General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Since earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami and many natural disasters were measured or calculated to release more energy than many H-bombs can produce every seconds, can we one day harness this powerful ...
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...
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...
The Settings: A pod of nanobots stranded on earth-like barren planet orbiting sun-like star. Assume no life form has formed on the planet, and nanobots popuate the planet. Could they evolve compl...
I'd like to construct a planet where the rivers all run east to west, but I need a plausible reason for them to do so. Rivers run from high altitude to low, but also I suppose there is the corioli...
I want to be able to apply tools or methodologies to help ensure consistency in my world. For example: Burning world Imagine a planet with a land mass around the equator on which a great fire rag...
Definitions: Slip Space - The area of space separating planes of the universe. Think of the universe as a flat piece of paper. Now imagine this flat piece of paper wrapped into a spherical ball. T...
Archimedes claimed that he would lift the Earth if he could find a suitable place outside it, with his knowledge of mechanics. So, my question is: What kind of set-up (e.g. how large lever or how ...
I'm writing a very nontechnical science fantasy with a star-ship (literally a giant spacecraft toting around a star) in stable orbit around a black hole. It uses one of the "stellar engines" mentio...
Take a modern nuclear reactor complex. Now picture a catastrophic meltdown, not unlike Chernobyl. But this time there is nobody around to do damage control, and all control mechanisms do fail. Th...
With news about the Faroe island solar eclipse, I wondered if a constant solar eclipse would be possible. Is it theoretically possible to move the moon or some large object into the L1 earth-sun L...
Following this question, I had additional question of habitability. Assuming that life could exist on planet formed roughly twelve billion years ago, allowing complex life to exist as of seven bill...
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...
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,...
Let's say, we've surpassed all tolerances of population. But, mega-corporations found a creative way to solve the problem. They dug into the Earth to build bubble cities in magma. They have access ...
I was wondering if there is a realistic way that one can "travel" to the future, using today's technology. Two scenarios I have thought of: An individual is put under cryogenic freezing and then ...
I am doing some research for a science fiction novel. I need to have a planetary body around 10,000 km in diameter appear in the Solar System near the Earth and proceed to orbit it artificially. I ...
My answer to this question essentially came down to the pilot being in a sphere with anything large jutting out of it. Some of the arguments made against me I feel are true if we assume fights like...
Is there a way to split a tectonic plate into two plates? or a way to alter their motion? -What would the impact of a such a change up here on the surface? I know that plate tectonics is run by gi...
Sorry for any errors; I'm Italian. I'm working on a story where the Earth is devastated by a great geological cataclysm (strong earthquakes worldwide, volcanism bursting everywhere, large tsunami ...
Is it possible for complex life to exist on a planet with no tilt and no moons, and be so close to its sun that the equator would be far too hot to cross on foot and still survive, and its poles fa...
Several science fiction books I have read (including, IINM, Nightfall by Asimov) have featured planets with several suns. Some worlds where this happened wrought interesting effects on the inhabita...
Considering a distant future where mankind has spread and inhabits lots of star systems. Would there be a justification for inter-system trade or exchanges ? FTL travel may be considered, but with ...
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...
It finally happened. The inhabitants of Metropolis, the capital of Our Nation, have finally had enough of the swampy lands, suffocating summers, freezing winters, spring floods, risk of surprise in...
Scenario: Earth men colonized a terraformed planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. There are already industries developed there, farms, mining etc. There's a large fleet of cargo ship capable of reaching...
We all know that genetic diversity in our species (homo sapiens) is maintained by sexual reproduction. Man and woman provide each half of genetic information randomly selected from their own to the...
And what would be needed to expand this effect, scaling up to the size of a city, or maybe a country? I've seen this question, and it seems that while one could do it with gravity, the effectivene...
Lets take a 60km radius island where the people have access to early XXI century technology. The whole island was planned and artificially built, so it has no mountains or otherwise bad/sterile ter...
See A city to last ten million years: Construction for background. Second question: What would be the best choice of site on the planet's surface? Assume the planet is more or less Earthlike in i...
So, within my setting, I would like to also have a kingdom based in a special desert. Absolutely all of the sand in the desert would be ore sand. Ores of any and all kinds that you could traditiona...
See this question for further details I also know how unlikely this situation is, so please refrain. From telling me "it won't happen." Jupiter is sent on a spiral into the inner Solar System. Bo...
How do rats and mice see the world? Because their eyes are on the side of their head with a big nose in the middle, would they see two 180 degree images with a blur in the middle or would it be lik...
A great many questions have been written about a habitable moon around a gas giant. This is my take on it. Somehow (extra points to whoever figures out exactly how it is possible) Jupiter gets kno...
The scenario is that it is a post apocalyptic world where the most of the humans have been eradicated and the sources of energy have been completely depleted. In this scenario, people discover an a...
In my current setting, one of the main dominant species' is the Golem, former automatons made of assorted materials who gained sentience through some kind of life-giving explosion. As such, though ...
I am doing some work within the setting of the Exalted tabletop role-playing game. In broad brush strokes, the defining feature of the world is the five elemental poles: Water (west), Wood (east), ...
I'm working on a space-fantasy setting and one of the cosmological quirks is that the cosmos, instead of being a vacuum, is actually filled with a gaseous substance. As a result, the entire cosmos ...
This question asks what would happen to the solar system if the sun vanished for about three days, the mass and energy of the sun simply ceasing to exist. This answer (as of this question, anyway) ...
Based on the previous answer here, concerning hammer-proof armor, one of the easiest way to mitigate blunt force trauma, both from swinging hammers and falling off buildings, are with some sort of ...
In my world, I would like to have a certain configuration and I wonder if it's plausible or not. There is a continent with a climate similar to the Amazonian basin, covered by a very dense forest...
Based on my previous question here, which a helpful other person pointed out, which would make the question too broad, here comes a different question for that. Given a desert full of ore sand, wh...
In the universe that I'm creating, the earth has been destroyed by nuclear wars fought by human kind. Nearly 98% of the population has been wiped out. There exists a society of technologically adva...
A super alien warrior goes training inside a gravity room. It's a room with a flat floor, but the surface gravity of the room can be modified at the push of a button. But under general relativity ...
Scenario: Earth men colonized Alpha Centauri. Barnard's Star is at range. There is a huge fleet of fission bomb pulse propulsion cargo ships. Given Enough time and space they can reach 0.8C. Qu...
How probable is it that a gas giant planet made of "air" (roughly the same composition as Earth's atmosphere) could exist? What would it be like? How would it differ from Earth?
The character is badly concussed, unable to stand straight, with nausea, but worst of all, unable to think straight - and he has a critical knowledge / mental skill, urgently needed at the moment. ...
I created a humanoid race called Lantoms for a fantasy world. They are about five feet in stature, have angular body parts, and an extra pair of arms. A layer of skin is attached to the arms, easie...
Earth is dying. We mis-managed it and brought the whole ecosystem to the edge of total collapse. About 50 years ago, we decided to move humankind to another planet, and now we are almost ready. A ...
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...
