General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I'm trying to come up with a the most economical design for artificial gravity. The simplest design for a space ship is to have a spinning ring structure around a central body. People living in the...
I am designing the geography of a lake in which two rivers flow. Should it have a river flowing from it to the sea or vice versa?
Imagine humans discover FTL travel and they send a crew of 100 people: 1 captain 2 pilots 2 copilots 40 scientists/doctors 20 soldiers 30 engineers 5 robots What supplies would they bring with ...
(This question is not about getting scrap metal out of orbit and recycling it: please see the second and third sections of the question text.) Consider an object which was not designed for, or ha...
Given the daylight cycle discussed here (see the graph in the selected answer), suppose that the moon revolves in the equatorial plane, at a distance sufficient to light (barely) the poles, avoidin...
Supercritical CO2 has been suggested as a potential alternative bio-solvent, replacing water, at high pressures and modestly elevated temperatures. But what about supercritical N2? ScCO2 is an ind...
If you want to tell a story of a lonely island on earth, isolated from the rest of the civilization, how many years do you have to go back to be realistic? I think about a story about 350 people w...
Ludicrous Leg Man has never skipped a leg day, as a result of which he has infinitely strong and fast legs and all attendant secondary superpowers. Don't ask why, just roll with it. While performi...
The core of this question is this: Given what we believe we know about the requirements for a tool-using, space-faring race to evolve, how viable would a species that has a hybrid exo/endoskeleton ...
I am imagining a special ecosystem on a rogue planet (a planet that wanders throughout space without orbiting a star or other heavenly object) but I would need your help to fill in the gaps and rea...
In this situation, humans have used ships to colonize other worlds very distant from ours but still maintain a interplanetary equivalent of our World Wide Web. These future humans have not yet disc...
I need a habitable body with 64-hour days and nights... but only on one hemisphere. The other side is perpetually dark. Is such a thing possible? I'm picturing a tidally-locked moon orbiting a ga...
I am trying to figure out the sex-determination of a very foreign form of reproduction. A species has three sexes X, Y, and Z. X produces X gametes, Y produces Y gametes, Z produces Z gametes. The...
If an Earthlike planet were fragmented into thousands of fragments (ranging in size from many small city sized rocks up to a dozens of small country sized rocks and a few Australia sized rocks) via...
Around 85% of my world is covered in water. I know that water tends to make temperatures more stable and reduce the extremes, but I don't know the details which is why I'm here. Would such a plane...
In particular, I want to know if a creature whose upper body displays bilateral symmetry and whose lower body displays tetramerism like a jellyfish is biologically possible.
Could my civilization use sonoluminescence to create exotic works of art? Someone said on a science forum that future applications of sonoluminescence can be art. Is this feasible or even possibl...
In my world an alien creature claims to be from an earth-like planet orbiting a 500 light-years away solar analog star. It tells us that the planet has x mass, y diameter, z orbital period, that sp...
Selective (Prioritizable) Healing What is it? It is the ability to choose which wound do you want to start healing first, or at least, which wound do you want regen faster slowering the rest of wo...
Would it be possible for a race of crustacean humanoids to live as nomads in a desert environment? I want them to have crab-like faces and crab-like skin with humanoid bodies. Would they survive in...
If humans colonize Mars how will the 2 societies (Mars inhabitants and Earth inhabitants) be able to synchronize and cooperate regarding time? Since: Martian days and years are different than the...
The dominant society on my conworld is at a level of technological and scientific development not unlike our own, with minor differences here and there. Scientific standards are decided by Academy...
I'm actually trying to create an alien ecosystem, so changing orbits, what's exhibiting tidal forces and the geography and such is welcome if needed. I also wonder how stable a setup with dramatic ...
In a previous question, I established an area that creates megastorms. Unlike a bunch of my other questions, this one is incredibly straightforward: Just how deep does a submarine (Or aquatic life...
This concerns a habitable, earthlike moon orbiting a gas giant, which is not tidal locked, and has an elliptical orbit eccentric enough to avoid frequent deep winter freezes (the freezes do happen,...
My society/area is set in a isolated wasteland where the primary income of people is ranching. However, I want my people to be able to at least be able to maintain technology at a 1916 level (the r...
For my story, I need there to be a planet close to the home world of my species (in the same star system) that the species could easily get to and easily colonize, but that does not have its own li...
I am designing a species specifically designed to be technician on spacecrafts, where their workspaces have low-gravity. Here is how they are currently designed: They have two pairs of arms inste...
If our hands had 2 thumbs and 3 fingers how would they work? I mainly concerned with the bones and how they would interfere and interact with each other. But the muscle work would be helpful as we...
So, if Humanity wants to conquer the galaxy one star at a time, it is going to need a massive fleet. This fleet will require massive resources to build. If I want to build a fleet to take over the ...
Let's just take antimatter off the table right now. As I've learned recently, it's hard to make, expensive as hell and even more volatile, and you can never get more energy out of it than you put i...
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
Similar to Could Plants Develop Sentience? but slightly more general: I'm not interested in plants in particular, but want a more general understanding of the effect of motion on intelligence and v...
I'm thinking of a world where the earth's moon is densely crowded with dark materials. Solar power plants, dark buildings covered with radiation shielding, large dark open pit mines etc. Imagine th...
Consider a rogue planet, moving in a region of complete void absent any type of star (they all burned out). It is orbited by an artificial moon which shines and serves as the planet's sun. However,...
So, this question has been asked before, but I would like to make a few stipulations regarding the specifics of my question. Firstly, the aluminium in question is fabricated in modern times, and...
According to Wikipedia, ...plants are green because chlorophyll reflects green light. And chlorophyll is found in all plants because it is the molecule that absorbs the light that is used to ma...
I'm very interested in a post-eruption setting in the continental United States. Unfortunately, it looks quite unlikely that a serious caldera-forming eruption is in our near future. However, we'r...
I am working on an alien species with mammal-like features and characterized by radial symmetry, in opposition to bilateral. They have four lower limbs arranged in a square-like disposition, with t...
Anatomically speaking, could an aquatic mammal develop a horizontal fin that instead of being localized at the end of the tail extends up the sides in a similar manner to how an eel's fin extends u...
In this hypothetical world, evolution occurs as it should. (Not to run afoul of any genetic diversity requirements of evolution; some simple viruses have aided in the genetic shifting process). But...
Let's say an intelligent civilization of beings capable of building planetary superstructures created an artificial planet with a solid core capable of generating a gravity well and covered the sur...
Rain happens when the pressure of moist air drops enough to form droplets and the droplets get heavy enough to fall. The trouble that I see is that the pressure will probably drop off slower than ...
My friend is writing a book, and I volunteered to create a planet for him, one with an epic mountain extending far above the clouds. The planet features lush jungles in the lower elevations and e...
My story opens with an old man who arrives at his "personal" asteroid somewhere out in space. When he arrives, everything is powered down and he has to bring systems online before he can take his s...
I wish to clarify my doubts regarding time dilation Is it possible for a planet to be habitable like Edmund's planet from interstellar, which has somewhat similar gravitational force as Earth (9....
Based on the desert world from this question I need to transport around 500 cubic kilometres of water / year across a desert. Using this calculator. this can be achieved if the main feeder canal is...
The setting I'm thinking of is in the not-so-distant future where humanity has become an interplanetary species using conventional propulsion. The solar system is largely colonized with human settl...
On Earth we don't really notice many effects of the Earth spinning, apart from the day-night cycle. It took a long time for people of Earth to realise that it even was spinning, but there are measu...
I understand there are a lot of factors to consider here, but would it be possible for material from the ship's destruction to fall to earth and cause significant damage to a city? What is a reason...
