General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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An airborne disease with an incubation time of 18 years goes unnoticed, but spreads across the world. 18 years later, its "timer" goes off, killing all adults. Good idea (thanks, @Morfium !), but I...
Premise I envisage a world of would-be navigators with roughly Bronze Age technology, sailing on ships to explore their planet. In contrast to our history of navigation where we "cracked the code"...
I've been working on a constructed world which started out as the home of an alien race from a sci-fi story I'm writing but just became a pure world building project. As you can see from the map i...
I'm exploring a post-apocalyptic world and want to build a realistic scenario for the condition of abandoned ruins. What would you estimate to be the lifespan of the following building types? And...
In my book I have a city which is constantly dark. The sun doesn't reach it. This is because it's a city of waste, so all the waste gets thrown into this city and lit on fire every single day, whic...
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter and the numerous Great White Spots on Saturn are storm systems that encircle the globes and last for decades, centuries in Jupiter's case. These are formed on Gas Gian...
There are many questions on WBSE that cover most aspects of building a planetary system. (some examples below): Creating a realistic world(s) map - planetary systems How many planets should I ha...
I am trying to find an explanation to a planet in which the gravity is not constant, thus allowing some continents to be situated 2-3 km above surface while others are "grounded" on the surface. T...
Humanity, with modern science, has established that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. The universe appeared in a low-entropy state, and for billions of years has been expanding and movi...
There are many tiny humanoids in fiction, the Arquilians of Men in Black, the Gargantians of Buzz Lightyear Star Command and a few others. This raises the question, is it possible for a humanoid sp...
In a future world that is obsessed by not repeating the so-called errors of their fathers, there is a backwards Olympics, or Scipmylo. All the usual disciplines are featured in reverse where it is...
No, I am not talking about space ships, I am talking about water-based ships sailing the oceans on planet Earth. What would be a plausible cruise speed and maximum speed for what would be the equi...
I'm building a world for a role-playing game campaign using the Stars Without Number system. Some background information first: Stars Without Number Original Setting: In the original story prov...
I am a writer. In my fictional world, I have an area that is supposedly covered with fairly thick fog during most of the night and nearly all of the morning, basically every day (it can leave a bit...
An astrophysical jet is a stream of particles emitted by matter falling into an supermassive star/black hole, travelling at up to 80% the speed of light. A troll with a portal gun (which places p...
First of all, I tried to look if this wasn't answered before. Found this and this but neither is exactly what I need. Some Context There's this race of humanoid fish people. They live in cities b...
This is the continuation of a thread of related posts on a hypothetical alternate universe/Light Plane. Other posts from this thread are here: How To Make an Earth with 27 Suns Work Radiation L...
Background: I'm writing a nomadic society that lives in the shadow of their planet's rings. These rings are as wide as possible to grant them the biggest shadow. The planet has an incredibly long y...
This is an idea for a space station on the surface of Eris (but could work on other celestial bodies), using rotating rings to simulate gravity. The idea is that these rings would sit horizontally ...
If a spacecraft is in low earth orbit ~400 Kilometres above earth. How big does it need to be visible from earth with the human eye without telescopes, with enough of its details to clearly distin...
The secret police of my fictional country (unoriginally) uses sodium thiopental in medical interrogations, usually in combination with various forms of physical torture. An antagonist (a courier o...
In a setting with (mostly) near future technology what material would a top end naval spaceships hull be made out of? The hull must follow the following requirements: Able to withstand the strai...
One finger, one thumb, one arm, one leg, one nod of the head, sit down, stand up, keep moving We'll all be merry and bright https://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/o113.html I want a creature ...
I'm fairly new to the idea of writing.... anything, and I was asked to make a character to insert in a friend's world. I am trying to create a fictional character that has the power of manipulati...
How would an individual in medieval times, the days of castles, knights and horses, be able to make a quick fix smoke bomb, I read out of potassium nitrate and sugar, but I'm pretty darn sure you c...
I've looked for an answer for this, but the only information I could find dealt with the ring itself. All I want to know is what would change on the Earth if all problems were solved and the ring w...
In settings with space travel we often see stories that rely on ships encountering each other, such as space piracy (which means you need to know where to wait in ambush), or distress signals that ...
I am currently designing a highly intelligent species for a sci-fi project I am working on. They are quite similar physically to prehistoric salamanders or similar amphibians, but I am having troub...
Hopefully this isn't a duplicate; I wasn't able to find another question which addressed this, at any rate. Let's say I have a generational spaceship going off to another solar system to establish...
I have two magical stones. The first one"”let's call it fire stone"”is a stone that able to increase its temperature equal to that of a normal fire. The second one"”as you might already guess, is ...
Scientists recently discovered a propellantless drive capable of completely negating gravity with low energy inputs! Huzzah! Sadly the Earth is going to be destroyed soon by a rogue handwave. Looki...
Many fantasy worlds use a "Medieval Stasis"trope. What resources could we expect to become depleted during a stasis? Surely, since technology is stagnant, the people would mine all the materials th...
In my story, humans have colonized both a high-G and a low-G world in the same star system. How would surface vehicles have to be designed differently for practicality and economy on each of those...
Is it theoretically possible to genetically alter humans so that they could live off solar energy like plants? What biological and physiological changes would have to be made?
Would a rocket or Bussard ramjet powered by monopole induced proton decay (Callan-Rubakov mechanism) be a feasible method for near-light interstellar flight? There are such drives in the Orion's Ar...
Extremely advanced civilization on a computerized space station orbiting a desolate uninhabited planet. There are no other known civilizations within this station's sphere of observation. Not many ...
Between a species that is hermaphroditic and a species that has males and females, then what would be the pros and cons of either one from a biological standpoint? Anything not regarding the biolo...
In this scenario we have a brown dwarf with a powerful magnetic dynamo from metallic hydrogen. The magnetic field is modeled after Jupiter's but just three orders of magnitude more powerful. Orbi...
Somewhat in relation to this question - What could restrain post-singularity societies from spreading across the Galaxy? I'm assuming not all star systems move at the same velocity in relation to ...
I have a colonized asteroid that is roughly spherical and has been hollowed out. To create artificial gravity I spin the asteroid creating a strip of 1g gravity around the "equator". What would hap...
An IPCC report of Oct 8, 2018 indicates - to keep the world temperature rise at or below 1.5 C, we need to reduce our CO2 emissions globally from the 2010 level by 45% by 2030, and a further 55% r...
The original idea was a race of matriarchal desert nomads, but most desert nomad societies I could find as inspiration were strongly patriarchal. I can change this aspect if I don't find a way to ...
From what I can tell, pulsars emit light in beams from the poles of the pulsar. Would it be possible to construct something to get energy from a pulsar's beams of radiation? Or is this as idiotic o...
A scenario in the far future -- The moon has been successfully terraformed. All problems have been worked-out, from flinging volatiles into collision course with the moon, up to creating and retain...
I have a spherical spaceship that is about 2 kilometers in diameter with an outer clear, yet strong shell. This spaceship is largely made up of empty space occupied by air. Aside from this the spac...
Disclaimer: First off, this is not a duplicate of this question. That question deals with stopping the hurricane, or preventing it from ever forming in the first place. It was discovered that wasn'...
My semiarboreal humanoids have a build quite similar to humans, apart from some more specialized arboreal adaptations. They live in rainforests quite similar to the Amazon Rainforest. Though trees ...
(Beforehand I'll excuse myself for my english. If you didn't need to know that you can just ignore it) There's a network of root-like life forms in the top layers of my planet. They use some kind ...
In a future Earth it has been discovered that earthworms can actually create wormholes. There is a lot more to this and I will be asking other questions, however at this point I just want to know...
Inspired by this question: Consider a trinary star system, in which the three stars are arranged in an xy plane and all revolving the same direction, equidistant from each other. The inward pull...
