General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I ask this question because in my fictional world, I want to create extremely cold, populated areas, especially in Northernmost areas, but I noticed that in our real world, regions with less than -...
From 2.4 to either 2.1 or two billion years ago, Earth underwent a surge in a waste product that we know as "oxygen". Before that, life thrived in an ocean rich with iron under an atmosphere loade...
I have only encountered the "Sonic Boom" a couple of times in my life, once when I was lucky enough to watch Concorde fly over my town in the late 70's. In a story I'm writing someone claims to ha...
In the game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, characters wear exoskeletons with an ability called "land assist", which allows them to slow down their fall using a jet of compressed air (or some speci...
So, my colony mothership crawls along through sub-space at a "slow" ftl as it sends out faster probes ahead of it. Once it has located a cluster (meaning an acceptably dense grouping, not necessari...
I mean as in a city that is not situated at the bottom of the ocean but is not floating on the surface of it either. What would a plausible size and population size be for this kind of construct? C...
My setting has a lush rainforest planet, which houses some of the most feared animals in the galaxy. The abundance of food would make competition tougher and tougher over millions of years of adapt...
Brief setting notes: it's a "basically earth" type situation, a spinning ball of rock in space with the same size and gravity and atmosphere and magnetic fields and everything else. The main diff...
In my world, there are 3 astrological bodies of significance, the sun, the moon, and a 3rd, geostationary object, believed to be the home of the gods. I want all three of them to have roughly the s...
I want to create a glutton creature that can open its mouth wider than the prey item like snakes do, but also can bite through that big hard object and even chew it; this creature doesn't swallow p...
I see that asteroid mining had already been extensively discussed in the context of today's technology (Ex. Is Asteroid Harvesting economic?) and the answer is a definitive "No" - it's not economic...
You know, dragons like myself are no strangers to falling. It's a natural part of flight and I used to do it a lot when I was a tiny and very adorable wyrmling. The problem is it hurt, and sure it...
My time traveller from the distant future is about to get stranded back in time, but realises that by travelling back a short time, maybe 100000 years, he is going to leave a trail of destruction b...
One of the plotlines, I'm currently working on, is about a dragon who is forced to serve a settlement to "pay" for some of his past "crimes". For clarity's sake, we call the dragon Gyvaris. Gyvar...
For this question, the word 'metals' does not refer to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It instead refers to metals as defined by the periodic table of elements. After researching the ab...
I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology...
I am currently writing the world, setting and characters for a project of mine called the ORION Project - a story set in a dystopian America in the near future of 2050, where the government has tak...
Assume I have a human colony on The Moon. A meteor fragment gets by the defense system and smashes into a portion of the dome, let's say the hole is 1 meter in diameter, it's big. Safety measures...
So, in the S.S Portland (The main setting of my story) there is a variety of rooms. A lounge, a lab, etc. so, i was thinking that at some point, the lounge would be changed out for a 0-g pool. A ba...
For an artificial gravity ring station, could you make a central hub, using similar magnet technology used to levitate magnet trains here on earth, to reduce the amount of mass rotating? My thought...
In prehistoric times, there used to be a dwarf elephant species in many Mediterranean islands. They were about 1.5-2 meters high, but probably became extinct before the arrival of the first human b...
So, If you're familiar with the anime GATE (not to be confused with Stein's Gate) or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you probably know what's going on and why I have a boiling hatred t...
So, as one of the many, many consequences of modern day humanity being given access to a runic magic system by an unknown party, nearly the entire human race discovers one morning that they've been...
Given current capabilities, is it possible for a missile launched from the surface of the Earth to impact the surface of the Moon? I would imagine the same "rocket" used send stuff to the ISS coul...
The "Weird" spell in my world is basically a magical version of the US government's goals with the "MK Ultra" project from the 1950s: it induces a shared hallucination in every creature within a 9....
Do you think it will become possible to create opposite sex clones in the future? A male clone from a woman or a female clone from a man? I think it will become possible. To create a female clone ...
Background: So this Kurzgesagt video talks about quark stars, and how two of them colliding could send strangelets flying towards Earth or the Sun. Now it's been said that since, theoretically (as...
How might an enterprising spacer, mining the rings of Saturn, go about quickly measuring/estimating the velocity of and distance to a nearby moving object (asteroid, habitat, pirate, etc)? Bonus po...
On Earth, civilization grew up around river valleys. Rivers are useful as a water source, a food source, and a waste disposal system, but their most important function to a civilization is enabling...
I'm new to this and my scientific knowledge is massively lacking in this area (so please take it easy on me!) I'm writing a historical science-fiction novel. Parts of it set in the past (1977) and ...
Magnetic white dwarfs (MWD) comprise almost 2 % of all white dwarfs and they are characterized by having a strong magnetic field, whose strength varies between 1 T and 100 kT. Compared to the Earth...
The mad scientist community is...mad, to put it kiddie-appropriately. Their logic has the tendency to make 0% sense 100% of the time (provided, of course, that they ever bring it up.) So you can ...
I'm creating a fictional universe in which several races exist that are very different from each other due to long term separation. One race is specialized for the tundra, and is subjected to sever...
Are there any areas of space where an antimatter object, the size of a small house could survive without coming into contact with any or extremely minimal amounts of matter? I had assumed in all a...
I know we generally operate - or religiously operate - on the principle that fundamental things don't change over time. It's the bedrock of geology - Uniformitarianism. I also believe it is unprova...
Question: does a liquid or gelatinous substance exist that once outside a body could solidify and be hard enough to be used once as a tool? The setting is low fantasy without magic, yet with creat...
With the emergence of cyanobacteria on earth 3.5 billion years ago, the shift from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere began. "The atmospheric O$_\textrm{2}$ levels (in PAL; i.e., normalized to ...
So me and my buddy are currently working on a story that takes place on a different earth-like planet similar to when dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus inhabit the landscape. A few differences is that t...
Blindsight is a first-contact Sci-Fi novel based on a group of transhumans exploring an anomaly in space and discovers a species that has great intelligence but no self-awareness. The author menti...
So I'm almost done with my draft of a story I'm writing. And I just got a random question popped into my head. Is it possible for Zues (the kaiju size dino) to survive? I already got a little bit o...
I was creating a map of the air currents in my world, working back from the climates of the land (which I had already determined). (The world consists of one continent, similar to Pangea, with empt...
In a short story I created, humanity encounters a sentient and consciousness messenger that is alien in nature and origin. Upon further examination, it turns out that there is organic tissue grown ...
Context: Humans have escaped a a super-bacteria, similar in situation to the Bubonic Plague, that they could not create a cure for. They've done this by engineering gargantuan trees and adapting to...
Think of a thunderdrum from the How To Train Your Dragon movies for its large mouth, but it has a wingless centaur shaped body. It has a large head that can open its mouth wide. How would it create...
Giant dogs aren't uncommon in works of fantasy. Sif from Dark Souls comes to mind. What I want to know is: what's the largest a canine could realistically get, what differences would they need c...
I'm working on a bioweapon created by an extraterrestrial agent. The being is 2.5 m tall, humanoid, digitigrade, intelligent and mostly predatory. However, it does not require water, food or oxygen...
Scenario: Humans need to create a pull factor for people to move to and establish cities and economies in less comfortable and densely inhabited places, because they're a bit full already. The huma...
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into Legosi from Beastars. He felt a dull pain a bit above his behind, as he li...
My question is more science-based than hard sci-fi. Basically, I'm envisioning a scenario in which technology is advanced enough that life has spread through the solar system, and this mostly via s...
Would it be possible to have a planet created by a God - but still obeying the known laws of physics - to have a bouncy surface that would be strong enough to bounce any large incoming matter, like...
