General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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On a planet where it is Earth-like, the orbit around the sun is a bit longer than 1 Earth year, and the orbit is on 2/3 eccentricity, but where only the "2" part is inside the Goldilocks zone. In ...
Without giving spoilers, this idea comes from the movie Titan A.E. How would one create an Earth-like planet in a reasonable time frame (100-250 years) that has both the gravity of Earth and a magn...
Recently I had an idea for a world setting. A large part of this world focuses around a habitable satellite the size of Earth orbiting a Super-Jupiter. The fact that it's a moon is pretty integral ...
Time travel on movies and tv always say they were able to tell the year by looking at the stars. But how? For example Voyager goes back in 1996 and Ensign Kim says astrometrics puts them in the ye...
Okay, this is unrelated to my current world building in any way whatsoever, but... I have always been a huge fan of the humongous mecha genre (bonus points to anyone who actually recognized my ava...
I'm wondering what adverse effects might be felt by someone from a planet with, say, 80% of Earth's gravity and a denser, but breathable, atmosphere with a higher concentration of oxygen visiting a...
Often in films and television shows when a person's brain is 'injected' with more information than it can handle, they suffer from immense pain. What would actually happen if you did supply a huma...
This is the second question in my Arctic Airships series of questions. The first one is Arctic Airships, Part 1 - Generating Electricity. The setting is outlined in Part 1, but I'll rehash the pre...
Looking at the recent questions on dragons and aviation bureaucracy has got me thinking about some animals I could include in my story. I want these animals to be jet powered. One of the answers o...
I'd like to know if a planet without any animals except humans can exist. The cause of this absence of other species could be anything but the humans should not have any social interaction with som...
Okay. I have been piecing together the elements of another story for my school PDF newspaper (we publish one to a wiki page every two days). Yesterday I asked this question on whether a second habi...
Most fantasy worlds have large creatures living in a world with humans and other races. In Tamriel, the province of Skyrim has giants, mammoth and even dragons roaming freely. The Lord of the ring ...
It appears that multiple planets existing in the same orbit is theoretically possible. In that case, how would we go about building a second Earth-sized planet and inserting it into some position i...
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 - ...
Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off sol...
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...
Is a scifi setting of constant artificial light everywhere plausible? I'm thinking to the point that the average adult person has not gone out of a city and has no experience of general darkness (o...
For a civilization like this, firstly, I would like to know what dangers there are, e.g: radiation, cave-ins, temperature. I also want to know about the sustainability of this colony, power I'd ima...
Picture a planet identical to Earth, but with rings. It has a satellite similar to the moon, except smaller; I'm not sure how big it needs to be but distance from the planet is more important so ...
The sun inexplicably ceases to give light. It's still there and continues to have a gravitational pull keeping us in orbit. The solar system continues to operate as normal, but the sun has gone dar...
What would be the characteristics required to make one region as hot as possible? How hot can it get; Can it be hotter than Dallol? Setting: an earth-like planet with all the same characteristic...
I have been trying to imagine a world which was also created by a Big Bang. Following is something that I have created so far: Another planet which was created also has species like us but they li...
Making things bigger or smaller is common in speculative fiction (giant ants, tiny people, planets bigger than stars, and stars smaller than light bulbs.) What general principles should be kept in...
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...
This is steampunk, so assume a non-relativistic, non-quantum world (but more on that shortly). I want a material that insulates against acceleration but not gravity. Full explanation: This is t...
I found an interesting Wikipedia article, quoted in an answer here. I'm looking into writing a story where someone has built a Death Star. The purpose of this craft is important to the story (and ...
Mars and Earth's moon already feature in a lot of fiction about space colonization. After these two planets, and assuming that other solar systems are too far away, what is the best place within th...
I have been reading on Wikipedia about cloning and am considering it a possibility for reproduction in my world. I am finding it slightly difficult to find all of the cons and pros associated with ...
What would happen if an extremely advanced race removed the metal (everything beyond H and He) from a star. Would the star still function? Would it change in appearance or properties at all?
The Hydra is a mythical creature with the ability the regrow severed limbs, including the head(s). According to the dungeon and dragon 3.5 version of the hydra : each time one limb is separated fro...
I want to have an upper atmosphere composed of a gas which is lighter than "air" so that my human occupants of a planet can harvest it and use it to fill blimps and hot air balloons. I'm planning ...
I have a fictional technology in my world that involves being able to create "tubes of compressed space" -- essentially, you have two stations and a (straight or curved) line of space between them ...
Let's say I have a binary star system. The planet is orbiting the smallest star similar to the Sun at 1 AU, the same Earth-Sun distance. The other star is located at around 50-100 AU from the Sun...
Apart from the obvious difference that liquid ammonia needs a much colder temperature than liquid water (but ammonia-based life forms wouldn't feel that as particularly cold), what would be the mos...
I am working on the development of a humanoid species. I figured they'd have split along the evolutionary chain around the same time as humans. They'd live in a warm climate, resulting in little ha...
Inspired by the many great questions asked for this fortnight's tag challenge, I got to thinking, could a plant develop/evolve to eventually consume an entire planet, and keep on living? What I mea...
There is this idea that we find in a few books, mainly The Swarm by Frank Schätzing and in the Ender Saga by Orson Scott Card, that some species could communicate via DNA exchange. Technically, y...
As the title says, what would the universe be like if the gravitational force was 0.1% stronger but the other forces (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetic force) stayed the same? Would t...
Given a planet about the size of Earth, and a moon the Size of the Moon, how could one destroy the moon without flinging the fragments onto the surface of the planet or into outer space? How can o...
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task. My ideal...
I was trying to put together an idea for a Gas Giant like planet that could possibly support some kind of fairly complex life, and I hit upon a few ideas: -Located in a habitable zone roughly simi...
Imagine a race of what we would call 'giants', each of them possibly around 8 to 10 feet (2.40-3.00 meters) tall. What differences would they need compared to us regular humans in order to function...
Would it be practical to use a "squirrel suit" and sacs of buoyant gas for deceleration from a free fall as opposed to a parachute? Furthermore, once the sacs have been inflated, could the person i...
As discussed here: How would a Reflecting-Oven-Jay Evolve? The Reflecting-oven-Jay This is a small African predatory bird with a perfectly smooth set of wings with an area of ~100 cm2, so ...
In novels (SF and FF) that hint at being earlier in Earth's history, such as Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, in which period would such a story need to take place to plausibly and realisti...
Let's say for some odd reason, a planet (while in orbit of something) travels at all times inside of a nebula. What all would happen to the planet? Could it sustain life (if sunlight was substitute...
Suppose there's a vault secured with a numeric code and a biometric sensor. What technologies and methods could be used to open the vault if a character isn't registered on the system? Here are a ...
I am designing a world where humans have somehow developed or have been put onto a planet in a primitive state. This world has only been habitable for about ten thousand years and therefore only ha...
Would any creature ever need to evolve a second (or multiple) brain(s)? If so, under what conditions, why, and what implications would it have on the creature's intelligence? Note that while an o...
In this world I'm building, I need it to be possible to have enclosed spaces/worlds connected to the main one. Ideally the main world would closely resemble ours, with the same laws of energy/physi...
