General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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It is said that around 50km above the surface of Venus is the most earth like environment on the whole solar system (source here), At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above Venerian surface...
A pharmaceutical company begins drug trials of a pill that they believe can activate a previously understudied and widely unknown region of the brain. The trial begins and when the first participan...
In a world I'm building - the same one as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? - there are many space stations in low Earth orbit, used as orbital spaceports, each about ten times the size of th...
To My Valued Fellows, As we are all aware, our people have made tremendous progress both evolutionarily and technologically. Thanks to us, our species is protected from the ravages of cancer and w...
I've read that the atmosphere about 60 km from the surface of Venus is very similar to the atmosphere on earth (the oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 levels and pressures are about the same). If there was a way,...
In a close future (in 100-200 years), humanity is in an energy/resource crisis and seeks new resources in the solar system. In my story, humanity, still in need after colonizing the moon, sends a m...
Exploring this new star system you have been pretty lucky to find an Earth like planet, with plenty of Oxygen, both in gaseous and in chemically bonded state (water, rocks, etc.). Just before you ...
Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...
I want to incorporate hot air balloons as a means of common travel in my fantasy world, but I recognize that hot air balloons aren't really "propel-able". My question is, how would someone hypothet...
Suppose we would create a river, canal or a tube around the earth and water would flow in it. Where would it flow? And if we put some turbines in this flow, could it produce free energy?
So I was building my world with underwater civilizations and someone raised a question (see here) that I thought was interesting related to trade aspect: how would we have a standardized measuremen...
In a brand baby spanking new world I am building, appropriately named Escargard, punningly named by the AndyD273, mollusks have become the dominant form of life. Resulting in aliens similar to thos...
Imagine a world much like Earth, except it is nearly tidally locked to its star, making a complete revolution every few thousand years. The planet is far enough away that there is a band of livable...
How can I make it so that an otherwise colonizable planet (or moon) can (entirely naturally) seem uninhabitable from a certain point on its surface? Background: There are a series of immovable gat...
By using antibiotics too frequently, some argue, we're setting the world up for a pandemic that we cannot treat. Every time an antibiotic substance is used, the bacteria that survive reproduce. Ev...
Let's take our regular "Great Blue Star Whale", with a mass of about 10 000 tons. That poor, poor whale is reaching the end of its life for whatever reasons. (Damn you! Space whale hunters!). It w...
Would it be possible to somehow inject astronauts cells with safe amounts of magnetic metals, or use some sort of magnetic properties, to hold them down to a space station floor with magnets?
In my high fantasy medieval world, the ocean is populated by underwater fish people and land dominated by your good old human. Different type of fish people (shark, whale, turtle, shellfish, etc.) ...
I need someone to fact-check me and tell me if there's anything immediately bogus or physically impossible with the scenario I'm about to propose. Billions of years ago, under the ice of Europa, t...
Here's the background. I'd like the planetary year to be just under 800 days, with a longer number of hours per day-cycle. If the settlers live in the Mediterranean type climate area only and use g...
Not a duplicate of "Overcoming language barrier; no speech" which confines answers to nothing that is clearly a form of communication; it focuses on translation, not physiology or evolution Not a ...
Some estimates put the percent of Earth's surface covered by landfills at 0.02%. Even if the world composted and recycled as much as possible, we would be left with an insanely large amount of w...
I have a metallic alloy called "Attrahite" in my world that conducts gravity the way that copper conducts electricity. Currently in the world, passing an electric charge through Attrahite "activate...
I'm building a Dyson sphere - a real one, like Freeman Dyson originally proposed, made of swarms of solar collectors in independent orbits that fully surround the star, something like this: Each...
If there's a habitable planet that orbits two suns like the above orbital route, what would possibly occur on that planet? Would it have two yearly seasonal cycle (compare to earth)? Would it be...
I'm considering a story set about fifty years (2065) in the future. It takes a rather optimistic view; space exploration has led to colonies on the Moon and Mars, as well as several space stations ...
UPDATE!!!! - FINISHED THE SCULPT :D [UPDATE: Much Much bigger response and feedback than i anticipated, I am hugely greatful and overwhelmed by the ideas and the help, I will keep the thread goi...
The most common explanation of what would happen to a space-ship that falls into a black hole ends with spaghettification. However imagine there was a space-ship built out of unobtanium, that cou...
Suppose in the future (about 3-4 decades in the future), we start preferring smaller people as mates. The average size of a human would go down, maybe as far as or further than average heights from...
So far, we see an alien life form depicted based on earth type of animal kingdom, we see an insect like Zerg, a humanoid grey alien, etc. However sometimes we see alien like Guardians of galaxy's ...
What circumstances would be required for a world in which human emotions directly affected the physical world. For example, if a person grew angry, releasing a burst of electrical energy which woul...
Would a state be able (with currently available technology) to cause cancer to its enemies, which it can't silence in a different way? (e.g. staged accidents, assassinations, imprisonment) Hugo Ch...
Knowledge has come to me recently that mussels can suck up pollutants, making them crucial cleanup crews in the New York filth. This knowledge is the inspiration for this alternate scenario, in wh...
If I were to build a world like Game of Thrones, how would the dragons not burn their own nostrils from the heat of flames?
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/nc...
Let's imagine an Earth clone devoid of naturally occurring fissile materials"”and, for comprehensiveness' sake, also devoid of fertile materials like thorium and americium that could be used to pro...
If we made a large moon near Mars, the tidal forces would encourage the tectonic system to rev up again, and start up the inner dynamo effect. There would be volcanoes, producing a new atmosphere, ...
Suppose we detect a stellar black hole passing near the Solar system, and we have technology and time to send a manned mission to study it. Are there any experiments or observations that would hel...
Assuming that in the not too distant future space travel developed enough, that large numbers of ships and people were leaving the earth's surface on a regular basis. Would this ever reach a point ...
What would the orbit of a planet orbiting two stars look like? Would the planet orbit the stars simultaneously or one after the other? How strong might be the gravity well of such a system be? Any ...
Santa keeps his elves under horrid, appalling conditions. Working everyday of the year for little pay in the freezing cold of the North Pole. But just how many elves does he need? How many elves w...
According to a recent National Geographic article, astronauts returning home after longer missions suffer permanently impaired vision. This is a problem that must be addressed in hard-science world...
Giant Planetary Ring Bases (or GPRB's) are space stations built on planetary rings or are artificial rings themselves, such as Starship Troopers' Luna Base But are these super stations feasible?...
The normal condition of life in a planet (Earth right now) is that below us is the planet's core, and above us is the sky. Now if there's a hollow planet like above, is that possible? How does ...
So I'm thinking about an underwater civilization and everything related to it, and I got to thinking about how they would communicate over extremely long distance. I knew that underwater species l...
I have wondered what a terrestrial ecosystem would look like dominated by cnidarians and ctenophores rather than insects and tetrapods. In order to fulfill the same niches I imagine they would need...
Ignorance is curable, living is forever. Robert A. Heinlein1 Cutting to the hard data: Due to some or another reason2 the genetic information stored inside cells (aka DNA) of my Immortals d...
In the year 2588, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) along with collaboration of NASA had discovered a new planet named Accio several light years farther than Pluto. Scientists have computed...
There are craters that are permanently dark at the Moon's poles, since the Moon's axis tilt is so small that the sun never rises above the crater rim. On the Moon these get incredibly cold, since ...
[Edit: I'm not looking for 100% realism. I'm looking for an explanation as realistic as possible, possible with just few exceptions to physics.] [Edit 2: In my imagination these worlds are differe...
