General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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After reading the question on inbreeding (Could fictional species benefit from limited inbreeding?), I started to wonder if there could be any reasons why an species (intelligent or otherwise) woul...
(Disclaimer: I tried this question earlier in the scifi site as well as real science sites, and was told should be on topic here) I'm writing a speculative story about aliens coming to earth - and...
On a planet without axial tilt and with a roughly circular orbit, there would be no seasons. The climate on the planet would be, as far as I can tell, exactly the same at any time of year, and the...
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...
I was looking at these two questions: Expanding Occupied Underground Habitations Safely Does Living without access to Sunlight have known Physical/Psychological effects? And in a story I'm writi...
Although a question about how large a living thing could be has been asked and answered, would a being such as Mogo from DC's Green Lantern series be possible? Mogo is the size of Earth roughly ...
I'm building an alien world for a game mod, and want to avoid any blatant mistakes from a world-building perspective. The world has three moons visible in the night sky - two on one side near each ...
When you look at the history of earth, the last ice age had major impacts on the flora and fauna of the world as well as biological migration. If I am creating an earth-like world and am developin...
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) ...
I'm looking for a solution to generate a strong enough magnetic field for planets with iron-cores - in my case, Mars - to keep the atmosphere from getting blow away by the solar winds (and ignoring...
I want to make a hot planet habitable for mankind. It could be a planet in the habitable zone like Venus or outside of the zone like Mercury. These are just examples. Someone said here:Â Terrafor...
There are plenty of threats out there that could terminate all life on our little planet in varying amounts of time (Solar flares, meteors and supernovas to name a few). Are there any disasters th...
What would a planet's rings look like from the surface of that planet? Would the rings be perceived to be stationary or move across the sky, and would the alignment of the rings relative to the ax...
Imagine the Earth is struck by a laser/magic beam capable of piercing it and leaving a lasting hole. What effects would observed? Would there be a difference between the hole(s) being made in the o...
Imagine the Earth is sucked into a wormhole powerful enough to pull it out of it's current orbit. the ones who created the wormhole wanted to move earth to protect it however didn't want their acti...
Imagine a species that evolved on a planet where there was no metal (or not much) of any kind. They, of course, discovered fire and were able to start building buildings and basic machinery from ...
Suppose a very large planet orbited a star or other spacial body in an oval shaped path, similar to Earth's but closer to induce a varying gravity during orbit. The planet has a large gravity wel...
There are quite a few known drawbacks to incest. However, incest can be helpful when trying to help a desired trait spread. Incest does happen in nature to some degree but it's not exactly activel...
It's a commonly known fact that whale song travels huge distances. In fact apparently before the oceans were so noisy they could communicate over 10,000km! However, whales are very big! They can c...
DISCLAIMER: This question was closed on Astronomy Stack Exchange as off topic, so I'll try my luck here. I'm trying to understand the climatic effects of the far future scenario of an Earth-like p...
Picture, if you will, four planets sharing the exact same orbit and orbital speed, and separated by exactly same distance from each other. Each planet is the same size and roughly the same gravitat...
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'm starting a story taking place around 2080 AD/CE, and I'm wondering if the key element - global pollution - is plausible. In my storyline, the XXIst century brings no huge technological advance...
One of the solution to make a cold planet habitable for us is to increase the greenhouse effect. It works with planets like Mars that are inside the habitable zone but would it be enough for a plan...
Is it possible (for humans)? My main concern was heavy gravity because they are much bigger and heavier. But it appears that in our system, the gas giants (but not Jupiter) all have a similar surf...
Why aren't animals photosynthetic on earth? And what would make it plausible for them to evolve to be?
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,...
Could underwater creatures with the intelligence of human cave men or possibly the intelligence of apes create technology (that is, more complex technology comparable to what we have now rather tha...
A quite common idea to provide "gravitation" in space stations is to make them rotate, so the centrifugal force gives an effective gravitation. A possible design is a ring-shaped space station. No...
This question comes up from Is there a man-made or natural event that can cause an abrupt climate change within hours/a day? "“ trying to get KaguraRap a functional answer to an abrupt temperature ...
Maelstroms are ginormous whirlpools. They can exist continuously in an area. They're cool. The question is, how large can they get? As large as an island? Could a maelstrom have a diameter of 60 o...
I am recalling the Space:1999 nuclear waste containment explosion; this has been criticized because such an explosion would have actually destroyed the moon. I am curious for events that could happ...
All life we know of to date (presumably) formed on a rocky planet (more precisely: earth). Fiction has been written about life in more exotic locations. Though as far as I know, these lifeforms wer...
I found this on Wikipedia. I'm aiming for the fastest climate change possible without that much advanced notice, e.g. perhaps a regional sized asteroid scientists miss or are too distracted to cat...
If a planet had such a large imbalance of protons and electrons that it possessed a net negative or positive charge what would happen to it and its solar system? First, could it be stable, or woul...
Some species that reproduce sexually, don't actually have sex as such. Instead the female might lay soft scaled eggs, which the male then fertilizes extrenally. I want to know what a society of an...
Simply put is there an upper bound for the largest possible living creature in a scientifically rational world without incorporating anti-gravity, magic, the force, or other physical concepts we ar...
Suppose the universe contained a species of planet sized turtles1 that can travers at least interstellar space. How can I explain (without invoking magic) that these turtles are not spherical? If ...
Is there any software tool for quickly prototyping a planetary system? Ideally this should: Allow for placement of planets of different sizes and masses around a star. Allow for examination of th...
Suppose one constructed a Bernal sphere, similar in design to that described in this article and this article at the National Space Society. If the sphere was simply rotated on a single axis, wou...
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...
Another mermaid questions I'm afraid! Fish have tail fins which are vertical, whales have fins which are horizontal. My race of merfolk are: Very active (more likely to be warm blooded) Have gil...
Assuming a civilization has the technology and capability to build a worldship, a planet that doubles as a spacecraft, installs an FTL drive on it and has the energy to power it, what would the eff...
Terraforming is the process of transforming a celestial body to become habitable by Earth-like life. Even when I try to imagine an advanced civilization, the cost, time and complexity to terrafor...
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...
In my future setting on Earth (or an Earth-like planet; haven't decided), the fields of robotics and AI have taken off and we have intelligent, ambulatory robots. (They were initially thought of a...
In the case of a world-wide plague epidemic that'll trigger the near extinction of humanity, is it possible that a virus/disease has inconsistent symptoms so that people aren't aware that it's real...
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...
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans converted entirely to machines, so the population can be larger than would be possible with biological humans. In contrast to biologically...
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans shrunk down as much as possible to allow a huge population. As the population increases they genetically modify their bodies to be as smal...
