General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I'm going to borrow many ideas from birds to keep my dragon airborne, porous bones and feathers to keep it light while spewing balls of flame to create warm air currents at high altitudes. The prob...
Long story short I need a unique ring system around a Jovian planet and thus I think of möbius strip. Can a gas giant have a ring system shaped like möbius strip exist naturally? Why do I post ...
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million." "Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on p...
Let's imagine a near future where mankind starts to expand into the solar system. For various reasons, some humans start to be born and raised in space, in zero gravity and micro-gravity. What cha...
I'm trying to create a nation that is greedy, opportunistic & obsessed with profits and trade. They are cunning, treacherous schemers that will swindle you despite all the pleasantries and assu...
For my fantasy world, I have what I think is a really cool idea. The world is flat, and elliptical in shape. If you touch the silvery edge, well, let's just say bad things will happen. (Not relevan...
If the North and South Poles' ice melted instantly, what would be the effect on humans and other animals? Would the sea creatures thrive? Would a lot of land get covered by water?
I have a universe where humanity has produced various civilizations on multiple planets (and no planet has achieved a single world government); and very few of these countries possess the know-how ...
I recently learned about a chemical known as chlorine trifluoride. This utter abomination of chemistry reacts to almost everything, setting glass, sand, asbestos, and rust on fire (to name only a f...
Introduction: I've spent some fair amount of time thinking about inventing an element to make part of my world easier for me. In this case, it is an LTA gas which I gave the WIP name LAL-gas (Leich...
We can rebuild him. We have the budget... but do we have the technology? In the process of reviewing the proposed enhancements for the Six Billion Dollar Man the following was discovered: Enh...
We can rebuild him. We have the budget... but do we have the technology? In the process of reviewing the proposed enhancements for the Six Billion Dollar Man, such as improved oxygen use, the fol...
Here on the Space Station 'A long way from anywhere V' (not to be confused with any other space stations) a wide variety of species pass through on their way to the Krasnikov tube terminal. Even th...
How do you cut through an unbreakable armor? With an all-powerful sword, of course. No really, if we had seemingly unbreakable matter (lets give it the original name of Unobtadamentium, or Uium for...
Take the Earth-Moon system as we know it. Now, something causes a large rock to be lobbed in the direction of our moon. Exactly how that happens is deliberately left unspecified; it could be everyt...
A man with a past traumatic experience developed dissociates amnesia. Every time he experiences something traumatic, his id persona hiding in his unconscious mind comes out taking over his body. Th...
What would the orbit of a planet orbiting two stars look like? Would the planet orbit the stars simultaneously or one after the other? How strong might be the gravity well of such a system be? Any ...
What I am asking is not if there is an possibility of an island (Isle of Wight size because it is an island I am familiar with) size tortoise , I will find a way around that, I just want to know if...
Before you comment "dragons can't happen", we've been there before. Based on the question linked above, assume dragons are scientifically plausible. You may change what you need about the...
How could a civilization create a dangerous autonomous mechanical ecosystem that will not be overly dangerous to its creators? Militaries are expensive; military research doubly so. So what's a sm...
I won't claim to be a biologist, but I'm fairly certain that it's really hard for disease to survive in space because most bacteria and viruses need a host in order to survive for long periods of t...
Context if you're interested In the very near future, a planet teeming with alien life is discovered several light years away from our Solar System - and with a few precautions, it may be habi...
What I want is to know if I could have seven Earth like (What I mean by this is having an Earth-like atmosphere and climate, in this scenario size doesn't matter and nor does gravity) planets in th...
In this answer about how to design the ideal cyborg, I said: ... Use electric tissue to power the machines. Cyborgs need some way to generate electricity when mechanical parts are invol...
I had the idea to make an artificially constructed planet which is terrestrial, but has the diameter of Jupiter. Instead of being a solid sphere, it would be five spherical layers, with land on the...
I know living on Venus would be virtually impossible for us now. But I'm trying to picture what life would be like on the surface of such a world, and how advanced in technology a species would hav...
A race of complete female humanoids have DNA that is similar to humans but distinct enough to be consider a different species (think donkeys and horses). This species can mate with humans and othe...
Context Recently, scientists have began researching superatoms and supermolecules in depth. The premise is that existing, natural elements can be rearranged into clusters, in the lab, to exhi...
Context NASA commissioned some awesome, vintage-style prints a while back advertising the colonization of Mars. Three of them stood out to me because they depicted colonization of the moons of ...
What would happen if the atmospheric pressure on Earth would suddenly start to slowly decrease? Let's say that the most precise prediction by scientists is that the air will be completely gone in 1...
Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist or geneticist, so my knowledge on the following topics is limited. Feel free to point out any mistakes, but please be polite about it. I'm currently planning a st...
In some star clusters, the stars are packed as densely as a light year apart or less. Many clusters do not appear to have black holes in the center, though they remain relatively stable in their or...
Would a blind astronaut be able to sense the gravity of a nearby star/planet/moon? Would an astronaut lost somewhere inside the Sun be able to sense which way is the core and which way is the surf...
Tolkien wrote on The Silmarillion about Tol Eressea, an island that the vala Ulmo (a god-like figure) used to ferry the elves back and forth across the sea into the Western lands. José Saramago al...
When confronted with cloning which leaves the original alive, there is the known issue that the clone could want to replace the original (e.g. as seen in The 6th day). A shared consciousness is ver...
Given a map showing terrain and settlement locations (cities, towns, villages) I'd like to design a road network that appears natural, rather than just being the most efficient. I'm interested in t...
Some of you have commented here: "How Do I Supplement Oxygen Intake?." I mentioned confidentiality, but that is no longer going to be a concern. We just want to do this right. The original concept...
A terrorist wants to shoot a bomb down onto an unsuspecting high-value target, for instance Washington DC. So, the terrorists somehow get a private space company to deploy what seems to be a norm...
I'd like a gravity room on my space vessel for long space stays to avoid osteoporosis. They would spend a few hours each day in this room, reading or doing paper work, to maintain bone-mass. I'm ...
I want to build a planet (or satellite) that: is smaller than Earth, has a thicker atmosphere than Earth but breathable, has neither intense volcanism, nor any extreme condition of that sort that...
I asked a similar question a small while ago. Unfortunately, the way the problem was defined excluded certain viable solutions. So I want to try again. The society would have to be complex. Perhap...
I've read this question, but most of its answers don't seem to apply to my question directly other than possibly this one, which suggests that in order to change a planet's orbit, you would have to...
Lets say you have a geothermal or nuclear power plant and nearby you have system which converts that energy into nutrient porridge. This nutrient porridge must have everything the human needs to su...
Some more-than-usually clever boffins have knocked up a system that allows them to form portals into a region where the laws of physics are rather...different. An object that is fired through one ...
Let's say a terrorist organization decides to attack the cap on the Deepwater Horizon oil well. They use high powered explosives to blow such a large hole in the sea bed that there is no viable way...
Short version - some physicists have created a pathway that appears to permit near-instantaneous travel between two distant points. Objects propelled through one side on the correct vector will eme...
Could a civilization grow or develop to advanced levels if they don't hold religious beliefs? I have just watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Who watch the watchers" (season 3, episode 4). It...
Let's say that there is a wind going 45 mph and the flight direction of the humanoid creature is in the same direction as the wind. As the flight is in the same direction as the wind, air resistanc...
The common evolutionary belief is that life originated in water, and that it developed to survive on land later on. Eventually, mammals evolved on land. Cetaceans, which include dolphins, whales, ...
Series Premise Made Short: For reasons that I'm not allowed to describe here (confidentiality), Earth's deciduous and tropical plant life largely dies off. A hardy and oxygen-hungry microbe infests...
