General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I'm trying to design human like race where all the children are born as girls, but later in life some of them switch to male, but no sooner then 15. Usually only the most dominant women switch, so ...
A K2+ civilization wants to build a fission star, a huge mass of fissile material which doesn't collapse due to the radiation emitted by its fission decay. I know there are reactors like the aqueou...
Currently, chemical rockets have taken men to Earth orbit and the moon by combusting rocket fuel to generate thrust. Even if we develop more efficient rocket fuels and can create significantly la...
Suppose that I have come into possession of a substance, technology, or spell that functions as a perfect insulator and reflector. No energy can pass through it, and is instead reflected back the w...
I'm trying to think of ways that a humanoid civilization, post-agrarian with solid mechanical knowledge but no electronics, can communicate in near real-time over large distances. Some of my init...
Many fish have specialized organs called buoyancy bladders which allow them to control their buoyancy - effectively rising or sinking in the water. What if humans adapted this to use in the air? I...
I'm trying to build a semi-plausible world where there is native flora and fauna, but the world is subtly not quite right for human habitation. I thought that having significant amounts of copper i...
Without a doubt, the most iconic mammals of Australia are the pouch-bearing marsupials. You can find less than 250 species in that one island-continent. Marsupials have been around for 65 milli...
NASA received a telegram from the direction of Proxima Centauri stating that the abominable snowman are coming for a visit and they expect snow to fall everywhere even along the equator. They also ...
In a distant future world, people going to cinemas will not just see movies but 'experience' them. Spectators will be a part of the cast with the help of immersive virtual reality. How would these ...
Context NASA commissioned some awesome, vintage-style prints a while back advertising the colonization of Mars. Three of them stood out to me because they depicted colonization of the moons of ...
If a sentient supercomputer was created as a weapon of mass destruction, and it wants to consume humans for their flesh, why would it do that? I know this might seem too far-fetched, but if there'...
What I am proposing is a bridge making it possible to travel between two planets, I have some ideas but I would like to know if and how it would work. Maybe somehow stopping their orbit and locking...
I have a series of astronauts landing on an asteroid. I'd like to know the threshold of mass for them to not fly off into space. Specifications: Assumption is all astronauts are under 180cm, 80...
I had the idea to make an artificially constructed planet which is terrestrial, but has the diameter of Jupiter. Instead of being a solid sphere, it would be five spherical layers, with land on the...
A hypothetical species reproduces by females impregnating males a la seahorses. However, their reproductive system appears woefully ill-suited to this task. Their genitalia are outwardly similar to...
There have been many questions of moving, floral animals, most of these focus on their intelligence, but what about their sense of sight. I fail to understand how a botanic based alien would be abl...
When confronted with cloning which leaves the original alive, there is the known issue that the clone could want to replace the original (e.g. as seen in The 6th day). A shared consciousness is ver...
On Earth we don't really notice many effects of the Earth spinning, apart from the day-night cycle. It took a long time for people of Earth to realise that it even was spinning, but there are measu...
You gotta admit. That roguish guy you just met at space bar looks cooler with cig in his mouth. Not only he always shoots first, but also he manages to do so while puffing awesomely looking clouds ...
Before you comment "dragons can't happen", we've been there before. Based on the question linked above, assume dragons are scientifically plausible. You may change what you need about the...
In pillbugs, sex is determined by two chromosomes: Z and W. Individuals who inherit two Zs develop as males, while ZW individuals become female. But in some populations, these rules are over...
Could anyone could survive a nuclear war and all that follows? I have read many things saying they would, and read other science-based answers, but they all talked about a nuclear war that was re...
In my story, a portal is opened from the Earth to an alternate world. However, this world is toroidal in shape and has a surface gravity equal to that of Earth. It rotates around an axis that goes ...
I've read this question, but most of its answers don't seem to apply to my question directly other than possibly this one, which suggests that in order to change a planet's orbit, you would have to...
I asked a similar question a small while ago. Unfortunately, the way the problem was defined excluded certain viable solutions. So I want to try again. The society would have to be complex. Perhap...
Part of a series I'm starting since the recent What could make a star green? did quite well and others could use the information here in their worlds. There aren't any "violet" stars. When a ...
Here on the Space Station 'A long way from anywhere V' (not to be confused with any other space stations) a wide variety of species pass through on their way to the Krasnikov tube terminal. Even th...
How do you cut through an unbreakable armor? With an all-powerful sword, of course. No really, if we had seemingly unbreakable matter (lets give it the original name of Unobtadamentium, or Uium for...
The largest animals alive today--and to loom into the human imagination--are the whales, a group of mammals that had been going from skinny-dip to full-blown dive in just 53.5 million years. Due...
Human (spoken) languages have a great variety in terms of grammar and what the basic elements are, but they have essential features in common in terms of being a time sequence of phonetic primitive...
Or, technically, a civilization near the core of a planet. In this question I will describe some aspect of my design, and you may comment on the realism of these aspects and add improvements, or p...
I'm working on a quest (Space game, but don't ask, it won't be good in anything but story and even that may be a stretch. XD), and I'm looking to use our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn specifical...
Thanks for taking a moment to help me understand the feasibility of this scenario. Essentially, what I am looking at is an Earth-like world that would be between 1.3x and 1.6x the mass of our own ...
How could a civilization create a dangerous autonomous mechanical ecosystem that will not be overly dangerous to its creators? Militaries are expensive; military research doubly so. So what's a sm...
The usual characterization of humanoids from high gravity planet is that they are stockier with thicker bones and larger muscles and this assumption isn't far fetched. Heavy animals on earth have ...
Lets say you have a geothermal or nuclear power plant and nearby you have system which converts that energy into nutrient porridge. This nutrient porridge must have everything the human needs to su...
Mankind is adrift. Only few millions of people survived, they are struggling to stay alive. Food is hard to find and plants do not grow (mostly). Water cannot be found on surface, the only way to ...
A man with a past traumatic experience developed dissociates amnesia. Every time he experiences something traumatic, his id persona hiding in his unconscious mind comes out taking over his body. Th...
What I am asking is not if there is an possibility of an island (Isle of Wight size because it is an island I am familiar with) size tortoise , I will find a way around that, I just want to know if...
In this answer about how to design the ideal cyborg, I said: ... Use electric tissue to power the machines. Cyborgs need some way to generate electricity when mechanical parts are invol...
Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies in the gray area between planet and star. They're huge, gaseous, hot compared to planets, and come in all different kinds. (1) Is it possible for life to develop...
Because of an error in the interpretation of the Mayan calendar I just discovered, I know now that Earth will be destroyed on March 13, 2021 at 11 o'clock in the morning, time zone of Palenque. I ...
What I want is to know if I could have seven Earth like (What I mean by this is having an Earth-like atmosphere and climate, in this scenario size doesn't matter and nor does gravity) planets in th...
WARNING THE FOLLOWING CONTAIN SPOILERS! I watched the first season of The 3% and I am wondering about the wisdom in the strategy adopted by this world. Spoilers Specifically, if the 3% ( "smar...
In a distant future, humans have colonized every corner of the solar system, and we can easily convert any object into anything else - be it food or a tricorder, you name it. Using these replicator...
Series Premise Made Short: For reasons that I'm not allowed to describe here (confidentiality), Earth's deciduous and tropical plant life largely dies off. A hardy and oxygen-hungry microbe infests...
Someone invents a portable, incredibly high-powered laser or similar energy weapon. The mechanism of energy production can be hand-waved away. In other words, it will heat up. Lots. Gigawatts lots,...
We are the only sentient civilization currently known to man, and sight is an integral part of both our everyday lives as well as most major technological advances throughout human history. Withou...
It is typical of fantasy stories that there will be a dragon somewhere down the line. They are typically the strongest boss right before or after the main antagonist. Now the question is what colo...
