General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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How dense would the atmosphere of a theoretical planet have it be, in relation to Earth's atmosphere, to fly with, say, a 10 to 15 foot wingspan? Math is acceptable and encouraged, and a set of art...
I have a planet where the equator temperatures are near boiling point (90ËšC or 194ËšF) during the "summer". What qualities would an animal need in order to survive these kinds of temperatures to c...
I'm working with a city that has cut itself off from the surrounding area. There may be as many as 10,000 people within it, or as few as 1000. I'm trying to be as realistic as possible. How long...
NASA has sent a crew of 100 people on Mars to start a colony. The crew was in cryogenic sleep during their trip to save food and water. And after the 6-month journey, they have reached Mars. My que...
I am trying to design my main character in my post-apocalyptic series to have a very dense, organic, durable skeleton. The skeleton should also be able to handle gun fire, a sledge hammer impact, a...
As part of Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design I am looking for a realistic way to create a particularly nasty creature. What I would like: A creature that is capable of emitting a ...
I'm heavily ignorant when it comes to mathematics and just science in general, but I have thought of four habitable planets, all of them revolving around a K-type sun. They're all colonized by huma...
So I've created this planet that's about 90% the size of Earth, orbits a binary yellow dwarf star and has an extremely electrified atmosphere. Cloud plumes coming from volcanoes contain various con...
A K3 civilization is a civilization that has access to the amount of power generated by a galaxy. Such a civilization would span 100s of galaxies. How can it exist as one entity if it takes thousan...
In a world very similar to ours, rain has a high concentration of simple carbohydrates in it, enough to sustain life on the surface. After some rainfall, this sugary rainwater is left behind and so...
The idea of forming a new country on Earth has been discussed previously: Can I still form a new country? and setting up a new colony on the moon has been noted here: How would today's nations r...
Under what conditions would a planet's night sky look like this to the human eye? The angular speed of the stars relative to the planet would need to be high enough for the stars to blur into th...
Suppose that I have come into possession of a substance, technology, or spell that functions as a perfect insulator and reflector. No energy can pass through it, and is instead reflected back the w...
A previous question's answer established that naturally occurring positrons could be gathered through positron-emitting isotopes. I've started looking into means that these isotopes could be gather...
Is it possible to have plants that wouldn't burn? Having the plant getting damaged by fire is fine, but I want the plant not to burn at all. It does not need to survive, it just must not catch fir...
While on a space mission to Neptune, you accidentally broke your tether on the way. After a couple of hours floating, you were hit by an asteroid. You passed out. When you are conscious again, yo...
OK, so humanity is going to space, and they are going to take farm animals into space, not only humans on earth value meat, but humans in space do, too. However, they don't want to waste precious r...
Is it possible for a plant to have the ability to fly? More exactly, the plant would either need to live without having any roots (and it would never need to touch the ground), or with the abilit...
Twenty years ago, a 40km diameter alien saucer came to Earth, and stopped 2km above the Atlantic ocean, somewhere near the midpoint between Casablanca, Morroco and Natal, Brazil but over internatio...
I am currently in the early stages of mapping out a conlang for a race of boar-people. I was stumped trying to think of what limitations, if any, having pronounced lower tusks would have on the de...
If we want to be realistic, we imagine ships pushing stuff out the back and relying on the conservation of momentum to move forward. Gravitational waves carry momentum. Are they viable as a kind o...
So I was thinking of a land animal with a biological harpoon, I'm not 100% sure why it would evolve with it. Details of it would be: Quadrupedal Medium-sized (similar to a pony) and would hunt s...
The Ahuizotl is a creature from Aztec mythology. It is aquatic, and appears similar to a small dog with grasping forepaws like a raccoon or monkey's, and a very long tail ending with an extra hand...
Setting aside concerns of containment for now; how much energy would it take to create antimatter? And how much of it would we get back using it as a fuel in a matter-antimatter reactor? What I'm ...
A spacefaring people buries their fallen heroes in space. The bodies are adorned in uniforms (fabric), equipped with the weapons they carried in life (mostly aluminium, steel or polymer, but contai...
Back home, Earth's moon is 2159.2 miles wide and orbits 238,900 miles from its parent. But let's pretend that the moon is 2500 miles wide and orbits 200,000 miles from Earth. Would the nightscape...
Okay so the story takes place up in the northern hemisphere around glaciers and polar bears and all that good stuff, its main character is named Xavior and he is a good human adapted to the radioac...
There's a human settlement at the north pole of the moon large enough to sustain expansion outwards for say 100 km in all directions. Humans like to think in terms of four principal cardinal direc...
So, I know that on the planet earth, the force of gravity is actually slightly less nearer the equator, due to the Centrifugal Centripetal Spinny Force. Not by a whole lot, but by some small amount...
The idea of the trope is that at some point, Earth is doomed, humans flee into the stars, knowledge of Earth is lost in the process, eventually becoming legend or myth, either due to loss of inform...
An organism lives and reproduces inside the body of other animals. This organism pays back its host by protecting the DNA from viruses and radiation damage in 100% of all cases. The organism itself...
This applies to all types of weapons, from simple knives to handguns to assault rifles to even military gear, such as night vision goggles. How far into the future do we have to go in order to see...
Sci-fi is full of examples of engineered diseases that spread as viruses and usually they are so powerful that they kill almost everyone, and the possible cure is always the slowest possible, vacci...
I have been working on a post-apocalyptic fiction story and there is one thing I have been wondering about, could (in theory) a mammoth make a good pet and transportation system in this story? Fo...
I recently came across Could pulsars really act as "lighthouses" to help in interstellar travel?, asked a week ago. The author was trying to figure out if pulsars could be useful for interstellar F...
T-Rex Forever LLC has a mating pair of Tyrannosaurus rex. They're a bit shady on how they got them, time travel, cloning...they won't say. Third-party biologists and paleontologists have examined...
I am considering setting my next D&D campaign on an earthlike but small planet. By "small," I am imagining a world that still feels vast, yet is circumnavigable over land and/or water with low ...
So I am working on a concept for a location, wherein a sort of oracle will exist. This oracle will in no way be super natural rather the strange behavior of the oracle (a human for the sake of the...
I'm trying to design a realistically looking capitol (with a few milion people) for one human nation on an exoplanet. The technology level is barely better than contemporary. The city is placed ...
The Phoenix appears in Greek mythology and are most commonly seen as beautiful golden birds that burst into flame and are reborn from the ashes. Is there a realistic way that they could evolve? Usi...
So there's been some industrial espionage committed against T-Rex Forever LLC. The method for how they acquired their T-Rexes has been stolen. Terrible Lizards Inc has acquired a mated pair of Vel...
The main creature in question is an intelligent species that stands from 3' to 4' tall on average. They are heavy-set and primarily bipedal, but able to move comfortably on all fours at the same s...
An uploaded personality, after spending 100 years as a biological human and 40 years as a post-human brain made of silicon (and later carbon) semiconductors plugged into a rack, decides to emigrate...
I'm thinking a planet orbiting a nearby star colonized by human settlers sometime in the not near, but not too distant future. How small could a planet be while still standing in as a relatively c...
If all humans on earth died out from a deadly plague, which species is most likely to take over the role us Homo sapiens left behind? Which species is intelligent enough to build their own civiliza...
The idea is to have a number of artificial, spherical satellite to have sort of a "spiral" orbit around a Ringworld, such that the inhabitants of each of a number of ring sections see a moon in the...
Lets suppose there is a race of Immortal beings. What are possible solutions to them slowly losing their teeth due to wear and tear? After all, if a normal human lived for hundreds of years at some...
It's Earth and the moon with all parameters as they are in real life with one exception, the moon is twice as reflective as usual. Instead of an albedo of 0.12, the moon has an albedo of 0.24. This...
(Edited question to meet concerns) The Problem Can you create synthetic biology that can be installed temporarily in human DNA to give people skills at birth, or are there problems, risks and lim...
I'm trying (failing) to write a story set within the exclusion zone around a nuclear power plant incident set in the near future. The 'incident' that leads to the exclusion zone being set up isn't ...
