General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The primary armament of the space warships of a race I am building use an armament that consists of explosive shells that have a rocket engine in them. The idea is that they are fired from the shi...
Say a star system in the local neighborhood (~15 light years away max) has a species that did not survive its own version of the cold war. The result is the usage of tens of thousands of nuclear we...
So I'm writing a story that takes place in Saturn's atmosphere, and I've run into a bit of a problem. You see, I wanted it to be possible to have some pretty badass scenes with sci-fi fighter jets ...
There has evolved a species of turtles large enough to maintain an atmosphere of their own and travel interstellar space. We have already discovered how they don't collapse under their own gravity,...
Here's an idea that I've been toying with. The aliens are real, they are here and they dominate at least a part of our galaxy. How did they overcome the vast distances and why haven't we noticed?...
I am currently orbiting Jupiter, the rent is pretty cheap and the view is magnificent. However, my former electricity provider refuses to connect me to earth's grid for petty reasons like "are you...
So, if Humanity wants to conquer the galaxy one star at a time, it is going to need a massive fleet. This fleet will require massive resources to build. If I want to build a fleet to take over the ...
Western civilisation fell over a few centuries ago, because the Earth shifted back into a full on ice age climate. Oh and Skynet kind of happened. Ice sheets expanded, inexorably rolling over the...
I'm writing a sci-fi screenplay and I wonder how a human face of an adolescent would look if it was somehow covered with a sort of flexible mask since birth? What would you discover if you removed ...
The "Light-Year City" Questions "” What would be the gravitational implications of a city in the far, far distant future, with an area spanning one square light year (3.456 × 10^25 mi² area)? Th...
Mythbusters did an episode about trying to foil a blood hound, when Adam played a convict who tried to make the dog lose his trail. Every trick he did failed like washing, changing clothes, going ...
In a magical world there is a tribe of people divided into termite-like castes. They live in the wilderness, far from most regular humans. They are effectively human; fully conscious and conscien...
Guran's comment Perhaps they are tinkering with the solar activity, turning stars into Yotta-watt, nano-bit/second beakons. (We would see the pattern eventually, but not before we looked at cen...
The Megaphragma mymaripenne is the smallest animal with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals. If by some miracle it could be still shrinked, how much smaller could it get before it st...
I have a mars-sized "planet" orbiting a superearth-sized mother-planet. There is also another satellite with an abnormal elliptic orbit, but it is of minor concern for now. This is the resume of ...
Consider a world in which instead of light coming from a single region of the sky, the sky appears close to uniformly luminescent. The intensity of this light depends on latitude such that amount ...
Space nets are a theoretical space organism designed by Tim B, to quote him: Imagine a life-form shaped like a giant net. It gathers space dust into itself to grow, using light from stars bot...
What would be the best way to launch space craft/get into space from a northern latitude? Canada, Scandinavia, UK, Russia, Alaska, those sorts of places. I understand that being closer to the equat...
Would it be possible for a virus to extend the average human life-span (but only by about 50-70 years max) if the infected people kept it controlled enough where it wouldn't (alternatively) kill th...
There is a nocturnal mammal, about the size of a common red fox, which has evolved (by way of some unspecified-at-this-point selective pressure) the ability to see well in situations involving larg...
Let's say I have a Dyson sphere roughly the same size of the earth with a very small "star" in the center. Continents, oceans, and people inside the sphere experience a reverse gravity in the oppos...
Could a kugelblitz be stored in a container lined with metamaterials to reflect back the outpouring of hawking radiation or would it require something more exotic? Could it be pinned in the center ...
Knowing that our brain uses just about a few watts of power and is as powerful as a supercomputer using megaWatts of power in 2016 and that we seem close to the physical limit of what silicon can d...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing. We've got them in all forms, sizes & colours. They are everywhere and go everywhere else. carrying with them anything from music, over tractors, to foodstuffs a...
If you arrive at a distant planet you mean to colonise, without enough food for the long term - just maybe a couple of plants and a bunch of seeds and enough food in storage to keep you going for t...
The Hoatzin is a jungle bird whose only remarkable trait, other than looking fabulous, is that their wings have fingers. Is it possible that these wing fingers could evolve into arms? What abou...
This scenario requires an alien creature with a decent chance of defeating a modern armor in a brief combat. This alien should be: At least as large as a horse, but not much larger than a semi-tr...
So take a creature like a werewolf or a Fallout deathclaw. Either through evolution or genetic engineering has claws with a graphene edge instead of keratin. The claws work like a more organic v...
Even now, in 2016, if you take a look around in a 7-Eleven or any European counterpart of similar small shops, you can find a comparably huge selection. In fact, this applies to large counterparts ...
I want to set up a long-term self-sustaining colony on Mercury. What and how needs to be done for a colony to survive and thrive on the planet Mercury?
Scenario: A generation ship travels to a star system that has at least one planet that's believed to be potentially habitable and, therefore, a possible location for a colony. After sending some p...
I have an asteroid. I want it to hit Earth. The best way to hit Earth is from behind the Sun, which makes it harder to detect you if you're an asteroid. Now, I have a basic understanding of things ...
What would happen if all dark energy (cosmological constant) instantly converted to radiation due to vacuum metastability event, while otherwise vacuum properties remain the same? Dark energy dens...
If two planetary bodies were tidally locked to each other (e.g. pluto and charon) then could there ever be a situation where the smaller of the two bodies had the 'heavier' gravity? Could you ever ...
My world is based on the concept of afterlife, with a twist: people who died in other worlds are resurrecting in mine. Once in the afterlife world if they suffer another lethal injury or condition ...
So I'm pretty sure your are all aware of what a cell is the microscopic organic units that make up all life. Well they don't have to be microscopic. An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell. ...
A short time ago I read that life might be possible on interstellar planets (i.e. planet-like objects which aren't bound to a star by gravity.) They may be insanely cold on the surface but inside t...
In a world I am building, I want the primary species to be 100% peaceful. The best way I have thought of for doing this post-sapience is to remove all identifying traits (skin, eye and hair color, ...
Cube worlds are cool and many people like them but unfortunately, they are less than feasible. Does this have to be this way though? What factors could lead to the creation of a roughly cube shape...
Far in the future, I have a bomb about to detonate in the skies above my city, a real city/province killer. A hero dramatically manages to enclose the bomb at the moment of detonation in a living c...
Stanley Miller's experiment was an amazing step forward in unifying inorganic and organic chemistry. It was also a landmark development for the theory of chemical evolution. Miller-Urey Experiment...
I have a world that has unexpected lifeforms detected. There are to-be-revealed reasons for it, but the way the ecosystem is set up is: Microbial life is abundant everywhere There is a single sp...
Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse ...
In a previous question on my purely peaceful, 100% pacifist species, I asked about how to remove all defining characteristics for sexuality yet still retaining sapience. As was pointed out, I had a...
Background- Writing a speculative evolution about the nine-tailed fox and had made twenty species that range in size from cat-sized species from Indonesia to wolf-sized ones in the Carpathian mount...
Many questions describe hypothetical biochemistries, or alternatives to carbon, water, DNA, etc that aliens could use. They cite specific examples, given a world we know about, of what creatures w...
Background I'm doing a prehistoric nine-tails which would be believed to the common ancestor of the kitsune, the kumiho and the huli jing and five more species I made up, this early specimen lives ...
Needs ideas for the reason for the different sizes for ninetailed foxes i Made up. . The Korean kumiho is sexual dimorphic as the males are big as a coyote while the vixens are as big as a red fox...
Here's the explanation These are the structural questions about my "Super Dreadnought". How wide would the ship have to be to be stable on the water? Would the Caterpillar treads hold the weight...
So, let's say that through a series of strange timey wimey events, I accidentally jump-start several technological revolutions in the early 1800's. So, at any given time, technology is ~60 y...
