General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I want to create a modern population which is adapted to stress. Meaning people could take immense mental pressures without getting into mental disorders. I thought a way to do this would be to bri...
Toxic Spiders and Experiments Gone Wrong: Let's Talk About Comic Book Mutations Numerous superheroes get their powers after something mutates their cells. Perhaps it's a gamma ray, and result...
My Kepler Bb planet has 4 moons and is habitable. So that is good. But all 4 of these moons are major moons which while indeed possible, could be a problem. You see, these moons are in resonance s...
Would Aristotelian natural philosophy, with planets and Sun orbiting the Earth, and forces needed to maintain motion Things having natural places and desiring to reach it horror vacui Four elemen...
For instance the size of an industrial garage door on a space station? Assume 1atm inside and 0 outside, anything is on the table from gaskets to some kind of embedded heating system around the sea...
I'm looking to not tidally lock my planet, but place it between two suns that rotate around each other. The goal is to have constant sunlight on all sides of the planet and for the suns to rotate a...
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AeT-Shield The shield uses nan...
I'm trying to work out the kinks of an ecosystem on a planet that is rather similar to Earth, but with some species of animal (both carnivores and herbivores) we aren't familiar with in our world. ...
I'm contemplating a world in which there is some sort of cyclical darkness that covers a continent or the whole planet, and humanity has to adjust to deal with the creatures that surface when the d...
I want to create a planet that has a frequency of two rotations per second, thus making a "Planet without Night". The planet will be like a flattened disc, due to inertia causing the planet to be a...
In a novel I am writing, everyone carries a small device in their head. The device is fragile, but the human head isn't. How can this device be destroyed by another person quickly (i.e. within sec...
Affected continent is Asia, the world is running out of coal and natural gas. A major mega structure project is underway, its goal is to provide electricity across the continent with a single fusio...
The Lorting are a very strange race. Not only are there multiple genders (the actual term for which is more like 'castes' or 'classes'), but when any member of their species is 'born' it is born at...
Like the title says, could a creature use metals absorbed through consumption to harden its natural armor? Metals and minerals that would be available would be similar to those on Earth (iron, alum...
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Humans require energy (food) to operate, but that energy must return back to the environment one way or another. If given an unlimited supply of handwave m...
First, for scale, this map is about the size of the continental US. Assume that the mountains are about the size of the Rockies. These mountains are jagged on the outer edge, and more sloping on th...
Could a Snowball Earth drive our species into total extinction? The most obvious problem is: How would we grow food to sustain any grouping of people?
I'm trying to write up a story in which superpowers exist, and I created a hero in which he could flip anything. People, the Earth, the Moon. I wanted to make him try to destroy the world, so what ...
A human-like creature that doesn't have gender, can not procreate, and was engineered by humans. My story is stuck with a creature that is not possible in real life; I just went from science ficti...
I'm working on a science fiction novel, a sequel to the best-selling Dark Space series, and I would like to include some reasonable (but fictional) possibilities for how the universe might cycle fr...
I want a realistic event to occur that kills the majority of the Earth's population. However, the nature of this event must not effect humans or machinery currently flying at high altitudes (those ...
If the moon had life and it progressed at the same rate as life on earth, including key points of technological discovery. When would we, on earth, have first detected them? Technological discover...
I am creating a race of aliens that are amphibious and mammalian in detail, they have six tentacles, bunny ears and also fur covering their bodies. They are about 3-4 ft in length, if this species ...
Let me pitch you a setting: a scientific prodigy with not a lot of common sense decides to release a horde of nanotech dissasemblers into the environment. These "dissasemblers" can dissasemble AN...
My Kepler Bb world has in total 8 seasons. 4 of those are transition phases. Their year begins on the first day of spring and their months with 9 day weeks are 65 days long. But that is just in Kep...
As a matter of course, a number of scientific articles and books have held speculation as to the possibility of life on a Jovian (gas giant such as Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, etc). Typically, this co...
I recently finished reading the Kim Stanley Robinson novel 2312 - set, of course, in the year 2312. Part of the background to the political negotiations and ongoing terraforming in the outer Solar ...
If a sentient supercomputer was created as a weapon of mass destruction, and it wants to consume humans for their flesh, why would it do that? I know this might seem too far-fetched, but if there'...
Spinny McSpinface is an ancient generation ship, invented and launched before the creation of Wrap drive and recently arrived at its original destination of A Long Way from Anywhere V. All the crew...
Microraptors are cretaceous-period dinosaurs with feathered wings on both their forelimbs and back-limbs. Despite this, they are not considered 'true flyers' as it is believed they used their five...
Here are some lists of North American and South American megafauna that went extinct during the Quaternary. In Eurasia, many species of large mammal were domesticated, most particularly the 'big 4...
Kind of a "universal donor" or "universal recipient"? Aliens that can take on the qualities of several kinds of species and recombine them to make a kind of "super" being?
Imagine you are give the power to create/summon explosive munitions of any type (with detonators of course) however you are limited on how much you can summon at any moment (1 per 5 seconds and a m...
Let's assume the reactor takes up about 4 vertical kilometers and has the same radius as the ship (4km). This gives you a volume of about 2.01e11 m^3, which given about 3-5% of the reactor's estima...
In a world where man entered North and South America without causing a mass extinction, all of the paleofauna which became extinct ~10,000 BC in the Americas are still around. There are several fam...
Scenario: The Moon disappears slowly -- within 3 days. It is a result of natural causes and we don't have any control over this disaster. What will be the Major Effects On Earth and life on Earth?
The BBC in the UK are currently screening a archaeology series exploring the idea that the Neolithic peoples in the Orkney Isles (North of Scotland) were the cultural capital of the British Isles. ...
Our planet's best line of defense against the worst of the sun is the ozone layer. It is no thicker than 0.01 millimeters. It absorbs 97 to 99% of the sun's medium UV light (200-315 nanometers). ...
This would only comprise death by natural causes, no accidents, suicides, homicides etc. As Wikipedia says: A death by natural causes is one that is primarily attributed to an illness or an ...
I am an average person being hunted down by a homicidal cyborg. He is about 90% metal, with his only remaining organ being a brain and all other meat on him being tissues which serve only as an anc...
Anytime one thinks "flightless bird" and "aquatic bird" put together, one would immediately think of Sphenisciformes, the penguins. But during the Late Cretaceous, there swam a different kind of f...
I really think that we can feed way more than our current population using more advanced farming IF WE FIND A WAY TO PRODUCE CHEAP RENEWABLE ENERGY. The solution would be hydroponic vertical farms...
In my other question I tried to find out if it makes any sense to colonize other planets or moons instead of just building space stations. The answer I accepted seems very well elaborated to me and...
I'm trying to figure out how a minimalist style society would work. Its secretive founders have been planning this since the 19th century, hiding in universities, influencing the young to attempt t...
I would like to create a sentient creature with telepathy and/or telekinesis. Can either (or both) of these concepts exist biologically? If yes, what would the biological mechanism be? Would ...
Radiating heat into a vacuum is a no-go, so a spaceship that generates any kind of heat is going to be in trouble. I had an idea for a potential solution - dumping your heat into a disposable heat ...
There's a Kardashev scale in which Earth civilisation is at 0 (the lowest) level with all following levels being purely hypothetical and describing civilisations more advanced than human. Is there...
Is there any feasible way to create a long-term sustainable habitat on the sun? My target region for habitation is the temperature minimum at the bottom of the solar atmosphere. Metals would have ...
So I'm creating a character that is an extradimensional being that exists outside of time. If we experience time as a linear event, how would time be perceived if this being has the ability to see ...
I have been poking at the idea of an eventual re-emergence of the PACER concept, where energy is obtained by detonating nuclear explosions... but not exactly in the same form. After humans become s...
