General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Can the oceans freeze (at least several feet below sea level)? I know that the temperature for salt water to freeze is lower/colder than fresh water, and when it does freeze, the ice is mostly salt...
This is a terrible planet for animals to live on, with all the humans around. Someone should just put all of them down. There is a group of radical vegans/animal rights activists that want to kill...
Our modern systems are predicated on the existence of electricity, which is a phenomenal discovery that helped propel the human race into our current civilization. However, electricity can be highl...
Follow up to this question: How would earth goverments respond to killing of most of a colony to keep the rest alive long enough for rescue but with a different approach. The same scenario occurs....
Assume someone detonates a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb in space. Since in space there's no air, the bomb will behave differently than on Earth. In particular, there will not be an air pressure wav...
Earth in this scenario still rotates once every 24 hours, and the temperate zone still has four seasons, each one lasting three months. But in this scenario, a temperate summer has the sun shining...
There is a place that has a natural boundary that allows all animals and plants to enter that place but any animal that can't fly is unable to leave that place. This place is large enough to have ...
Earth has an iron-nickel core which gives us a magnetosphere. Based on this question that replaces our iron core with a mercury core, would we be likely get a magnetosphere? Mercury is highly cond...
Alice is living on a sphere that has zero gravity and that is in an inertial reference frame. However, she and the sphere have electrical charges that are such that if she jumps she will accelerate...
Ok, so the Earth is filling up, finite resources, and as we all know, there are no plans for us to reduce our resource hungry ways,...and Mars has no magnetosphere apparently which means we couldn'...
Now I know that there are limits technically on size of plants as seen in this post, but what I want to know is what limits a plants speed? I'm guessing it has to do with the soil, but is that all...
Think about a big space station or whatever giant space building. What will be its mass to attract (with gravity): Small asteroids (1-10 kg / 2-20 lbs) Spaceman (100 kg / 220 lbs) Satellites (...
Let's say there is a species of intelligent beings who are indistinguishable from humans in every way - except on average they can jump twice as high as the average human, based on Earth gravity. ...
I have a group that's building a moon colony. The final end goal is a self-sufficient colony of at least 1 million humans. They have access to one million metric tons of lift per week at nominal ...
I am an awesome, famous, self-made billionaire - I started with a mere \$300 million and amassed that into over $4 billion in only 40 years (an amazing 6.75% return). Everyone loves me - the black...
Inspired by this article on Big Think: Genius or Crazy? Pangaea Reborn, how could humanity create a new Pangaea out of our planet? From what I remember of my earth science class, the amount of en...
For those (readers) who have seen the blockbuster movie titled I, Robot (2004 film) there is a humanoid robot who prefers to be called Sonny: Clearly this implies that Sonny is different from the o...
Radio Thinkers Creatures that communicate by biological radio pops up in science fiction occasionally and it's a fun idea. However, there are some practical concerns with regards to evolving a ra...
I know water is required for life on a planet so I got to thinking, is it possible for a world to be a functional planet (plants animals etc.) without polar ice caps and if so, how would it work wi...
According to Wikipedia and this answer, the Moon is orbiting the Earth at a distance around 20 times greater than than the point where it would break up. As far as I can tell, that means in a ficti...
In many SF stories (or fantasy if you replace science with magic), there is one technology that is hyper advanced in one specific field, like robotics in Real Humans or in Extant, but almost nothin...
Some answers to this question about mining asteroids suggest that it is easier and cheaper, in the long run, to bring the asteroid to you: move it into orbit around the planet where you are already...
I asked a similar question (in a SpaceEx manner) on Space Exploration, but here I've made it a bit more ... worldbuilding. We have a nice Space Elevator, and I'm in charge of the luxury guest acco...
Let's assume that there is a way to travel into space that's not in a rocket, and a human can essentially just walk/be carried into the upper atmosphere and beyond. Would there be anything that, p...
Most interested in effects during the first <75 years. Things to consider: What type of organization is building the space elevator? How is the service sold/rented? What is its maintenance/s...
At a crucial point in the development of human civilization, there is a split in the timeline: one where FTL travel is facilitated by jump-drives/wormholes, and another with superluminal speeds (St...
Pretty much what it says in the question title. Suppose a non-human, social species of Earth animal found itself on an evolutionary path that favored increased intelligence of a kind not completel...
It is simply a matter of time before human colonized our natural satellite and the red planet, so how to lay roads that is similar to ours on lunar and Martian soil? (For now suppose we are plannin...
I am considering a world with a very long light/dark cycle. However, I would like some natural method of measuring out a "day-like" period of time. Could an object with an orbital period of aroun...
I am thinking on a small group in the current Humanity, having only around 2-300 members. They have the most important positions in the world politics (i.e. politicians, media holding owners, key d...
In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
For my story to work, my characters have to stumble across a small wormhole that actually exists on Earth and is responsible for multiple disappearances throughout history. It connects a point on E...
Basically, it starts as a variation on the seahorse, once the ova are fertilized within the mother the embryoes are drawn back into the father who then carries them to term (there's actually a seco...
I have a planet with homogeneous core and mantle, but a thick crust separated in two parts: the north half is composed of water and the south part is an alloy of heavy metals, making the north ligh...
My moon is the basis for a fantasy setting, but I just can't bring myself to abandon science and say "a wizard did it." I want to make the months and seasons realistic, and I want to find a way to ...
The idea is simple, our intellegence is so far above a chimp or bonobo as to make us something different. There are things we can do intuitively that no Bonobo or chimp will be able to, and becaus...
I understand that Antarctica plays a large role in driving ocean currents and thus the climate of the planet. However, I'm curious what the world would be like if there was no Antarctic landmass at...
Mars' gravity is 38% of that of Earth's. Supposing a human born and raised on a Mars colony traveled to earth later in their life, would they be able to survive the increased gravity? For example...
Some time ago, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about magnetism, electricity, and graphene. I was (and still am) curious about developing a "deflector shield" based in known and viable scie...
So for the purposes of this question, the following items are already determined by our world: The humans and human society are in very beginning of an Industrial Revolution almost identical to o...
The idea is- as the moon is passing over, the pull of Earth's gravity on immediate area surrounding the spacecraft somehow temporarily cancelled out (still working on the how) and the craft falls t...
In many series (Elder scrolls for example) they have a huge moon. It is rare though when they explain how it can be larger. There are only two choices both of which couldn't work; One is to brin...
We like the moon. It's close, you can see your home from there, low gravity well, so you get easy mass drivers to orbit for fleshing out your spacer economy, plus you can do fun things in pools. ...
I am an immortal, megalomaniacal supervillain with unlimited resources and patience. I want to slowly eliminate the Earth's axial tilt so that its equatorial plane is coplanar with its orbital pla...
The US Government, and eventually the UN and all nation-states around the world, have realized they are broadcasting their existence to potential enemy civilizations in the nearby galaxy (at least ...
Here on earth, the moon is this big white thing that lights the world and hangs in the sky. Every culture on the Earth has incorporated the moon into some of their legends. Sometimes as a woman, so...
Okay, so humans are finally transitioning to a space-colonial society. We sent ships out, colonize worlds, etc... We aren't really in the business of sending multigenerational ships. Instead we use...
I have got a big rotating space station (radius is 5 km and length is 30 km) which provides its occupants the luxury of full terran gravity and atmosphere. The biggest part of the cylinder's inner ...
While smashing heavier and heavier particles together to create super heavy elements 122, 123, and 124, scientists noticed that these collisions created strange, random-looking electromagnetic wave...
This concept is relatively simple. There are many animals which start mobile, but become sessile later in their life history, all of which are simple and primitive. And I was wondering this: what i...
