General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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So let's say that I have a world with a moon, you know kind of like we do on Earth. But with life on the planet, is it possible to find life on the moon? In the artifexian video on habitable moons,...
Think basically a Jupiter brain (a megascale computer made from a gas giant) but with a Dyson shell surrounding it to act as a threefold nutrient/waste exchange (assuming it repairs itself and adds...
What would be the evolutionary setup for flying monkeys to evolve. They should have branched of from the same ancestors as present day monkeys.They need to be migratory like modern day migrating bi...
What if in a massive display of power, in the future a human military would build a massive spaceship with huge rocket engines and decided to land the craft vertically onto a desert in a magnificen...
Ok, this is take two. Hopefully this is specific enough. I have a link to the original question here. And for those of you eager to see my sources for this, I'll link two videos here from the You...
Imagine for a moment that a plant (let's say a maple tree, though any plant will do), has unlimited energy. There's no conversion of sunlight or anything - the energy is just there, being soaked di...
By the time we develop the technologies necessary for travelling between stars, I think it is fairly likely that we would have already developed the technology to digitally augment, edit, and uploa...
I'm writing a story about an alien race that is blind and deaf: They communicate based on touch and scent, and have a tech level generally similar to us. I'm assuming that they can measure frequen...
So say we discovered aliens through a wormhole near Saturn (Interstellar anyone?). Congratz to us! But we have a bigger issue in trying to communicate with them. They developed in a completely dif...
Related to this question on lack of human dimorphism, but hopefully the length of time my question has sat in the sandbox unremarked means that I have successfully been more specific. I'm writing ...
I'm working on the timeline for my world, but I keep getting stuck at the origins. I want to have had an advanced civilization (modern levels, maybe a bit beyond) that was destroyed in a vaguely de...
I am working a hard science fiction story and I cannot come up with a really good reason to put people on Mars. I need people on Mars for the story to work, but there is no reason for them to be th...
A person is traveling in a space craft that was designed and built by sufficiently advanced aliens. This space craft left from Earth and is capable of traveling infinitely close to the speed of lig...
Earth like planet has 3 atm pressure at it sea level. How would it affect its rainfall system? 1) Using internet calculator I got a result that boiling point for water would be 131°C, while freez...
Of all the creatures in Hatjörn's dominion, there is none as peculiar as the Murinae Spirita, the mean booze-rat. A vermin so resilient that has developed the most wondrous means of defence and...
I have a very specific aesthetic in mind for my science-fantasy setting, technology is largely pneumatipunk supplemented with weired phonotic devices;for "reason" there are few electrical devices i...
The hybrids were created when unseen aliens sent SETI a message explaining how to combine human and alien DNA. (Ignoring the scientific illiteracy and contradictions in the films) Under the constra...
How would I change the evolution of humans to result in horns on humans as a result of reproductive fitness, instead of social fitness. Meaning, NEITHER "Horns are sexy", or some strange infection....
In how smart can I make ants, an idea was suggested, to instead of making each ant individually sapient, make the 'anthill' as a whole sapient; a kind of unconventional hive mind. Just as a familia...
Edit: A bounty was offered; Later, I answered my question - see below the looong math answer. I accepted it, because it's the only one to calculate the outcome with all the parameters included. I'l...
Noting that this question is specific to human colonization, and Thucydides's answer is explicit that driving concerns are to support life, and I notice that the story I'm working on turns this on...
How would just the weather be affected if there was huge mountain range between the Arctic and the mid latitudes of a planet? Roughly 50-60 degrees latitude. A little further south than Earth's Arc...
What would happen to to a planet 10 times the size of Jupiter, if there was a black hole the size of a golf ball in the core of the planet? Would the planet be eaten by the black hole? Or would t...
My question is pretty simple, all the details about the planet are pictured below.
Every day the Sun is closer to be a Red giant, making the live of the initial home of the humanity practically uninhabitable. Humans are not there anymore. It's a protected territory, but the Sun g...
Would non-water based alien life have different life speed than us? (I have studied some chemistry in CPGE in 1978-80, but I was very bad at it) IIRC, chemical reactions are (exponentially) faste...
Joe Schmoe was six years old when he killed his best friend; it wasn't his fault, it was just the way that he was made... Joe was born with an auto-telepathic telekinetic feedback ability - he has...
The year is 2109 C.E my friends and I were caught in a space disaster when the spacecraft we're in broke apart during a daring escape from a patrolling spacecraft. We stole an antique cellphone (fr...
What would colonists building a base on Europa use for building materials? I am interested in habitats in three locations: on or just under the surface bolted onto the underside of the ice sheet...
I have a habitable moon orbiting a gas giant. The moon is not tidally locked with the gas giant. The orbital plane of the moon around the gas giant is the same as the orbital plane of the gas giant...
What colour will planetary rings made up of dust and rock (not ice) appear to be? Would there be a difference looking from space and from the surface? More importantly, how will the rings affect t...
In a world without enough land for a massive (and growing) population, but plenty of water surface, experimental cities have started to spring up along the edges of various continents. The first is...
That title is really long... but the essence of this question is basically asking whether a complete combustion flame would be more destructive(burn things faster? and spread faster?) than a incomp...
More specifically, I've had some debates with a friend on how a planet with low oxygen would work. Of course, it's his IP so he insisted on low oxygen, and we're hand waving aspects of it. But for...
Yesterday I was talking with some of my friends about ideal/utopian worlds and came across a potential infinite loop problem. My ideal world was that of a transhumanist vision. Humans still look an...
I Was playing space engine and i was looking for a planet like Earth for quite some time and then i stumbled on this beautiful world covered with liquid water which orbited a main sequence star wit...
Let's say the dots on Ceres are abandoned alien outposts. Within the next 40-200 years humanity manages to send a team of research scientists to the location. The scientists quickly found a way ins...
The lunar phases describe the form we perceive the moon having based on the light it reflects from the sun while being partially turned away from us. Q: Can we abuse science to make the moon have ...
In the movie The time Machine, humans drill the moon and destroy part of it. So this made me wonder, if we destroyed the moon like this... How would it affect the Earth? Is it possible to achi...
As human population continues to grow and need for raw resources grow, various nations and private organizations begin colonization efforts of our Solar System beyond the blue and green sphere we c...
The Setup: We have a highly advanced orbital station. It is designed to be rather stealthy, like a observation post. Is it possible to make it completely invisible to the naked eye, even when in ...
Let's start this whole question off by exorcising the negative connotations of the word from our minds. Out foul demons, OUT! Our fictional near-future world has no negative instances of slaver...
2035 a human population on Mars of 500 (mostly workers i.e.: miners, biologists, medical staff, engineers, etc. Most of the colony is underground with above grou lead bunkers. They have an establis...
If my Mars colonists don't want to be crippled, they need to bear their own weight as close to Earth normal as possible for their waking hours. How about shoes (leather from goats and sheep) with m...
I saw some games or stories where space mines were used. My question is: would it really work ? I think the chance of hitting a mine is really really low in space. Where would you place a mine in...
I am writing a fiction about Mars, 300 yrs after colonization. Earth turns hyper-fundamental and cuts off all communication, so they've been on their own for the past two centuries. In constructing...
Which voltage and frequency would be selected if there were no legacy issues? I can easily find how selection of electricity frequency and voltage was based on backward compatibility and quite arb...
Evolution is a great system for incremental refinements, but it's not very good at drastic changes, and can leave behind a lot of inconvenient vestigial elements. It's also rubbish at dealing with ...
Assuming the Alcubierre drive can be made to work, there are issues with it, like the creation of black holes and white holes in front of/behind the ship. There is also the having to be on tracks p...
The traditional description of the mermaid is half-girl and half-fish. That, both biologically and dramatically, is just ridiculous. If the mermaid were half-fish, then why does she move her tail...
