General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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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 ...
It seems that people who live at very high altitudes have demonstrably "thicker" blood, highly concentrated with red blood cells to overcome the low concentration of oxygen in the air. Moving betwe...
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...
Reality check: Protagonists of my story have a scientific device of a peaceful purpose. Unfortunately, despite the peaceful purpose, activation of the device, as a side-effect releases about 100 ...
Near the beginning of my story, my main character loses an arm, and is going to get a prosthetic replacement. I've done some research on prosthetic limbs, and as one might expect, you're not good ...
Assume we have an Earth-like environment. If a tribe with only early medieval technology were to settle in a mountain environment: What resources would be needed to deal with the elevation, co...
I'm getting bored waiting for monkeys or dolphins or crows or whatever to just evolve human-level intelligence. Is there anything practical we can do to create more favorable "natural selection" co...
If an earth-sized planet were tidally locked to a star, and was in the life zone of its star with an earth-like atmosphere, what would its wind patterns be like? The planet would have one hot hemi...
Some published settings -- such as the Greyhawk 'verse commonly seen in conjunction with Dungeons & Dragons -- treat the prime planet's host solar system as geocentric. How could this be reconc...
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 we harness energy from the sun using beams, right? Well what if we were to harness energy coming off the moon the same way? For those long winter months when the sun is rare we could use this to...
These questions are a sort of follow up of my question about white pupils. I'm designing some other creatures whose defining traits involve "weird" eyes: How would a creature with oddly shaped pu...
Through extreme pollution and large-scale warfare with atomic, biological and chemical weapons Earth has become completely unable to sustain life. The atmosphere is toxic, the water undrinkable and...
I'd like to tip my hat to this week's fortnightly challenge with this question by revisiting an old one. I asked a question about the Science behind a naturally invisible creature a while ago. At ...
I'm working on a map of several star systems (with the stars, planets, etc. not to scale with the map), and I'd like to show that they don't all lie in the same plane. Some orbits are perpendicular...
Could life be sustained only by a gas? Humans need food, water and air but can a ET or Alien could just live off gas.
Lets suppose that Antarctica at some point lost most of its ice (due to global warming or some other plausible reason) and now most of its bedrock surface is exposed. Compared to other continents,...
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...
We know that humans are capable of incredible feats, as displayed by Olympic athletes. However, the superhuman heroes that appear in comic books and fantasy novels tend to not only be able to perfo...
I've been mulling over an idea for my preferred RPG setting, and I wanted to check if anyone knows the following: Is it possible for a river to flow underground for miles, and then suddenly be put...
If a spacecraft is in low earth orbit ~400 Kilometres above earth. How big does it need to be visible from earth with the human eye without telescopes, with enough of its details to clearly distin...
Centaurs. Half human, half equine. The idea's been bouncing around in my head for the past hour, so I'm going to ask it here: Would a centaur structurally make more sense if the torso was at the ...
After reading hours on here, I stumbled upon alot of answers that rely on some major changes in our understanding of space and time and its tech to allow us control antimatter or some future thrust...
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...
I am wondering, what mechanism would be needed to generate gravity on a space ship in interstellar space, like we see it on Star Trek or Star Wars? What is the most realistic hypothetical way what ...
Assume that in the future, mankind develops Augmentations ala Deus Ex, where robot bits are strapped onto people in an attempt to improve them and their quality of life. This will eventually lead t...
Is there a way to make a planet invisible naturaly? I dont want the entire thing to be clear, but have a natural "field" or something that prevents the planet from being seen (or makes it much hard...
Is it possible for a planet's moon to always rise at the same time of the night? And in this way be used as a timekeeping device? What if there are two moons?
I'm currently heavily revising a story which is largely set on a habitable but not exactly hospitable moon of a gas giant orbiting on the outer edge (or just beyond) of the habitable zone around a ...
A lot of species on earth do not care for their offspring; they spawn thousands of eggs, that hatch into larvae, and then grow up towards full size. If a hypothetical species was sentient in the f...
Supposing we had many thousands of antimatter bombs (they can be detonated in many different locations), how much total antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans on Earth? Supposing...
This is a partner question to How do centaurs get enough oxygen to run Centaurs are a common mythological figure, with the body of a man where a horses head would be. They usual exist in a fantasy...
I want two populations to coexist in a world with extensive tunnels carved into the rock. One population lives in the tunnels, coming out to trade and gather food. The other is aware of the tunnels...
In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
Set in the distance future probably a type 3 civilization on a Kardashev scale, I plan to setup multiple chain of convenient stores at many wormholes where there are heavy traffics, how can I creat...
If a world containing various biomes (frozen tundra, plains, volcanic etc), was destroyed by an asteroid or series of natural disasters, would the huge chunks of the world be able continue supporti...
On a planet without axial tilt and with a roughly circular orbit, there would be no seasons. The climate on the planet would be, as far as I can tell, exactly the same at any time of year, and the...
I'm trying to figure out if a certain city, with these characteristics, is possible, geographically: Assume the city's the size of Renaissance London... With Renaissance London technology Doesn't...
Linked: What would conditions on a methane world be like? Question: As mentioned in the linked question, Titan is the second most likely world in the Solar System to harbor life. One of the answ...
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...
In the world I have been working on my planet has a gelatinous mass of cells coexisting but not a technical single creature. It bridges the gap between single celled and complex and it grows in siz...
Within the Star Wars Extended Universe, there is a science base on a small object within a near impenetrable sphere of Black Holes. Is this possible? The place referenced is called the Maw Install...
Is it possible for humans to evolve to eat something like wood or stone or something similar? Any hard material you would find or any abundant resource. So is it possible that humans in the past ha...
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...
Pretty much every vehicle ever invented has been used for racing on at some point, so it seems likely that people would want to do the same in space. However in space it doesn't really work the sa...
Say another Earth orbited the Earth, instead of the Moon. What effects would that have? Would gravity change in relation to the planets slightly during their orbits? I am world building and am tryi...
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 ...
Background I have a character. He is the master of a particularly specific martial art that is pretty much only movement. But it's pretty powerful, in that he can separately: a) move in a manner t...
In this question: Where to Anchor My Space Elevator We get a new material: Thanks to the recent discovery of handwavium filaments that can in principle be extruded to any length, we will be ...
Most aliens tend to be humans with bumpy foreheads and/or pointy ears. Even when they do have differences then usually it is an entire species being portrayed as a particular brand of human. For ex...
