General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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After an age of highly developed technology, including many different satellites in various Earth orbits, humanity loses the technology needed to control those satellites. After many centuries, how...
Hello! I am thinking about analogue mobile telephones, but they have some severe flaws- the most significant being privacy. How could an analogue system be encrypted? It doesn't need to be complet...
In a story that I'm writing, there is a giant waterfall which flows down a cliff face. The waterfall is extraordinarily large, and the torrents of water which flow over the side are deafening. Beh...
Is it possible, given a strong enough magnet, to rip out iron based molecules out of the blood stream/body of a person/animal? Would such an event be the thing that kills someone or are there other...
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...
Years ago I read a letter in a magazine suggesting a method for reducing the fire risk in an enclosed environment such as a space shuttle. The idea was to reduce the oxygen concentration to the po...
Under normal circumstances, monolithic diamond is pretty terrible at resisting impact, due to it being weak in certain planes, also known as cleavage planes. To solve this, why don't we just make ...
I've got this idea of a rogue planet that is moving that fast through the intergalactic void that the cosmic microwave radiation, thanks to the Doppler effect, actually provides enough heat that it...
Imagine a spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit. Say the craft burns at periapsis towards the planet such that its orbital eccentricity does not change and the craft's periapsis moves with the shi...
Building on the universe established in this question, what happens to identity verification when someone's physical appearance and genetic code are modifiable at any time? Review of universe rule...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
I know that this is a bit silly, but I want to make a calendar for my world and I'm really worried about having to do leap years and such to ensure continuing accuracy. Inaccuracy isn't an option;...
In a world where pollution and population have drastically reduced the effectiveness of sunlight to grow food, would light-panels be capable of completely replacing the sun? The problem I'm trying...
It is said that in dense rainforests, only 1% of sunlight (sometimes less) reaches the forest floor, which greatly restricts the types of plant and animal life that can survive there. My (limited) ...
A speedometer is a gauge or device used for measuring instantaneous speed of moving vehicle roughly speaking, so for example the reading shown on the speedometer of a car parked at road side displa...
I'm currently designing a world where the inhabitants see the Aurora Borealis on an almost nightly basis almost all the way to the equator. The lights are so strong they rarely see the stars beyond...
I've sketched out an island, and then threw some tectonic plate boundaries on top hoping it would help me plot mountains. But the more I look at geological diagrams of plate boundaries, and read u...
How could I modify an alternate Earth to have less tornados in the American Great Plains area known as Tornado Alley? Maybe make the Rockies lower? Introduce an east-west range of mountains or high...
Price's Law is a hypothesis that in an organization, or across an industry, roughly half the productive output is being generated by a number of people equal to the square root of those participati...
Time travel works...just invented, by you. The tests prove it! After many conversations and significant planning, your epidemiologist significant other has approved your plans for time travel, for...
What coloration pattern/ technique could a large mammalian predator employ to evade detection from other mammalian predators at 100 -> 20 meter distances (or close enough so that it could sprint...
How does a Neandertal compare with an anatomically modern human? This diagram below is a simplification of the real answer: The average Neandertal male stood 64 inches tall, weighed 143 pounds an...
Is it possible for a large enough Ion Drive with enough power to be dangerous to other objects "down wind" of the vehicle, even at long distances (100+km)? As I understand it, ion drives accelerat...
I have an idea for a land based mobile organism that moves and uses photosynthesis for its primary means of energy generation. Can a motile organism conceivably get enough energy from photosyntheti...
It's my understanding that if an Alcubierre drive were to be constructed, it would be able to function as a time machine because there would be certain paths through you could take to get to a dest...
A classic image of mermaids are their long flowing hair that swishes in the water. But in the scientifically realistic sense this makes none. The hair would be nothing more than a nuisance to the m...
What happens if Earth's magnetic field shuts down? How exactly does this impact humans, and how long before we need to make significant changes for survival? Does it make any difference if Earth'...
The Earth-Moon Lagrange points have names: L1, L2, and L3 are Libration Points, the L4 and L5 points are the Kordylewski Clouds. The Jupiter-Sun L4 is named the Greeks, and the Jupiter-Sun L5 is n...
I recently learned that it's believed that the solar system once had one more gas giant, which was ejected by Jupiter some time in the past. https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/Fifth_Giant Doe...
I was investigating a few ideas on recreational solar sailing, and came up with some interesting things - The primary equation in solar sailing is $ F = {{2 R S A} \over {c}} \sin^2{\theta} $ Whe...
Low gravity golf was invented by Alan Shepard in 1971 when he hit two golf balls 40 yards on the moon. Surprisingly, this version of the sport with little atmosphere and much lower gravity, is the...
I was recently introduced to the South Atlantic Anomaly. As I understand, for satellites and space craft, this is a natural feature that can wreck space craft by taking even computers designed fo...
So, Second Earth had/has a firearm problem. Since my magic is really just advanced science, I can't create firearm-disabling fields, so instead, I created a spell that should be able to ruin firear...
It might be that between year 0 to the industrial revolution (say 18th to common era), the Caspian sea significantly larger than it is today. If so, is there some graphical illustration as part of...
There's apparently a type of transmissible cancer that came from new world dogs thousands of years ago, the Canine transmissible venereal tumor. As I understand, this self replicating surviving ca...
I've created a genetically modified race of humans with an extreme height. I've taken into account the cube square law, and added some bones and muscles to help cope with that. I'm planning on maki...
What will be the view of the sky and the distances between stars, living on a planet or in a habitat in a super galaxy that has merged with all its nearby galaxies in its cluster, at a time in the ...
What would be the best way in which to genetically modify (or create through some other method) an animal which breeds normally for a certain number (50?) of generations before becoming sterile? Ge...
I want a world in which animals roam the wilderness on four legs, yet at least some of them are able to do the kind of carrying and fine handling of objects done by humans. The planet is superficia...
How would competitive wrestling change in a microgravity environment?
Theory If I am understanding this history of this correctly, in the 1920s the mathematical process of converting measurements with a certain amount of measurement error into numbers, then doing yo...
Imagine a far-future spacecraft drive that accelerates its reaction mass to a small fraction the speed of light (say, 1,000 km/s). Say the mass flow rate to the drive were 1kg/s, and say the reacti...
The way this would work is by creating lasers & pumping them into a chamber where it can't escape. The power for the lasers to be created is made either with a generator or by charging using an...
The concept of utility fogs is actually pretty old. The idea is a swarm of fairly small micromachines (about 100 micrometers in length) that would be able to mimic most materials and objects. Each...
So I thought about how my dragon-like species would get it's wings between the arms and legs and I figured that this would be the evolutionary path for such a creature: Hexapodal ancestor -> Q...
I am trying to create "black magic" with a visual black effect with lore backing (it is for PC game). How can I create this effect, either optically or neurologically? I am not talking about hue ...
The planet is identical to Earth except for one twist. It is not axially rotated but has an elliptical orbit, causing longer, planetwide winters. I would just like to ask what the width of the hab...
I have done some research and so much contradict one another or I simply fail to understand. Do seasons occur on a tidally locked planet that isn't tilted on its axis?
In my setting, one of the fallouts due to interstellar war between civilisations is that a planet's gravity can be removed. This capability is part of the setting's hyperspace mechanics so the exac...
