General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In essence: I'm playing around with a few ideas relating to a post apocalyptic United States, and one of the concepts I've come up with is a world of mostly dusty deserts and other regions mostly d...
In my story characters can go into perfectly simulated virtual worlds where their memories have been replicated down to the individual neurons and their protien structures. In these worlds time pas...
I once before asked a question on how to quickly submerge a large landmass/continent. The answers there basically concluded that literally ''Sinking'' (a la Atlantis) is pretty much impossible to...
When writing a futuristic story I always try to minimise the impact of computerization. Its rather uncomfortable writig a story when technology is advanced enough that humans arent in a position to...
This is sort of a follow up on my question Could a "multicellular" virus exist? in which part of the consensus was that viruses simply can't hold enough DNA. In theory, could DNA form in a structur...
After the fall of the lizard empire, most of the lizard people fled to Node to avoid genocide (This is in the Lovecraft universe, racism is mandatory). In short order, this former bomb shelter beca...
What hypothetical scientific procedure could be used to reanimate someone who is brain dead. I am aware that it is possible to bring someone back if they are clinically dead which is where a vital ...
I'm writing a story about a town whose residents all work at a nuclear reprocessing site. Some teenagers begin to hang out near a small body of water close to the site that they call "the swamp". T...
If we could replace DNA, RNA and the ribosomes in our cells by their mirror image versions, then everything would work in the same way, except that the chirality of all molecules would have been in...
Given the difficulties in doing things like constructing O'Neil cylinders or habitats on places like Mars, is it at all plausible that current humans could ever really colonize anything in space? I...
In the distant future a breakthrough in cryostasis technology can put healthy people into frozen state so that all metabolism halts and cells never age a bit, the spaceship is carrying them across ...
lets say this island is an exact copy of the climate and ecosystem of tropical India. how might Neanderthals evolve in order to survive this environment?
So I was outlining the part of the story where Gyvaris, a dragon, almost gets killed, when I realized I glanced over something. You see, Gyv had a human friend before and they used to play games to...
So long ago, I asked on how to make Earth's oceans as brackish as Lyr's, one of the many worlds imagined by artist Chris Wayans. The only real answer I got was something that that world had alread...
Node is the last active city of the lizard people. Node was built to be a self-sufficient city and a nexus of an interconnected bunker system. It was a vanity project from the peak of the lizard em...
I am wondering if habitable planets could form around stars in super dense dwarf galaxies. There are some super dense galaxies such as M60-UCD1 and M85-HCC1 which can have a typical distance betwee...
Glossing over the technological implications of interstellar travel, what sort of human labor might still be required in a future where we are capable of setting up nigh-fully automated endeavors o...
Those of you who are familiar with the DC Comics hero Firestorm know that he can alter the chemical structure of any form of inorganic matter, provided he knows the chemical equation. In my story, ...
So given an Earth in our near future, year 2100 or so, where some of our tech has improved to the point where we have robots and the usual sci-fi devices for interfacing with computers. A colony i...
I want to write a story about a thought experiment that I have on the other day : What kind of catastrophe will happen if an asteroid, let just say about 70 meters in diameter, penetrated Earth's a...
So in the world I'm building, I'm considering to give one of my characters the ability to quantum entangle specific particles on demand. Now although for many years we thought quantum entanglement ...
I don't fully understand the mechanisms behind an ice cap that contains all the water in the oceans. Just to be specific, I have a planet that resembles Mars, i.e. desert at the equator, ice at pol...
Hideaki Sena's cult classic novel, Parasite Evil and it's video game sequels revolve around the premise of mitochondria gaining sentience and usurping mankind after aeons upon aeons of multicellula...
Introduction I want my story, set in the modern day, to have a unique architectural feel. Part of my strategy - no skyscrapers. Wikipedia: The term skyscraper was first applied to buildings o...
I am creating an RPG and came across an image that I wanted to base my landscape on. It is shown above. Is it possible for terrain like that to form on Earth (ignore the wildlife)? If it is, how ...
I'm writing a novel set in a post post-apocalyptic world, where society on Earth collapsed a long time ago and has rebuilt itself by the time the novel starts. I need a reason to keep the people ...
Premise/question Correct me if I'm wrong, or if humans have terraformed the planet by the time you're reading this, but Mars is mostly desert-like. It has large ice caps which contain most of its ...
A hypothetical scenario I'm batting around in my head is a Habitable Gas Giant system consisting of a roughly Saturn sized body orbiting a sun like star at a comfy goldilocks zone distance. Orbitin...
King Solomon, founder of the Solomonian Dynasty, was the first emperor of China. After he conquered the mainland, he gave his alchemists the single command of creating an elixir that would allow hi...
What will be the view of the sky and the distances between stars, living on a planet or in a habitat in a super galaxy that has merged with all its nearby galaxies in its cluster, at a time in the ...
What if there was a binding global resolution passed tomorrow mandating that all countries gradually close down their terrestrial resource extraction sites and instead source from asteroid mines? W...
Assuming the power and tech existed to do so (addressing the requisite heat, pressure, etc), would it be possible to draw in atmosphere, condense and heat/cool the particles, and then produce a hig...
I need ten Earth years long day-night cycle on my planet. Hemera is a world I am creating as a setting for my story. Name comes from Greek deity - personification of Day. Needs of storytelling hav...
Having your radiators tactically protected from enemy fire by the armor shape of your space warship is nice, but having a regular one or double-sided radiators is still a vulnerability. Other conce...
In the universe of my story, the Earth is ridden with metahumans with uncanny powers that do all sorts of different things. Of course, to do all this, they would require a tremendous amount of ener...
Given a world where a human-like brain is synthetizable, I wonder: A human-like artificial brain would most likely crave sensorial overwhelm. Pleasure to humans is something deeply associated with...
I am creating an RPG and I created a continent in which it is set on. I want to make sure that the climate types in it are realistic as well as the continent. This island is called Lartess. Lar...
I'm basically designing a quadrupedal digitigrade alien, which has evolved from a predominantly arboreal animal into a predator with more cursorial adaptations, capable of running fast, but still b...
Ningens are an old internet legend/creepypasta. Supposedly living in the polar regions of the globe, these creatures are described as having white-skin, a roughly humanoid structure with clear hea...
I'm writing a steampunk/weird west story set in 1867 and I want to incorporate some form of armored battle "walkers" (aka mechs). Looking for ideas for powertrains that could conceivably run such a...
Well. This is for a hard sci-fi fiction. The main protagonist, an Action Girl, has just met her sidekick: an humanoid Iguana (it makes sense and it is explained why Iguana-people people exist (has...
Many know that the Lantern Corps of DC Comics are capable of constructing objects of any shape or size out of hard light using their power ring fueled by their emotions. However, I'm wondering what...
My non-magic fantasy world has a species of hominid that lives in a huge and wide sierra of mountains. If they had split off from the (now dominant) human species a couple million years ago, (say a...
Based on the planet from this question. The main thing that distinguishes this planet from, say, Europa, is the handwavium light-source, which I must assume is wrapped in a perpetual explosion wrap...
My world is a satellite of a gas giant. It has an atmosphere and is mostly covered by water (the percentage of water to its surface is somewhere in the high 80s-low 90s). Its rotation period is 28 ...
When I say multicellular I mean it's made of more that one viruses. Basically it's a bunch of viruses that act like viruses but use the viruses made by infected cells to build a "multicellular" lif...
along time ago a group Australopithecus somehow manged to get washed ashore on let's say the Antarctic peninsula or at least an island near Antarctica now inhabiting mainland Antarctica and evolvin...
This question answers the issue I was wondering about of how well an exoskeleton suit could help my characters move as normal in higher and lower gravity Could a robotic exoskeleton give humans Ear...
so i want to create a monster that dwell or fly inside thunderstorm as their defense mechanism, though they do goes down to get food, i want to know what method or modifications need for creature t...
In my fictional world, the planet has some very strong winds that regularly blow across large areas of land. In this world, however, very large, tall trees grow (the reason for the size of the tree...
