General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Sometimes old, discredited or impractical ideas come back to favor, because a new technology has evolved. Let us imagine a future Earth-like world (not early 20th century or steampunk) that would ...
In the human species, one male partner is enough for the sperm to fertilize the egg. The average cargo is just one child, half of its DNA from the mother and the other half from the father. But t...
I'm trying to make a world where my "humans" have ZW sex-determination system that means sex is determined in the ovum instead of the sperm. Could I just easily hand-wave everything else as being ...
I'm working on a story that takes place on a world that has 3 moons. At least 2 of the moons are the same size. They align extremely rarely. Otherwise, it's an earth-like planet. There is one...
Some science-fiction books I've read (including more than a few by Ray Bradbury) have men from Earth living on Mars, walking around outside of enclosures. I know that this is currently not realisti...
As seen on others questions biological radio could be a thing. How to evolve biological radios? What would a species require to be able to inherently transmit and receive radio waves? I was inte...
We know that light exerts pressure upon matter. I'm imagining a hallway where an intense light source on one end shines towards the other end. The goal is to have the beam of light exert so much p...
What happens when two flames (whether from dragons or blowtorches) meet head on? Many films make it appears as a front where the two flames repel each other, but my intuition is that, in fact, the ...
Setting: a mining colony on a distant world, exporting rare-earth minerals. As in many space opera stories, the world is a shirtsleeve environment with a reasonably pleasant biosphere. Tech level:...
Imagine a civilization capable of interstellar travel and building Dyson structures, so technological advancement and energy acquisition are not a concern. They found a planet that is very Earth l...
Let's say we have a society that for some reason (a MacGuffin, Unobtanium, Handwavium, whatever) have found a way to travel off the earth without having to fight gravity along the way. They can tra...
The setting: Very distant future, Earth is long gone/forgotten/just not around anymore. Humanity, whatever it may consist of (people, AI, something in-between) inhabits a single vast generation shi...
The current world population is around 7 billion living people and 107 billion dead people. Since the population is increasing steadily and faster than ever, I was wondering if we could ever reach ...
Setup: A planet generally with an earthlike climate, although slightly wetter and warmer as a general rule, with a little more oxygen in the atmosphere, but habitable by unmodified humans. Still h...
Hypothetical: Hundreds of years into the future. Humanity needs to travel to exoplanets quickly. I'm aiming for hard sci-fi. What kind of propulsion can travel people at 0.1 - 0.9 lightspeed? Is i...
If all of the crew and passengers of an interstellar craft were in suspended animation except prior to Earth departure and just before destination arrival, would they need artificial gravity (throu...
I'm in the midst of writing a space opera, and there are several characters that are sentient androids and I need some help with their physiology. I have them set up with small fusion cores for pow...
(First post on StackExchange, hello world!) The project that I'm currently working on involves a Binary Planet system, both with life, although I'm only focusing on one. This planet has a climate ...
Disclaimer: the overall idea of the world as presented is basically lifted from Strugatsky Brothers "Inhabited Island". The details of the question are for a derivative work in that universe. Imag...
Saw Pacific Rim for the first time with a friend recently; I'd never really thought too hard about giant robots/been as into Mecha and Gundam stuff as some of my friends before, but the Jaeger conc...
If a circular structure could be built that would wrap around the entire earth, but was of a larger radius, would it 'float' above the earths surface or would it somehow fall onto the surface at so...
This is the first part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold. Part II - Landing Edit 1: Added two movie referen...
I've got a species that lives in the Southern Ocean along the Antarctic coast, and they are basically a sentient crossbreed of Orca whales and elephant seals. They are omnivores, have opposeable th...
So, I made the slight mistake of worldbuilding by starting off with just a planet's local sentient species and working from there. This species, the Trillek, have a more or less theropod appearanc...
I'm trying to create a planet which environment is not immediately lethal to humans, (reasonable oxygen level) however after closer inspection turns out not to be specially Earth-like. One issues ...
The last time I checked ASIMO's battery pack only had enough juice for something like 30 minutes of continuous operation & then it has to plug in & recharge which isn't really that useful. ...
Suppose I take a group of alligators select the ones that emit the highest frequency of radiation (since all living creatures emit thermal radiation), and I breed those, and get rid of the rest and...
Much of the struggle with terrestrial fusion power seems to be with keeping the ultra-hot plasma contained. In a classic Tokamak configuration, magnets using massive amounts of power, suspend the p...
Inspired by this question, what would the pressure stabilize at over tens of thousands of years (at the moon's centre, surface, and any other interesting points) if you created a structurally stabl...
I've just bought myself a shiny new spaceship equipped with the latest in FTL warp technology, the only catch is the fuel bill, this thing drinks the stuff like it's going out of fashion (still, it...
This is not a duplicate of Building Noah's Ark or Can We Build Noah's ark?, because the former asks only about a relatively small number of species and the latter is set in Biblical times. Ignori...
Consider a planet which is entirely Earth-like. Same mass, same rotation, etc. But in this world, resource-rich objects are suspended by some phenomenon at varying altitudes up to 200km above sea l...
This might be more fit in physicsSE, but since I don't even know if my premise is physically sound, I'll post it here. One day, something caused the universe to get mirrored, meaning a left-righ...
I can understand Super-beings' great strength and some of their other powers, but flying is hard to justify. I want to consider only superheroes that can actually fly rather than merely jump tall ...
I'm currently working on a world where there are two groups of dragons, Continent dragons and island dragons. The basic story is that long ago there was one massive population of dragons that lived...
I've seen many questions about tides and tidal variations on a wide variety of interesting single star, multi star, single planet, binary planet, single moon, multiple moon, and even ring system co...
I'm writing a colony story, and I want my ship to colonise Ross128b, which is 11 light years away from Earth. I need the characters to be alive when they get there, but it's okay if they've aged tw...
How does a joint need to operate and be structured in order to allow a person to do leaps of 10 meters in length with ease and without taking a long run first? Here's an example of what I'm talking...
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. The result is a giant shadow that sweeps across the Earth's surface. This world has the opposite phenomenon. Instead of a...
I apologize if this question is not written up to standards, I am rather new to this site. I have been an avid fan of chucklefish's acclaimed sandbox title, Starbound, for a number of years now a...
My question is as stated above: if a planet is tidally locked to its sun, how would the people on the surface, assuming it's habitable, be able to tell time? What devices would they be able to use?...
In the 1955 science fiction short story, The Tunnel under the World a chemical plant explosion kills all the inhabitants of a town, whose consciousnesses are then uploaded into miniature robot...
I am currently writing a story, and part of it involves the invention and use of powered armor by the military. What I was curious about was how useful this armor would actually be, and what roles ...
So I am interested in doing a kingdom building novel in a sci-fi universe. I was thinking of having a English aristocratic government. With the king at the top and various nobles ( Dukes, Earls, Ma...
In an unfortunate miscommunication between a director and the special-effects company, a request for a prop version of The Matrix got mistaken for a request for the real thing. The director's goin...
Let's say that suddenly NASA needs my characters, a party of scientists without prior experience, to go to space with a Space Shuttle-like spacecraft for a seven days mission. They only need to do...
I am trying to fill my world with climates as realistically as possible. In addition to climate science stuff I read on this site, I've been using these two maps of the Earth as a comparison for wh...
My protagonist is in a sticky situation: floating in space (fortunately in a spacesuit) and about to be attacked by an alien avatar made from smart matter; tiny specks of dust which share a distrib...
For reference, I'm going with the accepted answer given here: How would technology adoption of Lithium Air battery work?. In my world, it makes sense that governments would be very interested in ge...
Some Context The setting is a fantasy world with lots of magic where Liches exist. A Lich is "born" through a series of complex, dangerous and horrific rituals that a mage casts upon himself over...
