Posts tagged technological-development
This question would be best answered for the time period of our first colonized planet, which will most likely be Mars. With the thinner atmosphere, weaker gravity, low oxygen, and the bodily damag...
We have a regular Earth as we know it, but instead of humans, there is this worm-like race, intelligent similarly as nowadays humans. Their inner physiology is different from our worms (and not imp...
Humans have grown fat, complacent and cock-sure of the certainty of future progress, arrogantly expecting to build minds in their own image. They even dream of building themselves a city, with a to...
Could an ancient civilisation create plastics on Saturn's moon - Titan? Much like how we forged metals and glass here on Earth... To prevent it from being impossible from the start fire can be pr...
My question is simple: In theory, would an industrial revolution driven exclusively by alcohol fueled internal and external combustion engines in the early 1800s be practical? What effect would th...
My post-post apocalyptic society (200+ years after the fall) is extremely technologically stratified, with the haves hoarding near-future technology and the have-nots making do with pre-industrial ...
I had in mind a sci-fi setting where humans have begun terraforming nearby planets without the benefit of faster-than-light travel. For example, Wikipedia lists a handful of terrestrial planets wit...
The story will take place near a galaxy filled with space faring civilizations. In this galaxy, a small group of scientists realize that their side is on the losing side of a war that will probabl...
Following on from this question and assuming the race in question had developed the ability to create tools how would they approach the need for mass calculation. Our early computers were used to ...
QUESTION I'd like a nation in the world I'm working on to be able to transport natural gas and hydrogen, for fuel and possibly ballooning. Natural gas pipelines and cylinders were first invented i...
I'm trying to come up with a history for a planet that's more-or-less Earth-like that was colonized by a small group of humans ~1000 years ago. Human civilization on this planet has an understandi...
BACKGROUND In the antiquity of my world, a college of pyromancers attempted to create stronger magnifying lenses so that they could apply their ability to control heat to ever more finely detailed...
Alien and fantasy creatures can be designed in an infinite number of ways. But are there physiological traits that would be common among all tool-developing (technology-building) species? As an e...
Malgrovian gliders inhabit the middle layers of the atmosphere of Malgrov, a gas dwarf. They spend most of their life gliding, preying on giant balloon-like floating lifeforms. When they get olde...
Following up on my Martian canals theme from this question and assuming the canals can be constructed, I would now like to ask what level of technology is required to do that. The basic problem Th...
In a far-distant future Pascal enters the bridge of his intelligent space ship. He's a lazy bloke who can't be bothered to sit or stand, so he flicks his fingers and in a moment of Clarkian...
I'm working on a sci-fi Western scenario on a habitable desert planet along the lines of Tatooine from Star Wars and Arrakis from Dune. For it to be habitable there has to be water below the surfa...
I've become interested in sci-fi / science-fantasy / weird Westerns. Building upon what I asked here I would like to be more specific and ask if there's scientifically sound ways to explain why a ...
Although the fossil fuel coal had been used as a fuel since 1,000 B.C., it wasn't until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution from the mid-1700s through the 1800s that coal began to replace b...
Once I heard a scientist saying the following: Imagine an ants' nest and all the ants living there perfectly organized, each one with specific duties to perform for the well being of the...
Linked What would the flora on a methane world be like? What would animal life on a methane world look like and how would it evolve? What would the conditions on a methane world be like? How wo...
This question about genetics (not required reading) contains the phrase "science of a Type II civilization." This got me to thinking: although we intuitively know what this means, does this actual...
In a future where all cars and public services are self-driving the way, I am assuming traffic congestion would be seriously limited, if not removed completely, because the road network would also ...
Imagine a species that evolved on a planet where there was no metal (or not much) of any kind. They, of course, discovered fire and were able to start building buildings and basic machinery from ...
Is a scifi setting of constant artificial light everywhere plausible? I'm thinking to the point that the average adult person has not gone out of a city and has no experience of general darkness (o...
Well, we went and killed ourselves off with our stupid wars. But aliens come along, find our marvelous planet and the evidence that we were here and they find some human (and other) embryos in a ba...
In the future, humans decide to conduct a long term experiment in which they make robots that move and think exactly like humans. They also need to eat, drink and breathe the same as humans. These ...
I would like to have a planet in which somehow it becomes necessary to harvest aurora for energy (and maybe matter if that's feasible). The civilization of this planet is moderately advanced -- e...
I'm currently working on a story and I'm having some interrogations about the plausibility of a civilization. Quick backstory: Humans had to abandon Earth a few thousand years ago for the classic ...
I have left a link to the NASA video in case you are not to sure what I am referring to or to get a better picture of what I am talking about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKFaAS30X8 With th...
Suppose a civilization in which every possible appliance is a bio-machine. There are automobiles, but each one has a human-like head under the hood. Each datacenter is a bunch of over-grown brains....
The BBC in the UK are currently screening a archaeology series exploring the idea that the Neolithic peoples in the Orkney Isles (North of Scotland) were the cultural capital of the British Isles. ...
I was wondering on others people's ideas on how to take a Space Age civilization and send it back to the stone or bronze age. My own idea was that war and disease broke out, crippling the nation as...
I am considering whether a pre-Industrial civilisation could carry on for millennia on an Earth-like planet without entering the Industrial Age. Of course, regularly destroying everything with pla...
After the WorldBuilding community helped Average Joe start his own microstate, Joe has become scientifically inclined, and uses his money to conduct somewhat dangerous research projects from...
This, unsurprisingly, is also related to mermaids. Spearguns using rubber bands and the like are popular underwater weapons, so slingshots would be useful to mermaids. The problem is, these requir...
Yesterday I was talking with some of my friends about ideal/utopian worlds and came across a potential infinite loop problem. My ideal world was that of a transhumanist vision. Humans still look an...
One thing that a few science fiction films seem to get wrong: it is extremely unlikely for two civilizations to evolve completely independently and yet be within a few hundred years of each other t...
In my world there exists a planet called Solara Prime. The planet orbits a large yellow star, healthy and capable of sustaining the system. There is one planet and 4 moons whose orbits are roughl...
I'm looking for some data to create my own sci-fi setting, but I want to base it on real world as much as possible. Also, I don't want to come up with any arbitrary year like 3290 with no backgroun...
I have a humanoid individual who for various reasons finds themselves in low orbit with no ship or shuttle or tech to take them down The society they come from is about renaissance era level (b...
This is the follow-up question to How could an underwater civilization develop electricity?, as mentioned there. In that question, I never addressed how my civilization could have discovered/used ...
Imagine an Earth-like society that has developed into the digital age. They have computers, the Internet and most of the conveniences of the modern age, but they still use a significant animal work...
In an alternate Earth (or even in a pos-exctintion future), suppose intelligent but primitive humanoids 1/10 the size of humans inhabit the planet. They don't coexist with current humans or have ac...
In the Carl Sagan novel Contact and the 1997 film of the book, aliens from Vega have picked up TV pictures of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, which is depicted as the first TV signal powerful eno...
Let's consider a multi-polar world where exchanges between the differerent poles are nearly in-existant (the other sides are considered decadant, too far away and previous interactions often escala...
I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with Michio Kaku, but he's a renowned physicist who has often talked about humanity's role in the future. He mentions some valuable words about how we are stil...
Let's start with these assumptions: We're 300 years in the future. The laws of physics are the same as our world, although new rules and understanding have been discovered. (i.e. not quite "hard ...
Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees? In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitiv...
Could something like this be possible? All humans have been replaced with highly advanced androids, indiscernible from humans, which have been implanted with the memories of the humans they were ba...
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