General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds a...
Following on from this question and assuming the race in question had developed the ability to create tools how would they approach the need for mass calculation. Our early computers were used to ...
Those of you who have read Game Of Thrones will know that in the GOT world seasons do not have a fixed duration, e.g., a winter might last three times longer than the previous one. I find most int...
Defining what is a super intelligent civilization: An industrial civilization that invest on scientific progress and that builds and manipulates computers, robots and nano-machines, has effi...
I'm not talking about stuff like radiation and mutations. I'm talking about mechanics (for now). Necessary effects: With superstrength, you can... lift objects weighing many tons without your f...
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...
Related: How would a completely urbanized city-planet be maintained? How would the global environment of a completely urbanized city-planet be affected? Why would a completely urbanized city-plan...
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 ...
My world has a huge crater (4400 miles in diameter) on a world that's roughly earth equivalent (so a circumference of 25000 miles). The native population doesn't need to know how it was formed but...
Almost all of our terrestrial furniture is designed and depends on gravity. Beds to lie down in, chairs to sit down on, tables to place things on top. None of these would work in a zero-G environme...
Picture the future, where man kind has spread out across the galaxy. What would be the most precious and sought after materials? Today it is metals like gold and platinum that are most sought aft...
Imagine aliens dropped a small black hole (say, 1% of the moon's mass, so you wouldn't notice the difference in gravitation) into the sun (from the far side of the sun, so nobody on earth can see i...
Is it possible for a planet's moon to always rise at the same time of the night? And in this way be used as a timekeeping device? What if there are two moons?
In the book 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke, Jupiter is turned into a star. Presumably this is done by making it more dense, so if Jupiter were to reach that density and become a star, what w...
A lot of species on earth do not care for their offspring; they spawn thousands of eggs, that hatch into larvae, and then grow up towards full size. If a hypothetical species was sentient in the f...
An abandoned outpost from a long extinct race is discovered. It can easily be repaired and would make an ideal location for a colony, however it has been breached and any usable air has been long ...
One way, I think, is if the gravity is exactly correct. However, while I think the water might be in a unstable equilibrium, I have been unable to work out the mathematics. Let's assume that such a...
I know it's been proven false in our world, but what is the most plausible mechanism by which an Open Polar Sea could form and persist? I don't mean all the ice melting, but an open sea as it was ...
I wonder if it possible for human civilization to evolve into two different civilizations. One is controlled by artificial intelligence (or by uploaded human minds) and the other is biology-based ...
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 ...
The size of a planet affects its gravity, its climate, and its likelihood of developing life. Earth is large enough for an advanced civilization to develop. A smaller body such as Europa, while a...
Would a blind astronaut be able to sense the gravity of a nearby star/planet/moon? Would an astronaut lost somewhere inside the Sun be able to sense which way is the core and which way is the surf...
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...
If the Earth's interior was not hot and liquid, how deep could we dig before the tunnels collapsed by the pressure or the air became too pressurized to be breathable? In other words: how deep can u...
For a long, long, long time I have had a concept of a world that exists on the inside of a hallowed-out sphere. The basic construction of the world is like this: It is a large world, at the cent...
OK, so humanity is going to space, and they are going to take farm animals into space, not only humans on earth value meat, but humans in space do, too. However, they don't want to waste precious r...
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'm looking for a rock from which my island is constructed. It needs to be: Either created from the sea or via intense pressure/heat Capable of trapping layers of gas beneath it White(ish) I wa...
Hello again :) My first questions had some wonderful answers, but brought me to the following problem: Although (in my eyes) really dull, the Cpt. Geary series (the Lost Fleet) tends to depict the...
A generation spaceship (a spaceship designed for multiple generations of humans to live in) could sail through the galaxy for hundreds of years before finding another planet, let alone a planet wit...
This is a partner question to How do centaurs get enough calories to live? Centaurs are a common mythological figure, with the body of a man where a horses head would be. They usually exist in fan...
This is going to take some imagination and assumptions (and knowledge about physics). Imagine gravitational mass and inertial mass would be different. In classical mechanics it seems a coincidence...
If a hostile group wanted to render Earth or an Earth-like planet completely unfit for human life, what could they do to go about achieving that end? By uninhabitable, I mean a planet on which hum...
Question is ultimately asking why would we do this? A few parameters first... Technological: Our current knowledge of physics is correct and there is no such thing as faster than light travel, ...
This question is connected to: Fire Resistant Flora I've been pondering a short story concept where a scientific expedition discovered a planet with a huge amount of both free hydrogen and oxygen ...
I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the assum...
A group of settlers from a mid-renaissance era have setup an initial settlement along a coastline. Materials for shelter exist and fishing serves as the initial food source. What are the primary ...
I am a writer. In my fictional world, I have an area that is supposedly covered with fairly thick fog during most of the night and nearly all of the morning, basically every day (it can leave a bit...
What conditions would have to happen to re-animate a mummified person to come back to life with consciousness fully restored? What would the conditions of the mummification be and biological/techni...
Are there any known laws of nature, which don't allow the existence of an animal with following characteristics? Can fly to the altitudes of modern airliners (around 10 000 meters or 32808 ft). O...
Now, taking out the cost to produce/collect it, assume somehow we perfected a formula or find a natural source (because that is currently very prohibitive), how feasible would be to use antimatter ...
I want two populations to coexist in a world with extensive tunnels carved into the rock. One population lives in the tunnels, coming out to trade and gather food. The other is aware of the tunnels...
Is it possible to have a planet that is both bigger than Earth and weaker in terms of gravity? I've got an idea about it being less dense, but I don't know what to do about its magnetic field. I ne...
Where should I shoot a solar flare that is at least as strong as the solar flare(s) in 2012 for the most death? What else would happen? And how much death, in percentage of world population, would ...
Recently, a robot called Philae soft-landed quite safely onto the comet 67P/Churyumov"“Gerasimenko, then shot some photos and got some other interesting information that was sent back to Earth. Thi...
If two (or more) planets are within travel distance from each other and they often trade with each other, how likely is it that these planets cultures influence(d) each other? For example: On plan...
I want to know about the plausibility and required parameters of the following scenario: Take an Earth-like planet, about the same size, composition and gravity. It has no plate tectonics to speak...
Assuming the ocean is deep enough and not overcrowded is there any upper limits to the size a "sea monster" can grow? On land creatures are limited by gravity, they have to be able to generate the...
Once geological processes have created a landscape a number of factors come into play in order to reshape it. This includes weather and climate effects such as wind, rain and ice reshaping the terr...
In my reading of sci-fi I came across a fascinating concept: an alien race called the Chromatics that had a partially photonic nervous system. They were described as having very fast reflexes. Now ...
