General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Replicators have become a staple of science fiction. However, many stories treat them as magical, or with inconsistent abilities. This is not a magical device that makes anything for nothing. Whe...
This question is inspired by Green's Volcanoes in Orbit! The premise is that there is a 50-mile-high shield volcano (again, let's ignore the height implausibility) with a slope of about 2-3 degrees...
Assume that a person is shielded by magic. The only thing this magic does is to keep air away from that person (ignore for now any consequences to said unfortunate individual). Aside from this, the...
The article Why Can't All Animals Be Domesticated? on Live Science sets out a list of criteria that a species needs to meet in order to be successfully domesticated by humans. In short, that list s...
The current topic challenge is apocalypse, so I figured I might as well come up with a question about surviving one. A man named Noah somehow learns that there will be a large flood within one yea...
In my Sci-Fi universe, I want humans to, initially, have two traits to their spaceship building: Really good drive systems, at least compared to other races. Complete and utter lack of any sci-fi...
A recurring theme is how an artificial intelligence that was built with completely reasonable and positive goals instead does great harm to the world. However I'm now thinking about the reverse: A...
This is inspired by The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. In the book - in the far future - humans have split into two races, the Eloi, who live aboveground, and the Morlocks, who live underground. The...
I was lucky enough to witness the total solar eclipse crossing the US this past August, but while it was impressive, it was also fairly short - lasting just under two minutes at my location. I'd l...
Assume Humanity was really wrecked by some malignant force, and a group managed to escape and find a habitable planet and 'settle' it. They weren't able to bring along much in the way of advanced t...
Start with a planet just like Earth as of today (whatever today means when you are reading this). For simplicity's sake, disregard mankind's continuous spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphe...
The Nachtkrapp is a german version of the bogeyman or in a more general term a kind of bugbear. Nacht is the german word for night and Krapp is used in southern germany and austria as a word for ra...
In my fantasy story, elves live high up in giant trees (or at least something similar to a tree). These trees are so massive, that entire cities can be built on their branches. The branches have fl...
A group of scientists has been slaving away largely in obscurity for two decades, with very few publishable results. Suddenly, one of them has an epiphany, which turns out to be instrumental to ena...
The DoomFleet returns! And this time, it's with a more "Conventional" weapon - That is, projectiles with an antimatter core. Ultra-simple explanation is they have a "small" amount of antimatter in...
In the answers to this question I learned that some cephalopods communicate via color: Some cephalopods are capable of rapid changes in skin color and pattern through nervous control of chromat...
I want to develop a water-dwelling, intelligent species that could ultimately reach space.1 My question here is about the biology of such creatures. I want my creatures to live in the water, not ...
Is it possible to create a room-temperature solid made from 100% human blood? One of my stories features a girl who has the passive ability to block the superpowers of anyone in a 100-meter radi...
Our AI in question inhabits a synthetic brain housed in an organic and genetically modified human body (With a few other cybernetics). This body/brain combination was the result of a black project ...
I have built a star that is loosely based on a real-world star. It has the following properties: Spectral class G Mass: 1.03 M$_\odot$ Radius: 1.02 r$_\odot$ Luminosity: 1.05 L$_\odot$ Surface te...
Say we're on a ship traveling between the Milky Way and Andromeda. We decide to stop and take a look out our space-windows. What do we see? I'm presuming that the Milky Way and Andromeda would bo...
Previously, I asked several questions about living in a massive banyan tree whose branches were about 600 feet up. Though I can't find the comments, I was informed that there would be very high win...
In Can I significantly shorten the days on a planet that can support human life? I asked about changes needed to a planet to support human life with a much-shorter day (12 hours or so instead of 24...
I have a city in space that will have a local population and a lot of travel in and out (center of commerce). Should I place it out in open space or near a planet? Being near a planet obviously i...
Welcome to the Black Cauldron. The Cauldron of Storms, even. It's a sunny day now, perfect for fishing. Just not here. There's no boats on the water. The weather can go bad, quickly. And anything o...
Disclaimer: This is not a duplicate of this question. This question deals with a specifically non-marine snake. My fantasy story requires a giant snake. The easiest way to create one (as far as f...
This is one of a series of questions centered around living on a giant tree. The setting/scenario is described below: In my fantasy world, elves live on a giant tree, very similar in structure...
I love chocolate. Today, when I was making myself a cup of hot chocolate, I was thinking about Easter and about all the chocolate I am going to eat. And at some point I was wondering: How awesome...
L.Dutch made a worthwhile observation in an answer to a different question: Moreover for close range shots there is almost no time to react and move the limb: for a shot fired at 20 m, with a s...
I could have sworn that there was a question that covered this, but I suppose I'm misremembering. If anyone finds one, let me know. Back in the early days of the Solar System, things were pretty b...
From this chart it appears that the star types closest to our own are K-type (oranger, a little cooler, and less than half as bright) and F-type (bluer, a little warmer, and much brighter). If I w...
In the movie Oblivion, the Moon has been destroyed by invading aliens. Several shots of the moon show what is left: If the moon was somehow shattered like this, what would the effect be on Earth?
This cat looks like a normal Maine Coon to the unsuspecting victim. Except for one little detail: Red claws that inject a neurotoxin into the victim onpon scratching it. What would be the most app...
We know that planets can have multiple moons, sometimes quite a few (like Jupiter). Assuming that a planet with several moons were habitable in the first place and has significant oceans (greater ...
I was rereading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I came across an interesting passage: Flare riding is one of the most exotic a...
I'm working on a map of several star systems (with the stars, planets, etc. not to scale with the map), and I'd like to show that they don't all lie in the same plane. Some orbits are perpendicular...
We're in a military space cruiser, designed for in-system patrolling. We're selected to test out a prototype FTL drive. The initial tests are supposed to be short-ranged in-system hops. A disaster...
I'm (slowly) working on a semi sci-fi world, set in a WWII-ish tech level (Semi sci-fi being how they got to this world). Except in this world, aircraft have developed significantly later, and batt...
Imagine a meta-human, one engineered to be immortal. A combination of cybernetic enhancements, genetic engineering, and other scientific modifications have made it so this human will not die from a...
This question is not a duplicate of this question. They're similar, but this one has one very large difference: only a large area has permanent cloud cover, not the whole planet. If low clouds or...
I recently asked a question about how a world could have permanent cloud cover. The answer was to turn the world into venus. However, my purpose for cloud cover was to have the people living abov...
Yes, the title is strange, but hear it out. The inhabitants of my earth-like planet live high up in the atmosphere - living on giant trees. However, I don't want them to be able to see the surface ...
So, here's the setup. Spaceship emergency lands on a habitable planet in the middle of a desert. Being a desert with decent wind movement, the ship quickly ends up being buried under the sand. A f...
The inhabitants of my Earth-like planet live high up in the atmosphere at ~1500 meters. When they look down, I don't want them to be able to see the ground. I figure the best way to accomplish this...
I have a colony of humans on Mars, living in enclosed cities to maintain breathable air. (If they need to leave, they suit up.) Assuming modern-day technology, how do I figure out how many people...
Imagine there is a space station shaped like a cylinder. The cylinder spins on its axis, in order to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. My question: How fast would the space sta...
Here's the setup. You have a gigantic mildly futuristic city, where construction is vertical rather than horizontal. Need a new city block? Add another few floors. Disregard for the moment any phys...
I'm trying to work out the kinks of an ecosystem on a planet that is rather similar to Earth, but with some species of animal (both carnivores and herbivores) we aren't familiar with in our world. ...
I recently finished reading the Kim Stanley Robinson novel 2312 - set, of course, in the year 2312. Part of the background to the political negotiations and ongoing terraforming in the outer Solar ...
Water is different from air, and sound waves propagate through water in a different way than they do in air (caused in part by interactions with the bottom of the body of water). For a society livi...
