Sun. Scale this mec...
So the world has been destroyed. Pick your poison. We have probably 300 different scenarios lying around here somewhere. What's Left: The world is a desolate wasteland, dry and crispy and barr...
Apologies; it just didn't seem like an appropriate question for Earth Science or Biology. Let me know if I'm incorrect. Maybe Physics? If all the ice, permafrost, ice caps, etc. melted due to glo...
What are realistic time-schedule expectations for far-future terraforming and developing earth-like plant and animal/fish/bird populations on distant planets, by means of robotic space probes with ...
What underground, for example burrowing or tunnelling creatures on earth, have underground organisation/societies, that are intricate enough for interesting narrative features, for example friendsh...
A question about portals from the 'portal' games. In the games, pairs of flat, identically sized and shaped, effectively for simplicity rectangular, portals, that lay flat on surfaces, link two pl...
Visiting the Worldbuilding site plays with my creativity and imagination. So I am going to describe the dream I had: I am member of a different (alien) culture, from a different star system. Also,...
In a video game series called Portal, we are given a gun, which shoots two portals: an orange one and a blue one. These portals have the following properties: Anything that goes into the orange ...
My time traveller has a maybe 20-minutes-into-the-future smartphone and laptop. They can store large amounts of data, on the Petabytes level or higher. The time traveller can effectively store the ...
I am not a writer. I have never written any story and I have no idea of what it takes to get this idea into any meaningful narrative. It's more of a thought experiment for me and I formally give th...
Imagine a species (the cause is largely irrelevant - could be alien meddling for all I know) that is Homo sapiens in all except one detail: they have additional organ which is kind of like gills - ...
Background story: In near future (max 10 years from now) mega-rich person suffers yet unknown disease. He obviously employs every doctor possible and spends loads from his fortune on researching, w...
Could you build a ring around the earth, so that it would just sit in the sky? I'm not talking a geostationary orbit of rubble like the rings around Saturn, but a solid structure just high enough t...
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?
Assuming that you had: some sort of amazing power plant on the moon that can create an unlimited amount of power a similarly amazing solar panel on earth that can receive an unlimited amount of p...
I've been hearing and reading about that solar flare in 2012 that could have sent us back to the 18th century, by causing huge geomagnetic storms which would have prevented (every?) electricity-bas...
Related to the this question about not going SPLAT. That one was for conventional travel through space at high speeds. Now I want to know about how things would work with an Alcubierre drive. I...
Related Question : Can we 'beam' energy from the moon? I was wondering if instead of 'beam'ing energy from the moon, could it be possible to extend a power cable from the earth to the moon? If th...
It's easy enough to figure out how a species might evolve a third biological gender in general (e.g. some sort of asexual drones/workers, ala insects). But what I want to build is a system where t...
The basic question is: When is a location good enough to build a space centre on it? Some info to the function of the space-centre: The space centre has a lot of traffic, also humans. I imagine...
Other than photosynthesis being an issue, if the Earth's surface became inhospitable and humans were forced to live underground, what biological changes would they be expected to go through to adap...
I want to make a superhero that can control all forms of energy. From what I've heard you can do a lot like, manipulate time and space, open blackholes, teleport, shape shift, and manipulate matter...
In the world I'm building, there's a non-human race that I want to have no concept of gender. Their language doesn't contain gendered words like "man" or "woman," and sexual attraction is not based...
A highly advanced civilization has developed and is about to ascend to become beings of pure energy in a hyper-dimensional universe. Before leaving they restore our universe to a reasonably pristin...
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...
Earth is destroyed in explosive fashion by an unknown force. How does this affect the rest of the Solar System? Does sudden absence of that mass affect the orbits of the other planets at all? Let's...
If a hostile group wanted to render Earth or an Earth-like planet completely unfit for human life, what could they do to go about achieving that end? By uninhabitable, I mean a planet on which hum...
Scenarios for a technological singularity usually seem to wait for machine intelligence to exceed human intelligence. Say the consumer needs of humans are food, clothing, shelter, transportation, ...
If Mars is thought to have once been like Earth several billion years ago, with an atmosphere, magnetic field, oceans, etc., then what would the planets true surface gravitational acceleration "m/s...
Very narrow question: assuming an immortality treatment keeping people at a biological age of a fit 30's, free of infections and cancers & ruling out death by aging, how long would people live ...
In a future where space travel is common, how would access to space be regulated? From what I know, currently the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) assigns slots for geostationary satell...
Would it be possible to raise a piece of land (say the size of Texas or France) from the bottom of an ocean (say, the middle of the South Pacific)? More specifically, would it be possible (given th...
If somehow Mars suddenly had our exact atmosphere, could there be lots of life in a few million years? Would the temperature rise quickly? Would the ice caps melt? Could the life be as advanced as ...
I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the assum...
Take a torus planet: It has the structure of a normal planet (ours): The diagram is not to scale. Assume similar proportions of Crust:Mantle:Cores as the Earth. Is has a similar volume (close...
If our atmosphere was much thinner (half as thin as we have now) how would animals and humans evolve? Would we evolve completely different? Would we have a quite barren planet? Let's just say that ...
Imagine aliens dropped a small black hole (say, 1% of the moon's mass, so you wouldn't notice the difference in gravitation) into the sun (from the far side of the sun, so nobody on earth can see i...
Suppose, through some fantastical mechanism, all macroscopic (i.e. reasonably massive) objects in the universe were instantly made at rest. In other words, the relative velocity between every two ...
Plausibility check of the whole "insect race". As background, I want some poor astronauts to "crash" (safely land, but because they had no other option, possibly some engine malfunction) and meet w...
This question is about a fictional scenario where an evil suicidal scientist has built a high-energy weapon somewhere on earth. His intention is to shoot a beam of some form of energy (or high-ener...
If there was a majority of land on earth (66 percent land), how would it affect the animals and plant? Lets say somehow earth has been created with 66 percent land and 34 percent water? Would our p...
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 ...
After asking my question about seeing black holes in your path between the stars, I also wondered abut other more mundane objects. Black holes affect large areas of space so even if you didn't get...
Supposed we have a ship travelling at the speed of light, or very close to it, or over. A second ship is travelling behind it at the same speed. The second ship wishes to communicate something ...
So I found out that it would under certain circumstances be economic to harvest Asteroids. Given the following: Technological level is nearly similar to todays Earth. There are transportships wh...
