General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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As we see today the interconnection between the brain and computing is becoming thinner day by day, we could imagine a future that where we could install additional artificial neurons. In a world ...
This just out of curiosity and interest, could something like the marsupilami exist in our world? If you don't know, the marsupilami is pretty much a bipedal, arboreal monkey like monotreme (egg-la...
Is it plausible for a species of ant that inhabits a mangrove-like marine environment to have their abdomen evolve into a tail-like appendage for swimming to move from tree to tree to forage?
The year: Sometime between 2025 and 2045. The place: A new high-end subdivision (or custom home showroom) near you. The sales pitch: This home is great for entertaining. It has a complete i...
Are Trojan Planets Possible? Are Habitable Trojan Planets Possible? A Trojan relationship is when an astronomical object A is orbited by astronomical object B, and a third object, C, orbits A at ...
It must be ingestable and the victim can't detect by taste or smell, though easily detectable in an autopsy, if performed, but mimics regular illness so the first few deaths won't be autopsied (Due...
In a certain world there is a ruler who runs a very powerful country with an iron fist. A faction of oppositionists has been giving her lip and has made some mean comments implying she brings the c...
I'm building a story around a newly discovered kind of deep-ocean octopuses whose ink contain "parasites" which act as acid in organisms. These ink parasites can be used as a weapon of mass destru...
In a Galaxy where there are numerous Earth Like worlds, and FTL Travel is possible but only by a small number of species, possibly only by Humans, perhaps they just happened to get there first. In ...
Lately, there has been speculation of what would happen if all the untapped oil, by the handwaving powers of the gods of television and money, disappear overnight. It has been explained, in varyin...
Background: I am working on a super soldier transhuman/posthuman concept for my fictional world. It takes the base human genome then uses genetic engineering to augment, delete, enhance, add, and ...
Premise By definition, an ectotherm uses environmental heat sources to regulate its own body temperature. The most common forms of body heat regulation that we observe from ectotherms here on Eart...
Imagine a sessile, multi-cellular slime like organism (or whatever necessary) awaits in a burrow or along a tree branch. Then an animal lands in its ooze and is trapped and soon paralyzed by its ve...
A character needs to build a computer out of raw materials in a bronze age. He has a nano scale factory, so manufacturing chips and such from silicon is possible, but I'm not sure of the best way t...
I am working on a story. i want to know if is it possible for creatures like snake, eagle, vulture to stay on an altostratus cloud without falling down. if possible the limits on how much force and...
How do my PA civilizations rebuild after a depletion of the planet's natural fuels? Even with a wealth of information to rebuild, would civilization still be permanently stunted due to being unab...
I'm trying to investigate the theory behind this phenomena. I have found answers to creating eternal storms but nothing specific to my world building. I'm looking at a future earth where any known ...
My planet, is roughly as big as Earth, but has two moons. The first moon, Luna, is essentially the same as Earth's moon, but the second, much, much smaller moon, Selene, actually orbits Luna. Sele...
What marine or brackish water animals would be best for domestication attempts by a semi-aquatic civilization? Bonus Points for those that get me pet/domesticated sharks!
I am a vengeful scientist who crash-landed on your Earth. While I was repairing my space ship, I had to obtain nourishment by consuming organic matter, and visited a local nutrition warehouse your ...
The Hegemony rules over the inner planets with a firm, but benevolent grip. To keep the far flung colonies defended and to keep the outer planets in check the Hegemony needs , and has, developed a ...
As it turns out, conifers are not the only trees to grow in boreal forests, or taiga. At the southernmost ends, the evergreens are mixed with such deciduous trees as: Birch Alder Willow Poplar M...
Would a state be able (with currently available technology) to cause cancer to its enemies, which it can't silence in a different way? (e.g. staged accidents, assassinations, imprisonment) Hugo Ch...
Humans developed a new weapon: Black hole launcher. How it works: A mobile particle acelerator acelerates two particles to huge speeds and collide both. A mini black hole is created. The mini b...
I have a small planet with a Radius of 3,900 kilometers and a density of 8.9 g/cc. It has an extremely Earth-like climate and has been extremely volcanically and geologically active in the "recent"...
Laugh all you like, you won't be laughing when it sprays you with its jade trunk of death. Info I figured out that I wanted an elephant that sprays poison (not acid) out of its trunk a while ago ...
I'm writing a short story in which my group of character is devising the stupidest and least practical way of lighting a fireplace. It then came to my mind that stuff that undergo reentry gets hot...
As the title suggests, this is a conceptual physics kinda question. What is the feasibility of using an electrically charged (as in not neutral) plasma as the working fluid in a turbine where the...
So, out in Kansas, in the DEC Oil Refinery, a group of people, called simply the Disciples, have set up a community. From the outside, it seems like a utopia, one where man and mutant get along pea...
Premise We have found extremophiles of the aquatic and microscopic types here on Earth, but so far large terrestrial extremophiles are the stuff of conjecture only. This makes it somewhat challeng...
My civilization is highly advanced Type III and wants to conduct an experiment on a red dwarf. They want to artificially cause it to become a blue dwarf, then a white dwarf and then finally a black...
I have a small isolated archipelago. Is it feasible that the flora of the island through natural selection (with animals favoring bigger fruits) has been steered to evolve large, plump fruits of th...
Can there be a different kind of mathematics with different sets of rules? That is without inference and axioms. One attempt might be Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", but I am not sure that...
As far as I know stars are going supernova as a natural process. Can aliens trigger it artificially? If this is possible then: How can I do this (what minimum technology and civilization develop...
IF they were real, would wormholes work in the way that they do in sci-fi (for all intents and purposes "teleportation", travel without movement, FTL, immediately "appearing" at the other location)...
Info I'm designing a breed of cow that produces acid instead of milk. Part of the reason this is useful for my story is that the cows produce as much acid as a dairy cow would milk (through selec...
In my most recent question, I asked for a material other than calcium and collagen that could form skeletons in alien creatures. My favourite answer was bio-steel; "Iron with a small percentage of ...
There is an empire expanding from the Netherlands to Western Russia, the empire is enthusiatic about turning rivers into canals for transportation. They don't care about the environment, they jus...
Using Artefaxian's excellent spreadsheet I have created a basic idea for my planet, but in the 'Stability Checker' part my low gravity planet is unable to hold H2O. I am wondering if it is possibl...
I've been curious about writing about a very durable exoskeleton humanoid species, but I have wondered about how the extra weight of a thick exoskeleton would affect their height. I do not see th...
So in my world there is a planet orbiting a star, which is in a far binary system with another star. Is there any formula to calculate when the distant star would be visible - times of year and/or ...
I created the above map using Photoshop and used Wilbur to erode the terrain a bit and calculate possible river flows. Still needs work but I need to create a river mask before I can go on. My me...
My new superhuman, Gravero!, has just entered combat. He's a new superhero with a lot going for him! He's resplendant in his dashing tights, his cape flows in exactly the right direction when he ...
Could a cow produce bottled milk? The answer is, of course, no; there is no way a cow could do that; obviously. Perhaps I should be more clear on what I'm asking. Is there any way a mammalian cr...
Somewhat similar questions have been posed before, but what I'm really interested in is what selection pressures would be necessary to produce a subspecies of giant humans, about three meters in he...
I have a type of coral that feeds off of bacteria that love bird feces (or something involving a bird species). It grows large rocky spires out of the water to create a habitat for birds. I need to...
I want to know if this is physically possible. So at first I thought I was nuts. Then I started reading about Hill Radii, and googled left and right. Turns out a Hill Sphere is the region around an...
What are the minimum dimensions (length, width, height, etc.) for rings to at least be as significant (as in brightness/visibility) in the night sky as our moon? Since there are so many variables ...
More posts from this thread are here: Metal-Feathered Macaw Viability Part 1: How Can It Fly? Info See this previous question to learn about the premise. We now know, via this amazing answer, ...
A common question seems to be how to survive tsunamis / floodings and the like. However I'm interested in what a building would look like after a year under the water. Depending on the depth and t...
