General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I am building a work in which steam plays a vital role. I would like to include the idea that much of the power for the people is being provided by a central machine that is isolated in one place b...
Take-off in a craft with rockets allows a gentle acceleration that doesn't kill the occupants. Given that the Moon has no atmosphere: Is there any current technology that would allow safe takeoff ...
So I've got this civilization that doesn't have electricity, but does have municipal power distribution via compressed air lines. Now, you can do a lot of useful things with compressed air. Even i...
Humanity builds a spaceship to leave Earth. For eight billion people or so, that vessel has to be gigantic. Using the metal from Earth's core for the construction and the biosphere to create a habi...
Introduction See background information here. 1000 years after darkness fell on Old Earth, humanity is scattered throughout the solar system. Apart from the Harmonious Republic of Mars, there are...
There are numerous programs and resources that can be used to ascertain pretty exactly the average temperature and general climate of a region. But is there any way to get a quantitative estimatio...
I am building a world that is mostly land but i need something to divide it all up a bit so i decided I'm adding an ocean. What i want to know is the following: Would it be even remotely possible...
I am creating a binary star system with a likeness to the Alpha Centauri system with an outer orbiting planet like Proxima Centauri. On an earth similar planet what would the temperature variation ...
Meet Greg. Greg was born with pretty average genetics. It seems like he was destined to have average intelligence, average strength, and be average at everything. There was one particularly though:...
Supposing I have a room currently occupied by Jedi Knights, or some other force that I can't defeat with battle droids and brute strength. I wish to incapacitate the occupants of this room with a g...
More often we have heard countless of familiar sci-fi scenario whereby the inhabitants of a dying planet faces world ending catastrophe most notable the superman origin. My question is can a planet...
Supposing a world like the Underdark, full of civilizations that developed and live their lives completely away from the light of the sun. In the typical D&D type setting, these creatures have...
This setting takes place with medieval level technolpgy. Upon death, all souls leave the body and go directly to God to become one with its consciousness. However, there are other competing gods wh...
In my previous two questions regarding temperature regulation and Rotations I set up the idea of creating a multi-layered shell world consisting of planetary crusts stuffed inside one another creat...
We all at some point in our childhoods thought that the moon is made out of cheese. As such, I thought: under what circumstances can a planetary surface form in such a manner that it is edible (and...
I have been asking around a bit because i am trying to create a world for a story i'm writing. And after some loose questions i think the better way to get an answer will be to just list the crite...
A large (compared to Earth life) species of creatures live in space. They gain energy from interstellar dust and starlight. How they do this is a separate question so not relevant here. However the...
Assuming an earth-like planet, but with several billion more years of cooling and settling (and with no moon to create tides). I'm imagining this planet would be geographically and tectonically te...
Having recently studied Galileo theory on the Square-Cube Law, I was curiously thinking about how this would apply to alien life forms on another planet. I've come up with these theories and would ...
Suppose humans have developed the technology to travel between star systems. This might be some science-fiction method like warp drive, jump drive, peanut butter drive, hyperspace drive or whatever...
This is a simple question, hopefully not broad. My colonizing company wants to put little habitats on the surface of a planet with more gravity (2.0G) than earth. Is there a way to reduce gravit...
I'm trying to setup a non-real scenario that doesn't break suspension of disbelief too much past the original idea. But so long as things keep consistency it should be fine. So you are flying a fi...
To expand the territory of the EU, one can consider recreating Doggerland by reclaiming the lost land from the sea: Had our ancestors had more technology, they could have dealt with the sea leve...
I'm asking this question as a reference for use in worldbuilding when developing world size, atmospheric content, or alien optometric abilities (aka, vision). While I'm specifically asking two q...
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges? Please note I have a strong cultural aversion ...
500,000 people have been kidnapped from all over the world by aliens. The aliens want to see if humans have empathy, and they can't understand our languages, as we speak they hear just random nois...
Let's say that humans were biologically immortal. Once they reach adulthood, they effectively stop aging. Due to disease though, the average lifespan is 100 years. (In practice, your access to heal...
As a linguist aboard a terraforming mission, you arrive at a new planet. The planet, orbiting a G2V star, has copious amounts of wildlife and some sentient lifeforms. However, you, interpreting an ...
What I want to know is if an asteroid about 15 KM in diameter and roughly double that in length, spinning at a significant speed, could go undiscovered until a crew of an asteroid mining ship happe...
In its heyday Earth was a great interplanetary trading post on account of its low gravity moon which was used as a warehouse for all kinds of goods. The Moon was covered almost entirely in large w...
Many of you may have heard that supercritical CO2 (as in at just the right temperature and pressure to be in between gas and liquid) is a possible alternative solvent for life, like water is for us...
The chance of conceiving quickly does depend on a woman's age. Women are most fertile between the ages of 20 and 24. The average person is born with around 300,000 eggs and steadily loses the...
If humans discovered a diamond exoplanet and then traveled there, how would they set up civilization on a diamond exoplanet? Everything needs a foundation, even on low-gravity planets (below 9.8m/...
So, we've gone off to another star system and decided to build a Dyson bubble--a continuous statite, supported by radiation pressure, surrounding a star--with a surface gravity of 1g to live on. N...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a rotating cylindrical space habitat comparable to the more well known O'Neill model. It was proposed by NASA engineer Thomas McKendree in 2000 as an update of O...
An artificially created organism called a symbiote has escaped from a research facility and has infected a human host. It has given this human new abilities, including super strength, speed, durabi...
Let's assume that this hypothetical alien crawled out of the identical primordial ooze to the point where they share significant genetic similarity with humans, and due to either evolution or outsi...
I have about five main planets in my fictional universe and like any planet, their days, months, and years are all different. Are there any problems that could mess the narrative up, since my chara...
Is it was technically possible for a superhero that senses radio waves (like low frequency EM) to "hear" the radio? This superhero senses radio waves a bit like we can see visible light, though n...
So, I'd love to have werewolves in the world I'm building, but as it's a sci-fi setting I don't really want them to be magical. I can stomach some pseudoscience, but I want the process to be as rea...
Supposing we had many thousands of antimatter bombs (they can be detonated in many different locations), how much total antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans on Earth? Supposing...
I writing a story about a physics student who has a difficult relationship with his estranged father, world famous physicist and strong proponent of string theory. As a revenge he wants to rule str...
I'm currently working on a story involving a refugee group of people escaping their society, which has made uploading a copy of their consciousness in to a virtual reality system obligatory. Howeve...
The testicle or testis is the male reproductive gland in all animals, including you humans. It is homologous to the female ovary. The functions of the testes are to produce both sperm an...
Many sci-fi words use anti-gravity or artificial gravity to manipulate the weight of their ships making flight much easier. Wikipedia even has an article on it which discusses several attempts to m...
All life on Earth is surprisingly homogeneous from a biochemical point of view. Every organism known to us is primarily built with carbon-based molecules that also contain hydrogen and oxygen, main...
Humans have been domesticating carnivores for over 10 000 years. And there are certainly carnivores big enough to ride. The former is the biggest feline ever to exist. They certainly can carry a hu...
Theoretical scenario question I came up with. Unrelated to anything, just a weird idea. A humanoid species has evolved to appear to humans to be a human female. In fact they have bat-like wings wh...
As part of a story idea, I'd like to create an alien civilization that colonized different solar systems in a manner similar to how European nations colonized other continents here on Earth. This c...
EDIT: As suggested by L.Dutch, I turned the original post into a series of its own. Some Context Though the name "Shared Consciousness" is pretty self explanatory to me, the best I can do to desc...
