General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Mythbusters did an episode about trying to foil a blood hound, when Adam played a convict who tried to make the dog lose his trail. Every trick he did failed like washing, changing clothes, going ...
Giant Planetary Ring Bases (or GPRB's) are space stations built on planetary rings or are artificial rings themselves, such as Starship Troopers' Luna Base But are these super stations feasible?...
In many countries, we number the years based off of proximity to an event in the Christian religion - we are over 2016 years past that date. However, in this scenario, religion has become less main...
Could two planets in the same solar system sustain life? I have one world that is about the size of our own planet. The other planet is farther away from the first planet think of it like Mars but ...
Santa keeps his elves under horrid, appalling conditions. Working everyday of the year for little pay in the freezing cold of the North Pole. But just how many elves does he need? How many elves w...
There are craters that are permanently dark at the Moon's poles, since the Moon's axis tilt is so small that the sun never rises above the crater rim. On the Moon these get incredibly cold, since ...
I have wondered what a terrestrial ecosystem would look like dominated by cnidarians and ctenophores rather than insects and tetrapods. In order to fulfill the same niches I imagine they would need...
Each year without fail the notorious serial house breaking old man always deliver the present to all the children in the world, yes you heard me now that's billions and counting, and a piece of coa...
In a universe with no faster-than-light travel, the Solar System has largely been settled, and has been for at least 200 years. I envision populations to look something like this: Earth: 8 billi...
So I'm thinking about an underwater civilization and everything related to it, and I got to thinking about how they would communicate over extremely long distance. I knew that underwater species l...
Imagine, if you will, an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sol-like star. Now imagine that, from somewhere outside the solar system, a rogue planet, rocky and of roughly the same size and mass of the f...
Is it possible to create a large space station orbiting the sun around 10 million kilometers away from the sun? It would be a large settlement which houses around 200 people. Energy would not be a ...
Knowledge has come to me recently that mussels can suck up pollutants, making them crucial cleanup crews in the New York filth. This knowledge is the inspiration for this alternate scenario, in wh...
Not a duplicate of "Overcoming language barrier; no speech" which confines answers to nothing that is clearly a form of communication; it focuses on translation, not physiology or evolution Not a ...
Let's imagine an Earth clone devoid of naturally occurring fissile materials"”and, for comprehensiveness' sake, also devoid of fertile materials like thorium and americium that could be used to pro...
If there's a habitable planet that orbits two suns like the above orbital route, what would possibly occur on that planet? Would it have two yearly seasonal cycle (compare to earth)? Would it be...
I was wondering if it would make sense to hollow out an asteroid to use for a generation ship? Also, might it be a good idea to use hollow asteroids for any kind of long distance space ship? I'm th...
I have a metallic alloy called "Attrahite" in my world that conducts gravity the way that copper conducts electricity. Currently in the world, passing an electric charge through Attrahite "activate...
Some estimates put the percent of Earth's surface covered by landfills at 0.02%. Even if the world composted and recycled as much as possible, we would be left with an insanely large amount of w...
Here on Earth, time standardisation was enabled by the invention of accurate time pieces which allowed us to create a global constant (GMT/Zulu time) and regional offsets. If we travel outside our...
What circumstances would be required for a world in which human emotions directly affected the physical world. For example, if a person grew angry, releasing a burst of electrical energy which woul...
The most common explanation of what would happen to a space-ship that falls into a black hole ends with spaghettification. However imagine there was a space-ship built out of unobtanium, that cou...
Let's assume I can travel in a space-time on Earth. Every time I jump I get to almost the same place, but in different past time relative to the first jump: it solves the problem of planet rotation...
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/nc...
Assuming that in the not too distant future space travel developed enough, that large numbers of ships and people were leaving the earth's surface on a regular basis. Would this ever reach a point ...
My novel take place in a world where the civil war in Ukraine escalates to a Third World War after a terrorist attack (dirty nuclear warhead) in Kiev. This war is ruled by Private Military Compani...
Is subsurface life possible on Titan (Saturn's moon) ? Temperatures on the surface are way too low to sustain any life (<-150 degrees Celcius) but since there is some tectonic activity, I was w...
If we made a large moon near Mars, the tidal forces would encourage the tectonic system to rev up again, and start up the inner dynamo effect. There would be volcanoes, producing a new atmosphere, ...
Lets say I have this nice gun which can shoot a certain amount of antimatter. After hearing answers about why that won't work, I added a magical coating to the projectile making sure the antimatter...
While rewatching the first episode of Stargate SG-1, I realized again, that it might not be a good idea to put your secret portal to other planets right under your central air command bunker. The...
So, on the Planet of the Aves, Tres' sapient crows are the dominant sapient species. Given that your average bird spends plenty of time on the wing, how intuitive would they find subsonic aerodyna...
Ideally this would be some sort of sun or star-related natural disaster that would affect the entire planet and make life outside of protected/shielded areas extremely dangerous. This is a human-in...
So most of you have probably heard of extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air to make water. In a world where water could be scarce, is this technique even feasible? Specifically, assuming ex...
According to several sources, all organisms process information at different rates - to a fly, the world is in slow motion (relative to humans), for instance, but to a pigeon, the world may move fa...
The animal I envision is very protective over its planet. It goes out into space and eats anything that gets close to it. To do this, the animal can float through space, and leave/re-enter the atmo...
So we have the animal that breathes ice and the traditional fire-breathing dragon. We even have animals on Earth that can emit electricity of over 800 volts. But what about another element, wind?...
I was wondering on others people's ideas on how to take a Space Age civilization and send it back to the stone or bronze age. My own idea was that war and disease broke out, crippling the nation as...
In Terminator, a human can evade a hit from a machine, rolling onto the floor at the last second. But a machine (cyborg) from the future would be able to do millions of calculations in a second, an...
Let's not delve into specific genuses, families, orders etc. Broaden your definition of "classifications" to words like "mammal" or "fish", "crustacean" or "avian". Science fiction depictions of...
Assumptions: We have materials that can withstand the temperatures/pressures/acidity of Venus. We can get to Venus and back reasonably easily (NASA does shuttles every 3 months). Here is Venus:...
"Every cloud has a silver lining." The saying is fairly well-known, but I was musing on it while staring through a cloud bank, and I started to wonder: What kind of hellhole would a planet have to ...
Due to a thick cloud layer(at approx the same heigh as Earth's) surrounding this planet, it's plants have evolved to stay above the clouds so that they can absorb sunlight from their nearby star. I...
Development The females ovulate on average 5-15 eggs per cycle. Unfertilized eggs get reabsorbed and fertilized eggs start developing a shell. The shell takes 2 weeks to fully form. Once all the f...
If a race were advanced enough to colonise space and travel between galaxies, would it be possible for them to harness a black hole in some way to generate power for the massive ships needed to col...
We Earthlings like to live in gravity wells but also have a taste for the exotic and are a bit lazy. Why not make colonies that take advantage of local conditions? Cloud cities over Venus, much le...
I made a map of the tectonic plates for my planet and then assigned each of them a direction. So as the question title says, what geographic features occur at each type of plate boundary? Also to ...
Diurnal vs Nocturnal These aliens have genes that influence whether the alien will be diurnal or nocturnal. Hatching time also influences this. Genetics: DD - Diurnal NN - Nocturnal DN or ND -...
There are two societies. One highly advanced with AI, posthumans, post-scarcity economy and off-Earth resources. So gold and platinum is what a Mercury base resident just calls "rocks". They hav...
No matter which mammal you are talking about, be it a rodent or a bat or a cat or an elephant or a whale, all have the same lung size--7% of the entire body volume. In this alternate scenario, the...
In the spirit of Thanksgiving (US) let's tackle a fun one. I'm defining "intelligent" in this situation as "at least on par with hunter-gatherer humans, able to communicate" What natural, environm...
