General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Say, we had a teleport in all bigger cities (let's say circa more than 1 million) in the world (and some other "important" places, like military bases). What would be the impact of this? Would the...
So I went and saw Rogue One recently. Wonderful movie... If you want absolutely no spoilers STOP READING NOW. The Death Star shoots up a couple planets in the movie. (Not much of a spoiler but sti...
Current technological level. (in the setting there is an awful tech stagnation, so waiting for better DNA engineering technology is considered as waste of time) Possibility to use all contemporary ...
I'm trying to figure out a concept for some sort of super-advanced space propulsion system that works by bending spacetime. As I understand it, planets' orbits are actually straight paths, but the...
Let's say there is planet, similar to Earth in almost all respects. However, some sort of geological process has shattered its continents, leaving lots of islands no larger than Iceland with shallo...
In my other question "Is it possible to build a bridge between planets?" several concepts of interplanetary bridges were formed. What I would now like to know is, are any of the proposed bridges ab...
I am aware of the square-cube law, so what conditions do I need for this to work ? The tortoise will be a similar size to the isle of Wight and will walk around in shallow areas in the ocean. What ...
In a Victorian society, an engineer has come up with a clever boat lift for his canal, using counterweights. In order to work correctly and most efficiently, the operators will need to know how muc...
I have done research on blood and in particular the component adding color and transferring oxygen. Hemocyanin is directly dissolved into the blood. This works for an octopus, but not a reptilian ...
Sister question to How do you communicate with antimatter beings? Defining dark matter for this question According to NASA, 27% of the universe is dark matter - and about 5% of the unive...
Say that a heavy (150ish kg) android was involved in some kind of incident in orbit and came crashing back down to earth (traveling at orbital-ish speeds upon re-entry). Would they be going fast e...
Scenario On Earth in the latter half of the 21st century: the increasing ravages of climate change (e.g. droughts and a rising sea level) are creating more conflict between nations over the batt...
This is related to the question as to whether or not cetaceans in an alternate Earth be related to a different group. The small but mercurial falcons belong to one order and one family--Falconifor...
Looking for options with at least some grounding in science: Several hundred years in our future, a group of wealthy philanthropists lavishly funded a colonisation project designed to create a Uto...
So, in this scenario, people are living in an Earth-sized planet, with an atmosphere. They travel via ultrafast train that carries them to the solid core of the planet, where they then transfer to ...
In an event immortalised in this Google Doodle, at 4 minutes past midnight (GMT) on Jan 1, 2017, the density of Helium suddenly and inexplicably increased from 0.1664 g/L (at normal temperature and...
My scenario It is 2150, and there are two major human settlements on Mars and a dozen smaller branching-colonies. The colonies, Genesis and Metropolis, founded by Space X and Mars One respectively...
Checkpoints have been a staple of video games for decades and are almost as old as video games themselves, but how? These little tiny features have made a huge difference in the way we play games, ...
I am a fictional writer and need info on a poison that can be put in food and is undetectable in autopsy. Symptoms also can't be too messy, no specific time in how long it takes to take effect.
I am writing a story where a freak magical accident causes a fully-formed landmass to pop into existence like it was there all along. For the purposes of this question, let's assume: the contine...
Each technology, that is evolving, begins with simple piece of programming code that starts with variables of certain data types. It is interesting to note that many calculative and computing techn...
I was thinking about how one of the reasons humans have been so successful is that we can adapt to live almost anywhere. A big part of this is that we can put on more clothes when it's cold, and ta...
How might a fictional parasitic superorganism like the Halo franchise's "Flood" function? Put plainly, how would the biology of a parasitic superorganism that grows by converting the biomass of o...
This question is focused on a purely chemical messaging system for humans that provides the same degree of nuance that spoken human languages convey now as well as all the information that smells c...
In a not-so-distant future, around 2300, mankind finally find a way to keep the body intact over hundred of years, allowing a limited number of humans to travel over hundreds of years in order to j...
A world, I am building, had been flooded, causing a species of fire ant that makes ant rafts to evolve a collective behavior, ditching anthills and becoming an ant-hill (I'm not sorry). Over thousa...
I'm trying to imagine mystery setting when amateur astronomer stumbles upon a torrent which contains a 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy. The map contains all large objects: star systems, planets, ne...
Entropy in a casual definition is the tendency of things to progress from order to disorder. There are a variety of specific definitions in different arenas of thought. For example, heat will diffu...
So, to make it normal for a human to have tetrachromacy, having four color receptors, would make our night vision nonexistent. In an answer in the question linked above, someone brought up the tap...
Inspired by this question, suppose that the Earth decided to move its orbit much further out to reduce the effects of, say, global warming or the effects of a dying sun (or far enough to make this ...
In a world where man entered North and South America without causing a mass extinction, all of the paleofauna which became extinct ~10,000 BC in the Americas are still around. There are several fam...
I have an idea for a scify/lost technology world, that I would like to check the plausibility of. What I want A terran world of large size. The crust of the world is thin, and hostile gas-organis...
For this scenario Satellite means an object that orbits the planet, and my satellite is going to be a moon and the structure would be a giant tube going to another planet. What would the people on ...
I sometimes tell my kid that when he grows up, he might be living on the moon. Last night he was worried that Santa won't be able to bring him presents there. To which I replied that sure, Santa ca...
I'm designing planets for a hard (ish) science fiction RPG setting. So I want to find out if there are any clues or theories as to what proportion of planets with life will have the basic biochemis...
Say a terrestrial planet is orbiting two stars as if they're a single gravitational well.(I haven't worked out the distance yet as I still on the phone...) I don't need the planet to be habitable b...
I've discovered some ways of coloring the atmosphere through personal research: The atmosphere could be colored by particles or colored gases (as on Mars, unless I'm wrong) The atmosphere could b...
So this sentient supercomputer is lonely. It wants to create human beings. It created many things but creating a human being is at the top of its list. And it is super determined to figure out what...
Today, most mammals have dichromatic vision, meaning that they have two color receptors. Which color depends on which species you're asking. For example, the real reason bulls charge at matadors ...
For story reasons, I'd like one planet habitable, plausible, but in some noticeable way older than Earth. Just not all planets are 4,5 bilion years. Tidally locked planet that orbit red dwarf, save...
My city's founders had the short-sightedness to place it on the coast. Now, for mysterious reasons, the sea level is rising. The municipal government has decided that building dikes is "too Dutch" ...
This question is based on the articles saying that the Mongoloid body plan was all due to an individual mutation from 35,000 years ago. In science fiction, humanoid aliens that aren't of the human...
Supposing that we can create an entire synthetic being, what material would be best to make its bones of attending to: Weight Strength Durability Reparability Let's set some scenarios: Case 1...
In one of my more recent questions, one Xandar The Zenon commented that a mutation that creates the gene for red or orange pigmentation on the human skin is more likely than green, blue or purple. ...
I'm going to borrow many ideas from birds to keep my dragon airborne, porous bones and feathers to keep it light while spewing balls of flame to create warm air currents at high altitudes. The prob...
For my fantasy world, I have what I think is a really cool idea. The world is flat, and elliptical in shape. If you touch the silvery edge, well, let's just say bad things will happen. (Not relevan...
My dragons all develop in similar ways. There are 4 developmental cases depending on what limbs the dragon has. First case: All limbs If the dragon has all 4 limbs here is how it develops. First,...
Nowadays there are warning labels on most everything: this is flammable, that will cause injury because it's sharp, this substance is poisonous, and that canister is under pressure, but what types ...
I recently learned about a chemical known as chlorine trifluoride. This utter abomination of chemistry reacts to almost everything, setting glass, sand, asbestos, and rust on fire (to name only a f...
The Average Human Achieves IQ Scores 60 Standard Deviations Above The Average Person of 2016 By the time the year 3016 rolls around, the human race for the first time ever has achieved an average ...
