General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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As conclusion of this question it seems that under a dense atmosphere it would be a good idea to place the main city in mountains. Just there is the inconvenient issue that top of mountains lack fl...
Hypothetically speaking, if we would find another planet, the size of Earth, with atmosphere as dense as Earth's atmosphere is, and we would insert (in some hypothetical way) nitrogen, oxygen and C...
In my understanding bacteria is a simple thing to grow as it requires: a Nutrition concentration at the right Temperature with the right Gaseous concentration at the right pH with additional Ions a...
In my world, ten is an important number that shows up frequently. In the solar system my world belongs to, there are ten other planets beside it, and there are ten months in a year. I know next t...
So, to quote pterosaur.net: Unlike the wings of birds, the wings of pterosaurs would have tended to change shape under aerodynamic load - something often referred to as 'passive cambering'....
EDIT: As many have pointed out, the whole Lunar Collision aspect I originally envisioned is probably more extreme than I predicted. I don't know where to start as far as the math goes, although my ...
In which wilderness area on modern-day Earth would it be easiest for a lone human to survive year-round? What resources are available there and what tools and skills would be necessary? What is t...
In my world, Rhino's have mutated and evolved to become larger than elephants. If I wanted to put some sort of dwelling on one (assume its trained) how would I go about doing that? EDIT: The dwel...
Cryostasis, suspended animation, cryo-preservation or cryosleep (the marketing guy's prefer this last one as "Oh yeah, we gonna kill you in a manner we that will hopefully make it possible to reviv...
Here on the stack exchange we talk about dragons... a lot. We have discussed all the factors that would allow dragons to exist and yet, there is a question we have not asked. What evolutionary pres...
Is it possible for a bioluminescent organism to be so pervasive in an environment, that creatures who eat it (because it's in plants for example) also start to glow? It doesn't have to be a bright ...
The Crystal Desert is a Sahara-like expanse of sand, dotted with numerous large clusters of crystal, and containing numerous monolithic sandstones. What would we expect Thra geologists to determine...
How would you design a saddle for a giant turtle (think rhino size) and a bridle, and how would you make it go, given that spurs or whip wouldn't really be an option with the shell?
The Question about the blockade of en entire star system makes me wonder: How would, if possible, a space "radar" work? Or how would you scan for Ships further away than your Optical sensors can ...
I've been working on this concept where a deadly new fungus starts spreading from two central locations. One in Europe and one outside of a major city in the United States. Over the course of 16 da...
The Scenario: Airships are awesome, but in the real world airship design is greatly constrained by the problem of lift. It seems like this, above all else, is what makes the elegant and compact s...
In a futuristic world, on a small military spaceship, I want to give it an external camera/telescope-like device that has incredible night vision so it can see the landscape underneath the ship in ...
Note: size here denotes the physical dimension(s) taken up by the creature in a natural, idling posture One of the many fantasy tropes that make me want to Fahrenheit 451 contemporary fantasy lit...
Can we make a human brain and body the size of a mouse's while still retaining the same level, if not more intelligence? Like how tech has evolved to be smaller but more efficient or how cars are...
My planet orbits two suns. The orbit of the first sun is similar to Earths orbit around our sun. The orbit around the second sun however makes it appears only around the horizon. Is this possible?
So basically, humankind was t the pinnacle of technological greatness. We had a massive network of floating cities all around the globe. During "The Fall", all the massive spire-like buildings fell...
If we humans are serious about terraforming our famous neighbor, Mars, then the terraforming process would take thousands of years before it becomes habitable enough for humans to live in. But tha...
This question's information is based on the answer in my previous question about what the aquatic creature need in order to live or survive in my acid water? The thing that's not in the descriptio...
I have a (digitigrade) quadrupedal alien creature with one of it's front limbs having a longer metatarsals, I'm trying to visualise how it would walk with this deformity for an animation. I'm havi...
In a game scenario I am developing, one option for a fleet to infiltrate an enemy is to use ftl to "hard burn" through a black hole's event horizon. Their ftl drives use a "warp bubble" principle t...
I have read many posts about planets in perpetual sunset or twilight. Tidal locking, perpetual sunset at the poles of a planet with zero axis tilt, and so on. Great information by the way. This que...
Inspired by the Paycheck and Minority Report movies. So far as I can tell, physical time travel is impossible for humans, and so I searched to see the future possible scientific or theoretical pos...
[Repost to condense question down] For a science fiction world of mine I am considering using a type of microscopic organism that is able to generate energy as it goes through its lifecycle, a life...
In my story, there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf, tidally locked to its parent star, with large oceans like Earth, two moons similar to ours and a thick atmosphere to distribute hea...
In our world, mountains generally only move up (while forming) or down (while eroding or sinking). Otherwise they follow the tectonic plates they happen to be on. In island chains like the Hawaiian...
I was wondering, if a planet in similar size and mass to earth would have, from its creation, been spinning at this hypothetical planet speed limit (with it somehow staying in once piece) could lif...
Would it be possible for life to evolve on a planet orbiting a blue giant? If so, what kinds of life forms? Could some sort of humans evolve there? How long would it take?
Human sight uses about 500 megapixels. Now, imagine someone who uses more than 500 megapixels (with the same width), I assume that he would see things more accurately. So my question is : - how man...
Edit: Okay, truth be known that this question was part of a set of 5 related questions that I was recommended to break up into individual posts (in their original form, the comments had no trouble ...
In an effort to gain inspiration for planetary formation and, at the same time, inspiration for governmental/territorial boundaries between residents of said formed planets, I've recently encounter...
In pop culture Vampire teeth are often assumed/shown to be just like human teeth except that they have fangs instead of canines. After spending way too much time in front of the mirror, making wei...
Sequel to this question. Basically, I've been designing an intelligent avian race based on bats. After reading through some of the answers for the linked question, I've decided that these bats wil...
I've seen almost the same question here, but it was like Can a microorganism reproduce so fast, to be used as fuel?. Then, I was inspired and new question came up. Does some real microorganism in s...
Let's say that space around earth has no debris. Super elevator is some super durable cable between a space station and earth by which some elevator can travel. Space station is in geostationary or...
This post about a tidally-locked planet got me thinking about plants and wind. Let's say plants evolve on a perpetually windy, tidally-locked earth-like planet around a sun-like star at about 1 AU...
I'm thinking of an alien alien world that has a vast biosphere. Now the creatures of this planet have evolved to be hexapods though there are a few creatures that are tetrapods (only have four limb...
Let's say that I start with a Stanford Torus that can house some amount of people. Over time, more and more people start living there, to the point it starts getting crowded. How could I expand the...
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...
Boules is a range of relative games played with small, heavy steel balls thrown on a court, such as the French Petanque and Italian Bocce. While there is variation between games in terms of how an...
I'm writing a murder mystery set on an interstellar starship. Context: The victim was found dead in a zero-gee chamber inside the ship. The ship is in interstellar space and traveling at around h...
I am working on a space game that allows players to participate in the human colonization of a distant star cluster. I could use some help determining what sort of numbers I should have aboard the...
I'm writing a book that involves having a space station that acts as a way point between Earth and a new planet. (Hard"ish" SF, or as "Hard" as I can make it...) The Station sits at the mouth of a...
I have a species that I wish to create whose life cycle is similar to a Xenomorph from the Alien series. By this, I mean to create a species wherein: A Xenomorph, or Species A, the base creature,...
It makes sense to me that the best food in an underwater dome complex would be fish. Considering the massive amounts of aquatic life in the vicinity, it could work pretty well. However, I can't th...
