General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Specifically, arthropod eyes that are neatly in their respective sockets, much like the human eyes. Could that work?
On the inside of a Dyson sphere there is effectively no gravity. Is there an alternative method to keep people on the inside surface from floating around? I know it could spin and that would keep...
In some universe,with physical laws the same as in ours, our world is some kind of "lab environment". Our solar system is enclosed in a balloon-like sphere with a radius of a few light-days around ...
I'm designing an Anthropomorphic Lu-pine. (Get it? Cuz it's technically a tree, but it looks like a werewolf.) They are mobile, omnivorous plants, slightly larger than the average person. They are ...
I have a super-earth world. The surface of the world is shallower due to extra gravity, so shorter mountain ranges and less ocean depths. The world orbits a binary star system at a distance of the ...
In a story I'm writing, there is a species of extremely rare cave dwelling bird. A scientist and a plummer have to find a specimen of this bird before it goes extinct. When they finally find it, th...
Is there a way to design a river system in an O'Neill/McKendree-style cylindrical habitat to passively feed into itself in an endless loop, from one end of the habitat to the other and back again? ...
I had the idea for a group of advanced humans using technology to rework their bodies so that they lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young, just like a platypus (possibly to survive in an al...
Say we have a large cargo spaceship and a small pirate spaceship. The pirate ship is the only one with any sort of weaponry (lasers, missiles etc.), but for the pirates to safely retrieve the cargo...
Looking for someone with meteorology/physics knowledge to help with this one. Let's say I've got an island that floats in the sky--nothing special, these are a staple of fantasy these days. For ar...
My time traveller has a maybe 20-minutes-into-the-future smartphone and laptop. They can store large amounts of data, on the Petabytes level or higher. The time traveller can effectively store the ...
If given a reason to develop such a process, such as attracting prey or scaring away threats or even making recognisable patterns to 'talk' to humans, what is the most likely way they would do this...
Before I start, let me say that I know that what animals think and feel and whether they do it is a highly, highly debated topic. But, for this question, let us just assume that many animals think ...
So, I know that there are naturally occurring beaches that are various 'odd' colors like pink, black, green, and orange and I was wondering if the color of this sand would have any effects on the c...
For the obvious reason of weight, our modern space stations and satellites are made out of metal or lightweight compounds to reduce cost. In a quick Google search, about $20,000 per kg is the cost,...
I have two tidally locked planets of roughly equal size (about the size of Mars) orbiting each other around a barycenter equidistant between them. They complete a day-night cycle every 72 Earth hou...
Would a Dyson sphere make a red dwarf appear to be a Brown Dwarf? Would it disguise a star enough to misidentify it what size it is? I'm just wondering if it could be possible that some Dyson sph...
Is it possible to build a garbage recycler that turns residues into its constituent elements using plasma and accelerating it through a magnetic field? The technology level is around that of the t...
Just for curiosity, I am a diabetic and I was wondering if humans would suffer from the same ilness if they were on other planets? Does the climate on other planets help the immune system? Will the...
In my fantasy universe, there is a disc-shaped world that has a flat surface that has roughly the same atmosphere as Earth (see this); the atmosphere moves along with the world. There is no gravity...
Segue 2 is a galaxy with only about 1000 stars and is 111 light years in radius. It has a light output only 900 times that of our sun. (This is a real galaxy in our universe) However, I want my fi...
Humans have come and gone. Their aggressiveness and pride have caused their own end. War has torn apart all society, engineered diseases pick them off one by one. The last remaining people have fle...
One of the aspects of most sci fi time travel representations that I find most challenging for my suspension of disbelief is this idea of people travelling through time and not travelling through s...
I'm designing an alien race that in structure to humans. One exception is that they have long muscular tails. I remembered while I was designing them, the reason why humans have no tails is becau...
So I'm writing a story and decided to use Hida Furukawa as the location. It has a high school with a field of 650 ft that theoretically could be used for a small aircraft to be use to take off. In ...
I've seen some cool art and scenes from the Cowboy Bebop which had trade lanes made up of what looks like large rings that accelerate and deccelerate a ship. I wanted to replicate a system like th...
I was thinking of adding rings to my planet and I wanted to give them a proper origin, so I thought about getting rid of the moon closest to the planet since I would still have one and it could mak...
The Hegemony has long looked upon Ganymede as a prime terraforming project for humanity. The Hegemony has the tech for large scale space production so large mirrors or sun shades are able to be bu...
(My world's details) I have a super-earth world. The surface of the world is shallower due to extra gravity, so shorter mountain ranges and fewer ocean depths. The world orbits a binary star system...
I had this idea the other day just for the heck of debating about if it would be feasible to build a bridge that crosses North Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Spain. I mean from St-John's (Newfoundl...
Let us say there is an adult male, adult female, a boy, and a girl. They experience time-travel. As a psychologist, what would you examine before and after the travel to ensure that psychologicall...
The "people" wearing this are 10 times stronger than humans and have near unlimited muscular endurance so weight is of little (but not no) concern. Their ballistic and gun technology is as advance...
In a world where human and dinosaur co-exist, would it be a good idea to use dinosaur as a mount ? More specific questions : Is a dinosaur smart and docile enough to be ride ? Which species of ...
I realize that many factors affect this answer so assume the following: Star type: G2 star (like our Sun) Composition: O2, N2, CO2, H2O atmosphere Magnetic field: Two different magnetic field str...
I've been trying to come up with a genetically plausible origin for dwarves, but with little success. By dwarves, I'm talking about the jolly and burly people similar to that of Tolkien's dwarves. ...
Within our local region of space are several hundred/thousand stars. I had long ago found some pretty good resources and made a starmap (using YGraph and some star catalog datasets I got from Nyra...
I was reading up a little while ago about Janus and Epimetheus and how every few years they trade orbits. The mechanics is interesting but I'm not going into them here. What I was wondering is ...
I'm building a story about a world where it has been discovered how to travel to any possible universe according to the many-worlds interpretation, and there's a company which is in charge of sendi...
The skyworld I'm currently working on used to be an Earthlike planet until a supernatural disaster struck. Dense, translucent gas billowed from geysers on the surface until the ocean of fog covered...
Is it unreasonable to suspend one's disbelief that an asteroid belt naturally formed with enough mass distributed through the belt to justify the formation of a belt-wide atmosphere given the follo...
I'm currently writing about an Earth sized planet that is 33% water and has 4 moons all the same size as our moon. All moons are 243,000 miles from the planet's surface and the planet takes 392 day...
Is it possible, with modern, or easily foreseeable technology, to build a compact digital data storage device that cannot be erased without removing the data store? The storage in question to be us...
I have a town, the capital of an empire. It covers 560 Hectares. What kind of natural barrier conforms to the following requirements: Is both heavily defensible and does not hinder trade all too...
My species of caniform-like creature has a relatively long muzzle because of its strong sense of smell. I would like to know how to give it a long muzzle with its large brain size. Members of this ...
I'm trying to design a humanoid or anthropomorphic organism that would be classified as a plant. The main argument people mention is that it wouldn't be able to produce enough energy to survive. I'...
Using comets at Mars L1 point, allowing the tail to constantly add to the atmosphere in both volatiles and increased temperature from the infalling matter, as well as blocking the solar wind which ...
Within the Star Wars Extended Universe, there is a science base on a small object within a near impenetrable sphere of Black Holes. Is this possible? The place referenced is called the Maw Install...
The premise of my story is somewhat similar to Jurassic Park in that a creature needs to be replicated from very little remaining organic matter. In this case, though, the relevant material is no...
Let's say a genetically engineered organism (as large as a whale), capable of swimming and breathing underwater, have an EMP field as a form of defense against man-made watercraft like warships and...
I'd like my world to have humanoid protagonists, while still reinforcing that they are ultimately not human, but have simply evolved in a similar way due to convergent evolution. To provide a const...
