General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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So, I was reading this article about how difficult it would be for any alien race to escape an exoplanet with about 10 times the mass of Earth. It states they probably would even lack satellites. ...
There is a lot of information on drying up a Mediterranean sized depression. However, there is not a lot of information on drowning such a large area or what sort of habitats could exist before the...
In the question Wind turbines in space The user asks about using solar wind to rotate turbine like things in order to get energy. Most answers say that using them to get energy would not work beca...
There's this creature that swims over the surface of water and it's giant, almost the size of a whale and has thick scales as armor over its back. This creature almost never dives underwater so fro...
Could a untethered blimp be built strong enough to with stand a thunderstorm? Could wind generators be placed on it to transfer turbulence of shifting wind into wind power? Rain could be collected...
I'm working on a scenario where one person can be at two places at the same time, kind of like a mirror version of themselves where the original person controls both bodies even though the two bodi...
In my world, I am attempting to design a primitive organism to be the ancestor of life on an artificial planet with all chemicals necessary for life. I want the organism to be as small as possible ...
The mountain in question is about the same height as the french alps. The headquarters in the should hold 500 people, is this possible?
I am writing a hard science fiction story and I want to avoid violating known physics, while still enabling some of the classic mainstays of science fiction under the auspice of sufficiently advanc...
Short Version (During the next 500 years on Earth) How does life change for students during school and after they graduate, to find work in a world where our economy is still based on gaining weal...
Solar wind density is very low even at Venus it is only 10 or so H+ ions per cm$^3$ but it is moving at a brisk clip of 400 km/s for the slow wind and 750 or so for the fast wind. So (feel free to ...
Essentially for my story my Evil Empire needs a constant and huge amount of new population to conscript for their armies. The way they accomplish this is by forcing every female member of society (...
While once living in Texas, my family and I had the privilege of watching a shuttle re-entry. It was breath-taking. I kid you not, it was like watching the finger of god drawing a line of fire th...
The development of microgravity cuisine is an interesting topic, especially when it comes to transferring simple processes like the successful thermochemical processing of muscle tissues (e.g. barb...
Would two moons of equal size and distance on opposite sides of a planet counteract each other's tidal pull?
One of the ways to create a major mountain range is a process called subduction. Here, heavy oceanic rock sinks beneath the lighter continental rock. The result--coastal mountain ranges like th...
In redesigning a large number of my ships, I've decided that having larger ships generate enough power for FTL was too convenient and made balancing the factions varied FTL methods difficult (both ...
Is it possible with some chemicals as intake for humans to completely convert the food/chemical to energy to survive? This is similar to when we are talking about clean energy where water and some...
So in many a fantasy world mountains, or in some cases a particular mountain that play an important role in the story. Maybe it's the seat of the gods or hosts a hidden Shangri La, you get the i...
In a previous question on this site I asked about the side effects of a having ludicrously strong, permanent, static magnetic field on the surface of a planet, capable of pulling in non-magnetized ...
A rare opportunity to send a colony ship off-Earth arose. The target is a somewhat Earth-like planet, with the exception that it was apparently conceived by George Lucas, as it only has one climat...
In my world, there's an era when only some 20 visible (big enough to see with the naked eye; all other animal life forms are microscopic) animal types lived on the planet. Mammals such as wolves, ...
Is a planet with varying fields of gravity possible? Yes. Earth has varying gravitational fields at various different times due to various factors, mainly location based. How extreme can I make th...
One of the points made in a number of recent questions regarding underwater races has prompted me to review one of my older pieces of world-building. Namely: the difficulty of producing common stru...
We are used to a world where humans are basically an apex predator; we don't really need to worry much about becoming some other animal's next meal. If that wasn't the case, and humans had to be w...
Life on Earth pretty early on settled on deoxyribonucleic acid organized in chains of base pairs as the means to code for the construction of proteins which make up a lifeform. It also has the bene...
I've seen many sci-fi scenes that feature a ship underway on a deep space journey. As the ship passes the vantage point we can see engines burning during sub-FTL speeds (The Expanse most recently)....
I am building an idea for a terraformed environment with 1/6 the gravity of Earth, with a permanent human colony that has been established and sustained for 40+ years. I have thrown around a few id...
I am trying to figure out what kind of liquid, if any, can be used to severely impede or slow human motion without killing or severely damaging their bodies (IE if after being submerged in this liq...
Piggybacking on this question: Can you simply scale up animals? how CAN we scale up living creatures to be giant sized? What would need to done to make truly giant animals (Dragons, Kong, Godzilla,...
As all of you know, humans eat for energy. While being able to maintain homeostasis is great, it's also human to want more. Maybe we want stronger muscles, or the ability to breath fire, or even to...
So, my climates are extreme due to a 31.1 degree axial tilt. The maps provided show a climate classification system based on prevailing winds and elevation. Based on Reddit user u/shagomir's Plane...
My Keplerians are humanoids but they have a special organ and special hormones for protein storage. Not only that but they don't get muscle atrophy from injury. Take the abdominal muscles for examp...
In both fiction and non-fiction worlds, that attempt to keep a sense of realism, planets are spherical. Is it possible for a planet to not be shaped like a sphere? If such a planet is possible...
So I am making another insect themed character (I can't help it insects are just so amazing to meâ¤ï¸) and I want this one to be able to control insects from a distance. I have some ideas (Pher...
I was not entirely sure how to word the title question, so allow me to put my question into more detail here: Suppose there was a planet with just the right conditions to allow humans to live ther...
I understand that there is wide range of bullet calibers. I am interested in the ones that is 50 caliber or less, and if you can be high enough in a blimp to be safe either by to far to see or to f...
I'm currently planning for my own new story, and in one point in time there will be a city somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean which has to have the space resources necessary to sustain for around 1 bi...
So I was thinking of using the asteroid Vesta as one of the many asteroid colonies in my future solar system. Is it a viable candidate or is there any "problems" with it. The colony would be made o...
So, I'm writing about the siege of an asteroid base. This asteroid is near the outer edge an asteroid belt at the solar radiation equivalent of Saturn's orbit from its star (although the raw distan...
To clarify on the title, K-type main-sequence stars--shortened as "orange dwarves"--are subjects of excitement for astronomers and astrobiologists. Why? They emit enough radiation to provide a...
I am developing a (magical) first-millenium CE alternate history based on an extension of historically matriarchal societies, and am trying to decide how this would affect the stereotypical male pe...
Imagine life evolving on a planet. First creatures crawl out of the ocean and start colonizing the land. Then one of the species gets into such conditions where it needs to specialize in two differ...
I totally get why humans who have colonised a low gravity environment (Mars or an asteroid, for instance) are skinny. Muscles doing less work, square cube law, force output of a muscle proportional...
In short I'm looking at creating an artificial sperm smart enough to fertilize an egg and develop into an embryo, so that would mean the sperm must have some means of carrying information similar t...
First, let me define what I mean by "full VR immersion". A helmet or headwear that covers or plugs into the brain, allowing them to control a virtual self or physical thing (such as a robot) as wel...
Inspired by this question, so credit to them for the core idea. How might a slow fire energy weapon reliably neutralize its target? Here are some details about the precise design I had in mind: I...
Start with present day "maker" culture. People, including youngsters, play with microcontrollers and machine parts, with synergistic technology like 3D printing, shoebox-sized robotic milling mach...
Is there some astronomical / physics reason why it would (or would not) be realistic to have more than one "larger-than-Earth-moon" object in an alien sky as backdrop to a movie or tv show? In oth...
Imagine that, in a thousand years, the star system of Proxima centauri has a planet located in its goldilocks zone that has been terraformed by earthling settlers. We do not really know what the b...
