General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Writing a story in which a human is trapped on an alien planet with an average temp of 6 Celsius, and I want to have the atmosphere be too rich in oxygen, but not to the point where an air tank is ...
There is a secret ship and it is used by pirates as a recharging point. It has a nuclear reactor as a power source and other ships are using electricity. Let's assume in this world stealth technolo...
Is it possible for a large enough structure built near a small enough subduction zone to become lodged in it or buried very slowly as opposed to taken underground? If so, how big would the structu...
Is it theoretically possible to extract all ice and water from moons with subsurface oceans like Ganymede or Enceladus? What would the consequences of isostatic rebounding be if this was done on ...
I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to place the biomes in my continent. Though I have researched which biomes can occur in a certain climate, I'm still confused when it comes to...
As the tittle says what would the ecosystem look like if predator and prey were to switch places? The cause of this change is either handwavium or a very unlucky sorcerer. The transformation is mai...
What I'm looking at doing is a small game where you land on a planet, and the atmosphere is not survivable by a human being, but there is local life. Over the course of the game, terraforming has t...
If it were possible to build a giant geodesic dome tens of miles in diameter, what effect would it have on nearby weather? If built in an arid climate like the Sahara or Australia, would it be li...
Radiation is the ultimate bane of all organic life. Its particles punch holes in our DNA, causing mutations and giving us cancer. But, is there a way to make an organism that is unable to get radia...
Is it plausible that a virus could contaminate the entire ocean to where humans that enter it are highly likely to contract the virus? It doesn't necessarily have to be the whole ocean what with th...
So I've been thinking about the idea of a series that takes place on a small fleet of generation ships, traveling at around 10% of lightspeed to Proxima Centauri, which should take around half a ce...
I'm attempting to flesh out the history to a sci-fi novel I'm currently writing, which is set in the future. Several hundred years prior to the beginning of the story, lack of resources lead to s...
Inspired by this question, which is asking how to deny land for several hundreds of years after a global nuclear holocaust, I would like to know, given only nuclear weapons, and especially salted b...
Dragons are very territorial apex predators. They build lairs on mountaintops, roost whenever they aren't hunting, and they hunt from the sky. With their size, wings and firebreath, there is no vir...
Phone message to you, Noel, on 10th October 2016 (AD): Hey, Noel, it's Rudolf JelÃnek here. God just send me a message on Facebook (I know it's true, because god gave me a vision in my sleep): ...
This question is related to Deadly, Heavier than Air Gas, and Is a world with two different types of air possible? but has several different criteria. I've also looked at https://chemistry.stackexc...
In my fantasy setting, slimes are a species of giant (about eight cubic feet), single-celled amoeba. They have the ability to freely change their state and viscocity, being able to "melt" into a sl...
Question: does a liquid or gelatinous substance exist that once outside a body could solidify and be hard enough to be used once as a tool? The setting is low fantasy without magic, yet with creat...
This is a bit of a continuation of my previous question, could a form of acoustic levitation be used as artificial gravity? In that question, I referenced how some scientists use acoustic levitat...
In a scenario where the Soviets didn't manage to stop corium from reaching the water reservoirs underneath the plant, causing a detonation equivalent to a nuclear explosion, what would life in the ...
At the moment it seems we have two different types of planet We have Rocky planets with a solid core that occupies most of the mass of the planet We have Gas Giants that contain a solid core but ...
I'm designing a tidally locked world around a red dwarf star. The habitable ring is an Earth analogue. The atmosphere and gravity are similar to Earth's, and we're going to pretend the wind is negl...
In the middle of the night, while J. Random Human is sleeping, A. Hypersphere picks him hyper-up extremely carefully (so that none of his matter falls out in a direction he doesn't have), flips him...
Previous parts here: Creating a scientificly semi-valid super-soldier, part 1: Skeleton Creating a scientificly semi-valid super-soldier, part 2: nervous system Creating a scientificly semi-valid ...
In my current writing project, I'm working in a universe where mysterious alien beings travel not directly through space, but through planetary atmospheres via wormholes. These aliens shotgunned th...
I've got an intelligent, stone-age species that looks a bit like an Azhdarchid pterosaur. It is around the size of a large eagle. They have a proboscis and a finger on each wing used for manipulati...
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse The multiverse (or meta-universe) is a hypothetical set of various possible universes including the universe which we live in. Together, these u...
What is a possible event${^*}$ that would cause a spike in the speed of $^{235}$U fission and reduce its average concentration in ore worldwide? As I understand the physics of the process, it is i...
Set in the distant future, human is transitioning to a type 3 advanced civilization on a Kardashev scale in about a hundred years or two. We have nearly exhausted the energy from our Sun and severa...
Imagine a visiting alien accidentally spilled a bucket of inverse matter (a substance I made up just now) on the planet Earth and this stuff will annihilate with ordinary matter to produce neutrino...
Taking into account the some limitations of the square-cube law, biology, and aviation, I have tried to make a dragon-like creature and a hominid that participate in a symbiotic relationship. For ...
I'm trying to build a story around a supermassive black hole, which is ejected from a merger of two galaxies, that is hurtling our own way. What is the smallest realistic distance at which the blac...
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...
Mining on the Moon, and by that I mean removing mass from the Moon, I believe will affect the equilibrium of the planet and cannot be compared to mining on Earth. When we mine on Earth we don,t rem...
Assume I have a human colony on The Moon. A meteor fragment gets by the defense system and smashes into a portion of the dome, let's say the hole is 1 meter in diameter, it's big. Safety measures...
Thousands of years ago (approximately 12 000 years), a group of humans (let's call them First Group) reached out and settled in forests with huge trees (Tall trees : atmospheric pressure) which mad...
I want to incorporate hot air balloons as a means of common travel in my fantasy world, but I recognize that hot air balloons aren't really "propel-able". My question is, how would someone hypothet...
I am working on creating a species where they have hollow horns (the horns have evolved to the point of being mostly for display and minor neck protection so they do not have to be super sturdy) so...
I'm considering making one "creature" that is encountered in a story a sentient star in an alternate universe. I hope to hand-wave a little of the more complicated stuff by saying "this universe's ...
If orbiting in the L2 lagrange point of a large planet (doesn't actually have to be a hot Jupiter, just large enough to fully shadow the smaller planet), how close could you get to the host star be...
How many people can live comfortably on planet Earth, assuming that humanity reaches Kardashev scale Type I level? This implies: Energy is cheap, and available in an almost unlimited quantity, c...
So, there is this entity in my story, Slenderman, who's ultimate technique is the Blackout. Blackout causes electronic devices and light-based communication to fail within a 5 km radius of a chose...
So, in this generic fantasy setting, where magic is technology, I have trouble regarding adventurers. To avoid rolling up a new character every time, adventurers are rebuilt shortly after death at...
As a follow-up to this question, what would be the effect(s) of a high-speed of super-heated plasma entering and impacting on a planet? The planet is about the size of 1.2x Earth(s), with a simila...
My knowledge of Stirling engines is that they work via a heat difference and are extremely heavy when used on a larger scale. This makes the use of them on vehicles a strange choice when there are ...
The Aargh are a humanoid alien race a couple solar systems away. Their home planet is quite earth-like (oxygen atmosphere, a lot of water, traditional organic chemistry even if a few proteins are d...
I've been thinking about a fantasy setting built around the idea of a habitable, tidally-locked world orbiting a red dwarf. Since it is fantasy I do have some leeway in terms of the real world limi...
The only limiting factors are that it has to be in an area near to the ocean and to mountains (Similar distance as the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal), and that it has to be in a hospitable place, ...
Can a planet with a dense atmosphere composed mainly of sulfur dioxide have a blue sky like Earth's due to Rayleigh scattering? Or would the composition change the color of the sky? I mean, it's we...
In continuation of my previous question, I'm wondering about the colour of a flat world's sky. To recap the previous question, I'm imagining a flat world with the sun fixed relatively low above th...
