General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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With typical modern depictions of werewolves (ie: turning into wolf-human hybrids) the victim suffers temporary amnesia and a loss of personality while transformed, is put into a state of extreme p...
So based on my limited understanding, some luxury cars have taken to using their sound system to make the cabin quieter when on the highway or something (Active noise control via wikipedia). And I ...
Premise: a massive organic structure sits somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean giving of an intermittent telekinetic pulse. This would presumably create a constant chain of tsunamis. What sort of abnor...
This is a follow-up to my previous question, based on one of the comments that was made. While the answers to the original make it quite reasonable that there will be no permanent effects manifeste...
The problem is that I would like to know how strong the creature I have in mind will end up being and if that would be too strong. I know that 15th century plate armor was very good against slashin...
I have several types of free-floating vegetation to pick from: Trees Reeds/grasses Lily Pad like-plants Which type would best survive in the open ocean supporting small pockets of creatures, si...
People have proposed mining the moon for Helium-3 and mining asteroids for gold, iridium, and other precious metals. Suppose we have the means to do so in an economically-viable manner. We've got f...
I want to know if the disease I invented is logical or just a total fiction. A parasite (parasitic fungus) lives within the human brain. It infects other humans by releasing spores while invokin...
I'm designing three guns here: a two-handed rifle, a two-handed shotgun, and a one-handed handgun. All of them are breechloader guns, so they can only shoot once before reloading. The goals I want...
I have a location in my story, the design of which needs a reality check. City Description: As my ship cut across the waves a blurred grey smudge appeared in the distance, as the hours passed...
Set in modern day, a small warren of rabbits randomly achieve sapience in an unremarkable, rural countryside. These rabbits become capable of thinking and self-reflection, as well as advanced teamw...
There are many hypothetical systems for bringing spacecraft of the near-future up to speed, some of which may attain some relativity-bending velocities. However, these systems, to achieve such high...
In the future, personal Cryonics (in the hope of cure or immortality on re-awakening)) have become enormously popular. However there is a storage problem. There just isn't enough space for all the ...
My world has a semi-nomadic people that inhabit a vast sandy desert. Underneath this desert lie the ruins of an enormous metropolis -- a city that was abandoned tens of thousands of years ago. In ...
The world is Earth, probably west coast of the USA, in the throes of severe climate disaster; major storms, earthquakes, droughts, fires and floods are the norm. I am looking for a way to suddenl...
It's tempting to think that anything with the outer shape of a human would simply collapse in a heap if its skeleton were not there. That is surely true if the internal structure was the same as ou...
Quick Context Basically I need one of my charaters to produce a lot of chlorine trifluoride, but human biochemistry wont allow that, so I was going to get a micro-organism to do the job and produc...
All I know so far is, they're a developed culture of humans who live in cave networks underground, made fit for life. They speak their own language, and they have some contact with outsiders, with ...
Some astronauts have just arrived in Mars orbit! They're fixing to set up a small refueling station/outpost on Deimos. One problem, how might they keep their small habitat and associated structures...
Our knowledge of exoplanets is changing all the time, but based on observations so far, is it possible to estimate the number of planets in a galaxy the size of our own that would have an Earth-Lik...
After asking this question, What's the worst natural disaster that could hit New York City in our lifetime, it looks like the most popular answer was a Tsunami. A tsunami, however, from the sources...
In this world there has been a recurring population surge of ferocious insects every 20 years for many centuries. The setting is approximately our own time in relation to the existence of "cave men...
How might the cardiovascular health of someone with both legs below the knee missing be affected? Would people be able to engage in activities that involve sustained cardio, like flying? Backgrou...
I don't know the science involved, so I'm hoping someone else does. But is it more probable a giant creature of that size and capability would be more likely to exist if it were, say, a silicon-ba...
We are living on this big lump of rock called the Earth, drifting ever so continuously through space. Now imagine a tiny but immovable object in space, a single atom of 'unexplanium', locked in sp...
For story purposes, I'm trying to determine what would happen if a small moon-sized object crashed into an unmovable barrier surrounding a planet. My goal here is to eventually get a ring surroundi...
I am aware of the possible consequences having a planetary ring may cause on a planet, but since I want my nights to be dark and not giant-reflective-curve-in-the-sky bright I've decided to make th...
Judging by the majority of answers from this question: What would be a logical reason to explain space based families having more children than an earth based one the spacers are going to have lots...
A race in my novel have hollow bones to allow for flight. The character that belongs to this race is a warrior. It would be very easy to break bones simply by punching a fighter of this race. Is th...
Darwin's hypothetical mechanism of inheritance was called pangenesis, whereby the body continually produced particles of information - gemmules - which aggregated in the gonads, and that that the o...
Would it be possible for there to be an almost torchship (essentially a very, very weak one) which could fly almost brachistochrone trajectories? So instead of a full on brachistochrone, where you ...
In the distant future, space-stations use centrifugal force to emulate gravity, effectively being a cylinder (or something similar like a wheel) spinning around a central axis at high speeds. A sp...
This is a follow-up to The running-backwards Olympics The designer of the backwards Olympics (aka The Scipmylo) is making good progress but there are some difficulties with the Low-jump. To be a ...
So I am writing a Sci-Fi novel where humans are currently spread out over 440 Star systems ( ~ 2000 Light years). There has been several breakthroughs in Automation technology and all manual labor ...
I have a cave that is ravine like and stretches approximately one kilometer down into the Earth. Let's assume that the cave has a clear, crystalline roof allowing some light in. Is there any sort...
Suppose that we pare down human consumption to a minimum survivable level across the Earth, and devote the entire surface of the planet (as well as the planet's interior, if needed) to support as m...
There's been a few questions about making big bugs before and the consensus in they can't get much bigger than 3ft or so (which in reality is still huge). Catch is, you need quite a bit of extra ox...
I'm working on a simulator-type game which I want to be at least internally consistent, and which I'd like to work as close to reality as possible. That being said, it's set in space, which means t...
Assuming we are unable to see the black hole via any way such as gravitational lensing, accretion disc or whatever. This is hand wave approach just to make my setting work, due to this answer whic...
I've been working on a fantasy race recently of sentient bipedal salamanders (sorta) and was talking with a friend about them until one of us realised that since they're amphibians they would breat...
I have a clonal colony of trees that are around 150 meters in height and live in a wetland habitat. These trees cover the majority of the wetland area, covering thousands of square miles. What re...
For one of my projects, I'm developing an inhabited Earth-like world, with the key visual difference being that much of the land is purple, instead of the brownish colour it is on Earth. My questio...
In my yet to be named sci-fi universe humanity has begun to expand into space and has established large scale space stations near Earth and on places like Eros and Luna. I wanted the stereotypical ...
A light-year distant from Sol saw the collision of a massive space-born battle fleet against an awe-inspiring dreadnought. At one point in the battle, the flotilla fired rail-guns with 100 metric ...
On an alternative Earth live the people of Tcelonia. One of their founding myths goes that, in the dawn of times, when they were under the menace of being attacked by an enemy population, for an e...
This is something that was just offhandedly mentioned in a Sci-Fi book I read once and as I am now writing one myself I thought I might use it. The scenario is that I have a ship approaching a wa...
I am looking for a good reason to make radio communications on a planetary scale unfeasible or impossible. Short-range use is acceptable, but no transmissions should make it to orbit or over the ho...
Bob is older than he looks. Specifically, even though Bob looks like he's in his twenties or thirties (it's hard to tell), he was actually born in Europe about ten thousand years ago, long before ...
So I've always assumed Mars never had enough available CO2 on-site for terraforming, something that new research seems to have confirmed. But my ideas have always relied on getting CO2 from altern...
Suppose a team of astronauts have travelled to another solar system, and are currently living in a craft which is in Medium Earth Orbit of a planet which has oceans, continents, and complex life. A...
