General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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How can I make it so that an otherwise colonizable planet (or moon) can (entirely naturally) seem uninhabitable from a certain point on its surface? Background: There are a series of immovable gat...
Let's assume that sometime in the far future, ice-mining on Europa has become a very profitable business venture due to dwindling fresh water on Earth and the growing demand for more water from the...
In this scenario, all the humans on earth have disappeared, except for Fred. Sure, Fred is sad that everyone that exists is dead but him, including his friends and family, but he doesn't let that g...
There is a multiverse with different settings in each of its universes - steampunk in universe A, fantasy in universe B, biopunk in universe C, etc. And in steampunk world there is a group of chara...
I plan to write a story about a large number of space probes that are equipped with artificial intelligence and told to explore star systems and travel between them. These probes are not equipped w...
Edited to give a reason why synthetic diamonds wouldn't work instead. In the distant future, all the diamonds are gone. While synthetic diamonds are an excellent sollution for technology - as @...
In a distant future, humans have colonized every corner of the solar system, and we can easily convert any object into anything else - be it food or a tricorder, you name it. Using these replicator...
I can understand that all animals would instinctively stay away from a fire, however for a fire breathing dragon to be warded off by torches seem puzzling to me. What could help explain such ironic...
WARNING THE FOLLOWING CONTAIN SPOILERS! I watched the first season of The 3% and I am wondering about the wisdom in the strategy adopted by this world. Spoilers Specifically, if the 3% ( "smar...
Someone invents a portable, incredibly high-powered laser or similar energy weapon. The mechanism of energy production can be hand-waved away. In other words, it will heat up. Lots. Gigawatts lots,...
Would it be possible to somehow inject astronauts cells with safe amounts of magnetic metals, or use some sort of magnetic properties, to hold them down to a space station floor with magnets?
Let's talk about the visible light "rainbow" In almost all depictions of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light is shown as a rainbow, and adjacent parts of the spectrum are monotone in color...
To My Valued Fellows, As we are all aware, our people have made tremendous progress both evolutionarily and technologically. Thanks to us, our species is protected from the ravages of cancer and w...
If there existed a planet that was made completely of liquid water, no solid matter at all, what would the core of such a planet be like? Let's assume that this planet has conditions similar to ear...
A non-inertial frame, such as a planet that does not have constant velocity in its orbit, would change the laws of physics in many ways. For example, if you stood on the surface of the planet as i...
Now a solid body of rock will collapse itself to a round shape when it hits about 600 km in diameter (400 km for ice). Now, the Second Death Star is estimated to be between 160 and 900 km. How big ...
Venus is being paraterraformed with floating cities. Mechanical machines collect material from the surface and send it floating at an altitude of about 50 Km where conditions are more Earth-like. H...
A pharmaceutical company begins drug trials of a pill that they believe can activate a previously understudied and widely unknown region of the brain. The trial begins and when the first participan...
In my high fantasy medieval world, the ocean is populated by underwater fish people and land dominated by your good old human. Different type of fish people (shark, whale, turtle, shellfish, etc.) ...
I've read that the atmosphere about 60 km from the surface of Venus is very similar to the atmosphere on earth (the oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 levels and pressures are about the same). If there was a way,...
So I was building my world with underwater civilizations and someone raised a question (see here) that I thought was interesting related to trade aspect: how would we have a standardized measuremen...
By using antibiotics too frequently, some argue, we're setting the world up for a pandemic that we cannot treat. Every time an antibiotic substance is used, the bacteria that survive reproduce. Ev...
Exploring this new star system you have been pretty lucky to find an Earth like planet, with plenty of Oxygen, both in gaseous and in chemically bonded state (water, rocks, etc.). Just before you ...
Here is what we know of the planet Mars so far: DIAMETER: 4212 miles MASS: 6.39 × 10^23 kg DISTANCE FROM THE SUN: 141.6 million miles It isn't to say that we haven't found water on Mars, ju...
Let's take our regular "Great Blue Star Whale", with a mass of about 10 000 tons. That poor, poor whale is reaching the end of its life for whatever reasons. (Damn you! Space whale hunters!). It w...
The year is 2026 and there's angry talk of repealing old free-trade deals as politicians claim jobs are being destroyed by foreign competition. That is, Chinese and Indian construction companies ar...
Consider a hard-SF (slower than light) starship. Boosting it up to speed takes enormous energy. There are good reasons to want to not take all the fuel with you, but to collect energy on the run....
Many pets are very disturbed by the presence of mirrors or other reflecting surfaces where they see their own image. If there were many reflecting surfaces in nature I would think that it would rep...
On Earth, the presence of tides due to the Sun and Moon influence certain currents and other movements of water. This in turn leads to different forms of erosion, which can transform a landscape. ...
I'm designing a sentient, aquatic creature, and trying to decide how many eyes it should have. This creatures biological strategy is one of redundancy - it has multiple mouths, multiple tentacles,...
Recently, a robot called Philae soft-landed quite safely onto the comet 67P/Churyumov"“Gerasimenko, then shot some photos and got some other interesting information that was sent back to Earth. Thi...
Nature does some pretty interesting things with gender: This is a female trilobite beetle. Scientists have observed females extensively, yet for decades, scientists could not identify the male ...
I'm considering a story set about fifty years (2065) in the future. It takes a rather optimistic view; space exploration has led to colonies on the Moon and Mars, as well as several space stations ...
I want to put 10,000 humans in a space ship and send them into space. They don't have a set destination - they're having to flee their homeworld, and they don't know what planet will take them in, ...
We see plenty of seasonal variation on Earth, due to the large axial tilt, but the Earth follows an almost perfectly circular orbit, so we don't get much variation as a result of that. What if we ...
I have two large continents on an earth like world. I would like for the dominate predator on the more desert continent to be a large cat. I have found the leopards and jaguars of Egypt, but am unc...
A civilization has a "magic" computer with memory and processing capacities far beyond what our physics says is possible. They decide to run a massive simulation of Conway's Game of Life with a ran...
Suppose in the future (about 3-4 decades in the future), we start preferring smaller people as mates. The average size of a human would go down, maybe as far as or further than average heights from...
I've created a species that, instead of eating multiple times a day like us, eats one tremendous meal and survives off of the fat stores for long periods of time. My question is about feasibility....
Moreover, could a culture of microorganisms form a collective hive-intelligence similar to ants or bees? I'm trying to design a scientifically plausible hive-mind, and I'm trying to decide whether ...
I read recently that metal-rich planetary systems around large (>5 solar masses) O- and B-type stars can form enormous solid planets (potentially bigger than Jupiter) relatively quickly, photoev...
If I've recently started a colony on a somewhat habitable, but uninhabited planet, what's the best way to determine the location of any ore or other subterranean resource deposits? The planet is E...
I'm working on a world where the human race lives on a planet that is much closer to its star than Earth is. The temperatures range from 150C to 300C in the day and below 0C at night. My question...
I'm worldbuilding a continent that's mostly desertic (still trying to decide if sand or rocky desert, but definitely a hot desert). All the rain would fall on the edges of it, through a chain of mo...
After traveling a long long time, your spaceship is finally entering into the gravitational sphere of influence of a Sun-like star. Your captain would now like to move from the Oort-like cloud dist...
This question on Physics.SE asks whether other colors are possible for the sky. I would like my planet to be inhabitable by normal humans. It has 768 days and they are living in a temperate/Medite...
Context: Brains in Vats and Virtual Reality on Steroids In the (reasonably near) future, humans have developed the field of medicine significantly, and we now have the technology to isolate the b...
What would happen if two spaceships with Alcubierre warp bubbles were colliding? Would the space bubble collapse? Would they reject or push each other? Would they survive it without problems?
Simulation of artificial panspermia, in inter-galactic travel, as a model for the study of reproductive isolation. Case 1: If we send a mass of proto cells(kept alive by some mechanism like cr...
