General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Many sci-fi words use anti-gravity or artificial gravity to manipulate the weight of their ships making flight much easier. Wikipedia even has an article on it which discusses several attempts to m...
I've always loved well-done ghosts. However, I've always hated the afterlife-speculation that they engender if used in a story. So I need a way to get ghosts without the fluffy spiritualistic bits...
An Orbital is a miniature ringworld used by the Culture in Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Wikipedia has details on their basic structure, but to simplify, the main difference from a Niven ringworl...
The Question about the blockade of en entire star system makes me wonder: How would, if possible, a space "radar" work? Or how would you scan for Ships further away than your Optical sensors can ...
This question is inspired by the last paragraph of my answer here: Negating the negative effects of childbearing (A follow up question to this can be found here: Methods to ensure gene flow in spe...
A recent question concerning generation ships made me come up with a rather original alternative in my answer. It was pointed out that the concept of embryo space colonization has already been thou...
Suppose we have a planet whose atmosphere has roughly the same gaseous proportions as Earth, but helium replaces nitrogen, and has a strong hydrogen presence in the upper atmosphere; has a gravitat...
Suppose that there is a species of dogs that are much more intelligent than humans and can speak. The humans know that the animal is smarter too. The only reason these animals can't rule over human...
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 ...
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...
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...
Would it be possible for a creature to have a nervous system working at 250 volts? What kind of physiology would it need to sustain that? Could you use that creature as a power source, to power a ...
A group of behaviorally modern humans was cut off from the rest of the earth-like planet. At the time of the separation, humankind had reached a technology level including cattle ranches, brass, wr...
An ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) has come to the conclusion that we humans should be put in a simulation. It has also decided that it would rather not turn the Earth into computronium. Fortun...
Ornithopters are vehicles that fly by flapping their wings, rather than trough use of a propeller or jet engine. They've been proposed and built many times throughout history, and are a common elem...
We are used to a world where humans are basically an apex predator; we don't really need to worry much about becoming some other animal's next meal. If that wasn't the case, and humans had to be w...
In a future where space travel is common, how would access to space be regulated? From what I know, currently the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) assigns slots for geostationary satell...
In this setting, humanity has advanced to the technological capability of extra stellar travel via faster-than-light drives. However, due to distances between inhabited areas being extremely large,...
See A city to last ten million years: Construction for background. Third question on Forevertown: What are the key issues for maintaining the physical infrastructure of a low-tech city over ten m...
Is it realistic for me to write about a time period where silicon-based sentience have evolved alongside humans? Perhaps they could have evolved to sentience when driven by nanobots (which could be...
I have an idea for a short SF story, where an alien race infects a tiny village with a virus, which eventually spreads to entire Earth. And I need to know what minimum time is required to infect th...
Let's assume a planet like ours, same size and same conditions. My characters live at approximately 60° North, in a boreal forest, with a climate much like the Nordic countries in Europe. They are...
On Earth the planet's magnetic poles line up fairly well with the geographic poles. This makes things like navigation very straightforward as all compasses point to (roughly) the north pole. How...
OK, so scientists have found a great new substance: That substance makes you think ten times as fast! The advantages are obvious. However, as every medicine, this pill will have side effects. Ther...
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...
The idea of knocking a satellite out of its orbit is common in fiction, but what does it actually mean.
I have an area of my world that is essentially a large crater. It is a huge barren land surrounded by mountains. The ground is stone, then below are underground rivers, and below those are pools of...
Premise Imagine a slightly more advanced modern day world where space flight was starting to commercialize. Imagine that all of a sudden laws changed and the only thing different is that no comput...
In a futuristic sci-fi world (galaxy?) I'm building, warfare has become highly regulated and commercialized. When two corporations meet on a deserted planet to do battle, they're followed by all so...
What minerals can we find in martian soil? Or what rare minerals can we find on our planet and can be placed beneath Mars? How deep, how much, and most important: how precious. I really appreciate ...
This is the first question in my Arctic Airships series of questions. The second one is Arctic Airships, Part 2 - Navigation. The premise: An Earth-like planet plunged into an ice age roughly 2,0...
If the gravity on earth was different, how would our bodies change? For this question, assume that gravity was five time stronger (5G) from the beginning of the Earth. Would a human-like body stil...
Some science-fiction books I've read (including more than a few by Ray Bradbury) have men from Earth living on Mars, walking around outside of enclosures. I know that this is currently not realisti...
I know the idea seems a bit far fetched but it's something I believe is common is science fiction and fantasy stories. I remember the talking trees of Zelda: Ocarina of time and of course, Tolkien'...
If Mars is thought to have once been like Earth several billion years ago, with an atmosphere, magnetic field, oceans, etc., then what would the planets true surface gravitational acceleration "m/s...
What sort of xenobiochemistry would support information-carrying macromolecules like DNA if only trace amounts of phosphorus were present on an alien planet? Since the phosphoribosyl backbone of DN...
In Pokemon, there are many different creatures. Nearly all of them will, at one point, reach a level of experience where they evolve into a more advanced creature. These evolutions are much more dr...
If the North and South Poles' ice melted instantly, what would be the effect on humans and other animals? Would the sea creatures thrive? Would a lot of land get covered by water?
I am looking to have a Tunnel drilled through a world and deal with the physics of What happens in the centre of a planet, what happens with the heat at the core and whether it is faster to travel ...
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 ...
What are realistic time-schedule expectations for far-future terraforming and developing earth-like plant and animal/fish/bird populations on distant planets, by means of robotic space probes with ...
In theory I believe that if you moved far enough above the surface of the pole you should be able to reach an area where you have constant sunlight, even in the middle of winter. My question is - ...
Would a civilization that is trying to permanently colonize a landless world with no atmosphere (think Europa's sea) be able to do so? Permanence matters - it means you can't simply build domes th...
As fas as I know, there isn't a single plant on Earth that (naturally) produces any sort of luminescence. But it is seen in science-fiction worlds, especially Avatar. From an evolutionary point of...
This question is inspired by book The Day of the triffids and this question Russia and USA have never been really "friends", lets admit it. So we will not be surprised, that one of them (pick your...
For my current setting, there will be super robots of ludicrous proportions strutting about as though they own the place (which in all honesty they actually do). So, being so nonsensically powerful...
Imagine a red dwarf star orbited by a considerably Earth-sized planet in the star's habitable zone. Assuming the planet has a sufficiently powerful magnetic field to protect its surface from the st...
Related Question : Can we 'beam' energy from the moon? I was wondering if instead of 'beam'ing energy from the moon, could it be possible to extend a power cable from the earth to the moon? If th...
The title is pretty self-explanatory. How powerful does a computer have to be before it has the hardware capability to simulate and emulate a human mind in real-time? I'm leaving the question of ...
What would happen a volcano the size of Australia were to erupt? How high on the extinction-list would it rank? Would it be above the asteroid that hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs? Which known...
