General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I've had a look around the internet and the only real classification system for planets seems to be the one from Star Trek, which I don't want to use. The real groups that planets fall under seem t...
How would this effect nature as a whole and our living conditions if it does? The color is not too far from blue so it should be more feasible and not change the Earth too much.
A Milankovitch cycle is defined in Universe Today as a cyclical movement related to the Earth's orbit around the Sun. There are three elements to a Milankovitch cycle that affects the amount ...
Tech level: more or less contemporary, no tech that would put you in awe. I'm trying to make realistic, driverless, mass-transit system. The first idea was that "driverless" implies that in each ...
A scientist creates device that allows some degree of communication with the afterlife. The communication is very difficult and the dead can only pass small bits of information on, so there is a lo...
We are talking about those comrades who come out on wet autumn days - you're right, normal earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris. Playing an important role in ecology, earthworms stand at the lower end ...
Imagine the Earth is sucked into a wormhole powerful enough to pull it out of it's current orbit. the ones who created the wormhole wanted to move earth to protect it however didn't want their acti...
What would be the effects of an Earth-like planet with a longer year and longer lunar orbit? I have a planet with 432 days in a year and a lunar cycle of 36 days, with 12 months at 36 days each. Th...
In our world's 2016, the German town of Munich is part of the country of Germany. Now in an alternate Earth I would like Munich to be part of the Great French Empire (in the alternate year of 2016...
I'm coming up with a science fiction world for an assignment. Would it be possible for a planet like Earth to be eaten by a giant alien creature that moves through space at a relatively slow speed...
Judy likes coffee. Right now he is standing in the middle of the urban park sipping it. Unbeknownst to him a local phenomena occurs somewhat near: space itself bends where a lovely group of lilies...
Basically, I want to create an apocalyptic event that knocks out most electricity, for a long time, hundreds of years at least. Electronic devices that do work would be extremely rare, and people e...
Suppose there's an Earth-like planet. In the middle of the desert, a wizard/sorcerer/etc has enchanted a 30-mile-long rectangular area, so that, for two hours a night, clouds form and gently rain i...
Currently your work and life schedules fall mostly into 'day' and 'night', with a few areas breaking up work times into 3 part shifts, morning, evening night etc. Imagine we live in an artificial ...
I plan on writing a story about a human born in the wild and raised by wild animals. I have heard of stories of real humans being raised by wild animals, mostly in Africa. I have also done some res...
It's always ~7:30 PM. Gravity and air are normal, and clouds and winds and storms exist, but there's no moon, and the sun is always just touching the horizon, without ever moving in the sky. The w...
Faster than light travel is Dangerous with a capital D. The main reason for this is because by the time you see something, you've already smashed into it and vaporised yourself, the target and any...
In my near future of manned Mars exploration, NASA/ESA/etc have a dozen or so rovers spread out around Mars. For scientific purposes, the rovers 'talk' to each other via low and high gain antennae...
A common theme in older novels and some more modern publications is that of body parts (potentially from multiple species) being 'swapped' on to new bodies and recombined in (usually grotesque) way...
Welcome to this fun little series, that will explore all the classic sci-fi tropes and attempts to turn them into reality with the ALMIGHTY POWER OF SCIENCE! Today's topic is: The Force Field ...
Recently I've been creating a race of parasitic Aliens that eat entire Solar systems. So basically, the alien queen arrive's on a planet or moon that exists inside of a solar system. Then the queen...
The planet in question is this one. The atmosphere mainly consists of nitrogen and is approximately a quarter the density of Earth's; I chose surface temperatures ranging from -50°C to 0°C. I ne...
With a Janka Hardness of 5,060 lbf, the Australian Buloke is considered to be the hardest wood on Earth. Compared to other materials however, it still yields a weaker Compressive Strength and Modul...
Is it the case that if I was to develop an alien world that the most likely outcome would be that the animal in the middle of the food chain is going to be the one that is most likely to develop in...
Scenarios for a technological singularity usually seem to wait for machine intelligence to exceed human intelligence. Say the consumer needs of humans are food, clothing, shelter, transportation, ...
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 ...
In my world, the knowledge of science is largely lost, but many of the practical facts are still remembered. Chemistry morphed back into alchemy. My main character grew up as a peasant in a city's...
There is a terrestrial planet called Paveiha that orbits a small Red Dwarf star. It is the third planet in a system of 10 planets. Paveiha is close enough to the Sun that it is tidally locked and t...
Since the geological history of the world's largest nation is as big as the nation itself, and since I don't have a master familiarity with Russia's formation over hundreds of millions of years, I'...
One of the big problems by manned space exploration and colonization, that it's insanely expensive. Building a colony on other celestial bodies - since it's impractical to bring back the acquired r...
The Precursors are looking for recruits for their interstellar army. Obviously they don't need primitives who can only just bang rocks together, so they've set up a test - a beacon, lying above the...
Could an artificial planet be created considering there is a perfect void, the core is a super-magnet(an artificial planet core made of magnetic metal) that is coated with earth as is our planet an...
I'm looking at a science fiction scenario similar to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness where buildings are exposed to the elements for millions of years. I have a feeling they wouldn't be qui...
TL;DR: suggest human traits of mind/society that one should (a) tweak (b) leave well alone, in order to generate an alien worldview that allows a novel length tale to be told purely from perspectiv...
What conditions are believable for a racial society majority to accept a racial minority, and those to reject them? I have two races. One is a racially pure majority and the other is a mixed breed...
I'm designing an FTL system for a new universe, and I'm trying to figure how 'plausible-sounding' this thought is. The idea is that space is tangled and twisted in twelve dimensions, so that dista...
I'm effectively looking to change the 'Could' in this question to a 'what' or 'How'. Could higher land-based life exist on a planet with a pressure of about 1 MPa? I'm working on a story in which...
Humanity has been exposed to prolonged nuclear radiation for thousands of years. In the past, hundreds of nuclear bombs dropped; then nuclear warfare ceased for thousands of years. Assume that hum...
In some of my first questions on this site I asked about a world with a day that lasts 9 years. Many people agreed that life on this planet could survive via migration, but not evolve.The problem l...
Was wondering if anyone with physics knowledge could tell me something about desert worlds. If the surface of a planet was mostly a fine sandy material (e.g. Sand) then could tidal forces cause th...
Space Voids are areas in the universe that are for the most part, empty. They lack stars, meteors and black holes; They are simply put, the lack of celestial formation. Considering that future un...
Now I love huge living creatures and fantasy settings, this just might be reflected in my questions, so I had the idea to make a massive living island. I saw a similar question, but unfortunately i...
This question is inspired by discussion in the comments of the question What kind of supernatural powers don't break the masquerade? TL;DR Suppose you want to create a world where beings with supe...
A hypothetical organism is tetraploid and isogametous. To reproduce, four haploid gametes must meet and fuse into a tetraploid zygote. Any four individuals are sexually compatible, barring self-inc...
This hypothetical marsupial species raises young in a manner loosely similar to seahorses. Only the males have pouches: after gestation the female deposits the fetus into his pouch to compete devel...
More specifically, would this heighten or accelerate the fight/flight response a person may have? Or would it make little difference? In the past I had come across rare stories where a person was ...
If a child grew up since being a toddler (2 to 3 years old) in an environment where the gravity levels fluctuated so they were sometimes stronger than earth gravity and sometimes weaker, how would ...
Suppose you took earth and gave it approximately 3 times the air, with most of the extra being N2 or Ar. Combustion goes up with the partial pressure of oxygen. So unless we want to burn down the...
If an alien species ate minerals (aka a lithovore species), how might their bodies differ from ours? How would they eat/digest the materials? Do those answsers change if they eat substances like di...
